As many of you know, for a variety of reasons I haven't been sleeping very well of late. It's probably inherent anxiety, but hopefully it will be sorted soon. On the other hand, perhaps it is someone upstairs preparing me for the delights of my training contract. Anyway... the things you learn:
a) there is still quite a lot of traffic on the road, even at 3am
b) car alarms seem to go off quite frequently, even though I never wake up to them when I am asleep
c) there really is no decent tv (even on Sky) around 3am... I watched an episode of DinnerLadies last night, that was about all
d) you can watch the end of all your favourite films (without missing them, because you are asleep!), via your laptop, in bed
e) you get hungry about 1am
f) hot baths, hot drinks, alcohol, no alcohol, caffeine, no caffeine - they all make no difference
g) the motto "if you can't sleep, don't count sheep... talk to the shepherd" does actually work to an extent... it's peaceful
h) being awake and yet dopey is a great excuse to re-read the endings of all your favourite novels and poems

I'm going to away and therefore be in company for the next four nights... fingers crossed I shall be able to sleep like a dream!!

I see from the Guardian that I left a name out when discussing potential replacements for Johnnie Walker. Apparently, Chris Evans is a hot tip. Hmm.

This is just a little note to say that my posts on this darling weblog may be slightly less frequent than in the past. This is for a variety of reasons:

a) Dayorama is actually getting quite a reputation as a rather credible weblog - consequently, my wittering and bad grammar doesn't have such a place as it did
b) I'm going to be away quite a bit over the next few weeks, so may not be around to post as regularly
c) Considering the fact I start work in 6mths, I need to be increasingly careful about what I say over the internet

That's all really.

Wow, how's this for breaking news... Johnnie Walker has just announced all of 30 seconds ago that he's leaving the Drivetime slot on Radio 2 at the end of March in order to start presenting a more spiritual show on Sundays, and do more filling in for Wogan in the mornings. Take your bets now for his replacement - I have Maconie in the clubhouse as leader, Richard Allinson as next favourite, Noel Edmonds has to be up there, and on the outside John Inverdale and Alex Lester. (And on the very outside, Mr Williams, who is keen to introduce organic housing to a broader audience...)

G4 - they of X Factor, Bohemian Rhapsody, and that funny little blonde one who's the only one anyone can remember - are releasing an EP.

In what could never be construed as a blatant attempt at commercial gain off the back of shallow emotional blackmail, the working title for the EP on Sony BMG's guide to release dates is 'Mothers' Day EP', which should give you an idea when it's coming out as well.

Completing a bumper week for fans of plasticky music reality TV also-rans, Journey South are releasing an album at the same time, currently wittily entitled 'tbc' on the spreadsheet. 'Mothers' Day Album', anyone?

Five Live really got me going just now.

It's a phone-in show hingeing on a debate about a website entitled Fake Alibi which does exactly what it says on the tin: pay your money and the website's staff will organise a fake alibi for you according to your requirements. The idea is mainly aimed at love rats, who can arrange to receive a full itinerary as well as messages and phone calls relating to an entirely fake trip, then spend the weekend away with their lover instead, with nairy a suspicion on the part of their loyal husband/wife.

Naturally plenty of the people phoning in to the show were hostile to this idea, not least the show's presenter himself, who branded anyone calling in support of the website 'mad'. But in a point I made by text message (and they actually read it out, which pleasantly surprised me) the presenter made the odd assumption that the people being cheated on using the service were absolute angels. More than once he exclaimed that the service was allowing people to con 'decent' and 'innocent' individuals.

Do you think everyone using the Fake Alibi service will be setting out to con a decent, innocent individual? Or might some of the site's clients be oppressed (psychologically, mentally, perhaps physically), frightened individuals escaping an aggressive environment? If you were trying to buy time away from a threatening partner to spend either with someone else or in therapy or seeking help somehow, would you rather lie to them outright with no support, or use this service to give you a 'watertight' alibi? (Of course in that situation you'd probably want to talk to someone like the police or social services, but threatened people don't often feel capable of doing that for obvious reasons.)

Changing subject, and if I've had my little slice of fame on Five Live tonight, one of our erstwhile readers' dads has had his across the pond. David Whitehead, dad of Rachel on the LCC broadcasting course, is quoted in a New York Times article on ownership of port operations. It's probably quite exciting if you're well versed in the world of ports and shipping (and he's director of the British Ports Association so I imagine he knows a thing or two), but suffice to say the article goes a little over my head. Congratulations all the same!

I'm currently working on a very interesting article regarding the identity of an Oxford student who emailed SPEAK, the animal liberation activists, with this:

Hello my friends,

I will kill a cat for each new post on your website!!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHA (Where your website is www.speakcampaigns.org.uk )

To prove that I am not bluffing, I hit a stray cat on the head with a baseball bat, but it wasn't quite dead, so I put it in an old cage I use for torturing hamsters and threw it around a bit.... Then I took the attatched picture on my mobile phone. * Click to see picture * I was thinking of posting the cats I've killed to you, but what address shall I post them to? Please let me know.

See you on saturday!

Attached to the email, sent early on Friday morning, was a photo of a cat in a state of distress. You can read SPEAK's version of events here (and let's not pretend SPEAK are an entirely blameless organisation when it comes to acts of violence, but that doesn't make the email any better).

I'm well aware who the student was that sent the email, and was all set earlier to provide full details here. But I've been warned off doing so "for security reasons" at the college concerned. I'm waiting to see exactly what those security reasons are before doing anything else, so I'm afraid there's no news for now, but suffice to say the individual involved appears to be disturbingly odd on a number of levels.

I can't get away from the similarity between the e-fit police have issued over the Great Tonbridge Robbery, and the 118 118 team.

Of course if my suspicions are confirmed and the latest adverts are to be believed, the police will have quite a job catching them: they've got an A Team made up entirely of children and a ten-strong choir helping them make good their escape...

Had a parking ticket off Barnet council recently? Then it's your lucky day.

A tribunal's ruled all their parking tickets are invalid over a technicality, explained as follows:

The tickets only stated the date of the parking infringement, not the date on which the ticket was issued. The adjudicator, Timothy Thorne, argued that this was against the law even though [the tickets] are almost always issued while the car is illegally parked.

[source: This Is Local London - 'Council ordered to pay back parking tickets']

And the tribunal agreed with that in the test case of Hugh Moses, from Golders Green, who said: "Barnet Council must be really worried. It would be interesting to know how they are going to deal with the other people that have received tickets."

Indeed it would! I'm reliably informed that parking tickets in Barnet generate a whopping £5,000,000 for the council each year. Now even if we say it's only the last year's tickets that are invalidated, or perhaps tickets more than a year old can't be the subject of claims against the council, that's a lot of money to pay back. In fact it's the council's entire housing budget for this financial year, and around about the budget increase they're seeking for next year.

The plus side for Barnet, of course, is that by no means everyone will now flock to court to get their £40 or whatever back. But one wonders how quickly they'll alter the tickets they're issuing. Strikes me it's free parking in Barnet for the time being...

Dayorama's weekly showbiz round-up now (all of one paragraph at the bottom of a post about Barnet council), and we can exclusively reveal that Jude Law used to live in Lewisham with orange bedroom walls and a black floor. More on that story as we get it, which probably won't be for a while since we're not particularly close to Jude, so you'll just have to make do with that nugget.

And finally today, a Norman Lamont anecdote, because we don't often have those here. A while back, two passers-by (my sources) bumped into Mr Lamont in central London, looking somewhat the worse for wear. Their suspicions were confirmed when he rather boozily enquired of them where he was. At which point one of the pair looked around, pointed at the building next to them and said, "It's the treasury, Norm. Remember? You used to work here."

Two new features are now live on Dayorama!

It's been a long time since I've been able to say that. The site design you're seeing now came into being around June last year, and after that I've only really changed the images that rotate at the top of each page, with maybe the occasional RSS icon change or something.

But today, two brand new pieces of kit: first up, we've got a blogroll.

It's been a long time coming, but there's now a 'Blogroll' option on the menu beneath the Dayorama logo (it's replaced the old 'Gallery' option, which I never, ahem, got round to properly sorting out). If you click that you'll go to a page where we've each supplied a selection of our favourite links, and I'm sure we'll come up with more as we go along.

Second, on the right of the home page you can now find 'Dayorama Prospects', a list of events coming up in our lives that we're likely to mention on here. For example, at the moment you can see there's an auction in Northampton on Friday, along with some other stuff. The idea is you can see what's coming up and then come back later on to find out what we had to say. We might drop some major news, political and sporting events in there as well, as reminders for both you and us, and as a hint we'll be covering them here. If you click any of the entries you'll be taken to a full list of what's coming up.

That second gadget's provided for free by 30boxes.com, an ingenious online calendar application. You can sign up for one yourself if you want. The idea is you've got one big box in which to enter all your events - just type the date, what's going on, any times involved and anything else you want, and it'll work out what the hell you mean. It's not perfect at getting it right yet, but it's doing pretty well.

What really impressed me, though, was the fact that I could build one of those boxes into my Google toolbar. The little Google search box above my main browser screen can now transform, with one click, into a 30Boxes entry form, so I can quickly write calendar entries into it and then hit return - hey presto, it's on our calendar. That's extremely powerful functionality. 30Boxes therefore comes highly recommended from me!

Our Curryspondent's been in touch about his revelation that Ken Livingstone isn't the only politician with a grudge against a London media organisation. Nope, we can exclusively reveal that of all people it's Milky Whiskers MP, formerly known as George Galloway, with an axe to grind against BBC London.

We know this because our Curryspondent went along to Kitten Towers yesterday to grab a quick interview about, well, curry in his constituency. Mr Whiskers' public relations officer was of the opinion he'd be up for it, but alas on arrival, that wasn't the case. Our Curryspondent said he was from BBC London and this seemed to put the cat out, so to speak. It turns out that according to George there's some form of ongoing dispute between the two parties, and Galloway, normally so difficult to actually shut up, won't say a word on 94.9FM.

One wonders if it might be over the insults traded between Whiskers and Oona King during a debate arranged by BBC London last year, as recorded in this (oddly bipartisan) Respect report:

BBC London's political editor Tim Donovan, who was chairing the debate, asked if he thought it "odd" or "misguided" that he should be attempting to unseat one of the few black women in parliament.

Clearly between then and now BBC London and Whiskers have gone their separate ways.

Anyway our Curryspondent went back this morning offering to do the interview for a different BBC station, but nothing doing, only a very curt 'no' from Mr Whiskers, famed for his kitty impression at the feet of Rula Lenska. It's almost as if he's suspicious of the press these days.

I'm not alone!

For years I've battled on in my faith, ignoring the many detractors or those who simply had nothing to say, and now it's all paid off.

Someone else loves Five Star.

My friend Alice, off the LCC course, has not only heard of them (usually an achievement in itself) but knows the lyrics! We were singing 'Rain or Shine' together in Elephant and Castle earlier. It was a heavenly moment. This hasn't happened before and isn't likely to ever again.

She also fancies Romford's finest, Stedman Pearson, one of the five members of the Pearson family who made up Five Star in the mid-80s. "A British version of The Jacksons", no less, according to their Wikipedia entry.

1986 and 1987 were Five Star's zenith, which you'd think might rule me out of their fan club, aged between one and three as I was. But no. They released five singles in 1986 alone, reaching the heights of numbers two and three in the UK chart. A video of my toddler self dancing to one of those hits exists somewhere, so I know I already liked them then, when they actually were quite famous. Always in when the bandwagon's barely rolling, me, Kaiser Chiefs style.

Less thrilling is the revelation that their Greatest Hits album, my Five Star bible and a collection I'm now listening to on my laptop, reached just number 53 on the album chart in 1989. How the mighty fell! But they'll always be remembered, by me and Alice.

a) A milk float. When did you last see a milk float in central London?

b) A camper van driving down Oxford St. I'm sure that must be illegal.

I know a few people who will be genuinely thrilled to discover that MC Hammer has a weblog.

Thanks for that little nugget go to our erstwhile friends Bloggers' Blog, though for some inexplicable reason they failed to mention OJ's contributions in their round-up of Olympic blogging.

Elsewhere in the news, the 'great Tonbridge bank robbery' now makes sense. They've found the van near Ashford, just a short way down from the Kent Showground. I'd been wondering how the Kent D of E group was going to pay for last weekend's extravaganza...

The Animal Liberation Front are apparently going to attack anyone with any connection to Oxford University, which I'd imagine will become quite a drain on funding and manpower for the group; I wonder if, as a one-time paid-up member of the Vegan Society, VIVA and PETA, I'm on the hit list. Strikes me they may want to do a little background research before sending the heavies round to leap on top of me and beat me into submission.

Meanwhile their good friends Pro-Test are all over the telly this morning, marking the earliest point an Oxford student has ever woken up on a Saturday. Mr Tom Holder from Pembroke College made an appearance on the news, so being a nosey sod I went on Facebook and found his profile (everyone has one now, no wonder certain folk wrapped from head to toe in tinfoil claim it's a big CIA conspiracy to get all our details in one place).

