And so it came to pass that Ollie and I finally had lunch at the Fox & Hounds pub in Christmas Common, Oxfordshire. (For Ollie's account of this meal, involving tree graffiti, click here.)

It's a delightful, homely pub with fabulous food. I'd highly recommend it - to ramblers, locals, day trippers and families alike - a very welcoming atmosphere and very good bread! It was a shame that both Ollie and I are out for dinner this evening, otherwise we could have easily been tempted by one of their sumptuous puddings. It seems I'll have to wait a few more days for my custard fix...

To burn off a potato or two (or maybe only half...) we then went for a short trot and an opportunity for Ollie to take a photograph of me for use on this site. Departing with the tradition of the Bucks sculpture park, we went to the aptly called Hilarious Sheep Hill. For anyone who knows the journey from Oxford - London on the M40, this is the hill on the left as you leave the Oxfordshire plains behind and head over into Bucks. There are often suicidal sheep on the hill (although there were none present today) and I'm not alone in being convinced that due to the steep gradient of the hill the sheep really must have one leg longer than the other in order to remain standing up straight. The hill has a glorious panoramic view across Oxfordshire with the towers of Didcot power station in the distance.

To get to the the apex of the hill you have to follow a couple of signs with the phrase "Natural England" accompanied by an arrow. Perhaps this is a misnomer. Since when has a view of so-called Natural England involved the M40? It's perhaps more beautiful for it though.

Those sheep may have one leg longer than the other and, by the look of the tree below (a fabulous example of how the force of the wind has shaped the growth of the tree), must be pretty windswept, but it must be worth it for the view.

All in all, it was a very pleasant way to spend the last day of 2007.

Human beings are, in essence, vain souls. Which means that when you launch a new-look website, the people involved start queuing up to have the photo on their 'About' page changed.

The Fox and Hounds
Originally uploaded by Dayorama

We dined at the Fox and Hounds pub in Christmas Common, marking the second successive year that I have found myself in the same pub alongside a Dayorama author on New Year's Eve. Last year it was David Sheppard (who has yet to complain about his photo but is unsure of the pink background), this year Amy. To read her account of the following adventures on the windswept hills, click here.

Amy's old profile photo was taken at the Chiltern sculpture trail between my home village of Stokenchurch and Christmas Common, but I decided we needed a new venue for this one.

Amy has long been a fan of what I like to call 'Hilarious Sheep Hill'. You'll have seen it if you ever drive through the cutting just before junction five of the M40 heading south into London. As you enter the cutting there is a sheer drop from the top of the hill on your left hand side but, despite the severity of the fall, a few hardy sheep sometimes cling to the hillside, grazing near-perpendicular to the road.

By going through the Aston Rowant nature reserve you can reach the top of Hilarious Sheep Hill and look down over the motorway and across to the Didcot power station (put that way it hardly sounds like an inspiring view, but it's a bit better in the flesh).

That view was nice enough, and we've got a few decent pics of Amy for the profile page, but the best shots definitely came from the forest itself. For someone had been busy chalking up some superb graffiti on the trunks of the trees.

Good With Numbers
Originally uploaded by Dayorama

I'm assuming that Lucy loves sudoku, the number puzzle which has taken the country by storm in the last couple of years, but the spelling is a little lacking.

The alternative is that she loves sodoku (note the change of first vowel), which is something entirely different - a bacterial disease acquired through rat bites or scratches, according to Wikipedia.

Not the sort of thing many people would claim to love, per se, unless perhaps Lucy is a vet or medic.

Wooden Top
Originally uploaded by Dayorama

Yes, the words 'hard' and 'wooden' aren't normally associated with the female of the species, but the wooden knockers on this are something else. Some artistic soul has carefully crafted an entire chalk woman around an amusingly-shaped pair of knots in a tree trunk.

You must have to be quite incredibly switched on to spot that tiny imperfection and turn it into a work of art with, on recent evidence, a fighting chance of the 2008 Turner Prize.

So expect Amy's profile photo to change in the coming days, but it won't be a patch on the Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire border's very own Banksy. Happy New Year from me!

You may be wondering what on earth has happened to Dayorama.

If you've joined us any time in the past two and a half years, you will have got to know Dayorama in its third incarnation - grey borders, panels, stretched picture at the top, purple logo and little pictures of all the authors.

That design took shape back in July 2005 when I was frantically trying to find something, anything, that would take me away from revising for the final exams of my degree.

As I knew then, and have been discovering all over again in the past week, re-designing a weblog is incredibly time consuming and becomes a labour of love in which your head spins with bits of code remembered, gleaned, stolen and bodged together.

The result, which you see in front of you now (hopefully!), is Dayorama version four. It's been around four days of solid effort in the making, with a couple of days' designing before that, and this is what is new:

1. This is Dayorama's foundation stone. We are very proud to have been blogging for over five years, longer than many on the web, and this block commemorates our establishment in August 2002.

At the same time, I have incorporated a Twitter feed into the foundation stone, so that we can update the stone's message at any time, anywhere in the world. Look out for snappy slogans, quotes and observations that won't make a full post but deserve an airing, plus important messages.

The traditional Dayorama logo, in Showcard Gothic font, has been a fixture since version two (2003). The only change here is a barely noticeable tweak to the shade of purple.

2. Dayorama would no longer be Dayorama without the revolving pictures at the top of the page, a feature since version three. The original set of photos got an update this time last year, so I've refreshed the set again, with 14 new banners on random rotation whenever a new page loads.

