Any other business

On the road to Agra, travelling to see the Taj Mahal, we found ourselves passing a seemingly endless convoy of trucks. Well, not so much a convoy as a convention, since the trucks were stationary. Miles and miles of motionless juggernauts, their drivers smoking biddies or drinking chai on the roadside. I turned to my colleagues and said, facetiously, ‘Sustainable transport.’ We had intended to see one of the Great Wonders of the World that day, but had stumbled across another. Our driver explained that the trucks were queuing to pay a toll levied by the Delhi government. The queue can last up to four days, though some drivers expedite the process with palm grease. In temperate climates, food left in a truck for a day may suffer some spoilage.

I’m going to start with a declaration of interest. I own a four-bedroom house in Cambridgeshire, in which I have been living for the past nine years. I own no other property, either in Britain or abroad. I feel obliged to say this because increasingly when I read headlines such as ‘Doom and gloom as house prices fall further’, I wonder: has the author got a portfolio of bedsits in Stoke-on-Trent or has he just bought a house in Tooting and is desperately trying to flog his flat in Streatham? The received wisdom that falling house prices are a bad thing is certainly not shared by the public at large. Last week a BBC poll revealed that 28 per cent of Britons can’t wait for house prices to fall — compared with only 22 per cent who want them to rise.

Neil Collins says the rights issues recently announced by RBS, Bradford & Bingley and HBOS are a sign of desperation — and their terms are an insult to loyal shareholders Within the next few days, half a million savers with the former Halifax Building Society will receive a fat, bewildering and highly complex document. It will invite them to buy more shares in HBOS, the company that now owns Halifax after its merger with Bank of Scotland, at what at first glance seems a highly attractive price. If they also happen to be shareholders in Royal Bank of Scotland, they’ll have received a matching batch of gobbledegook from it too.

These days, Vesco the fugitive fraudster would have had a top job on Wall Street So farewell, Robert Vesco, the fraudster, drug trafficker and fugitive from US justice whose death last year has been ‘confirmed by Cuban burial records’, according to the Daily Telegraph. Vesco absconded with $200 million of other people’s money — $60 million of it in banknotes in his excess baggage on a commercial flight — after looting Investor Overseas Services, the mutual-funds empire created but recklessly mismanaged by Bernie Cornfeld. Welcomed as a white knight when he gained control of IOS in 1970, Vesco proceeded to steal most of its remaining assets by selling them to fictitious companies as fast as he could print imaginative new letterheads.

When the corridors of power echo to the strains of ‘Nil nisi bunkum’ When did the newfangled service for a dead nob first come in — the one that says it is a ‘celebration’ of the life, rather than a lament for the death? I would like to read a learned survey of the subject. When I was a boy in the Thirties, all centred on the funeral, which was a solemn, often grand affair. People counted the number of cars, or carriages, which followed the hearse, and spoke of ‘a forty-carriage do’. Everyone wore mourning black suits, black ankle-length dresses, hats and veils. Sometimes as many as a thousand mourners trudged behind the coffin to the cemetery. As the cortège approached, everyone on the pavements stood still.

Christian Sylt and Caroline Reid say the motorsport industry is in turmoil — and could lose millions in sponsorship — as a result of Max Mosley’s tabloid embarrassment Few sports have a sexier brand image than Formula One. Race-cars snaking through the streets of Monaco past grandstands full of the world’s most glamorous women; grid girls in tight T-shirts; top models such as Naomi Campbell and Heidi Klum hanging off the arms of the team bosses: F1 has always used glamour to boost its global appeal. But in the past month the sport has gained an association more akin to Soho than St Tropez. Its mystique has been shattered and F1 is just beginning to count the cost.

Death and taxes: these, according to Benjamin Franklin, are the two immovables of human existence. In modern life, however, there is a third: drivel, from which, try as one might, it is now impossible to escape. I concede, of course, that it is possible that it’s my sensitivity to drivel rather than its incidence or prevalence (to borrow two terms from epidemiology) that has increased over the years. But I don’t think so: I can’t go further than a few yards from my front door without encountering some. That wasn’t true always. Personally, I blame broadcasting. It insinuates itself everywhere almost without human agency, or none at any rate that dare acknowledge itself, and rots the brain utterly.