Morning:
9°c
So the City generates - or at least it did- £13 billion in income a year for other businesses, and, I am told, one hedge manager kept two other people in work.
Well, all I can say is the lights going out in Mayfair are already darkening Exmoor, where I've spent the past fortnight. Barmen are polishing glasses gloomily behind bars in legendary sporting pubs and bookings for shoots - a Klondike economy of recent years, pumping £20 million yearly into the area - are already thin on the ground.
One shoot in neighbouring Wiltshire is an early casualty of the, er, unpleasantness at AIG. The insurers used to book out 18 days a year. Not this year, though.
Pubs, hotels, beaters, cleaners, caterers, pickers-up, drivers, all of whom depend on the crumbs from the hedgies' tables, are all facing very lean times, as corporate shoots cancel their knees-up post the Glorious Twelfth.
This doesn't, I have to say, bode well for Glyndebourne, Henley, Garsington, Ascot, Goodwood and the rest of the so-called "season" which now starts with the Chelsea Flower Show and ends with the Notting Hill Carnival.
I'm the last bird in the world to stick up for the bankers but I'll say this much for them. They did know how to spread it around, and not just in London.
* It has become fashionable under the aegis of a certain Mayor to talk fluent Latin wherever possible (cf the opening speech of the Hadrian exhibition at the British Museum). Well - mirabile dictu - it's catching on.
As I was driving along Talgarth Road I almost crashed because I was trying to read the notice in Latin in the rear window of the car in front. Basically, it said, if you can read this, you're too damn close (nimis propinquis ades). If things go on like this Latin will overtake Twitter as a lingua franca, in Londinium at least.
* When I was at an all-girls' day school in Hammersmith we fancied the history boys from Latymer much more than we did the swotty "Paulines" at St Paul's.
Apparently, decades later, nothing has changed, and confirmation that Latymer Upper is still officially the coolest (because it's co-ed) and most thesp (because of old boys such as Alan Rickman and Hugh Grant) independent school in London comes in the adorable shape of Latymerian Toby Regbo, who is starring as Eliot in the new Polly Stenham play Tusk Tusk at the Royal Court.
When I melted over his pic and said I wanted to go, my daughter (in Year 10 at said Latymer) was unimpressed and made a tutting noise. "It's not tsk, tsk," I said. "It's Tusk Tusk, darling."
