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The Lord will provide. Honest! It just might take a while
• Heady days for Gordon Brown's former business adviser Lord Bilimoria, whose company Cobra Beer foundered two years ago owing creditors £70m. Like a phoenix from the ashes – or, if you prefer, a cobra from a wicker basket – Bilimoria came back days later, entering a joint venture with the North American brewer Molson Coors in a controversial deal that kept him as Cobra's figurehead. Meanwhile, suppliers laid off staff and cut wages to manage their losses. But you can't keep a good man down. So it's inspiring to see him leading from the front, parading Cobra's first profit in 21 years, £4.9m, and telling Curry Life magazine that the firm will spend that on marketing. "We are spending almost £5m advertising Cobra. Scary, but exciting." Very exciting for the secured creditors, most of whom have been paid, he says, but also for the unsecured creditors, who are still millions out of pocket, save for those who claimed on their own insurance. You'll get your money, Bilimoria promised in 2009. From India, he repeated the pledge. They wait, and wait.
• With relief we note that Waity Katie Middleton finally has her own coat of arms. "Let joy be unconfined," as Groucho Marx once said."Let there be dancing in the streets, drinking in the saloons and necking in the parlour." But some will have more jollity on the day itself than others. And here we reflect with sadness that the celebrations will be muted at Charterhouse, the independent boarding school in Surrey. No day off for students there. They'll be working towards the exams. Have you come over all republican, we ask them? No, says a spokeswoman. We considered a lost day but then decided against it. They'll watch, cheer a bit and then back to work. The same on lefty May Day. More study on that occasion, fewer supportive cheers, we suspect.
• And we did enjoy the story in the Independent about Wesley Hosie, 25, a trainee accountant who bought jelly beans and discovered that one looked just like Waity Katie. More than that, we loved the workable URL used by the malicious Twitterati to circulate the story. Not the Indy's fault. In common with many other sites, its URLs are externally adaptable. Bad geeks; doncha love 'em?
• A big time for the "big society", and one headteacher getting in the spirit of more for less is Dr Paul Doherty, who asked staff at Trinity Catholic High School in Woodford Green, Essex, to forfeit 1.5% of their salary to prevent redundancies. However, the proposal was dropped following union objections. Still, Doherty wasn't asking staff to do anything he wouldn't do himself. The head gives £3,000 a year from his own salary to the school. But then he can afford to, as he is also a bestselling author on the side. With more than 60 books published, the head's salary must seem like petty cash to him.
• Meanwhile, last week's literary salon at Shoreditch House revealed the hitherto unguessed-at intellectual depths of our favourite tvTV soaps. Natalie Haynes, author of The Ancient Guide to Modern Life, told how EastEnders scriptwriters urge each other to "Greek things up". Sophocles's Oedipus is a particular inspiration for endless interfamilial trauma and revenge, apparently. Dominic Treadwell-Collins, series story producer, told Haynes that the only Greek myth the scriptwriters haven't used is Euripides's Medea – not that they haven't tried. "It was eventually deemed impossible to have a favourite character stay in the programme after revenging herself on her faithless husband by murdering their children," Haynes explained. "She buried him alive instead."
• Finally, we live in a state of emergency and constant anxiety. Floods, wars, terror, no one is immune from the sense that, in this day and age, things are not quite right. It afflicts them at Tatler as much as anywhere else. This frantic bulletin marked "High Importance" was circulated within the upmarket glossy: "Has anyone received a package this morning from Highgrove addressed to Georgina Blackwell. It contains a duck nest. We URGENTLY need to find it…" Ministers have the Cobra crisis committee to deal with this sort of thing.