If they do it, we’ll thank them

And not in anticipation

Nineteen eighty-five, and just out of university with a bachelor of laws and a diploma in legal practice under my arm. My next rendezvous was with Bishop & Co., Solicitors of St Vincent Street, Glasgow, where I would start my traineeship in the practice of the law. Over two years, I would wend my way through the four C’s: first, Company, then Conveyancing, on to Chamber, and finally Court six months in each. If I did well, awaiting me at the end of that journey would be an Act of Sederunt admitting me as a Solicitor in Scotland.

My master for Company, the first of these C’s, was Hector Cameron, who wore double-breasted suits, smoked whilst rotating his cigarette around his middle finger, and who established our relationship by stating categorically, “You’re far better qualified than I am, but I have the experience you’re just setting out on.” He talked straight, and taught me to talk straight, and I think we liked each other for that.

In those days, we had no computers: an office comprised a desk, a hat stand, a row of metal filing cabinets, a shelf for your Gloag & Henderson, a desk, a chair and a dictation machine. Typing? That was done by the typists down on the second floor.

Positioned, as two other trainees and I were, in a sort of desk-huddle outside the offices of Cameron, Talman and Marshall, every painful step of the way towards the perfect solicitor’s letter would—if the typist was ever to understand what the heck we were rabbiting on about—need to be e-n-u-n-c-i-a-t-e-d at fairly distinct volume into the hand-held dictaphone one had been issued with. Full stop, new paragraph, initial capital.

Within days of my having been issued with this device, I was tasked with composing a letter intended to induce someone, I remember not who, to do whatever, I remember not what. Having arrived at the point when I’d said what needed to be said, there came the signing off. We would in time learn the difference between yours truly, yours sincerely, and yours faithfully, but I felt it was a little brusque and abrupt to finish in such a cold and businesslike manner (little realising at that time that cold, businesslike manners are precisely intended to be brusque and abrupt). I recalled a phrase that my mother had taught me from her time as a secretary working for a painter’s and decorator’s in Sandyford Crescent on Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street thirty years previously: thanking you in anticipation. So that is what I said into this little black box. “Thanking you in anticipation—”

“NoooooooooooooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOO!” was the very long, single word, that came blaring from Hector Cameron’s office. I paused. And listened. Intently. Silence. I rose and approached Mr Cameron’s open door and craned my neck into the sanctum. “Eeeer … excuse me, Mr Cameron?” enquired I. Without looking up from his work, a cigarette rotating around his middle finger as he tapped the ash into the heavily overloaded ashtray, he simply said in a quiet voice something I have never forgotten to this day: “If they do it, we’ll thank them.”

BP is reversing its green policies. It’s too far, too fast, they say. Christ, I hope no one ever thanked them in anticipation. If they’d done it, we’d have thanked them. But we don’t crack open the champagne for vague promises. Because all promises are vague.

William Spaniel is a game theorist who lectures at Pittsburgh University and has a channel on YouTube. In this episode, he restates Cameron’s point: Don’t listen to what leaders say, watch what they do.

Thank you.