Welcome to the Starship Thornhill Park & Ride.

They've been building this new passenger hall - or 'Advanced Huddling Platform', as it essentially is - for years. It replaces a series of four or five lonely, glorified windows behind which we commuters would usually cower from the Oxfordshire elements.

And you'd think, with all the time and effort that's gone into this, they'd be able to come up with something half decent.

Let me be generous first off, since it's much more fun to complain and I don't want to spoil the complaining later on by having to provide a balanced argument.

It looks quite nice, despite giving the appearance that it blasts off at night and lands again at around 5am. It is wonderful to have a nice, warm enclosure (yes, come on, we're all cattle in this business) in which to shelter from the rain and wind. Plus, from afar, it's a whole lot glossier than the previous sight: bedraggled queues of snivelling wretches shivering in the dark.

But when you actually reach the building - in itself a feat since fencing still surrounds two thirds of it, so good luck running for that bus - things start to go tits up.

So that there is the main entrance, with the bus stop for London-bound coach services on the far right of the picture.

Two issues here. First, those doors are quite heavy if you open them by hand, but conveniently there is a button which opens them for you if you press it.

Less conveniently, everyone this morning immediately assumed you had to press the button to open the doors - and then the doors closed back in on some people before they'd made it entirely through (lesson: never, ever dawdle in a brand new doorway). Cue people leaping forward as doors close on their hand and their rucksack. The doors move quite slowly and were always unlikely to take somebody's arm off, but it doesn't seem the cleverest piece of design in the world.

The second minor technicality is less a fault with the building, and more a fault with the human race. See that bus stop? That's quite a busy bus stop since both the Oxford Tube and Oxford Espress (poncy name) stop there to pick up London-bound commuters.

Now, we've all been given a lovely warm waiting room to sit in. But we are all from the Home Counties, and we all work in London. This makes us a heady combination of self-important, determined, anxious and cunning. Therefore, we all forgo the luxury of the waiting room in order to queue outdoors in the wind and rain - with even less protection than the glorified windows we used to have in front of us - in order to make sure we get on the bus before anyone else.

When I got there this morning, a huge queue of people had snaked right in front of the main doors, all attempting precisely this manoeuvre. Then the park and ride double decker going to Oxford city centre turned up, cruised past this bus stop into the distance, and almost all the queue disappeared. It turned out they all wanted the boring old park and ride, not the London coaches - but nobody knew where the hell that bus left from so they all found the nearest queue and stood in it.

Which brings me to my next problem.

Here we are then, we've gone through the main doors and we're inside the cosy waiting room. What's the first thing you think you'd put in the waiting room of a brand new building at a busy bus station?

Seats, you say? Well alright yes, maybe, but let's say the basic furnishings are in place. It functions as a waiting room. Now what? If it were left to me, the very first thing I'd add would be a great big sign explaining what had changed, and where you can now find your bus, given that all the old bus stops are cordoned off, and there are lots of new stops nobody has ever seen before.

And as you can see - that scene was mirrored in whichever direction you looked - there was not a dickie bird. Instead it was left to the passengers to either:

a) wander around in a zombie-like daze until they hit upon their stop of choice,
b) perpetually hassle the two members of staff selling tickets for the London services, or
c) take a hopeful punt and stand in the wrong queue til their bus cruises past, then run after it.

I have always been of the opinion that Oxford's bus companies are sometimes run in the sort of fashion that makes Trotters Independent Trading look like Coutts. The lack of a simple sign explaining matters, on the very first day of operation, is a bit of an own goal.

As is this sort of thing:

They've had yonks to finish this new building off. It's behind schedule as it is, and as though the fencing, men at work signs and great pits of brown soil directly outside the new terminal weren't bad enough, wiring left dangling inside is just shabby. God knows what this wiring will eventually become. Part of me is hoping against hope that it'll be high definition satellite TV...

So to summarise, the new park and ride building at Thornhill looks like something out of Doctor Who, provides a warm waiting room that nobody sits in for fear of losing their seat, has absolutely no information on which bus leaves from where, and helpfully offers a selection of loose wires suspended in mid-air.

And now the work begins to dig up the old bus stops and replace them with parking spaces. Pass the ammunition.

I don't know what it is about transfer deadline day, but I always fall for it hook, line and sinker.

We all know damned well at the start of the day that it's going to be the biggest anti-climax since somebody said, "Hey, why don't we build a dome there?"

But does that stop me keeping Sky Sports News on all day and refreshing about ten different gossip websites every single minute I'm at a computer?

Does it hell. I want news! Signings! Glamour! Glory! Somebody who can hit a barn door with a tank for Manchester City!

It was around midday when it was first mentioned that City might be signing Zimbabwean striker Benjani, who has been banging goals in for fun at Portsmouth this season. In my considered opinion, signing Benjani - for the rumoured £6m price tag - would be A Good Thing.

So good, in fact, that it took on that strange status we occasionally afford things, where they are used to make anything bad seem insignificant.

You know what I mean. Let's say you're going on holiday to Hawaii. Whatever happens the day before you leave - asteroid hits your house, pet dog savages next door's children, your husband is arrested for child molestation - you'll still say, somewhere deep inside: "It doesn't matter, I'm going to Hawaii tomorrow."

I had a bit of a shit meeting early this afternoon, and since then it's all been a bit of a long slog sat behind a desk. But I've met every hurdle with a quiet internal whisper of: "It doesn't matter, City are signing Benjani."

God knows why. As though it'll make the blindest bit of difference to my everyday happiness.

The bugger hasn't even put pen to paper for us yet since it all depends on other deals going through in the five and a half hours of the transfer window that remain - and even if he does sign, he'll almost certainly fall prey to the strange disease that demands new strikers at the club immediately cease to be at all effective at scoring goals. (Witness Greek striker Georgios Samaras, who'd scored something like nine hundred goals in twelve appearances before joining, then didn't so much as trouble the halfway line for the ensuing two years.)

But for some reason the spell has been cast and I'm sat here, alone in the office, watching some non-entity harping on about Benjani from outside our ground. He's not had his medical, but he does have his work permit. My heart leaps - he'll definitely sign if Jermain Defoe goes to Portsmouth from Spurs. And oh look, they've got someone outside Portsmouth's ground. He says there's "no fresh activity". My heart sinks. Damn this rollercoaster of footballing uncertainty!

Happily, we have just signed Felipe Caicedo from Basel for around five million pounds. Regardless of the fact that I know you have never heard of him, and he's about as likely to become a successful Premier League striker as I am to present Match Of The Day this Saturday night, he is something. And as we drift into a night of frantic transfer fumblings, I shall cling to that.

Did this man illegally break into a Mancunian sewer?

We'll find out in a short while, because today has been spent learning all about health and safety.

Don't yawn. Sure, where you work health and safety seminars are probably incredibly dull and largely pertain to correct desk posture and the use of fire extinguishers to prop up fire doors. But the BBC's health and safety training days are something else. Stick with this post because you will learn some very interesting things, not least the source of my inspiration for the post title.

For a start, the examples we have to work through are both genuinely terrifying from a producer's point of view, and they're also situations you can all too easily find yourself in.

In the room we had around 12 people, ranging from sports journalists like me to Blue Peter producers, the director of an adventure/reality series about to be filmed in Kamchatka for BBC3, and the line producer about to take his place on the set of the forthcoming BBC adaptation of Little Dorrit. So as you might imagine, some of the experience in the room puts my little excursion with an elderly marathon runner into the shade.

The morning was taken up with lots of group work, legal explanations and definitions of how we grade risk in the BBC - how we make decisions on what we should film and what is too dangerous, and how we avoid hazards. You just know Top Gear is going to come into this. We will get to Hammond and his car shortly.

