We're not looking to max out on the leverage

Looks as if Dubya’s got a case of the brad pitts at the G8 Summit. Can’t help wondering whether he deliberately ate a bunch of oysters left on a radiator in order to avoid a handbagging (not this meaning, I hope) on climate change from just about everybody else there.

Now we none of us like discussing the painful subject of fees with clients (the product of our labours generally comes in at a bag o’ sand per page, before expenses - all of those Deliverance dinners and 2am cabs). So how about settling them with a game of spoof? Billionaire Mike Ashley did, and he lost. Whereas £200k is a mere bagatelle to Ashley, the dude from Merrill would have had the hell of a meeting with their risk management people (assuming that they have any) had he lost.

There’s very little that hasn’t already been said about this week’s Apprentice – we all knew that Sralan’s East end henchman probably aren’t completely au fait with the requirements of the UK’s sex discrimination legislation, but trust the good old bloody moaning Indie to bring the TUC and the Equal Opportunities Commission into the fray. It all comes down to the old question – what’s wrong with being sexy?

The strange thing was just how much of an unpleasant cow the blonde founder of Ultimo pants was on the aftershow – she seemed to get off on telling everyone what a totally brilliant and successful millionaire she is. Not a pleasant character trait. She also proudly declared that everyone who works for her loves her. Yeah, right.

The boring 2012 logo debate rumbles on. I wonder if any of you remember that the sinister and pointless Wolff Olins who are behind all this have also been let loose a couple of times in our own fair profession.

Firstly, these are the guys who came up with the brilliant idea of PricewaterhouseCoopers (all one word, no punctuation, annoying small ‘w’, capital ‘C’ without a space before it), which I should think is mis-spelt one third of the time it appears in print, some nine years later.

The comble de joie, however, was renaming PwC consulting ‘Monday:’ (don’t forget the “:”) at a cost of £75m. The rebrand lasted a grand total of 50 days (a cool £1.5mil a day) before being re-re-branded to something along the lines of 'IBM Global Services' or something equally dull.

But if you’d like to see an example of a tragically misunderstood branding exercise, check out the logo of the Brazilian Institute for Eastern Studies. It certain rams the message home.

The subject of sore posteriors leads one nicely onto the subject of cycling to work – yes, the chimp bike has been dusted off for the first time in about 8 months. The battle for London’s streets continues unabated – Ken’s latest wheeze at Vauxhall is for cyclists and pedestrians to ‘share space’ when crossing a major road junction. This results in chaos, since both parties, having followed separate cheery diktats from City Hall that walking and cycling are very good things, are filled with righteous indignation that the other party is getting in their way.

In the same way, Wandsworth BC has somewhat undermined its policy of splitting paths between cyclists and pedestrians with a big white stripe by nailing signs saying ‘Cyclists must giveway’ (oneword, apparently) on every lamp post. So if I am on what appears to be a cycle path and a pedestrian throws himself under my wheels, is it my fault for not givingway? Idontknow.

Life was perhaps a little simpler when, in the absence of millions of detailed lists setting out everyone’s rights, people had to behave with common courtesy and consideration towards each other without bleating and reaching for a rule book.

God, it's so boring to spend so much time moaning. Back to drafting initial comments on the SPA.