Every Monday we feature a favourite Alex cartoon selected by our readers. This week’s offering is from 2010.

Ted the insurance broker was one of those offscreen characters in the strip who Clive had the occasional alcoholically ruinous lunch with. The reader who chose this cartoon has requested to remain anonymous as he works for Lloyd’s of London, which his banking friends describe enviously as “the last bastion of the long lunch.”

In the early days of the cartoon quite a few of the jokes we wrote were based on personal experience. Okay, we didn’t have experience of some of Alex’s more exclusive and expensive lifestyle accessories: things like a mobile phone. It’s hard to believe today that owning a mobile was once a status symbol and would attract envious glances from passers-by on the street. Russell vividly remembers the first time he saw one of those early brick-sized devices, when one of his City contacts proudly showed it off in the Champion pub off Oxford Street. It’s one of those seminal moments that lives in your memory for ever, like seeing your first colour TV (Russell is old enough to remember that too. Actually he saw it in the USA, so technically it was a color TV).

Phones and cars aside, when we were in our mid twenties we led roughly comparable lifestyles to the likes of Alex and there were many universal themes that we could write about: chatting up girls, eating hot curries, having an eccentric grandmother etc. Pretty soon though, those City guys, on their big salaries with even bigger expense accounts, started to lead lives that we could only dream about. Or, rather, be told about over lunches with them (on those expense accounts naturally). We would then satirise these lifestyles in our cartoon, hoping that our readers would assume that we knew about such upmarket living first-hand.

This is one of the occasional cartoons of recent years that was drawn from personal experience. As Charles both wrote jokes and drew the artwork, Russell had to take on the compensatory task of having lunch with the City contacts. These lunches, with the other person’s employer picking up the tab, usually involved fine cuisine and even finer wines. In the 1980s people were very cavalier about their expenses claims, brazenly putting down the recipient of the hospitality as M. Mouse or R. Reagan, knowing that they made so much money for their bank that their boss would turn a blind eye to a few lunches with their mates. By the 90s people had to be a bit more circumspect and actually put down the name of a genuine client on their expenses claim. Russell would have to masquerade as a fund manager, who according to the records might have had several lunches with different brokers in different restaurants on the same day.

Lunches in those early days tended to involve quite a lot of alcohol. The intention was that the City guy would get drunk and tell indiscreet stories and Russell would remain sober and write them all down in the notebook he always carried on such occasions. But it didn’t always work out like this and Russell would end up with a sore head trying to decipher the increasingly spidery handwriting in his notebook. Out of politeness Russell would occasionally reciprocate by buying a lunch for the City guy. There was one financial PR man who told Russell that this was the first time in his career that he hadn’t had to pick up the tab for a business lunch (it’s what PR people exist for in the opinion of the rest of the financial community).

By the 2000s when compliance started to impose its iron grip on the City, with the introduction of party-pooping legislation like the Bribery Act and MiFID II, it became much harder for people to expense lunches and consequently guests had to pay their own way. This is where the inspiration for this joke came, when Russell realised that a free lunch with an appalling hangover (and some indecipherable stories in his notebook) was less attractive than a self-funded lunch with lower-quality information, but less collateral damage to his health.

Russell doesn’t drink any more. He finds he fitted a lifetime’s quota of alcohol into the 38 years that the Alex strip ran.

If you click on the strip above you can see it in its original 2010 context.

If you’ve got any suggestions for a favourite cartoon for future inclusion please email us. And do tell us if there’s a particular reason why it appealed to you.