First we were given fairly generic examples. How about your presenter needs to climb up a 70-foot tree for a part of your film? What would you need to sort out in terms of risks and hazards, and avoiding them?

Well it just so happened that one of our number had been in Siberia mere weeks earlier, filming with a very well known adventure series presenter. I am not allowed to identify anybody, but the name sounds a little like shooting a rather large hibernating mammal, then putting it on a barbecue. (That may well mean nothing to you, but if you watch enough of these documentary things you might get it.)

Mr Barbecued Mammal found a 70-foot tree in Siberia, oddly enough, and wanted to climb it. Just like our example, down to the letter. But where the advice in the example is to use a professional rope access team to rig the tree so it can be easily scaled, Barbecued Mammal wanted to do it unaided. In other words, clamber a 70-foot tree with nothing but his hands and feet for grip.

If you are the producer - i.e., the buck stops with you if anyone is hurt or killed - this is what we in the trade call an absolute fucking nightmare, if you will excuse the language. Your presenting talent, a famous one at that, wants to be left to his own devices to go 70 feet into the air. He is influential enough within your broadcasting company (not, in this case, the BBC) that he probably has more power than you to make these decisions. But if he falls and dies, your career is over.

Our man the producer, sat back in London with us telling this tale, let him do it. Cue a profound gasp from our safety advisor taking the course - but he understood the dilemma faced. It is quite incredibly difficult to tell an influential presenter, renowned for taking risks on television, that he cannot climb a tree unaided because it is too dangerous. And if he insists, you risk a major flare-up by trying to face him down. What would you have done?

See the problem is, your presenting talent often gets in the way of making a wise production decision in the heat of the moment. And this is where Top Gear comes in.

We spent the whole afternoon studying a detailed report into Richard Hammond's jet car crash, covering every aspect of the risk management the Top Gear producers performed - from the initial concept at a production meeting, to the three weeks in which the shoot was set up, to the single day at the airfield and its disastrous end.

The Health & Safety Executive brought no prosecution against the BBC or the production team having thoroughly examined the precautions taken, and rightly so. On the evidence put in front of me today, they made a very good fist of trying to protect Richard Hammond and everyone else in their care.

But those preparations were not without some minor faults, and in my eyes there were one or two decisions taken which - while they didn't contribute to Hammond's crash - could have caused something equally as bad, or worse, in their own right.

According to the report in front of me, the executive producer took an early decision that Hammond should not attempt a land speed record in the jet car. This was a very wise move because it immediately takes pressure off Hammond and the production team. There is no target to hit, no need to try that little bit harder - just go very fast and stay safe.

But no maximum speed had been agreed between Top Gear and the private company to whom the car belonged. The car had done over three thousand successful runs at very high speed prior to Hammond's day with it, and held the UK land speed record, which stood at 300.3mph.

Richard Hammond was given, to quote the report, "half an hour or so" off camera in the morning in which to learn the controls of this car. He completed a few runs without the afterburner (which doubles the horsepower from an already insane 5,000hp to 10,000hp), then switched the afterburner on.

In his last successful run at 5pm, he reached a top speed of 314mph - though he was not told this at the time, as the producers had maintained their desire not to give Hammond any targets to try to beat, since they knew the adrenaline would carry him away.

Read that again. Yes, Richard Hammond is a very experienced driver and a motor racing correspondent of some considerable pedigree. But after half an hour's training and a handful of goes without afterburner, he proceeded to take the car 14mph faster than anyone, and specifically the private company's own drivers, had managed in three thousand previous attempts.

That is a genuinely terrifying thought when written down in black and white. Putting a presenter into that kind of situation, where you can't even complete a risk assessment because 314mph is an unknown quantity for the car, is not good at all.

Yes, it ultimately (and luckily) made for great television, but where do you draw the line? It was only luck (and an incredible helmet and roll cage) that kept Richard Hammond alive - who knows how many times out of ten that sort of accident results in death.

The ideal scenario would have been for the company's own drivers to do the driving, but since Top Gear's format does not allow it to simply report on events, it had to be either Hammond, Clarkson, May or The Stig driving - or else it wouldn't fit into the show's structure.

So Top Gear had hoisted themselves by their own petard. They gave a top presenter barely half an hour's tuition in the UK's fastest car, then watched as he took the car past the limit it had established over three thousand previous runs. But they had no choice but to use a presenter if they wanted to do the piece, and they wanted a strong editorial line out of the piece. Of course, they got one, though not the one they were expecting.

It is important to note that while Top Gear's risk assessment and management was not one hundred per cent, it was still remarkably good overall, and showed a thorough and dedicated approach to getting it right and keeping Hammond (who was not the original driver down to do the stunt: that was May) safe.

The same cannot be said for other productions. David Dimbleby, above, got into a bit of trouble over some sewers while filming the recent series How We Built Britain. Here is an extract from a gossip column in The Times back in October 2007:

A stroll in the sewers appears to have landed David Dimbleby in the . . . well, in the sort of stuff you find in sewers. A scene from his BBC series How We Built Britain has had to be cut from the DVD version because it breached health and safety rules.

The BBC were given permission to film in Manchester’s Victorian sewers as long as they attended a three-day health and safety course. But, as Dimbleby told an audience at the Cheltenham Literature Festival yesterday, the television crew were too busy to complete their training.

The BBC agreed to remove footage of the sewers after a complaint.

“Health and safety rules!” moaned Dimbleby. “I ask you.”

And you'd be inclined to agree with him, wouldn't you? Silly health and safety with their three-day course just to go down a sewer.

Except, even if you take that point of view, it's not wise to employ the alternative that the show's producers apparently found.

Having eschewed the official route, Dimbledy ended up in the same sewers, our safety advisor told us. He had been escorted by, to quote the safety advisor, "a couple of adrenaline junkies who knew how to get into the sewers".

In other words, a film crew and highly regarded presenter for a flagship BBC television series knowingly trespassed into Manchester's sewers. They then showed the resulting footage on national TV. It is difficult to comprehend quite how daft you have to be to do this - naturally, within seconds of this footage going to air, the sewer company had called the BBC to enquire how this was done when nobody had attended the required safety course.

I sincerely hope that, like the Scoopt post earlier this week, somebody leaves a comment correcting this version of events. It staggers me that one of our film crews would have done this. I realise it sounds trivial but if Dimbleby had slipped on the sewer floor and injured himself (been in a sewer lately? I bet it's fairly easily done), the shit would have hit the fan like you would not believe.

It doesn't end there. A case is ongoing where a sound recordist, filming a community farm four years ago, was hit by the prop of a wind turbine as the turbine was being dismantled. He was left paralyzed.

But it's difficult to compete with some of the truly gobsmacking idiocy displayed on BBC television in the 1980s. If you're of a certain age you may remember Michael Lush. Lush was a viewer of the 'Late Late Breakfast Show', hosted by Noel Edmonds, who won the chance to take part in a stunt live on the show.

The stunt was that he would be winched high into the air in a box, which would then explode, leaving him plunging to earth... only to be saved by a bungee cord. But in first rehearsal, the bungee broke free and Lush fell to his death. The show was immediately taken off air and Edmonds withdrew from television for two years.

The show's producers should have seen an event like this coming. This video shows amateur stunt drivers attempting to leap a series of cars. It is a miracle nobody died, but the second driver ended up in hospital with a number of serious injuries.

Thankfully the breathtaking stupidity on display there is unlikely ever to happen again. You probably think I've been brainwashed reading this extended treaty on the merits of health and safety but, having seen what I've seen today, any of our production staff would be mad not to have this paramount in their thoughts.