3. Version three also introduced the now-familiar colour schemes for authors - green for me, light blue for OJ, ultramarine for Amy, and gold for David when he joined in September 2006.

They stay in version four, but the pictures of the authors have gone (you can find out what we look like on our individual pages - see below).

What we do have is a new font. Trebuchet is now font of choice for the headline and several other bits of the design. You'll notice we no longer use categories, either. They're just so 2004.

4. Version two had a purple background, version three had grey, so what about version four? Well, I couldn't decide, so you can choose. Click any of these little boxes in the top right hand corner of the page to change the background colour accordingly.

5. Each of our authors now has a new page about themselves, with a photo, which you can get to using the sidebar. All the usual information like recent posts and the 'on this day' feature are now on the left - the posts themselves have swapped sides!

6. Further down the left hand side of most pages you will find Dayorama's Flickr stream, showing a selection of photos from our Flickr account. Click on any photo to be taken to a larger version.

7. One of the quirks of the last design was that I definitely had a decent-looking search results page somewhere, but then it disappeared, so that whenever you tried to search for something, you ended up with a bizarre-looking purple leftover from the version before last.

This time the search button works properly and takes you to pages in keeping with the rest of the site, should you want to find anything.

(During testing I discovered there is practically nothing we haven't covered. 'Squirrels' was bound to generate results, but I was impressed when 'cardigan' and 'heffalump' both produced the goods as well!)

8. Beneath each entry there's a reminder of the author and a permanent link as per previous versions, but there are also some new features.

Stars of the social networking universe can now share our posts with friends on Facebook, or alternatively submit our posts to the wider world using the Digg website.

Finally - and this, I hope, will be one of the biggest improvements - I have overhauled our comments system.

If you've ever tried to leave a comment before, you won't need me to tell you that the window almost always crashes when you click 'submit', leaving you unsure whether your comment has worked or not. Most people submitted each comment up to five times in the hope of making sure, when it always worked first time round, but looked as though it had all gone wrong.

This, coupled with a bucketload of spam comments at our end, made the whole process of comments a bit of a nightmare. So I've been plugging away at it and now the comments system should be much easier to use.

Click the 'Comments' link from the main homepage or an archive, and it will take you to the comments section of the page dedicated to the entry in question. Write your comment and click submit, and we'll tell you if your comment made it or not, and if not, why not. Touch wood, the page won't just fall over and die, leaving you guessing!

You know what, why not try it out now. Tell me what you think of the new look using the comments, and we'll see if it works or not. Call that the acid test.

Anyway, I hope you approve, and if not be sure to let me know as it's never too late to change things. Thanks as ever for visiting Dayorama and stick with us in 2008. Coming up shortly will be my look ahead to next year, and I might just find time, after all that coding, for a Dayorama zeitgeist. Cheers!

So as not to be out done by Ollie in the "photographing our feathered friends" stakes, here's a couple of ducks shot earlier today. For context, my Mother and I went for a short walk along the North Downs / Pilgrims Way just behind our house - on the way we stopped off to feed the ducks in the village pond:

Edit: Please see below for the reason behind the tiny duck picture (MSN conversation between Ollie and I):

Amy says:
olliieeeeee
Amy says:
what have you done to my ducks???
+--- Ollie says:
they've been temporarily minimised as punishment
Amy says:
oh, but, olliieeeeee
Amy says:
they were cute
+--- Ollie says:
lol...
+--- Ollie says:
[but] it sort of killed [the site]
Amy says:
humph
+--- Ollie says:
i shall restore them shortly!
Amy says:
oh, ok, um, ooops.
Amy says:
sorry
+--- Ollie says:
amy dearest i've told you ten gazillion times how to resize pics for dayorama you're just, RUBBISH!
+--- Ollie says:
but how are you, anyway
Amy says:
blissfully enjoying being rubbish

HUMPH!

For the record, I am usually OK at loading pictures. I'm just being a little rubbish at the moment. I'd upload a photo of the balsa-wood Dodo I made on Xmas day... but that may drive Ollie mad, so I'll refrain for now.

And just to get in a few seconds before the Queen... a very Happy Christmas to all our regular readers from me too.

Well, it seems that I am more successful when it comes to clothes shopping. We’ve just had a very enjoyable afternoon, en famile, in Canterbury. We always go on Christmas Eve and there’s always a wonderful atmosphere. As you can see, the cathedral looks beautiful…

We had fish and chips for lunch, another silly tradition, and then leisurely wandered around. We didn’t have anything specific to buy so went in art galleries, book shops etc. - just general mooching around, really. It turns out I need to save around GBP2,000 for a painting by an artist I’ve liked for ages. Hmm, one day. Anyway, I bought a few necessary things – like a 2008 diary, some earrings and a dress for work – nothing exciting. And then my father said he’d treat me to a couple of evening dresses. Well, I think he said he’d buy me an evening dress. I naturally interpreted this as two dresses. I’m usually pretty quick and determined clothes shopping. It’s grab a selection. Try on. Make decision. No fuss. Consequently, my father has always been quite content to sit, wait and appraise: if it’s his money buying the dress, he wants to have a say in which rag is purchased. Sometimes our tastes differ though:

Me (having come out of changing room): “So, what do you think?”
Dad: “The dress is confused”
Me: “What do you mean, it’s confused”
Dad: “Well, it doesn’t know whether it is supposed to be a dish cloth or a dress”

Urr, that would be a “no” to that one then! We did manage to agree on two lovely dresses though, so thank you Dad.

