I have been asked to be the star turn at my secondary school's speech day this year as a "distinguished" old boy. I can't tell you how chuffed this makes me feel, although slightly alarmed as well.

Back in the early Cretaceous period - or whenever I was a ragged arsed and actually rather undistinguished pupil at my Thames Valley comprehensive - I was an award winner a couple of times. Handing out the prizes then were the late theatre critic Sheridan Morley one year and the virtuoso pianist Semprini (also alas no longer with us) another.

I vividly remember sitting waiting nervously to pick up my prize for "trying very slightly harder than last term" or whatever gazing up at the impossibly ancient (certainly in the case of Semprini, born in 1908) figure on stage.

It is disconcerting to think that the ranks of pupils waiting to be handed their awards maybe thinking the same thoughts as the teenage me thirty odd years ago. "Who is this bloke, why is he droning on so long and couldn't they get someone younger."

But who cares, I am the guest of honour, it's my gig. For 15 minutes I get to do all the talking in a school hall when once teachers told me to shut up if my lips so much as twitched. It's an achievement of sorts and I plan to enjoy every ego-stroking moment of it.

It must be one of the oldest surviving pieces of health and safety advice: "light the blue touch paper and retire." If only it was that easy.

The words of pyrotechnic wisdom were playing through my mind as I fumbled for matches last night.
Having got home late from work and invited the neighbours and their children round for a firework show I was fighting against the clock. As I discovered when it comes to fireworks, ignite in haste, repent at leisure.

I thought I'd impress the assembled throng with a noisy rocket for starters. Match was duly applied to blue touch paper as per ancient instructions. Only one snag - it was the wrong end of said fuse and the blasted thing shot up almost instantaneously and blasted straight into the side of my face about an inch from my eye. I was lucky, it ricocheted off into the night leaving me almost unscathed. In the words of the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, "I've had worse." 

From the safety of the end of the garden the audience missed my brush with disaster (perhaps it should be 'light the blue touch paper and expire') and merely grumbled about the lack of end product. And of course the show must go on. Having worked out that it was best to apply the match to the end of fuse furthest away from the firework, the rest of the display went without further incident. Until the end. I looked on with horror as the last of the wretched things fell over and began spitting great gobbets of fire at the kids. Fortunately they fell just short, harmlessly landing at their feet. The kids loved it of course, thinking it was all part of the display.

As I accepted the half hearted round of applause my mind was fast forwarding to the next seasonal Dad task fraught with danger - placing the star on top of the Christmas tree.

The organic food industry may be looking in worse shape than a chemically enhanced death-burger but it does have one formidable advocate in Elizabeth Hurley.

The actress and model, who launches her own organic snack range at Harrods tomorrow, sticks her green wellies in the boffins at the Government’s Food Standards Agency who concluded - in effect - that organic food was just a gigantic con in a study published earlier this year.

Liz’s response: “I think that study was flawed and misleading. It didn’t deal with what isn’t found in organic food, namely pesticides, antibiotics, hormones and numerous chemicals. Neither did it mention the appalling conditions some animals suffer when intensively farmed nor that the planet simply can’t sustain the present levels of conventional, chemical agriculture.

“Of course, there are many responsible non organic farmers and many of them are in this country, but some of the meat which is imported into this country and sold cheaply has got a horrific history. I wouldn’t buy meat, organic or otherwise, unless I could trace it back to an actual farm.”

Well said Liz.

Sir Terence Conran's mould breaking Gastrodome restaurants of the Nineties brought much that was good and, alas much that was not so good to the London dining scene. It was Tel's establishments that lifted London's standard service charge from the traditional 10 per cent to the now ubiquitous 12.5 per cent. Word is that he wanted to go for 15 per cent but decided the punters would revolt and chose 12.5 per cent as a compromise. Whatever.

So there is a nice dollop of irony - which goes very well with humble pie I'm told - in his successor's announcement that the former Conran chain, now known as D&D London, is to axe service charges altogether. 

It would be nice to think others will follow but there are good and complex reasons -  the minimum wage and chip and pin among others -  why the "optional" service charge automatically added to bills has become embedded as the London way of handling the tip.

Most restaurant goers will welcome this change from D&D. It is quite right that diners should be able to show their appreciation for outstanding service, which makes a huge difference to the overall enjoyment of an experience that costs us ever more in London. Let's face it, service is still dire in many London restaurants where there is really no excuse.

For more than most it is a day that will forever be inextricably linked with tragedy at City brokers BGC Partners. The firm was formerly part of Cantor Fitzgerald, which lost all 658 of its employees working in the World Trade Centre on 9/11. So it is good to be able to report some genuinely uplifting news about the firm's annual 9/11 Charity Day, when it invited celebrities to take the phones to do deals on behalf of its traders.

I was lucky enough to be there this year and it is a mad, anarchic, good natured occasion, which combines the noise and confusion of a trading floor with the glamour and neck craning excitement of a celebrity event. 

On that day all commission earned on trades goes to the 26 chosen good causes. This year Sir Alex Ferguson, Jonathan Ross, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, Sir Ian Botham, many of the Ashes winning England cricket team and Rainbow TV stars Bungle and Zippy (I was particularly thrilled to see the Seventies childrens TV icons buying and selling swap options) were among those who helped out.

Across BGC's four offices - the others are in New York, Paris and Singapore - the firm raised a record $10 million. Well done.

I'm a hopeless and incorrigible optimist. In my universe England are always going to win the World Cup and slay Australia in the Ashes (you see, sometimes it works.) But I'm not buying into all this "phew, we got away with it" hysteria about the end of the recession. On the economy I am a fairly gloomy "double dipp-ist.".

