Tonight:
4°c
Listen earnestly to our leading pub bosses and become convinced they are pushing beer barrels up a fearsome hill. Pubs have certainly had a rough year, as the bombed-out share prices of Enterprise Inns, Punch Taverns and Mitchells & Butlers attest.
The smoking ban, a sharp consumer downturn, cheap alcohol at supermarkets and savage falls in property values have left many pubcos hugely in debt.
They are struggling to support landlords, some of whom are seriously pondering whether to shove the keys through the letterbox and scram - or have one last lock-in before setting fire to the saloon bar.
The Treasury's lack of sympathy is making a tough situation worse. There's no arguing here with Jonathan Neame of Shepherd Neame, who says: "The Government continues to regard the Great British Pub as a tax-collection point on one hand and a social problem on the other."
A campaign to save the British boozer has begun, though their trade body won't admit that few of the five pubs that close each day are actually that great.
Grotty pubs going under might be a shame, but it's not a national tragedy. And even the worst-run boozers can justifiably blame their demise at least partly on the business models of the big pubcos.
A near-consensus has been reached in the pub trade that traditional wet-led bars just can't survive. Hence the rash of gastro pubs, faux wine bars and garish cocktails. Pubs moan that they can't compete with supermarkets, though this raises the question of why they should try to - if the local pub was a nicer place to be than the average living-room, people would surely come.
Some of the pubs run by the big chains are about as appealing a place to drink as Tesco's frozen-food aisle. But one London firm is showing the rest how to do it.
The Capital Pub Company opened its first pub in 2002 and has now expanded to 24 unbranded, old-fashioned hostelries with a strongly local feel.
Yesterday it said that sales in the last six months were up 11% to £10 million, allowing it to turn a profit of £2.5 million - a rare outbreak of cheer in an industry awash with red ink.
One key factor in its success is that the pubs are free of tie: the publicans don't have to buy beer chosen by the pubcos at inflated prices.
This tie may be what hurts pubs most. As prices go up, landlords have to sell a narrower range of products at rising prices, leaving them with little cash to spruce up the properties.
Capital lets the landlords be entrepreneurial, and backs quirky promotions. Chief executive Clive Watson says: "It's not rocket science, it's just back to old-fashioned pub retailing. We do good cask-conditioned ales and give the manager autonomy to choose beer suitable to his market."
He makes it sound simple, but Capital has been bold, too.
One pub it took over was the World's End in Finsbury Park. No chance, I thought at the time, it being the kind of place you entered expecting at least a punch-up.
Now it's a roaringly successful, comfy-looking boozer which does good beer and is back to putting on the live music it was once renowned for.
"Finsbury Park is different to South Kensington," says Watson, diplomatically. "London is a series of villages, so when I go around our pubs they are all different. If I were in charge of a branded concept that wouldn't be very exciting."
How many big pub bosses would even get the notion that a pub might be a source of excitement?
Not to pick on Tim Clarke of M&B, but he lists his hobbies as ballet, opera and architecture. That doesn't mean he can't also run great pubs, but it's hard to imagine he spends many nights in his own outlets. For him, pubs are financial assets -and that's how he talks about them.
M&B pubs are perfectly okay - if you don't know the area, the nearest O'Neills will be a reliable place to escape the rain for an acceptable pint (unless you want proper bitter, in which case you can probably forget it). But you'd never give a recommendation that went much beyond, "Go here, it's not terrible".
Capital's pubs are a class above this. Perhaps they will show others the way back to the future.
It's not too hard to take sides in Wood v the WSJ
Jon Wood, the wannabe Keyser Söze of hedge funds, has a new enemy. He is suing the Wall Street Journal for daring to report that the performance of his SRM Global fund has been awful.
He isn't claiming the paper was wrong, just that they shouldn't be allowed to reveal how he's doing, on the basis that the information was "confidential" and to publish it a "flagrant disregard" of his rights.
A High Court hearing is pending and it is easy to take sides.
It's not clear whether Wood gave himself the Söze nickname or whether someone else thought he resembled the psychotic crime lord from The Usual Suspects, but either way he seems happy with the description.
He says that the disclosure of his secret positions would have encouraged rivals to place bets against him -- a mean-spirited tactic that he, as a famously tough hedge-fund manager, would never himself employ.
The worry is that a judge may decide that the kickboxing, litigation-happy Wood has a point. If he wins, it would make future reporting on hedge funds even more difficult than it already is, just as regulators and the public call for greater disclosure.
The WSJ notes that Wood has never been slow to cultivate media attention when it suited him, and that must be a key point for the judge. Would he have complained if the WSJ had unveiled "confidential" data showing how well he was doing?
How Ashley always gives himself a sporting chance
Is Mike Ashley a brilliant strategist so far ahead of the game it's uncanny, or a scattergun operator who sometimes hits gold?
Talking to him, it is easier to believe the latter, and lately his record is patchy at best. But is that because he isn't really sure what he's doing, or just that the rest of us can't make out what he's doing?
He was clearly prescient when selling a major stake in Sports Direct at 300p last year, banking close to £1 billion in the process. And he was amusingly unconcerned at the dramatic slide in the shares and the abuse this attracted from pension funds, chuckling that those folk in the City were a "bunch of crybabies". Hard to argue with.
What's his game now with arch-rival JJB Sports?
JJB's future looks dicey - debtors are circling, banks are nervous and the share price is flat out of energy, losing another 15.38% to just 22p yesterday. On one hand it would be good for him if such a major competitor died, but with Ashley things are never simple.
He's a major shareholder, which gives him a powerful say over how the company is run and also, perhaps, first dibs when JJB wants to offload a lease (Sports Direct picked up four more JJB stores yesterday). It also lets him interfere in any sales process as it suits him, blocking a takeover bid here, a rescue offer there.
On the other hand he'd lose his investment if JJB went under and shareholders were wiped out. And in the short term the clearance of JJB stock would dent Sports Direct's sales.
Perhaps his strategy comes down to this: have your fingers in so many pies you don't care which ones get burnt and which ones turn out to contain plums.
