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 sinc