And the boy seems practically identical to me with one minor exception. He plays the drums, likes Pink Floyd, enjoyed the film Hotel Rwanda, has an Eddie Izzard quote on there, and is a friend-of-a-friend of four friends of mine (as in me, my friend, their friend, Tom). But he likes to poke animal rights extremists in the face with sticks, figuratively speaking at least, and I really don't.

This probably makes him far more upstanding and righteous than I in the minds of a section of society, but I adhere to the basic sentiment that the protesters outside the Oxford labs are unlikely to be reasoned with on the ground. Or indeed anywhere else. Setting up a separate protest and going over to say hi is tantamount to getting a vivid red flag, then wandering over to a bull who's just lost a winning lottery ticket, and waving it vigorously. Yes of course they've got every right to mount a protest (anti-protest? Pro-Test anti-protest protest? Protest cubed?), I just think it's asking for trouble rather than making a serious point or any real headway. This is not going to change anything for the better, it's going to antagonise an already unstable group of people.

(I don't think the animal rights protest outside the lab is going to make any real headway either, but two pointless activities do not a point make.)

Finally, Londonist is trying a little too hard with its post on a new Leonardo Da Vinci exhibition. And speaking of Da Vinci, Dan Brown, author of a little-known book mentioning the name, will be in the High Court in London next week in a case to do with it. I might see if I can find out where and when and get down there. Obviously I'll have to be quick about it to beat the absolute media scrum that will descend. Still, knowing the luck of people in the same room as Evening Standard journalists, he'll probably have the misfortune to accuse a Protestant of acting like an Opus Dei member on his way out...

Yesterday evening I got a taxi back to my flat from Mile End. It was only about 8pm but it was dark, cold and I didn't fancy walking back on my own. I telephoned the local taxi company I use and as usual they asked me my name and what colour jacket I was wearing. Usually they then tell me what the vehicle type/colour will be. Yesterday however, the woman said that I would receive a text when the taxi arrived. Sure enough I received a text detailing the time, the location, the car and its registration. The driver addressed me by my first name. I felt secure. I knew it was the right car, and he knew where he was taking me. Now if that isn't about making the world a safer place, I don't know what is.

Ken, you plonker. All concentration camp, no concentration (and not really camp either, inviting homophobic clerics for tea and all that). Mr Livingstone's been suspended for a month over all that palaver about calling a Jewish reporter a concentration camp guard.

Initially I'd thought Ken hard done by to even be held to account over this, but admittedly it took til today for me to realise he went ahead with that little aside having already been told the reporter was Jewish, which is a little less clever. However, Jon Snow is one of many people mildly concerned that three unelected officials can unceremoniously dump his mayority into touch for a month. From the Channel 4 News presenter's daily Snowmail update:

I can't think of many democracies in which a man democratically elected can be taken out of office however temporarily without either consulting the people or at least, the law. It seems hard to believe that this decision is going to be allowed to stand.

Speaking of controversial politicians and ongoing feuds with London media institutions, we might have one of our own by this time tomorrow. It's a joint Dayorama/LCC operation. More when we get it from our Curry Correspondent (all shall be revealed).

* Alternative titles: Build The Oxford Animal Lab; Spank My Monkey; etc. etc.

This is one of those rare things for a historian: the chance to make a prediction about the future. Tomorrow, in Oxford, there will be two demonstrations. The first is organised by SPEAK, who are an anti-animal testing organisation. Over the last eighteen months, they have been protesting about the construction of a new building in the University's science park that will consolidate all the animal testing that is currently done in Oxford. They are regularly to be found near the American Institute (an oasis of liberal arts in a mass of chemistry buildings in the science park), and have a particularly catchy shout of "Stop the Oxford Animal Lab." Typing it doesn't really do the cadence justice. To varying degrees (depending on who you believe), SPEAK is associated/has been infiltrated by the ALF. ALF - the Animal Liberation Front - are a militant organisation who have burnt down a number of college boathouses, violently threatend the architects involved with the project, and recently stated that anyone involved with the University in any way is a legitimate target. It is because of the ALF that the project has been delayed by some eighteen months so far, and that the Government has become the ultimate underwriter of the project. It is also why all the builders contracted to the site wear balaclavas to hide their faces.

The second demonstration is organised by Pro-Test, a group that is in favour of the Oxford Lab, and against the actions of the ALF. From 11.30 to 1.30 tomorrow, they will be marching from Broad Street, up to the science park, and back again. It turns out that the instigator of Pro-Test is a 16 year old boy from Swindon on a gap year between GCSEs and A-Levels. Since then, however, the cause has been taken up by many in the Oxford community. And the media links here mean that I counted reports on tomorrow's demonstration in all of today's broadsheets.

Some are predicting that up to 1000 students will march with Pro-Test, as some will also march with SPEAK. All I ask is that it stays peaceful. I doubt that Pro-Test will have that many people turn up. I, for instance, will actually be in London, dining with Ollie and Amy and finally exchanging gifts. But if they do, then it's entirely possible that all hell will break loose. Not least because there's also an English Faculty Open Day happening as well in the same area. Colleges as a matter of course are gated during these demonstrations. But one thing I'm almost certain of - it'll be on the front page of the Sunday Times. Check back in a couple of days to see if I'm right...

Hmm. Following my post about the Irving trial a few days ago, I've been wondering what exactly I should write. Much has been fluently expressed about the situation elsewhere in the press and the blogosphere, so I shall just add my own scattered thoughts, rather than synthesise the whole thing.

David Irving is a bad historian. He misrepresented his own sources, and failed to account for others that were readily available. There is a lot to be said for being outside the mainstream academy, but there is also a limit which I think Irving crossed, whereupon he became a posterchild for forces that used history for their own ends. Of course, some twenty years ago, Irving was widely regarded as a good historian. That's the way these things go. It's important to remember that he went to prison not solely because he is a bad historian. If there were punishments for bad history, I should imagine that there would be many - not least in Oxford - who would be afraid.

Irving was punished under Austrian Holocaust denial laws. So the real issue, and I don't think this got enough space in the commentaries, is whether as a society we should be willing to imprison people for making statements that are so offensive that we classify them as criminal. After discussing the matter with some friends, there was a clear argument that Austria (in this case, though it goes for the other countries with similar laws) is showing a lack of maturity as a nation. 60 years, and almost three generations on, there is hardly anyone who does not appreciate what happened during World War II. More importantly, I don't think there's any reason to think that by letting Irving's speeches go unpunished, Austrians - or Europeans - are implicitly in agreement with them. Ever since the Lipstadt trial, Irving has been widely discredited in mainstream society, and those who favour his beliefs are a minority for whom Irving is only one idol. That to me is a sign that society has done a pretty good job of self regulation in this matter. It goes back to that oldest of choices - would you rather be too free and suffer some negatives, or unfree and miss out on the positives? Freedom always wins. And part of being a historian, of course, is going back to the sources yourself if you disagree with the conclusion of someone else. As much as it is true of postgrad historians, for example, it is also true of everyone else - always think for yourself.

And so here's another thought. In light of the current climate, could Irving's writings ever be construed as "glorifying" holocaust denial? It is a shame the debate concluded before the trial started.

Bad news, I'm afraid. In a remarkable turn of events, it was actually quite mild overnight, and consequently there was no ice or snow this morning. As a fellow competitor said, "It's been a disappointing luge season so far." We continue to hope for the appropriate conditions - the cameras are waiting.

I just popped some flowers in a vase. Some were roses and therefore there were thorns. One punctured my finger. Blood EVERYWHERE! Ouch.

I've not been to many exhibitions in my life. I can remember going to the NEC once when I was a lot younger, and I've been to Earl's Court for plenty of concerts, but not proper exhibitions. So going to Ecobuild was quite interesting.

Three hours later, having waited over an hour for my last interviewee to turn up, it was less so. Let's be honest, I'm not much of an architect, and I think that was the fatal flaw in the day's events. It was pleasant enough for an hour or so, milling around the exhibits and interviewing a few people involved with the energy industry, but after that it dragged. That's despite having a swanky press badge attached to my coat, allowing me to indulge in leering at other people's badges, confident that at least I looked like I had a purpose. The managing editor (online) of Architects' Journal and a member of the Isle of Wight Council were just two of the distinguished guests to wander past.

Anyway, photos ought to liven up this dull account a bit. I had real trouble getting sound effects for my energy review piece at the exhibition, resorting in the end to the sound of rain hitting a solar panel outdoors - this one had the good fortune to be inside:

In fact, between the solar panel and this fountain and garden, the entrance to the exhibition was pretty top notch:

But that was nothing compared to some of the exhibits. This being the Ecobuild exhibition, the aim of the game for most of the exhibitors took the form of new housing concepts, be that heating, decoration, structure, design or planning. And some of those exhibitors wanted nothing more than to build their proposal in front of your very eyes. I give you the strawbale house, which does exactly what it says on the tin:

See, you think you've seen it all now. Afraid not. Next door but one from the house of straw, we have...

Yes, a house of hemp! The exhibitors took pains to stress that it was all manufactured legally...

I was going to stop there, but I've just been reminded of something. A certain individual I know uses the word 'chillax' in conversation. It's a hybrid of chill and relax, in case you couldn't tell, and it's one of the single most annoying sounds known to mankind, along with the sound of sniffing, the sound of babies crying, and the sound of James Blunt (hackneyed but true). This is an open letter to that individual, mentioning no Rachels - stop it. Otherwise I'm going to write you an online dating profile like I've already written someone else's...

It snowed this morning in Oxford, and spent the rest of day raining. The result is that all floors and pavements are soaking wet and, if tonight is anything like last night, they will be iced over tomorrow. In that spirit, it will be time for some homemade Olympic sports. First up will be converting the ramp that is now in Grove Quad into a luge/bobsled track. Pictures tomorrow, if we get things sorted...

Snow! How exciting. London is now even colder than Culham station yesterday. The snow is forecast to become sleet at around about the moment I go outside.

It never snows but it pours for Prince Charles, roundly lambasted by everyone except the Telegraph (quel surprise) this morning for his diaries and what not. The Mirror:

The truth is Prince Charles was born into a privileged position with a public platform of which ordinary people can only dream. He is supposed to be above politics. That includes party politics. Harking back to the days of empire or championing hunting with hounds is an intrusion when silence would serve the monarchy better.

[source: The Mirror - 'An abuse of privilege']

The Guardian:

Judging by his 1997 Hong Kong diary, released in court yesterday, the prince initially took to Tony Blair (a fact that the Mail on Sunday unaccountably chose to omit from its coverage). But even in 1997, the prince was beginning to rail against Labour for "being in such a hurry". Now put that, and the intervening years of very public hand-wringing, together with January's comments from the prince's office, praising David Cameron's first month in office as "amazing"; or with the Sunday Telegraph's claim that "senior officials at Clarence House are making no secret of their admiration for the youthful new Tory leader"; or with another report this month that the prince and Mr Cameron have had "a meeting of minds" in which "you couldn't put a wafer between them on most of the big issues". Some of these reports may just be Telegraph mischief. But the prince is a fool to allow this issue to fester.

[source: The Guardian - 'Time for a change']

And the Telegraph, Boris Johnson at the despatch box:

One after another, the self-interested editors of our media organisations line up to accuse him of being a headline seeker. What has prompted this orgy of abuse? Has he said that government ministers should not be driving 6-litre Jaguars? Has he complained about the destruction of the Green Belt? No: it is only when you read the papers quite carefully that you discover that the Prince has not said anything new at all. On the contrary, it turns out that the Mail has illicitly obtained his private diaries, his private diaries, and has splashed them over several pages, including some quite fruity stuff about the handover of Hong Kong.

[source: The Telegraph - 'Go on Charles: babble, rage, and ignore the treacherous toads']

Now Boris wins this debate through sheer force of being Boris Johnson, but he does actually have a point too, one I was going to make last night before I decided the media hadn't really had a go at Charles. Now they have, so I'm making it. You can't go nicking someone's diary, publish extracts, then turn around and accuse the individual concerned of meddling with politics and publicising his own causes. Granted Charles does occasionally speak up quite forcefully, but rarely with a view we wouldn't expect him to have. If the Pope can say what he likes, I don't see why Charles can't (let's face it newspaper editors get a column to themselves each morning, and I trust their judgement as much if not less than I trust that of Charles). Even the Guardian admits the published extracts in the Mail on Sunday carefully avoided the bit about Charles initially taking a shine to Tony Blair - if the media is so happy to pin its agenda blatently to its front cover, it is hypocritical to accuse Charles, far less influential than they, of doing the same.

Until last night I had forgotten that the above expression existed. I hadn't used it or heard it in such a long time and had neglected to remember how good it was! However, it has that element of passion about it that made me want to know where the expression/phrase/idiom came from. After a little bit of googling, it would appear that the phrase originated at the beginning of the twentieth century. Apparently the earliest examples relate to cattle ranching: cattle would be driven to rail heads in NW America. In 1939 a book was published by Paul Wellman with the title Trampling Herd: the Story of the Cattle Range in America it was stated, "In spite of hell and high water is a legacy of the cattle trail when the cowboys drove their horn-spiked masses of longhorns through high water at every river and continuous hell between.". So there we go.

