It was when Squirrel Nutkin appeared at the October Board meeting that Mr Ramsay began to acquire his reputation for eccentricity. And that’s putting it mildly. A mild mannered man like him, too. Never said a word, usually. Kept his contributions to meetings to shaking his head in disapproval. Let everybody walk all over him. Especially Mr Giles.
To be fair, there were people who said at the time that there was nothing wrong in wearing a glove puppet to a board meeting as such, but there were more who disagreed, and several who thought that Mr Ramsay was off his chump. The matter was hotly disputed in every one of the company’s offices, on the shopfloor, in the canteen. Mr Ramsay was well-liked, even if everyone thought him ineffectual, so a lot of people stuck up for him, even if they thought the squirrel a bit odd. The one thing at which everybody drew the line, though, was his according the squirrel executive powers.
It happened during Mr Giles’s monthly overlong summary of the company’s financial position. Two factors, he was saying, were making the prospects for Ramsay & Co look bleak. These were:
1. the downturn in the ladies’ hosiery market. Sales had, like the inferior products of the company’s competitors, been slipping for years, and
2. the inefficiency of Ramsay & Co compared to its competitors.
The first of these factors spoke for itself, he said. There were simply fewer items of hosiery being sold, whether this was due to a new fashion for bare-leggedness due to the long hot summer combined with the undoubted increase in the uptake of feminine trouserings, or was a sign of continued recession was not for him to say. Ramsay & Co simply had to face the facts, whether they liked them or not, and accept what the market was telling them. Reality didn’t always turn out the way people wanted it to.
