Full marks to Barclays Capital for digging deep at the International Financing Review awards last night. It's traditional for the bank of the year to dig deepest for charity on the night but BarCap's £600,000 was the largest contribution in the last decade. Rich Ricci and Jerry del Missier's outfit stumped up almost half of the overall £1.3 million raised, which lagged last year's £1.4 million final sum, when Deutsche Bank emerged with bragging rights. But it was still enough to ensure the event, held in association with Save the Children, hit the £20 million mark after 17 years.

*Even bankers' image problem has not escaped the charity's president, the Princess Royal. Acknowledging the generosity of those in ballroom at the Grosvenor House Hotel, she noted with royal diplomacy: "It's a message that is quite difficult to get across."

*Newsreader Natasha Kaplinsky was despatched to the floor to drum up bids, but got slightly distracted when she discovered a table representing Prada, there to pick up a gong for its IPO. "Would you like to give me a couple of dresses or some shoes or something?" she asked, very much in the charity spirit.

*TV comic Hugh Dennis, of Mock the Week and Outnumbered fame, was the after-dinner speaker, berating the Grosvenor's lack of natural light (it was after 10pm, Hugh). "This must be the most exciting basement in Britain," he said. "With the possible exception of Max Mosley's." Dennis also had a stab at understanding the euro crisis. "If Greece can't manufacture and export its two main products, hummus and taramasalata, then we'll end up in a double-dip recession." Quite.

FedEx fails to impress again
Oh no! More trouble with FedEx: A City Spy reader tells how, in the last 30 minutes of the eight-hour slot that the logistics company had allocated for her delivery, a FedEx van pulled up outside her house in north London on Monday.

The driver opened his van door for three minutes, holding the parcel. She stood at the front door, waiting for it. Then he slammed his door shut and drove off, and marked it "homeowner unavailable" on the parcel's tracking page on the FedEx website. Most odd.

A FedEx phone operator told the City Spy reader it didn't know the reason, adding that it couldn't re-deliver for two days, even thought the depot is just five miles from the reader's home!

FedEx did eventually deliver after 24 hours. And there was City Spy thinking FedEx wanted to improve its image after last month's episode when one of its US staff arrived at a customer's house, didn't ring the bell, and dumped his delivery over the fence, smashing the contents.

'Runaway banker' escapes the City... to Saatchis
It's a dream that many fed-up investment bankers must secretly harbour. They flee the City, desk and all, to do something more creative and fun with their lives.

And that's exactly what happened this morning as one "banker" escaped from Canary Wharf on a motorised desk and headed straight for Soho.

It wasn't a real banker, of course. This was a stunt arranged by advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi to promote its summer graduate recruitment scheme. The motorised desk - a converted Rover - even had number plates, so that it was deemed roadworthy. Understandably, there were a lot of puzzled looks from bystanders who caught sight of the desk cruising towards Saatchi HQ on Charlotte Street.

"Escape from your boring office," explained leaflets handed out by the Saatchi staff on board. "Now recruiting talented grads and anyone else who fancies a more creative job."

The timing couldn't be more appropriate as bankers have just learnt the size of their bonuses and are ready to quit. The poor souls at Goldman Sachs have seen their payouts cut to a mere £238,000 a head.

*You've got to love the Institute of Economic Affairs. After the latest rise in dole queues to 2.68 million, the rabid free-market think-tank's solution is: make it easier to sack people.

Apparently the "time intensive and costly" process of sacking employees is a major barrier to hiring them. "This is tempting many companies to squeeze more hours out of their existing workforce rather than take on new recruits," says the IEA.

*RBS Insurance has been fined £2.17 million by City watchdogs after staff at Direct Line and Churchill altered customer files and forged signatures in an attempt to pass a regulatory inspection. So one arm of the state - in the form of its 83% stake in Royal Bank of Scotland - must hand over our money to another arm of the state.

So taxpayers lose twice over. The problem dates back to 2010, so this time old boss Sir Fred Goodwin can't be blamed.