If Manchester City think they've got problems with Joey Barton wanting out, they're in nothing like the trouble BBC Sport might be.

The report about Barton wanting to leave on the BBC Sport website reads as follows:

[Stuart] Pearce stood by Barton after the player was sent home from City's pre-season tour of Thailand in July 2005 for an altercation with a 15-year-old Everton fan.

And the manager admitted he was disappointed with Barton's transfer request.

"I wouldn't have done what Joey did after the club stood by him in the summer," said Pearce.

[source: BBC Sport - 'Man City reject Boro's Barton bid']

But at the top of the page there's a picture of Barton, and underneath that there's a quote. It reads: "I wouldn't have done what Joey did after the club stood by him in the summer." That's a quote from Pearce as shown above, of course. Alas, someone has captioned it as being by 'Barton's agent Willie McKay'.

Can you imagine the horror when Joey Barton's agent realises the BBC have written a caption that apparently shows him openly disagreeing with his client about putting in a transfer request? It would not be a pleasant moment.

Below, is the text of a google-talk conversation between Ollie and I earlier. I was asking him why he needed to speak to someone from the London Tourist Board. I know the contents do highlight one of my blond/85k? moments, but I need to provide you all with some laughter (before Ollie does):

Amy: Why are you phoning them?
Ollie: madame tussauds
closing the planetarium
Amy: right. really?
Ollie: replacing it with the "auditorium" which will show crappy celeb things
Amy: urgh.
Amy: fish are much better
Ollie: no more universe
Amy: oh sh*t
sh*tty sh*t
Ollie: lol!
L O F**KING L
Ollie: oh you're never going to hear the end of that one
Amy: i know
Ollie: it's got PLANET in the bl**dy name!
oh dear me
Amy: shut up

How was I meant to know a planetarium wasn't an aquarium?

I've never been one to particularly respect queues at bus stops.

I don't know why this should be. At train stations, airports or in shops, I'm as steadfastly earnest and eagle-eyed in my observation of a queue as any other Brit. If there's a queue, join it. Do not dare attempt to skirt around the queue or in any way disrupt the functioning of the queue. The queue is sacred. Do not disturb it.

But this doesn't hold true for bus stops. Maybe it's because they are, by their very nature, quite open plan and approachable from all angles - a central point around which the queue of prospective passengers may circulate like a miniature solar system. Without a linear arrangement in place, you can lurk anywhere within ten yards of the bus stop itself and consider yourself to be waiting for a bus. I'll happily abandon any pretense to queuing in this situation,and, the moment a bus finally hoves into view, I'll simply make a dash for it and cannily position myself where I expect the doors to finish up.

This is a potential flashpoint when surrounded by twenty or thirty other people during the morning rush hour. You might expect it to be less immediately problematic when accompanied by one other person at 10:30pm on a chilly Monday night. Not so.

Imagine, if you will, a version of Bill Murray that has been given a London accent and then stomped on by a dinosaur a few times, so that he's quite a few inches shorter than Mr Murray himself. That's pretty much an accurate representation of the other passenger waiting at the bus stop outside Streatham Common station this evening. After five minutes, the little 'Countdown' system - which purports to tell you how long it'll be til the next bus turns up, but is really nigh on worthless - said a number 60 was on the way. I wandered out from underneath the Countdown display and positioned myself next to the bus stop sign, ready to flag the bus down.

A voice behind me piped up:
"Are you waiting for this bus?"

I turned around to find Squashed Murray looking at me. I looked over my shoulder in case he meant the bus was actually coming and I was going to miss it, but it wasn't there.

"Er, yes," I replied, a little unsure.

"Good," he said. I was glad that this appeared to satisfy him, and as he looked back down at his paper I allowed my gaze to wander off into the distance. It was dragged back to him about five seconds later:

"Only the thing is," he added, dropping an octave and with a truly harrowing look in his eye, "the queue starts behind me."

He expelled these last two words in such a menacing growl that I practically ejected the fajitas I'd consumed only hours earlier. But you know me, I'm no doormat. I waited for about a second, deliberating how to handle what was becoming an explosive situation, with no other witnesses along the road and darkness settled in for the night. His gaze did not shift from mine. I steeled myself.

"In that case," I said, slowly and deliberately, making myself big and pacing off the five or so steps towards him, until I stood with my not entirely slight frame towering over his lesser torso. "In that case," I repeated, his eyes boring into mine, our horns locked in the battle to become the alpha male of public transportation, "I shall stand behind you." And I did.

See, I knew OJ had been quiet for too long. And then slowly but surely, a few more Dayorama posts emerged from him. Coupled with Amy's usual consistency, I was horrified to find the sea of my green-tinged posts, to which I had become accustomed, turning to mauve and sky blue. But our only other indication of where he'd been all this time was the mention, in one post, of the Facebook.

For those not in the know, it's a community website where you can put a little profile up and add all of your old friends from uni to a little list on that profile. You can also create groups.

And now I know that the true master has returned to form. OJ has created an entire group dedicated to Caecilius, star of basic Latin textbooks and a source of much intrigue when we had to learn Latin at school. As I recall, Caecilius had the minor misfortune of living in Pompeii around about the time of that rather large eruption, but in the months running up to it we grew to know and love his whole family. Most of whom were then wiped out.

Still, it brought back a cherished childhood memory, and now any Facebook member from Oxford can join in the fun. As OJ writes on the group page: 'Caecilius est in horto. Caecilius in horto sedet. And don't you forget it, buddy.'

I don't see the point of the Post Office launching their own directory enquiries service. Surely after all the advertising when directory enquiries changed to 118 118 or whatever, everyone chose to remember one number and has ever since used it? Who is going to change to use this one? Is being slightly cheaper really going to affect the average customer who just wants to know one number? I think not. I just don't see the point. The market is already saturated, surely?

Having followed the fortunes of the Thames Whale (yes, it requires capitals, on a par with royalty as it appears to be) all last week, those in the know and with nothing to fill their lives are now following the progress of the watering can used during its failed rescue. The can's up for sale on eBay and, as reported earlier in the week, was at one point fetching well into six figures.

Alas, it seems the people bidding that much may - gasp - not have been entirely serious. The auction has been restarted and the current price is now far closer to, though not yet, a sensible figure: £325 at the time of writing. Only pre-approved bidders may now get involved with the sale. This may not be the first whale-related case of people artificially inflating something far beyond what was right and proper. I might add that a Valentine's cruise for two down the Thames is currently selling for only just over half the watering can's top bid, to put even that drastically reduced figure into a little context.

