Despite my reservations at the time of the Eircom launch, and its current share price collapse, I am of course greatly pained now that I did not originally subscribe for some 50 million shares, sell them for the entirely predictable and enormous profit on the first few days of trading, and walk away.

Borrowing the money would have presented no problem. Every bank and building society at the time had a walk-in/carryout policy regarding Eircom, and all you had to do was sign your name and pick up the dosh, perhaps leaving a small child behind as a guarantee in some of the few remaining institutions which were old-fashioned and rude enough to ask how you might repay the loan.

Having duly bought and sold the shares, I would then have established myself as a fully fledged successful speculator, with the profits to prove it. I might justifiably have thought of myself as a George Soros in the making. I would be a confident, polished, slick operator, creating frissons on the worldwide money markets, making millions with a few quick decisions, buying and selling shares on the Internet, spotting opportunities everywhere, and crushing competitors.

Sitting in front of my screen in a clutter-free, people-free cantilevered villa perched somewhere on the edge of the Atlantic, I would be a serene and fulfilled creator of wealth, devoted solely to the manufacture of money. I would do this without any tedious provision of goods or services, without any middleman, without any customers, without compromise or concession, without a single personal communication, without ever having to shake hands with, never mind clap eyes on, any other human being, and without ever having to speak to another member of the human race.

But it isn't the money. Honestly. The appeal of such a life is its incandescent purity.

Next time round, you will not see me lacking in courage.

This is why so many of you have been stuck with your increasingly worthless Eircom shares. You stumbled into your first-time dealings, pallid and nervous, your pathetic cheques and wads of grubby notes clutched in your sweaty hands. Your family, its entire savings part of your crazy dream, held its collective breath outside the door. You handed over the dosh, consumed between anguish at its departure and longing for its enhanced return. You were now, for the very first time, an "investor" in the stock market.

Or so you thought, because you thought small. You were not an investor, but a fall guy. You could not see the larger picture, and your sad little place in it. You thought a "bed and breakfast deal" was what you got on the previous June weekend with the wife in Fethard-on-Sea. When you eventually "took a bath" you thought you would emerge clean, rather than cleaned-out. You were an innocent, and you paid the price. The price was high. More agonising than your cash losses, even worse than the departure of your family, in recent days you have had to suffer lectures by leading economists and leading editorial writers. You have been cruelly reminded of the platitudes mouthed at the time of the launch, namely that share prices can fall as easily as they can rise, and that experts are not always right. It is worse than being back at school.

So: what to do now? Perhaps this time you are going to take the standard media advice, and hold on to your tiny shareholding in the hope that some helpful telecommunications giant will some day appear on the horizon, utter soothing cries of sympathy and buy up your shares for a sum that will cover your losses to date? Perhaps Santa Claus might join in the rescue too?

Look: the media were no use to you then and they are less use to you now. Forget about them. But it is worth remembering that apart from Mary O'Rourke, who was quite obviously in the advanced stages of Eircomania at the time, there was no genuine gung-ho McCreevy-like figure on the scene at the outset to urge us onward, to rout the begrudgers, to sneer at the timorous and to encourage the bold.

Had there been such a courageous personality, a true visionary, more of us might have been given the correct advice: to go for it, all in and all out, to shove every last penny we could find into Eircom, and to remove it all again, with profits, a couple of days later. Then, instead of gazing forlornly today on the wreckage that is Eircom sharedealing, we could look back blissfully at the short but beautiful life of the Eircom chimera, the miraculous, moneymaking mirage.