It's seven months since we moved from our offices in Mount Street to our new building in the IFSC. It was a great shock to the southside contingent to realise that they would actually have to cross the river to get to work, but for those of us on Dublin's increasingly fashionable northside it marked a new chapter in the development of the city. Finally it's OK to work in Dublin 1.

The major question as we took up residence in George's Dock was not where the long bond was heading, or whether the Bundesbank was likely to raise rates in the immediate future, but whether the air-conditioning system was really going to work.

Our days in Mount Street were steamy affairs - nothing to do with the personalities in the office, merely the fact that the dodgy air conditioning meant that the temperature in the dealing-room was always somewhere in the 90s unless you stood under an air vent, in which case it was somewhere in the sub-zero region.

The lesson is that market crashes can have nothing at all to do with fundamentals and everything to do with ambient temperatures. Keep an eye on the progress of El Nino is my advice!

I'm pleased to say, though, that our new home is top-notch when it comes to air-conditioning and time will tell how this affects our business. We can be cool and calm no matter what the markets are doing and therefore make our decisions in rational and unemotional ways. Um, yes, maybe...

The financial services centre is a strange place. It's a working theme park - MoneyCentre or BondWorld or Forexland. The buildings are retro, infinitesimally different, yet somehow all the same. Like the people who work here, I suppose. The building contractors with their low-slung jeans and hard-hats provide a welcome contrast to the theme park uniform of discreet navy suits of my male colleagues with a daring splash of multicoloured tie.

The female inhabitants don't have the same type of uniform - there are some pale suits and the occasional silk scarf wound artistically around the neck - but generally women don't dress for business in the same way as men. But we should. People take you much more seriously in a suit and women need to be taken seriously in business.

Men are more aggressive, more demanding and more self-confident. And they wear a suit from day one. A man might only have one suit, but in the office he'll wear it until it falls apart. It signifies that he's part of the club. And no matter how much we'd like it to be different, you still have to be part of the club.

Since our move, both bond and equity markets have pretty much continued their bull run but lately we've seen a few reversals of fortune in bonds and there's a sense of restlessness out there.

We were kept busy after the Fed's Alan Greenspan harked back to his "irrational exuberance" speech of earlier this year. He mused that people were growing complacent and muttered darkly about inflation and higher interest rates. The Bundesbank followed his remarks by raising interest rates. This was hailed as an unexpected move - it doesn't matter that there had been market talk about such a move for weeks, whenever the Bundesbank does something you'll find it's unexpected.

The markets got the jitters and people who like looking backwards started talking feverishly about Black Monday, October 1987, October 1929 and the like.

Monday the 20th was a particularly edgy day, given the press comment in Britain about the prospects of them joining EMU and the fact that the stock exchange launched the new automated quote system. The darkest predictions failed to materialise then, although yesterday equity markets took a heavy fall after the Hong Kong collapse.

In this part of the world, most people in the market are fed up with EMU. Practically every market move in Europe in the last few years has been because of the `Will they? Won't they? Can they? Can't they?' fears. And even if you're a dead cert to be in, someone will write a piece of research saying you should be out and the market will get into a tizzy for a few days before deciding that, since you're a dead cert to be in, you'll be in and hang the consequences.

Because nobody can be truly sure what the consequences will be. It's like the fall of the Berlin Wall - so extraordinary that you can't presuppose what life will be like afterwards. Still, now that the day of reckoning draws every closer we'll have all the stuff about how you'll be able to have bank accounts in euros and pounds. Great. Overdrafts in two currencies.