So, how can you check the degree to which your own bank, life insurer or fund manager is ready for the year 2000? How can you avoid those eight laggards which are on a very shaky footing?First of all, don't expect the regulators to help you. The Action 2000 ratings are determined by the FSA, which refuses to say which company is in which category. FSA spokesman Robin Gordon-Walker says: "We're certainly not naming now. The reasons why are imperiling confidence and creating the potential for a run on financial institutions, which would only damage their existing depositors, policyholders or investors." Mr Gordon-Walker says the FSA will be asking each chief executive from the sector's 450 biggest groups to confirm in writing that their own company has done everything reasonable to ensure year 2000 compliance.Just about every company in the industry has already issued a bland corporate statement about its own millennium readiness. Invariably, they are peppered with words like "confident" and "robust", but offer no real clue as to which of the bullish-sounding companies issuing them are whistling in the dark.When the Action 2000 report came out last Monday (July 12), The Independent circulated a questionnaire to the UK's 10 biggest banks, 10 biggest life insurers and 10 biggest fund managers. There was one question: "What was your own company's colour rating in the Action 2000 report?" Almost all the companies said that the FSA told them their own ratings only on the condition that they not tell anyone else, or claimed not to know what rating they had been given Only Scottish Widows were prepared to speak out. Grant Hamilton, head of Scottish Widow's Year 2000 team, says: "We've been rated as a blue by the FSA".

A blue rating indicates no identifiable risk of material disruption.How much faith should we place in the FSA's classifications anyway? As recently as March this year, the FSA had 47 companies labelled as red. By the end of June, when information used in the report was finalised, only eight reds remained.Do these changes show a surge of progress among the industry's worst companies? Or are they evidence of their desire to avoid a red rating by telling the FSA what it wants to hear?Four key questions to ask your financial provider before committing funds to any organisation:Are all computer and computer-related systems in your organisation and its key suppliers fully prepared for the century date change?Have you completed business continuity planning regarding possible internal and external problems arising around the date change?Has all the above been verified by independent audit, and can I see a copy of the audit report?Is your chief executive willing to confirm in writing that all is well?. Sand Jungle Mud Dust Raging torrents. These are the elements that you must endure if you are to travel the length of Africa by land. Then there's the locals, the police, the petty officials, the fellow travellers, not to mention the army. So why do it at all, let alone in a knackered Austin 7? What on earth could be worth all that suffering and hardship? I fell in love with Fiona Campbell, the eldest daughter of a colonel in the old British Army in India, when she was 20, in 1966. I was four years older, a penniless writer who wanted to be Ernest Hemingway.

So when Fiona went off to her birthplace in South Africa, I went to a stone cottage on the west coast of Ireland to write books. Every morning - after nights at my typewriter - I wrote letters to Fiona asking her to marry me After a month she said yes. I proposed driving my 1937 Austin 7 Ruby saloon, called Alexa, from London to Johannesburg to claim my bride. In the summer of 1968, I spent May in Paris, demonstrating with 10 million strikers; by autumn, I was working on Alexa to prepare her for the Sahara and the Congo. I knew very little about mechanics, but learnt fast.When all my bills were settled, I borrowed the money from my parents to buy a ferry ticket to France so I could drive to Paris, where I had pounds 150 saved up (there were currency restrictions in those days). The Irish Independent agreed to pay pounds 10 each for articles about the journey, and on 13 November 1968, I set off to drive to the bottom of Spain.

It took more than a week.There were not the great motorways then that there are now, and it took me more than a week. At Algeciras I discovered a crowd of people full of dreams and illusions, who also wanted to travel across Africa. Throughout the trip, we would stumble across each other.From Algeciras, I took the Virgin of Spain ferry to Ceuta in Spanish Morocco, and drove alone to Algiers, where the British consul kicked Alexa to convey how insane he thought I was. He recommended I join an organised safari of six Landrovers going the same way, but when I found them they were condescending towards Alexa. I set off south the next day alone, over the Atlas Mountains on the Hoggar Trail, determined they would not catch me.I was, naturally, nervous about the Sahara Desert, 1,800 miles of rough track from El Golea in southern Algeria to Zinder in Niger. For days I drove on my own, and discovered that the Sahara was like a village.

Drivers passed me going north and south, and told others later who I was, and I became part of a transient community.Then one evening, north of Tamanrassat, I ate rotten sardines in the company of four young French drivers. They woke me by singing God Save the Queen, but I was terribly sick, and insisted on crawling on by myself.Later that day, on a patch of tarmac, I hit a steel barrier erected by local soldiers; this ruined Alexa's good looks but did not hurt me. The soldiers helped me patch her up again over two days, but the radiator remained bent like a bow.At Tamanrassat I met four young English boys in a Landrover who seemed keen - for I had achieved a small notoriety by then - to help me over the worst part of the Sahara. For two days they pushed, until the atmosphere became brittle on the second evening. They claimed their vehicle's clutch was becoming weak, and promptly left me to my fate. I remember watching them drive off into the dusk, leaving me surrounded by watchful Touregs, still 200 miles from the next town, Agadez.