Along with the bras (see below), I also treated myself to the box set of Teachers. Series 1,2 and 3. I can have Andrew Lincoln in my living room, all to myself! Wonderful.

A girl can never have too many handbags, shoes… and bras. It’s true. A bra can both make an outfit (and your figure look better), but also make you feel good about yourself. I bought a gorgeous bra about a year ago and I’ve been hunting around for the same type ever since. I’d even looked on the internet, but to no avail. Anyway, today in the bargain bin of bras in Fenwick there was my dream Gossard. There it sat, in my size, just waiting to be bought. So I bought two. Just to be on the safe side. You see, a comfortable and shapely bra is like a good pair of shoes. You never want to stop wearing it. But, to continually wear it would ming, and to keep washing it would be a hassle. And the worst thing is, you also never know what makes a comfortable loveable bra until you’ve left the shop. Again, like a pair of shoes. Like shoes, bras can look pretty and feel nice in the shop, but once you’ve walked five miles in them they are as uncomfortable as a piece of chicken wire. But after today’s purchase I am happy. It’s a good ending to 2005.

PARAGRAPH 1

Blair: The UK begins 2006 in a strong position thanks to eight and a half years of a Labour Government.
Cameron: The Conservative Party can look forward to 2006 confident in our values, clear about our direction, and optimistic about the future.
Kennedy: At this time of year, we need to remember those worse off than ourselves.

VERDICT: Blair looking back, Cameron looking forward, Kennedy looking for anyone worse off than Kennedy.

PARAGRAPH 2

Blair: Britain today benefits from record police numbers and fear of anti-social behaviour is falling.
Cameron: As Gandhi said, "we must be the change we want to see in the world."
Kennedy: Fundamental unfairness in modern Britain isn't just about wealth.

VERDICT: Blair on autopilot, Cameron on something illegal, Kennedy on proportional representation.

PARAGRAPH 3

Blair: Our achievements are being acknowledged across the globe, a fact recognised by the international community when we won the 2012 Olympics for London.
Cameron: We’re at the start of a process of change, becoming a Party which is more like modern Britain.
Kennedy: Let me paint a picture for you. It's Christmas Day. The house is overflowing with people - aunts, cousins, grandparents. As the day wears on, the space seems to contract. It's hot and increasingly claustrophobic. The youngest children get fractious and older family members get irritable trying to keep the peace. It happens in even the closest of families.

VERDICT: Blair not quite understanding true international depth of feeling regarding a few other events e.g. wars, Cameron not quite realising a party more like modern Britain means a party of chavs, Kennedy not quite entering spirit of Christmas (and using double spaces after a full stop, the fool).

PARAGRAPH 4

Blair: David Cameron has stated clearly he wants to return to selection in our schools. He believes we should return to investing less in public services. This is not the right future for our country.
Cameron: I hope that we can inspire many more people to be part of the Conservative Party in 2006.
Kennedy: Now let me tell you about a real family. In this household, what many of us only experience on Christmas Day, happens every day.

VERDICT: Blair sounds off, Cameron signs off, Kennedy supporters drop off.

PARAGRAPHS 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 AND 12

Blair: public services, welfare, Afghanistan, Iraq, economy, America.
Cameron: long since gone home.
Kennedy: housing, social mobility, education, Charles Dickens.

PARAGRAPH 15

Kennedy: Happy New Year and best wishes.

VERDICT: In your own time Charlie.

Speeches in full:
Blair | Cameron | Kennedy

Interestingly, you can get both Downing Street and Labour-spun versions of Tony's message. I used the Labour one. Here's an example of the difference, in the opening line:

Labour website: "The UK begins 2006 in a strong position thanks to eight and a half years of a Labour Government, re-elected in May thanks to the hard work of Labour members and supporters."

Downing Street: "The UK begins 2006 in a strong position."

Of course, it won't be long before Tony's out of Downing Street forever. An opinion piece in The Telegraph today says that if he goes next year, we might have a general election fought by three new party leaders within months...

I may accuse my housemates of being two-dimensional but this takes the cake. If you studied French at school you might have had to endure little taped 'slice-of-life' soap opera-styled sessions, where some family or other does something in French and you get to listen in and try to understand what's going on.

Here's the English equivalent on the World Service 'Learning English' site, called The Flatmates. Click here for the first episode and work your way through. At the time of writing, the latest episode deals with the humour behind a joke involving a play on the words 'purpose' and 'porpoise', which seems a wee bit technical - I'd be struggling if that was in French.

Also of note is the corner cutting by the graphics department. There are four Flatmates. Each has been drawn only once. The four drawings are then rearranged in front of a different background photo for each episode's illustration. Very occasionally an expression changes, other than that the four are stock still throughout the 22 episodes to date.

Update: Read the Language Point explanation of different types of English joke. It's a masterclass in sucking the life out of something funny. Watch in awe as it is explained that dolphins wouldn't normally talk to each other, but for the purposes (porpoises?) of this joke, they do...

When we started opening presents during our second mini-Christmas last night, my Dad asked me to change the TV channel to something worthwhile instead of whatever rubbish we were watching. He wanted Sky Sports, naturally, but I changed it to BBC Parliament instead just to annoy everyone.

Well, now you don't even need a pillock in charge of the remote control to get your parliamentary fix. There's now an online broadband console allowing you to choose between BBC Parliament itself or live coverage of the House of Lords and Select Committees, along with other political highlights. You lucky things, you.

BBC News Online's Jenny Green was tasked with getting the project off the ground and she explains its significance:

This is the first BBC channel to have its own online media player, enabling the live broadcast of the Lords and committees and other political events around Westminster and beyond.

She also talks about the ideals of her post-grad course in online journalism versus the realities of having to negotiate her way through life at the BBC:

During [the] post-grad course I was taught to think of blue skies. In the cold realities of working life I have learned to dodge the perpetual smog and occasional storm clouds.

My shopping list of web-desires has been nipped and tucked and pinched and poked and probably made a lot more sensible than it was before. It was a question of tempering what was best for BBC Parliament with what was technically and politically possible and with such taut purse-strings.

Ideals versus realities is probably something I should be bearing in mind at this point in my career development, too. The rest of her article is here, and the BBC Parliament media console is here.

Ugly word. Do bear in mind that the 'Admin' category usually hosts information of more interest to the three of us than anyone else, so don't be surprised if you're bored by what's below.

The end of 2005 is almost upon us, and tomorrow - New Year's Day, as if you need telling - I'll unleash a little recap of the Dayorama year just gone.

This will include posting statistics. Amy reckons there's been a 'posting war' going on, and whilst I wouldn't necessarily say that it started intentionally, I have been happy to up the ante and try to find lots of interesting things to say each day.

This has escalated to the extent that there were nine posts yesterday, equalling a record set on 3 June this year. Technically I alone made 15 posts on 3 November 2004, but since that was our special coverage of the US Election it was one-off and doesn't count.

So, tomorrow you'll get to see how we've been posting since the last update, which was in September. At that point I had made 428 posts, Amy 377 and OJ 265 since Dayorama began (remembering, of course, that OJ and I had a substantial head start but that equally we don't blog each individual snowflake separately). I therefore had a lead of 51 posts (163 over OJ, who trailed Amy by 112), though I do feel the need to point out that a return to quality over quantity is probably a worthy New Year's resolution for the entire Dayorama clan.

Finally, I do hope you've enjoyed the new look to the site since around June this year. There'll be one or two small changes for 2006, but nothing earth-shattering - you may not even notice. And remember, if you can't stomach the layout, you can always grab the RSS feed from the top of the home page below the Dayorama logo, and read us at your leisure on your desktop.

Not, alas, a BBC News headline. Yet. Those NHS budget cuts could be tough though.

No, this is a movie currently showing on the Horror Channel on Sky Digital. In a vain attempt to procure something decent to watch, I carried on scrolling down the channels until this title caught the eye. The description:

Masochistic nurses, wearing lingerie and heavy eyeliner, inflict terror upon male patients with an arsenal of knives, whips, shotguns and booby-traps.

Aside from the fact that I've just guaranteed us a busload of comment spam with phrases like 'masochistic nurses wearing lingerie', the film itself is pretty dreadful. During the three minutes I could bear to watch, some awful footage was only rescued by a fairly amusing body count screen, showing the running total of gruesome deaths thus far. Over I went to IMDB to find out how such a fantastically named movie rates, and the answer is it gets a paltry 2 out of 10, which one suspects is generous. 'Snoopy', an IMDB user from Budapest, had this to say:

Here's the formula to duplicate this movie: shoot some cheap videotape footage of women in white lingerie. You don't even need to shoot sound footage. In fact, it's more flexible without sound. Just make sure there are plenty of shots of the women from behind, so you can dub in some voices later without having to worry about lip-synching. This gives you the additional advantage of having the movie in any language for later distribution.

...

Here's how to lengthen it. Watch a travelogue on TV and tape it. Let's say it's about Venice. Choose about 10 minutes of good stuff, insert it in your footage somewhere near the end, and have one of the characters say something to another, something like "you wonder how it all began? Your mother and I met in Venice, where I was working as a gondolier."

"Hey, no travelogues on tonight. Just some shark specials on Discovery."

No problem, my friend. Just change the monologue to "your mother and I met off the great barrier reef, where I was hunting the Great White with Captain Cousteau's crew." Pretty much any real-life footage will work.

[source: IMDB - 'Maniac Nurses (1990)']

Oh, and speaking of underwear and what not, here's what Andy McNab's new range of underwear might look like according to The Sunday Telegraph earlier this month. So hideous, even pencil sketches demand their faces be blacked out...

I've decided to write to Simon Hoggart (Guardian fame) and complain that due to his damn book criticising Round Robin letters, our family haven't received any this year. How will we survive not knowing how Christina got on at ballet, or whether Charles survived his gap year. And did the grandmother die in the end from tooth ache? And did the dog, Bernie, manage to have a full night of sleep following his operation. These people are too scared to write such entertaining letters following Hoggart's red book. Bring them back! Bring back the humour. Please!

P.S My Mother no longer wants to know me since the "capsual"/"capsule" moment.

P.P.S. If you haven't already noticed, there is a posting war going on. OJ has lost. Ollie may have won this battle... but I will win the war...

When even your mother asks whether you’ve posted recently, it is perhaps time to get back to posting. Or at least, post. So, instead of watching another gardening program, here are some things that have been in and out of my head over the last week or so:

Simon Schama – yes, he of DayoSchamaLlama fame – has an interesting piece in today’s Guardian where he reviews the more monumental things that have happened since the year 2000. Apparently, 2006 marks the start of the second half of the decade, though I would have thought that 2000 is part of the ‘noughties’ and 2010 is not. It’s windy and wide ranging, marrying digital progress with political shocks. And it has an amusing punch line, so take a look.

On a not un-distant theme, the publication of BBC History’s Top 10 Worst Britons seems to be making both the media rounds and the blogosphere. I have no great qualms with the choices; perhaps there might have been someone more interesting than Jack the Ripper for the 19th Century, but then I did avoid it because it was slightly boring. Perhaps the Duke of Cumberland is an awkward choice. He was, after all, only doing his job, and if we consider that in defeating the Jacobites he butchered Scots but saved the Union, perhaps it is difficult to see him as a worst “Briton”. And it was hardly as if other battles were somehow less bloody. Also the list contains, I suppose, a warning about the teaching of history. Ever since we did medieval Britain back at the age of 11, I have always been of the belief that Thomas (a?) Becket was in fact a good man wrongly murdered. Having never studied the period since, it is something of a surprise to see him listed as a worst Britain. Mind you, I didn’t really like history back then (my aversion to medieval stuff runs deep), and I seem to remember that we learnt this particular tale by acting it as a class. I think I was one of the knights, but I’m not positive.