Oh and for the record – probiotic-yogurt-covered-aloe-vera-pieces are utterly unpalatable. I mean, they’re sickly sweet, disgusting, yucky, funnily textured and just urgh. It’s not so much ‘ello vera as goodbye vera. The cheese and plum crisps are OK though.

And to end, here’s a photo of me looking slightly mischievous:

In the Guardian magazine every Saturday, Guy Browning writes a highly entertaining column called “How To [Blah]”. How to have a picnic. How to blog. How to pack. How to effectively encourage your Mother to do your washing (hint, again). Etc. I suppose it’s the left-wing, text form of the Telegraph’s social-stereotype. Anyway, it’s always an entertaining read. What I’m about to write however will probably a) not be entertaining; and b) should, most certainly, be called How not to shop in Sainsbury on Christmas Eve.

So, I woke up around 7am this morning. That’s another thing, incidentally. Silence. I actually wake up to the sound of silence. Nothing. A spattering of bird song. It’s wonderful. Anyway, so despite fluttering puppy-dog eyes at my Mother, I knew that the trip to Sainsbury was inevitable. Now, I actually went to Tesco yesterday. It was awful. I was visiting some friends and in the knowledge I had to replace the brandy and benedictine (see previous post) I nipped in. Horrendous. Queues halfway down the aisles. People having trolley wars. Couples on the brink of divorce. Shelves about to cave-in under the strain of boxes of nuts and nets of oranges. I just abandoned the plan and decided that purchasing the above at around 7.30am in Sainsbury the following day would be preferable. Needless to say, it was.

Anyway, to start off, I was in a silly mood. I insisted on playing a cheesy Christmas CD in the car on the way (it’s the family rule I invented years ago that whoever is the driver i.e. always me, gets to chose the music) and singing along. This was bound to increase the silly mood. On the driving point though, I’ve taken custody of my Mother’s car for the past couple of days – it’s nicer to drive than mine and it’s not my petrol. How has petrol suddenly leapt to around 105 pence/litre. Blimey.

Back to Sainsbury. To begin, I was utterly inappropriately dressed for a trip to the supermarket. Don’t ask me why (it was the first thing in my pile of clothes) I was wearing a large fluffy grey jumper, tight trousers and knee-high boots. It’s actually very flattering, but not for a rural Sainsbury at 7.30am on Christmas Eve. So much so that by the time I’d reached the veg counter a young chap (I think he was probably drunk) had said, “don’t I get a smile, luv” to me and said, “can I have your number”. Score. I smiled and swiftly headed for the cabbages. Now, can someone explain to me why on earth Sainsbury shrink wrap their veg? I actually understand this is being stopped since they’ve had so many complaints, but honestly! I mean, an organic turnip (sorry, organic “swedes” for all of you Southerners who don’t call a turnip a turnip, you call a turnip a swede and a swede a turnip, anyway), for example, is shrink wrapped. It’s organic. It’s meant to have mud on it. It’s a root vegetable. For goodness sake, it does not need to be covered in plastic. It’s described as “grown locally” but then they probably send it to China to shrink-wrap it. Hello carbon footprint. Hello air miles. Hello insanity.

I managed to embarrass my Mother (she really is long suffering) by picking up two melons (yes, you know what’s coming), holding them to my chest and asking her if she wanted them. I am a respectable, mature, 23 year-old with a serious job, car and mortgage, really. I received a scornful look from said Mother. I then insisted we purchased the “camembert and plum” flavoured Kettle Crisps. What sort of flavour is camembert and plum?! It sounds like an air-wick perfume. I also got heavily distracted in the dvd section, but managed to only come away with Amazing Grace , but I did manage to buy the required replacement alcohol. The other utterly unnecessary purchase was a bag of nuts. Well, I say nuts. It’s a bag of, wait for it, “prebiotic yogurt aloe vera & nut mix”. What the bloody hell is the point of a prebiotic yogurt aloe vera & nut mix? Is it sort of, trying to make out that yogurt covered nuts are healthy? Because the yogurt is prebiotic? And aloe vera? I thought that was something you had in moisturising cream and deodorant? In fact, I’ve just realised that I’m sitting in my parents study typing this and there’s an aloe vera house-plant on the bookshelf behind me. Anyway. I just didn’t realise that Mr Sainsbury would package “aloe vera pieces with prebiotic yogurt coating, Brazil nuts & almonds”. Oh well, along with the cheese and plum crisps, the aloe-vera-pieces-with-prebiotic-yogurt-coating will be an “interesting" culinary experience.

I was a useful chauffeur but I question my overall effectiveness in aiding my Mother with the Sainsbury shop.

I think my favourite quote or saying about Christmas, is the following by Dickens: “I do come home at Christmas. We all do, or we all should. We all come home, or ought to come home, for a short holiday -- the longer, the better -- from the great boarding school where we are forever working at our arithmetical slates, to take, and give a rest”. And so that is what I did on Saturday: I came home for Christmas.

I was wonderfully excited about coming home. The past three months in HK have been great, but I’ve been looking forward to a complete break from work, a few home comforts, seeing family and friends, and some solid British food. Oh, and for my Mother to do my washing. On a more serious point though (although, I am deeply serious about my Mother doing my washing and ironing too), it’s lovely to actually feel such excitement / magic / anticipation about doing something. Most of us are fortunate to have all of the material “things” that we “want” in this life. We have ample choice in our supermarkets (more on that in a post later), we have comfortable homes and we can easily be in contact with our friends and family through a wide range of communication methods. I think raw emotions are probably rarer than they used to be – there’s probably less fantasy / trepidation / discovery. However, I really was genuinely engulfed with a sense of childish excitement. It was very magical, very warming (makes up for the weather I suppose) – and just a lovely feeling really. It still is and it makes me want to smile. It seems I’ve ditched the stilettos and corporate bitch attitude for a couple of weeks and turned soft.