Thanks to a Dayorama reader's Mum and the Times, I went to dinner last night for £5. It was a lovely evening. Four friends from Oxford, two of which I hadn't seen since June. The other (the Dayorama reader) I had seen in January (Sir John Soane Museum accomplice), but it seemed ages and ages away. It was lovely to catch up with them all. A few observations:

a) It's wonderful how four people, who lead completely different lives in London and haven't seen each other for a while, can all sit down and have a very enjoyable dinner where it feels like we have been having dinner in the same manner each week for the past four years.
b) Eating out for £5 is a wonderful idea... but I think it puts you off a restaurant, rather than endears you towards it. You get crap service, and naturally very unstimulating menu. But, tasty food all the same... and two courses for £5.
c) When you have grown up with a Mother like mine (bless her), you have never been able to understand why her little food fads have always left the home and entered eating out e.g. she will never buy a packeted chicken sandwich on the basis that you don't know where the chicken is from (battery hen etc). You've mocked her in the past. But what is inevitable? Every woman turns into her Mother. And what am I doing? I'm turning into my Mother. I wish I was actually, I'd lose about 3 stone. Anyway, for starter I had some roasted pepper (they weren't roasted, they were actually quite hard, but anyway) thing with tomatoes in the middle. But when I came to eat it, I couldn't touch the tomatoes. Why? Because I currently have a fad about organic tomatoes and don't think that I want to eat un-organic tomatoes because they are probably pumping goodness knows what into them. So I didn't eat the tomatoes. Similarly, in a restaurant the other month with my Uncle I asked the waiter if the salmon was organic before ordering. I detest un-organic salmon in all its bright pinkness. Help. I am my Mother.
d) I think I'm an alcoholic. Well, that's going a little far. I have a high alcohol tolerance. We had two bottles of wine between the four of us. So, 3ish glasses each. Did it touch the sides? No. Was I tipsy? No. Was I absolutely fine getting home? Absolutely. Other people? Feeling tipsy. There's a tolerance thing going on there, probably due to regular alcohol consumption. Oh well.
e) When women get together, amongst other things they discuss: men, men and men; s*x (I've put the asterisk as I'm not getting any more complaints from Ollie for dragging undesirable search strings to Dayorama); v*irginity; periods; circumcision; breast enlargements/reductions; dieting; men, men and men. It's a recipe for disaster... but a very fun evening!!
f) Actually with one bottle of wine + tip, the meal cost £15. There was then the share of another. Then £8 on a taxi home from the tube (an expense I will afford on the grounds of safety, even if not strictly necessary). That's £25+ easily. It makes you realise how good value that is, compared to a normal meal out!
g) Something totally irrelevant to this meal, but instead related to last weekend when Ollie came to Kent. Dialogue between Ollie and my Mum.
My Mum: Ollie, would you like anything to eat or drink (it was around lunch time)
Ollie: No thanks, I've had lunch
My Mum: OK. A Boots Meal Deal? What did you have in it?
Ollie: **Stumbles over what to say and goes bright red, including the ears**. How did you guess?
Amy: Because Ollie, you always have meal deals!
We then discussed which Boots in Victoria he purchased it from and how many points he managed to collect. Wonderful!

Goodness me, what a day. You know a day will not go down in your annals as the best of times when you get to see far more toilets than would routinely be the case. This has been such a day. I don't know what I ate that's done it, but since around about yesterday lunchtime I've been a slave to the public loo. Airport hotel, airport hotel again many times throughout the night, Virgin train back down south, Oxford station, and finally Victoria station. All remarkably nice toilets given my usual preconceptions about public facilities, I must say, although my view may be coloured by the sheer relief at finding each one (Victoria was the best 20p I've parted with in a long, long time).

Anyway, you probably didn't need to know that. Suffice to say I'm feeling a little better than around midnight last night, when I was talking to Amy J on MSN messenger. Suddenly I started shivering uncontrollably, and I mean shivering. I've never known anything like it, I could not physically stop myself for a good ten or fifteen minutes, my entire body convulsing. Since I was in mid-conversation on MSN, I had to slowly but surely eke out a message to Amy to explain why I was so quiet and why I was going offline. This being me, the message had to include no typos, which becomes tricky when one's hands are moving of their own accord, so it took a good three or four minutes to painfully type one sentence. I then buried myself under the covers and shivered myself to what I thought would be a decent sleep. Alas, alas.

Still, no rest for the squitted, and I had to interview the man in charge of nuclear fusion research in the UK this afternoon. He's based at Culham, where I'm reliably informed Amy K's dad used to work. I can now exclusively reveal that Culham is the single most desolate train station I've visited in my life. I've been on some quiet platforms in my time, notably Didcot Parkway at midnight, but Culham wins hands down. Observe:

Okay, that last one isn't Culham station, it's Amy J wearing a St Hugh's College Women's FC top in an ice cream shop in Oxford, where I met her this afternoon. But I needed something to put there, and we'll come back to her in a minute anyway. In the mean time, Culham - look at it. Not a soul on either platform and it was blowing an absolute gale, I swear the windchill factor was minus fifty degrees. Only the equally barren voice of the First Great Western Link announcement lady for company. Still, thank god I got back to the platform for 3pm, otherwise it was a two hour wait until the next train. Not the best served station in the country either!

So, Amy J, yes. A week ago the Mail on Sunday published an article about her dad (a member of the House of Lords, no less) which was, shall we say, less than complimentary. It involved a house in Botswana and while not repeating the allegations, which didn't appear as serious as the Mail were making out, suffice to say I'm told the no-win, no-fee lawyers are interested - not least because they included a photo of the house which seems to identify it quite clearly, right down to the house number, which neither Amy nor I are sure is a legally sound thing to do. Journalists, eh...

Ah, one more thing before I go. No, I tell a lie, three things. First, my dad's never used a cashpoint in his life. I discovered this yesterday when he looked at one in the hotel and read the 'Insert Card' sign. He asked me if that meant insert your hotel keycard. No, no, it doesn't mean that. Wonders will never cease.

Secondly, I've always fervently proclaimed my antipathy towards Apple, declaring that I wll never buy any of their products. And indeed that remains the case, but I never ruled out getting an Apple product for free as part of a subscription deal. I've signed up to Audible.co.uk, who provide audio books for download, and they sent me a free ipod shuffle as part of the deal. It looks very light and easy to use, and with none of my cash going directly into the palms of greasy Apple executives.

And finally, here I am traipsing round the country trying to find out about the energy crisis this country may or may not be in, when it turns out all we need to do is switch our computers off. At least once we all get the chance to order quantum computers off PC World, that is. It turns out at least one quantum computer being tested at the moment has done a decent job of its work while technically not switched on. For those well up on their quantum theory, the New Scientist reports:

The idea behind the feat, first proposed in 1998, is to put a quantum computer into a "superposition", a state in which it is both running and not running. It is as if you asked Schrödinger's cat to hit "Run".

Read more here, and have a lovely evening.

Apparently. On the 8th day, do you think that God sat down and thought, "what shall I do next"? I've created the night and day, the water, the dry land, the animals, the plants and the people. I know, I'll create a city out of biscuits. No, I don't think he did. But there are bible stories about the wise man building his house on the rocks and things, aren't there? It doesn't say anything about whether it would be wise to build a city out of biscuits though. Anyway, I don't know why I have gone off on such a tangent. This chap, Song Dong, creates cities from biscuits. I saw a clip on "This Morning", this afternoon (yes, I turned it on at 12.15pm), and there was Song proudly presenting his biscuit city. I've a good mind to trot along to Selfridges and see the real thing for myself. I might, but I've decided to give up sweets and pastries for Lent (I may change this idea)- so I'd have to go before next Weds as it could be too tempting, and also it's too cold right now to go anywhere. Just out of interest, why is Selfridges called Selfridges? Was there a Mr Selfridge, or did they begin my selling-fridges? I've looked on their website but the "flash media" element is rather flashy and confusing. Those who know me should have worked out precisely what mood I am in by now...! Off to the gym to burn off excess energy...

Sat here in the lobby of Bewley's Hotel near Manchester Airport, there's probably just time to regurgitate some interesting stories from today whilst I wait for my dad and friends to turn up.

The Social Affairs Unit, hot on the heels of its Pro-Test interview (*spit*), has come up with an article that deconstructs Kaiser Chiefs lyrics (there I go, dropping in some buzzwords for Google, as if we need it right now when Sol Campbell's breaking our backs, so to speak). Harry Phibbs, 'a journalist' no less, searches for the deeper political tensions underpinning their songs, and by thunder, they're all anti-government. There's a turn up for the books!

A quick headline I couldn't resist: 'Did early humans socialise to avoid getting eaten?' It is nice to know that in the days when I was fundamentally an antisocial creature, I was in fact simply allowing a few million years of gut instinct to take over, wisely deciding that school discos may involve cannibalism.

Nick Robinson's Newslog continues to prove the best reading I know online. His entire article on David Miliband is worth your time, but the closing paragraph appealed to me most:

I told you that nothing would happen whilst I was away. Apart from a ban on smoking in all public places; a vote which will have the effect of forcing people to carry ID cards; a huge defeat for Labour in a by-election; the banning of glorification of terror; the birth of a new Cameron and of the "dual Premiership" it was quiet enough and just the right time to abandon Westminster.

It's alright Nick, I looked after it for you. Read the rest of the article here.

Finally, naughty Chris Moyles, swearing on national radio! Although it's good to see him follow the pristine example of Micah Richards, the Manchester City defender who kept us in the FA Cup with a late, late goal on Sunday night, then opened his post-match interview - live on the BBC well before the watershed - with 'fucking hell, that was brilliant'. Good morning Mr Ofcom, welcome to BBC Towers, how lovely to see you again...

Well, I sincerely doubt that Ken Livingstone actually reads Dayorama, but remember my rant here about people eating on the tube? Well, I saw a sign on the tube today requesting that passengers don't eat smelly food. Yay. However, they also have signs requesting people not to have personal stereos too loud... and considering Ollie's post, it seems no one takes any notice. At least the sign is a thought in the right direction.

Trains. Wonderful creations. I'm sat on one now writing this, although by the time you're reading it I'll hopefully have disembarked (if you're reading this five years from now, I would certainly expect that to be the case, delayed though trains often are).

People. Wonderful creations. I'm sat on one now- no, wait, I'm not, but they're still pretty special. They do all sorts of stuff, like build trains for example, write books, play football, invent cures for diseases, or make music.

People on trains. Nightmare. Somehow, for more people than you might expect, what might be considered basic rules of engagement on a train are quite spectacularly bypassed.

For example, this morning I got on the 08:43 service from Streatham Common to London Victoria (delayed by two minutes, par for the course). I walked right the way down the platform so that I boarded the very first coach of the eight that hoved into view. It was rammed, so I found myself shoved up against the head of a woman whose hair had funny little white spots all over it, very reminiscent of nits. Time will tell on that one.

So people on trains are a bad idea in the first place because there are too many of them, all sat in seats that I would ideally be occupying, some of them harbouring parasites.

Then we immediately encounter the second reason why people on trains should be consigned to the waste bin and train designers sent back to the drawing board, to come up with a way of building trains so that I, and I alone, am allowed on them. People with MP3 players. No. Bloody hell, no! A rarity indeed is the owner of an MP3 player who can keep the thing at a volume charitable to those around them, and I include myself in this rant - but remember, the train is there for me, dammit, and not the gentleman sat three seats away from Nit Woman, who was listening to something involving a mouth organ, quite possibly Bruce Springsteen. The very fact that I can hazard an educated guess at what a man six feet away was listening to in his headphones is a clear indication that all is not right with the world when people are put on trains.

Note, at this stage, that his kind are by no means the worst offenders. If there were an Audible Nuisance category in the great Crufts of Crappy Commuters, it would be won by the chavvy teenagers who get on in little gangs and play music through the chuffing speakerphone on their MP3 mobile. There they sit, chatting away or trying to look cool in time to the music (synchronised cool, coming soon to an Olympics near you, if we get the stadium for it built in time, which we won't), intimidating the life out of everyone around them and generally making life a misery.

One day, when I particularly feel like dying a slow and agonising death at the end of a twelve inch blade, I will encounter a group of these individuals doing this very thing on a train, and I will make a stand. I will take out my own MP3 phone and select something a little more cultured: perhaps something classical, or Billy Joel or even bloody Coldplay for god's sake. And I'll play it on speakerphone over the top of their music. See how they like that. You'll know when I've tried this because it'll be all over the papers the following day when they find the body.

I've got one more hypothetical trick up my sleeve: this one's for the Audible Nuisance Class contender we've already mentioned, the bloke sat there blissfully unaware that his earphones are serenading an entire carriage. This is more common on the tube, where people turn the volume up in the noisy tunnels and then end up deafening themselves and the rest of us when the trains reach a halt in stations (or, more often than not, in the middle of the tunnel for half an hour).

My trick involves getting two or three more friends to come along for the ride, then finding one of these peculiar bastards (earphone offenders, not my friends) and preying on them. We'll wait until we've all picked up the rhythm of what they're listening to, and then we'll begin to dance. Usually it's the techno/d'n'b stuff that's easiest to pick up, so chances are we'll be going at it like we're at a rave. In the middle of the carriage, slowly rotating around the offender in question. I would imagine it wouldn't take long for the point to be made. If I get my hands on a camera crew during TV training next term, this is most definitely going to get a green light.