I interrupt this post… well actually, I return to it. I’ve just seen the Return of the Goodies special on BBC2. What kind of mind does it take to come up with a puppet government that includes Sooty as Prime Minister, a Clanger as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a giant Dougal that was operated by using ten men? Comedy gold.

Where was I? Now, while the top ten worst Britons have been making the news here, the blogosphere has been more interested in the top ten worst Americans. I’m trying to find the links – I seem to have lost them – but many of them are overly contemporary. If I see a list, I’ll post them. And I’ll put my mind to it as well, and see what I come up with. Of course, studying the Revolution is little help here, as all the people who did good were American, whereas all the losers magically became British. This is tangentially related to an essay I’m writing, which basically argues that just because it’s hard to find a bad American (or negative views of a good American) does not mean they did not exist. But more on this, surely, in the weeks to come.

Christmas! It's that time of year again. Five days after the last one. Parental divorce, it's the way forward I tell you. More lovely presents from my Dad's side of things, including some cracking eau de toilette, both series of The OC on DVD, and plenty of books.

But books, eh. What's the big deal. You have to sit down, plough through the buggers, and then you get to the last page and feel like your best friend's kicked you in the knackers and run off into the distance, never to be seen (or read about) again. In a world dictated by time, books demand far too much of the stuff. Especially those Harry Potter books, bloody hell, half the size of Kent and about as hard to get through given Amy's snowy narrative. I read the third one when I was a lot younger, and that's it, never again (even though I enjoyed it). I've relied on the films for the story since then, something I'm told is stupid since the films necessarily skip a lot of what goes on in the books, but tough monkeys, Rowling.

Til now, that is.

I was petrified that the silly bint would release the final book next year (as she has confirmed), with me still waiting for the fifth and sixth films to come out. But having tried to read the fourth book and abandoned it twenty pages in, I knew it'd be folly to go near the books again. So a cunning plan slowly evolved...

And now I'm the proud owner of the fifth and sixth books on CD, read by Stephen Fry. I'm going to copy them to my laptop and pop chapters on my mobile phone so I can listen on my way into London and back each day. Sorted! With a bit of luck, and a few healthy long tube delays, I'll be up to speed before devil woman Rowling can get number seven out.

Lemsip is taking over the planet! Do you know how many different products they sell? Lemsip drinks (in several flavours), lemsip caplets, capsuals, 12hr extra capsuals, direct powder, and so the list continues. It's bad enough having a cold and feeling rough, without having to chose between them. And then of course, there is the Beechams selection, and the Boots home-brand, and then...aghh. Just make me better!

Dayorama is fast becoming a trendsetter for society's bright young things.

Yesterday, Amy mentioned www.justducks.co.uk, purveyor of 'luxury and deluxe' rubber ducks (what's the difference between luxury and deluxe?). Today I noted with interest that the Facebook profile of Amy Jones, student at Oxford and secretary of St Hugh's JCR among many other (mostly cricketing) accolades, had been updated.

Facebook, for those not in the know, is a place for people at uni to put a little profile up and link to their other friends, a feature which paves the way for contests to see who has more friends. I've got about 30-odd listed, Amy J has 153 at the time of writing, so you can tell who the aspiring socialite is. In fact, I lose to just about everyone. Shows what happens when you spend your first year of uni barely prodding a petrified toe out of your own doorway.

In any case, I digress. Her profile had been updated and I note with even greater interest that it now lists her favourite website as none other than www.justducks.co.uk. I have no way of proving that this link surfaced as a direct result of Amy K's post on here, but I'd bet my house on it. On the grounds that if I lost, my housemates and their cats would be homeless.

Charles Kennedy has hit back against claims a petition urging him to stand down has been signed by around 3,300 Liberal Democrat members.

And so he should. During the all-member 2004 internal election for the presidency of the party (victor: Simon Hughes), there were 72,868 ballots issued. So there are at least 70,000 Lib Dem members now, I'd imagine, unable as I am to dig up an exact figure. If that's the case, as is likely, then under five per cent of the party membership have signed this petition, one in twelve of whom are apparently Lib Dem councillors.

One in twelve? Under five per cent? If someone you knew issued a petition demanding that you do something, and somewhere between one in twelve and one in twenty of your friends and colleagues supported it, would you even bother acknowledging its existence, let alone act on it? The 3,300 who signed the petition represent a smaller number of people than voted for the fifth-placed candidate (David Rendel, 3,428 votes) in the last Lib Dem leadership election, back in 1999. I'm no Charles Kennedy fan but, if I were him, I wouldn't be in the least bit bothered by this.

Very quickly, two more good (and blissfully brief) articles to add to those in the last post.

Bloggers' Blog (yes, reciprocal linking, bring it on) leads the fightback, along with the Chicago Tribune, against what the Tribune calls an 'ego-gratifying rabble who contribute only snark, sass and destruction'. In other words, people who only blog with a negative outlook. Stand up once again, Biased BBC, to whom I'm not linking this time because the last thing I want to do is give them more hits.

And London's struggling to come up with the 10,000 hotel rooms it promised for the 2012 Olympics, according to this short piece on CatererSearch (via Londonist). It says there are four hotels within a mile of the main Olympic site now, with a projected total of 17 by the time all those giddy tourists roll up in six and a bit years. Total: 1,088 bedrooms. As Londonist notes of the thirteen hotels still to be built, 'they better be big'.

Plenty to discuss this afternoon in this weblog's apparent new remit as the British Newspaper & Weather Review.

First up, Adrian Flook, international man of Dayorama infamy and former Tory MP for Taunton, is not alone in this world (alas). Sean Lennon, son of marginally better known John, has popped an advert for a girlfriend into a major publication, as reported by The Mirror:

In his plea in a New York gossip column he asked for women to send in their requests - but laid down strict guidelines.

He said: "Any girl who is interested must simply be born female and be between 18 and 45. They must have an IQ above 130 and they must be honest."

[source: The Mirror - 'Lennon's son: Find me a girl']

Amy, Sean's carriage awaits.

Elsewhere, I was delighted to discover this morning a weblog involving Bryan Ward-Perkins, tutor at Trinity College, Oxford and a man who taught both OJ and I last year. I'm afraid he's only making a guest appearance at the Oxford University Press weblog, discussing the fall of Rome along with fellow don Peter Heather, but it's good reading for the academics among us (that'll be OJ, then). Part one of the discussion is here, and part two is here. A weblog worth bookmarking for some serious academic discussion, highly readable.

Okay, on to television and my goodness me, who was that on ITV last night with his very own tsunami documentary? Could it be? Yes! Rageh Omaar, you traitorous dog, absconding from the BBC (you remember him reporting daily from the rooftops of Baghdad) to join the Other Side. The first five minutes weren't exactly promising, but once he got stuck into the questions of faith surrounding the disaster, it was good viewing. Until I fell asleep.

During one of the ad breaks on ITV I saw a commercial for Mint credit cards. I cannot comprehend how these things get as far as national television without someone realising they're unmitigated shite. Mint have ripped off the Muller 'pleasure/pain' ads, where one person eats a Muller product and another person crashes their bicycle into a tree and is struck by lightning, thus preserving the balance between the two. In the Mint ads, there's a balance between cleverness and stupidity, during which one person decides not to bin the copious quantities of junk mail Mint have sent them, and over in America another person falls through their conservatory doorway whilst trying to clean the windows. Balance preserved. Personally I'd have thought the poor American woman ought to be putting the finishing touches to nuclear fusion to compensate for someone signing up to Mint - one of the few credit cards, owing to its curved shape, a rail ticket machine won't accept.

While we're on TV, I've woken up these past few mornings to discover the BBC Breakfast presenters behind a desk all morning. When did that happen? They used to have a nice red couch to lounge around on, Bill Turnbull with face set permanently to quizzical, Natasha Kaplinsky clone occupying other seat. Now we've gone all professional and desk-bound. Why? Are they shampooing the couch over Christmas, or is this a new look in the offing? Oh, the intrigue.

All of that and I've not even got to the leader articles in today's papers (something I'm intending exploring on Dayorama in the new year). Notice, also, that the MEN's article on the passenger dumped on a tiny island by Monarch (see yesterday) is now across national radio and on the BBC News site. Apparently jail is on the cards! He'll be on ITV's Holidays From Hell in the near future, then. Expect some more stuff in a few hours on the way back from the sunny North (guffaw).

I haven’t really mentioned the snow have I? Here goes…

Lenham was mentioned on the BBC national news on Tuesday evening for having such bad snow. Why is this? Well Lenham is in a valley at the foot of the North Downs. And wind blows through at any direction and it is notoriously bad for harsh winters and lots of snow. People always say, “Lenham gets more snow than anywhere else”. And so it seems. Other parts of the county are bare, but we are in a little white island of our own. So, on Monday evening it began to snow, and by Tuesday there were a couple of inches. It’s proper snow-man making snow and when my Mum and I went for a walk on Tuesday onto the Downs there were people sledging. However, it was a beautiful sunny day and the snow began to thaw. Then on Wednesday it snowed again and we managed about 6”+. Everywhere is eerily quiet and there is little traffic on the road. The pavements are thick with ice… definite “deep, crisp and even”. So that was Wednesday. Although it didn’t snow yesterday, it hadn’t thawed either so we have our 6” still and the temperature didn’t get above zero. I was supposed to be going to see a friend yesterday evening and thought I’d see how busy the main A-road was. At 4pm I got in the car, carefully turned onto the road into the village and then washed my windscreen (because it was muddy). The water froze instantly. The temperature was –2. I’d only driven about 50m if that. B*gger that. I headed home and spent the evening in front of the fire. And now? Well,, remember our favourite film, The Day After Tomorrow? Well it’s like something out of that. The snow is back in blizzard form and it is icily cold. The snow is thrashing against the window and my bedroom window currently has a bank of snow against it, as well as icicles dripping off the window frame. We were meant to be going to S-bury, but think we’ll delay!

You remember when you were little and your parents told you things that you later learnt to be untrue e.g. that there was a tooth fairy, or that Santa only came if you were good? And then you felt a sense of disappointment when they told you it had all been a lie? Well I felt that sense of disappointment tonight. My mother suggested that we all settle down to watch Bleak House on BBC4. Now, I couldn’t cope with watching this when it was serialised on BBC1. All a little deep to watch in 30min slots. However, everyone raved how amazing it was and even my little chappy who I watch on GMTV at 7.45am every morning telling me about “this evenings tv” thought it was excellent. But, the thought of watching it in one go appealed. So, we sat down to watch it. And, it was rather good. A little complicated at first, establishing all the characters etc, but it began to make sense and get quite exciting. It is a bit dark… I mean, it’s meant to be “bleak”, but that doesn’t mean everything has to be in shades of brown, grey or black does it? Surely “atmosphere” can be created in different ways. Anyway, I was enjoying it. Until… until I realised that this wasn’t the whole of BH in one go. Oh no, there are another 5hrs to go. From 7pm on NY Eve. Now, I don’t plan to do much on NY Eve, but I expect to do more than watch BH. Bring on the dvd box set!

