Congratulations to Steve Jobs, the Apple chief executive, who has become one of the select few to read his own obituary. Jobs had previously battled pancreatic cancer, raising inevitable concerns over his health on Wall Street. Now the Bloomberg wire service has accidently pushed the wrong button and informed Jobs and the rest of us about the “reality distortion field” that surrounded him, “a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand”, according to a former colleague and, possibly, now former friend.

Plus, his “mercurial” style and reported habit of parking in spaces reserved for the handicapped at Apple HQ to save himself a walk. I wonder if you can sue for a premature obituary? Probably.

The most famous recipient of such was, of course, Mark Twain, who after another wire service blunder remarked: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” Plus, Bob Hope and more recently, folk fiddler Dave Swarbrick, who charitably conceded that all the facts were correct apart from the obvious.

Rock Hard Ruth finds it's becoming a small world

I note that veteran stock-picker Ruth Keattch, whom I remember on the smaller companies beat at Schroders more years ago than either of us will admit to, is joining fund manager Artemis in Edinburgh, which has apparently decided that small and medium caps are about to come back into vogue. Keattch is something of a City legend, having acquired the nickname “Rock Hard Ruth” after she took a stand against private equity firms five years ago that were buying up small companies for buttons and then floating them again at a huge profit. While at Deutsche Asset Management, she famously refused to sell its stake in gym chain Fitness First. She instead raised the stake to 10 per cent-plus of the company, an almost unprecedented move, hung on and took a profit when the new owners flipped the investment to a rival firm. “There's a lot of resistance to being mugged again,” was her comment on opportunistic private equity firms.

Paul Walsh, chief executive at Diageo, says the company plans more ads at Christmas telling people not to drink too much. This is despite research on last year's campaign suggesting that the “drunk” partygoers in the ads looked like they were having more fun than the “sober” ones.

The regular trading statements from property company Panther Securities - which once failed to buy my local department store, a time-warped institution straight out of Are You Being Served - are always enlivened by the trenchant views of its chairman, Andrew Perloff. He is not a great fan of the current Government or many of its predecessors. In yesterday's interims he takes shareholders through his experiences of previous property collapses and then muses on plans by Parliament to scrap rules, “made in Elizabethan times”, which prevent “idiots and lunatics” from becoming MPs. “I suppose they consider this may be the one case where retrospective legislation is necessary to help to keep them in their jobs,” fumes Perloff. He is not quite accurate. Lunatics are indeed not allowed to become MPs. Being an idiot is, alas, no bar.

You have to admire the timing of a rival newspaper which is peddling a special supplement on careers in construction next month. Bits of the industry are healthy enough but don't expect too much from the housebuilders. But what of the DIY chain advertising massively discounted garden furniture, under the headline “Sun's Out!” I suppose the forecast is good . . .

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