Right, where were we. Ah yes, why people should not be allowed anywhere near trains. The train I'm on now goes from London Euston to Manchester Piccadilly, and I've got the shittiest seat in known history - worse, even, than Cuthbert's.* It's between two windows, so as the scenery flashes past I can see precisely nothing. For some reason I've become incredibly claustrophobic sat here, possibly because the lack of a window is interfering with my internet access, and frankly if I had Seasonal Affected Disorder my life right now would be a profound misery.

The reason I am sat in this seat is that smug bastards, including the man two rows away wearing a grey jumper who looks like Hitler crossed with Gary Neville, had reserved the rest, leaving me no choice. Except half the people who reserved seats never bothered to turn up for them (probably sat elsewhere on the train) so a load of latecomers have got lovely seats with nice big windows that I intentionally avoided, fearing a confrontation with Gary Hitler and his kind. If none of these people had ever been allowed near a train, this would not have been an issue.

So there we have it. Trains and people are fundamentally clever inventions, but like hamsters and vacuum cleaners, they should never cross paths. Except me. I am the exception that proves the rule.

* Cuthbert was a monk, and consequently a bishop, who lived on the island of Lindisfarne for a time in the seventh century. His seat was a plank of wood stretched between the island and a rocky outcrop, looking down into the choppy seas below. Cuthbert would edge himself out until positioned over a hole in the plank, and from there would do his daily business, so to speak.

Time for a round-up since I've not had time to pull my thoughts together for a while - starting with Amy's D of E bash in Kent on Saturday night.

The evening was dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the Duke of Edinburgh's award, and was held at the Kent Showground in a rather large building which was not, thankfully, the marquee we had been dreading it would be on a particularly chilly night. I got over my initial exasperation at the flappy things that pass for a collar on dress shirts - mine wouldn't sit down properly like everyone else's, and it was messing with the bow tie - and enjoyed a lovely evening in the company of fine individuals and food.

Two of Amy's closest acquaintances got awards for their service to D of E, something she'll no doubt get in half a century's time judging by the conversation I had with two of her young charges, one of whom having been involved in an unforgettable incident involving illegal immigrants and a threat to eat the entire D of E party.

There was a laser light show to finish the evening, using one of the clever green lasers put to good use by The Australian Pink Floyd band in Oxford last year. I want one!

Sunday was the gig in Oxford, which went pretty well all things considered, even if the drum kit did fall apart on me early on. It was another battle of the bands and, indeed, another battle of the bands we didn't win, but it's always great to be playing, especially when it seems increasingly likely the band is breathing its last. We'll be going our separate ways this summer when the other three leave Oxford, so who knows what will happen, but I'm not convinced it'll be possible to keep going.

One person who didn't turn up to the gig was other Amy, an Oxford student (and therefore someone who had to travel considerably less far than my own mother, who came all the way from Somerset) who found herself otherwise engaged. In retaliation I'm therefore going to set aside this paragraph for a little ritual humiliation. Other Amy took the time instead to launch a miniature witch-hunt into the sexuality of a good friend of hers, and then succeeded once again in not telling the person she loves that she wants to go out with them. This saga has been running on for a number of weeks if not months now, and infuriatingly she comes within a whisker of asking this unwitting individual out time and time again, only to somehow blow it. I've had a friend like her before, called Simon (whose voice intriguingly sounds exactly like Amy's, but slightly deeper), who refused point blank to ask out a girl he liked back in Somerset. No matter how much badminton they played together, nothing doing. I despair. Take a chance! Roll the dice! At least get an answer, one way or the other. Rant over... for now.

Onwards, and it's a busy week ahead with more people to speak to. This week I'll hopefully be hearing from Dr Kevin Anderson at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change in Manchester, who's pencilled in for 2pm tomorrow before I head off to the Hall of Fame gala dinner at Manchester City FC (second outing for the black tie in four days, after two years of mothballs). Dr Anderson wrote a very good piece on the BBC News site a month ago on the UK's energy crisis, and I'll be following up on that with him.

Then back down to Culham, near Oxford, on Wednesday to interview Chris Llewellyn Smith, the man in charge of Britain's nuclear fusion research. Fusion isn't like the nuclear we use now, it's a futuristic, somewhat enigmatic technology that we're told will be mightily powerful and very safe. Alas, it's half a century away at least, assuming they can get it to work (they're building a new test facility in France to find out, I believe). I'll be asking Chris what the odds are that this will sort out our energy problems. I expect the answer is 'slim', for now. It's all very exciting because in order to get onto the Culham site I need my passport to prove my ID - access all areas, this journalism lark, I tell you.

On Thursday it's off to the EcoBuild exhibition at Earl's Court, home to a vast array of household renewable energy solutions. At 2pm I'll be speaking to both Gareth Ellis of the Solar Trade Association about how we harness the potential of the sun to power our homes, and then to Mari Martiskainen from the British Wind Energy Association. She's their Small Wind Officer, which I think is a great title, and she'll be setting out the conclusions she'd like to see the UK energy review reach. I'll also be asking both of them if the different forms of renewable energy are happy being lumped together in an age-old 'nature versus nuclear' debate, or if they're actually competitive in their own right - after all, if you think wind power is better than solar power and you're trying to capture the same market, why would you want consumers identifying the two of you as one rather vague whole?

Finally, a quick look at a couple of news stories I've seen. Unlikely Headline of the Week award to This Is Local London for 'End Illegal Treaty And Save Babar', which refers to terror suspect Babar Ahmad and not, as first thought, the loveable elephant king of same name. 'Man Killed Landlord With Crossbow' also caught the eye, and lodged itself in it, as did this Social Affairs Unit article on Pro-Test, the pro-animal-testing group formed by an Oxford student. Except in this case that means a student from the Oxford area, as in a 16 year old from Swindon, and not a student at Oxford University, which is what most national newspapers assumed when they reported it. Reading the article the individual concerned seems unduly preoccupied with ensuring he gets media coverage, which is a shame, because these things should be done out of genuine belief and not a desire for self-promotion; the media would have come flocking anyway.

David Irving, Holocaust denier, has been sentenced to 3 years in an Austrian jail. I'll just put this up for now, because I think this deserves a serious post and I need some time to put my thoughts together. I also have a historiography seminar tomorrow, and I'm sure there will be some strong views there too. Suffice to say, this is huge.

You see, this is what makes us British. Incredible. I wish I had as much passion as some of these people to campaign for the things I care most about.

Naturally I've been following the spread of bird flu - haven't most people? However, until the government issues any specific health warnings, I'm not going to do change my habits. Admittedly I don't think I'd go to a Bird Sanctuary anytime soon (and wouldn't anyway since the last time: went with a group of my Mum's school kids - about 80 of them aged 4-7 or something... I had about 5 in my care for the day who my Mum promised me were "sweet and lovely" etc... yeah, right... one of them was scared of birds and I had to drag this poor screaming girl all around a bird farm all day... we had to walk through loose geese and chickens... nightmare... I will never work with children or animals and it has put me off bird farms for life... ) and I will continue to buy organic eggs and poultry. I was therefore rather surprised to see a selection of books in WHSmith with titles such as Beat the Flu: How to Stay Healthy Through the Coming Bird Flu Pandemic. Just pop "bird flu" into an Amazon search to see what I mean. Should we be reading this? Is this scaremongering? Is this an easy way to make a bit of money? Or is it sensible? The questions remains.

One old lady chose the morning of last year's London bombings (round one) to die in an unbelievably horrific fashion:

The injuries sustained by Hilda Reinhart were so severe she had to be identified by her Nectar card, jewellery and CCTV footage, Westminster Coroners Court heard last Thursday.

Miss Reinhart of Fulwood Walk, West Hill, was attempting to cross Buckhold Road in Wandsworth at 9.55am on July 7 when she was run over by an articulated lorry, a second lorry and a small van.

The court heard how Miss Reinhart's brain and organs were strewn across the road in a statement from a London Ambulance Service paramedic.

[source: This Is Local London - 'Woman, 86, run over by two lorries and a van']

Apparently the lorry drivers knew nothing of the incident, since Miss Reinhart had failed to make sufficient impact on the vehicles for them to realise they'd hit something.

On a happier note there'll be a full report on last night's Duke of Edinburgh's award bash in Kent, with our very own Miss Amy Kennedy, from me in the near future (and possibly from her), not to mention something on tonight's Idiotchild gig in Oxford.

Up til now, the audio I've put up on here has usually been in the shape of extended interviews with people - just me and them, having what amounts to a five-minute fireside chat about the hot topic of the day. Once or twice there've been little one-minute segments, or one-minute fully prepared packages with little audio clips in them, narrated by me.

Here's something altogether new - an entire finished 20-minute bulletin, prepared by an entire 14-person LCC newsroom team. We're currently operating as BBC London with these things, so the show is styled as such with BBC London jingles and presentation. Scroll to the bottom of this post and press 'play' to hear it (if you're reading via RSS, you'll need to come to our website and view the original article to see the play/pause buttons and listen).

This particular programme is from Wednesday - the newsreader's my good friend Yana, and you'll find a package by me on the terrorism bill about two minutes into it. If you keep listening (and I appreciate not everyone can, or wants to, spend the time to do so!) you'll hear examples of work by a lot of other people. Not everything in the programme is perfect by any means, in fact it's probably fair to say none of it is one hundred per cent great, but we're all learning still so that's to be expected. It's definitely a good effort by everyone though, and gives you an idea of what we get up to. In reality, all those five-minute chats you hear me doing are gutted to provide two or three quick 15-second audio clips, and the full interviews never get aired. Cruel world, I know.

My Mum and I tried to cook dinner earlier... neither of us actually turned the gas on. I thought she had done it, she thought I had done it. Only about 10-15mins in did we realise that nothing was cooking and then began to wonder why... then we realised that there was no gas lit on the hob. A blond moment for me :: a grey moment for her. There is a lesson in there somewhere.

The crew in the newsroom, all hard at work - spot the Ollie.

Cor dear me, it's been a manic couple of days. You can tell we have our fully-working-newsroom days on Wednesdays and Thursdays because either a) I put all sorts of audio on the site or b) I go AWOL for 48 hours. This week, we got off at the 'B' stop, to paraphrase Whybird, a much underrated icon of children's television.

Not that I don't have audio to offer. In the can from the past couple of days we have:

Mark Field MP talking about the UK energy review and his pro-nuclear stance, based more than anything on the negatives of all other options outweighing the negatives of nuclear.

Dr Matt Genge of Imperial College London, discussing his once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to analyse some space dust brought back from a comet by the NASA Stardust probe, the first cosmic dust samples to arrive in that fashion since the Apollo missions.

Colin Challen MP providing the opposing viewpoint on the UK energy review, arguing that nuclear makes no sense compared to the 'infinite, free' power offered by renewables (though conceding that supply could be 'intermittent').

Roger Evans, member of the London Assembly's environment committee (and member of just about every other committee, I've spoken to him before about transport issues) bemoaning the state of London's water pipes after two burst mains this morning, and pinning some of the blame on Thames Water.

Hilary Bennett, Thames Water spokeswoman, unsurprisingly refuting that point of view but admitting that it is 'unfortunate' for two main roads to have been flooded when London's in its worst drought for thirty years.

And owing to time constraints I just missed out on the chairman of London Travelwatch discussing passenger safety on the tube following the stabbing of three people on the platform at Holloway Road station last night. Some of this might make its way online in the near future.

Our ISDN line is now working, which means it's considerably easier to get hold of people to talk to. ISDN provides much better quality audio than a normal telephone line, and most places that can expect reasonable media interest from time to time have an ISDN line installed (messrs Evans and Bennett both used them to talk to me today). It means I can sit in a studio and conduct interviews instead of trekking across London - or even to Reading in the case of Thames Water - for a chat.

On this subject can I also mention Mark Demery, press officer at the London Assembly, who is the most helpful member of his profession I've spoken to in a long time. He went out of his way to set up an interview with an assembly member about London's water pipes, bringing back several suggestions and providing the ideal candidate. These things are not taken for granted and I'm grateful.

Contrast that with the London Underground press lady, who berated me for 'only' giving them two hours' notice that I'd like an interview, exclaiming that 'even the BBC give us far more'. I checked this with Martin, the course director, who worked for the BBC for a number of years, and as I suspected that's entirely untrue. It also transpired that LBC had interviewed a London Underground rep on their breakfast show about last night's stabbings, an interview that can hardly have been arranged with much notice. Some press officers are either fools or take me for one. Others, like Mr Demery, are warmly appreciated and not forgotten in a hurry.

Now then, your reward for reading this far down - more photos! Don't say I never treat you. All taken this evening by various people, then shared using the wonders of bluetooth (what fun we had with that). Scroll over the images for captions.

Finally, a date for your diaries: 20 July 2006. It's my graduation day, to probably be held at Westminster Hall, across from Westminster Abbey (assuming, of course, I actually manage to graduate...). This post so named because Mr Andrew Silke was hassling me like a bitch to get this online.

