Any other business

I can perfectly well understand why someone should be an agnostic. But to be an atheist — to deny flatly and without qualification the existence of God — is to me wholly unsympathetic. The depth of folly, indeed, and not without malice to us all. It makes little sense in reason. For if it is difficult, even strictly speaking impossible, to ‘prove’ the existence of God, in the sense in which we prove a theorem in geometry or the second law of thermodynamics, it is much more difficult to prove that he does not exist. More seriously, atheism necessarily demeans humanity.

Rupert Steiner meets Bupa chief Val Gooding, one of Britain’s most successful female bosses A silhouette of a faceless giant hangs on Bupa’s atrium wall. The piece is bisected and has vaguely medical undertones, appropriate for the corporate offices of a private healthcare group. But the parallels do not stop there. Bupa has another almost anonymous giant in Val Gooding, its 56-year-old chief executive. She is Britain’s second most powerful female boss, but with very little of the profile many of her male counterparts court and enjoy. Over the past ten years Gooding has turned Bupa around, grown its market share, produced record results and built the business into a rare world brand.

Larry Silverstein, the 75-year-old property developer who bought a lease on the twin towers of the World Trade Center six weeks before they collapsed, has been a lonely defender these past five years of his right to build the office space of his choosing on what to others is sacred ground. But he has played a difficult hand well — not least because he is, by all accounts, a difficult man. Facing off against the Port Authority, which owns the World Trade Center site, and the state government, which half-owns the Port Authority, and the city government, which has had its own ideas for the site, he has haggled doggedly over who gets the last say on what gets built. The state and city would have loved to find a way of squeezing him out cheaply.

What has been the single most successful and socially useful investment innovation of the last 30 years? Although paradoxically few investors will know what it is, or why they should be grateful that it exists, my nomination is the index fund. On 31 August this year, largely unheralded in the media, this dull but remarkable invention celebrated its 30th year in existence. An index fund, also known colloquially as a tracker fund, is a fund that does nothing more exciting than set out to mimic the performance of one of the market indices that are regularly featured in media reports about the day’s events in the stock market.

Can there be a middle-aged man in Britain whose heart did not beat a little faster last week at the news that Hornby has expressed an interest in acquiring Airfix? This would be a merger that might have been dreamed up in a 1960s toy cupboard. Ailing Airfix is owned by Humbrol, which makes the little pots of enamel paint we used to use on our Airfix model aeroplanes, and which also produces Plasticine. Hornby is the great model railway company that also happens to make Scalextric cars. To complete the set, all we need is a deal-structure modelled in Meccano (also originally a Hornby product) by a suave young investment banker called Action Man (b. 1966). But can Airfix survive at all?

For the first time in my life I had to call an ambulance, because my mother was suffering from chest pains. It was a fascinating episode: so much so that my mother, when she was feeling a little better, accused me of actually enjoying it. The reality of Monday morning in a south London A&E department — within 25 minutes of the 999 call she was in the recovery room at St George’s, Tooting — may lack the intensity of ER and offer no hint of the tangle of doomed doctor-nurse-paramedic relationships that afflicts Holby City, but it gives you plenty to think about.