We scour the internet, swans around at Ascot, lurks on street corners and goes to sweat-soaked ceremonies and beer-soaked clubs – and all for you
For one night only …
Being something of a music buff, I'm eagerly anticipating The Architecture Foundation's battle of the bands tonight in Farringdon, east London, celebrating the biennale. Will Fat Midget eat Cheeseburger? Will Badly Drawn Details take the biscuit? Will Grimshaw and Hopkins be throwing some shapes in the mosh pits? Mystery surrounds the identity of the axemen, though initial reports that Norman Foster will be fronting a Kraftwerk-style hypermodernist collective appear, sadly, to be wide of the mark.

And he scores – twice!
I bumped into Balfour Beatty's amiable spinmeister Tim Sharp at a football-related drinks do held by PR firm Lexington Communications. Keen Watford fan Sharp's luck was in that night at the charity raffle, in which he won a shirt signed by England captain David Beckham. His number then came up again for a poster signed by golden boy Wayne Rooney, but Sharp generously declined the prize. What a gent.

A worrying site
I was saddened to hear of the plight of construction group Montpellier, which lost £20m last year. Keen to find out if its fortunes were improving, I endeavoured to grapple with the internet to find the firm's site. When eventually I stumbled across it, it read "website coming soon, under construction". Oh dear.

An awards do? In a brewery?
To the RIBA awards, where this year a grand total of 69 buildings were honoured for architectural excellence. Curious, then, that the chosen venue, the former Truman Brewery in east London, should be a glum 1960s industrial shed with poor ventilation and terrible. If it was still a brewery, I could understand …

Paris, here we come
All publicity is good publicity or so they say. Mike Power, who has the job of getting London's Olympic bid together, wants the construction industry to plaster its hoardings with Olympics paraphernalia. Still, the industry stands to benefit most should the games come to the capital. And I'm sure those hoardings will look very natty.

It's my gherkin
I gather that the pinstriped occupants of the Swiss Re are to share their new building with an unexpected tenant. Apparently none other than Norman Foster is considering taking a floor in the gherkin to use as a private office.

The wrong Stefanou

I enjoyed a splendid day’s racing and hat watching at Ascot last week, and it was nice to see that nearly half of the construction industry had found time to turn up, too, even if some of them were not on top of their game. While I was in a box enjoying the hospitality of concrete contractor John Doyle Group, one of their guests, Construction Products Association chief Michael Ankers, made a bit of a faux pas. Bounding into the box, he went straight to the host, Stef Stefanou, and warmly congratulated him on receiving an OBE. Unfortunately Ankers had got the wrong man. It was Stef’s brother Stelio who got the gong.

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