Where were you 20 years ago today, on Black Monday, the great market crash of ’87? For those of us in the market, the world really did seem to be coming to an end, and it all had a certain horrible fascination. How far would the market fall? As you can see from the graph, we’ve come a long way from there. I was a market reporter for a big wires service, so on the previous Friday, the 16th, with the markets closed because of the storm, I took the day off. Those really were different times.

I had arranged to interview the head of a big engineeering conglomerate in the West End at nine o’clock on the Monday morning. I wandered into his office, on time.

He gave me a funny look. “A bit surprised to see you here today.” Why? Oh, no. No, no . . . I dashed back to the City to find that, to put it mildly, my absence had been noted.

I also missed, at other times and for various reasons, the death of Robert Maxwell, 9/11 and the unexpected departure of at least one chancellor. To prospective short-sellers who want a look at my forward diary: I am open to offers.

Jefferies remains quietly ambitious

What is going on at Jefferies, the New York investment bank? The market rumour is that the bank is sniffing around a number of London brokers with a view to boosting its presence here. Jefferies employs more than 300 people in London but some feel it is punching below its weight. There is a new boss, David Weaver, promoted last week and charged with building the business up. One name mentioned is Panmure Gordon, which Jefferies looked at three or four years ago when it was with WestLB. Also mentioned, Bridgewell and Numis. No comment from Jefferies, which accepts it is trying to expand here.

A regular contributor is on, about No Man’s Land Fort in the Solent, up for sale again as I wrote the other day. He attended a wedding recently at another Victorian fort, built but never used in anger, just like the Solent one. Does this make them, like the Bomb, the successful military deterrent of their day? And could No Man’s Land, some way offshore, not be pressed into action to solve the shortage of prison cells? Or even as a temporary home for Parliament, while this is being refurbished?

Why make it temporary?

Markku Wilenius, an academic in Finland described as “probably the world’s only professor of futures studies”, is joining Allianz, the German finance house and moving to Munich. I’m sorry? Shouldn’t the world’s best-qualified expert on financial futures be so rich already that he need never work again?

EDF Energy, which owns London Electricity, has taken out a series of “Come on England” ads in national papers. That’s the French energy firm EDF, is it? And what did your ads say last week, mes amis ? “Allez Les Bleus ”? Mind you, they’ve got form on this - aside from the usual Gallic tendency towards perfidy, that is. EDF Energy is one of the sponsors of the London Olympics. The parent company backed the rival Paris bid.

One winner whatever happens tomorrow will be BA, official carrier to the Springboks and England. Not much mention of BA’s link to the ’Boks here, for some reason, though it is well aired in South Africa.

Scenting the collapse of Western civilisation

There are times when news arrives that is so ineffably moronic, so irredeemably stupid, that you simply have to despair at the survival of Western culture and wonder if it really might not be better to go back to the caves, or join the Islamic fundamentalists, or whatever. Something, anything, has to be better than this. The makers of the downmarket TV show The X Factor, on which the untalented are humiliated in return for evanescent micro-celebrity, are making a perfume. What sort of imbecile buys a perfume based on a trash TV show? “Priced at the lower end of the market.” Oh. I see. I’m off for a long weekend now. I may be back.

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