26th April is Ian Graham’s birthday – he is 49 today, some six months younger than me.

Trawling the internet for him over the past few years has borne little fruit; even posting an appeal on his birthday brought no success.  This was what appeared on 26th April last year:

Ian Graham is 48 today.  It would be good to wish him ‘Happy Birthday’, except that he seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth.

Ian’s father was a priest in the Church of England and lived at the vicarage in Chilton Polden, a village in Somerset between Bridgwater and Glastonbury.

Ian and I did our A levels at Strode College at Street in Somerset before he went off to the University of Sussex where he read biology.  Thirty years on, and the memories are all happy ones!

On graduation he worked in IT for Williams and Glyn’s Bank, then J P Morgan, and then (I think) Banque Paribas. He was best man at our wedding in 1983.

The last time I saw him was 1994, he was still living in north London at the time. In 1996, he moved to Scotland, before moving to Australia, where he was with Macquarie Bank.

The Chairman’s Report at the Annual General Meeting of Macquarie in 2000 declared

“I would like to announce that Ian Graham will join the bank on 1st September 2000 as Chief Information Officer”.

In 2002, Computerworld announced that Ian had completed his appointment with Macquarie and had gone surfing.  In an article titled “CIO ditches financials for fins”, it reported:

“Three weeks is a long time in the banking world, especially when the sun is shining and the surf is up. In a low-key changing of the guard Nigel Smyth has been appointed CIO at Macquarie Bank, replacing Ian Graham who has, at least according to his former employer, taken up life as a waxhead, replete with a brand new surfboard under his arm as a parting gift.

Smyth officially took over the CIO’s chair at Macquarie on September 1, although a “hand-over” period of around three weeks saw them both collaborating to usher in the new regime.

“Ian was here for two years on a fixed-term contract, and the organisation was very happy with the direction of ISD (information services division) and wanted to continue that”, Smyth said referring to his appointment”.

Ian, if your profile is high enough for you to merit mention at AGMs and trade journals, how have you disappeared since then?

I tried this exercise last year and got a few visits from Macquarie registered ISP addresses, but no information.

The world is a small place. Someone out there can tell me where Ian is.

The world is a small place.

This morning, coincidental with my best man’s birthday, a letter arrived from the south of England.  Ian’s father, now of very advanced years, had written; not because of anything that had appeared anywhere online, but because my appointment to a country parish had appeared in the columns of the Church Times.

Old ways are often the best ways!

(And no thanks to the guys whose alerts must have picked up the previous posts and never responded!)