Martin Vander Weyer

As the absurdly coiffed and probably deranged Kim Jong-Il fingers his nuclear button, not even the ballsiest hedge fund manager would contemplate investing in the prospect of Korean reunification. But I could name one secretive London investor who took a big punt back in the 1980s, buying a bundle of North Korean government debt at a tiny percentage of its nominal value on the off-chance that it will one day be redeemed at par by a united Korean treasury. I guess he’s going to have to hold on for a few years yet. It wasn’t such a mad idea, though. In the days when I was a regular visitor to Seoul, everyone I met there believed as an article of faith that the heavily militarised border along the 38th parallel would one day melt away.

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.

The week in which HMV completed its £63 million takeover of Ottakar’s — and announced that Ottakar’s bookshops will be rebranded as Waterstone’s, which HMV already owns — seems a good moment to contemplate the future of the book trade in the virtual and digital age. There is something so unchangeably pleasing about the feel of a book in the hand and the ambience of a room full of books that it is hard to imagine the demise of the traditional well-stocked bookshop, what-ever alternatives technology may offer. And yet our own book-buying habits are the best indication of the speed of change.

A head of steam is building up behind the campaign to halt the imminent extradition to the US of the NatWest Three, the trio who face trial (and two years in a tough Texas jail before trial) for an alleged $6 million ‘wire fraud’ against NatWest in connection with the sale of a joint venture between the bank and Enron. Attention has focused on the unequal extradition terms to which the Blair government agreed in its eagerness to be America’s best friend in the War on Terror, allowing US prosecutors to summon British suspects for trial without first having to present evidence against them.

Time for a naked protest against global cant and in support of Jeremy Clarkson I was all set to join some of my more liberated neighbours on York’s Naked Bike Ride last Friday, until I discovered that it was yet another protest against ‘global oil dependency’. The debate about climate change, carbon emissions and who is doing what to the planet has reached such a fever pitch of self-righteousness and middle-class guilt that it is time for sensible people to start backpedalling.

Listing page content here ‘We all have different ways of doing things,’ says David Jones, when I ask him what makes a good captain of a corporate ship. He certainly has his own way of preparing for a high-pressure day like the one he had last week at the annual general meeting of Wm Morrisons, the supermarket group where he is deputy chairman and troubleshooter-in-chief. ‘I generally wake up about 6 a.m. My body is stiff and I’m almost unable to move. If I’m at home, I ask my wife Ann to move my legs out of the bed and pull me up. If I’m away, I have developed a technique of rolling off the bed on to the floor, then getting on to my knees before making a supreme effort to stand up. This can take anything up to half an hour.

Many of my friends were hooked on the latest series of The Apprentice Many of my friends were hooked on the latest series of The Apprentice — even our usually infallible television critic James Delingpole, who told me that he loved it ‘because it’s so awful’. Perhaps I should make more effort to master postmodern irony, but I’m afraid I found Sir Alan Sugar and his contestants just too irritating to watch for more than five minutes at a time.

I would love to have been a fly on the wall — or a butler — at the US embassy I would love to have been a fly on the wall — or a butler — at the US embassy in New Delhi in March 1963 when Milton Friedman, champion of laissez-faire, came to lunch with J.K. Galbraith, high priest of higher welfare spending and at that time President Kennedy’s ambassador to India. Not only were the two economists lifelong intellectual opponents who found each other’s core beliefs morally reprehensible, but the magisterial Galbraith stood some 20 inches taller than the bantam-cock Friedman.

The demise of Peugeot’s Ryton factory came and went as a news story The demise of Peugeot’s Ryton factory came and went as a news story in little more than 48 hours, mutating swiftly from ‘shock closure’ to more measured explanations of inevitability. Though Peugeot is accused of welshing on promises that the plant would keep working until 2010, its French bosses never suggested that it would make a new model after the Peugeot 206, and the fact that cars can now be built cheaper in Slovakia than in Coventry comes as no news at all.

Christopher Fildes’s City and Suburban column first appeared in June 1984 and notched up over a thousand appearances; before that, he served as business editor under Nigel Lawson in the late 1960s. As a chronicle of modern City life, the Fildes oeuvre has only one equal and that comes in the weighty form of A Club No More, the last volume of David Kynaston’s magisterial history of the Square Mile. In the lighter field of daily and weekly journalism, Christopher has been peerless in his combination of wit, learning, firmness of judgment, appetite for gossip and enthusiasm for lunch — preferably at the Savoy Grill before its tragic refurbishment.