On the front of today's Manchester Evening News (this being where I am til tomorrow night), under the headline 'Castaway':

A drunken holidaymaker was dumped on a remote island after he launched a foul-mouthed tirade at the crew of a passenger jet.

The man, who had been drinking heavily, became so rude to cabin staff and passengers that the pilot diverted the four-hour flight from Manchester to Tenerife to make an unscheduled stop on Porto Santo, a tiny Atlantic island off the west coast of Africa just ten miles long by three-miles wide.

...

It is understood the man is still a castaway on the Portuguese-controlled island, which is a two-hour ferry ride from the holiday island of Madeira.

[source: Manchester Evening News - 'Jet pilot dumps drunk on isle']

Also in the news, text messages sent to fine evaders could soon be in use nationwide after a trial in Staffordshire. To quote eGov Monitor:

It involved sending a "pay up or get locked up" message to about 150 fine evaders' mobile phones.

It worked! The element of surprise frightened about three quarters of the offenders into paying up immediately. Because it was so successful, it may form part of the National Enforcement Service (NES) which will be tested next April and come into effect a year later.

Constitutional Affairs Minister Rt. Hon. Harriet Harman QC MP said:

"Everyone's got a mobile phone and as one of the most common ways to keep in touch these days, it makes sense for the courts to contact offenders that way too.

"It's about being one step ahead of the criminals.

"It doesn't cost much, it's quick and effective and most importantly offenders take notice."

[source: eGov Monitor - 'C-U-IN-CRT']

So, the Government wants to use text messages to hassle fine evaders. I imagine it has practical uses in many other areas too, from council tax to local election reminders.

But I'm not so sure about Harriet Harman's assertion that it doesn't cost much. I certainly hope the Government is on contract. It'd be a little humiliating for the PM to have to queue up at the local Co-Op for extra credit because too many people had parking fines outstanding.

Wonderful. Did you know you could buy so many types of rubber duck?

For once. I thought my ongoing row with Barclays was going to take another turn this afternoon when it continually refused to accept my passwords for internet banking, although I knew they were correct. It was my fault. The cookie stores my father's log-in number and surname, not mine. That would be why the passwords were different. It was really annoying, until I found out it was actually my fault. Bloody Barclays.

There's a great piece by Julie McCaffrey in The Mirror discussing, or rather dissecting, her performance in panto at the Wycombe Swan over Christmas. She'd have been fine - if it weren't for my all-time hero, Basil Brush:

Basil, meanwhile, is being helped into a pirate's costume and having his tail brushed. He calls me over and offers some advice: "When I get nervous, do you know what I do? Spend a lot of time on the toilet - boom, boom!"

In my next scene, I have to dance the hornpipe towards Basil, leading a line of children some of whom are, embarrassingly, as tall as me.

The scene is supposed to end as soon as the music stops with me scuttling off with the children. But as the kids exit stage left, Basil says: "Oi! Edwina! Where are you going? Come here!"

It's not in the script! And I'm caught in the lights like a rabbit on the M3.

"You're frrrrom Scoatland, aren't you Edwina?" says Basil. I nod pathetically. "I think we should teach you to speak properly, shouldn't we, boys and girls?"

Basil makes me say: "air", "hair" and "lair", then asks me to string the words together. I do - and discover I've fallen into Basil's trap, as "air-hair-lair" sounds like the Queen saying "oh hello". Boom boom!

[source: The Mirror - 'My brush with pantomime fame']

From 'Boom, Boom!' to Boomtown Rat. Equally amusing for different reasons in The Times is Bob Geldof's reply to their enquiry about his work for the Tories, announced yesterday. He replied by text, as shown on page 4 of today's paper:

Such a cool customer.

Sometimes I really think my parents have lost the plot. Picture the scene in our family living room earlier. It is snowing in short bursts, and my mother (whose chair looks out of the window into the garden) keeps saying to my father, "look, it's snowing". He groans, dutifully moves in his chair to look behind him and sees said snow (his chair faces away from the window). After having to move on about six occasions to "see the snow" my Dad was getting rather irritated (as well as having a stiff neck). What does he do? He goes upstairs to the bathroom and brings down a free-standing mirror. He places it on his coffee table. Now when my Mother shouts "it's snowing" or "oh look at that squirrel" he just looks easily into the mirror and can see the view out of the window (you see, he doesn't really give a damn about the squirrel, or the snow, but has to keep my Mum happy). Wonderful, but mad.

The Guardian's Newslog (see, Google Reader already coming into play, as mentioned in previous post) mentions that we'll have an extra second to play with in a few days' time:

Londoners who are familiar with the "Underground minute", or the phenomenon of time actually slowing down as a train approaches a tube station, will have no trouble grasping the concept of the "leap second". Briefly, 2006 will arrive a second later on Sunday because the earth is not keeping up with our system of timekeeping.

The friction of the tides means that the rate at which the world is spinning on its axis is slowing. Days are now about two milliseconds longer than they were at the beginning of the nineteenth century. So the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service occasionally deploys a leap second in order to regulate "sun time" with "clock time".

Also worth looking at on that page is the little 'Contemporaria' section beneath the post. It shows the date and time the post was made - standard fare for a weblog - then gives us the top stories from The Guardian and BBC News websites at the time. A nice little gimmick (puts me in the mind of the announcements at the beginning of Drop The Dead Donkey episodes, when we're told that this was the week when...) and it's nice to see the BBC and Guardian sticking together in precisely the kind of fashion that will piss off everyone at Biased BBC.

Finally, The Guardian Newslog has its fair share of bonkers comments. A gentleman named Oliver - not, I hasten to add, me - had added a short comment inferring that the extra second would give him more time to indulge in his hobby: paedophilia. It has since been removed.

Warning: This post is potentially a wee bit techy, self-indulgent and tedious. Approach at own risk.

Every now and again I let Google in to run my life.

Last time it happened was a few months ago on my old laptop. I downloaded Google Desktop Search and left it for what felt like a couple of months to index that laptop in its entirety, which let me tell you is no mean feat. The MS Outlook emails on there numbered something like 30,000, plus a gazillion and one archives of old instant message conversations and such like. And all my old photos. And the music. (Does it index music? Who knows.)

So anyway. Now it's happening again. It started when I decided I wanted a new aggregator. If you know what one of those is, skip a paragraph.

Right. Hi, Dad. An aggregator, in this specific context, is a piece of technology you use to collect information from websites like this one, i.e. other weblogs. If you have lots of weblogs you like, you can use an aggregator to keep you updated with all the posts people make to those weblogs, without having to check around all the different weblogs yourself. It's like opening up one web page and finding all the new stuff from those weblogs on that page, so it's very useful for saving time and effort. You might have heard of things called RSS feeds. If you look at the top of the main Dayorama page, you'll see we've got our RSS feed link there. These are the things aggregators use to do what they do. They take the link provided by the RSS feed, and they use that to monitor the site and get the new info every time something new happens on that site. There are lots of aggregators around, and the difference between them tends to be the way they present the information they gather, since obviously it can be tricky taking it all in. Right, back to the story.

I'd had an aggregator once before, called NewzGator or some such. It worked fairly well, but the layout was quite plain and I sometimes felt a bit swamped by all the posts rolling into the system. That's not necessarily NewzGator's fault, of course - if I choose to receive a great big wad of information from 50 different websites then I can only expect to face a barrage of text every day - but subconsciously it still put me off the service a bit. When I swapped to my new laptop, I didn't bother re-installing it and so departed the world of RSS and aggregators again.

Today I decided I quite liked looking forward to reading different people's opinions each day, so I'd get an aggregator again, but something other than NewzGator. I used the much-maligned Wikipedia to find a list of them, and the two I checked out were called Nutshell and Pluck. I liked Nutshell because it had a fun, informal approach on its website and it put me in mind of squirrels, a guaranteed selling point when it comes to offering me a service. It tried to be an aggregator in a sort of instant-messaging style, which didn't seem to really work, so I abandoned it again. Pluck tries to fit an aggregator into a sidebar in Internet Explorer, but again I wasn't overly impressed. And then, as I was about to uninstall Nutshell, I saw a piece of news on it about Google Reader, Google's own aggregator. As quite a fan of Google's products (the search engine, the email service) I went and downloaded it.

And it's okay. I've added a lot of different feeds to it to test it out: my usual sites like web comics, Dayorama itself, a couple of other weblogs and some BBC News feeds, plus a range of feeds from newspapers like The Times, The Telegraph, The Mirror and The Guardian, to give me a decent spectrum of newspaper opinion pieces. It's not been tested properly yet since I've only just done it, but so far it does the job in a very clean-cut, professional way, even though you can't sort your list into feed order, something that might prove annoying (since there are always certain sites you want to read more than others).

I wanted an easy way to access Google Reader, perhaps building it into Google Mail or something, so I downloaded the Google Web Toolbar to see if that had a Google Reader link on it. The Web Toolbar sits just underneath the URL Address box in your browser window, and no, it doesn't have a way of accessing Google Reader. So that was a failure although I'll keep it, since it might prove useful in other ways. Then I noticed a button on there allowing me to download Google Desktop Search, the thing that I'd previously had on my old laptop, and I thought what the hell, so I downloaded that again.

And so I'm back to having Google silently running my life via my laptop, only now it's even worse than before. Not only does the Desktop Search open a series of windows showing me my Google Mail, my Google Talk instant messaging service, my To Do list and Google's idea of 'What's Hot' on the internet (no Dayorama, can't be right), but now I have Google Reader condensing my favourite parts of the internet into one place for me, and the Google Toolbar watching over everything I see online. You can see why people might get a little tetchy about their personal privacy with one company carving so many avenues into their lives, even if I do think those worries are ultimately unfounded. Personally I take the Google mark to be a sign of something sturdy and reliable, built by enthusiastic employees, and that's an impression Google has spent ten years successfully trying to convey to us all.

Right. Time to give Google Desktop Search some time to get on with it. It only indexes files on the PC when I'm not doing anything, and that's so rare that in two hours it's only seven per cent of the way in, so I'll give it the whole night to finish off wrapping its claws around my entire life.

A sponge from Morrisons could be set to lead the battle against MRSA, according to a professor from Heriot Watt university:

A simple household sponge appears to be an effective weapon against hospital superbug MRSA - but experts are baffled as to exactly why.

Tests on new anti-MRSA antibiotics show the microbes thrived on one kitchen scourer, but not others.

The sponge is sold only at supermarket chain Morrisons, which said it was investigating who made the sponge.

Brian Austin, a professor of microbiology at the university, discovered the bacteria earlier this year growing on fucus seaweed in the Firth of Forth.

His research team were surprised to find it produced a powerful chemical that attacked and ate the superbug.

Prof Austin said: "We want to speak to the manufacturers to find out what's special about these sponges.

"Why won't the bacteria produce these antibiotics on any other supermarket sponges?

"It could be something very subtle like how shiny the surface is. We're keen to take the study further as an antibiotic powerful enough to kill MRSA clearly has lots of potential."

[source: BBC News - Sponge puzzles superbug experts]

More reasons to shop at Morrisons, eh?

Delighted to see my old buddy Eadric Streona making waves again, about a millennium after his death. He's been named as the Worst Briton for the century 1000-1100 in a new BBC History Magazine survey of the Worst Britons in History.