Now, turning to some more non-entity fixation, which after Chantelle won Celebrity Big Brother must be all the rage. Whisper it quietly, but I'm told a former editor of mine - from the days when I worked on music websites - has been unceremoniously dumped out of the Kaiser Chiefs' forthcoming book. The individual concerned is closely involved with the band and has been since their very inception, as well as running several music websites and writing for others. I resigned from my post at the websites concerned last autumn, ostensibly owing to family illness but in reality because I found him incompetent and disorganised in the extreme. With, in my opinion, all the communication skills the whale now possesses.

This may have come to the attention of the Kaiser Chiefs' management, for whom he does plenty of work. He was to have been mentioned a few times in the Chiefs' book, but I'm told management have now taken the liberty of going through it and removing all references. Draw your own conclusions - Dayorama, continuing its role as your first port of call for useless Kaiser Chiefs information.

Finally, a reminder that my own band are playing in Oxford on Wednesday night at The Wheatsheaf pub. Email me for more information, or just turn up on the night if you know where you're going. Bring plenty of friends.

Just in case I forget, somewhere between procrastination, the Facebook and a regular diet of DVDs by post, I sometimes have to read books with big words in them. In this case, it's a magazine - this month's Prospect, but there were a couple of pieces that if you're interested, you may wish to take a look at.

First is an essay by William Davies on 'Digital Exuberence'. In it, he takes into account the future of a connected Britain, and the social implications thereof. Where does the "always on" society actually go? Take a read - the full article is online. Second, there's a piece by Robert Hazell, supremo of UCL's Constitution Unit, who reviews constitutional changes since 1997. For those of us with more than a passing interest in the area, but no formal training, this is just the kind of thing I've been waiting for. It's also online, thought it costs. Still, I recommend it!

Now back to cooking and less mentally taxing tasks. (That's not to say that cooking isn't a tought mental activity. I'm know it is after a certain level, but I fear my student culinary skills are yet to reach such heights.)

Last night I went to see the musical of the The Producers. The musical, by Mel Brooks, is the stage version of the film of the same name. The plot centres around a failing Broadway producer called Max Bialystock. Bailystock's career is failing and reviews of his latest plays are disastrous. However, his accountant comes to his rescue and suggests that putting on a "failed" Broadway play is actually the way to success. The pair then set out robbing - or more appropriately, shagging - old ladies of money, finding a play which will be a guaranteed flop, and whilst enlisting the campest producer around and worst cast, they stage the play of "Springtime For Hitler". Obviously, this is a raging success, and the pair end up losing money... etc etc.

It is a wonderfully funny, laugh-a-minute production. That is, if you think jokes about sex, Hitler and gays are funny. It is in the best possible taste though. I would recommend people going to see it.

Anyway, as with many plays/musicals etc, often the most entertaining thing about the evening can be your fellow audience. To start with, the Drury Lane theatre is an incredibly strange venue. It's rather how I imagine an old Blackpool hotel to look inside. The artwork is obscure, to the point that I don't really know how to describe it, and you do get the feeling that it has never really worked out what it wants to be. Needless to say, this adds to its charm. So, back to the audience. There are just three episodes worthy of note. First, the couple sitting on my right. Throughout the first half, the lady sat and stared, rather harshly. She barely chuckled and instead complained she couldn't see. It didn't bother me, I just felt sorry for her long-suffering husband/partner. After the interval however, she was a completely changed person. She passed comment, giggled raucously and even whooped when the play finished. Such a transformation. There was definitely something in her gin! Second, was the German couple sitting on our left. All publicity for The Producers makes it clear that there are going to be a number of jokes levelled at Hitler and/or Germany. This couple sat in deadpan silence. After the Hitler-esque saluting pigeons in the first half, clearly they had seen enough and did not return for the second half! Finally, the couple at the end of the row. General opinion is that this couple were probably not Londoners. They'd come down for the day, wanted to have a "London" experience and were out at the theatre. Consequently they too were rather sloshed. The female (mid-thirties?) found the musical hilarious and her giggling could be heard throughout. It was rather amusing, and of course the volume and intensity of this laughter rose an extra layer after the alcohol-fuelled interval. When it came to leave the theatre it took quite a while for them to get themselves together and actually move. This wouldn’t usually be a problem… but they were at the end of the row. The man turned to the person I was with and said, "Sorry, we're having problems - drunk a little bit... ha ha". My companion simply smiled and told him that all he had to do was "put one foot in front of the other" and all would be OK. At this, the man turned around, grinned and shook his hand. Bizarre. They didn't manage to move any quicker though, so we turned the other way and made our escape out of another exit. It does indeed take all sorts. But, none of the audience were annoying - just everyone was simply having a very good time! Lots of fun.

P.S. It snowed (see, snow reference again) in Covent Garden last night. Lots of flakes.

Also of note today is the first Lib Dem Leadership Hustings... being held in the Novotel in Plymouth. Take from that what you will. That rubbery taste in your mouth isn't going to be chicken, fellas.

Surely it should be MOH? Actually, it sounds like an excellent idea - pretty simple, and with beneficial results all round. Proof that the Government isn't always totally loopy. Although today's Matt (you'll have to click on the link on the Telegraph site) is probably not too far from the truth.

A few days ago, Amy and I had a discussion about the future of squirrels both red and grey. The debate focused on whether it was right or not to exterminate grey squirrels to protect red ones - the policy our government is currently pursuing. The qualities the red squirrel possesses in order to enjoy this preferential treatment are: some people think they look nicer, they're smaller and less aggressive, and they die of diseases that don't affect the greys. And they were here first, of course, but have since had a good couple of centuries sharing the forest.

Into this argument I'd like to introduce Barbara Toner, writing in The Guardian today and clearly inhaling toner at the same time:

Is this fair? I don't love the grey squirrel. Some days I hate it. The gang that lives in our garden digs up our lawn and plants. Were I a killing woman, I might get a gun to them. But were I a killing woman and were the squirrels red, I'd take them out too. Discriminating on the grounds of colour has never seemed right. But is this relevant? You could argue, no. The grey squirrel not only threatens the future of the red, it also threatens the future of the dormouse and woodland birds. But I am arguing yes because it's my guess that if the red squirrel is allowed to flourish in the manner of the grey, it will behave in exactly the same way and then who's going to be looking silly?