Here, finally, is the continuity announcers on the day that Noel's Late, Late Breakfast Show was pulled off the air, following the tragic death of Michael Lush. This is not a health and safety issue, it's a common sense issue, but could the Beeb not have chosen a movie with a slightly more appropriate title for the poor woman to announce?

When writing yesterday about the mysterious case of the photographer and the marathon runner, part of me knew it probably wouldn't be long before somebody got in touch.

After all if I worked for the photo agency Scoopt, I'd be checking various blog searches and what-have-you on a daily basis just in case the name had been mentioned (indeed, I check each day to see if Dayorama and various BBC sites have had mentions elsewhere).

It really didn't take long at all. Earlier this afternoon Kyle from Scoopt checked in on the comments:

"Apologies about the 'photocall' reference in the captions," writes Kyle, referring to my observation that snaffling a few photos in the background of a filming session hardly counted as a "photocall" as per the description given on Scoopt.

"This was my mistaken assumption, not the photographer's," he continues. "I've changed the caption on Scoopt and requested the same change on Getty Images."

Not only that, Kyle has now credited BBC Sport in the caption, which is more than adequate compensation. Whinge about caption hereby withdrawn.

"Other than that, it strikes me as a perfectly legitimate photo opportunity," he concludes.

Can't argue with a word of that, really. As I said in the last entry on this subject, it's difficult to cry foul and demand privacy if you're going to go around filming people in the middle of the capital.

I was just a little surprised that I'd not even noticed the photographer at work - but shortly after Kyle had been on to put forth the Scoopt line, the snapper himself surfaced to explain:

"It is the cheeky monkey here," wrote photographer Craig, alluding to the opening line of the last entry about this.

His version of events is he was simply out on his lunch break and, as a keen photographer, looking to get some good shots of Parliament. Then he noticed the filming going on and decided to get in on the act.

"I am pleased that the cameraman filming the interview liked some of my images, but he was unaware that I was there as I did not want to interrupt him doing his job. I had therefore set my camera to silent mode so his interview piece was not ruined.

So perhaps I was being a little disingenuous in suggesting that Craig had been stealthily spiriting photos away into the night, although photographers working for London agencies are generally not renowned for their conscientious approach to noise levels.

"I carried on photographing other things in the area," adds Craig, "including ironically the Scotsman on the Westminster Bridge who had been playing his bagpipes, which was mentioned in your other piece."

It is good to know he remained alive after the plumbers dealt with him, then.

"London is a fascinating place to work in as so much happens when you walk about. Hopefully the images on Scoopt will also be used to promote your own piece."

Yes alright, alright, Craig, no need to lay it on thick. And the photos I saw on Scoopt (this is my favourite) were indeed pretty impressive - to quote a colleague back in the BBC Sport offices, "those are bloody good, aren't they!"

Credit to both Kyle and Craig for writing in so speedily. I quite enjoy this internet lark. Back in, say, the 1980s, it wouldn't have been this easy to a) whinge about some cunningly taken photos and b) get a direct reply from the parties responsible within 24 hours. But then, our boy the marathon runner wouldn't have reached a hundred, so we wouldn't have been filming in the first place. God bless 2008 and all who film in her.

PS: Disappointing that the potentially intriguing Scoopt blog has not been updated in a couple of months. But the question is: is the site struggling and it's therefore been abandoned, or have they got too much business to get around to writing it?

So said a colleague during a dim sum lunch earlier today. The questions followed my squeals of protest after being told I had to eat chicken's feet before leaving Hong Kong. Nothing like an idle threat to entice me to do something. So yes, I have to say I have gingerly eaten part of a chicken's foot. Needless to say, it was foul.

In retrospect, it's not the taste that's the problem. I had two tiny nibbles of this bone-like thing and it simply tasted as though I was eating a heavily sauced piece of meat fat. You can't taste anything beyond the black bean sauce and gelatinous slime. It's not even the look that causes me problems. They just look like spare ribs. The concept though is another thing all together. Chicken's feet. Probably battery fed poor little things. Urgh.

But there, it's done now. Never again.

Somebody has been a cheeky monkey.

As you may be able to tell, the gentleman behind the camera in the purple fleece is yours truly. To my left, in his running gear (I left mine at home), is fellow journalist Richard. In front of us is the centenarian marathon runner I wrote about here.

Behind us, as has now become apparent, was a man with a digital camera. And he is now selling photos of the event (including some much better than the above, of our marathon runner in front of Big Ben) via the website Scoopt.

Scoopt - tagline "Sell your pictures to the press" - is a picture agency promising to take pictures from members of the public and flog them to newspapers and websites. It is a front for market leading photo agency Getty Images, and most of the good Scoopt photos end up on Getty's pages. (Several of the photos of our marathon runner are now available via Getty.)

I now find that the best I can do is download a photo of myself, taken without my permission, with a bloody Scoopt watermark all over it. Oh, the harsh trappings of fame.

It is difficult to preach from any kind of moral or logical high ground about privacy when one is one half of a camera crew, standing on the banks of the Thames opposite the Houses of Parliament, filming in broad daylight.

But is it any wonder people sometimes get a little narked by photographers? This gentleman must have sidled on up unannounced, taken a load of photos, then nipped off to try to flog them to anyone who cares.

On the Scoopt website these are listed as shots from a "photocall" with the marathon runner. Photocall, my posterior. It was a BBC filming session and nobody else had any sort of call about it, photo or otherwise. Clearly there is no box to tick for "opportunistic click-and-run operation".

This only adds to the surreal episode on the banks of the Thames, which had us as the primary film crew, a pair of Swedish cameramen filming us filming, and a photographer with his wits about him, capturing us filming on film.

At least the photographer's keenness to get the shots indicates my plan to film in front of Parliament did indeed offer some arresting visuals. Obviously taking photos of something like this is really incredibly harmless... but I can start to appreciate how lurking photographers could quickly get annoying.

Our finished video piece is now available online, by the way. You can watch it here. I have been asked to point out that the horrendous pun with which the piece finishes is entirely my responsibility. You can read Richard's written piece about the day here.

As you may have seen, Manchester City went crashing out of the FA Cup earlier today, losing 2-1 at Sheffield United.

I was one of the seven or eight thousand City fans behind the goal to witness what has since inevitably come to be known as 'Balloongate'.

City fans had introduced so many blue and white balloons to the Bramall Lane ground that, by the time the match kicked off, City goalkeeper Joe Hart's penalty area was awash with them.

At one point the referee suggested to Hart, so City boss Sven-Goran Eriksson later told the media, that while the ball was up the other end of the pitch, the keeper might want to pop some of the balloons.

Hart made a token effort but, preferring to focus on the game, left most of the balloons intact.

Moments later he was left to rue this decision. A low cross from the keeper's right sent the ball wading through a sea of balloons, confusing the hell out of City defender Michael Ball, and gifting Sheffield United a tap-in as the City defenders struggled to separate the ball from the sea of balloons.

Hart, infuriated, made it his mission to stomp vengefully on every balloon he could see. In the picture below all that remains in the penalty area is a graveyard of blue balloon material, although a lone white balloon, to the left of the shot, has escaped the carnage. Meanwhile, behind the advertising hoardings, two dozen or so balloons have taken refuge:

It is arguable that the balloons directly contributed to City's demise and that, therefore, the club's fans knocked their own team out of the FA Cup. Using balloons. Only Manchester City (whose players also had money stolen from the dressing room while the game was being played) could suffer quite such a bizarre humiliation.

Some blame could rest with keeper Joe Hart for not dealing with the balloons but, as his manager told Sky: "You can't ask a player, when the ball is live, to clear the pitch."

