Just how is Hank Paulson, the 62-year-old US Treasury Secretary, coping with the appalling pressure? The question was highlighted this week when Senator Judd Gregg, after more than 12 hours of talks, asked a visibly sighing Paulson if he needed a doctor. He refused, and talks carried on. But the current phase of the financial meltdown has been running for five weeks, with some of the most hair-raising moments happening at weekends, so no one is getting any rest.

Paulson even missed his 39th wedding anniversary, which coincided with the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae bailout. “We were going to go out to dinner but we were too tired,” he said. “She (wife Wendy) cooked me an omelette.” Those at the negotiations are living, to judge from the delivery boys, on takeaway pizzas and sandwiches.

Paulson is a Christian Scientist, teetotal, drinks Diet Coke and at Goldman Sachs was in bed by 9.30 and at the gym at 5 am. But some say the strain is showing. Discreet inquiries receive the reply that he is in fine form and still goes for a 10-mile run and rides a bike when he can. No wonder he looks tired.

Redneck should be told Buik is definitely no red

David Buik, commentator at BGC Partners, has been called any number of things in his time but not, I suspect, a socialist. Yet a comment on the US banks' bailout provoked hate mail. “Excuse me, but when did this douchebag David Buick (sic) acquire the authority to spend $1 trillion dollars of the United States' taxpayer's (sic) money?” asked an enraged American backwoodsman. “You folks need to get his stupid ass off the television . . . you Brits can be socialists if you want, we are not. That's why we kicked your green-toothed asses out of here 200 years ago.” Those of us who know Buik, and nearly everyone in the market seems to, will appreciate the inaccuracy of the “socialist” tag.

— Spotted whizzing along Cheapside on his bike yesterday, London Mayor Boris Johnson. I can confirm that he was wearing a crash helmet this time, whether out of fear of plunging banker I cannot say. And he was willing to exchange a friendly word with his constituents. His predecessor, whenever I glimpsed him on Tooley Street, was wearing something that looked like a yashmak, which hindered recognition, let alone conversation.

— Here is a curious thing. Someone has been carrying out a few amendments to the website of Merchant Equity Partners. This used to have quite a detailed account of the business, the board and various deals. Now there is only one page, none of the links to recent events work, and there is no mention of, to pluck a single example out quite at random, you understand, the recent near-collapse and sale to management of MFI, in which MEP had invested at least £95 million.

No mention, then, of its partners in the deal, Hilco and the modest and unassuming investment bank Goldman Sachs. Can there be a reason why “Europe's leading private equity firm focused on the acquisition and operational turnround of underperforming businesses” might not want to draw attention to this?

— So Mervyn Davies has had to stand down as a Tesco non-executive because of a conflict of interest with his day-time job at Standard Chartered. He is, oddly enough, the second director to go because of a conflict this year. Carolyn McCall of Guardian Media Group had to go on the entirely understandable grounds that Tesco was suing The Guardian for libel. To lose one non-executive . . . Still, if like Tesco you are in the business of swallowing the Universe, such conflicts are probably inevitable.

— Cadbury not all sweetness

Ken Hanna can be forgiven a quiet sigh of relief as he slips away from Cadbury Schweppes for life as a non-executive, at first as chairman of car dealer Inchcape. His four-year stay at the confectionery maker has not been an unalloyed delight.

There has been the on-off disposal of the Dr Pepper and Snapple soft drinks side. This was to go to a private equity firm but Hanna himself accepted that the credit markets had “virtually closed”, famously describing the crisis as worse than the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001. In the event, the business was spun off and floated in the US.

In his time as chief financial officer at Cadbury he has overseen swingeing job cuts and factory closures, an accounting scandal in Nigeria and an outbreak of salmonella in 2006. He also had to contend with pressure from US activist investor Nelson Peltz. With the company again involved in a contamination scare and forced to take products off the shelves in Beijing, Hanna must be wondering how many times history has to repeat itself.

He was lured away to Cadbury from Compass Partners and the (then) less stressful private equity world but came to prominence in the late 1990s masterminding the break-up of Dalgety, a curious hybrid that involved itself in pigs and pet food.

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