The scene is the official ceremony to mark the stake taken in Barclays by the China Development Bank. This is a video conference, and on one end of the link is a table of Barclays directors, led by chief executive John Varley. At the other end, a team of Chinese bankers.

The time comes for the award of presents, a very important issue in China and a matter of great face. Varley stands to unveil Barclays’s, a silver shield. Then, with great solemnity, CDB governor Chen Yuan places a huge box on the table before him. He withdraws a vase. A genuine Ming vase, anything from the 14th Century to the 17th. One went for £5 million a while back. The Barclays team try to contain their horror. The vase is heading, carefully wrapped and guarded, for Barclays’s HQ in Docklands. The cheapo plate, with all the prestige of a Surrey golf club trophy, is heading in the opposite direction, probably by FedEx. Don’t you just hate it when this sort of thing happens?

iBlame, as only she can

Martha Stewart, disgraced US domestic goddess, is something of a techno-geek, she admits to Wired magazine, with an iPod in a drawer in every room to replace all that bulky hi-fi equipment and maintain a properly minimalist look. But it was not always thus. She blames, in part, the first Walkman for the ending of her marriage. “I’d be in the garden, weeding and chatting away, and no answer!” Marriages have, I suppose, broken up for less. In the US.

She also plans to set up Marthapedia, a wiki which allows her fans to post useful tips, such as how to get red wine stains out of a white napkin. Or how to fashion a serviceable shiv for use in the prison showers out of damask brocade and a bent curtain rail?

Sovereign issue for supermarket sweep

The pricing announcement for moneysupermarket.com claimed that this was “the largest ever UK internet offering”. Hang on, what about the £4.4 billion flotation of Gibraltar-based PartyGaming in 2005? This is not just a quibble, because such announcements have to be signed off, and every single fact has to be right. It seems moneyetc’s lawyers may have taken a close look at UK constitutional law and discovered that Gibraltar is “a British overseas territory . . . which the UK considers to be under its sovereignty, but not as part of the UK itself” (Wikipedia, but apparently reliable). Which is how lawyers earn their fees.

The BBC is seeking an accountant to be Head of Business Assurance. He or she will “monitor and report upon actions taken as a result of the recommendations of Internal Audit”, a weirdly recursive, typically BBC job, which seems to mean reporting on the actions of people who report on other people’s actions. Quis custodiet? The job will also involve ensuring “that the BBC is operating robust controls and effectively managing risk”. In the light of recent phone-in scandals, a bit late, surely?

Nicola Horlick is on Desert Island Discs on Sunday. Her choice of music is a closely guarded secret, but the trailers feature the theme from The Snowman. With a brother who is a concert pianist, we expect some serious choices. But I can exclusively reveal one is Heaven by Bryan Adams. It seems a concert given by the Canadian singer was one of the first dates she went on with husband Martin Baker. He took her to a Bryan Adams concert? And she still married him?

Also in the sits vac, Hector Sants’s old job is on offer, managing director, wholesale and institutional markets division. Interesting to see whether they go for a City heavyweight prepared to accept a cut in salary in return for putting the boot in to his former colleagues. My money is on an internal appointment.

Yes, turbulence in the markets is a bad thing, and yes, the City is a big driver of the British economy. But am I the only one whose eyes remain resolutely dry at the thought of all those heavily leveraged, fat-cat private equity deals coming to grief?

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