So, through rose-tinted glasses, England is of course beautiful. Nothing could beat driving out of London to Kent as dawn was breaking on Saturday and being treated to chequerboard fields, low rising mist, a beautiful skyline and the just the overall English landscape. Greeted by my parents with a richly decadent mince pie (my first one of the season) and champagne breakfast, the downfall to Christmas overeating and drinking began. Oh and my parents have a new breadmaker – it’s divine – I hadn’t eaten bread since being in HK and the smell and taste of warm bread is lovely. I could even be persuaded to purchase one. Nothing beats coming home. Oh and my parents had also, as a surprise, replaced one of the blinds in my flat (something I’ve been meaning to do for two years but have never got round to it), so it was lovely to see that too and see my own little sanctuary again.

Just as an aside, we still received a couple of round robin letters with Christmas cards this year. It seems that despite his best efforts, Simon Hoggart has failed to eradicate them. My parents had to inform me on Saturday evening that a close family friend had passed away a couple of weeks ago. It was a shock and is still rather upsetting. It also fuelled me to drink one or two, or perhaps three or four or five brandy & benedictines (the alcohol, not a monk) (another family tradition, only ever drunk at Christmas, it’s like liquid mince pies and is simply delicious) with my parents. So much so that I actually had to go and replace both the bottle of brandy and the bottle of benedictine earlier today (more on that later) since the three of us seemed to get through the best part of both bottles (meant for the duration of Christmas) in one evening. That’s not bad going for someone who hasn’t drunk for 3 months. And no hangover either: I am my father’s daughter. Anyway, I digress. On about my third drink I was reading one of the aforementioned round-robin letters and I was so appalled with it (I was reading extracts out in a silly voice and generally being slightly silly – it was full of such rot) that I theatrically threw it on our open fire (another wonderful thing about being back – I’ve been strongly fighting with the cat for the prime spot in front of the hearth) and decided that was the best place for all round-robin letters. In retrospect I still stand by my decision, but admit that it was possibly a little dramatic at the time. Ah well.

So, Christmas Eve. A host of angels in my advent calendar today (yes, I actually brought it back with me from HK). Off into Canterbury later to wander around and soak up the Christmas spirit, eat more mince-pies and then home for more mince-pies (there’s a theme here), more alcohol (another theme) and midnight Mass. Our Midnight Mass begins, as usual, at 11.15pm. I’m pleased we haven’t adopted this approach – how can you have Midnight Mass at 8pm? The whole idea of Midnight Mass is a) it’s at Midnight (there’s a clue in the name there); and b) you’re meant to turn up slightly tipsy because it improves the quality of the carol singing.

Alright. Fingers on buzzers. Last front-bench politician to convert to Catholicism?

Ann Widdecombe, correct, who changed denomination from the Church of England following the decision to ordain female priests. Good old forward-thinking Widders.

Interestingly, if you answered Alan Clark I'd have marked you wrong on two counts. For one, I'm not sure I'd call him a front-bench politician, since he never held high office. And two, his widow denies the reports that he converted to Catholicism shortly before his death. So it's Widdecombe or bust. Or Widdecombe's bust. I'll allow you a quiet shudder there.

So who else, then, has done a Reverse Henry? Thrown away the faith into which they were born in order that they might join the Alma Mater of Christianity - perhaps while serving as a peace envoy in a hotbed of religious zeal?

Looking down the list I find Buffalo Bill and Eric Gill to be a happy rhyming couplet of Catholic conversion. Bill, whose achievements primarily involved bison; and Gill, who not only sculpted Prospero and Ariel for the BBC, but invented its current font of choice - Gill Sans. Both found sanctuary in the Pope's bosom (not Widdecombe's). Gill converted early on in life, and we shan't mention the child abuse in any detail as it's an open goal as far as this conversation is concerned. Bill took the oath on his deathbed. They all count.

Bob Hope makes the list, having lived like Blair with a family composed in its entirety of Catholics, and John Wayne's last act was to follow suit for the same reason. The Jewish Siegfried Sassoon bit the bullet during his life as well, as did Evelyn Waugh (in 1930). And the man who once upon a time occupied my first room at university, JRR Tolkien, moved with his mother from Baptism to Catholicism at the age of eight. (It's not name-dropping if the name in question had been dead for more than 30 years when the incident to which you refer took place.)

But perhaps the finest name of them all on the list is that of Delia Smith. Yes, your favourite gastronomic goddess is a culinary Catholic. She was baptised into the Church of England but became a Catholic at the age of 22, writing the book "A Journey Into God" in the process - rather God than me.

Inspect the list for yourself on Wikipedia here. I have double checked all the entrants above but be careful with some of the others, it being Wikipedia and all that.

I know, I know. Not only have I spent the last month or so drooling over Cranford, I'm now immersed in the world of Oliver Twist (and, whisper it softly, but I've got the Fanny Hill two-parter to watch as well). Pass me my knitting.

Actually I used to be able to knit, but that's a whole other story. Tonight is the finale of the new Oliver Twist adaptation on BBC1, and having had a nice glass of wine and settled down in front of the telly, I'm going to sit here and write as I watch. (I may have had enough wine that this is the only way I'll stay awake throughout the episode.)

