I start the week moaning and groaning: my friend Emma had tricked me into a "gentle introduction to Pilates". A few stretches, I had imagined, followed by lattes and gossip. But no, this was a new variant called "Heartcore": hardcore, more like. I had the feeling it was not designed for wimps like me. But then my competitive side kicked in, and I was practically shouting "Give me more, I love the pain" to the rather bemused South African instructor - who, I was led to believe, is called Rhino. Really.
For the rest of the week, I am reminded of my showing off every time I so much as roll over in bed. I wonder, briefly, if "post-Pilates trauma" is a good enough excuse to cry off from the Adidas Breast Cancer 5km run on Sunday, which said "friend" Emma has also bamboozled
me into. But in the end I decide that neither she nor my pride will forgive me if I bail. And I am glad I did not. Running beside other women in Hyde Park - including, for about a mile, a very tall female Elvis impersonator - was a wonderful, if weird, experience. I am very proud of my medal, and it matters not a jot that 17,000 other women got one, too.
I top and tail the week in Birmingham, covering the possible takeover of Cadbury and catching up with my class of 2009. For a few months now, I have been following a group of Birmingham college leavers as they search for work. This week, I take a couple of them to meet the cabinet minister responsible for addressing youth unemployment, Yvette Cooper. At a greasy-spoon café, we give the minister tea in exchange for sympathy. She is perfectly well meaning, but she doesn't say anything that reassures me about our youngsters' chances of finding employment. And I think she owes one of them a job at the very least: for it was Natalie who spotted a photo-opportunity disaster looming and averted it. The café owner's motorbike, positioned right where the minister would walk in, had its name painted along one side in glorious technicolour: "Muff Diver". Nice.
After spending the evening editing in a Birmingham car park in the pouring rain, hopping on the Eurostar the next morning is a welcome change. On the eve of the G20, finance ministers are meeting to see whether French anger about bankers' bonuses was all it seemed. I interview René Ricol, a friend of Nicolas Sarkozy's of 30 years' standing, and the man he's put in charge of making French bankers behave themselves. He is wonderfully indiscreet, telling me that Sarko simply does not care about bankers and the state of their industry, that he has told them to their faces, and that Gordon Brown should take a leaf out of his book if he wants to get re-elected.
The next morning, I interview the glamorous French finance minister, Christine Lagarde. Her opening gambit is "I am told the British people would like me very much", and I cannot help but agree. I cannot think of a single charismatic British female politician since Mrs T. She gleefully tells me she is off to buy suits from Austin Reed between bilaterals that afternoon - and will be telling Alistair Darling that she is splashing her cash to help the British economy catch up with the French one. You have to admire the Gallic cheek.
Lagarde, like Ricol, is all guns blazing about bankers' bonuses. Financiers really are the global punchbag these days. How things have changed! For the 15 or so years I spent covering politics, it was politicians who were despised.
At drinks parties, I got used to the look of pity - sometimes accompanied by a whiff of disgust - that greeted the sentence: "I'm a political journalist." Having swapped SW1 for EC1, I find nothing has changed. I have brought the pity and the whiff with me.
Since the late Nineties at least, MPs have had exaggerated respect for tycoons. The self-styled masters of the universe really are running the world, politicians have frequently told me. "We must find ways to learn from their success," they'd say, proudly listing the bankers and CEOs they could name as close friends and supporters.
The sneering that went in the other direction was just as embarrassing. I was amazed at how much the MPs would put up with, just to be close to the City slickers. I remember, at a lunch organised by a lobbyist some years ago (where, as usual, the business leaders were the stars of the show and the ministers the appreciative audience), one underling telling me that his CEO could "make, or lose, one of these ministers' entire annual budgets in a day". Nauseating. It's easy to see why so many politicians are enjoying their revenge.
And so from one extreme to the other. This week, I'm off on a two-day hostile environment course in deepest Hampshire, to face the humiliation
of being shouted at by marines as I struggle into a boiler suit designed for a snake-hipped teenage boy and attempt to crawl like an Action Man. Wish me luck. Lord, give me Pilates any day . . .
Daisy McAndrew is economics editor of ITV News