[source: The Guardian - 'Pest control: grey squirrels and BB stars']

Read the full article to see why I think the dear lady must have been on something with a bit of a kick to it (Big Brother and bronze are all involved). But she makes a point I largely agree with, in that it is singularly not the grey squirrels' fault that we and the red squirrels have a problem with them. Cunning though they may look, I'm prepared to bet that their forebears did not put in a request to be transferred from North America to the UK all those decades ago. Their descendants living in our trees today would proibably happily get along with a red squirrel if they ever saw one, which chances are they never have. It's not their fault that red squirrels drop down dead the moment they inhale the same air as a grey squirrel - that's a design fault in red squirrels. And in my personal opinion it's a little rich for politicians and park-keepers, many of whom must look truly hideous to the squirrels, to start discriminating on the grounds that red squirrels scrub up a little better for the cameras.

Imagine - and I fear I may have recently trod this ground on Dayorama, but in any case back we go - imagine, if you will, an alien race descending on earth. They decide that it's horrific, all these humans polluting the place and generally spending the last few millennia making life a misery for the rest of the planet's inhabitants. And they all look ugly anyway. The only course of action is to cull the humans. When they come a-knocking on my door, I'm going to be terribly aggrieved that the aliens want me to die on those grounds. None of that is remotely my fault. True, I'm associated by species with some pretty terrible individuals and organisations, but making me answerable for that is extraordinarily unfair. Grey squirrels would no doubt put forth the same argument. Having probably never so much as seen a red squirrel in their lives, how can we turn up on their doorstep and obliterate the lot for the sake of a nigh-on identical rodent in a different shade of fur? Bizarre.

I've had a few replies to my request for your views on the UK energy review, mentioned here - nuclear is the clear winner. That's not necessarily a conclusion with which I agree, because I haven't looked properly at the facts yet and spoken to all the people with the right knowledge, and I'm reserving judgement until I've done that.

For now all I'd say is that nuclear waste needs to be guarded for millennia, and decommissioned nuclear plants can only be sealed off and left to slowly throb with radiation until the distant future. The relatively short lifespan of each nuclear plant means we'd be looking at a coastline pockmarked with dead and oh-so-slowly decaying nuclear tombstones for a long time to come if we embark on an expansion programme. In a similar vein, nuclear has plenty of hidden costs, not least those same waste disposal and decommissioning expenses, coupled with the outlay constructing the things in the first place. Nuclear is not at all cheap to introduce or withdraw. It takes 10 to 15 years to build a plant, from which you get a maximum of 60 to 70 years in active life. If we launch a new programme of nuclear expansion now (bearing in mind if we don't, there'll only be one plant left in operation by 2023) then by the end of the century there'll be the 20 or so current plants all lying defunct and irradiated, plus X many others dotted around, all rotting away. That's not a long-term vision for the UK by any means.

And I needn't mention the terrorism concern - Finland, which is building the first nuclear reactor in Europe for 15 years, only gave it the go-ahead on the understanding that Finland doesn't have that same terrorist threat. Nuclear plants in the UK have some of the finest security going and take every precaution they can, in fact they're remarkably safe places to be by all accounts, but compared to the renewable options there's always that nagging, spooky sensation that something sinister's ready to break out of a nuclear installation.

The arguments against nuclear's rivals, of course, are as many and varied, ranging from the similar concerns affecting wind power (vast expense, unsightly, NIMBYism rife) to the technological advances we need to properly harness solar or nuclear fusion, to the growing instability of the fossil fuel supply (witness Russia/Ukraine). So don't understand me to be fundamentally opposed to nuclear power, I'm simply putting what I think are the most convincing reasons not to make that choice. The one thing that's already clear to me is that successive British governments have dilly-dallied on this for long enough - a choice needs to be made in the immediate aftermath of this review, or we could miss the boat entirely and plunge ourselves into a real energy crisis.

Over the course of building a short radio feature looking into the energy review, I'm hoping to talk to at least some of the following (in alphabetical order):

Dr Kevin Anderson Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research & University of Manchester Author of a clever piece on the energy debate published by the BBC, in which he argued that the wrong questions were being asked, and that we should concentrate more on reshaping our energy demands than the supply.

Alan Duncan Shadow Secretary for Trade and Industry
With David Cameron keen to present a new, green Conservative party to the voting public, how torn are the Tories between their traditional foothold as an economic powerhouse and their new responsibility to place the climate and environment near the top of the agenda?

Alan Johnson Secretary for Trade and Industry
The man ultimately responsible for the energy review as the head of the relevant department, and the man who initially announced it. What's he expecting from the review and how quickly does he think his government will be able to act on its recommendations?

Sir Digby Jones Director-General, CBI
The views of British business are central to the energy decisions our government takes. In Sir Digby's own words, 'the decision on nuclear power has been allowed to drift too long'.

Chris Llewellyn Smith Director, UKAEA Fusion Research Programme
ITER, the next-generation experimental fusion reactor, was scheduled to begin construction in March this year. This man's at the forefront of fusion research and can explain how likely it is that we'll be able to harness fusion as a power source, and whether it'll be available in time to plug the UK energy gap.

Michael Meacher Environment Minister 1997-2003
Challenged Tony Blair over the assertion that Britain needed more nuclear power stations, arguing that 'Britain needs nuclear like a hole in the head'. Outspoken and can speak with experience of the decision-making process.

Elliot Morley Climate Minister
The energy review decision's intimately tied up with government climate change policy. Problem is, Elliot Morley's part of Defra, but it's other departments like the DTI, DFT and Treasury that make decisions on levels of emissions etc, so there's the age-old dilemma of the right hand not knowing what the left hand's doing.

Sir Robert Smith Lib Dem Energy Spokesman
With other Liberal Democrats expending more than enough energy in the company of rent boys or fighting it out for the leadership, what would they do in Labour's place now?

Malcolm Wicks Leader, Energy Review
The minister who matters, the man leading the review itself and reporting back to Alan Johnson. What difficulties has the review encountered; how tough, how clear-cut, are the choices laid before the government likely to be? Is it now or never for the maintenance of a robust UK energy policy?

