Words and Photography by Nadine Wilmanns

Ian Rosmarin

In conversation with Accountant Ian Rosmarin in London

This is Ian Rosmarin. There’s a brutalist-style building next to the National Portrait Gallery and here are the offices of Calder & Co, where Ian Rosmarin works as an accountant. “There can’t possibly be anything interesting to write about being an accountant,” he muses when we meet in his conference room. And to be honest, I wouldn’t have expected stories of big adventures when talking to an accountant, but there I was, firstly reminded of the English virtue of understatement and of false prejudices. In fact, the conversation that followed was remarkable.

Anyway, back to the beginning:

“I’ve been an accountant for more than half a century and am semi-retired now,” says Ian.

“Some ask me: ‘Don’t you get bored now that you are retired?’ — ‘Not at all,’ I reply, ‘Now I finally have time on my hands. I take my dog out a lot, enjoy the fresh air, and chat with people who stop to admire him. Sometimes I just sit in a café — it’s bliss’.” He looks around the plain but elegant room. “I don’t have to sit inside under artificial lights all day.”

He remembers this bliss from when he was a young man living in Pimlico. He had worked for six years as a financial director and got bored of it. After advising his boss to let him go, he found himself out of work. “I went to cafés and read the paper, walked in the park.”

He took one year off to explore new opportunities.

Year of bliss

“I saw an ad from someone looking for somebody with a piano. I had a huge piano.” It turned out to be an Italian singer who wanted to practice her arias. “She came in the morning playing the piano and singing while I had my morning shave.” Ian smiles at the memory.

It was a most interesting year, he says in hindsight. “I even thought about opening a wine bar. One day I decided to go to Japan.” He got talking to a Japanese student in London who offered to be his tourist guide. “We kept in touch,” he recounts. “She later became the owner of a dungeon. I have since lost contact with her.”

The year of bliss didn’t start as such, though he admits: “It took me about six weeks to unwind because I didn’t know what to do with myself. I also went to therapy with visualizations. One of the most life-changing things I learned from visualization was that the only fear is the fear of fear — you’re scared of fear.”

He soon realised that he wanted to start his own business. “It was good that I had this year though,” he says.

Hard work

“Why did you become an accountant in the first place?” – I always want to know why someone chooses their career.

“I had two cousins, one was a lawyer, one was an accountant. The accountant was richer. Also, my dad said, ‘You would be a good accountant’,” Ian explains. “Really, I got talked into it.”

Having made the decision after finishing his A Levels, he had worked extremely hard. “I didn’t have the best grades at school, so I had to prove to my friends that I could do it,” he reflects. “I worked for big companies — that’s where I learned to drink. Eventually, I became a manager. It was very hard work, but I learned a lot.”

Unexpected potential

“In those days we just had adding machines — it was just before the calculator came out. We typed in the numbers and had a handle that you pulled — we did races with them.” Ian smiles. “One day, there was not much to do at the office, and my boss gave me a phone book and asked me to add the numbers up in my head. Later I was able to count up numbers to the thousands. That just shows you what the human brain is capable of.”

Ian leans back and continues: “Once, I was visiting Bolivia. I was in the jungle, piranha fishing — delicious. The native tour guide worked his way through the jungle with a machete in front of us. We reached a small waterfall that foamed into a stream. The tour guide felled a nearby tree so it would lie across the water as a bridge. He walked over it as if it was nothing and grinned at me from the other side, urging me to follow. I was terrified and thought, what nerve — by now the tree trunk was wet and slippery. I grabbed a branch of a tree and started balancing, but after a few steps, I had to let go of the tree branch. And there I was — deep water under me and a slippery, narrow tree trunk to walk on. I knew I had to relax, take deep breaths … And that’s what I did, and I walked across as if it was nothing.” Ian shakes his head and smiles faintly. “It shows what we are capable of. When I think back on it I still can’t believe that I made that.”

There might be something

By now, I’m not surprised that Ian got bored after six years working his socks off as a financial director following his year of bliss.

People in his course on how to open a wine bar had asked him whether he could do their accounts once they had set up their restaurants. “I thought, there might be something…,” Ian reflects.

“There was an advert saying that someone wanted to sell half of his accountancy practice — ‘no experience necessary’,” Ian recalls. “We got on well.” It was the start of his career as a self-employed accountant.

“In fact,” he adds, “this was one of the two most wonderful guys I have ever known. He had a heart of gold. The other one was the leader of my wife’s dance company. But he was murdered in Guantanamo. It happened like this: His partner, who was in the UK at the time, …” If it hasn`t been obvious by now, Ian does his very best to prove that accountants can be anything but uninteresting but full of surprises. And aren’t surprises the best!