Yes, the official figures will say that recession ended at the end of September but that doesn't mean the good times are back. After the V-shape, the U-shape and the bath-shaped downturns, some economists are now talking about the "square root sign" recession. That is a sharp fall in output followed by a small bounce and then a period of stagnation when GDP is flat for some time.

Personally I'm not sure the square root comparison works. The mathematical sign has a short downstroke followed by a longer upstroke, hardly the expected pattern for this recession. I prefer to think of it as the "heart-beat" recession. The classic ECG monitor of the rhythm of the heart shows a peak, a sharp fall, a small recovery then flat-lining until the next heartbeat. Got it?

Blimey all this heavy duty economics is making my pulse race. Anyway whatever convoluted comparison fits best my feeling is that Britain's borrowing addiction, which had remained remarkably unaffected for much of the year, finally ended over the summer.

The remorseless rise in redundancies and the huge competition for the few jobs that are out there means that more familes are asking the "what if" question. They will rein in spending and seek to pay down debt as a defensive measure  - just in case. Just look at the West End sales slump - the worst since 7/7 - reported in the Standard today.

This week will be a good reality check with the City braced for dismal figures on unemployment and the public finances. The Government might be giving the electorate the V-sign over the recovery. Me, I think these green shoots amount to the square root of sod all.

One of the first major stories I covered as a young business journalist was Nestle's hostile takeover of Rowntree. The bid was bitterly contested with much nationalist outrage about Polos and Smarties falling into foreign hands. Times have changed. We now live in a world where Rolls-Royce, the Mini, Manchester United and a host of other "British to the core" brands are foreign owned. It has lost the power to shock.

Even so, there is something so fundamental to our self image about the Cadbury brands that I can feel a tumult of nostalgic breast beating coming on already. How can Americans understand and respect the role that guilty pleasures such as Crunchie, Wispa, Turkish Delight, even the humble Freddo bar have played in all our lives. And not just the products themselves. They are names that bind us in common experience: those toe curling but strangely thrilling "All because the lady loves..." Milk Tray ads; the fabulously kitsch "Full of Eastern Promise" campaign from Fry's Turkish Delight and more recently the brilliant drumming Gorilla for Dairy Milk.

The other strain of nostalgia that this bid will evoke is for the multi-billion pound contested takeover. Mouths will be slavering in the City and not just at the prospect of all those free Creme Eggs. There is nothing like a corporate ding-dong on this scale to send the fee meter whizzing round. With luck, it will run for months with the raiders from Kraft eventually seen off by Cadbury. By that time enough bonuses will be earned to keep the London property market going for another year. But more importantly the Curly Wurly will have been saved for the nation.

Took the train to hols in Italy this year. A mixed blessing. Railway stations are infinitely preferable to airports but lumping the luggage around to make connections in Paris and Milan is not anyone's idea of fun. But perhaps the biggest disappointment came in the first few minutes of the entire 1100 mile trek.

Get this. The Eurostar pulling out of the magnificent station at St Pancras and heading for the Continent could not muster a decent cup of coffee. I mean, come on, this is not BR we are talking about. There was no Gaggia machine and what I was given as an excuse of a latte (for some reason my preference, a cappuccino, was not available) was an all-purpose brown slop that tasted more of UHT milk than the mighty coffee bean. Unforgivably it was made from a sachet of instant powder. And the final insult? I was asked to hand over £2.50.

So my message to Eurostar boss Richard Brown is this: Sorry, just not good enough. If you can provide a Caffe Nero in the departure lounge at St Pancras (hopelessly undermanned by the way) it is surely not too much to ask for a decent coffee on board.

The Italian state railway, TrenItalia, which as we discovered has many shortcomings of its own, gets it. The charmingly old fashioned and ramshackle buffet on the sleeper to Rome boasted a gleaming coffee machine that spat out an immaculate espresso for Euro1.20 - about a quid. Of course you would expect that in Italy, but let's face it getting a decent cup of coffee in Britain is not the challenge it used to be.

Come on Richard. Wake up and smell the coffee. And not out of a packet.

Southampton to London does not quite have the ring of San Francisco to New York but it is good to see the legendary Greyhound bus company over here. The owners claim the pricing will start from £1 with most fares under a tenner. Meanwhile I was asked to pay £42 for a one way rail ticket to Poole, admittedly a little further but not by much.

So it came as no surprise to read that Britain's railways are the most expensive in the world. The reasons are not hard to fathom: a back-log of investment in long neglected infrastructure that has to be paid for, private operators who need to make a profit and a Government that has never regarded the railways as a national asset, but only a drain on revenues.

It was great waving all the teachers goodbye last week before they disappeared to the pub for their summer holiday 'Thank God it's all over' knees up. They went away garlanded with end of term presents, wine, chocolate, potted plants, books, CDs, you name it.

Tesco, in one of those probably spurious but nevertheless fascinating piece of research that the supermarkets spew out, estimate that the number of end of term thank you gifts for teachers is up by 30 per cent this year. It was never like that in my day. I don't ever remember giving a present - not even an apple - to a teacher during my school days in the seventies and eighties. My feeling is that any pupils doing so would have been regarded with deep suspicion and gained a reputation as appalling toadies and rank teachers' pets. 

So when did this new and to be fair, very nice, 'tradition' get going? And where did it come from? America presumably. Is it tied up with the post-Diana 'emoting society' or are we just pleasanter people now. Whatever, it is yet another glorious marketing opportunity for the high street to be slipped into the retail calendar between Fathers Day and 'Back to School'.

Inevitably there are cards with 'thank you teacher' messages and a dedicated display of presents at many stores. Is it a good thing? Why not. Teachers work hard and form close bonds with their charges. Call me a creep but a bottle of plonk or a box of Ferrero Rocher doesn't seem much to pay for their dedication.