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14 June

Interesting obit of Multiplex founder John Roberts in the Times today, including a recent story I had failed to pick up on. In April the man who dominated the Australian contracting and development sector for most of the second half of the twentieth century donated three giant Galapagos tortoises to Perth Zoo. These were bought from friend, former Tory party treasurer and Building columnist Lord Alistair McAlpine, who started a zoo for endangered species in his beloved Broome, the Western Australia resort he almost single-handedly put on the tourist map, in the 1980s.

The obit puts the company's current travails at Wembley in some context. The job is one of the few real disasters the firm he founded in 1962 was associated with, although it has flirted with controversy in its dealing with Australian building unions. And Roberts was a huge figure both physically and in his presence in Australian business circles, as well as establishing a dominant presence in the current construction boom in Dubai. One can't help reading rather ruefully the description of the firm's Australian operation though - "A hallmark of Multiplex was its cost efficient use of sub-contractors instead of a permanent workforce."

11 June

I see most of you agree that putting up office temperatures to 24 degrees to save on energy would be a good thing. Our web poll has nearly two thirds of you backing this. The QS News office has taken this principle a tad too far though - our air-conditioning has packed in today and the current temperature is a sweltering 30 degrees. I'm looking forward to journeying home on the tube in order to cool down a bit.