As the owner of a vintage green vinyl copy of the ‘Hotel California’ album, it was inevitable I’d wind up watching The Eagles at the O2 Arena over the Easter weekend. And as I sat for an hour afterwards trying to extricate myself from the car park, I had plenty of time to reflect on how the music business has changed since 1977, when I donned my Brutus flares and took the steam train up to Oxford Street to pay my £2.99 for the precious LP.

The first thing to note is that while Hotel California cost me a month’s pocket money back then, today you can get a copy on play.com (remastered) for £3.99. And this method of actually handing over money for recorded music is increasingly only for the technically inept and the terminally honest – you can download it for zilch elsewhere without leaving your seat. Such is the deadly power and convenience of the Long Tail.

They say that the rise of digital, which has wrecked the cosy business model of the music industry, has also led to an unpredicted rise in the popularity of live performance. Prince did no fewer than 21 nights at the O2, which seats 23,000 people. It’s easy to see why, since the most expensive ‘gold circle’ front row seats for the ageing Californian country rockers were going for £950 a snip. Do the math, as they say in Sacramento.

There’s no real point belly-aching about this, as the Guardian reviewer of the Eagles concert did: ‘Suited and booted, they take to the stage looking like a gaggle of senior executives jamming on a team bonding exercise. And they are about as captivating… It seems harsh to accuse four baby boomers playing a three-hour rock show of lazily going through the motions, but that was exactly what this was. The Eagles came, they saw, they cashed in.’

The problem is – as new EMI owner Guy Hands will tell you – that after years of pursuing an economic model that didn’t work, this is good business. As the Eagles’ cadaverous 60-year-old guitarist Joe Walsh sings: ‘Life’s been good to me so far’.

I’m not surprised to read this morning that British Poles have had it up to here with the Daily Mail. The Federation of Poles in Great Britain has ‘reluctantly’ filed a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission accusing the newspaper of defaming Polish residents in the UK. In its letter of complaint to the PCC, the federation accused the Mail of printing articles that gave rise to ‘negative emotions and tensions between the new EU immigrants and local communities’.

I’m not alone in wondering what would happen if they got fed up and went home tomorrow. Everyone I know has their own Polish wonder story. It’s an urban commonplace. Our baby is looked after part-time by a delightful young woman who has a degree in child psychology, never stops smiling and answers every remark I make with ‘no worries’ (fiancee is a Kiwi). When I think of a couple of the hopeless English misery-guts who looked after my first son, I still shudder. On an unexpected return home once, we found one of them in the shower with her pair of eighteen-month old charges sitting dazed in the living room. 

My house is cleaned by another marvel who spends all her cash broadening her mind by travelling with her earnings – from Athens to Havana. And she works like stink as a receptionist in a GP’s surgery. This morning my delivery of a new pair of Merino wool blend socks from M&S online was ‘packed by Miroslav Filipowicz’ – presumably also a Pole.  And we’re also having a bit of building work done at the moment – so inevitably the Poles got the contract. Indeed, so vigorous are they about their work that we heard from our neighbour that a massive argument and minor scuffle broke out the other day, presumably as they disagreed about the relative merits of the English versus the Flemish brickwork bond.

Of course they’re not all great. We had a disaster last year with one over-energetic chancer who totally messed up a bathroom. I’ve never seen tiling like it - ‘Bronislav the Builder! Can he fix it? No he can’t’. But in general they’re making a massive contribution to our economy.

So, lay off the Poles – they’re precious. How one gets the many millions of Brits stuck on unemployment and long-term sick benefit off the dole and into the jobs currently being done by the Poles is another, but equally important, matter...

The chancellor stated in his budget that we’re well prepared for economic slowdown. Well, one of the industries already dawdling along in neutral, occupying the slow lane, is Big Motor - and it will not have heard Darling out with much pleasure. There is huge global over-supply at the moment and the pain, especially in the States, is already acute as Motown downsizes.

Darling looks as if he’s going to clobber big, new cars hard by having a special high road tax rate for year one – that amounts to an extra sales tax on powerful new gas-guzzlers, and could amount to almost £1000 for the worst offenders.

The point is that the cars that produce the most carbon dioxide are almost always the larger-engined vehicles. And it is those very vehicles on which car manufacturers make the highest margins and enable them to churn out small, fuel-thrifty vehicles further down the range, often with very little profit to be had from them at all. The Germans will be especially fed up with this as it will hit BMW, Audi and Mercedes where it hurts. Porsche is already expressing its annoyance with UK lawmakers by attempting to sue Ken Livingstone over his increased level of Congestion Charge in London for high-emitting vehicles.

The most fashionable drive around town at the moment may well be the new Fiat 500 – a friend has just ordered one but it can’t be delivered until September - but Fiat’s profit from that virtuous midget of a car is meagre indeed. And they’ve stripped out just about as much cost as they can without the things being made from plastic and paper. In the days of post-war austerity the original models did have their fair share of cardboard in them, after all...

Excuse my metropolitan rant, but I have a few thoughts on transport. One of the many joys of living and working in London is actually trying to get from A to B within this city. Those of you who toil wretchedly each day with our public transport system in the capital will be quite familiar with the broken, useless, stroppy disaster that is Transport for London. Or TfL as it’s known to its mates. It’s now ten to ten and currently half of MT’s staff aren’t here because of failures in the system. And it’s hardly the first time.  I’ve just spent half an hour down the tube in conditions that were I a young bullock or lamb, would have had the RSPCA down on the carrier like a ton of barnyard manure. And it’s now virtually the most expensive system to travel on in the world.  But I mustn’t grumble – at least the train turned up and didn’t break down for four hours in a tunnel.

Ken Livingstone has done zilch to make things any better. However, the thought of Boris Johnson behind the deadman’s handle is enough to give anyone the willies. God only knows what the answer is – even with tens of billions chucked at the problem it will take years to see any improvement. And in the meantime our European neighbours just laugh, while those with the money tool around in their chauffeur-driven Mercs and BMWs.

This isn’t to say that all is well with the infernal combustion engine, either. I’ve just returned from my first visit to the Geneva Motor Show, which was an eye-opener. What took me by surprise were not the hordes of broad-beamed motoring hacks falling over each other to snap four square centimetres of the dashboard of the latest Kia sub compact. Nor, in the face of climate change, was it the vast number of new V12 off-roaders or the sickening display of Hummers.   No, what took my breath away was the fact that as soon as you walk into the vast hall, the first thing that greets you is an array of semi-naked ‘babes’ with cheesy smiles draped across the bonnets of the cars. I thought this sort of thing had died out years back. It just summed up the mentality of the car industry – purblind, blokey and stuck-in-the-past. It’s five minutes to midnight and they just don’t get it.

Lest you think me a total misery-guts, there has been one good transport angle to my week: London City Airport. What a dreamy experience flying from City is. Quick, efficient, no-nonsense… Compared to the hell of Heathrow or Stansted, it was very Elysium.