1910 So here we are. Five minutes to go til it starts, and this Oliver is suffering a fate worse than his namesake in the Dickens novel - he's having to watch the last few minutes of Strictly Come Dancing, in which Bruce Forsyth is singing. I don't normally watch this. Does he do that every week? If so, how does it get any viewing figures? Jesus Christ. Let's Twist again, already.

1912 A bit of background: if you've not been near your set this week, BBC1 has been running Twist every day since Tuesday's hour-long opener. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday have each had half-hour instalments, and tonight is the concluding part.

1914 I'm sure you all know what happens in Oliver Twist, but I'm hopelessly ill-informed. My only real knowledge of the show comes from the Disney adaptation in which a cartoon kitten plays the title role, ably assisted by the Artful Dodger, taking the form of a mongrel with a bunch of sausages around its neck. I am now told by IMDB that Billy Joel is involved in that somewhere. I absatively, posolutely can't believe that. No wonder I like him.

1915 More trails than you can shake a pocketful of handkerchiefs (chieves?) at, including one for the forthcoming series in which they try to find stars for a new Oliver! musical. I might actually be tempted. Somebody shoot me.

1916 Hey hey! Here we go. Much splashing through water, and there's Fagin packing in a bit of a hurry. What Fagin this boy is, too. Timothy Spall may be on the plump side for a King of street urchins, but he's done a fine old job. Ooh! It's the Old Bill! With Oliver's saviour Mr Brownlow in tow! This'll be a good half hour, y'know.

1917 I do love the opening titles, especially the bull terrier. A long, long time since bull terriers were in fashion. We used to have a bull terrier called Lizzie, who famously bit through my ear one day. Lovely dog, honest.

1919 Sykes is marching Oliver off (with bully tagging along), somewhere away from London. Mr Brownlow is not impressed that Oliver is not back with Fagin, and the police officer (who I'm sure appeared in the first episode - was there only one copper in Dickensian London?) is not amused either. Fagin "peaches" and tells the police that Sykes has taken Oliver. Not looking good for Fagin as he's taken off. Even Ezekiel the crow is condemned, and neither are going to go quietly.

1920 Have you noticed, by the way, that Ezekiel and Fagin never appear together? Clearly the producers couldn't get the crow to squawk in a room with actors in it, so they stuck it on a perch and just filmed various takes of it doing its lines alone. Poor effort from the crow.

1922 "You're my protection, boy. You're supposed to say, 'It couldn't have been Bill Sykes what done it', cos I was out here, wa'n't I?" Tom Hardy is a bloody good Sykes. Shame the bull terrier's had enough and done a runner. And can you blame it when the ghost of Nancy, the girl Sykes has just murdered, is there in the forest with them? Even Lizzie would have thought twice before sinking her fangs into that.

1924 Ah, the first appearance for Mr Monks, otherwise known as Edward Brownlow, but best known to us 21st century types as Mac out of Green Wing. And how superbly he's gone from affable ladies' man to the embodiment of consummate evil, as he plots the demise of the workhouse boy who stands to halve his inheritance.

1925 Here's a situation. You are a ten year old boy being held hostage by a deeply depraved, ethically vacant gangster who has started to see the ghost of the lover he killed. What's your next move? Sing "Abide With Me"? Spot on.

1927 Mr Brownlow confronts Edward, who says he has lost his mind. (He wouldn't be the first in the opening ten minutes.) It doesn't take long for Mac to crack and things are starting to unravel, as are people. Now the Good Guys have the letter from Agnes in their possession. Which is good 'cos they've got eighteen minutes of broadcast to sort this mess out.

1928 By the way if you don't know who Agnes is, go to iPlayer and watch the first four episodes. You've got til Christmas Day 2007 before the first one expires. Crack on! (It's from the BBC and it's free.)

1930 Edward's trying to exercise his influence over his grandfather one final time. He ain't buying it. Bets on Edward killing grandpa in the next minute?

1932 Nope, nope, Mr Brownlow is alive and well. Edward clearly didn't fancy his chances versus the coppers in the house. We've had the noose threatened enough times in five days' viewing but that would've been, if you will excuse the pun, a dead cert.

1935 Dodger and Fagin, who have been as close as lovers throughout, have a frantic discussion in jail. Dodger is charged with finding Oliver as he's dragged away by more policemen. (Who, even in this century, were never around when you needed them.)

1936 Sykes has lost it and as Oliver makes good his escape, his captor's off into the sewers of London - punishment enough, you'd think, and the coppers don't seem in much of a hurry to pursue. It won't exactly take long to smell him out when he resurfaces.

1937 Dodger and Oliver bump into each other but Dodger's not getting any joy. Meanwhile Fagin is up before the beak, and this time it isn't Ezekiel's. Now - is that one of the blokes out of Armstrong and Miller playing the part of the judge? I'm sure he is but a) I don't know which is which out of those two and b) I'm notoriously shite at celebrity spotting, even on telly.

1938 Fagin refuses to renounce his faith in front of whichever one of Armstrong or Miller, so it's not looking good for him. (That noose has been promised action all week, in fairness, and it's been left, er, 'hanging' til now.)

1940 Here's a situation. You are a deeply depraved, ethically vacant gangster who has started to see the ghost of the lover he killed. You're on the run in the sewers. What's your next move? Sing "Abide With Me"? Spot on.

1942 Oliver's back! Rose is overjoyed and Mr Brownlow, never overly expressive, looks on in the background. They'll live happily ever after. Fagin, however, probably won't, as he looks out across the crowd at his imminent hanging. He spots Dodger, who can't bear to watch and hides as the grisly sound effects play out around his ears. Out of nowhere the bull terrier pops up, clearly sensing an ear to be nibbled, and Dodger has a new companion. I used to play with that dog in a crash helmet after the ear incident, just so you know Dodge.

