Neil Collins

The M6 Toll is a moneyspinner for its offshore owners but unloved by motorists, says Neil Collins. Is it really the best model for road-building without taxpayers’ money? Drive south down the M6 towards the Midlands and you pass an illuminated sign at junction 15. If you’re lucky, it will display the following message: ‘To J8 for M5, 34 miles, 34 minutes’. A couple of junctions further on, you can’t miss a similar sign with the message: ‘M6 Toll clear’. Ah, you say to yourself, that’s all very fine, but I’m not a boy racer looking to do a ton and get away with it. The earlier sign effectively tells me there’s no point in investing £4.

Kim Schlunke would like you to buy a flying saucer. No, honestly, he’s got a video of it on his mobile, showing one buzzing round his lab in Perth, Australia. See it fly! See it hover! See it land delicately on its little legs! It looks, in other words, like a special effect of the sort that DreamWorks can throw into a movie with scarcely a thought. Yet this flying saucer does not break the laws of physics, and Schlunke, one of those archetypal garrulous Aussies, has actually flown in a larger version which could one day become a flying car. Well, he says he has, although his phone has so many clips of the unmanned prototype that he can’t find the one with him flying the bigger model. And he hasn’t flown very high, less than two metres off the ground.

This is getting serious — so serious that I’ve done something I may have cause to regret terribly a year or two hence. I have sold my shares in Lloyds TSB. I did so with a heavy heart, and an even heavier loss, since they were bought when the shares were yielding 7 per cent, a rate comfortably in excess of the interest on the bank’s most generous deposit account at the time. They are still yielding 7 per cent, in a manner of speaking, but the shares are sad, shrivelled things, and the extra income I’ve had is a tiny fraction of the capital I’ve lost. Lloyds was the bank that did Dull.

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.

Scroll through the Multimap website to Bosworth Road, London W10, and it reveals that this sad corner of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea boasts three primary schools, two more schools and a college, all within a couple of hundred yards of each other. No need for any other seats of learning, you might think — yet there’s another primary school in this street that the site doesn’t show, which is so oversubscribed that it has just registered its first pre-birth application from desperate parents. Maple Walk is a fee-paying school, but quite unlike other prep schools in the capital. Where they boast of the quality of their facilities, Maple Walk has almost none.

Neil Collins has become addicted to alphaville’s interactive forum for stock-market watchers There are thousands of websites for anyone interested in markets. You can spend whole days shunting from one to another, blitzed by irritating ads, looking at share prices anywhere in the world, reading opinions expert and stupid, blud-geoned by analysis. Where on earth do you start? Can you sift the wheat from the chaff? More importantly, can you avoid being bored to death? The small, resolute band who still read the print version of the Financial Times have long since become used to skimming past what we in the trade call a ‘house ad’ — a puff for something related to the paper, or owned by its proprietor.

The trade could only gasp at the figures Charlie Mayfield revealed a fortnight ago. Next week, the new chairman of John Lewis Partnership hopes they’ll be gasping again as he opens 17,000 square feet of food hall at John Lewis in Oxford Street. No, not quite a Waitrose, but something that he claims will be different, the result of ‘co-operation between Waitrose and John Lewis’. If you thought that as sister companies they were on the same side, then you really don’t know how big corporations work. And JLP, as it is inevitably called by its executives, is a big corporation nowadays, with 68,000 employees — oops, sorry, partners — 26 stores, 185 supermarkets and sales of £6.4 billion a year.

Guillaume Pepy doesn’t look like a man in a hurry. An elegant 47-year-old Frenchman with impeccable manners, he doesn’t look like an archetypal railwayman either, which may be because he isn’t. It’s true that he’s an énarque, a graduate of France’s elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration, but he’s also been both a judge and a market-research expert with Taylor Nelson Sofres in France and America, which hardly sounds like suitable qualifications to run La Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer. Yet as chief executive of SNCF, which runs France’s pride and joy, Les Trains à Grande Vitesse, he can claim to be Europe’s most powerful and successful rail boss.

It’s simple, this internet grocery shopping. Log on, pick what you want, pay with your credit card and get on with your life while you wait for the doorbell to ring. No need to schlep to the supermarket, fight your way to the checkout, lug all those overloaded plastic bags into the car and out again, to discover that you’ve carefully placed the bananas at the bottom of the heap. We spend £120 billion a year on groceries, so buying them on the net is such an obvious new market that it’s no wonder lots of people tried to get into it. For some, it has been a miserable, expensive lesson that doing the weekly shop is nothing like as simple as it looks. Webvan, an American pioneer of internet grocery, pledged to go from cow to steak for customers but went bust instead.