Last Friday, when most of you were working, I was in St Paul’s helping to represent the City Solicitors Company at the United Guilds Service.

This is an occasion of total civic pomp. The cathedral is packed with liverymen in full dress. Trumpeters, choir, the Lord Mayor and, this year, the Archbishop of Canterbury as preacher. The service was started by the Guilds of the City of London in 1943 to cheer everybody up and it still has something of that effect.