“Quite a lot of work went into fibre fit to be buried, tortured, boiled, frozen and stretched”

At first, the range of topics on offer for this particular interview seemed downbeat. A leading engineer in a Chinese telecoms firm, itself suffering through some challenging PR issues, would talk about life in the infrastructure sector since the 1950s, and about some possible futures in infrastructure.

I was only too pleased to set up this call, because Michael’s CV showed that he had started work in the telecoms sector, but not for a Chinese firm: Michael joined the Post Office, that being the main player in telephones in those far-off days. In this respect, Michael was similar to my late uncle, without whose early influence I would almost certainly not have had a chance of penetrating the technology business at all.

So I was in a well-behaved frame of mind for this chat, which almost immediately headed in a direction I wasn’t at all expecting. I was going to ask about the job market in fibre-optic based telecoms, assuming that his road from the Post Office to global telecoms names based in China was in the nature of a mobile and rewardsdriven job market: no, not a bit of it, he said. He’d stayed still, while the ownership of the company employing him had moved from the public sector to the private and to overseas domiciled environment.

The business he has just retired from is Huawei; the short version of the history of owners is that this group came out of Post Office ownership, into a kind of stewardship scheme in which the