The consensus among City fans seems to be that play should have been stopped earlier and the pitch cleared. Other supporters insist that a rule in the Laws of the Game demands that play be stopped immediately should the ball hit a foreign object that ought not to be on the pitch - in which case the goal should have been disallowed.

This, I fear, is clutching at inflatable, rubbery straws. 'Balloongate' is typical of the club's luck and the happy knack City have always had for generating slapstick situations in the unlikeliest of circumstances, but it doesn't mask what was a particularly inept performance.

For those of you who follow football and/or City, I'd like to argue that Martin Petrov should be summarily shot for his pitiful excuse for a performance today, and our forward line delivered their usual delicate blend of confusion flecked with boundless incompetence.

Youngster Daniel Sturridge was our only real consolation. He scored just minutes after coming on as a sub. in what I think is only his third appearance for the first team.

My dad and I saw him play for City's youth team at Reading in midweek, where Sturridge scored all three City goals in a comfortable win over the Royals. He looked a class above the rest of the players on the park, without giving the impression of necessarily being a Premier League star in the making.

His finish against Sheffield United today, a left-footed volley into the net off the underside of the crossbar, might lead me to re-evaluate that criticism. Given the somewhat disappointing absence of reinforcements up front for City this January transfer window, young Sturridge could become the club's great scoring hope over the next few months.

As usual, we're passing quite some burden onto the shoulders of another bright spark arriving from our academy. Let's hope his balloon does not burst too soon.

No, sadly not all together… just a few random thoughts for a Sunday:

Backing Boris

So it seems I'm now an official Backer of Boris. A colleague surreptitiously signed me up to Boris' supporters list and regular email updates. At the last count on Boris' website here, there were only 4,000 or so people registered. He's a long way to go if he's going to conquer London.

Anyway the email updates, together with the website, are quite entertaining. I think I share some of Ollie's thoughts in his comments to the post here. Promises, promises but how you put them into action is another matter. But, best of British to old Boris.

You have to chuckle at the following from his email update on Friday:

I refer not to the content but to the fact that he finds it utterly unnecessary to reference the Today program to Radio 4, and just assumes the reader knows what the Today program is. If it had said Coronation Street, he perhaps wouldn't have needed to say “a soap opera on ITV", though the BBC would in a report, wouldn't they? Would the less advantaged of London, whom Boris has regularly been visiting during his campaign trail and whom he hopes will vote for him, also know what the Today program is? I sincerely doubt it. It does seem slightly indicative that Boris is somewhat removed from certain parts of society.

In the election across the pond, at least Obama has triumphed over Hillary in the South Carolina primary. It bodes well for Super Tuesday next week.

You Tube

I've been looking at Masters programs at Oxford and the University of London. It's just a whim. Anyway, whilst on the Said Business School website I clicked on the Studying at Oxford tab. I always find it quite interesting to look at articles about what it's supposed to be like to study there, knowing full well that behind the cloisters, vast lawns, rowing and gargoyles, lies a harsh reality of academia alongside glorious fun. Anyway I suspected the opening web page to be just that. Idyllic pictures, suitable prose and a general sense of being part of a historic and amazing institution. Consider my surprise when I was presented not with this, but instead a You Tube video. A You Tube video? Promoting study at Oxford? Is this right? It's rather snazzy, quite punchy and yet, you know, it works. How times change.

The Ironic Pill

The heading in this BBC article here caught my eye. The pill has saved 100,000 lives. Or prevented 100,000 deaths. I’m not sure if there’s a difference. Anyway, maybe so. But the pill? And saving lives? Ironic it's also killed (in the eyes of those against contraception, anyway) billions of others. I just never think of the pill as live-saving.

In thinking about this post I wasn't setting out to i) lower the tone of Dayorama; or ii) turn Dayorama into one of those sites that include picture upon picture of amusing shop signs from around the world. The fact is I may, at least in part, succeed in doing both of these things.

The above was taken earlier today in Wanchai, Hong Kong. I don't think it needs much explanation. When it comes down to it I've the humour of a schoolboy and it made me giggle. It is, I promise, the sign for a florist. I'm sure there's meant to be an "apostrophe S" at the end of the first word. It just seems to have been forgotten. And believe me, this was actually a florist selling flowers. It's not a rather humorous name for a beauty or grooming parlour. Pretty funny if it was though. It beats simply saying you're going for a Brazilian. Much more stylish to say you're going to have a florist arrange your... Anyway, so. Sorry parents. I'm sure Mapplethorpe (of orchid photography fame) would approve.

Amy might be threatening to run it next year, but that's nothing compared to the arduous task of filming these insane people who sign up to take part.

On Thursday I went to Lambeth to meet a gentleman who has already reached his century, having apparently been born back in 1906. That does not seem to be stopping his bid to run the London marathon in April.

It was a slightly odd filming session. This gent nominally works for a local company as a cleaner, but I can't believe he's retained primarily in that capacity. Given we were the third film crew to arrive that day (the second being a pair of Swedish cameraman producing a documentary on "extraordinary old people"), and given our subject was branded head to toe in company logos, it was difficult to see him as anything other than a walking PR stunt.

This makes filming a little tricky, when everybody is a walking billboard - particularly the decision of all interested parties (personal trainer, colleagues etc) to wear bobble hats or caps with the logo prominently on display. Those had to be subtly removed from shot when filming interviews. We're not trying to remove the company from the piece entirely, they're entitled to one mention I think under BBC guidelines (which of course don't allow for any form of advertising, no matter how subliminal), but dolling up your star in that fashion is really a bit counter-productive.

The man himself was rather sprightly despite this being his third stint of the day, although I don't think he took much of a shine to me. As a cameraman you have to make sure you get enough good shots that the piece can be cut back at base, which means you need these component parts:

- Interviews, of course. But your subjects must be well lit, which can be tricky on very bright days since shadows come into play and people squint, and they must sound good, which is tricky on blustery days since you get wind noise over the mic. Thursday was bright and blustery and I faced the twin demons of a man playing bagpipes in the distance (who mysteriously stopped five minutes after a company employee left the shoot) and somebody drilling in the background. So good interview clips was a challenge.

- Setup shots, by which I mean the slightly hackneyed shots you always see prior to someone talking. Speaking to a politician? Maybe the politician at his desk, then, opening a letter. Or your reporter walking down a path with them. In this instance I wanted to get our man tying his shoelaces ready to jog, and then jogging along the bank of the Thames with our reporter.

- Cutaway shots, so named because you can cut away from an interview clip, or join two different clips together, using one of these in the middle. Watch the news very closely and you'll see these cleverly deployed when a producer has two great lines from an interviewee, but needs to sew them together. The shot will switch to their hands, or their eyes, or them doing something vaguely relevant to the clip - they will carry on talking over the top, and then the shot will return to their face. You have been victim of a cutaway, which stops you seeing the jump in the video of the interview where the cut was made. Cutaways can also be used to pad out the visual side of things when you need more time to talk in your package, so I filmed plenty of our man warming up and doing stretches.

- Piece to camera, usually the jewel in any piece as far as reporters are concerned (being reporters they tend to be keen to get into their own reports!). These normally require a fair few takes as your reporter has to memorise their lines, then deliver them faultlessly, often in an unpredictable environment where some silly bugger will wander in front of shot, or make a noise with their phone, or start pratting about in the background.

This is quite a demanding list when it actually comes to the crunch, so persuading a geriatric marathon runner to jog, and jog again, and jog again, and now jog that way, involves diplomacy. This gent did not seem to be taking to my particular brand of diplomacy, but happily our reporter was on his wavelength and doing a much better job of smoothing any ancient ruffles. (When you're filming you often use a tiny wireless microphone, clipped to your subject, to pick up sound from a distance. This meant I could hear every grumbled complaint in my headphones, even from fifty yards away. If you're ever filmed and given a similar microphone, be incredibly careful and remember to take it off before you go to the toilet...)