Don't answer that. The strangest thing happened to me today. I was driving home to Kent from London and as is usual for early evening the traffic was queuing southbound through the Blackwall tunnel. There were two young men in the car behind me. Both were dressed in black tie, they looked rather well off (though not particularly good looking through the rear-view) and judging by the car, one of them at least wasn't short of a few bob. Anyway, I could tell they were laughing about me - you can see a lot in a rear view mirror, and vice versa. They then ended up alongside me, and both smiled. It's a good job we were only crawling along. I then ended up back in front. The passenger had obviously found a copy of the paper or something and a pen. He scribbled "You are gorgeous" on it, and held it up so I could see it through the rear mirror. The traffic then eased through the tunnel and they sped off with a smile and a wave. Now if that didn't make my day!

I have a few random musings:

a) Valentines Day in London is incredible. I was on the tube around 7pm last night. There were women smiling with bunches of flowers, other women looking on at the "flower girls" in envy, other women were smiling back. There were couples looking happy to be going out and there were men dressed smartly - also with bunches of flowers etc. Somehow, the whole tube seemed united in a sense of "loving". It may be a commercial load of rubbish, but somehow it was really beautiful. For the record I smiled at my observations - and had neither man nor flowers with me!

b) I've started reading Alistair Cooke's Letters from America. It's actually incredibly interesting and I've learnt quite a lot already. Some of it, of course, goes straight over my head.

c) Still ploughing through the witch book Ollie bought me. I certainly won't be so turned off fantasy books in the future.

d) I've my advocacy exam tomorrow. Wonderful. I'm then heading home for a long weekend, but have exams on Monday and Tuesday

e) That's all for now I think!

My coat may smell a bit of smoke after tonight's meal out, but after summer 2007, never again. What a victory for common sense today's smoking ban is, I'm absolutely thrilled.

Anyone who knows me knows how much I hate smoking, something that stems from having to suffer it at otherwise enjoyable football matches when I was younger. I can understand why people smoke and have nothing against anyone who does, but it's enough of a health risk to those people and those around them, and enough of a horrible imposition on any non-smokers in an enclosed environment, that this legislation is fantastic news.

Oh and by the way. Sol Campbell. Have just checked and yes, I do know someone who used to go out with him. How exciting! I'm having an interesting and funny conversation over Google Talk with that person now. Can say no more though...

We at Dayorama can't believe the rate at which you, the world, are coming here to read about Sol Campbell and his sexuality.

In fact, you almost broke our website. We've had so much traffic coming to the site to read the Sol articles (especially this one) that our bandwidth limit, which very basically is the number of people who can visit our site before our website hosts get annoyed, has been shot to smithereens. I personally am delighted by this, even if we have to pay more!

On this subject, shoutout to Rachel, who professes herself 'addicted' to Dayorama. 'I was reading about some guy's birthday and I don't even know who he is!' Yes, my dear, that's the power of the internet. You, too, can stare at a man you've never met before with his trousers round his ankles, from the comfort of your own home.

Meanwhile, OJ's arguing in our comments that the calls for less press intrusion that surface every time someone like Mark Oaten is 'outed' must mean that respect for privacy will increase. This, alas, is bollocks. Papers like the News of the World won't give a monkeys about calls for less press intrusion, they'll just try to outdo themselves, you watch. That kind of journalism - and I'm not knocking it, either - is here to stay.

OJ says it's a shame that people who want to work in politics might have to act as paragons of virtue from an early age to avoid embarrassment further down the line in their chosen career. Personally I'd rather the politicians in charge of our lives were angelic individuals with a squeaky clean past: it'd make me a whole lot more inclined to take their word for things and accept their authority, and it'd leave them more time to get on with governing if they spend less time frantically cramming skeletons into closets. I also think prospective politicians would do very well to watch their activities at university and conduct themselves with caution, and that it doesn't necessarily mean they'll turn into political automatons - avoiding drugs, not doing insanely stupid things while drunk and refraining from taking part in leg-comparison contests is not always the hallmark of a dullard. And if, in OJ's words, those party antics represent a 'typical university experience', thank the lord mine was atypical! My legs are nothing to look at, trust me.

Returning to Rachel, she adds 'the politics on Dayorama is boring though'. Can't please all the people all the time, eh. After all, not many people are likely to come to Dayorama looking for both gay people in football kitand politicians... unless they're Lib Dems of course. Wahey! So many Lib Dem jokes. I'm sorry, I'll stop soon I promise.

In other news: spoke to Mark Field MP and Paul Flynn MP, both of whom are really nice in their own ways. Interviewed Mr Field for my UK energy review piece, he was very quietly spoken and then told me of his libertarian stance on the smoking ban, which placed him entirely at odds with Mr Flynn, who gave the whole LCC crew a little talk inside Parliament itself, and expressed his deeply held belief that smoking in public should be banned. And it looks as though that has come to pass. Hurrah! Possibly another MP on the horizon tomorrow, along with two scientists at Imperial College who are taking delivery of dust particles nicked from a comet by the Stardust probe. You remember the one - it plonked back down to earth in the US desert last month, having committed GBH on a comet two years ago. I'll be finding out what exactly the London team are doing with their dust.

PS On a final quick note, I was unreliably informed tonight that I actually already know someone who used to go out with Mr Campbell. Could be an outright lie, could be an intriguing truth...

Great Food Live have been talking about this recently. Roadkill on the menu: Supreme of squashed hedgehog followed by panfried battered badger and rat pie with a cat coulis to finish. Hmm, perhaps not. I'd be interested to see the recipe book though.

During my search for a story to go out and report on this Wednesday, I came across a mountaineering website listing a series of lectures going on this month. One of these lectures has quite possibly the greatest title ever:

Wednesday 15 February - 7.30pm

'Don't Cook Yak In Anger': Climbing in Western Sichuan with Ed Douglas

In October Ed Douglas and Duncan Tunstall made the first ascent of the North Face of Xiashe (5833m) in a five-day round trip. Xiashe sits above the Zophu Valley, an outstandingly beautiful area and home to a long tradition of Tibetan nomadism that is rapidly facing up to Chinese development. Ed shows you don't have to be a super-hero to do interesting new routes in the Himalaya, and gives the low-down on climbing and travelling in this extraordinary corner of the world.

[source: Alpine Club Lectures]

If you'd like to go along, it's at the Outside Cafe in Hathersage, Derbyshire. Which I might add my dad and I drove through a few weeks ago, somewhat coincidentally. I even checked train times from there to Euston just in case it'd help me get home quicker. It didn't.

I do worry about OJ - he may have done no end of damage to his future political career. For a start I now have those embarrassing birthday photos stashed away (see OJ's last post) ready to break them out when political correspondent in thirty years' time. More worryingly, perhaps, who else might have got hold of them?

Take the case of a Mr Unwin, undergraduate at another Oxford college, as an example. Some unkind soul lifted a number of quite grotesque photos, involving him and a female stripper of a certain size, from Facebook, and placed them on the Oxford Gossip website for all to see (click here to see them, but I warn you it's not pretty and certainly not work safe).

Alright, fine, so that's just one web site and not really one frequented by anyone outside the university. No real damage done. But an Oxford student enveloping his face in a stripper's flabby extremities is precisely the image of the university that the rest of the town loves to cultivate. Lo and behold, there's a discussion on the web site of Nightshift, the Oxford music magazine, dedicated to those same photos.

One person posting a message to that discussion says:

The depressing thing about it is that as oxbridge graduates half of these morons-losers-wankers-take your pick- will probably be forming the government of 2025. Someone should keep these pictures. They'll be worth a lot to some tabloid paper when one of these shit bags runs for leader of the opposition or something.

They've all obviously have had limited or no sexual experiences too. That or there just a load of sadists... Actually, wait a minute. A load of sadists and a few naive, easily lead virgins. Looks like the government of 2025 will be pretty similar to the one we've got now.

Indeed, although if the government of 2025 involves people who've "all ... had limited or no sexual experiences" then at least it won't be Lib Dem. But don't you worry for OJ yet? Have you seen those photos with his trousers down? Do you want to see them? Do you think the political editor of the News of the World will want to see them in twenty or thirty years' time? Did George Osborne stop to consider this before having certain compromising photos taken? Oh ho. There may be trouble ahead...

News in brief: I'm going to Key103 for my placement, as I'd originally planned, and not Fox any more. OJ will no longer be able to tune in to listen to me each night (unless he goes online for the Key103 version), but anyone in the Manchester area ought to be able to catch me, or at least my work, on Key103 news broadcasts between 24 April and 15 May this year. And it's Parliament aplenty tomorrow - I should with a bit of luck be speaking to Mark Field MP in the morning about the UK energy review (he's pro-nuclear), and in the afternoon we're being invited into the Commons by the very kind Paul Flynn MP for a quick tour and a chat.

I used a dictionary in my writing exam today. I couldn't decide whether expiry had an "a" in it or not. It turns out it doesn't. See, I'm learning... *cough*

Last week, I mentioned that a friend and I headed out to a club we used to frequent as freshers in Oxford. We were going, as good fans of Prince, to party like it was 2002. It turned out to be a rubbish night, but have no fear! Yesterday was my birthday, and to celebrate the dizzying heights of being 22, I had a room party. It was very enjoyable, quite drunken, and full of good cheese. (That's actual cheese from the Oxford Cheese Company, not the music. We had a very good soundtrack, mainly consisting of old school jazz, and modern day Dartmoor folk.) As well as being my birthday, this weekend also marked the halfway point of this academic year. That was anothe excellent excuse to party.

We didn't get the camera out until quite late, by which time some people had left. And most of the debauched stuff (Monty Python-esque spankings, bra unhooking competitions - actually, you put it like that, and it's like being back out at Princeton again) had already gone by. Instead of putting up the photos here, I will merely direct you to their place on shutterfly, where there are vaguely amusing captions. (Though if you have facebook access - yes, you Mr Williams - the captions there are distinctly wittier.) All in all - hurrah for birthdays! Hurrah for Zoidberg!

(In a slightly more serious tangent, the Archbishop of Canterbury was at Lincoln yesterday, as part of the Turl Street Arts Festival. He spoke for 20 minutes on "Satire, Irony and Religion" and was outstanding. I want to marry his brain, steal his voice (so luxurious... like aural chocolate) and quite possibly his beard too. He dealt deftly with questions concerning the Danish cartoon controversy, and absolute hit one about postmodernism out of the ball park. Everyone in the room was seriously impressed.)

Even the Tories are joining the PC band-waggon. Whatever is the world coming to?

There's an interesting supplement to the Observer today - Pleasure: What It Is And How To Find It. Obviously, this is coinciding with Valentines Day. However, it does provide some interesting statistics and questionnaire answers. As the title of the supplement suggests, the main discussion is regarding Pleasure. What is it? Is it the look of love, the sensation of losing yourself, do you achieve it skydiving, or is it found sitting on the edge of a mountain? Surely pleasure means different things to different people. However, I think I agree with the sentiment that "pleasure - narrowed down - seems to be built up of simple transient moments". For me, pleasure could be a particular meal, a particular smile or conversation, a particular afternoon spent walking or with friends. I think I have had a pleasurable birthday weekend. Friday was wonderful, Saturday was a very relaxing day and then today I went to church, had a leisurely and enjoyable lunch with a group of friends and then wandered around an art gallery looking for some art to purchase (savings and birthday monies). What could be more relaxing? Or pleasurable? Obviously, this pleasure is brief. Tomorrow morning I shall sit in an exam hall and the "pleasure" will no longer exist. However, the memory will still be there. Now that, is the definition of pleasure for me. Think of all those wonderful moments you have had, the meals you have shared or the times you have sat in front of an open fire with a bottle of wine and some crisps (a common pastime of my Mum and I) and I'm sure that even thinking about it will bring a little bit of pleasure into your world. Well, that's my thought for the day.

Judging by the site stats, Dayorama is fast becoming the headquarters of the 'Sol Campbell might or might not be gay, and only the News of the World can tell us' movement. For the conspiracy theorists out there, a brief glimmer of light this morning - '2 Gay Premier Stars Revealed' in the top corner of today's front page, above a cheeky 'Chelsea let 3 in at the back' pun.

Alas, turning as instructed to page seven, you'll find the last thing the 'Premier stars' are is revealed. No photos, no names, no nothing. Just a byline for correspondent Rav Singh, 'still wincing' at seeing photos which allegedly demonstrate two Premiership footballers in various intimate positions. Sadly for the Sol sexuality sleuths, the paper describes Player A as 'a rebel on and off the pitch' and Player B as a 'goalscoring midfielder', neither of which would seem to fit the bill. The search continues...

(I should make it clear that my interest resides more in the ability of the News of the World to break a story you know it wants to, than any intrigue regarding Mr Campbell's personal life. I suspect I'm far from alone in not really caring if Sol spends his Thursday nights shacked up with Jermaine Jenas, Shergar, Daniel Radcliffe, and one of Elton John or David Furnish, depending on which of the two is available that night. Although presumably it would make him a Lib Dem, which is a let-down.)

