Sunday Sunday

Sunday, Sunday - what a day.

Picture the scene. It's a scene of domestic bliss, a Sunday lunchtime idyll where the only sounds that can be heard are as distinctive and traditional as they've always been. Ever since the relaxation of the Sunday shopping laws many years ago Britain has been totally pre-occupied with the kind of activities that just over 50 years ago would have been considered totally illegal, religiously unacceptable, morally incorrect and spiritually offensive.

It was a family lunch at our local Wetherspoon which is not so much a pub more of a packed restaurant and what could be commonly known as a gastro bar. There's an abundance of both food and drink on the menu and everything that is mouth wateringly gastronomic. The Sunday pub experience is now completely different to the Sunday pub of the old days. The opening hours are much longer and chucking out time is somehow a self imposed time of the pub's choice. It's normally 11.00 and just before the mid-night hour or maybe later if the pub band turn off the speakers off at a respectable time.

Over the years the pub decor hasn't changed all that much. True there are no traces of sawdust on the floor and the furniture is much more pleasing on the eye. Or maybe I'm just a snob. The fact is that the days when pubs resembled the Rovers Return in 1964 are long since gone. The pompous, severe and matriarchal Annie Walker type are quite definitely a thing of the past and even the optics behind the bar sparkle with a gleaming respectability. Coronation Street may have been at the forefront of our minds but this was an altogether different soap opera.

Today my wife, daughter and father in law all wandered into Wetherspoon's with the healthiest appetites and thirsts ready to be slaked. Sunday wouldn't be Sunday without the family unit and wherever you looked there were families with children and families with the obligatory dog next to them. Mind you it was hard to imagine any of those dogs queuing up for the roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and a variety of vegetables. Still, it's a lovely thought.

But while we were waiting for our table to become available I noticed something quite odd. In the corner of the pub, a TV showed a channel which struck me as slightly unusual. On the wall the satellite channel Bloomberg was beaming all of the recent and present developments in the cut throat world of high finance, thriving global industries and booming business. It looked an absorbing watch but for somebody who finds the accumulation of wealth too much to take in it may well have been another language.

Bloomberg takes you into a sizzling world of mergers and acquisitions, high flying economists, trading deals in far off exotic corners of the planet and currency rates across the world that bounce and fluctuate by the second. Bloomberg is a channel devoted to million dollar conglomerates, men with thick wallets and nineteen figures in their bank balance and a fistful of dollars just for good measure. Sorry that was a western wasn't it?

And yet the rolling news at the bottom of the screen ran a whole succession of vital commodities, basic foods and all those necessities we perhaps take for granted. There was corn, sugar, wheat, rice, tea and coffee plus everything with huge profit margins and substantial potential. It was one continuing sequence of all those products and cutting edge technologies that perhaps a Sunday pub TV audience couldn't have been expecting.

Normally today's pub normally keeps up an incessant coverage of Super Soccer Sunday from our dynamic friends at Sky. But today at Wetherspoon Sunday afternoon telly consisted of the futures market, the derivative market, the commodities market and above all an interview with that famous zillionaire Bill Gates.

It was hard to know what Gates was talking about since the volume was completely down and besides it was difficult to lip read. But the gist of what he might have been talking about had to be related to money. Yes that glorious subject that has more or less dominated our every day lives, transforming the mindset of vast swathes of the human population, influencing our every decision in the shop or supermarket and revolutionising our  entire outlook on life. Money has ruled the roost since well- for ever. It speaks the lingo of the high street estate agent, a congested property market and anything connected to bricks and mortar.

Bloomberg is more or less a genuine shop window on the whole world of money. It focuses on the changing patterns of not only our disposable income but the very motor that drives consumerism and capitalism. But here we are in the very early stages of the 21st century and Wetherspoon has discovered the financial powerhouse that is Bloomberg, a channel for money makers and million pound wheelers and dealers, of negotiators and big businessmen and women.

Many years ago now I once went for a job interview at Bloomberg at Finsbury Pavement in London. Now for reasons best known to myself  I was applying for a job in Bloomberg's vast and magnificent news room. Why I was looking for a job in financial journalism still escapes me. I have nothing but unqualified admiration for all of our accountants and chartered accountants but Bloomberg looked like one huge trading floor at the Stock Exchange, acres of flashing computers with whizzy graphics and journalists who seemed to be speaking French, German, Spanish and Italian all at the same time.

I can now see myself gazing around at this incredible looking high tech office and quite clearly feeling like a fish out of water. I remember scratching my head at quite the most terrifying test before you'd even reached the interview stage. Still it was a real eye opener and made me more and more determined never to have anything to do with numbers or figures. Even the TV studio at Bloomberg looked daunting but then it was an interesting day out.

Just for the record my Sunday lunch comprised of roast beef, turkey, potatoes, carrots and peas which may sound just like any other meal but one that was satisfying and in its way, financially rewarding. Besides it isn't every day that you get to see a financial TV channel in a pub. Now I wonder how my tin, steel and nickel shares are doing.  On second thoughts I think I'll come back to the real world and watch Super Soccer Sunday on Sky.