Villains in the Square Mile should beware of Kate Swanson, a fleet-footed WPC from City of London Police, who clocked up the second-fastest female running time in Thursday night’s annual 5km City Race. Ms Swanson clearly has had a busy year pounding the streets. She finished in 18min 21sec, almost a full minute faster than her time last year. Ms Swanson, who at 35 is also the national police cross-country champion, clearly has an irrepressible appetite for chasing down crooks. Far from spending yesterday recovering from the ordeal with hot towels, City of London Police tells me that she was out on patrol again all day and unavailable for comment.

–– Evidently the insurance giant Legal & General is not working its staff hard enough, given the hours of training its team apparently put in for the event. L&G’s male team made mincemeat of the opposition, with four of the top ten places. In particular, Phil Wicks, a claims administrator from Kingswood, made the rest of the City look positively sluggish with his winning time of 14min 6sec – more than a minute quicker than the next fastest. But Mr Wicks’s gig at L&G is just the day job – he is also a British international cross-country runner.

Former bank executive is now doing temping

If financial markets implode in the next few weeks, it will be Thomas Huertas who has to mop up the City blood. Mr Huertas was named this week as temporary head of the wholesale division at the Financial Services Authority, filling in until a permanent successor can be found for Hector Sants, who has formally stepped up to the post of FSA chief executive. Huertas is no stranger to regulation. He joined the FSA two and a half years ago after a lifetime career at Citigroup, which has been second to none at getting into scrapes with regulators.

–– Has Stanley Fink, the billionaire hedge fund speculator, former Man Group chief executive and regular fixture of The Sunday Times Rich List, reinvented himself? A press release just reached me about the launch of a new record from the singer-songwriter Fink entitled This is the Thing, which I’m told could be one of the hit singles of the year. Can this be the same Mr Fink, who trained as a chartered accountant in the 1980s and went on to revolutionise the institutional managed futures business? In an interview on Fink’s Ninja Tunes label website, he explains his apparent change of heart: “I feel like I’m 21 all over again.” This purveyor of cool, laidback Ninja Tune beats has done what very few recording artists would dare to do – he has changed. Completely. Apparently so.

Guide to surviving in the wild M&A jungle

Given the seemingly boundless deal-making appetite of private equity firms, the release of a new book by professors from the Cass and Bournemouth Business Schools is timely. Intelligent M&A: Navigating the Mergers and Acquisitions Minefield by Scott Moeller and Chris Brady contains a handy cut-out-and-keep guide to surviving the M&A jungle. The old methods, it seems, are still the best – don’t go on holiday, update your CV, contact the headhunters and get the gossip from your PA.

Richard Farleigh, the permatanned Australian star of Dragons’ Den, has this week joined the board of Oxonica, the nanotechnology company in which he holds a stake. But has Farleigh been applying some of Oxonica’s own products a little too liberally? The group’s Optisol additive for tanning lotion is used in the Boots’s Soltan range to extend its UV protection. To judge by Mr Farleigh’s complexion, it may be of questionable effectiveness.

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