Martin Vander Weyer

A short stroll from Poultry to the Mansion House offers vistas of the old and new City. The fortress of the Bank of England awaits its new Governor while the Royal Exchange earns its keep, like much of the modern Square Mile, as an upmarket nest of boutiques and eateries. The Lutyens-designed headquarters of the long-gone Midland Bank stands apparently abandoned by its oligarch owner, facing the avant-garde pink edifice that replaced the Victorian ‘Mappin & Webb Corner’. The skyline gives glimpses of the Lloyd’s Building from 1986, the Gherkin from 2003 and the ‘Walkie-Talkie’ conceived in 2007, due to be completed next year; each a monument to the boom that preceded the bust.

An unfamiliar noise floats over the town; an insistent, one-note metallic drone. Tracked to its source, it turns out to come from a sawmill in a hidden wooded valley a quarter of a mile from my house. Abandoned for the past year, the mill has suddenly come back to life. It is emitting great plumes of steam as well as a multi-decibel industrial racket. And men are working there — I can see only two or three, but still they constitute another little piece of the great employment puzzle. An uptick in demand for sawn timber matches reports of increased levels of activity in the construction and housebuilding sector.

We have had a very high failure rate in deliveries of the catalogues for Emily Patrick’s exhibition,’ says an email from the painter’s husband. ‘Over 50 per cent have been lost in the post or inexplicably delayed.’ Come to think of it, my own most recent Amazon order, allegedly dispatched a fortnight ago, hasn’t reached Yorkshire yet — and neither has last week’s Spectator, although a large envelope posted to me from Old Queen Street on Wednesday did arrive on Thursday, but without its contents. Have aliens seized the sorting offices, or have Royal Mail managers been distracted by a ‘secret 62 per cent increase’ in their bonuses, revealed this week?

Antony Jenkins, the new-broom chief executive of Barclays, has the tone of a junior minister, not long in parliament, who finds himself promoted to high office after the big beast who preceded him was toppled by scandal. In fact he’s been in the bank 30 years, climbing the ladder so quietly that none of my contemporaries there (I coincided with him in Barclays for a decade) ever mentioned him as a man to watch before he was picked to follow Bob Diamond.

Funny how little phrases go viral. Suddenly everyone’s talking about ‘fasting diets’, ‘zombie companies’ and ‘leadership plots’. As to the first, the idea of the ‘5:2 intermittent fasting diet’, I gather, is to eat as little as you can for two days a week. It’s all over the media, and any moment now someone will call George Osborne’s fiscal strategy ‘the 0:7 fasting diet that’s starving us of protein for growth’, or some such. There you are, Mr Balls: yours on a plate, as it were. But ‘zombie companies’ are not so easy to explain.

So farewell, Wegelin & Co, the oldest bank in Switzerland and the one with the simplest strategy for growth — which was to offer secret accounts to American tax-evaders who could no longer obtain that valuable service from bigger Swiss banks such as UBS. Founded by a linen merchant in 1741, which makes it half a century younger than Coutts and Barclays, Wegelin last week pleaded guilty to helping US citizens evade tax on $1.2 billion, agreed to pay $58 million in fines and restitution, and announced that it is closing down.

I tried, I really did, right to the bitter end. No column has made more effort than Any Other Business to spot pinpoints of light on this year’s dark economic horizon. If there was a Spectator Optimist of the Year award, I’d walk it. But with the Chancellor and the Governor drowning out the carol singers with what has become a dirge-duet about the long, hard and winding road to recovery — and with evidence even I can’t deny of an autumn setback after the late summer bounce — my self-appointed role in the national conversation has begun to look more eccentric than ever. All I can do at this stage is invite you to charge your glass for a toast or two, and offer my Christmas recipe for staying cheerful against the odds. Here goes.