1943 Agnes gets a proper send-off at last, in the company of sister Rose and son Oliver, who remembers Nancy too. Dog and Dodge make their sombre way across town, throwing the occasional heartbroken threat at passers-by, and even Mr Bumble (come on, keep up) gets a quick cameo at the end with his new madam.

1944 A series which for a moment looked as though it would end with Mr Bumble getting a kick up the arse, actually ends with Oliver and Rose playing a wonderful piano duet in front of an appreciative Mr Brownlow (who, at the outset, disliked the instrument immensely). The show closes with "Merry Christmas!" ringing in the air. And to you, too.

If you watched Oliver Twist all week, let me know your thoughts in the comments. As I'm sure you can gather I've rather enjoyed it. It's no Cranford but it's whiled away three highly enjoyable hours and at least, now, I know the bloody story. Can I have Oliver and Co on DVD for Christmas?

When I wrote about Ceefax the other day, I hadn't realised one of our regular readers is capable of reeling off The Story Of Ceefax from memory.

So I was mildly surprised to find Carl, whose comments you might have spotted before, had written a comment as long as your arm beneath my pitiful Ceefaxy offering.

There's some cracking information in this so I've reprinted the majority of it here, since it deserves a slightly wider audience (the three people who read Dayorama as opposed to the one person who checks the comments).

Here we go then. I present The Life And Times Of Ceefax, by Carl...

"Ceefax (and indeed any other teletext services) pages are composed of a 40x24 screen. This translates to a row of text 40 characters across the screen, with 24 rows in total, plus an extra row for the Fastext (coloured) options on the very last line, making it 40x25 really.

"All tetetext services (and indeed Ceefax) are transmitted digitally over the analogue signals in the hidden areas of the picture. These are the parts of the picture, just beyond the top and bottom of the TV screen that you cannot see. On TVs made before the 1990s or so, it was possible for the viewer to adjust the picture, and it was here that the normally invisible parts of the picture could be made visible by adjusting the vertical hold, etc. Teletext services can be seen as little dancing lines at the top of the picture – very strange looking!

"There is no technical reason why teletext services cannot continue after digital switchover, and teletext services have been digital since their inception anyway! Indeed, some satellite and cable channels operate small services on digital platforms.

"However reliable it is, it’s often not a good idea to use teletext services to check your lottery numbers. The reason for this is that errors can sometimes occur, leading to the occasional character not being displayed at all, or perhaps even the wrong character! This does not happen with the newer interactive services, like BBCi, but they’re not quite as fun at times, or nearly as accessible or fast. Teletext services have a whole 7 megabits of capacity all to themselves!

"I know all of this off by heart – I didn’t look it up! How sad! Well, I have always wanted to be an ICT teacher. Why I do know these terribly nerdy facts about Ceefax? Well, I once edited pages like this, though these were viewed by around 1,000 or so people, not several million! This was in the heady days of the early 1990s – well, up until 1994 actually – where my secondary school run its own internal Ceefax-like service. We called this “Noticeboard”.

"In those days computers started up almost immediately, and after pressing a red function key, one was quickly presented with the main Noticeboard page. From here, you would enter a three-digit page number that would take you to any number of pages of information. In fact, we had hundreds! Pages included sports pages (the school was and still is recognised for its sports activities), a ‘home page’ for each form, fun facts, quizzes… all sorts.

"Lots of fun in those days, though it had to be shut down in mid-1994, when the BBC network was finally switched off and we moved to an all-PC network. I had the grand title of... wait for it... "Acting Deputy BBC Network Manager". Beat that!"

Having started a job where a five-hour daily commute is thrown into the bargain, I've started to watch a lot of television on the coach to and from work. Plug socket, free wi-fi, BBC iPlayer, and away we go - hours of fun.

Or hours of weeping softly through the rolling hills of the Home Counties, if you choose to spend that time watching Cranford.

I am not usually one for period dramas, but the first of Cranford's five episodes - adapting Elizabeth Gaskell novels into a series on the life of a small Cheshire village in the 1840s - aired the Sunday before I started these gargantuan trips down the M40. Given it provided 60 minutes of entertainment I plumped for it, and what an excellent decision that turned out to be.

Cranford is pure television gold. It is one of the most innocent, charming, relaxing and heartwarming dramas I have ever seen, with the sort of cast you'd pick if you were told you had free reign to choose anyone at all.

Philip Glenister (i.e. Life On Mars) for example, giving a tremendous performance as a gentleman in charge of an estate, who takes it upon himself to educate the young son of a poacher.

Or Dame Judi Dench as the simple, generous, good-hearted centre of the predominantly female village society, Miss Mattie.

And just when I thought they couldn't top that, they did. In the final five minutes of the last episode (and this is giving very little of the plot away, I promise you) one character's long-lost brother returns from India. And who appears in the briefest of scenes as the brother?

When you can get Martin Shaw (always Judge John Deed to me) to appear for one scene, for 45 seconds, in the final episode of a series, you must be onto a winner.

It's not even worth trying to explain what made this so good, or taking you through any of the plot. You have to see it. Here, as reassurance that I'm not alone if nothing else, are some thoughts from people commenting on this website about the series and the books:

"If only Cranford could go on for ever and ever! BBC historical drama at its best."

"My cynical Scouse husband, my 17 year old stepson, and my 77 year old mum all join me in loving Cranford."

