Board and strategy meetings today in our Johannesburg offices which overlook the Wanderers cricket ground, although our view is not quite this good.

At long last we have a respectable Macmillan South Africa website. The first item is the announcement of our black empowerment initiative which we have been working on for more than a year. We decided to take this step as part of our partnership with South African education.

And it's not just South Africa. We are the largest publisher in the Southern Africa region with significant operations in Botswana, Swaziland, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia and, of course, the unfortunate Zimbabwe.

For some reason mention of Zimbabwe reminds me of my former boss (a short-lived experience), Robert Maxwell. There was a wonderful BBC documentary of parts of his life starring David Suchet (who,incidentally, was my dormitory captain at my first boarding school) in the title role. His performance was chilling and accurate - well worth getting to see the programme.