CITY DIARY

Three days of intense meetings with bankers over the Eurotunnel crisis went on through Wednesday night for Tony Jarrett, the senior NatWest executive running the show for the four agent banks. At 5am yesterday, two hours ahead of the announcement and straight out of a meeting with the lawyers, he was seen by early birds breakfasting with the porters at a cafe at Smithfield meat market in London. Nothing else was open.

Two steps forward, one step back for Sir Peter Levene, the hard-nosed boss of Canary Wharf in London's Docklands. Fresh from clinching a deal with credit insurer Trade Indemnity, for 70,000 sq ft of office space in the 75-per-cent-let development, Sir Peter hosted a lunch for property agents yesterday. Nearly 200 turned up at one of the still-vacant buildings, 140,000 sq ft of which has just been let to Reader's Digest, no less (see page 27). Sir Peter quite justifiably crowed that Canary Wharf was filling up fast and was no longer perceived as a white elephant from the Eighties. Only one thing cramped Sir Peter's style. The assembled agents, coming in mostly from central London, had been delayed for 40 minutes on the Docklands Light Railway. Sir Peter apologised, and insisted the Jubilee Line underground extension would open on time in 1998. Here's hoping.

You will no doubt be delighted to know that it is "National Breakfast Week". Anyone with a taste for fry-ups will be excited to hear that two companies, Simply Sausages and Cranswick, have teamed up to launch a range of upmarket bangers. Mouth-watering flavours include Cajun Smoky, Mulligatawny, and Boerewors. Cranswick chief executive Martin Davey is launching the sausages through Sainsbury to start with.

Frank Barlow, the small but perfectly combative managing director of Pearson, is to become non-executive chairman of Logica. Mr Barlow, who joined the company as a non-executive director in January, points out chief executive Martin Read, adding - a touch light-heartedly - "He obviously knows how to spot a good company when he sees one."