On Friday morning I got the chance to take this footage and unleash it on Television Centre's editing systems. Our bit of TVC uses Final Cut Pro, which I've never previously had the chance to see. Having previously relied on another piece of kit, Avid, to get the job done, I have to say that Final Cut Pro is much more user-friendly and straightforward. Even for someone with a considerable dislike of Macs, like me.

But all that software bollocks is nothing compared with the real thrill of the morning. I decided I wanted some footage of Paula Radcliffe setting her London Marathon world record in 2003 to start the piece. (The idea being that Paula holds one marathon record, but not the one for age.)

If I'd tried to do this in Berkshire, I'd have been wished the best of luck finding footage of Paula Radcliffe, and three minutes later I'd have forgotten all about it. Here, a quick search of the BBC sports library, then a trip six floors down to the basement to post-production, who keep a massive archive of tapes on site. In the twenty minutes between placing my request and popping down to see them, they'd dug out the tape which held a recording of the live broadcast in which Paula set her record.

I'd never even seen a Digibeta tape like this before, and I'll confess I quietly (and somewhat naively, I'm sure) marvelled at the possibilities. They must have so much stuff down there, all on tapes like these, which you just whack into a machine and then get the clips you want. Sod the iPlayer, spend a weekend in that archive and you'd be able to find some decent shows to watch, I'm sure.

Working in a building where tapes of the exact moment you need, in over 50 years of broadcasting, are never more than 20 minutes away, is not really a bad deal, is it? So Paula found her way onto the front of the piece, we ran it all onto another tape once it was finished, and that tape got rushed off to News 24. Job done. Knackering eh? Running the thing must be nothing in comparison. Kennedy, you got off lightly.

It's not often I've been able to come out on top in a conversation by relying on my knowledge of Welsh language television.

But then, it's not often I've ended up verbally sparring with a Tesco member of staff at the checkout.

We - Sam and I - were next in line to pay for our king prawn linguine, when I began to overhear some of the conversation up ahead. A young cashier with glistening black and dyed blonde hair, swept across his skinny, slightly sunken features, was extolling the virtues of various movies to a similar young man on the other side of the counter.

As that man left and we moved forward, the cashier told us he was sorry for any hold-up, and that he doesn't always talk movies with his customers. But that didn't stop him with us - he was soon into his routine, telling us how much he was looking forward to the new X Files movie, and had I seen Alien vs Predator? (Bearing in mind we had one pack of prawn linguine and two birthday cards to pay for, he managed to cram a lot in.)

No, I hadn't seen Alien vs Predator. This, it seems, was the wrong answer. How many times has your Tesco checkout boy said this to you?

"You. Rock. Living. Stone. Under?"

Delivered in bitingly sarcastic tone, it was so unexpected that I even missed the slightly lazy use of two different words for "rock" in his put-down.

Now I'm not sure how I managed to shift the subject from my woeful lack of film knowledge but, in the ensuing minute or so, we found ourselves on the subject of Welsh television.

The other week I'd been watching one of those identikit Top One Hundred... programmes, and Pobol y Cwm, the long-running Welsh language soap opera, made an appearance for some reason at something like number 76. I didn't take in any of the stuff that was said, but I remembered the name since it sounded good.

Our boy behind the checkout hadn't heard of Pobol y Cwm. He didn't even know what S4C was. ("It's what? The Welsh language Channel 4? Nah, we get terrible reception in Sandhurst...") So while he might know his Alien from his Predator, I knew my Pobol from my Cwm. A score draw, and a bizarre conversation to be having in a Tesco when all you want is a prawn linguine and a bit of peace and quiet.

On the way out, Sam trumped both of us. It transpires that - having studied in Bangor and all that - she's starred in not one, but two Welsh language television shows! I am told she appeared in a women's rugby team in one episode, and appeared chatting away in a bar scene in the other. Which is particularly special since her Welsh bar chat isn't exactly word perfect, so one assumes there was a bit of blagging it going on...

I promised a photo of the run. Well here it is. Or, should I say "here we are" at the end of the race. Points to note. I look around 12. My hair is too long. My body posture is awful. And I clearly look disinterested. I wasn’t, I was just pensive and didn’t realize the photo was being taken (and hate photos being taken at the best of times anyway). As one colleague put it: “ouch, that’s a real Ms K look… one day a junior lawyer will get that from you and then they’ll know they’re in trouble”. It’s true.

An article on the Telegraph website caught my eye today. It's found here and its by-line reads Can a sponsored weight-gain challenge save the life of long-term anorexic Lizzie Grimaldi?

The woman in question, Lizzie Grimalidi, is a former dancer with the London City Ballet. She is described as a tardive anorexic. An adult sufferer of anorexia. She has lived with her condition for the past twenty years. Last November, when she reached the "five-stone" territory, she decided to go on a so-called "pounds (lb) for pounds (£)" sponsored charity weight gain. For every lb in weight she puts on, she hopes to raise £ for the Hospice of St Francis in Berkhamsted, where her father died of a brain tumour. The article states that Lizzie is 5'6". Imagine her at 5 stone. There was a time when I, at 5'2", weighed just short of 5 1/2 stone. And there was not an ounce of flesh on me. There are decaying skeletons out there with more. So Lizzie isn't just moderately thin; she's extremely thin. And (although this may not always be the case) the article illustrates how strong her anorexia has taken hold. As she states, "[being] six stone I could just about rationalise, but when I got into five-stone territory, I just knew it had become insanity". Rationalising six stone shows deeper forces at work than just being a skinny ballerina. The article goes on to recite those all too familiar routines - "She gets by on eating as little as possible to live. She is permanently cold, weak and depressed (starvation depletes serotonin levels), sleeps with a cushion between her knees, and pretends to everyone "that I've had the forkful of linguine when I've only had the strand"...".

By this time next year, the article reports that Lizzie wishes to have put on a stone and a half. For her determination, and openness, I admire her. I wish her strength of character and courage. Courage to accept the aspects of her life that she has to change. I genuinely hope she reaches her goal. And yet something in the back of my mind isn't convinced. Or, perhaps it's not that I'm not convinced, I just fear for her. Fear that she's putting additional pressure on herself by embarking on this campaign. Fear that her weight gain will be too rapid and she won't be able to cope. Fear that she will put it on - but then lose it again. Perhaps I also wonder whether she's just enjoying the attention and enjoying being to able write about it on her blog. Maybe there's even a tiny part of me who is jealous that she weighs so little. She states, "I've managed to put weight on before, during treatment, but each time I've lost it all - and more - afterwards. But now there are other people who'll be let down if I fail, it makes it more do-able. For me, this may be the turning point." And perhaps it will be. But letting others down isn't sufficient. You can always come up with reasons as to why you've let them down. Anorexics who try to put on weight but fail, day after day, are letting their parents, their families, their loved ones down. And yet they carry on. They rationalise themselves out of it and embark on another episode of restriction. It takes something much more. Something deeper. Lizzie touches on it when she says she has too many other carrots ahead of her - the ability to have children (she hasn't menstruated for 20 years) and the chance of doing a postgrad. degree at Oxford. And yet she also notes that her husband - a Doctor - hasn't been able to be her nursemaid. He can't be, "... it's not up to him for me to get better. It's up to me." And that's the crux. I genuinely believe if Lizzy really wants to do this. If she really wants to get better, if she was the one who picked up the phone to the Doctor and said, in a flood of tears, "I'm an anorexic. I need help", then she will succeed.