Eadric was a bit of a bastard. He was chief counsellor to Aethelred the Unready, a position he snuck his way into through methods we don't entirely know, but which probably involved an extended winter stopover by Aethelred at Eadric's place in around 1005. After that we suddenly find Eadric at the top of lists of dignitaries on charters, something usually dictated by seniority, a quality he definitely didn't possess. The boy's clearly a slippery customer by this point, but the worst was yet to come. To use the 21st century term, we can be fairly sure that Eadric was briefing against Aethelred in the years leading up til 1015, when the Danish king Cnut invaded. Eadric promptly swapped sides immediately beforehand, the act which earns him his Worst Briton nomination, and Aethelred was duly defeated.

There is, however, a happy ending. Cnut was a wee bit wiser than our dear old Aethelred, despite the occasional desire to sit in front of the sea and bark orders at it. Within a year, he'd had Eadric executed for no particular reason other than being Eadric.

Of the other candidates on the list, I think Thomas Becket's been hard done by as the nominee for 1100-1200, listed purely because he fell out with the man in charge over a fairly important bit of policy. On that evidence we could pop John Prescott on the list...

... but who cares? It's snowing!! Its snowing!! In a wonderfully romantic way.

This Christmas has been lovely in Kent so far. We've had a laugh (especially as my cold means that I sound like a sea horse on crack), drunk and ate too much... oh and we've also realised that my grandfather is the ultimate stinge (yes, his only contribution to Christmas was a box of chocolates that he got free... that was funny enough... the best part? he took the remainder of the box home with him... classic). Anyway, it's now snowing. I don't have to be anywhere until next Monday... as Anne of Green Gables would say... God is in heaven and all's right with the world (despite the crappiness of ebay...)

Email from eBay to yours truly:

So, in case you can't see the image above, a recap of the text:

Unwanted gifts? Start selling now ... and buy what you really wanted.

This sickens me. Ebay does well enough for itself already, without flagrant capitalisation on the continuing crass commercialisation of Christmas. (Who said alliteration was dead?) To be issuing a 'reminder' to its customers - not members, don't give me that, they're customers - that they can shift unwanted gifts for cash using eBay's services, less than 24 hours after Christmas Day, is appalling.

Not only that, but eBay obviously knows it's in the moral and ethical basement with this one. If you care to scroll down the email a little - something the email is designed not to make you want to do, with a very large clickable image at the top - you'll eventually find an 'eBay for Charity' box. That's it, on the left below the big advert for '5p listing day', where it says 'Sell your unwanted Christmas presents and make some cash for the New Year!'. Below that, the charity box reminds us that we can also sell our things and donate the proceeds to charity using eBay. There's also a tie-up with paragon of virtue The Sun allowing you to auction unwanted gifts and raise money for Great Ormond Street hospital. Fantastic. Why are these initiatives not at the top of the email, rather than the bottom?

The obvious answer is the ugly truth: people are more keen to look after their own pockets in the aftermath of their Christmas shopping spree than look after those of others less fortunate. But that doesn't justify eBay in pandering to that selfish outlook. It could have tried taking a lead and encouraging the donation of gifts and cash to charity. Even if it felt that would somehow be presenting a damaging image of the company (how?), it could have just kept quiet and assumed that those people who wanted to profit from their unwanted gifts would find their way to eBay sooner or later, especially if they're already registered customers.

I tell you what, here's a place to go on holiday if you like your golf: Bermuda.

I was having a play with Google Earth, the free application which maps the entire globe using satellite photos and allows you to explore it at your leisure, and I came across Bermuda. On closer inspection, I saw a little golf course in the bottom left hand corner of the island, and thought how nice it was that the islanders had a golf course of their own.

Then I saw another.

And another. And another.

In total, I could spot no fewer than seven different courses on the island. Having done a bit of research there are actually nine, although two are not full 18-hole affairs, which is probably why I can't find them easily.

As one article says, this is the highest concentration of golf courses per square mile (9 in 21) in the world. Can you imagine the effect on land prices there? All that potential building space for new houses etc and you've got nine golf courses instead. That's one course for every 7,300 people (there being around 65,000 people living in Bermuda). To give you some context for that figure, there is probably one golf course for every 20,000 people in Britain, and we're not short of courses here (the best figure I can find for British courses is "over 2,500", which I upped to 3,000 for a conservative estimate, and the population is c. 60,000,000).

Presumably the logic lies in the attraction to golfing tourists, the same as adverts for Ireland (and any other country) on TV invariably include footage of a picturesque golf course. But if Britain were as well endowed with golf courses as Bermuda, you'd have to turn twice as much of the nation into fairway. Now I'm the first advocate for lots of green spaces, particularly for something as enjoyable as golf, but even I think that's mildly excessive.

Not as political as Blair's… nor as eloquent as the Queen’s… but simply “Merry Christmas”…!

I’ve just received an email from my Fairy God Mother who said “I think that Christmas Eve is the best part of Christmas. I still, after all these years, find it magical. Why is that I wonder?”

I think I have to agree this year. I’ve had a lovely day. OK, so it began less favourably at about half 6 when I woke my Mum up to make me a lemsip as I was too poorly to struggle out of bed (ah bless), but I’ve got steadily better through the day. I’ve entertained my Mum and Dad with spectacular coughing fits though, always followed by a couple of sneezes. Very bizarre. Anyway, I made the Christmas pudding this morning (better late than never) and then settled down to watch the Secret Garden. It’s a delightful book (up there with children’s classics such as Anne of Green Gables, Pollyanna, Little Women, the Railway Children etc) and the film has a pretty naff ending compared to the book, but it’s still tear wrenching! We then all headed to Canterbury. We thought it would be really really busy and with the Sally Army doing their thing, the Christmas lights and the general buzz of Christmas, it would really get us in the Christmas mood. As it was, we had a lovely few hours, but Canterbury was really eerily quiet. The large department store had clearly made sure they had plenty of Christmas staff, yet they were standing around doing nothing as there were no shoppers! We did have a wander to the Cathedral though, where they was a rather special life size wax-work-esque nativity scene and then we watched the Archbishop of Canterbury walk into the Cathedral to take Evensong. He looked incredibly grand in all his gold finery. After that, it was a cone of chips (!) – yes, but they’re the best chips in Kent, and taste all the better when they’re eaten in the fresh air and then on the way home we slowed down past a couple of hideous, yet spectacularly decorated houses. Now, I’ve just left our open fire (Daisy and I are fighting out for prime position in the hearth… she keeps biting me if I shade her from the hear) after watching Strictly Come Dancing. SCD is an amazing show and I’ve really enjoyed it. I’m pleased Darren Gough won again – his dance this evening was really spectacular. Although, James Martin is still cute too! And now it just remains for me to eat another mince pies and then go to midnight mass.

So yes, Christmas Eve really is magical, isn’t it?

I've been waiting about 18 months for a piece like this:

THERE IS AN ADVERTISING campaign for L’Oréal that puzzled me at first. Next to a picture of a late-20s Paul Newmanish guy, the caption reads: “You think you look the business? She thinks you look overworked.” On another, a Christian Slater lookalike is cracking a gorgeous crinkly smile: “What you think are great lines,” chides the strapline, “she thinks are premature wrinkles.”

“No, ‘she’ doesn’t!” I exclaimed. There’s not a “she” alive who’d kick that Paul Newman-type out of bed for having dark patches under his eyes, that make him look a bit filthy, but in a good way. And since when did a hard-working guy — a fireman on night shift, a barrister preparing a big case — get less attractive to women? Does L’Oréal think we prefer an unemployed doofus cluttering up the sofa, just because he looks peachy-skinned and well-slept?

And those lines on the Christian Slater guy’s brow? They are great, actually. They make him look worldly, entertaining company, like he’d know exactly what to do in bed.

Thank you Janice Turner in The Times. Really, the L'Oreal adverts are just horrible. I have no idea how they passed quality control at the ad agency. Was there not one person there thinking, "Gosh, I hope this is a parody because otherwise this a sad advertising campaign?" Because I cannot honestly think of a single man who would be encouraged to rush to the shops on the basis of a wrinkle appearing and being called something else, such as, gasp, old. They must exist, but surely they can't be worth a national television campaign. There must be specialist magazines, surely. Or at the very least, a slot during a break of Queer Eye. But not mainstream viewing. Like men give a damn.

I was waiting for the day I'd be able to put "BBC Watch" as the category for a post and for the post itself to include me.

Completing my little triumvirate of Santa-related posts, Anthony at Somerset Sound has been working commendably late and has just put the mini photo gallery from yesterday's trip to the Santa Express online. Not only that, he's put my full seven minute report as a 'Listen Again' feature next to it (it originally aired at about 2:15 this afternoon).

Click here for the gallery and select 'Ollie Williams reports' in the top right hand corner to listen. Who knows, I might be back at the station in half a year or so...

You may recall that a short while ago Amy got herself mentioned by name over at the Bloggers' Blog, thus trumping me (I'd only had a link to an article of mine on there beforehand).

Well we're even. Clearly the people there are very sharp because yesterday's Santa Express post has found its way on there, with my name attached. Alas, the bit they've quoted includes a joke in ever so slightly bad festive taste: Santa refusing to miss a single child, 'just like Herod'. I probably don't seem overly Christian to the good readers of Bloggers' Blog now.

Still, those folks clearly read this thing and know we're having a bit of a turf battle over this. It's 1-1 on namechecks now, excluding OJ, whose New Year's resolution appears to be to only post on the first and third Thursdays of months beginning with H.

Not that I have a clue who reads the Bloggers' Blog. But it mentions us. So I heartily recommend it.

I promised you the delights of the Santa Express yesterday, and there they are. It was great fun. Not only did I get to meet St Nick himself and walk with him through the carriages as he gave out gifts to children ('never a child missed' his motto, just like Herod), but I also got to ride with the driver in the engine cab on the way back! Maybe the kid inside took over (no change there) but it was the most amazing experience, being thrown around the cab as the engine blasted tender-first back through the Somerset countryside to our starting point. All the while I was gingerly clutching my microphone and trying to record material over the top of a barrage of steam, clunking and whistling. "Here we are," I gasped as we surged over a level crossing, "on our way back from Williton to Bishop's Lydeard, and not a reindeer in sight. Although we did disturb a sleeping pheasant just then, there he goes, look!". Radio gold. I might be able to get the finished article online over the weekend, it's being broadcast tomorrow morning and I've got to knock up a longer eight minute version for the afternoon show.

It's amazing who you meet when you're out recording. I arrived in very good time for the Santa Express this morning and wandered onto the platform at Bishop's Lydeard station, to find two gentlemen talking about trying to find the managing director of the railway. I chimed in with the observation that I was supposed to be interviewing him so he better had turn up. One of the men introduced himself as Peter, head of catering for the railway. But it soon transpired that before retirement he'd been the head of the BBC's library and archives, not just in the westcountry, but at White City in London. We had a fascinating chat, during which he assumed that as a Somerset Sound reporter I had an intricate knowledge of the corporation's inner workings, and I duly staggered through the conversation with a mixture of bluster and ignorance. Was I attached to the local station or to regional news? Did I have a parking permit for the Bristol car park? Did I know what Area Y was? All a little tricky to navigate for someone on a week's semi-official work placement.

Still, our little chat did mark one milestone. I drank a cup of tea. I had no bloody choice: he invited me into the station cafe and asked the lady behind the counter if we could "stand a cup of tea for the gentleman from Somerset Sound". Actually that's also a point, I've noticed this week that I'm no longer the "young man" to anyone I meet, I'm "the man", which is an interesting departure. Anyhow, I felt I couldn't possibly interrupt and turn down such a generous offer on the grounds that I didn't like tea, because past experience has taught me this is akin to saying I don't believe in breathing. So the tea arrived in no time at all, before I'd had a chance to find a plant to dump it in. And I drank it. Every last sodding bit. And I liked it. Bastards, the lot of you. Milk, no sugar, thanks. And don't you dare give me coffee.