I can't imagine I'll get to speak to all these people, and I'll no doubt find plenty of others with valid opinions and new insights, but that's an idea of the contributors I'd like to have. When all is done and dusted by the middle of March, I'll present the finished report on Dayorama as ever.

Do you know what? It's snowing. And do you know what that means? I can go on and on about every little snowflake again. And annoy Ollie, of course. Wonderful!

... isn't it amazing to watch them fluttering around, falling out of the sky. They dance... like, well... like... snowflakes (!) just looking for somwhere to settle and rest their pretty little bottoms...

OK, OK. I'll stop now. I'll return to the window and watch the beautiful little white blobs descending from the heavens...

I've had lunch, coffee and dinner with three different sets of people today. What was one of the main topics of conversation? The Lib Dems? Why, because they are all suddenly saying they are having relationships with rent boys or gays, or they are alcoholics. I applaud the openess. But, it's just slightly so very un-English!

It was at around midday, when I was just coming on shift as a newsreader during one of our guns-blazing LCC training days, that I said to our editor it was rapidly becoming 'Galloway Day'. The boy George had greeted me when I woke that morning, sat next to Saddam's son Uday and sharing a little light banter, before winning his legal battle against The Telegraph later that morning. By the early afternoon the focus had switched to that evening's antics on Big Brother, and throughout our afternoon bulletins it was impossible to escape Galloway stories left, right and centre.

So it's heartening that I wasn't alone in my view. The Guardian also called today 'Galloway Day' on their News Blog. At 5pm I got to speak to George's agent live on our drivetime show, and was extremely disappointed to have to stick to the questions I'd been given on my script, on pain of her hanging up the phone if I strayed. This was particularly difficult when I asked her if George's short stay in the house had been A Good Thing, to which she replied that it had given him a 'chance to show he is a human being'. I sorely, sorely wanted to interrupt to the effect that George had spent more time showing himself to be a pussycat with milk on his wikkle whiskers. Alas, I was denied. Still, it was an oddly enjoyable feeling to be chatting to Mr Galloway's agent on first name terms (hers being Wendy) on such a busy day for the man.

Thanks to OJ for pointing out Andrew Marr's comments on the LCC lecture - I was disappointed that he didn't go into as much detail as I have might have hoped in the article, and gave rather an odd impression that seemed almost contrary to the one I got at the time. I suspect he may have been cornered by overeager print journalists at the drinks session following the lecture, where they'd have badgered him into admitting, under duress, that print had a future. I stick by my assertion that the picture he painted of print was enough to put anyone off ever going into it.

Finally, a spoof BBC News Online article in the exact spirit with which I approach the news story in question:

If you read it closely, you'll see the protagonist(s) had my sense of humour, and Amy's sense of spelling and grammar.

My Orange contract ends next month so I renewed it last week and chose my upgrade phone. A Nokia 6680. I just wanted a phone. You know, nothing fancy. Something to phone and text from. Well, my phone arrived this morning and I am just about getting to grips with it. It's always slightly worrying when the phone comes with three instruction manuals and a CD! It's a rather large phone and it appears to sing, dance, access the internet (3G), have two cameras on it, a radio thing and thousands of other things. Having said that, it is proving easy to use... well, despite a couple of dodgy text messages to my Mum to begin with. And the best thing? I've had Byran Adams Summer of 69 for two years on my old phone... so I couldn't part from it. Luckily I have managed to download the polyphonic version. Bryan's on my phone, and all's right with the world!

It's not that I don't want to go to my research seminar. It's just that internet quizes are often enlightening. Apparently.

I'm a Chevrolet Corvette!

You're a classic - powerful, athletic, and competitive. You're all about winning the race and getting the job done. While you have a practical everyday side, you get wild when anyone pushes your pedal. You hate to lose, but you hardly ever do.

Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz.

Well, perhaps not. But in his notebook in today's Telegraph, quasi-official Dayorama hero Andrew Marr gives his point of view of the lecture he delivered on Monday to Ollie and his associated radio minions. There's a couple of interesting things here. Ollie claims that Marr was both encouraging trainees to learn the skills of print journalism while also admitting that the newspaper industry was dying out. In his column, Marr notes only that:

The students, meanwhile, were deeply offended at any suggestion in my talk that papers were declining. Lunchtime O'Booze, your day may return.

Hmm. I'll side with Ollie on this; I can't honestly believe that a younger generation trainees cannot spot that new media journalism is the way forward. The papers may not die - certainly not while the great media conglomerates continue to dominate the business overall - but they are hardly the bastion of primary information anymore.

The second interesting part is Marr's view on the associated decline of the Fleet Street community, due to the wonders of technology, resutling in "hundreds of hacks marooned at their kitchen tables, wanly poking around in the fridge before e-mailing the office." Too true, but Fleet Street is hardly alone in this. Might it mean the end of mavericks such as Michael Wharton/Peter Simple (who I'll point out now was an Old Member of Lincoln)? Probably, but bear in mind the countless other changes in journalism that have happened - tabloid morality/trial by tabloid, the movement away from broadsheet formats, increase in lifestyle features, corporate tie ins etc. Alcohol won't help stop the rot, though it might make it less painful for a bit. And it's hardly as if the lunchtime and afterwork boozer is extinct. This is the age of binge drinking, of course. After all, without copious social fraternisation, how else would Ollie have got his mobile back?*

* Though the question remains - would he have lost it if he hadn't been out partying?

OK, the whale. It was in water, right? And it died of dehydration? (yes, I know it's to do with types of water and food sources, but it still makes for an amusing headline).

As you may be aware, I've got a project on my hands to come up with a five minute report on an aspect of national government, involving MPs. At the moment I'm giving thought to concentrating on the UK energy 'crisis' - how far is it a crisis, is our future supply in grave danger given the lack of fossil fuels, impracticality of renewables and closure of nuclear plants before new ones can be built, does that mean foreign imports risking the kind of situation Russia and Ukraine got into, can we really cut carbon emissions at the same time as digging ourselves out of this hole, etc etc.

I'd like to hear your views on the subject if you've got any. Either leave them in the comments or email me. How would you meet our energy needs in the decades to come, and how far do you think the Government needs to be looking ahead with the energy review it now has underway? Should it be thinking years, decades or centuries? Will we be able to reduce carbon emissions? Given that we're predicted to only generate 80% of our own energy by 2015, how much of a risk - diplomatically or otherwise - do energy imports pose?