Contrary to popular belief, I'm not a great fan of literary works such as Narnia, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Harry Potter, even the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I've read them all, and I suppose I have enjoyed them - for their quality and imagination only. However, I wouldn't go into a bookshop and, out of choice select such a book. I'd much rather go for a chick-flick-novel or pretty much anything from the "Penguin Classics" range. I also read a lot of modern fiction - the latest booker prize winner or whatever. But, if the novel fell into this "fantasy" category, or indeed "crime", I would be less likely to pick it up.

I therefore approached one of my birthday presents from Ollie with caution. A book titled, "Wicked" by Gregory Maguire. It is a black, hardback, rather austere book. It has green edging on the pages, with gold gilding on the front and small illustrations spread throughout the novel. The summary on the back of the novel refers to The Wizard of Oz - "we know all about Dorothy and her triumph over the Wicked Witch of the West, but what of her arch-nemesis, the mysterious witch herself?" This book promises to enlighten me on the witch. It takes "readers past the yellow brick road and into a phantasmagorical world... [the novel] is a rich and triumphant feat of imagination and allegory". It's sounding quite interesting isn't it?

Obviously, for those in the know - there is a rather ironic reason that Ollie has given me a book involving a witch. He also, incidentally gave me the book Jim - The Nine Lives Of A Dysfunctional Cat, because no witch can be complete without a cat. By the way, this book is an absolute reflection of the life of Daisy.

Anyway, back to these witches. The author of the book is American and in his introduction he discusses his move to England and the rise of fantasy fiction. Maguire states that he had moved to England, a country that he knew mostly through fiction, in order to write about a country he knew mostly through fiction. This is a good point - it is possible to glean a great deal about English life, countryside and culture through fiction - both modern and classical. Consequently, there is supposed to be a "little bit of Oxbridge" in the book, and the animals in the book do owe something to Orwell, C S Lewis and Beatrix Potter etc etc. I think you should be getting the picture by now. I must admit, this book does appeal. So far I've read 32 pages and did have to drag myself away and go back to some revision. Clearly bewitched. I hope it doesn't disappoint. Thanks, Ol.

I always used to wonder why Amy had some features on her GMail that mine didn't possess. What most vexed me was her insistence that above her inbox was a 'web clip' or some such, with 'spam recipes' occupying that spot in the spam folder. These didn't exist on my GMail in any shape or form, and nor could I find reference to them in the settings.

Still, I can live without 'web clips' and spam recipes, I thought, so I didn't press the matter. And then a few days ago, the blasted woman comes on Google Talk and tells me how her GMail now links up with Google Talk, so that it saves all the conversations in GMail for future reference. Well, that was the straw that broke the camel's back, because I'd quite like that. Again I searched feverishly for that functionality in my copy of GMail, to no avail. My copy of GMail clearly despised me and had no desire to comply in any shape or form.

Then, a brainwave. I swapped the display language in the settings from English (UK) to English (US). Lo and behold! The entire set of features appears: first web clips, then a special place for saved chats. They'd been there all this time but, for some as yet unknown reason, Google wasn't offering them to people with UK English as their language of choice. Such discrimination! Sod any privacy or censorship issues with Google, what about the 'special relationship' our countries are supposed to share? Gone in the blink of an eye. Disgrace.

Of course, this set my mind entirely at ease. I can cope with the US English setting - it makes not a jot of difference, except the Americans probably wouldn't use the word 'jot' in that or any other context - and the features are well worth the sacrifice. More to the point it meant Amy was doing nothing spectacularly clever or different to get hold of the new stuff, and had simply not bothered changing the settings to her own native language, presumably on the grounds that 'guarentee' is correct in neither American nor British English.

So now if I use Google Talk, anything said is saved automagically in GMail. This is highly useful and a teensy bit more accessible than MSN Messenger, which tucks away its saved chats in mildly user-unfriendly XML. What would be perfect now is if Google Talk got hold of the ancient MSN Messenger 4.0 emoticons, tiny pixellated things that didn't look as daft as all the new stuff, and added them to its own interface. Then I'd have no shame in using it exclusively. I'd just have about three people to talk to.

(As a further note, the option exists to go 'off the record' with Google Talk, clicking a button that will prevent the messages exchanged from being saved by either participant in the conversation. This is very clever, but no journalist likes the words 'off the record'. Where's the fun in keeping a record of incriminating conversations if the other guy can smack that button? Still, the old rule applies - you have to decide you're off the record first, there's no hasty backtracking...)

Oh, and a little slice of stupidity arrived in the mail this week. About eighteen months ago I ordered a set of books for the last year of my history degree, including Variae by a bloke named Cassiodorus (I wouldn't bother, he's got nothing on JK Rowling). All the other books turned up but Variae did not, so I just borrowed library copies when I needed it, which wasn't very often anyway. And yes, it turned up a few days ago. This would be my cue to laugh, but for the fact I suspect it is also the cue for the distributor to charge my credit card for its safe arrival.

Click here and watch the short video.

You have to feel so sorry for the dog. It puts a lot of effort into making its territory clear at the start, then thinks it's settled the matter with a brief but powerful show of force at the second attempt. It's so convinced of victory that it turns its back on the enemy and gets back to business. And then it all goes wrong.

This site is a treasure trove of similar net-knick-knacks and may potentially affect my future productivity.

The BBC have been accused of many things. Some of them are true. The accusation detailed below is (probably) not:

I have just had a call from the nutter to beat all nutters, and I feel he may well phone again on our other numbers. He reckons the BBC arranges for doctors and nurses to implant transmitter receivers into people's brains in order to be able to influence what they think and do. He comes out with a whole load of technical stuff, and I thought I had misheard what he was saying but, sadly, I hadn't. I did tell him 'no', (funnily enough I didn't need to seek advice on this) the BBC does not do this sort of thing - but you may get him on the phone so you have been warned!

That's an email forwarded to me from an employee at one of the local BBC radio stations. I've spent just one morning answering the phones for a BBC local radio show, and I spoke to enough slightly unhinged people then to entirely understand that 'enquiries' like this are worryingly commonplace.

Nice article from Neil McIntosh here on trying to keep weblog comments civil. In that spirit I have refrained from spitting feathers at Amy in the comments to her last post, for having the nerve to say she was disappointed at the lack of a special Dayorama banner for her birthday (you've had more dedicated specifically to you than either OJ or myself dear, including one rather endearing anagram of the weblog name entitled 'Adora-Amy', and neither of us gets one on our birthday either!).

However, I have uploaded a brand new banner to the rotating series at the top of the page, which is now one of thirty-nine we've got on the go. It features a kindly gentleman whom I was horrified this morning to discover has been forced into retirement.

As OJ noted in his rather optimistic post above, it was indeed my birthday yesterday. Obviously, this means it is his birthday tomorrow (hence the presents etc). I have sent a card in a rather distastefully mango coloured envelope to Lincoln, so perhaps the Porter's really will think he is rather "unique". I had, it is fair to say, a very mixed but enjoyable day. It was one of those days where I did so many different things - I had an exam in the morning (quickly erased from the mind), lunch, spoke to lots of people in the phone, saw Ollie, saw Sally, went out for dinner in the evening etc etc. Quite a packed but enjoyable day. Ollie was in my semi-bad books for a short while (he doesn't know this yet) because I was expecting a Birthday banner on Dayorama, but it wasn't to be. Luckily his present, card, and sparkling presence (at Victoria nonetheless) made up for it! So, thank you for everyone who made it a lovely day. Now onto more revision and work. Or, perhaps I'll just read the paper first.

Well hello there. Since Ollie is travelling again, and Amy is out drinking (it's her birthday, see), it falls to me to post today. Actually, although I was told to post by Amy, in order to ensure the world doesn't fall apart, I've had one of those days that is worth mentioning. So here we go.

I'm not the tidiest of people around a sink. I am large and have a preponderance to oafishness. So that usually involves splashing water around the sink and associated areas. This is made worse in my current room in College due to the sink being a tad small. I think they might have installed the toddler version. Usually, then, the platform the sink is, erm, sunk into has a layer of water. Nothing too lake like; if it causes trouble it gets washed up. Over the last 48 hours, though, things have been getting worse, and some of the water has been dripping onto the carpet. It was something to keep an eye on, I thought. I was surprised, therefore, to have the College electrician knocking on my door this morning. In he bustled, enquiring whether I had a leak. I pointed to the sink, saying it was slightly wetter than usual. His response: "Riiight. And you haven't reported this yet?" Let me quickly hop off the narative track to say that I was keeping an eye on the problem, and I would report it if it got problematic. But in the general schemes of College maintenance, it was perfectly fine. It wasn't causing any difficulties, and often it is more trouble to get these things fixed than to leave them alone. Hence the wonky curtains, and the dodgy hinges on the wardrobes. But I should have thought that another couple of days and it would have been reportable.

Anyway, back to the story. It turns out that I didn't have much water on my floor because it had actually dripped through to the room below, and the basement beneath that. In doing so, it had ruined a fusebox (but who on earth installs a fusebox below a sink and boiler, for crying out loud), and a matress in the basement. There were also apparently four buckets full of water. Then the questions started. It was quickly ascertained that no, I hadn't left a tap on overnight, nor had I hosed my floor. Still, this was pretty serious, and some of the stuff that I kept under the sink was pretty wet. (That just goes with the territory, I thought.) So, in came the plumber and his apprentice, who i presume was about 15 or 16, but looked about 10. Nevertheless, they quickly identified the problem being the sink. ("bit of a piss pot, isn't it?" said the plumber. I told you it was small.) There were leaky taps, an overflowing trap, and a broken seal around the sink. All in all, a bugger. But hurrah - they said they'd fix it. So I left them at it, returning later in the afternoon to find six of the maintenance men in my room. I didn't realise the team was that big! The result of their work was the removal of some rotting wood, tighter taps and a resealed sink. A result all round. And the fusebox seems to also have been repaired. Good work, gents.

Quel excitement. But there's more. With a birthday coming up this weekend, I have also had the pleasure of receiving plenty of post, none more so than today, when a parcel awaited me. It was with a smirk (and, I would like to think, a none too small portion of awe) that the Porter immediately identified my package as coming from "The Well Hung Meat Company." So perhaps that should be my delivery. I'm very proud that I'm probably the only person in College who gets sent meat in a care package (well, OK, as a birthday present). And of course, it being perishable, it did have to be opened today. Tomorrow looks like it will be a mixed grill day. All that and rugby. Thanks Richard and Anne!

Also of note is my DVD watching habits. I have recently started watching Deadwood. What an excellent show - Lovejoy cast as a swearing, abusive saloon/brothel owner in the South Dakota territory in the 1870s. It's made by HBO, so that means full 60 minute episodes, full nudity, and full swearing. Every other word is some sort of abuse. The show is also very dark, which means that, while it is also original, you can guess what is likely to happen with the plot by assuming it will be the most violent and rude. Excellent viewing all round!

Anyway, that should keep people going until the others can come back and post. As for me, hall awaits, and a mid-term bop tonight. Another chance to party like it's 2002 all over again.

Since when have a pack of ink cartridges (I can't write an exam in anything other than a fountain pen) cost £3.99?? That's inflation for you.

Yes, we're back on the exam descriptions again. Property Part 1 for me today. This means that it is 1/2 my "property" element on the LPC, but I am issued with "advance facts". From these, you have to "issue spot" and hopefully you do this correctly, prepare some "answers" and go in and write an enjoyable exam. Well, it worked for me anyway. Part 2 (no advanced facts) is tomorrow. But for today, I've been home about 90mins, and already cooked chocolate brownies. I was in the mood! Now for some revision... and perhaps the gym!

The 10 O'Clock News has gone postal over a special report into corruption in Kenya. Bollocks to that. You want real corruption? I present you two home-grown examples of fraudsters at their finest.

First to Somerset, where the BBC is showing it hasn't entirely lost sight of worthwhile stories. This one is entitled 'Imaginary sheep fraudster jailed'. The headline alone is worth a medal, the article following it is simply the icing on the cake:

A farmer who claimed back nearly £1m in VAT payments from his trade in non-existent sheep has been jailed for three years and nine months.

Over the course of four years, Richard Coate, from Broomfield, Somerset, kept records claiming he had traded 425,000 sheep with a mysterious Spaniard. He then applied for £865,799.27 in VAT compensation from the government's Agricultural Flat Rate Scheme. But the sheep had never existed - Coate owned just 29 animals.

[source: BBC News - 'Imaginary sheep fraudster jailed']

Four hundred and twenty nine thousand sheep, all invented by one man. But that's not all, oh no. From fleecing to freezing now as we travel to Court Six at the Middlesex Guildhall Crown Court, opposite Parliament in central London. There you'd have found me sitting on the press bench this morning, watching the trial of several men accused of corruption involving an ice cream van.

Yep. Ice cream. One ice cream man, one policeman and two council officials accused of operating a bribery scam so that the ice cream man got to illegally pitch up in between Tate Modern and the Millennium Bridge, earning £1000+ per day in takings (in summer at least) in the process. Over a period of three years that's quite a lot of dosh. The ice cream man's admitted his part in it, but the policeman and council officials all deny corruption charges.

That's bizarre enough, but more interesting was the evidence of a council street trading officer, who told the court in a prepared statement that this was far from the only case of ice cream men with dodgy lolly. In just two days during the summer of 2003, her street trading inspection unit carted off no fewer than five illegal ice cream vans, and that's just 48 hours in the tiny London district of Bankside. Imagine how many are scattered across London in total! Be careful and watch your whippy, I say.

