Michael O’Leary, chief executive of Ryanair and not a man to walk away from a fight . . . No, let’s start again. Michael O’Leary, a man who would cheerfully shuffle on his bended knees over broken glass in search of a fight, is attempting to take the Advertising Standards Authority to the Office of Fair Trading. He claims the ASA is biased against the airline, such is the number of times it has taken action against his adverts. Not least the one for “hottest back to school fares” which featured a barely dressed schoolgirl. Tasteful. Ryanair swung into action with a full presentation yesterday on the evils of this “Anti-Ryanair Agenda”, and the number of times the watchdog has taken action. Admittedly, quite a few.

I ring the ASA. “Ah, but we’re referring them to the OFT.” I’m sorry? “Didn’t they mention that? They have consistently refused to comply with the codes,” the ASA tells me. “They are trying to pre-empt us.”

Lack of flu catches the drug companies cold

Blame global warming if you will, but it seems that the American flu season is not going according to plan. It generally hits in December but has been delayed. The drugs companies are not happy. “Unfortunately, people have not been getting sick at a rate that we would all like yet,” A.G. Lafley, chief executive of Procter & Gamble, told The Wall Street Journal. In jest, or at least displaying an unAmerican facility for irony, Jeffrey Rein, of the chemist Walgreens, suggested to shareholders that those feeling a cough coming on should “go to a movie theatre or on a bus”. The First Horseman of the Apocalypse was unavailable for comment.

— Our reader, whom we will call Robert Smith and who uses the name Bob, agrees to act as treasurer for his son’s rugby tour. He pays all the money up front, and the parents of 20-odd classmates send him cheques. These come in, some addressed to R Smith, some to Bob Smith, some to just B Smith. He tries to pay them into his Lloyds TSB account. They refuse every one that doesn’t have Robert on them. A visit to the branch has them accepting, grudgingly, Bob, but not B Smith. Lloyds tells me this is normal practice for all banks, although there is some leeway if you are known to the branch. Few of us are because they like us to bank online. I have a suspicion that, ten years ago, this would have been settled with a little common sense, but such are the times we live in.

— I have in my hands a copy of British Airways News that celebrates the “Dawn of a New Era”, the opening of Terminal 5. BA has probably taken all the ribbing it can stand on this subject without turning completely psychotic, but my understanding is that most copies of this special issue of the internal paper have been pulped, so this is a rare object. Should I put it on eBay?

— Apology of the month comes from Loaded, the little boys’ magazine, which somehow persuaded itself that Heinz once supplied the Nazi regime with a version of alphabet spaghetti consisting of tiny swastikas. This is an urban myth. “We now accept that Heinz has never produced swastika-shaped spaghetti nor did it support the Nazi regime in any other way. Indeed, we accept that Heinz was a major contributor to the Allies’ war efforts, producing rations for the troops,” the mag admits dolefully.

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