I go back to the fears I mentioned above. Fear that her weight gain will be too rapid and she won't be able to cope. My initial weight gain was to get me through my A-levels. It worked. I got the grades. But everything had been far too quick. Far too sudden. I'd passed through in a whirl. And for me, my condition became more complicated, because then I restricted more or binged and restricted. I was utterly fcked up (for want of a better expression) and every possible aspect of my life was entangled in this dreadful black hole. Remember how it feels post-Christmas. You feel fat and lumpy. Your jeans don't fit. And panic sets in. Imagine that intensified ten, maybe twenty times over. Lizzie put on less than a pound over Christmas. This year I managed 13. And that was in a 2 week period. I have another 7 to lose before I'm back to where I was. I now see that as normal indulgence. But less than a pound? That's, not meaning to be crude, a trip to the toilet. Another problem will arise when people tell her how well she's doing. She states, "In many ways I am a measured sensible person. But then there is this insane anorexic gremlin on my shoulder telling me that losing is normal and gaining or even maintaining is abnormal, that it is wrong to be robust, to be normal, that if people say I look well then, ergo, I must be fat". I still feel this, and I've been fit and healthy and well for over two years now.

I admire her and I hope she does it. I just hope she does it in a controlled way that will mean she is able to share in her success, rather than be sickened by it. I hope she's also receiving therapy to see her through. It's a touching article and one that brought a tear to my eye. It's also another reminder that however much the country is suffering from obesity, there are many more struggling with the daily battle to eat a custard cream without shaking with fear.

That video documents possibly one of the greatest achievements in the history of television.

You might not have seen the original BBC Timewatch documentary, Bloody Omaha, broadcast a couple of weeks ago and presented by Richard Hammond (who looks ten years older standing on the French coast than he ever did sitting in a fast car).

The programme itself was very nicely put together, featuring a motley collection of talking heads - historians, military figures and Operation Overlord veterans - interspersed with some incredible footage of battle scenes taking place on Omaha Beach itself.

Even as I watched it, I was pondering in the back of my mind how those scenes had been filmed. They were clearly a product of the 21st century but looked as though they'd have needed a major US film studio, not a tiny in-house production team, given their scale and texture.

Then I saw the above video, and it turns out that three people put it together. Shots that involved hundreds of soldiers running up a beach, some picked off in a hail of gunfire while others clambered up a cliff face, were simply the same three people, replicated dozens of times.

It is truly one of the most spectacular achievements I've ever seen. I spent some time on the BBC's "Safeguarding Trust" course this week (which is compulsory for all staff, it's not just me in the doghouse), and the essential basis of the two-hour seminar is how we make choices between outright deceit ("Well done, you voted to call this cat Socks!") and what is jauntily termed "acceptable creative artifice". You might want to translate that as "conning the audience but for their own good", as opposed to "conning the audience for our own good" faked phone-in style.

This is a prime example of acceptable creative artifice. The footage you saw during the Timewatch programme was an outright lie. A team of BBC staff took the place of authentic soldiers and ran up and down a beach several hundred times, then pieced it together to give the impression of being an entire army. You can't get a much more breathtaking example of televisual deceit than that. But if they hadn't done it the programme would have been all the poorer, and our understanding of the scenario at Omaha (or at the very least, mine) would have diminished.

Study this picture carefully. Take in the colour. Green. Healthy green. Then take in the words, slowly now. Aloe. Wheatgrass. Juice. Remember them. Store them somewhere in the back of your mind. But, not too far back that you’ll forget all about them. Just in the sort of place that you’ll remember them when necessary, sometime, somewhere. Remember them when you’re about to purchase some Aloe & Wheatgrass Juice. And then remember this post. And remember what it advised. Never, never, buy this stuff. And if you do buy it, then don’t drink it. Give it to someone you don’t like. Feed it to your fish. I don’t care, just don’t drink it.

This beverage was included in the “gift” / “goodie” back following the race earlier. Some “gift”. Not really a “goodie”. Wheatgrass is up there with organic muesli. It’s disgusting. Grainy and yucky and tastes of, well, wheatgrass. You know it’s going to taste as bad as it sounds. Nothing, can make organic muesli pleasant. Yes, Mum, even you have to admit it tastes pretty much like glorified birdseed. And expensive birdseed at that. Simple, it doesn’t matter how good it is for you, it’s not worth it. There are many other things which are good for you that actually taste pleasant – blueberries, for example. Just not wheatgrass. And not aloe either (remember the incident here and here over Christmas?). Don’t do it, children. Leave it alone. Save the grass. It’s like saving a tree, just slightly less effective when it comes to the whole CO2 thing. But it’s still worth saving.

Beat the banana, huh? Do I mean physically beating a banana? Of course not, that’d be too obvious. I mean beating, in a 3km charity fun run, a guy dressed in a banana costume. No kidding. I’ve still not quite figured out the logic of trying to beat a guy dressed as a banana, but it seems as valid reason as any to raise money for the charity World Cancer Research Fund, Hong Kong, and of course also continues my yellow theme from the other day. The official Beat The Banana website is here.

And why was I doing this on a Sunday morning? Well, the law firm I work for decided to take part, so a motley crew of around 12 of us all turned up at the sadistic time of aound 8:30am to take part and join in the fun. Fun you say? Well, it was only 3km. And it’s always quite enjoyable to drum up a little team spirit and see families out enjoying the glorious sunshine. We also managed to beat a rival law firm in the sponsorship stakes, which is never a bad thing.

The photo below doesn’t exactly prove I got around the course in that it isn’t a photo of me at the finish line, but it does show my t-shirt, bananas and medal. We also had to wear a firm visor. Hmm, attractive.

What this race also triggers is the start of my 2009 London Marathon campaign. Yup, that’s right. After 4 years of being in the ballot, I was successful for 2008. I’ve deferred for this year, but this means I am guaranteed a place in 2009. The training will begin in earnest when I return to the UK… it’s only 26.2miles, right… *nervous giggle* Although, I spoke to an ex-fitness trainer about it and he reckoned I'd be OK. I have done 10k runs and things in the past (even if it was in a past life and I am no way near as skinny or fit as I was then) but it shows I have running miles and self-discipline in me - I'm not an absolute beginner - so it's a start. The thing that worries me the most? It's not the running. It's the fact I think I'm actually going to have to enter the C21 and buy an i-pod.

That's Academy Award-winning.

I'm not actually lying, although I am being a little economical with the truth. It's actually News & Sport Festival Academy Award-winning. Which is as good as an Oscar as far as I'm concerned.

Each year the BBC holds a two-day event in London to celebrate and discuss its news and sport coverage.

On Thursday afternoon I went along to sample a couple of the discussion forums being held and have a nosey around an area set aside for presentations on new technology and the move up north to Salford in a couple of years' time.

It was all very interesting but I was a little nervous, because my real reason for being there was a TV sports bulletin that I would be presenting.

A week before I had been sat at my desk when an email arrived advertising the festival and its 'academy'. If you're not normally on air in your job, it said - and bear in mind that at Television Centre I'm not - then have a go at presenting in front of a panel of top judges. After much umming and ahhing, I signed up to try a television sport bulletin, News 24-style.

And that bulletin is what you can see above. I know it's probably the worst bit of television you've ever seen, and I'm fairly sure this will also come back to haunt me at a later stage in life, but cut me a little slack as that marks the very first time I have sat in a studio, in front of a camera, and had to do the whole autocue thing. I am aware that there are a number of moments in it where I look quite considerably stupid, but I think I compensate for that with my rather sweet and innocent 'Goodbye!' at the end. Butter would not melt.