Oh, that reminds me. This photo's just surfaced as evidence of my awfully big night out a couple of weeks ago. Over a bottle of wine at Clare's party in Hammersmith, then a drunken tube journey down to Brixton for Andy's party, where this picture was taken showing me sat next to a different Clare, holding a more likely Ollie beverage than tea:

The obvious observation is that I look extremely drunk. That's because I am. God knows what I'm looking at off in the middle distance, but chances are I'm seeing three of them and they're not the colour they should be. Actually now that I study it again, I'm probably trying to focus on Clare but experiencing difficulty. Oddly I seem to look thinner than usual and, somehow, almost scouse in appearance. I don't know how I've managed that. Nice to see I'm wearing a t-shirt showing a sheep plugged into a wall socket, though. That added a touch of class that might otherwise have been lacking.

The conclusion of my mum and myself (and probably Amy as well): Ollie should not be let out on his own. Ever. God help us when he finishes his driving lessons and the pink Micra is his mode of transport!

(P.S. I'm posting this to prove that I'm not stuck in a Bermuda triangle. Devon can be a very odd place, but the truth is that I'm actually stuck in a mixture of malady, DIY (no change there) and festivity. Certainly nothing as interesting as the return of Flook. Apologies to all two of you who have missed my posts!)

A picture speaks a thousand words. Not only do these signposts give you an idea of where I was today, but what's that in the corner? Could it be? Yes! It's an Adrian Flook sign from his last Conservative campaign here! And don't we at Dayorama remember it well. For those less familiar, Adrian Flook came along to my school when I was standing as the Tory candidate in our 2001 mock election. He sat with me during a mock debate and suffice to say he was a hideous embarrassment to all concerned, telling the mock Green candidate to 'stick her head in a flower pot'. I've not held him in overly high regard since. But there's his sign! Left abandoned for a good four or five years, tied to a tree in deepest, darkest Somerset.

So why was I there? Well, I was on my way to the RSPCA centre at West Hatch. It's a bit of a hub for animal care in the region because it has a dedicated wildlife centre alongside the normal shelter for domestic animals. With so many animals to look after, it's one of the few places that can't shut at all over Christmas, so I went up to see what they were doing. I spoke to two lovely people, Jackie who works at the kennels and wildlife supervisor Paul, who showed me the three seals the centre is currently caring for, as well as a den of some 40 hedgehogs, each of whom is too light to hibernate of their own accord. They're shacked up in upturned dog baskets inside the centre instead, forming a sort of hedgehog hotel. There's also about 10 or 15 swans regaining their health there, and even a pigeon getting over a gunshot wound. From time to time you'll also find everything from foxes to buzzards ('lazy' birds, says Paul, so they tend to be brought in malnourished because they didn't bother eating) being cared for. I might be able to pop an edited version of the interviews online, it was genuinely interesting to see how wild animals are looked after there.

The problem came when I left. The plan had been to catch a bus back from Hatch Beauchamp, about a half hour walk away over a nearby 'A' road. But I'd been so interested in the goings-on at the West Hatch centre that I'd missed it, so instead of going that way I decided to walk up towards Taunton and rejoin the 'A' road at the earliest opportunity in that direction. The reasoning was that the nearer to Taunton I join the 'A' road, the more likely it is that there'll be a bus along, since bus frequency increases the nearer to town you get. I could hear the sound of cars in the distance (you know, the low hum of continuous traffic), so I walked towards it.

An hour and three quarters later, having gone through West Hatch itself then up and over a few hills and through Stoke St Mary, I realised my problem. The noise of cars had been the very distant throb of the M5, not the 'A' road I'd been after. So I stood on a bridge over the motorway and pondered how exactly I was going to get a bus. It was now going dark, too. The only thing for it, having come this far, was to walk the rest of the way back to the newsroom.

No one believed my story when I eventually traipsed through the BBC's front door at just gone 5pm, around two and a half hours after leaving the RSPCA centre. It's a good six mile hike, if not more when you account for nooks, crannies, hills and dales, and I'd imagine not many of their work experience lackeys pull off that kind of stunt during their week or two in the newsroom. But there we are, that's the sort of intrepid reporter I am. Determination ten, common sense nil. Looking at a map of the route I took, I twice came within tantalising distance of the 'A' road in question, only to turn back on myself and head up a separate hill in my misguided quest for the M5.

Still, it's off to the Santa Special on the West Somerset Railway tomorrow. The railway is carrying its two hundred thousandth passenger at the same time (how are they so sure of this?), so I'm going along to report on it. I'll probably be so stiff that I'll just have to grab a bit of rest and recouperation on Santa's lap for most of the journey.

An amusing article (pointed out to me yet again by my Mother) by my favourite Simon Hoggart in the Guardian is here. He goes through a number of potential "awards" for the year e.g. best speech, worst speech, jargon of the year, tv insult etc.

The award for the most "blathering blather" goes to Cameron...

"I have got a sense of direction, and I'm going to take that sense of direction all over the country."

Let's hope he has GPS in his car.

That was the message that Mr Clip on Word greeted me with this morning. I didn’t know he was into pastoral care. I thought he was just meant to confuse you with endless tips and shortcuts.

I’m feeling a little under the weather today. My Mother, bless her cotton socks (because I know she’ll read this) doesn’t believe in Beechams or Strepsils. Consequently although I’ve had a cold/sore throat since Saturday I haven’t taken anything. It hasn’t been that much of a cold, but it’s been there. If I had had my way I would have dosed myself up and felt fine (btw, the Word grammar correction wants to change “dosed myself up and felt fine” to “felt myself and fine up”. Heh) by now. But I haven’t. I’ve carried on regardless. I woke about half 5 this morning feeling rather shitty and I’ve just gone to the Chemist to buy some of the above medicine. I now feel much better. Mmm. Sugar free strawberry flavoured Strepsils.

Adding to my morning of discontent are five
additional factors. These are, in no particular order:
a) my father
b) the cat
c) the computer (again)
d) my Christmas lunch
e) clocks and beeps

a) My father has lit a fire in our sitting room and I need to do some work on the computer (advocacy mock on 6th Jan). Rather than sit in the cold study on my own, I would much rather sit in the sitting room and use his laptop. But oh no, “he’s using it”. Like hell he is. He’s “just decided” he will. Men. I would have brought my own laptop home, had I not feared that the travelling would have killed it. Yes, I know it’s a laptop but it is rather lazy and doesn’t like to be moved. When it is moved it gets incredibly stroppy. You just wait till I get a laptop allowance next September.

b) Daisy is really quite clever. Have I mentioned before that when she brings mice in, she has a rather disturbing habit of putting them in our shoes? We invariably have “garden” shoes by the back door and you have to make sure they don’t have mice in them these days! My old trainers have been the shoe of choice this morning. In comes the cat with mouse in mouth. It gets popped in the shoe and then battered about. That’s quite clever. Daisy is also biting my Mother a lot. If she wants food, she just bites her ankles. If she wants a door open, or to play in the cellar, or have the back door opened because she doesn’t want to push her flap, she just bites her ankles. And continues to do so until my Mum gets up and follows wherever Daisy leads. It’s hilarious.

c) My Dad has done something to the speakers on our main computer i.e. unplugged them. I don’t trust myself to plug anything back in the right place (and I’m too stubborn to get him to do it) so I’ve brought my old stereo into the study in order to listen to some music whilst working.

d) I have my CAB Christmas lunch today. I ordered my meal at the end of August. Do I have a clue what I am going to eat? Do I ‘eck. I think it is melon, salmon and meringue. But I could be totally wrong. We shall wait and see…

e) Our life today is filled with clocks and beeps. Everything has a clock on it. Everything has a beep. My parents bought some new phones yesterday… and they have a clock on the stand. Why? We have mantle clocks, wall clocks, clocks on dvd players, clocks on the tv, clocks on the boiler, the microwave, the thermometer, the computer, mobiles etc. Why? Isn’t one enough. And anyway, the more there are, they all tell the wrong bloody time. And also, everything beeps. Phones, dvd players, stereos, alarms, microwaves, answer phones, even bloody washing machines. Our life is driven by beeps.

**Edit: It was actually smoke salmon roulade, brie and tomato tart and pavlova. So I was 2/3 right with the salmon and the meringue. I also won a box of choccie biscuits (so my Mum can't complain about us having chocolate biscuits in the house :)) and it was a very enjoyable lunch all round!

Good job I wore my bright orange fleece today, since I spent the afternoon conducting a fairly bizarre experiment on Taunton's High Street.

The idea was that no one can really tell the difference between a clementine, a satsuma and a mandarin. Can you? Let's say you have a medium sized orangey thing (A), then a bigger, slightly less pale one (B) and a much smaller one (C). Which is which?

Well, the answers are A: satsuma, B: clementine and C: mandarin. So I went out into the town centre armed with a microphone to see if the Somerset public at large could get through our little identity parade. I popped the three fruits on a wall and beckoned people over to identify which was which, with varyng degrees of success. The first couple I asked got it bang on, as did a group of five teenagers, but only after much discussion during which one of them accidentally referred to the clementine as a 'chlamydia'. I've left that bit in to be broadcast tomorrow.

I'm practically the station's Christmas correspondent right now - today they broadcast a piece I did on ethics at Christmas, and tomorrow will have an interview with a debt adviser on what to do if you overspend at Christmas, a vox where people tell me how much they've spent, another vox where they tel me if they've bought a normal or free range turkey, and the whole satsuma debate.

People called Helen seem to feature in my posts more often than might necessarily be expected, but at least they tend to be different Helens so my motives are above suspicion. This Helen is Somerset Sound's online monkey, doing interviews and such like but primarily charged with responsibility for what's on the BBC Somerset website. And she is obsessed with James Purefoy. Who he? Find out for yourself by reading her interview with him. It was only done over the phone, but now her little office has become a James Purefoy shrine. So much so that whenever she receives email, a voice pipes up that says 'Hi, I'm James. You have mail!'

Finally, I sat in on a station meeting this morning where plans for its expansion next year were discussed. I probably shouldn't mention any specifics here, but it seems really exciting and I'd like to think that a part of the BBC that's expanding (and that's like finding a needle in a haystack, trust me) means a chance of a job next summer...

This is a really boring piece of information, but because I mentioned it to Ollie on a voice mail earlier, I feel I have to mention it. All I did was go to the hair dresser at 9am this morning. It's only about 500m from our house, and I should have got home about 10.30. Instead I returned at midday after having my hair done, visiting my sort-of-gran and buying a ball dress! Expensive! Bloody lovely dress though. Now I need a ball to go to. Ooops. And they say you can't buy anything in small little villages.

I hope we've all seen the story about the maggots on the lady's face in hospital. I'm not going to be the only one subjected to its horrors.

A woman was shocked to find maggots crawling on her mother's face in a hospital's intensive care unit.

Nyree Ellison Anjos alerted staff at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital when she saw the larvae wriggling near a feeding tube attached to her mother's nose.

...

Mrs Ellison Anjos, from Robinswood in Gloucester, said the incident happened on a hot day in July.

"We saw there was a fly flying around there. Everybody was making it go away even the staff in the hospital," she said.

