How kind of the Duke of Sutherland to give us all time to pass the hat around to raise £100m so that we can prevent two masterpieces that he owns from being "lost to the nation". It's a bargain, we're told, because the things are actually worth £300m, apparently.

The value of these pictures works out at around £5 for every man, woman and child in the country. Whether you think that's a bargain or a sign that there's still irrational exuberance in asset prices after all, is up to you. Personally, I wonder how many people in the country have ever heard of Diana & Actaeon or Diana & Callisto. (I would be thought either patronising or a philistine if I'd asked how many people in this country have heard of Titian.)

The idea of a painting - or any other work of art - being "lost to the nation" seems unreal in this modern high tech world. Surely, for a tiny fraction of £100m, a website could be developed with some ultra-high-res photographs of the canvases. I know, I know, seeing a work of art on the web isn't the same thing as seeing it in real life. I know: I've been to Florence and twice queued to see David. But the vast majority of the population ain't ever gonna see these paintings with their own eyes, even though they'll be paying for it (if the Duke's Plan A goes ahead). At least such a website could allow many more people to see them and to study the brush work in much closer detail than is usually possible in your average national art gallery. The good Duke -- and it was kind of him to offer us first refusal -- can then get top dollar for his pics, while also doing the right thing for national culture. (Such a site could also bar most non-British viewers, the way that BBC's iPlayer does.)

By the way, I note that almost every company outside the FTSE-350 has a market capitalisation under £300m. Perhaps it is only necessary to convince the Treasury that "management is an art" and that the national coffers should therefore be deployed to buy up any small-cap PLC that feels itself being threatened by an overseas bidder.

Fund management group Henderson has announced that it is proposing a scheme of arrangement that will see the company move its tax domicile from the UK to Ireland. (See BBC.) It follows pharmaceutical group Shire and others in leaving Britain for lower tax rate countries. You can look at some of the key issues in our recent article.

Henderson. Hmm. That name rang a bell for us. Sure enough, it was Henderson Global Investors who wrote to every FTSE-350 company chairman in February 2005 asking them about their tax strategy. The results of the survey were published in a survey entitled Tax, Risk and Corporate Governance.

The funny thing is, Henderson didn't write to the FTSE-350 bosses telling them to minimise tax. On the contrary, it said, "Arrangements that minimise the amount of tax paid in the short term may be detrimental in the longer term if there is a significant likelihood that they will be challenged by tax authorities."

Presumably, then, Henderson opposed the scheme that saw retailers reduce their tax bill by a fraction of a penny for every £100 of high street revenue - an artificial tax structure that channeled revenue through "card handling" service company subsidiaries and which was eventually ruled illegal - but has no problem with completely upping sticks and moving the whole corporate entity across the Irish Sea, well out of reach of Alisair Darling.

We wrote about Henderson's survey in our October 2005 Financial Director Guide to Global Tax Strategy. Get hold of the whole publication here or just the article here.

After 63 successive quarters of growth, the UK has finally kissed the buffers if not actually hit them headlong.

The ONS revealed today that Q2 GDP was, er, zero. It had thought that growth was 0.2%, but has "downward revisions" to the numbers relating to production, construction and services industries have knocked the plus sign off the aggregate GDP figure.

Have a nice weekend.

The US has seen a sharp decline in the price of gasoline coming off of a peak of $4 a gallon down to $3.80 a gallon.

Most people would say market conditions are the reason behind the dip - fears of global recession leading to a fall in demand, sudden outbreak of peace in Georgia, that sort of thing.

But there is a prayer group in Washington, DC, that's taking full credit for the petrol price fall. Rocky Twyman, a veteran community campaigner, said, "We don't have anybody else to turn to but God."

He added: "We have to turn these problems over to God and not to man".

Does God really encourage the continued use of a product that involves mining the earth's natural resource to the brink of depletion while at the same time creating a by-product that has the power to destroy the planet with (amongst other things) another flood?

But then again "Pray at the pump" does have a certain ring to it - though we doubt very much that this is what Adam Smith meant when he wrote about the "invisible hand".

£5.3m - Amount of money raised in fines by the Financial Services Authority in all of 2007 (source: BDO Stoy Hayward)

£5.6m - Fine levied by the FSA against Credit Suisse for mis-pricing asset-backed securities (source: BDO Stoy Hayward)

£5.7m - Take-home pay of John Connolly, Deloitte's UK senior partner and global chairman - and now Britain's highest-paid accountant (source: Accountancy Age)

The still-blundering John Prescott has "backed" Gordon Brown in a most embarrassing way - by comparing him to the captain of the Titanic. He wrote on a blog, "It wasn't the captain that sank the Titanic - a ship they claimed was unsinkable - it was the iceberg."
- The Independent, 5th August 2008, page 2

On a completely different point, the paper reproduces a recent interview with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who said in relation to the pre-revolutionary leadership of Russia, "Who if not the captain is to blame for a shipwreck?"
- The Independent, 5th August 2008, Extra page 3

After weeks, and months, of whispering and speculation about the chances of the UK falling into a recession, yesterday was the first day evidence showed itself. I heard the words 'we are in a recession' twice in a few hours; once before lunch from a fairly well informed colleague, and once immediately after lunch from a friend who, working in marketing, I'll presume is equally well informed on corporate spending patterns. And it really put the kybosh on my post-lunch lull.

This for me is pretty momentous (the admission of being in a recession, not the loss of a post-lunch lull) since no one has quite had the courage (or the brass neck) to say it out loud this year. People have pussy-footed round the idea, taking refuge from impending doom in whatever random positive stats or news stories they could find to legitimise their upbeatness, while others just clung to conventional wisdom, waiting for the two quarters of negative growth to pass before opening their gob either way. I really can't recall anyone saying out loud until today, we are in a recession. Once it's said out loud, it's just a matter of accepting the situation, watching and waiting - while companies gird their loins for the 'strategic reviews' and the bums disappearing from seats.

Certainly the news headlines today preceding the two recession comments sounded pretty bad: for example, pre-tax profits in the first quarter (before restructuring and redundancy charges) at BT fell by 7 per cent to £613m, and large half-year losses at the UK's biggest mortgage lender HBOS have hit at a time when fears over the strength of UK banks (and their potential to hurt the overall economy if another one reveals dire circumstances) are running high.

I think we can deceive ourselves no longer: here we stand, it seems, in recession. Recession. Let the word roll around in your mouth. Get up close and personal with the idea. Take it to your bosom. Just don't shoot the messenger...

Melanie Stern, deputy editor