Furthermore, who should I be talking to about this in your opinion. Not just MPs, but which industry reps, which pressure group spokespeople, which people who don't belong to any 'side' but have a good, relevant story to tell? Do you want me flown to Ukraine to ask Yushchenko about this, or three stops up the line to Battersea to look at the redundant power plant there? Let me know.

Oh, and I forgot to mention earlier - did quite well in the theory half of my law exam, which we had back today. Also had a lively chat with Glenn Del Medico, the gent in charge of our law course and a man who was - until last year - the person on the end of the phone line whenever top BBC correspondents and producers had legal issues. When he speaks, everyone listens. And today he spoke to tell me my handwriting is the second worst he has ever seen. I'm gutted to have missed out on the gold. Glenn's opinion on Sven versus News of the World: Sven hasn't got a prayer.

As opposed to 'Free Willy', you see (down, Oaten, down!). Anyway, we all know I'm entirely sick of the now-legendary Thames whale, so let's keep this brief. People on eBay are flocking in their droves to list unlikely items with bizarre connections to the whale, initially for charity and consequently with a heavy dose of irony. Observe the following, all listed as I write:

Thames Whale Collectable - 99p, 1 bid
The photo is of a banana skin. The description tells how the whale made the seller realise 'just how fragile life is'. They go on: 'I thought the skin would make a perfect memory of the moment for somebody'. There's also an empty can of Coke further down the page that bears an uncanny resemblance to this item, along with others.

London UK Thames Whale Watering Can - £441, 21 bids
Earlier in the week, the watering can used to help the whale was listed on eBay. This is not that watering can. Someone has, to date, bid over four hundred pounds for a can that is, according to the description, 'extremely similar'.

Thames Whale Cross Stitch Pattern - £3.75 Buy It Now, 10 available
Depicts the whale's head bobbing out of the water, looking cross and with stitch from all the swimming.

Thames Whale Watering Can - £1, no bids
Another ersatz watering can (I've been waiting for ages to use 'ersatz', what a word). What makes the £441 fake so special? A bargain at one four-hundred-and-forty-first of the price.

Thames Whale Commemorative T-Shirt - £10, 1 bid
Medium white t-shirt depicting a whale with a halo round its head. One person has asked a question as follows: "Talk about cashing in! It's not even a bottlenose whale!"

Thames Whale Watering Can - £9,800, 128 bids
The real deal. Surprisingly (or not, perhaps) quite far down the list.

I won't bore you or me any further, but you can also get Thames Whale hose pipe, photos, fridge magnets and mugs.

Anyway, in the New Labour spirit of burying bad news sufficiently far beneath a large whale, I've booked my driving theory test for 28 March, 2pm. In Oxford. I might turn up in subfusc (seeing as if newspaper reports are to be believed, none of the actual students will have to bother any more).

In reference to me, the "About" page on this website states, "...look out for posts... on her arch nemesis Barclays..." Well, perhaps times are about to change...

I have two current accounts. Lets call them X and Y. The X account is used for all standard transactions. The Y account deals with money transfers, cheques, odd sums of money etc. A few weeks ago I wrote a cheque, thinking it was out of the Y account and transferred the relevant sum of money into this account. However, when it was cashed a couple of days ago it was actually made out from the X account. As the relevant sum of money wasn't in this account, I went into the red by a small sum. When I spotted this, the next day, I was really angry with myself because the money was sitting there all along. I cursed Barclays for taking the £25 fine off me, but accepted it was my mistake nonetheless. In the post today I received a letter from Barclays. I quote...

"I wish to advise you that on X, you current account balance was X overdrawn... a fee of £25.00 has been applied to your account...

... in recognition of the fact that you usually keep your account in good order and have not incurred such a fee during the last 12 months, on this occasion only, we have refunded the £25.00 fee to your account..."

It then details the sanctions that will apply if I go into o/d again.

I love them, I love them, I love them!

I'm just back from hearing Andrew Marr deliver the annual Hugh Cudlipp lecture at the London College of Communication.

He spoke for about thirty minutes or so - perhaps a little less, it certainly didn't drag - on the subject of popular culture and how he interpreted the future of the media. He admitted that whilst he himself had been somewhat 'high-brow', and had consequently spent a less than successful period as editor of The Independent in the mid-90s, he felt the current preference for 'popular culture' over intellectual 'news' to be one worth defending. He made the point that whilst papers like The Mirror had Diplomatic Correspondents in the 1950s whose reports regularly made the front page, that was a different era whose hopes and fears rested on a different agenda. He defended the News of the World's publication of allegations concerning Sven-Goran Eriksson, and professed to have met 'fake sheikh' Mazher Mahmood, expressing both admiration for him and incredulity that Britain was still a nation where you could 'don a tea towel' and learn the most intimate secrets of anyone to whom you chose to speak.

Oddly, during the question and answer session that followed, he told one student that it was better to first become a print journalist rather than dive straight into broadcasting, because of the basic manipulation of words that print journalism would teach. This ran in contrast to much of his talk, which often returned to a theme of newspapers in decline - there will be no new newspapers, said Mr Marr, and younger generations pay almost no attention to them. Newspapers, he argued, are in every sense yesterday's news to anyone under the age of 20 (I'd argue 30) because these people are used to finding their news online, so it takes columnists and exclusives to sell newspapers, not news. The suggestion he made, but did not explicitly state, was that a popular newspaper has to place finding 'something extra' in the form of columns and 'popular culture' stories ahead of the day-to-day business of raw reporting.

I don't see why there is thus any attraction in becoming a print journalist. The argument would seem to be that you get taught basic skills useful as a broadcaster, whereas broadcasting doesn't teach skills you need for print. Setting aside the fact that I disagree, there's absolutely no incentive to learn those basic print journalism skills if no market exists for your services once you're done studying. In an environment where, as Mr Marr himself put it, sounds and images are taking over from the written word, it's the broadcasters who have the skills associated with the fastest-moving form of news today, not the print journos. Even if we hypothesise that news completes its leap into an online environment, broadcast journalists have the skills to add sounds and images to their written reports, print journalists do not. Broadcasting provides life and colour to each story it touches, it's what we're encouraged to do the whole time. I think the exciting developments occurring online and the progress of TV and radio news make broadcast journalism the cutting edge, regardless of the apparent induction print journalism provides. You can't treat print journalism as a step up to broadcasting if, as Andrew Marr suggests, there will shortly exist barely any step on which to find your feet.

