Bonuses may be, er, a bone of contention these days, but at the employee-owned John Lewis Partnership they're handled with all the style and grace you'd expect from the never-knowingly-undersold retailer.

The bonus announcement is always awaited with great excitement in every John Lewis department store, office and Waitrose around the country. At precisely 9.30am on the big day (it was yesterday this year), the "partners" - they're known as staff everywhere else - crowd around while a chosen one of their number, often the oldest, youngest or newest employee in the place, rips open a sealed envelope then waves aloft the magic number.

Yesterday it was 13% - down from last year's bumper 20% but, hey, times are tough. Each one of the 69,000 partners gets the same percentage of their pay, regardless of their role or seniority, and cheers and polite applause are usually the order of the day. None of that undignified carping you get about bonuses down at those greedy City banks. Definitely not.

* Getting creative to beat the crunch, part one. A growing number of businesses that have laid off staff are now renting out their empty desk space to people looking for somewhere to base themselves without the cost of a Regus-type serviced office. Two agencies, Office Share and Desk Space Genie, have sprung up to profit from what could be a new mini-boom industry.

* Part two. Minicab firm TST Cars has seen a 35% drop in the number of corporate account customers booking rides so is offering a £9.95 flat rate for central London. The boundaries are such that you could get from Westminster to Primrose Hill for a bargain of under a tenner. "So many companies have put their staff on the Tube we had to take drastic action," says key account manager Roy Pollard.

So, how was it being me?

To a private showing of Frost/Nixon arranged by City PR supremo Roland Rudd in aid of the NSPCC.

A stellar business contingent, including Charlie Dunstone, Lucian Grainge and bankers Bob Phillis and Russell Chambers, were treated to a Q and A with Sir David Frost himself before the film in which he secures the first post-White House interview with the fallen President Richard Nixon.

Then, after Frost, none other than Michael Sheen who plays Frost in the movie, appeared and was interviewed by Frost. So there was this man quizzing someone about being himself... How weird is that?

* Sheen recounted how, when he was studying for the part, he spotted Frost leaving a Channel 4 television party. He followed the veteran broadcaster down the street so he could learn how to walk like him. So there was this man walking along a road who was being stalked by another man who was about to play him in a film... Layer upon layer of weirdness.

* “I hear he is a neat freak,” says Bernard Madoff investor Burt Ross, a former mayor of Fort Lee in New Jersey. “His job in prison should be to clean the latrines.”

The Bogus band banned by the bank

Despite being based in Edinburgh, Royal Bank of Scotland knew how to party. But a past beneficiary of its hospitality budget has fallen victim to the new regime.

Under Sir Fred Goodwin, the bank was fond of shelling out £3000 a time on a rock band from Yorkshire to enliven its annual awards ceremonies in London, Glasgow and Birmingham. They were told to turn up either wearing kilts or dressed as Chicago gangsters.

The lads' leader, Paul Munday, told City Spy that the band had performed at the events for three years running, but that the latest invitation was cancelled just as they were about to hit the road.

“If Sir Fred gets to keep his pension and decides
to celebrate, maybe he will book us for the party,” said Mundey. The name of the group? The
Bogus Brothers.

* Meanwhile, make what you will of the fact that RBS has taken one of the swishest boxes available at the Cheltenham Festival. And of a comment from one stuffed guest tottering from the majority state-owned bank's box, declaring: “They've completely over-ordered. There's masses of food in there.”

* Philip Murombedzi, editor of the Zimbabwe Guardian, a Mugabe propaganda rag, takes heart that Britain has followed his country in embracing “quantitative easing”. The difference, he adds, is that “Britain, unlike Zimbabwe, is using the same measures without biting economic sanctions; which suggests they are in a deeper hole than Zimbabwe was, or is”.

* Times are tough, but tougher still at property firm Quintain, where they've stopped giving breakfast to employees. It's only available to the directors now, so the minions have to fend for themselves...

Double whammy at Teathers

Poor old Teathers. The stockbroker was chugging along rather nicely until it gave up its independence in 2005 and became embroiled in the Icelandic banking meltdown.

First it was bought by Landsbanki, which went bust in October. Then white knight Straumur arrived to buy the name and save half the staff.

This week, more bad news: Straumur, too, was being nationalised. The staff have been emailed an HR reminder that they can have counselling if “work pressures get too much to deal with”. One worker told City Spy: “This would be funny if it weren't so tragic.”

* Joke doing the rounds in school staff rooms: “Can we expect the following quid pro quo: teachers from failing schools are fast-tracked to become bank managers.”

* HSBC's taipan in Asia, Sandy Flockhart, was forced into damage control after Honkers and Shankers' shares tumbled 24% on Monday. “I give my children HSBC shares,” Flockhart told reporters in Hong Kong. City Spy recalls how John Gummer fed his four-year-old daughter, Cordelia, a hamburger at the height of the mad cow disease scare in 1990...