When we first meet Trixie, she's a hard-drinking, Prada-wearing, girls-just-wanna-have-fun type who happens to be a bond dealer and is also recovering from a relationship with the office cad.

Written by Helen Dunne, associate City editor with the Daily Telegraph, Trixie is the heroine of a weekly column, and this is another instalment in the bonus-fed lifestyle of a City of London worker who happens to be female, with, as she repeatedly tells us, a pert bottom, massive bills and a lifestyle threatened by the fact that she hasn't done a day's work in months and is facing the chop.

In the accompanying blurb, Ms Dunne tells us she found the fact that a trader once sent her clients a detailed account of the sexual gymnastics she would perform with her significant other that evening, and her boyfriend a detailed analysis of the day's trends in the market, "wonderfully liberating". Quite.

Short on sexual gymnastics but well-endowed with sarky lines, Trixie gives us a tongue-in-cheek insight into the wonderful world of merchant banking, with prostitutes being provided for clients, massive quantities of alcohol (among other things) being swallowed, even bigger egos vying for space and a myriad of office cliches such as the geek, the hunk, the cad, the east-ender made good, the hyper-efficient, and the fact the women have to out-lad the men to get ahead.

Essentially we are in subBridget Jones country here, with the patina of the City overlaid to distinguish it from the pack.

Trixie is littered with de rigueur references to designer labels, trendy London locations and small bouts of high finance for beginners.

And why, oh why, can't anyone put on shoes anymore without the Manolo Blahnik or Jimmy Choo prefixes?

comidheach@irish-times.ie