As OJ is aware, I'm not very good at printing things myself. I spent most of Oxford utilising his dear printer (although I did pay for paper and half of the toner I hasten to add) and since being in London I have used the facilities of the College computer rooms. To be honest, I don't need to print that much. However, I have advocacy presentation to do next week. And I needed to print my script off. But I'm not at College this week, so how can I print? So what did I do yesterday? I emailed the attachment to my Mother, she printed it off at home, popped it in the post and it arrived in my post box this morning, less than 24hrs from sending the original email. Now that is service! It is also, I admit, on the same lines as when I sent the jumper home from Oxford in the post to be washed. What are retired Mothers for?

Here's a post that combines two topics that Dayorama (or should that just be Ollie and me?) write about: RSS feeds and internet browsers. I wrote last week that I had downloaded the Beta Preview of IE7, and very impressed I am with it too. It's only crashed once so far, which is pretty good going, since it completely installed itself over IE6 without asking me. The two key features of note are tabs and the RSS implementation. Tabbed browsing is found in every browser other than IE6, and very useful it is too. Instead of opening up a new copy of IE down on the windows task bar everytime you click on a link that opens in a new window, it comes up in a tab within the the original window. This saves an awful lot of time, and is a far neater solution. It allows you to open up all your favourties sites at once, for instance, and they will load in parallel. There are also very cool ways to look at all your tabs at once. Neat.

But wait, there's RSS too! Again, like Safari, Firefox, and every other browser that's out there, IE7 finally integrates RSS into the browser. And...it works. Really well. Which again, is a good thing, because it broke my previous reader, Pluck, when I installed it. In fact, it finally makes RSS usable for me, which should save me a lot of (procrastination) time in the future.

Of course, this is IE, so the usual caveats about security flaws and crashing apply, especially since it's in beta. But otherwise, good job Microsoft.

Wow, the House of Lords eh. I would! Sexier than any woman, more glamour than every issue of Heat put together, packed with more members of the elite than the Majestic 12 annual coach trip to Bognor Regis.

Us LCC folk got to go down there today and say hello to Baroness Fookes, who I personally thought was really nice and well worth listening to. She's 70 in two weeks' time and has been at Westminster in one form or other since 1970, when she was elected to the Commons (representing Merton & Morden, I believe, which would have included my house if it still existed as a constituency). She went on to represent Plymouth for the vast majority of her Common career, then switched to the Lords in 1997 when she was granted the honour by the outgoing John Major in his resignation honours list.

She seemed quite down to earth considering how you might reasonably expect a Baroness to behave. Barring the occasional, endearing 'By Jove!' slipped into conversation, she was good at explaining who else walked the corridors of power in her company, what they all did, what a day in her life was like, and the stress and strain of heading up the committee on refreshments in the House of Lords. Disappointingly she remained tight-lipped about a particularly forceful complaint about the food passed on to her just before meeting us, although we were told that one Lord has lodged a complaint mentioning a lack of sardine sandwiches. However, lest you get the wrong impression, when not acting as sandwich monitor Baroness Fookes is deeply involved with animal welfare having previously chaired the RSPCA, among other things.

My only memento from the trip is my visitors' pass - I also noted, on receiving it, that the only way to get near a bin in central London now is to pass through parliamentary security barriers. You won't find a decent bin for love nor money elsewhere in case some swine tries to bomb everyone, and now we can't even just watch out for Irish accents and dodgy vans parked up nearby; however, the first thing that greeted us once we'd beaten security was a big litter bin with an entire walkway to itself.

That's not the only perk of the job either. Parliamentary water! There were bottles of it neatly arranged all round the desks in Meeting Room G, where we congregated once inside the main buildings. I didn't dare touch the stuff for fear that it wasn't meant for us at all, but once Will, sat next to me, reached out for it, then that was that. This water had to be special. Somehow. Who knows how, but if they're feeding it to the Lords and the Baroness in charge of refreshments herself is in the room, it's going to be akin to the sweat of God, isn't it. Now that I think about it I can't recall it tasting overly different, and the dilemma quickly became how to get the empty Parliament-branded bottle out of the building intact. I failed. By which I mean I left it behind, rather than risk a massive glassy 'ker-runch' as I walked past security.

We also had a talk from Robin Brant at lunchtime, political correspondent for Radio 1. Yes, Radio 1 has a dedicated political correspondent, the only such being tied to a single radio station in the country (or so he told us). And yes, his message was how to sell politics to the kids, although he cheated by opening it up to international relations and even oil tankers sinking off Spain. So in reality he's the 'stuff our listeners won't understand and don't give a monkeys about' correspondent, but he seems very good at what he does.

Oh, and I noticed this in today's South London Press (on the inside cover, behind front page headline 'DOGGED BY TEEN SEX SESSIONS', which ought to generate plenty of comment spam on here):

The jury in the Damilola Taylor murder trial were yesterday warned not to act like TV Judge John Deed. Mr Justice Leveson referred to Friday night's episode where Deed, played by Martin Shaw, became a juror in a trial.

He claimed if they copied his maverick style it could "derail" the whole court system. Deed made his own research into the case and was then allowed to cross-examine a witness from the jury box.

Mr Justice Leveson said: "I do not know if anyone watched an episode in a series of Judge John Deed. I understand the particular episode had the judge as a juror and he embarked on his own research in the case and then consulted privately with the judge.

"You probably don't need me to say whatever they might have done on TV it does not represent the English law. You must simply not start to research the case yourself, whatever Martin Shaw might have done. It would simply derail the entire process."

[source: South London Press - 'Dami jury told "don't act like TV Judge John Deed"']

Couldn't agree more. I didn't even see last Friday's episode, the one referred to above, but my dad gave me a decent idea of what happened. It's all gone downhill this series. Deed epitomises those great, heroic individuals in life who slowly become consumed by their crusade, to the point where their rational grounding disappears and it all goes horribly wrong. Geldo- er, Deed used to be a bit of a maverick but only because he was standing up for what was right in the face of idiots. Now he more often than not ends up acting like a total idiot and somehow fluking his way to a satisfactory conclusion each week.

Which of course is more the fault of below-par scriptwriting than anything else, much like The IT Crowd, which has drawn unfavourable comparison with this bag full of human faeces (Majestic 12, teenage sex sessions and human faeces in one article, this is going to send half the internet to Dayorama). In case you don't know it's the new comedy from Channel Four, filmed in front of a live studio audience and supposedly as good as, if not better than, Peep Show. Alas, no. Not even close. A straw poll of the three other people in the pub on Monday night showed the panel to be 100% in favour of burning all individuals involved.

By the way, follow that Majestic 12 link at the top and read it thoroughly if you have time. It's comedy gold. Maybe if Jimmy Carr'd been reading that, he wouldn't have been booed off stage...

I've rambled on before about the fact our lives are now filled with things that "beep". I've now decided everything "hums" too. I've been working at home for one day and the fridge hums, the bathroom fan hums, my laptop hums at me. All these electrical hums.

Also, the real gripe. A modern telephone. A delicate cordless thing which when you have finished using it, it has to be slotted back into its stand and then the phone responds with a beep. If you have a double-glazing esque call, get angry and want to slam the phone down (as you would be able to do on an old style phone), you can't. Instead, you have to gently place the phone back and wait for the stupid little beep. I'm not sure if new technology is a blessing, or simply gets me more stroppy. Not that I ever get stroppy, obviously.

I finished my Harry Potter audio books last week, so it's back to listening to music til I find a replacement (I've downloaded Martin Shaw, he of Judge John Deed fame, reading The Silmarillion, but I can't get it to make the jump to my mobile phone for listening on the move). Last night I loaded a selection of albums onto my phone, including Coldplay, Mew, Editors, Kate Bush, and Arcade Fire.

The latter released their album 'Funeral' over a year ago, but it still makes for great listening. My favourite track has always been 'Neighborhood #3: Power Out', a stomping track with hefty bassline and rhythm thrown into the mix with the usual wailing guitar.

And then I got home, and the power is out.

Needless to say, I'm not thrilled. There's not a flicker of light in this house except the torch on my mobile phone, which is munching power like a handheld Hungry Hungry Hippo, and my laptop, in front of which I sit bathed in its ethereal glow. Not a standby light remains otherwise, and the battery life is slowly fading on both laptop and mobile. Captain! She cannae take it much longer!

All of which is highly inconvenient. I made a point of getting home on time for Life On Mars on BBC1, only to find my TV is kaput so that's out of the question. I can't eat the ready meal I had planned because the fridge is screwed and the microwave rendered useless. The fish and chip shop over the way has no power and is also closed, leaving me the wittily monikered 'Chinese Dinner' takeaway shop down the road, which mercifully stayed open, although having eaten my meal I do wonder if their fridge and its contents suffered too. Lovely.

Nor can I settle down to do some shorthand (woe is me) because we've no light in which to do it, and nor can I really do some proper research for any of my many assessments because I can't make any notes, struggling to see my hands on the keyboard as I am. This post is taking an eternity and the only reason I'm persevering is because there's really nowt better to do. This is almost the time to go down the road and try out my local pub for the first time, but yes, it was shrouded in darkness when I got home too.

How appropriate when I'm doing a five minute piece on the UK energy review due out next month. If nothing else, this should inspire me to demand some answers from the MPs I speak to.

Perhaps Larkin's wit was misplaced in his poem "This Be The Verse". My parents have today come up trumps. They have excelled in all parental duties. What arrived in the post today? On the day of release of the new Pride and Prejudice DVD... it was delivered to my door. I am so pleased my parents can use Amazon! I am, therefore, now thoroughly content.

Any of you with long memories might remember Floating Dog, the improbably named current affairs website I tried to set up about eighteen months ago. If you do remember, your memory is far too long for my liking. It didn't really work (although the site design and basic idea were alright, in my humble opinion), and has long since died a quiet, lonely death.

But hark! What's that! The sound of Ollie getting his grimy little mitts on another current affairs website? Without even having to design it or pay for the hosting?

Ohh yes. We get split into two teams at the LCC for the 'Online' section of our course, where we get some basic training and then get unleashed on a pre-designed news website for a few weeks. And I'm in charge of one team. Floating Dog is reborn! In an entirely un-Floating-Dog-like form, written by other people, where I sit around and see what everyone is doing and then nod sagely. It's like a dream come true.

Check out www.lccbroadcast.org.uk to see the site. Advance warning: most of it's currently bizarre since we spent the afternoon testing it, and some stories may involve dogging and other such potentially libellous accusations. My team is 'Castles', just so you know. As opposed to 'Elephants'. The imagination runs riot in this newsroom...

I'm sorry, but a dog is a dog. This mixing of dog breeds to create "fashionable" pets is outrageous. The poor little things. How can you have a half pug/half beagle, or a poodle crossed with a cocker spaniel? It just seems wrong, especailly as I can't see how these cross-breeds can be healthy.

This survey is an outrage:

Top 10 bendy roads in Britain

1. B3081- Cann Common to Tollard Royal, Dorset/Wiltshire
2. A686 - Penrith to Melmerby, Cumbria
3. A537 - Macclesfield to Buxton, Cheshire/Derbyshire
4. A466 - Monmouth and Staunton, Monmouth
5. A4061 - Pricetown and Treorchy, Rhondda, Wales
6. A157 - Louth to Mablethorpe, Lincolnshire
7. B2130 - Godalming to Cranleigh, Surrey
8. B6270 - Keld and Reeth, North Yorkshire
9. A39 - Bridgwater to Minehead, Somerset
10. B797 - Mennock to Warnlockhead, Dumfries and Galloway

Apparently it was done by Continental Tyres, who can never have gone from the M40 across to Northampton. There's enough roundabouts and assorted bends on that stretch of road to nearly break my neck with the G-forces. Maybe Continental weren't counting roundabouts. They should've done. I swear my dad loves veering round the bends on that stretch of road when I'm in the car, watching with glee as I (and usually my laptop) go slip-slidin' away into oblivion.

Oh and look at the comments on the BBC report on it, linked to at the top of this post. Everyone loves a natter about roads in this country. The opinions are piling in.

In other news - and I've been meaning to mention this for ages - John Simm, he of Life On Mars (on tonight!) on BBC1, is also The Voice Of XFM, insofar as he voices all their jingles. Fact.

This brings back memories - a story given prominence on the front page of the BBC News site this morning talks about the 'King of Bling', a member of Saxon royalty found buried in Prittlewell, near Southend, Essex.

This is the same king whose burial goods I went to see at the Museum of London a couple of years ago, and who merited a radio piece I heard whilst writing an essay on exactly the subject of royal burials. So he's pretty much the symbol of all those months and months of Anglo-Saxon toil, to the point where I'd occasionally stroll down the streets of Oxford thinking to myself, 'Not too many people my age actually know this much about these people.'

Of course there's a very good reason for that, seeing as they're not particularly relevant and no one really cares. Except the guys now protesting outside the King of Bling's burial site, and even they care as much about the trees and park that will be reduced to nothing by the proposed new road. Still, it's nice that someone has the time and resources to fight for these little slices of pre-history.

