CITY DIARY

There are signs that Sir Colin Southgate, chairman of Thorn-EMI, is running out of patience with City analysts. Earlier this week he made a highly publicised attack on speculation that he was poised to sell the company's music businesses to Michael Eisner's Disney. More subtle was the implicit needling of analysts in the company's choice of their annual gift of compact discs after the meeting. The gifts included albums from bands pointedly called Blur and Simple Minds. "It was as if he was trying to tell us something," said a bemused recipient.

The financial crisis at Lloyd's is not standing in the way of David Rowland's fund-raising efforts on behalf of the Dover Bronze Age Boat Trust. This is a charity to restore a 3,000- year-old sew-plank boat found in the path of the A20 on the outskirts of Dover.

The boat, one of the oldest sea-going vessels in the world, gives archaeologists crucial evidence about Bronze Age man's trading links with France in the period after the Stone Age land bridge to the Continent was broken.

To reach France, 10 strong men were needed to paddle the 40-foot vessel across the Channel.

To pay for its restoration, Rowland, who prefers to spend his spare time in the safety of his Norfolk country house, is hosting a party at the New Baltic Exchange, set to reopen next month after the IRA's demolition effort.

The appointment of Cyril Freedman, 49, the veteran venture capitalist and marketing man, to S Daniels is a shot in the arm for the struggling food processing and distribution group. The company has suffered three years of losses in the last four years and looks set to make further losses this year, which it blames on the price war among its supermarket chain customers.

Freedman started his career marketing Bulmers as an advertising executive and, as a venture capitalist at Apax Partners, helped with the funding of new Covent Garden Soups. A collector of oil paintings of the region around his villa near St Tropez, he will appreciate the chance to make money out of the generous options

Pub-goers bored with the usual entertainment range of dominoes and gaming machines are set to be offered access to the silicon world of the Internet by Ansells, the Midlands pub arm of Allied Domecq. The company has redecorated the basement of Club Nevada, one of its less successful pubs in the centre of Nottingham's nightclub and retailing district, and turned it into a "Cyberpub".

Management hopes punters will take time off from boozing and chatting up to take their pints and grub to the computer terminal for a bit of "surfing" on the web. Kevin Barry at Digital's Multivendor Customer Services Business Unit denies the idea is a ridiculous gimmick designed to spruce up a poor pub site.

"It's a trial concept for the whole of Ansells outlets," he announces grandly.

The line of beautiful women who have promoted Lux soap is impressive: Elizabeth Taylor, Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren.

Now comes a complete change of direction in a 70-year marketing strategy, with Paul Newman being chosen, despite his very obvious masculinity.

Beauty bosses are increasingly worried that the use of superstars and models is giving the public an inferiority complex.

The new campaign for Lux sees Newman as a 70-year-old racing driver and loyal husband spotting the beautiful but unknown model, Stacy Ness, at an airport and treating her like a star. The message they are trying to put over is that Lux "brings out the star in you".