VIEW FROM THE GROUND: Since I'm totally euroized by now, I surprised myself last week when I took out my purse in a bookshop in Covent Garden and then put it back in my bag saying that it was my Irish pound purse not my sterling one.

Maybe the fact that everything around me was priced in pounds had caused my sudden reversion into our erstwhile domestic currency but even saying "Irish pounds" sounded odd while the girl at the till frowned at me and then asked if I wanted to pay in euros.

Despite the best efforts of the British eurosceptics, the bookseller reckoned that joining the euro would be a good thing as far as Britain was concerned. She was fed up running a dual-currency system.

That day the British newspapers were full of the Steven Byer's "foot-in-mouth euro gaffe" and both print and other media were whipping up a storm over Tony Blair's intentions towards the pound. The markets are currently working on pricing in those intentions - sterling started to fall against the euro in April and the decline has steepened, helped probably by Blair's comments in his interviews with Jeremy Paxman.

Clearly the five economic tests (one of which is a convergence of the euro zone and UK economies) can be fudged as much as the politicians want, and so the only real test is whether or not the markets can take sterling lower and keep it there - thus helping the actual tests to become self-fulfilling anyway. Which is how markets work really. When traders see the inevitability of a certain course of action they give the politicians and the financial authorities what they want. A game that both sides play to their best advantage.

Of course the main topic of conversation in Britain isn't the pound or the euro - it's still Beckham's foot. I'm feeling somewhat out of things for this World Cup since, no longer working with a gang of people who know every detail about every player, I'm not picking up all sorts of interesting football info by osmosis as I used to. But the Beckham foot is clearly still far more important in the eyes of the British media than the Byer's one, even to City traders.

Actually, I reckon there will be more bets placed in goal difference trades than euro/sterling over the next couple of months. There isn't a hope in hell that there will be any institutional deals of note going down during the football fest because dealers will be watching the TV not the Bloomberg or Reuters screens, and they will be utterly resentful of anyone interfering with something so mundane as a sale of sterling or an IPO.

Not that too many IPOs are coming the way of the markets lately. The pulling of Spectel as well as Ark Therapeutics over the past few days has shown that investors are still not ready to pay a premium for any business model that isn't ready to make them immediate and significant returns. While some companies are stressing that their planned offerings will come to the market, the advisers are probably earning their fees in building up order books and pitching the price at the right level.

The difficulty at the moment is getting the pricing exactly right. People who bought into HMV at its flotation are undoubtedly feeling a little pressurised by its poor post-float performance. Brokers have to be upbeat and positive about the prospects for any company coming to the market but, right now, the market is still in a downbeat mood and taking broker recommendations with large pinches of salt.

So I was interested to see that US broker Charles Schwab has initiated a new way of rating stocks for its customers. Schwab, of course, has suffered from the demise of the private investor (and even more from the virtual disappearance of deal-happy day-traders) but it has made a big play in its efforts to woo them back by the new system. Now it plans to offer customers computer-generated ratings for more than 3,000 stocks. And it's really simple.

The stocks are rated A to F. Each stock gets one letter. That's it. So out goes the "buy", "strong hold" and "weak hold" recommendations and in, instead, comes a letter. And let's face it, if your stock is rated F you know exactly what the analysts at Schwab think about it.

I don't know how well this will work since Schwab hasn't given out any information on exactly how it will come up with each rating. And the company will have it's own way of weighting different factors. But it gives investors a very simple yardstick by which to make their choices.

Something we are unlikely to see on the Dublin market any time soon. There are too few stocks on the Irish Stock Exchange to be able to deal with them so ruthlessly. And the way things are going there will be even fewer in the next couple of years since IPOs seem likely to be outnumbered by mergers, take-overs and just plain delisting.

You never know, Smurfit might be off the exchange sooner rather than later and there are a few other companies whose share prices are languishing at low enough levels to make them potential targets.

Institutional investors may have departed the Irish market in droves since the introduction of the euro, replacing the old reliables with a blend of British, US and euro-zone stocks, but many private investors don't like to have to worry about exchange rate movements.

There are plenty of other euro-zone stocks out there but dealing costs are high and most people don't know as much about Metro and Carrefour as they do about Tesco. So maybe if and when those five economic tests are met and the Brits take the plunge the private investor will turn attention to Britain once again.

My attention, in the meantime, is focused on the blisters on my feet courtesy of that London trip. Unlike Beckham, I don't have Uri Geller and a nation sending me healing waves, just a pack of plasters that I bought in Boots in Oxford Street. They seemed priced about right at the time but then I converted the cost back into euro and it was astronomical. Still, it was worth it to be able to hobble back to my hotel without sobbing.