Martin Vander Weyer

This column comes to you from the cruise ship Minerva in the Greek port of Piraeus. Why I’m aboard is a story for another day — and let me admit up front that, as financial-crisis reportage goes, observations provoked by a Homeric vista of islands and cocktails on the poop deck are unlikely to match Newsnight’s Paul Mason choking through tear gas outside a burning Athens bank. But still there are parables to be trawled from the placid Aegean waters. As the anti-austerity bandwagon gathers momentum, the Greeks seem to be in deep denial about the other element of the recovery equation.

Unless you bet your life savings on gold some time in the past three years — after its price had passed on the way up the level to which it has now fallen back — there’s no need to be distressed by headlines about a ‘gold rout’, nor even the prospect of a ‘bear embrace’. The impulses behind this sudden downward lurch are positive for expectations of economic revival. Gold is the timeless safe haven for those who distrust governments and fear inflation, so a stampede of sellers — on Monday there seemed to be virtually no buyers — indicates an ebb tide in those sentiments.

The day Margaret Thatcher died was also the day Britain nearly ran out of gas. In late March, it was reported that stored reserves were down to just two days’ supply. As the cold spell continued, the BBC even reported the names of ships bringing liquefied natural gas from Qatar, each cargo representing six hours’ worth of urgently awaited heat and power for the nation: the Mehaines had just docked at the Isle of Grain, the Zarga had been sighted approaching Milford Haven. The worst-case scenario was that the last gasometer would be flat by 8 April, and since a third of UK electricity generation relies on gas, that would, or might, have meant temporary blackouts for businesses in some areas in order to maintain supply to homes, schools and hospitals.

A short stroll from Poultry to the Mansion House offers vistas of the old and new City. The fortress of the Bank of England awaits its new Governor while the Royal Exchange earns its keep, like much of the modern Square Mile, as an upmarket nest of boutiques and eateries. The Lutyens-designed headquarters of the long-gone Midland Bank stands apparently abandoned by its oligarch owner, facing the avant-garde pink edifice that replaced the Victorian ‘Mappin & Webb Corner’. The skyline gives glimpses of the Lloyd’s Building from 1986, the Gherkin from 2003 and the ‘Walkie-Talkie’ conceived in 2007, due to be completed next year; each a monument to the boom that preceded the bust.

An unfamiliar noise floats over the town; an insistent, one-note metallic drone. Tracked to its source, it turns out to come from a sawmill in a hidden wooded valley a quarter of a mile from my house. Abandoned for the past year, the mill has suddenly come back to life. It is emitting great plumes of steam as well as a multi-decibel industrial racket. And men are working there — I can see only two or three, but still they constitute another little piece of the great employment puzzle. An uptick in demand for sawn timber matches reports of increased levels of activity in the construction and housebuilding sector.

We have had a very high failure rate in deliveries of the catalogues for Emily Patrick’s exhibition,’ says an email from the painter’s husband. ‘Over 50 per cent have been lost in the post or inexplicably delayed.’ Come to think of it, my own most recent Amazon order, allegedly dispatched a fortnight ago, hasn’t reached Yorkshire yet — and neither has last week’s Spectator, although a large envelope posted to me from Old Queen Street on Wednesday did arrive on Thursday, but without its contents. Have aliens seized the sorting offices, or have Royal Mail managers been distracted by a ‘secret 62 per cent increase’ in their bonuses, revealed this week?

Antony Jenkins, the new-broom chief executive of Barclays, has the tone of a junior minister, not long in parliament, who finds himself promoted to high office after the big beast who preceded him was toppled by scandal. In fact he’s been in the bank 30 years, climbing the ladder so quietly that none of my contemporaries there (I coincided with him in Barclays for a decade) ever mentioned him as a man to watch before he was picked to follow Bob Diamond.

Funny how little phrases go viral. Suddenly everyone’s talking about ‘fasting diets’, ‘zombie companies’ and ‘leadership plots’. As to the first, the idea of the ‘5:2 intermittent fasting diet’, I gather, is to eat as little as you can for two days a week. It’s all over the media, and any moment now someone will call George Osborne’s fiscal strategy ‘the 0:7 fasting diet that’s starving us of protein for growth’, or some such. There you are, Mr Balls: yours on a plate, as it were. But ‘zombie companies’ are not so easy to explain.