"This too short series made the licence fee all worthwhile."

"Television at its best. More emotion conveyed in just a glance than in a whole hour of soap histrionics."

"I have finally found a flaw in this wonderful production - that it has finished so soon."

"My wife was not with me when I watched it and I, for a 62 year old, cried buckets on my own. What a joy this series was. It was spellbinding from start to finish. Have to hand it to the BBC, just brilliant."

I work in a totally different bit of the corporation and have absolutely no attachment to this programme other than loving it to pieces, but my God it warms the cockles of my heart to see people, for once, applauding the BBC for getting something right.

On the subject of the Beeb, hello to Scaryduck. Scaryduck has become the latest person to realise the Dayorama comments system pretends to break each time you use it, but secretly works.

In response to my somewhat self-indulgent (look, it's a blog) ode to my first story on Ceefax, Scaryduck writes:

Gad! Eighteen years, and I've never had a Ceefax.

Which, among other clues on his own blog, leads me to conclude that our duck has seen far longer service at Television Centre than I.

Not that I am about to forgive Scaryduck for winning the Guardian's Best British Blog 2002 award, when we at Dayorama were merely shortlisted - even in five years, duck, I have not forgotten that name!

Click here to read the original article announcing the winner. Those were the days. Please do check the duck's award-winning (fix!) blog out here.

You know you've arrived when you get your first story on Ceefax. Even if it is the second item of three on page 385, sandwiched between two boxing articles.

Cleverly, the system we use duplicates the first four paragraphs of selected stories and re-encodes them for Ceefax, meaning there's no need to write everything twice - once for the web and once for Ceefax.

However, there is a strict limit of the number of characters (i.e. letters and spaces) you can fit on a Ceefax page. So we have all sorts of visual indicators on our screens to let us know when we've exceeded the limit, and all our copy must be edited to fit the Ceefax constraints.

This is why almost every report from a Premier League football match on the BBC Sport website carries a four-paragraph summary of the game (for Ceefax) then launches back into it from the beginning, in much more detail, as soon as you reach paragraph five.

Exactly the same article as the one above appears, with a picture and some links, on this page of the web.

Personally, I prefer the Ceefax version. When I was younger and we went to stay at my nan and grandad's house in Scotland, I'd wake up every morning to find my grandad sat in his armchair with a plate of toast and a banana, meticulously combing his way through Ceefax. It's nice to think I'm part of the machinery now!

... great big fat lazy cats grow. Anyone remember the cute little bundle of fluff that Daisy used to be? Well, she's been the family cat for three years now, as of a couple of days ago. This is her present state... utterly flat out in front of my parents open fire, clearly dreaming of nothing but being fed turkey and cream in a week or so. There's no "catching" anything insofar as Daisy is concerned, so she'd never dream of hunting mice. Her only activity is following my Mother and Father around, literally, everywhere (she almost had a trip to the bottle bank the other day when she decided to jump into my Dad's car boot - he'd got half way down the road before he spied this cute little face in the rear view miror and turned back) and biting my Mother's ankle's whenever she's hungry (thus, my Mother's ankle's a pretty much bitten to death).

Oh how we're a Nation who love our pets. In other news, one week and I'll be back in Blighty. Watched a performance of the Nutcracker yesterday and I can safely say I now feel suitably Christmassy. Now I have to pack. Urgh.

First things first, before I present to you a short but significant scientific paper. You can now find some photos from Tuesday's archery filming on the BBC Sport Flickr page (which you should visit often, hitting 'refresh' many times on each occasion). The shot of an arrow piercing a watermelon is the star of the show, although you should also see what an amazing day it was outside - despite being bitterly, bitterly cold.

Right then. Time to blind you with some science, for I have discovered an entirely new scientific principle that I like to call the Williams Loop of Futility. Here it is:

We'll get to the minutiae of how this loop is produced very shortly. The Williams Loop of Futility serves to embody what, precisely, it means to be a member of the barnstormingly fallible, transient, intransigent species that is the human race.

Let us pick on a specific and perhaps representative example of the breed, a man who, on a Sunday evening, must drive his car from his home near Oxford to another house in the town of Yateley. It is a fifty minute drive from door to door on a good day. Today is a good day.

The following morning, our man must make his way from this latter house to his place of work in London. However, he cannot take the car with him. He must either drive the car all the way back to a car park near his home in Oxford, then take a coach all the way back down the same motorway again and into London; or leave the car at the house in Yateley and travel in by train, returning for his car later on.

Our man chooses the second option and takes the train on the Monday morning. However, to complicate matters, he is then driven to Shropshire in another car, where he stays overnight. He leaves Shropshire in the same car at 5pm the following day.

He must now collect his car and return to the original house to sleep. But how?

Well, we watch as, at 7.45pm, he is dropped off at a park and ride near Oxford - just ten miles from his house. However, the car has yet to be retrieved.

With no money about his person, he uses his Oxford Tube bus pass to cadge a lift on a returning coach into the centre of town, and walks to the train station, where he buys a ticket for the slightly delayed 8.15pm service to Bournemouth, calling at Basingstoke.

The train arrives at Oxford fifteen minutes late, and reaches Basingstoke station by 9.22pm. Spotting his connecting train waiting at an adjacent platform, our human guinea pig pegs it through the underpass like a man possessed, throws himself onto the train as the doors close, and finds himself fifteen minutes later on the platform at Fleet station.

