Some adjustments will be needed at Alfred McAlpine, which has just agreed a takeover by Carillion. As befits what was once a posh Scottish company, McAlpine has an office in a town house in Pall Mall, handy for London’s clubland. Carillion - which I still can’t help thinking of as Tarmac - is in rather less swish Wolverhampton.

Which is where the McAlpinies will end up, relocated to what I imagine is the old Tarmac HQ.

The exit from the town house will not, alas, make much of a dent in the £30 million of cost savings that John McDonough, the Carillion chief executive, wants to make, because it is leasehold.

McAlpine used to be called Marchwiel, after the location of the founder’s home, I recall. The firm once fell out with the related Sir Robert McAlpine over the use of the family name and was told by a court to reinstate the “Alfred”. No idea what happens to the name now.

The Hollywood TV writers’ strike really starts to bite next month, with shows that attract the middle class, such as Grey’s Anatomy (Hillary is, apparently, a fan) finally being hit. So the television moguls have keyed up a load of reality TV shows. When the writers last went on strike, a decade ago, this prompted American audiences’ first exposure to the genre in a desperate attempt to fill the schedules - and once this sort of stuff oozes in under the door, it’s awfully hard to sweep it out again when you don’t need it any more, so the shows are around to this day. Just confirmed for January: American Gladiators, a show in which underdressed women hit each other with sticks, I believe. Very classy.

A further example of senseless girl-on-girl brutality: tomorrow evening sees two “million dollar babes” hitting each other in London. It is one of those “white-collar boxing” events that have caught the imagination of City audiences and the more louche, younger members of the Royal Family. Ali “Boomaye” Battison, a London-based private equity lawyer, will fight “Luscious” Lisa Bauch. The latter is apparently an American gym owner and something of a star of female boxing. A curious distinction - somewhat akin to being a big name in Azerbaijani stamp collecting, I suppose.

At PricewaterhouseCoopers, they are burying the ghost of Sir Siegmund Warburg. Partner Richard Setchim is putting SG Warburg Group into members’ voluntary liquidation, along with various other linked companies. Warburg founded SG Warburg in 1946 and it went on to become, younger readers might not realise, one of the great names in the City. The name now lies subsumed somewhere within the limping colossus that is UBS. These things have to be done every now and again for companies that become dormant. “It’s a kind of simplifying exercise,” says PwC.

Hermetic philosophy

David Pitt-Watson, of Hermes, has been waxing philosophical - as, indeed, you might if you owned so many Northern Rock shares. Regulation is not the answer; it is down to investors. “When the post mortem is conducted on the credit crisis, it will find the cause to be one which was identified thousands of years ago. As Aristotle said: ‘That which is common to the greatest number has least care bestowed upon it.’ ”

Something arrives from Reckitt Benckiser. It is titled “Football Press Release ” but is all about the purchase of a New Jersey-based pharmaceuticals company. Nowhere is football mentioned. Did someone forget to remove the codeword for the target company?

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