Further to Amy's post, I remember Five Live taking apart the guy behind the 'this will be the most depressing day survey' on air a few weeks ago, so I've been taking it with a hefty pinch of salt. Or at least I was until I woke up this morning.

First of all, my housemates kept me out of the bathroom for half an hour. This is the first time ever that our three schedules have clashed, after nearly five months. So that set me back. Then I got to Balham tube station to discover that due to 'passenger action' at the next station (which turned out to be someone pulling the emergency alarm) the northbound Northern Line was suspended.

Twenty minutes later we were on our way, and I was back on schedule by the time I got into Elephant & Castle. On the front entrance doors at the LCC was a sign saying there'd been a break-in over the weekend affecting the media block - when I got upstairs to the newsroom, my course director was walking the other way and told me a server had been nicked, so none of our systems would work, from printing documents right through to editing audio and lining up audio playlists. Apparently well over ten grand's worth of equipment has gone, 'stolen to order' according to the prevailing conspiracy theories here.

This doesn't pose too many problems today, but we've got newsdays coming up on Wednesday and Thursday, when we operate as a fully functioning newsroom with hourly bulletins from 10am til 5pm. We're told it'll be three days before replacement equipment is in place, so this probably means two newsdays with none of the audio capabilities we're used to and have been trained to use, plus no internet connection to take national news clips from our provider, IRN, and no printer to print scripts to read. I'm the newsreader on Wednesday, so it looks like it's going to fall to me to bring in my laptop and printer and frantically type out handwritten copy given to me by our journalists before each bulletin; meanwhile, any audio we need will have to be saved to the desktop on each of our now-lame PCs, then transferred to minidisc and played out that way instead of using our database. That needs a lot of manpower so where we had one person doing each of the four editorial/technical jobs before, we now have at least two. So there are only going to be five or six actual reporters. In short, it's going to be chaos, and to cap it off it's the first day that we have an outside Guest Editor coming in - from Manchester's Key 103.

I've also got a cold and a sore throat, and am in the middle of waiting for six hours between 1pm (our early finish time today since we've no facilities with the equipment gone) and 7pm when Andrew Marr starts tonight's lecture here. And - now that I remember - this morning we were given four different deadlines for work this term, involving a 10 minute 'social documentary', a 5 minute 'national government' package, a 90-second Newsbeat package to hand in to Radio One's news editor if we fancy a job there, and an 'online' section of our course dedicated to journalism and the internet. So I'm inclined to give that study a little credence after all - for most of us in the newsroom, it's been a god-awful day.

Well, apparently today is meant to be the most depressing day of 2006. This was reported, naturally, in the Scotsman. Well my day hasn't been too bad at all, so if 2006 isn't going to get any more depressing, it will be a good year!

Big problems for the UK in Russia this morning after Russian journalists misheard the sentence "British intelligence centres on Iraq" for "British intelligence centres on a rock":

Not that I think British journalists are faring much better. I'm getting bored of Damian Grammaticas' half-hourly interruptions into this morning's BBC Breakfast programme about this - the scripts are not exactly daring in their originality. For example, the 7:30am script read like this:

Presenter: Damian, this is a bizarre story isn't it?
Damian: Yes, it's almost like something out of James Bond...

And at 8:00am, the script ran:

Presenter: Damian, this is almost like something out of James Bond isn't it?
Damian: Yes, it's a bizarre story...

Apparently, The West Wing has been cancelled. *sniff* And so marks a momentus change in my TV watching, last seen with the end of Buffy.

Though it's about a product I've never seen, and mentions several other things I swear I've never engaged in, this post is a brilliant example of set-piece writing: building up a situation then, with a flick of the wrist, transforming the entire thing to highly readable effect. All in just a few paragraphs. See, after a whole day listening to my Harry Potter audio book and wanting to be J. K. Rowling (to the extent that I was dabbling with the plot for my book-that'll-never-get-written again), now I've read that and want to be a world-class blogger again. Which is about as distant as the day my book gets published. Back to trainee journalism it is then.

Not content with trotting out the camera in Hyde Park yesterday, I went up to Kenwood House in north London earlier today. There's a rather grand house there as one might expect, but the grounds were the attraction - plenty of woodland and a small lake, perfect for more wildlife photos. Here's a few that I took:

One last squirrel, on the basis that a massive cull of grey squirrels was announced today. Amy and I have already had this discussion - I'm not convinced it's the fault of the grey squirrels that humanity put them in Britain and they went and threatened the existence of red squirrels here. Imagine if a higher power put humanity on the planet, then came back only to find, to its horror, that we were killing all the other animals. 'Right,' it said to itself, 'I've got to kill all the humans to save the animals.' I'd be putting my hand up when it came to kill me and enquiring if it was really my fault, just as your average grey squirrel would probably not see what it had done to deserve a swift and untimely demise. Equally, I know everyone likes red squirrels and no one wants them to die out. So I don't see an acceptable solution either way. It's sad.

Gulls aren't cute and furry so naturally everyone hates them, except old men who throw bread into lakes - as has been the case here, leading to a private little war. And below, a scene reeking of an emotion I know only too well: that feeling that comes over you when you know you've just kicked your ball somewhere from whence it ain't coming back...

In the spirit of the whale, I think it's appropriate that we mention that it has indeed died. As one reporter stated, it was "being kept like a goldfish in a bowl... it doesn't surprise me that it died". Two useful things to note from the article though - a) a group of whales is known as a "pod"; and b) when I saw the photo of the whale in the paper yesterday, I was convinced it looked like a dolphin. Well, that wasn't such a stupid thing to think because it was a bottle-nosed whale, and thus it does actually look conceivably like a dolphin.

"Prostitution Strategy A Missed Opportunity" - Oaten.

