Hamish Champ: £5.2m - yes, that's right, £5.2m - for a pub?!?

£5.2m for a pub?!? "Christ on a bike, you've got be joking!" I hear you cry.

But no, I'm not. Yessiree bob, restaurateur Gordon Ramsay has, according to sources, apparently paid this not-insignificant sum for the Warrington Hotel pub in London's Maida Vale.

For those of you who've not been in the pub in question it's a wonderful (large) site with an art-deco interior that has to be seen to be believed.

But Jumping Jehovahs, five million quid? Ramsay's no property developer, and nor is he an idiot, but even in these times of soaring multiples that's pretty serious money to be chucking in the direction of a pub, if you ask me.

At least that's what I thought until a friend of mine who knows a thing or two about such things did me a quick calculation on the back of a pristine white napkin.

Lookit: the weekly servicing cost of a £5.2m loan would come in at around £5,750 assuming an interest rate of 5.75 per cent. Further assuming rent/property servicing costs equate to 12 per cent of turnover - which is pretty typical, he believes - this implies weekly sales in the region of £48,000 per week.

True, it's back of an envelope - or napkin - stuff, but iIf our Gordon's per head meal spend, including booze, comes to around £50 a head - which is quite high even for a Maida Vale gastropub - he will need 960 customers a week, or 137 customers a day.

If Gordon's per head spend is lower, say, £30 a head - a more realistic target, one suspects - he will need 228 customers a day. That is starting to look quite a tough bulls-eye to hit.

But he'll have done his homework on this. And presumably he would additionally have the pub operating in its own right, which would in some way help offset the responsibility of maintaining such gargantuan numbers.

Whatever the case may be, we mere mortals just stand there, looking on, open-mouthed in wonderment at the scale and ambition of it all.