Having by now found a cashpoint he lobs a ten pound note into the hand of a taxi driver and is soon reunited with his car, with the time standing at just gone 10pm. A short while later, with the car de-iced and its driver refuelled on a little pasta inside the house, the final leg of the journey - a three-motorway trek back towards Oxford - may be completed.

And, as car and driver arrive just ten miles away from their starting point at 11.20pm, taking over three and a half hours to replicate what is normally a fifteen minute drive, the Williams Loop of Futility is complete:

Let the Williams Loop of Futility stand as testament to the only species on Earth that could conjure up such an insanely complicated method of going ten miles down the road back to its resting place. Never again. Never again. (Until this Sunday.)

I'm going to be decorating a Christmas tree later today in the company of two cats and a chicken.

I remember once, before going on a long flight, I read from cover to cover a book entitled The Black Box: Cockpit Voice Recorder Accounts of In-Flight Accidents.

By the time I boarded the plane I was sorely regretting my choice of reading material. Perhaps, with that in mind, I shouldn't have just watched this video:

Jets v Scimitars
Originally uploaded by Dayorama

Edit, 10pm: Sheffield Scimitars got the game-winning fourth goal to claim a deserved, but still surprising, victory. I spoke to Jets coach Steve Moria afterwards and before I'd even opened my mouth, he was saying he didn't have any answers. For a team with title ambitions it's more than a little worrying to be so badly caught out at home.

Hmm, well my absence has something to do with work. Lots of work. Lots of billable hours. Little sleep. One observation: they say that HK is a City that never sleeps. Too true. In the last fortnight I’ve walked the 10-15minute walk from work to my apartment sometime during each hour from eleven through till 6am. With each passing hour, another part of the City comes to life – whether it be people falling out of bars, people loading fresh fruit and veg into restaurants or the newspaper sellers setting up for the morning free paper drive. Fascinating. Just think, if I hadn’t had to work so much, I’d have never seen this side to HK… hmmm… not very convincing.

I’m not sure where the time has gone. Two weeks and I shall be back in Blighty. Off to listen to the HK Philharmonic Orchestra with a repertoire of Sibelius later this evening. Considering I only got up at 3.30pm, I suppose I’d best get my act together.

I'm not sure I necessarily believe in fate, but sometimes you wonder how the series of choices you make affects the outcome.

This evening I got to my bus stop in Shepherds Bush and discovered it was packed with people sheltering from the rain. One said he'd been waiting "ages" for an Oxford Tube, so I decided sod it - I won't wait out in the cold, I'll nip into the nearby Hilton hotel, sit in the lounge and read a book for a while.

45 minutes later I re-emerged to find an Oxford Tube passing by. Fine, I could wait. But there at the stop was another coach, loading up with passengers. Except that looked rather full, so I decided I'd ignore that one too, since I was in no hurry and they're fairly regular.

As I was bored (stick with this story, it'll go places shortly) I took this photo of the rain sheeting down onto Holland Park Avenue:

And there, to the right of those traffic lights in the lane of oncoming traffic, is where a woman was hit by a car moments later.

The two of us at the bus stop heard the thud and the scream, and could make out a silhouette hitting the floor. We both ran, alongside a few other pedestrians, and a car on the opposite side of the road immediately drew to a halt. And for the first time in my life I dialled 999.

I have always wondered what that would be like. Obviously you never find out what it's like to call the emergency services until you actually need them, and it felt very strange - as a man who grew up with Casualty and The Bill - to be uttering the immortal words, "Ambulance, please".

My legs were soon trembling. A few people were urgently tending to the stricken lady, who was motionless on the floor, while her daughter screamed a gut-wrenching, alien, horrifying scream, as I'm sure any of us would if that had been our mother on the tarmac. I've knocked my mother off her bike, face-down into a road before and that was enough to make me want to pass out with fear, without seeing her hit by any car.

I did the best I could to tell the emergency services where we were, and described what little I could see of the lady's injuries, and an ambulance was on its way. By some minor miracle a doctor had happened across the incident and was now treating the lady, who appeared conscious but could definitely not be moved out of the road.

As you can imagine, it did not take long for the presence of a car and woman, spread across Holland Park Avenue's westbound carriageway on a Friday night, to cause problems. We were right by the junction and cars were backing up thick and fast behind us. I went back to help a couple of vehicles reverse away from the scene, then decided there was only one way to solve the problem. Lo and behold I found myself standing in the yellow hatching of the junction box, and I began to guide traffic around the accident, using one of the two eastbound lanes as an impromptu contraflow.

If I never thought I'd end up dialling 999, I definitely hadn't bargained on standing in the middle of a central London junction, directing buses, lorries and taxis. I had to keep going for at least 15 minutes before the police arrived, and even kept it up a while longer as they established what had happened. Eventually a proper traffic officer took over the operation. My umbrella of power - wafted assertively at wantaway drivers - and I could take a break.

There was one final vehicle to be flagged down by yours truly. With the bus stop now blocked to traffic, I had to head down the hefty queue of cars (the second time in two weeks that I've been partly responsible for a major tailback!) and bang on the door of an Oxford Tube. The first driver didn't want to know but, by chance, there was a second coach in the same queue, whose driver proved far more amenable.

I wish I knew how to find out about the health of the poor lady, and her daughter for that matter. I have always been particularly sensitive to things like that - it properly grieves me when I think people are going to lose a mum or dad - and I have never been so close to raw anguish like that. I really hope everyone will be okay... I don't think I'll be wanting a second go at dialling 999 for a long, long time.

And to think that if I'd got on any one of the four or five buses which passed me by, I'd never have been there at all.