See, you leave the internet alone for all of 20 minutes while you catch an episode of Futurama and eat your dinner... and then a story like Oaten happens. Good Lord! Even though Ollie posted this first, I feel compelled to comment on it - if only because I saw his campaign launch on BBC South where he was interviewed in his house, having breakfast with his wife and two delightful children. It's a shame he's so young. If all the stories about him crossing the floor to the Tories in time for the next election are true (he has a none too healthy margin in Winchester), then he's a generation out of date. Cameron's Conservatives are squeaky clean, whereas a rent boy allegation would have fitted in nicely with 'Back to Basics'. Actually, thinking about it, I wonder what his televised denial will be: something like that of Sir Norman Fry MP, of Little Britain? Something along the lines of "I happily gave him a lift home and was leaning over to help him with his seatbelt when accidentally..." (I actually never saw an episode in the last series, but was bombarded with the press releases all over the media that I can still remember that.) And pity poor Lembit Opik - first of all, loyal to Charlie Kennedy to the last, and then manager for the failed Oaten campaign. I bet he wishes January never happened.

Brace yourselves folks, the News of the World, not satisfied with trying to wreck English World Cup chances, is now wading into the Lib Dem leadership contest. It's responsible for Mark Oaten dropping out of the leadership race over rent boy allegations, and you just know it'll all be in tomorrow's paper (with more Sven remarks from the fake sheikh tapes, of course). But I'll be buying it for the TV pull-out as ever. Honest.

By the way, I'll be sent to interview MPs on a topic of my choice for my national government assessment this term. If anyone has a specific MP (or two, or three) and a topic to recommend, be my guest to the usual address. I'll publish audio of each interview and the finished package on here for your listening pleasure.

In response to Ollie's Hyde Park post, I can't agree more. It was a very enjoyable and fascinating afternoon. Just what I needed: a bit of fresh air on a crisp but remarkably warm and sunny January day. I did plan to work today, but after a google talk conversation which went something like this (see below), Hyde Park was a much better option:

Amy: Need to work, but don't feel in the mood. I fancy a walk somewhere; a bit of fresh air.
Ollie: Fantastic. I want to use my camera.
Amy: Hyde Park?
Ollie: Yep. Let me have lunch first. Let's say 1.30 at Victoria. Or 1?
Amy: Or maybe 1.15?
Ollie: Haha, yes. Usual spot.
Amy: Yep. Thank you!
Ollie: Thank you too.
Amy: See you later.
Ollie: See you in a bit.

You see, that's what friends are for. Personally, I was amazed that that there was so much wildlife in the Park. I might not be quite as quick on my knowledge of wildfowl as Ollie's Mum, but I wasn't bad. Apparently. At least I knew a cormorant, coot and moorhen when I saw one. All that time as a member of the RSPB paid off! Ollie also didn't mind my persistence in trying to find Diana's memorial fountain. It was a bitch to find, but an absolute gem. Slam the critics - it's a very peaceful, fascinating and living tribute. Admittedly different to the bog-standard statue, but it certainly shouldn't have received the negative press that it did. We also managed to trot to Buckingham Palace, see Albert's Memorial statue and also try to guess the type of airlines that were flying above the City (we definitely identified Monarch, British Airways and Virgin). And now for that work...

Having not ended up going to Oxford like I thought I would, I spent this afternoon in Hyde Park with Amy instead, armed with my camera. Here's a few of the better shots:

There are squirrels everywhere in Hyde Park, from 'Psycho Squirrel Alley' opposite the Royal Albert Hall to the ones feeding on nuts in the tiny bird sanctuary at the top end of the park. This one seems to have been in mid-meal when I snapped him. (Are all squirrels 'him'? Surely not, but I can't remember anyone I know referring to a squirrel as a woman...)

The lake had plenty of swans, geese and assorted wildfowl on it, particularly since one or two slightly batty individuals had taken to the time-honoured pastime of hurling loaves of bread at them all. Further down the lake we saw this:

The original photo was just going to be the birds on the posts, but then we had an unexpected visitor on the chain in the middle. The dopey bird proceeded to scare a resident seagull away and then clamber, in ungainly fashion and as shown in a series of photos above, onto the vacant plinth.

If Oxford doesn't happen tomorrow either, I'm tempted to nip down to a local RSPB reserve and take some more photos. We'll see. There's nothing quite as deadly as me when I'm in the mood for photography.

It's official. I am a "social stereotype". In the Telegraph this morning, Mather describes the oversized bag. "Natasha is dwarfed by her object of desire... she is not now going to admit that it is too big, that baby blue is the wrong colour (particularly in January) or that lacking the detective skills of Sherlock Holmes, it is impossible to find one's keys at the bottom". What did I buy last Sunday? An oversized suede bucket of a hand bag, in baby blue. Wonderful.

Alright look, I can't take much more of this bloody whale. This is turning into some sort of media parody, the sort The Day Today or Broken News would have perhaps tried to carry off. One whale turns up in the Thames - admittedly very rare, to the tune of having happened once - and the entire nation holds its breath until the thing sorts its life out.

I didn't want to return to this topic, having nothing much to add as regards the fate of Moby Dagenham, but the news on BBC1 has just forced me. There was a full four/five minute report on the whale, detailing its movements all day long, accompanied by a narrative that turned sinister and foreboding when giving tell of the moment the whale beached itself in the afternoon. And then - you could almost hear the leap of a light-hearted flute in the background - a sighting of it near Greenwich, suggesting it was going in the right direction. Spontaneous cheering was clearly the order of the day.

And then, heaven forfend, and then - the clincher. BBC newsreader, once the report finishes, looks into camera and delivers the ultimate in news parody:

Digital viewers can see more pictures of the London whale by pressing the red button.

JESUS. H. CHRIST. Live footage of the whale on the BBC website all afternoon, a full four minute report on the whale's antics all day long on the Ten O'Clock News, and now you can press the red button for even more whale? This should be a bloody 'And Finally' story, not four minutes of 'ooh look, a whale!' further up the running order than Eriksson suing the News of the World and a report from the West Bank! As I write there's a report on the Ten O'Clock about rising sea temperatures in the Antarctic affecting sea life there - that would have been perfect to tie into the whale story, at about this stage of the bulletin. I'm all for a relaxed attitude to the news, but I do wish we'd keep things in a little perspective.

Ten days ago, I wrote a short article entitled 'Pants On Fire', which essentially lifted copy from a BBC News Online article. The BBC said a man had been found to have lied about his part in the rescue of two people from a burning light aircraft, and a quote I took from it ran as follows:

Nigel Gallimore had claimed he had rescued the pair after their plane crashed near Bournemouth Airport [but] told an inquest that his original claims in a statement were false ... Mr Gallimore admitted: "A lot of things happened and a lot was being asked."