Life, is invariably made up of "plans". You know, "why don't we plan to do that", or "shall I plan to meet you there" etc. And then of course there are the so-called "plan A's" or "plan B's" for when things go wrong. Today, Ollie and I had a series of mishaps - they involved both the presence, and the absence, of plans. First, Ollie and I arranged to meet around 2pm at Victoria. We didn't say where because, as regular readers should know, our rendezvous venue is outside WHSmiths. So I was there from about 1.50pm, and Ollie rang me about 2.05pm. "Where are you". "Outside Smiths", I reply. "Oh no you're not". "Oh yes I am, I'm sitting on the bench". "Oh no you are not" - and so this went on and the person sitting on the bench next to me started laughing. It turns out that I was on the "wrong" bench. The bench the other side of the pillar to the "usual" bench. But, still a bench, and still outside Smiths. Oh well, we were united so all was OK.

The next step was getting to Debenhams/John Lewis/House of Fraser on Oxford St to do a bit of shopping for Ollie. To me, this is easy. The plan is simply to take the Victoria line north to Oxford Circus. But oh no, Ollie has another "plan". Victoria line north to Green Park, and Jubilee to Bond St. I wasn't convinced. Ollie was cold (hence the shopping trip... for a coat) so he figured that it was better to walk further underground, than over ground. Hmm. So we reached the Jubilee platform. And we waited. For about ten minutes. I thought this was ridiculous. No trains were being announced. There was no hope of a train. And, we could have already been in Debenhams by now. So, we opted for my plan. To walk back to the Victoria line and go to Oxford Circus. So, we got back onto the platform (which we had left, about 12mins ago) and waited. Then they announced that the next train would be in 14mins. Aghh. So, as we turned to go back (Ollie's original plan), again, to the Jubilee line, Ollie looked back and noticed that indeed there was a "train approaching", and so we abandoned the plan, and did get to Oxford Circus. On arrival, it turns out that the Jubilee line had just been suspended. We made it eventually. We laughed, and probably made a spectacle of ourselves by bickering outrageously at both Victoria and on the tube platform. But ho hum. It just goes to prove that there is no easy way out when a) having no plan fails; and b) when having a plan also fails. Dear oh dear. At least Ollie bought his coat.

Enough with the Sol puns. How disappointing for the News of the World today to have had nothing more to offer than...

SOL: I'M OK

The only thing they had on him was that he's been seeing a faith healer, contrary to rumours ranging from 'Sol has AIDS' to 'Sol's seeing the same rent boy as Mark Oaten'. The report was written by one 'Lewis Panther', an improbably named NOTW hack with a case history of getting bylines on the biggest exclusives, ranging from Michael Jackson to Robbie Williams, paratroopers fighting naked to comedy terrorists 'invading' Windsor Castle. 'Sol Campbell sees faith healer' will not rank highly among Mr Panther's conquests.

Indeed, the paper's opening line says it all:

Runaway soccer hero Sol Campbell broke his self-imposed silence yesterday and claimed: "I'm fine. What's all the fuss about?"

Personally, I remain convinced we haven't heard the last of this. However, having now truly exhausted this weekend's non-event, we move on.

I bought a copy of Rugby Challenge 2006 yesterday for the PlayStation 2, and it's pretty good at what it does. It's from the same people who made the classic Jonah Lomu Rugby, and having played for about an hour I can tell you it's remarkably easy to get into and start stringing passes together, even for complete rugby no-hopers like me. Having detested actually playing the sport since the age of six, I've always had a soft spot for gaming versions, which allow me to get all tactical and shrewd without getting all cauliflower-eared. So far I've stuffed the Japanese a couple of times to warm myself up; I'll try my hand against someone a little meatier later. They've got club teams too, which will be a chance to finally educate myself on the rugby union teams of Britain - currently, I don't know my Wasps from my Harlequins.

Whale number two has bought the salmon farm. This one was in the Humber, foolishly failing to learn from the Thames whale or indeed a dolphin that strayed into similar territory in Cumbria a week ago, only to get itself bottled by intellectually vacant locals.

Not that the dolphin learnt much either - having been rescued once, it came back three days ago and brought a friend. This, the great meeting of two of the planet's most intelligent species: one species swims into the harbour and gets stuck, so the other species throws stuff at it. Species one is finally rescued by some of the more sensible members of species two, but comes back a few days later on a sightseeing mission to show a friend round. The mind boggles.

One wonders if, like the watering can used to help the first whale, someone will auction empty beer cans tossed at the dolphin on eBay...

Campbell update following yesterday's speculation - The Mirror reckons it has an 'exclusive' with the following:

Besotted Sol Campbell desperately phoned a teenager he fancies dozens of times the night before he vanished during a Premiership match. The girl did not answer his calls and friends fear the torment over another failed relationship tipped the Arsenal defender over the edge and sent him into hiding. He is said to be prone to depression.

[source: The Mirror - 'Exclusive: Tortured Sol']

Right then, so The Mirror thinks it's a girl, not a bloke, and goes on to say she's an 18 year old from Chigwell, in Essex. Sol has spent the last three months, according to the paper, 'bombarding' the girl with invites out on dates after meeting her in a club, but she keeps saying no. And now she won't answer the phone so he's disappeared.

The Mirror is thus asking you to believe the following: a 31 year old multi-millionaire Premiership footballer has been thrown off the rails, to the extent that he walked out on a top football match and an event with Tony Blair a day later, by a reluctant 18 year old from Chigwell he met in a bar.

If this is the case, then Mr Campbell needs a) counselling and b) perspective. But I can't help feeling there's more to this than simple Chigwell kiss-chase. In the last sentence of its report, The Mirror happens to mention that Sol's brother was jailed for a year last June. His crime? Assaulting a Spurs fan who made gay taunts at Sol.

And lo and behold, on the front of the News of the World's website tonight:

Don't miss tomorrow's News of the World for the full story on troubled soccer star Sol Campbell. We'll reveal the truth behind his shock disappearance from Arsenal this week.

If you're at all interested - and by rights you shouldn't be, but we all know plenty of people will be buying the NOTW tomorrow for this, and I have to admit my posts on this show I'm fairly curious - then you'll be wanting to click here to see if they've uploaded the full story yet.

UPDATE: Not Sol-related for once, but forgot to mention this next bit first time round. Can someone please explain to me why central London was awash with alcohol and Aussies this afternoon? You couldn't move for pissed Australians, decked out in everything from sombreros to national flags to baggy greens, wandering the streets around Victoria. They were all over the tube, too. I can't for the life of me find anything Aussie that was going on in London at the time. I know there was an Aussie rugby league outfit in Huddersfield yesterday, but surely they can't all have gone up there and come back to London to get wasted before going home?

Like OJ, I too attempted train travel today. To Oxford and back I went. I left London at 3.00pm, and was back by 1.30am. Wonderful, and precision timing, as ever, on my part. One question: why is Oxford so damn cold? I also walked streets of Oxford that I had never tread during my degree (to the extent that I had to call Ollie, in Ldn, to make sure that my idea of a "short cut" wasn't going to be a "long cut"). Bizarre.

Sol Campbell, the Arsenal defender, has been missing since he walked out of the club's defeat at home to West Ham United earlier this week. It's looking more and more likely that the 'personal issues' supposedly haunting him involve his sexuality - he's heavily rumoured to have a skeleton in his closet about this, ranging from, er, 'straightforward' homosexuality, to more rent boy scandal, to even having AIDS. His name and club are, of course, a sub-editor's paradise when a story like this comes along (camp, bell, arse-sol, need I go on...).

I'm also told Channel Four News mentioned the rumour in passing tonight. In the past, it has seemed to me that whenever the News of the World are about to break a story, it's Channel Four News that warns everyone it's coming. Is there a deal going on here? I think it was Jon Snow's Snowmail update, just before C4 News goes out, that foretold the coming of Sven revelations in that Sunday's NOTW. So if they saw fit to mention the Sol rumours tonight, even without mentioning the paper, I'm willing to bet Mr Campbell will be on the front page come Sunday.

Current Sol rumour of choice: the News of the World will reveal he's gay and he walked out because he's upset that lover Jermaine Jenas is dumping him.

One of the more unusual sources of news (taken from a BBC Sport article):

Newcastle must move fast if they want to appoint Sam Allardyce as their next boss with the Bolton manager considering retiring in five years. Yet Allardyce could shelve plans to quit football if England come calling.

The Bolton boss told Discovery Real Time Channel's Total Fishing: "I'm 50 and told the wife that 55 might be the best time to get out of the rat race."

[source: BBC Sport - 'Allardyce contemplates retirement']

And in other news, Saddam Hussein tells Dancing On Ice the precise grid reference where the weapons of mass destruction are hidden...

Of course, speaking of news sources, journalists are often privy to far more information than is actually let on to the public. You only need look at Charles Kennedy's drink problem, and the subsequent admission that most lobby journalists all but knew for sure about it, for your proof. I spoke to one BBC journalist earlier today who had plenty of things to say about the July bombings etc that aren't in the public domain, and also told me of the BBC's plans in the event of a something affecting their broadcast capabilities in London. Obviously I'm not about to reproduce them here, but I did find it interesting - because of an in-joke between myself and OJ, admittedly - that the Cobra Committee drew up the BBC evacuation plans and is responsible for activating them.

And finally tonight, the horrendous slide of my language skills into nothingness continued apace earlier. My friend Helen brought three friends from Switzerland, where she used to live and work, to the pub. The four of them merrily bantered away in not only German, but Swiss German, whilst myself and good friend Ray sat at the end of the table trying feebly to come up with some German back. Ray got as far as "es war prima!" to describe his food, I just about reached "Ich spreche nur ein bisschen Deutsch". Then we had an argument over whether "Entschuldigung Sie" was actually German or not (of course it is, as I was trying to tell a somewhat inebriated Ray). This debate was curtailed when Ray realised he was accidentally eating a Swiss lady's food by mistake, leading to a cultural exchange of plates as the bemused woman explained, in broken English, that she had thought her food didn't look, smell or indeed taste like duck.

I'm running away from Oxford, having done some four weeks here. Just heading home for the weekend, with vast quantities of rugby to watch, good food to eat, and beds to sleep in. So a few thoughts before I head off. First, I'm going to be able to watch the Superbowl in Sunday night, which will be great. I can't decide who is going to win; Pittsburgh are probably the better team, but somehow Seattle have the momentum. Should be an interesting one. Second, Internet Explorer 7 Beta Preview is available, and I'm using it right now. Hello tabs and redesign. It's taking some adjustment, and it's broken my RSS feeds, but certainly a step in the right direction. And that's pretty much it. To the trains!

Environment minister Lord Bach said earlier today that we in the south east could be facing the worst drought in thirty years this summer. The BBC broke the story at 2:58pm here. Naturally, by that time, I was long gone and off on the tube to visit Jacob Tompkins, director of Waterwise, the water efficiency NGO charged with reducing water wastage in the UK (I'd nicked the story off the BBC's internal wires, which members of staff were busy testing in our newsroom, before they'd had the chance to publish it).

He told me that not only were we in a drought now, but we'd be in one for well over a year, and we'd had only forty per cent of our usual rainfall during that time. This meant a pretty serious situation, and one climate change would do nothing to help in future. His essential point was that people in the south east are using more water than actually exists, and if we're going to all get along fine then we'll need to adapt our water usage to reduce the amount we waste. He was keen to stress that its wastage, not usage, that matters - Waterwise doesn't want to impact upon our natural way of life, just tweak the way we use water so that less of it gets needlessly wasted. Use the 'play' button below to hear the full interview (which was, for our 5pm bulletin, gutted to provide two short clips during a live piece I delivered from St James's Park).

I know lots of people get angry when they phone a customer service telephone line and have to select about five different options before, if they are lucky, they get to speak to a human. I'm sending back my complicated, useless upgrade phone to Orange and on the letter they actually state: "If you have any queries about returning this equipment, please call XXX... select option 4, followed by 1, then 1". I suppose it should ensure I get through to the right department, but if they can be so precise it makes me wonder why I can't just press 9 or something in the first place!

The question is, if you pretend to work at the BBC, must you also pretend to strike?

If, like Amy, you believe a planetarium to be a water-holding vessel in which to deposit fish, this piece of audio may not be for you.

For the rest of us who understand the London Planetarium at Madame Tussaud's to be quite an iconic venue, there's a chance a tear might be shed at its departure. They're renaming the big dome The Auditorium instead, and they'll show films about celebrity culture, not the night sky.

I went to the Department of Trade & Industry this morning to talk to Colin Hicks. He's director-general of the British National Space Centre, which in effect means he's the head honcho when it comes to the UK space programme. "What space programme?" I hear you say, and to answer that he lists the projects we've been involved with during the interview, as well as talking about how he came to have that prestigious post, his thoughts on the Planetarium closing, and his views on whether or not we even care about space in this country any more.

I've praised the google email service, "gmail" before. This morning I noticed something else about the service that made me smile. It has a very good spam filter, and I thought I'd have a look in it and see what spam I had. At the top of the spam folder are recipes using spam: spam fajitas; spam skillet casserole; spam primavera - and then the appropriate link to recipesource.com. Wonderful!! Another of google's amusing ideas.