"The next day I went there and there was this yellow thing by her tube and I thought that didn't look right. She kept touching her nose and fiddling and we could see it was bothering her.

"I had a close look and could see little maggots moving in there."

[source: BBC News - Maggots found on patient's face]

Myself and assorted members of the gang just before the LCC's broadcast journalism students headed out for our Christmas bash.

Spooky goings-on were afoot in the Somerset Sound offices today. At around about 2pm Vic, the ever-cheerful breakfast show presenter, came up to me with a small piece of paper. On it was written my name and phone number, in what appeared on close inspection to be my handwriting. He wanted to know if I was the 'Ollie' to which it referred, and yes, I was.

But I hadn't written my number down anywhere.

He said he'd just found it on the floor, it must have been down the back of one of the desks. If so, that explains where it's come from. Last time I was at Somerset Sound, about four months ago, I must have written that note. When I left, it disappeared out of sight. On the first day of my return, it re-emerged. I appear to have the ability to write psychic notes.

Elsewhere we had someone ringing round all the pubs and country clubs in Somerset to see which ones would accept parties from gay marriages in the run-up to the new laws coming into effect. Only two of the 38 we surveyed refused to accept such an event on their premises. However, one or two more were a little unsure of themselves, or more accurately of what the hell was supposed to be happening. One Australian lady was shocked to discover that gay marriages were only legal on Wednesdays, when in actual fact we'd said "from Wednesday".

The excuses people come up with to avoid me when I'm out doing vox pops continue to thrill me. One couple dodged questions on ethics and debt at Christmas with the line "we're not from here, we're from Wales", as though the question was thereby rendered void. Another woman decided she was "meeting someone just this moment", and one bloke laden with Christmas shopping, the perfect choice for such a question, told me he couldn't spare a minute unless I wanted to "explain to the chief constable why I'm late". Well it's not going to be because of me, matey, is it? I think Argos, Toymaster, Boots and Debenhams might have had more to do with it.

My Mother and I visited a family friend earlier. Her great-grand daughter was in attendance. I have just been called "Hayley" (no chance of "Amy") by a screaming three year old brat for the past two hours. The brat was called Scarlet. Says it all.

"I don't know when I last made a casserole."

That's my mum talking just now. This all came about because in a book I'd been reading on my way down to my mum's flat in Minehead, the word 'casserole' was mentioned. I couldn't remember the last time I'd even heard the word casserole, let alone eaten one, and it seems like it's the same for my mum.

"I remember making nice vegetable casseroles with cider and dumplings."

That's her again as I'm writing. I remember those too, and even - gasp - the lamb and beef ones before we all went vegetarian. And consequently vegan. It used to feel like we had casserole at least once a week, with me bursting through the door from school after playing football til god knows what hour to find the translucent, dingy brown casserole pot on the oven top, carrots bobbing up and down like little life jackets in the gloom.

Why is it that I've not so much as heard a whisper about casserole since then? Why don't you ever get casserole on restaurant menus? Is this some kind of anti-Lancastrian bias, given that my mum's under the impression that it's a dish that originates there? Obviously it's a French word so I went to check out the original meaning ('stew pot', funnily enough...), and there I was confronted by a few other translations of 'casserole' into foreign languages. 'Casserole' translates into 'plat cuit à l'étuvée' or 'cuire à four doux' in French, I'm told, both of which seem peculiarly longwinded phrases when they invented the bloody word in the first place.

But it's the Dutch and German translations that truly intrigue me. I can entirely understand if the dish isn't overly popular in either of these places. After all, in Dutch, who would want to order 'stoofschotel' or 'stoofpot'? (Most Dutch people are probably stoofed up on pot anyway.) And then there's the German. True enough, there's the tame version - 'Kasserolle' - but I'm more interested in its counterpart 'Schmortopf', a word sounding a little too close to 'autopsy' for my liking. If I saw Schmortopf on a German menu, I'd be steering clear.

Do you know what I did at 5.00am this morning? I got up. And I drove to London. I got to my flat, loaded a load of clothes, christmas presents and work into the boot and drove back to Kent, arriving home at 7.35am. Why? Because the route to my flat passes the M2 interchange with both Bluewater and the M25, and also requires the Blackwall Tunnel. You think I'm going to drive through the shopping traffic? No. It was much nicer to have the road to myself (having said that, relatively speaking it was actually quite busy) and then have the rest of the day chilling out at home. I've just been to the gym actually and feel better for it (I've been suffering from a cold - poor me). So mad, maybe. Practical, yes.

Jesus Christ. We're developing quite a special relationship with Bloggers Blog: Blogging The Blogosphere. A few days ago I mentioned my Flintstones pun in relation to Hurricane Wilma had appeared over there. Well Amy's trumped me. She's been namechecked! Click here then scroll down to observe the following:

Amy at Dayorama explains what getting Amazoned is: "There's a rule to Christmas shopping. Don't order something over Amazon from a computer where someone else's account is automatically logged on. If you do, then when you order something the other person receives the confirmation email. When this happens, the person reads the email then finds out what one of her Christmas presents is!"

So, Space Cadets eh. How utterly disappointing. How woefully unimaginative. How weakly it ended. I'm appalled.

The premise, for those of you without television or preferring to watch whatever other tripe was on: Johnny Vaughan presents a Channel 4 show in which a small group of 'contestants' are convinced they are going to space, then convinced they are actually in space aboard a shuttle. They are actually on a disused airbase near Ipswich.

Oh, such promise. I've watched more than my fair share of this in the belief that it's a glorious premise and one Endemol, they of every-reality-show-ever fame, couldn't fail to deliver on. I was sadly, sadly mistaken. A quick trip to the Space Cadets forum on the Channel 4 website will confirm that I am in the vast majority when I declare it to have been unmitigated shite.

The problems are numerous. First, the ending shown tonight - in which the three remaining participants are told they're not really in space - was dire. Presumably in an effort to dampen the shock to the unfortunate trio, C4 elected to break it to them gently in a series of stages, rather than just open up a wall of the shuttle simulator to reveal a studio audience laughing themselves to death at their expense. This is an entirely morally upstanding way of doing things, but it's a little late in the day for a television series based in full on duping 'suggestible' (for which read unbelievably gullible/stupid) people into thinking they're in space. If morally upstanding was the end result we were looking for, we might have perhaps come up with a programme like Gardeners' Question Time. In this instance, inflicting one last, memorable burst of mental and emotional agony on the hapless participants would have infinitely improved the series. After all, they got £25k and a real trip to Russia and trip into weightlessness anyway. It can't be that bad.

That wasn't the only issue. Johnny Vaughan became progressively more withdrawn from his own series as it went on, presumably having laboured under the same basis as us that it would be hilarious, only to discover as we did that the producers had sucked any speck of life out of the concept. The participants were made to endure a selection of increasingly 'wacky' tasks, like demanding 'admittance to Uranus', chortle chortle, as the series went on. This may have been done with the intention of giving them clues as to what was actually going on, but where's the fun in that? It was just pandering to the lowest common denominator and was cringeworthy.

This could all have been so much better. Why not take one person, pop them in a capsule on their own surrounded by 360 degree monitors displaying 'space', and leave them to it for a week or two? Imagine the psychological insights you'd get. Naturally, the big problem in the 21st century is the wet-behind-the-ears brigade who'd be down on you like a ton of bricks saying how unkind it was. But for two weeks it'd be our very own Truman Show, one person in their 'space' capsule, watching the Earth (easy enough to fake using screens and old shuttle footage), believing themselves to be in space. No gimmicks, no nonsense. See if they realise it's a con. Burst open the capsule at the end to reveal a studio audience. Rush over to prevent the inevitable suicide attempt. There's your television. Taking this ingenious premise and transforming it from one of the most intriguing psychological experiments ever devised for telivision into a sham targeted at people as stupid as the 'contestants' is a betrayal of Channel 4's remit to deliver provocative, alternative broadcasts. They and Endemol should hang their heads in shame.

It was the LCC broadcast journalists' Christmas party last night, in Kennington, and it was great fun.

Til I lost my phone.

After that, it rapidly became not fun. I'd gone to the loo in the bar to which we'd decamped, at which point I noticed my phone wasn't occupying its usual spot about my person (my left pocket, before you ask. I don't keep it in such an unusual place that I need to go to the gents' and undo my flies before it's noticeable).

So back out I went to find it, scouring the places I knew I'd sat, asking friends if they'd seen it, getting friends to ring it, realising it was on vibrate anyway and would simply be giving a thief a thrill right about now, and asking behind the bar. But it was gone.

Realisation set in. My dad is going to kill me. I have lost every contact I've made ever, from OJ to Michael Buerk. I am going to have to cancel my SIM card immediately before the thieves spend £20,000 voting again and again for Shane on the X Factor. I've lost the text message from national rail enquiries which tells me when the last train home is. And some bastard is probably listening to Kate Bush on it now. Well alright, perhaps not.

I decided the best thing to do was solve the SIM card and last train home issues, by going home and using the landline to ring Vodafone (it'd almost be morning in India, they'd be wide awake and happy to help). Plus by now I was far too dispirited to enjoy the party. A couple of my friends were leaving too, so I tagged along with them, barely paying any attention to what they said and looking for a cat to kick (though not overly concerned by that either, since there were two bloody deserving targets waiting at home).

Then, as if by magic, a noise in the distance. The sound of someone running towards us. Excellent, I thought, they've come back to get the headphones for it off me as well, because they've realised they can't use the radio on it without the headphones acting as an aerial. But no! It was Will, the kindly gent on my course who used to direct Watchdog, wafting my phone above his head and hollering at us.

I did what any reasonable person would do in those circumstances. I ran across a four-lane main road and threw my arms around a 42-year old man. I've rarely known joy like it. Turned out he'd overheard some other person in the bar saying they'd just found a phone, and on closer inspection it turned out to be mine. One hell of a slice of luck (even if, by making sure everyone damn well knew I'd lost a phone and telling them exactly what it looked like, I might have helped my cause). Merry Christmas, Will and all.

You remember the Segway, don't you?

This guy has a point... who needs a watch when you have a till receipt?

I've just searched for this article on the guardian website. It has articles dated for tomorrow. That's just weird.

I'm not sure I've ever touched on the subject of the NHS before. Here goes. There's not much hope for a hospital when all the fish in the "relaxing" pond outside the main entrance are all dying and have fin-rot! Also, there's no confidence about the lack of MRSA when the visitor toilets are worse than those found on Virgin trains. And when you have to visit a patient in a "contaminated" ward and are made to wear a yellow bin liner-apron and some gloves, you really have to wonder "what the f**k is this going to protect". I spent the time visiting my Father trying to keep the gloves on, but tying the fingers together. It was amusing, honest.

Also, tomorrow will be a year since we got Daisy. Remeber the idea behind her? To keep the mice at bay. Bloomin' heck. She brings more into the house. We're like a new mouse limbo. They run around the house between severe injury and death, and then they die and we become a really stinky mouse graveyeard. And what does the cat do? Sweet nothing. Useless animal. But cute.

As term winds down and Christmas approaches, Monday saw an excursion to London. I had three things on my plan: meet Amy, meet my friend Jamie from Yale, and go to the Conservative Future Christmas Reception somewhere in Shoreditch. Yes, it was time to unleash my inner hack. Look, Jane! See my hack run!

