My foray into the markets this week started later than usual owing to the fact that I managed to pick up the stomach bug that has been plaguing all and sundry of late. I spent Monday and Tuesday - well, you don't want to know how I spent either day other than that they were marginally less traumatic than Sunday and on no occasion were the Long Bond, Dow Jones and Footsie uppermost in my mind. All I can say is that life takes on a new perspective when even the sight of a glass of water makes you want to be sick, so can you imagine what a glance at the stock markets would have done on an already weakened stomach.

I did eventually flick over to Teletext on Monday afternoon to have a look at the markets and they were as bad as me, so I lay back, hauled the quilt to my chin and went back to sleep for a few hours. When I woke up again I watched Fifteen-to-One and Countdown. I decided that I was really ill when I couldn't get more than a four-letter word out of the Countdown letters and when I multiplied seven by nine and got a dyslexic 36. I thought about accessing NCB's brilliant new share-watch service over my mobile phone, but I couldn't even press the buttons on the phone properly and I reckoned that, even if I did manage to call up a share price and graph, I wouldn't have known what one it was. Technology may be everything, but not on a queasy stomach.

Anyway, as I said, markets were so sickly when I did look that there really wasn't much comfort in them. And, of course, it's October again which gets everybody reminiscing about October 1987 and muttering darkly about Black Mondays. (I feel that my own personal one has passed by at this point.) However, I confidently expect to see words like "meltdown" and "freefall" used copiously in the newspapers, at least until the month is out. As you know, everyone has been predicting a setback in markets for the past four years, so a touch of freefalling isn't exactly outside the realms of possibility. The question of knowing which stocks to buy when it stops is the more pertinent one just now.

It's interesting, though, that Greenspan's words on the exposure the banking system might have to a stock market fall were the ones that brought out the shakes. Greenspan has become so much like the boy who cried wolf in relation to stock market valuations that you wonder at what point the markets really begin to take him seriously.

If I was a bank with big exposure to some of the dot.com companies, though, I'd take him very seriously indeed.

I managed to stay awake for most of Jeremy Paxman's interview with Bill Gates on Sunday evening. While Bill isn't the man I love to hate (as he seems to be for so many people) he's not my favourite person either. Let's face it, he ships a product that sometimes has a few bugs in it but you don't complain because, hey, it's a software package and there's always bugs in software. Then, just as you're getting to grips with it, he upgrades it so (surprise, surprise) you need a faster machine to run it on. And applications like Word and Excel which should be really easy to use are made more and more complicated by the addition of totally unnecessary details. But we're all suckered into the upgrades because we can't help feeling that more memory must be good and that more bells and whistles in the software must be better. Most of us end up going on courses to find out how to use the damned programmes and the courses are twice as expensive as the software.

Actually, as a capitalist, Bill should really be my favourite type of person since he ships a product with occasional flaws, makes it almost indispensable to everyone with a computer and every couple of years forces you to buy the new version. What more could a company want?

Also he writes books which are mega best-sellers which makes me incredibly jealous!

I felt, though, that Paxman was a little overawed by Bill Gates, which is incredible when you think that he hasn't been overawed by any politician he's ever interviewed. I remember reading once that his usual thought at the beginning of a programme was to wonder "who is this bastard and why is he lying to me". But it wasn't the approach taken in his chat with Bill which goes to show that most of us over the age of 30 are still filled with wonder by anything technological, even if it doesn't work exactly how we thought it would.

There's a picture of the original board of Microsoft doing the rounds, which shows them all with long hair and beards - or, in the case of Bill, with shiny blonde hair and a particularly geekish look - and the question being asked is whether you would have advanced any money to any of these people? Probably the fear of missing the next hot technology thing is what has banks falling over themselves to lend money to the dot.coms, which is where Alan Greenspan's concerns come in. Because there is not a shadow of a doubt that lots of these companies will fail. Yet the ones who don't will make so much money that the bankers cannot afford to pass up the opportunity of being there at the start.

Fear and greed, all over again.

Not much sign of either at the Association of Corporate Treasurers' annual seminar last week. Ireland's corporate treasurers spent the day listening to ways of minimising risk, hedging against risk and generally being as risk-averse as only a corporate treasurer can be. I can't say anything horrible about the association since they kindly asked me to speak at their event. To be fair to them they actually listened even though it's always difficult to push back the plate and allow people ramble on when you've just had a decent meal.

And very decent it was too. It was, in fact, the last decent meal that I had before the illness, for which I'm very grateful.

Oh well, normal eating will resume next week.

Sheila O'Flanagan is a fixed- income specialist at NCB Stockbrokers