Not only did I have an autocue ticking away in front of me, I had an earpiece, a gallery with a director and three other people, and the panel of judges sat directly behind the camera. They were the news director for the BBC's 6 o'clock bulletin, a gentleman high up in news at Five Live, and the reporter turned News 24 anchor Ben Brown. No pressure there, then.

Afterwards they were all very kind to me, particularly Ben, who I've always admired on television and whose opinion I therefore especially valued. While he wasn't sure of my television 'presence' (and let's be honest, I hadn't exactly dressed for the occasion), he had a lot of nice things to say and some very helpful bits of advice.

The best part was discovering a couple of hours later that I'd been shortlisted to win the award for best sports entry, and then - an hour after that - going up on stage to collect it. It's moments like that which make entire days, weeks and months (and decisions to go on attachment) worthwhile.

I'm incredibly grateful to the judges and to the amazing people who set the studio up for us and ran the project. I was thrilled just to be able to sit there and look like a presenter then meet the judges, let alone get a little award for it! The prize is putting together a showreel (i.e. demo) with a proper and therefore clever producer, which is superb as I'd always wondered about a television showreel but wouldn't know where to begin.

Regrettably in the 24 hours since I got this award the phone has not rung and I am not suddenly to be found on News 24 talking all things Boeing - but I can at least dream the dream with a morsel of justification.

Well, that's it from me. Now, the news where you are...

If your day is special, then you must be having a red-letter day. Or maybe you're angry and seeing red. A blue day is when you're feeling sad. If you listen to a lot of music by a well known American punk/rock band, you're clearly having a green day. Alternatively, perhaps you've just done rather pro-active with your recycling. A black day is when things are going badly. If you're having a grey day, then it's probably got something to do with the British weather. Or perhaps you're spending time with your grandparents. If you're in the pink, then you're either associating particularly with persons of a certain sexual preference or maybe you're supporting a breast cancer charity. I think a white day must be your wedding day.

But what about yellow? What is a yellow day? Pop it into Google and nothing. There is a suggestion that if you have young children you could have a yellow day by dressing in yellow, eating yellow foods and doing things outside in the sun. Clearly yellow is a happy colour - think of the sun or the typical base colour for a smiley face. So should a yellow day be when you're happy? Perhaps the latter is a valid hypothesis, but I think I can better it with the proposition outlined below.

A yellow day is, ironically, when you begin a little off-colour. This is how I began my Friday. For no particular reason - although having a slightly fuzzy head could have something to do with it - I just didn't feel that great. Nothing in particular - I'm not ill or upset and have no reason to be overly stressed or feeling a little low - but I just didn't feel right. Simply off-colour. It was Friday. I couldn't be bothered. I'm in Asia and I decided I'd rather be in Europe. I knew I had a yucky work task ahead of me. I felt a bit fat after eating a large dinner yesterday. But, I thought nothing of all of that. I simply got to work and began my day. Needless to say though, the sort of day where you imagine yourself ticking off every minute before Friday afternoon comes around.

And then my day became a yellow day. At around 9.00am, so just as I'd settled at my desk, my boss (also a Brit.) delivered me an egg tart. And suddenly there was an instant smile on my face. Why? Well, obviously egg tarts are one of the most delicious foodstuffs in the world. They're also rather English. The egg tart smelt lovely, and it was freshly baked and so still gently warm. And it doesn't matter that they're fuelled with
calories, because they're good, wholesome, happy, yellow calories. But importantly, someone had thought of me and I had received something I wasn't expecting. In general it might be better to give than receive, but in this instance I felt all the better for receiving. And then of course there was the fact that the custard tart is yellow. It's instant happiness. That folks, is what makes a yellow day. You begin slightly off-colour, but a simple act of genuine kindness can put a smile on your face and make your worries slip away. I would hedge a bet that it would also work if you were the giver of the egg tart.

Now, I may be wrong but I suspect many of you (even though there can't be many of you since I know for a fact that we shouldn't be using the word many to describe our readership - so many of the few of you, as it were) may be wondering why egg tarts are available in Hong Kong. The fact is, egg tarts - or custard tarts, egg-custards or custard-egg tarts – are immensely popular in Hong Kong with both locals and expats. alike.
Introduced by colonials in western cafes and bakeries in the 1940s, the aim was to compete with the puddings offered by the local dim sum restaurants. They are available in a range of sizes from the dinner plate of a doll's house through to the dinner plate of an Emperor (Chinese, of course) and are seriously yummy. The Hong Kong egg tart is slightly different in taste and consistency to the traditional English custard tart (less milk is added and you don't have the typical sprinkling of ground nutmeg on the top), though when it comes to it, it's pretty much the same thing. And of course, rather inevitably, you can now also get white-egg tarts, milk tarts, honey-egg tarts, green-tea-flavoured-egg tarts etc. etc..

One rather amusing tale relating to egg tarts features dear Chris Patten. Apparently he was known to be fond of egg tarts and patronised one bakery in particular. The egg tarts sold at the bakery became known as Fei-Paang egg tarts. And the literal translation for that? Fat Patten's egg tart. Fat Patten being the nickname (in Cantonese) for the ex-Governor. Now that's surely getting egg [tart] on your face.

Imagine you're about to be told the answer to a joke. The statement is Art Jamming. Now, consider the question part of joke went something along the lines of the following. What do you get if you place a group of lawyers in a room with artists materials, a blank canvas each, food and copious quantities of alcohol?

I wish, at this stage, the above was a joke. Sadly, it isn't.

It turns out that in this context Jamming, as it's called, has nothing to do with that substance commonly spread on toast at breakfastime. Sadly, nor does the addition of "Art" in front of "Jamming" remotely relate to the mess that a young child may, perhaps, create whilst eating a breakfast of the type aforementioned in the hope they are the next Picasso, rather than just a creator of an unholy and messy nightmare. Incidentally, is there a similarity there - between a Picasso and a jammy mess - I wonder. Anyway, I digress. Quite simply, Art Jamming is based around the assumption (foolish or otherwise) that City bankers, lawyers and other such professionals
do have a creative side. By that I mean creative in the artistic sense, rather than creative in their methods of fleecing less fortunate for vast sums of money.

Art Jam customers (so-called) are provided with a canvas, unlimited acrylic paint, sponges, brushes and spatulas and are instructed to "let loose with their imaginations". Hmm. Sceptical, perhaps but as a "creative" work social events goes this, at least in my mind, beats paint-balling / go-carting / bridge building / other such awful outdoors team-building exercises and is slightly more entertaining than the usual
"dinner and drinks". So, I went along reasonably enthusiastic and intrigued.

At this juncture let me add that the Art Jamming crew provide unlimited "healthy juice" drinks to all would-be artists. No hope, there. Thankfully the Firm laid on satisfactory quantities of food and alcohol to, urr, help stimulate the flow of creative juices (of the mind, rather than the production of bile, one hopes). As one colleague put it towards the end, "I seem to be seeing abstract versions of everyone's paintings". Quite.

In short, it's an incredibly good idea.

A few people saw it as an opportunity, naturally, to impress colleagues. Some had clearly spent the last 8hrs of their "working" day on Google, trying to find a picture they could paint and / or simply looking for artistic inspiration. However, most just saw it as an opportunity to have fun. It was almost like playing in the sand pit at Prep school. Utter freedom.

I don't think it rally makes "art accessible for everyone", one of the theories behind the idea. I don't see how splashing some paint around will encourage you to go to an art gallery. Did designing sand castles want you to become an architect? Perhaps I'm wrong. Since I enjoy galleries anyway, perhaps it's hard for me to see the other side. Whatever.