Of course, these things are never so simple. First up, Jamie got his timings wrong, and will probably be on his flight from Boston right about now, rather than yesterday. So no meeting with Jamie. But that’s OK, because instead of just catching Amy for a brief moment at lunch, I could now spend a few hours in the afternoon with her. Also, these plans allowed for a substantial lunch. Stuck in Oxford Street, I made my way to an Angus Steakhouse, nay, the very one that Ollie and I had lunched at during the summer. There’s nothing like a good burger to keep you going, and I would be able to dine in some sort of comfort. Alas, things went horribly wrong. To cut a long story short, the computer the waitress used to pass down everyone’s orders to the kitchen below was in fact not passing any orders anywhere, thus leading to delays of about 45 minutes. I appreciate cooks taking care to cook my meals properly, but for crying out loud, this was just a mediocre burger. In the time they had, they could have suckled a calf, raised it, slaughtered it, cleaned it, hung it, and cooked it. Due to my impending rendezvous with Miss Kennedy, I (along with others) was on the verge of leaving, when they suddenly produced my food, and gave me free drinks and bread to make up for the wait. I’m quite easy when there’s free bread, so I wolfed my lunch down and caught a cab to meet Amy.

Seeing Amy was delightful, and had a particular highlight when the Sky installation men arrived. This will mean something to only a few, but it’s safe to say that we met long lost cousin of Mutt. And that is all you need to know.

After Amy, it was off to The Light Bar to meet lots of people I didn’t know, but were all active within the Party one way or another. In fact, there were only two people I did know, which combined with my sartorial elegance, made the beginnings a little difficult. (Seriously – I was dressed as smart casual. Wearing your work suit is not smart casual, even if you have come straight from work. At least take off your tie?! I didn’t realise that Oxford rules worked outside of Oxford – casual means suits without tie, smart casual means suits, and smart means black tie. Just kidding. I was just fine, but I was probably the most colourful person there, and I had a green sweater on, for crying out loud.) But I soon picked up speed and met various interesting people, and shook a lot of hands. Then the man of the moment arrived – Dave Cameron himself. Speaking to one of the organisers, I heard that they gave away some 150 tickets when it was announced, compared to the 80 who had registered before hand. I’d like to say I was in the latter… but I wasn’t. Anyway, Mr Cameron is shorter in real life than on camera, but was very pleasant. Although I failed to get a photo with him (indeed, I forgot my camera), I did manage to block his path and thus shake hands and congratulate him, before he walked past me to work the room. Give the man credit, he stayed for some 15 minutes and gave a good impromptu speech thanking us for our hard work and mentioning his hopes for the future. And then he disappeared, along with his entourage, which included his PPS, Des Swayne, a great guy who was happy to chat. After that Francis Maude did the raffle draw, I failed to win anything, and then there was more meeting and greeting, after which I headed back to Oxford. And so my descent into that of political hack seems to have begun.

Soemtimes I wish I had a camera phone. There I was in Gray's Inn this morning. There was a spiral fire escape in front of me. There were ten pigeons all sitting along it. If I had been able to take a photo, I could have sent it to the BBC's "ten things this week" competition. I always tried to capture ten pigeons on Coutts' bank in Oxford, but whenever I had a camera at the ready, there were always nine or eleven birds, not ten. Damn.

Shocking photographic evidence that my band were winning followers with a penchant for livening up the Berlin Wall, before I'd even set eyes on a drum kit...

Richard Pryor, 1 December 1940 - 10 December 2005. Star, along with Gene Wilder, in 1989's 'See No Evil, Hear No Evil', a film that has a very special place in my heart. It wasn't just that it was so funny (the premise is a deaf man sees a murder and a blind man hears it happen, so the two work together to solve it), it's practically the first film I can remember seeing and it brings back fond memories. So that's my little tribute to the man.

His official website is ensuring he remains funny even after he's gone. It's entitled 'I Ain't Dead Yet M*therF@ck%r!!'.

Elsewhere, I've found an interesting letter in the latest edition of the Mitcham, Morden & Wimbledon Post. It's from a Graham Hawkes, Chairman of Governors at The Priory School, one of the schools that first adopted Jamie Oliver's school dinners programme. He's defending the school's decision to alter some of Jamie's menus to incorporate things more palatable to kids' tastes. He concludes:

I have eaten four meals this term. After a lifetime eating across the whole range of educational establishments, I can honestly say that I have seldom experienced such good meals, except perhaps in the halls of Oxford and Cambridge colleges.

Aside from the concern, arising from the first sentence, that he must be bloody hungry, you have to wonder whether that quote is criticism or praise of the school's meals. Comparing them to college food is not an endorsement! I avoided it like the plague during most of my time there, particularly the god-awful salmon and green goop combination. Jamie Oliver would have been welcomed with open arms.

Oh yes, my most favourite form of luggage features again. The silly suitcase on wheels. This morning, I arrived at Victoria one minute before the train was about to leave. I’d already decided that there was no way that I was going to make it, so I was quite prepared to have the spare hour in Victoria before the next train as I could buy [another] girly novel, get some flowers for my Mum, have a look for some silly Christmas presents etc. However, the train was delayed. Wonderful! The problem was, I didn’t have a ticket. Or any substantial sums of cash. Luckily there was a nice ticket man on the concourse, and I purchased a single ticket to the first station on the line for the grand sum of £2.10 to get me through the barriers, and ran onto the [delayed] train. There was only standing room on the train, so I sat on my bag near the door. At the end of the day, I’m still a student and after the Xmas Party last night, I was a bit delicate! Standing in front of me was a slim, slightly camp looking young man. He had a wheely bag thing, with another bag on top of it. The tags on the bag indicated that he was actually “cabin crew” for BA (the image fitted perfectly). Anyway, this was fine. I sat quite contentedly on the floor, feeling quite at home. Suddenly, the train jolted. This gentleman’s bloody wheely case on wheels and additional bag came flying down on top of me!! It bloody well hurt. The handle hit my forehead and the other bag came crashing down on top of me, rolling off my shoulder. The man looked quite shocked – he just about managed to mutter an apology and check I was ok – and a few passengers who witnessed the event gasped. I was just angry. Not at the fact I knew I’d end up with a juicy purple bruise on my shoulder, but at the fact dliagj nm,jaeb; [‘aergjkn mb (Daisy, sorry) that a bloody wheely bag was to blame. Send them to room 101, please! Oh please!

In other news, I think David Cameron is rather lovely. Robbie Williams was also rather lovely (although in a slightly different way) on Parkinson tonight. I’m disappointed that the lovely James is no longer in Strictly Come Dancing (Colin or Darren should win) and I’m also worried that my Aunt voted for the lovely (again, in a different way) Carol Thatcher to win the celebrity-eat-a-bug-revamp-your-career-and-get-paid-for-it-program thing. That’s all really.

Following the previous late-night bitching session about other weblogs, in which I said Dayorama was purely a personal site for keeping friends up to date and mouthing off, I shall now embark on my customary "Ooh look! Someone's linking to us!" session.

Back when Hurricane Wilma was causing trouble across the pond, I mentioned it briefly in a bit of a news-in-brief post. We all know I love a good pun, and the attraction of Wilma's name proved too strong to resist: the post was entitled 'Fred Had Better Watch Out'.

Well, it turns out I got a little online recognition for plodding into the inevitable Flintstones punnage. I've found this page, which documents blogging about Wilma. To quote from near the bottom of the article:

Yabba Dabba Do: There are some expected Flintstones jokes and references in the blogosphere as well: here, here, here, here, here and here.

My Dayorama post is the second 'here' - the others listed went for variant on "Wiiiillllmmaa!" or, imaginatively, "Yabba Dabba Do You Have An Umbrella?" as their titles. I'm in the company of legends.

I am fed to the back teeth with petty, small-minded sniping from both sides in the Israel vs Palestine conflict. Particularly online. Every other weblog I read is either a woolly liberal or insanely blinkered right-winger (more often the latter) with nothing better to do than allow drool to escape their mouth, settle on the keyboard and eventually form puddles that depress the keys into something resembling prose. Only it's hollow, sickly and always black and white, like some sort of godforsaken Kinder Egg of Boredom.

Yes, the whole Israel/Palestine conflict is important and warrants discussion. But for God's sake, not by everyone, and not, every bloody time, in this dictatorial voice that says 'I'm right and I know I'm right because I'm Jewish/not Jewish/American/not American'. And I'm looking at you, Biased BBC (occasionally highly accurate, usually depressingly banal) and Oxblog (online equivalent of watching paint dry). I've just noticed there's a post on Oxblog about there being a new issue out of Central Eurasian Studies Review. I can't tell if it's a piss-take. I really don't think it is.

I appreciate that in response, the authors of those weblogs would tell me Dayorama is hardly a gripping read for them. But Dayorama is a place for my personal notes, for any one of my friends to come and read if/when they feel like it. It's not the home of the kind of dogma you'll get elsewhere, or at least I hope it isn't. It just depresses me that so many people waste so much time bleating inanely and helplessly when there are lives to go out and live. Maybe I just want to kill off politics in its entirety and replace it with bunny rabbits and birdsong. Why hello, David Cameron...

Okay, so I'd had a few pints as I left the LCC in Elephant & Castle and walked along the subway to the tube station. But I wasn't posing much of a threat to anyone. So I was surprised, having walked past a couple of police officers and a police dog stood at the subway exit, to hear "Guv! GUV!" in the distance.

I turned around and the officers were calling me back, so back I dutifully went.

I was then stopped and searched. This is the form I was given afterwards with all the details of the search:

I'll take you through a few things on it, starting at the top.

Stop Code: D means I was stopped "to investigate suspected crime".

Search Code: B means a search for drugs under the Misuse of Drugs Act, section 23, which reads:
"If a constable has reasonable grounds to suspect that any person is in possession of a controlled drug in contravention of this Act or of any regulations made thereunder, the constable may ... search that person, and detain him for the purpose of searching him."

Outcome Code: 1 means no further action was taken (well of course I didn't have any bloody drugs on me, did I - I've never even seen a drug).

Clothing - no mention of my hilarious t-shirt, disappointing.

Grounds for Search - so in other words, I was stopped because Chindy the Staffordshire terrier went postal as I walked past. It is more than likely that someone was smoking cannabis in the student union bar where I'd just been. Either that or the dog could smell two cats on my clothes. Imagine cat lovers nationwide being frisked on a daily basis thanks to slightly misguided police dogs...

I've blurred out a few things like my address and anything that might identify the policeman. Just in case.

Now these are the guidelines printed on the leaflet explaining your rights etc:

The officer who dealt with me didn't mess around. He gave me his name then explained that I was "detained under the Misuse of Drugs Act, which means you're going nowhere, guv". Enough with the guv already, this isn't bloody Eastenders! He proceeded to thoroughly search everything on me, including my wallet and even the battery casing of my phone. When he gave up and concluded that either the drugs were very well hidden or, maybe, didn't exist, there was no apology, only a "cheers, guv".

This is all well and good. I knew I was innocent so I didn't particularly mind, in fact it was quite interesting being stopped and searched since nothing like it's happened to me before. As it was happening I was already writing this post in my head. But what did annoy me was when I was told a record of the search would be kept on file for a year, and when my details were transmitted to HQ over the radio to check for outstanding arrest warrants etc. I think that's an invasion of privacy and I'm not at all happy that records are kept even when people are searched and shown to have done no wrong. Maybe it's just overly bureaucratic, but innocence should not need to be placed on record in those circumstances. My details should only become the property of the police when I commit a crime or a crime is committed against me.

