I am probably going to get into trouble for this, but I do not immediately associate India with advanced standards of animal welfare. There. I've said it. But Vodafone is in trouble over a frequently aired advert, which, it is claimed, involves cruelty to a dog. The pooch, Rocky by name, is seen chasing after a bus to deliver a tie to its owner, and the Animal Welfare Board of India told Vodafone to pull the ad, saying that the pug dog was forced to run and threatening legal action.

Vodafone is indignant. “I think the dog just likes chasing buses,” says a spokesman. “This dog has got god status in India. [I may have inadvertently misread my shorthand here.] Rocky is only required to run for three seconds.” After which, he retires to his luxury trailer on the lot with some foxy bitches and a couple of lines of Bonio. Yesterday an Indian court ruled in favour of the ad, which is back on the screens. The dog stays in the picture.

— I have been pondering some serious research from University College London, which equates investors' purchases during bull markets with the first phases of a love affair. I think. The argument from Visiting Professor David Tuckett, in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, is that investors are carried away with wishful “phantasies” - unconscious desires and motives - which serve to suppress negative emotions that might warn them of the risks they are taking. “Like falling in idealised love, at first you notice only the best qualities of your beloved,” Professor Tuckett says. Standard economic models fail to factor in these “emotions and unconscious mental life that drive human behaviour”.

— Welcome back, Kitty Ussher, the City Minister. She has been invisible these past few months and I confess the carping, negative, cynical part of me, the part that gets most of this column filled, assumed that the MP for Burnley via South London had been lying low and hoping to ride out various tax rows, including the latest about overseas earnings. But I am wrong. (It has happened before. It was a Thursday. June 1978. I looked it up.) Ussher returned to the City last night for her first speaking engagement, at Bloomberg and about the need for financial services to stay competitive, after four months off on maternity leave and the birth of her son George.

— John Prescott is the latest to lambast the banks, in Property Week. He accuses them of “greedily manipulating a stable economic environment created by New Labour to convince borrowers to take out excessive home loans and ramp up house prices”. Hmm. Part of the housing bubble was the huge growth of buy-to-let, aided by the banks' willingness to lend and equally obliging planning rules. And the man in charge of the planning system during that time would have been ...?

— The Dance, a sculpture by Nasser Azam, recently outsold various BritArt stars, including Peter Blake, Marc Quinn and the inevitable Damien Hirst, to go for £25,000 at a celebrity charity auction. We last came across Azam as a talented painter and artist in residence at the County Hall Gallery. And as chief operating officer of Merrill Lynch in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. And The Dance is one of his bestselling sculptures. I think I am seriously beginning to dislike him.

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