It would only take a small improvement in the value of sterling against the US dollar and we’d be touching down at JFK, headed for courtroom 14B, 500 Pearl Street, Lower Manhattan in the hope of being put straight by judge Jed Rakoff. He is not a man shy of giving an opinion, as well as a judgment. No siree.

Rakoff has long run what Obiter’s friend the New York Times calls ‘a lively courtroom’, but it is the recent case of financier Guy Hands against Citigroup over Hands’ ill-fated purchase of ailing music group EMI that had Obiter checking its air miles.

Here is the good judge on board papers referenced by Citigroup’s lawyers: ‘Some day I will see a minute of a board meeting that reflects what actually went on but in my 67 years, I have yet to see it.’ The case as a whole he summarised as ‘a catfight between two rich companies’. And to advocates for both sides who stressed that the two key players were married with children, Rakoff noted: ‘I congratulate them on their fertility. But, I do think it’s rather irrelevant to any issue in this case.’

Winningly, he doesn’t expect the jury to be any more fazed than he is by the complexities of a big business fraud trial: ‘It could with truth be said that some of the evidence in this case is boring, none of it, in this court’s view, is remotely beyond the ken of any one of our jurors, let alone all nine.’

Obiter is certainly paying attention.