I think we've failed in our "BBC Watch" category. We haven't commented on the fact you can now select the "UK version" or the "International Version". It just goes to show how widely the BBC website is used across the world. It’s quite interesting to see the difference in main stories. I hadn’t realised how much I probably miss out on my not bothering to click on the international pages from the existing UK website. Perhaps the two versions will entice me to do this more in the future. Perhaps not. Perhaps I’ll just be truly British and xenophobic.

The Oystercard is now registered as lost, and despite the search and rescue efforts of Anthony, has yet to be found. I understand now why parents put reins on children.

Today saw David Cameron’s first stint at the despatch box against the Prime Minister. It was a baptism of fire really, for whoever won. Win the election at 1500 on Tuesday, and be prepared to debate at 1200 on Wednesday. I sat and watched the show at lunchtime, and was suitably impressed (though I later found out that a friend at Lincoln managed to snaffle tickets to the event itself). Cameron certainly didn’t blow Blair away, but he didn’t screw up, which is all he had to do for this to be a win. There were a couple of nice soundbites – the “you were the future once” was particularly effective, though I found his quietening of Hilary Armstrong less effective for those of us watching on television. It looked like he was really quite aggressive to the power button in the bottom right. And I also liked the “I’ve heard the Prime Minister is at his best when he’s at his boldest.” The education brief was predictable, but the consensus angle was interesting. It clearly threw Blair for a second when Cameron gushingly agreed with parts of the white paper, even if this was merely an attempt to force greater divisions between Blairites and his opponents within the PLP. But, the novelty of the consensus approach will wear off quickly, I should imagine, so DC should really get his policy creation unit online as soon as he can. Overall then, probably a draw, which in itself is a result for Cameron.

Some thoughts more generally on Cameron, since I voted for him having said back in July that I would vote for Davis, and considering that I seem to be a token Tory within my friends in College. I voted for him because, at heart, he gets that the party has to change substantially in order to become electable again, and particularly to appeal to those of my generation, since the Tory base continues to die off. I also prefer his more moderate approach to social justice and tax cuts to that of David Davis. And if he loses the next election, which I suspect is more likely than not, he will still be young enough (and hopefully will have instigated enough party reform) and have done well enough to carry on with few problems. He also has a very strong shadow Cabinet. Still, he’s hardly the answer to all our problems. There is a distinct lack of new policy at the moment, and how long will that take to develop? Keeping Davis as shadow Home Secretary is a big move; he will probably keep the party further to the right than Cameron would like, but it should also mollify some of the potential (and inevitable?) in fighting. And Cameron is young and inexperienced; the issue is not so much the age as having only a single term as an MP so far. It need not be a huge disadvantage, but one feels that having at least another term could not have hurt him. Finally, the rise of the “political class” is slightly creepy; the Cameron machine is staffed with people who have spent their waking days doing whatever it takes to be a politico. 7 years as a Director of Corporate Communications (and, if reports are to believed, a distinctly average one at that) is hardly high flying business experience. But the potential to establish a generational shift in the political culture of this country is staggering, and exciting.

(Though if you see the cover of this week’s Private Eye, I too had a very good chuckle.)

Yes, it's another rant about my favourite bank. I have two current accounts and a savings account with Barclays. This week I have received three separate envelopes in the post, with three separate statements. Why couldn't they have just saved postage and two envelopes (trees) and put everything in one envelope? No doubt next week they'll send me another letter advertising a product, and the next week I will get my Barclaycard statement... and so the list goes on. Mr Barlcays, don't love me by sending me post, just increase my interest rate!

We've got a new Tory leader and no OJ spouting off about a brand new dawn, an unstoppable Conservative machine grinding its way to election victory, and the part he'll no doubt play as political history is made?

For my part, I'm looking forward to the new front bench. I want Hague back in, and I want Boris Johnson down there somewhere too. And Francis 'wily old fox' Maude. Then I want Archer back in for comedy value.

Sadly for Big Dave, the fact that absolutely no one I spoke to today gave a monkeys about his election as Tory leader may be indicative of a media bubble that will burst before too long. Last night's horrendously intrusive Newsnight piece on him made me cringe at the thought of being associated with the journalist involved. Trying to be annoying on purpose doesn't strike me as the pinnacle of political broadcasting. That said, it's the precise aim of Big Dave's first appearance versus the Prime Minister later today...

"You've been Amazoned" is the phrase I greeted my Mother with earlier. There's a rule to Christmas shopping. Don't order something over Amazon from a computer where someone else's account is automatically logged on. If you do, then when you order something the other person receives the confirmation email. When this happens, the person reads the email then finds out what one of her Christmas presents is!

Not only do people born in December have to contend with merged Christmas and Birthday presents, but the choice of Birthday cards currently available in the shops is shocking! Absolutely pants. I must be more organised next year and buy them in August or something!

Bugger. Somewhere between swiping my Oystercard in at St. James's Park, and getting off at Bow Road, my Oystercard vanished. Bugger.

I've just sat down to email a few people. Due to the events of the past week I'm thoroughly drained and knackered. There I was, writing to a school friend - I'd probably written about 600 words. Suddenly, I hit something on my keyboard and 95% of text disappeared (and it wasn't in the clipboard). Who knows. Probably a sudden select all, and delete. Anyway. It's OK because gmail does an auto save of drafts. Just as I went to retrieve my writing, it auto saved. The Bastard. It overwrote the previous one, and just auto saved my remaining sentence. Grr!! I can only smile, otherwise I would cry. For about the sixth time today (it's been one of those crying over spilt milk days!!)

The BBC's Newswatch site has recently added a piece attempting to explain why some murders receive far more media coverage than others. As their main example they take the murder of Anthony Walker, whose two killers were sentenced to over 40 years in jail between them yesterday, and compare it against the murder of Richard Whelan, killed in an unprovoked attack by a black man on a London bus in the same week.

The Whelan murder did receive some coverage, but nothing like the media frenzy that has accompanied Anthony Walker's savage murder. The BBC's TV Newsgathering Editor, Jon Williams, explains this like so:

What made the [Walker] story front page news - and the lead story on radio and television - was not his tragic death, but the claim by police, prosecution and the boy's family that the killing was racially motivated. In 2004/5, just 4 cases of homicide were classed by the Crown Prosecution Service as 'racist incidents'.

...

In the same week as the black teenager was killed by two white men in Liverpool, a white man was stabbed to death by a black man on a London bus. Richard Whelan was also the victim of an unprovoked attack - killed in the prime of his life. The story was covered by BBC London and on BBC News 24.

But there was - and is - no suggestion that the attack was racially motivated. Indeed, the police made the point that the victim could have been 'any one of us on a night out'.

[source: NewsWatch - Questions of murder]

That's mostly understandable, but the following sentence, taken from near the beginning of his explanation, is less so:

Most [murder] victims are known to their killers - only a few are genuinely newsworthy.

What a bizarre statement to make. It implies that murders where the victims knew their killers are not, as a rule, newsworthy.

That's bollocks.

For a start, Anthony Walker knew his killers. I've just finished watching a piece on the BBC which summarised the entire story of his death, from the incident to the ensuing media coverage, funeral and sentencing of the two men arrested. At one point, Anthony's mother clearly stated that they had all played together as they were growing up, and Anthony's sister described playing football with one of the murderers. The victim was known to the killers and this was still a huge news story.

I personally think Jon Williams' entire justification misses the point. Many people become very angry when certain murders get more coverage than others, because it's either seen as journalists being ignorant and uncaring, or as some form of hidden discrimination. It's neither. The BBC and other news organisations are not a collective forum for public mourning following these disgusting crimes. Horrific though murder is, affording certain instances of it less airtime than others is not an insult to someone's memory, it is simply newspapers and broadcasters doing what they do best - playing to their target audience.

The concept of a target audience has been drummed into me almost every day since I came on my broadcasting course. Today, a woman who graduated two years ago and now works for BBC Southern Counties told us it was by far the most important thing to remember. Most BBC local radio stations have a booklet about 'Dave and Sue', the mythical late-middle-aged couple the station imagines to be typical of its audience. The booklet explains exactly what they like and don't like. Commercial stations generally have a younger target audience - for example, Capital plays to women in their 20s and 30s.

The reason certain murders receive more prominence than others is because journalists and employees at a high editorial level take a decision as to what is important to their audience. This is where the racist element of Anthony Walker's death comes in. Entirely unfair though it may be, the good looking black kid brutally murdered is a story that touches most stations' target audiences far more than a white man in his late 20s. Young women listening to Capital will be shocked and might imagine it as their own kid or maybe a friend. Parents and grandparents listening to BBC stations will be horrified at the racist element and, again, will imagine Anthony as one of their own. Additionally, the use of an axe in the murder adds a graphic element missing from the stabbing of a man on a London bus. Notice, though, that BBC London et al reported extensively on the Whelan murder because it was local to them, another massive factor in working to a target audience.

So someone, somewhere, took the decision that the Anthony Walker murder was immediately of national importance. The moment tabloids like The Sun catch hold of a story like that, it is incredibly hard to treat it like another murder, because radio stations feed off tabloid-generated hype, which in turn keeps stories fresh in people's minds throughout the day, which means the tabloids feature it the next day. And so it continues. Someone, somewhere, decided that the murder of Richard Whelan didn't have the necessary 'ingredients' to be as interesting to their target audience.

Once one influential person, station or newspaper makes a decision like that, it snowballs. If ITV or Channel 4 cover the Anthony Walker murder in depth, you can all but guarantee the BBC will, because no one wants to be seen to have been left behind. An important job at a radio station is to monitor the competition in case stories are being missed. (Look for the phrases 'it has emerged' or 'it has been revealed' as sure signs that someone else beat a station to a story.)

Therefore the murders that make the headlines are those which capture the imagination of a relatively small clique of people who decide running orders. That probably makes it sound like the news agenda is driven more by journalists than actual news, and yes, you're damn right, it usually is. Nor can I think of an easy way out of that, because journalists will never stop being influenced by other journalists. Imagine leaving the BBC, ITN and the rest of the news organisations cut off from one another entirely for 24 hours. Get them all to create a running order from the stories of the day. I bet they vary wildly.

So it's not just the racist element that made Anthony Walker's death such a media fixation, although it really helped when it came to interesting a target audience. It's a deep-seated modus operandi in terms of journalists making decisions. Jon Williams gets closer to it here:

News coverage is driven by the judgements made by journalists, every minute of every day.

But the extent of that coverage is certainly not driven by whether a victim knew their killers or not. Anthony Walker is evidence against that, not for it.

Forget OJ's dictionary here, I've my own definition for you:

Knackered (verb): Tired, dead on feet, drained, in need of sleep, shattered, unable to think due to lack of sleep.

One is knackered.

Wow - you're not going to see me doing any deep sea diving.

I've a friend in the Navy, who has been in and out of Iraq for the last three years or so. We've had intermittent contact throughout and I did see him over the summer. I had to contact him the other day, but rather than sending an email I sent a text as I had forgotten he would be back by now. I think this will be his 2nd Christmas out there. Anyway, the text said something along the lines of “send me an email, it will be easier”. It never ceases to amaze me how you can contact people out in Iraq now. You imagine a war stricken country, and yet you can still text and phone – or send letters via the internet, which then get printed off at a station in Iraq. I don’t suppose this makes it any easier for families, I’m not trying to argue that out now – it just simply amazes me. Somehow it makes the world an awful lots smaller, and closer.