The BBC article is here.

Three days after I'd published my short piece, a man named Paul left a comment against it:

I find it amazing that you reported your story in such a negative way. He never admitted to lying. If you read the two statements that were questioned in the hearing, you would have realised that there was only one item that was different: between pulled the person from the plane and pulled the people away from the wreckage. How can the press be so negative and nasty without reading or reporting the truth as it was presented?

It felt a little like Paul was attacking me for the BBC article, which I hadn't had any involvement with whatsoever, so I emailed him about it. He told me he was Paul Gallimore, brother of Nigel, the man who stood accused of lying. And Paul proceeded to explain their side of the story, starting with the hearing that had taken place into the death of the third person in the light aircraft. Nigel was called as a witness to the crash, having given statements to police at the time:

Nigel wrote two statements that were read out in court. The first reads along the lines of, 'We pulled the people from the plane to safety', and the second reads, 'We pulled the people away from the crash site'. The rest of the two statements were the same.

The judge asked Nigel if what was written in his first statement was correct. Nigel answered no. There was no contention as to what he had written in his second statement at all, keeping in mind that there was a small change between the two statements and everything else was the same. Can you tell me how the press can hang Nigel in the way they have over a simple word like 'no'?

When Nigel got outside the court he had no idea the press were waiting for him. He thought they were asking him about the small change in the statements - that is why he said what he did. He had no idea they were going to do this to him.

In his next email he provided some evidence. 'Winstanley' is another man at the scene, quoted in the BBC article with several derogatory comments regarding Nigel Gallimore:

Here is a link to the story that a local paper first ran after the accident. If you notice, Winstanley says: 'I could see the petrol pouring out and I thought "I have got to get them out". We realised there was another person in the plane but there was nothing we could do to get to him.' Is this the royal 'we' or does he mean himself and Nigel?!

On page 18 of the same paper today [14 Jan 06] there's a letter from a chap called Nigel Pudwell. He says 'Mr Gallimore was one of the people who aided Mr Winstanley'. There is also a photo of the scene before the emergency services arrived and Nigel's in the picture.

Finally, Paul sent me a link to a BBC News Online article dated May 2005. The title is 'Plane crash rescuer given award'.

He has a valid point when he asks me how the press can stitch someone up quite so badly. Obviously I was nowhere near the crash and don't really know what happened at all. From what I can gather Nigel may not have done exactly what he said in his first statement to police, but equally it seems wholly inappropriate for the media to haul him in front of the British public as a 'liar'. It's particularly interesting that BBC News Online were so quick to splash the 'local hero' story in May, and equally hasty to knock the man back off his pedestal some months later when his testimony was altered a little at the hearing.

To my barely-trained ears, this smacks of bored journalists at the inquest finding nothing better to write home about that Mr Gallimore's revised statement - or perhaps more likely, journalists working to a deadline and knowing they have to produce some story from the hearing. It's sad, but true, that even at my early stage of career development you feel a lot of pressure to deliver the goods come what may when you go out on a story. If it changes whilst you're there, even if it drains away in front of your very eyes and turns into the biggest non-story of a generation, as a low-paid local journalist in a fairly competitive environment you're nigh on duty bound to spin it into a story.

I've no idea how to go about changing that, and don't think I'll be able to either, crusading young, naive moral high ground or not. But hearing Paul Gallimore's side of that one news article - quite an insignificant one to most people who would have read it - taught me a valuable lesson. It hasn't yet been drummed into me on my course, and I'm not sure how far it would in a working media environment, that the stories we report on involve real, breathing people, with families to go home to, friends who read newspapers, and both livelihoods and reputations to maintain. It'd be nice to think that when I'm unleashed into a job in, say, half a year, I can avoid clambering over those people in search of any story I can find.

I'm no fashion expert. In fact, I wear a simple style of clothes - sometimes enhanced by the odd expensive top or skirt. Nothing outrageous, nothing particularly "in fashion", but just general clothes. I make an effort to look good though, and I am conscious of those little things that can make or break an outfit. I also think I know what does and does not suit me - in broad terms anyway. So, lately I've been constantly enraged by people I've seen around London, a few on my course, who really could use 5mins with Trinny and Susannah.

First. If you're a woman, you should buy a bra that fits. There is no excuse for a tight bra, and a tight top. This means that the bra squashes the skin, and then skin/fat bulges outside of the bra. This can be clearly visible under a top. Why do it? It looks horrid!! Just buy a proper bra. It's not that hard. And on the subject of bras, there is no excuse for being able to see the tip of them under a low cut top. Perhaps men think it is sexy? I don't.

Secondly, thongs. OK, so I'm known to wear them. But at least I make an effort to cover the back of my jeans. I don't want to see the entire plumbers backside of a girl sitting near me. It isn't pleasant.

And last but not least, shorts. It's fashionable at the moment to wear cropped trousers - to around the knee. These look amazing... if you are a stick insect. So if you're not, it looks bloody awful. Don't do it to yourself, just wear something that fits.

Right, that's all I have to say.

Sven-Goran Eriksson's going to sue the News of the World for breach of confidence. Good. I think he's right to do so. The News of the World went out on a 'fishing expedition' (appropriately enough given that there's a whale in the Thames right now, allegedly 'lost', although I don't know how anyone knows that - it could be perfectly on course, has anyone asked it?). They got what they wanted but had, from what I can tell, no grounds to go out 'fishing' for Eriksson's private thoughts like that. He shouldn't have divulged everything he did, but at the most basic level this is deception.

Breach of confidence came up in my revision for my law exams earlier this week. It's quite a convenient piece of legislation because it can be easily manipulated to fit a particular situation. For example, breach of confidence was used by the Attorney-General against The Observer and The Guardian in the 1980s when they published extracts from Peter Wright's tell-all book Spycatcher; but it was also used to ban newspapers from revealing the new names and whereabouts of the two killers of James Bulger upon their release from prison. It was also used by OK! magazine when Hello! magazine published hastily-taken photos of the wedding of Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas despite OK! having the (expensively acquired) exclusive rights. The wedding, and it followed the photos, were ruled to be protected by the law of confidence as a 'valuable trade asset'.

There are three 'tests' of breach of confidence:

1. Does the information have the necessary 'quality of confidence'? <