All in all though, it was a good experience. I'd recommend it. My friend Jona, whose wretched painting took *forever* - e,g. until closing at 11pm, when I (along with most others) was done at 9pm (that's true friendship to wait for her with a couple of bottles of wine, whilst everyone else left) - is below:

And now you're wondering what I came up with, aren't you? Well, I'm English, right? So, I refer to Brooke: If I should die, think only this of me: that there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever, England. This is my abstract idea of what I think of when I close my eyes and imagine the sight from the aeroplane as it lands at LHR... (note, I said it was abstract...)

Life is at its very best when it imitates art. And, in a scene you'd expect to find in any one of a number of obscene television sketch shows, life played a blinder in an underpass in Shepherd's Bush this morning.

Along one of the underpass walls, in an admirable but ultimately futile attempt to make it look less like an underpass, somebody has painted a series of sheep. Huge brick sheep, picked out against a murky blue 'sky', with about five facing one way, then five facing the other. It's like a little sheep ghetto confrontation, although one imagines that was not necessarily the design brief.

I was walking through this underpass on the way to work, and had slowed to an amble since ahead of me were an elderly couple with a pram. Grandad and granny were taking little junior, who can't have been much more than a year old if that, for a stroll among the Underground Sheep Of Death.

Granny - and put on your best elderly cockney accent here - was chirruping away to the littl'un.

"Look at those," said Granny, motioning baby's gaze excitedly towards the sheep. "Can you tell me what they are?"

No audible response from the nipper, so Granny kept going.

"Baaa! Baaa! Baaa! That's the noise they make! What do you think they are?"

Again, no dice. Which is pretty reasonable from a toddler, you'd think, but Granny was having none of it.

"Well they're sheep, you silly twat."

Not exactly Watch With Mother, is it?

Everyone, I'd like you to meet Sparky.

Sparky is a one-legged Kiwi being kept at a sanctuary in New Zealand, and my friend Becky, doing a placement as a doctor Down Under, is the remarkably lucky owner of this photograph.

And whisper it, but they even let her stroke Sparky, which she assures me is not normally allowed.

In fact Becky is doing an incredibly good line in animals, so to speak. Once Sparky had been tended to, a possum presented itself for petting:

Put this alongside sandboarding, the beach, hiking, swimming, and Christmas in New Zealand, and this whole doctor lark starts to sound quite attractive.

Interestingly the UK isn't the only place suffering from peculiarly heavy and recurrent flooding these days.

While Gloucester may be peeking nervously over its sandbags for a few days to come, and for the second time in half a year, there are thousands of Kiwis (the people, not Sparky) who know exactly how that feels.

Becky tells me that New Zealand has had two "hundred-year floods" in the last year - that is, floods of an extreme nature that should, by law of average, occur just once a century.

Can anybody honestly look at everything going on around us on this planet and tell us climate change isn't happening bloody quickly? I mean sod who's done it, it's getting a bit tricky to see how anything we do will make a blind bit of difference.

Renewable energy is miles away from being worthwhile, no country on earth has made any meaningful commitment to not screwing the planet up royally, and the one country that didn't even bother to read the Kyoto treaty cover to cover, the US, has a better record on many emissions targets than all the ones who signed the thing.

Meanwhile the world's remaining polar bear population has an ice sheet the size of Chipping Sodbury with which to content itself, the Antarctic calves icebergs faster than a Take That song makes me retune the dial, and if you live anywhere in low-lying southern England you might as well burn your house for all it's going to be worth.

All of which leads me to conclude that either we all go and live in Norway - which would be immensely inconvenient since it's got just the right number of people in it as things are, with the possible addition of me - or we all live on top of hills. And we were on top of this rather nice Buckinghamshire hill first, so you lot can find your own.

You'd never think it, but there are politics associated with the work fridge.

I have a box. Small Tupperware affair (well, it's a click and click thing, actually), labeled quite clearly Amy K. Others have similar (although labeled with their own name, of course). This is fine. Neat, and fine.

Sometimes people put plastic bags with food in into the fridge, which is fine since this is usually a temporary thing.

Occasionally people put uncovered food in the fridge. This is not fine for a number of reasons: i) you have to look at their food when you open the fridge; ii) it usually smells; and iii) it goes off quicker (or appears
to).

Now for the past week there has been a sole uncovered potato (of baking potato size) in the fridge. Just sitting there, all on its lonesome. Over the weekend (probably bored with the inactivity of simply sitting on a
paper plate) it has begun to wrinkle and sprout sprouts.

Now, why does the owner of this potato not just remove it? Simple. Because they'll have to do it when no one else is looking, otherwise it will soon get round that X was the owner of the stray potato. And should
they dispose of it in the main bin, or surreptitiously hide it? And it's not just a case of removing the sprouting food, they'll also be scrutinized simply on the grounds of "why on earth (needed if you want
this potato to grow, it won't work in thin air in a fridge however many sprouts it sprouts) do you want a raw potato anyway". Or if the pantry manager catches them, they'll be lynched for ever having un-covered food in the fridge. It’s a tough call.

I can't remove the potato and nor can anyone else, because that would be removing someone
else's food. And woe shall be upon you if you do that. Only when it needs to be removed on grounds of health and safety (if only that potato were green), can it be removed. It's bad enough when someone rearranges the Tupperware boxes in the fridge (I have the back right position on the bottom shelf). People get quite possessive of their place in the fridge.

No one is ever going to eat this potato now (there's drawers of free chocolate available for late night munchies) and yet it can't be thrown because the owner *might* want it. They won't, but probability is
important in this instance.

Beam me back to London where everyone goes out for lunch and Tupperware is reserved for parties only your Great Aunt Mildred (sorry to any Great Aunt Mildred's out there reading this who don't have Tupperware parties and are offended by my stereotype.) would hold.

And why is the fridge on my mind? Because the air conditioning in my office today has been set to -10'C, the office manager was away so I couldn't effectively get it altered, at one point my fingers turned blue (seriously) and I've drunk so many cups of boiling water (to warm me up) that I had to keep walking past the damn fridge (to obtain the boiling water) and seeing the bleeding potato staring at me through the window of the fridge.

Other than that, I’ve had a productive, satisfying and very good day, even if I was freezing for the most part.

This little beauty nearly took a live BBC webcast off air last night.

It had spent most of its evening on the ice, writhing back and forth in a passionate encounter between the Slough Jets and the Guildford Flames, while I commentated from our nice, warm, safe gantry.

But clearly the puck fancied the idea of taking a breather and sitting up alongside me in the box seats - so it elected to join me.

Taking a fierce deflection, it flew a few feet in front of my face, ricocheted into a piece of pipework above my head, and came to rest about five inches away from the live broadcast equipment.

So it had opportunities to either a) cream the commentator or b) take out the technology. But, much like the Flames, it couldn't make those vital moments count, and had to content itself with a place in my rucksack as a trophy.

I'm actually surprised that it's taken til now for a puck to invade during the live commentary. Having picked it up off the gantry floor I looked down and saw all the fans beneath me looking up and laughing, so at least my unauthorised visitor was providing entertainment for the packed-out crowd.

In fact one lady told me afterwards: "I always watch you up there - you get so into it, don't you! You're great fun to watch, pulling those faces and pacing up and down." I am going to take that as a compliment.

Meanwhile listeners were emailing me to tell their stories of close encounters with pucks. One man was hospitalised when he took a puck to the forehead just before Christmas a few years ago. Few games demand quite such a wary, alert approach from their spectators.

The Jets beat the Flames 7-5 in another thrilling game so the race for the English Premier League ice hockey title is very much still on. We're back on Saturday for the visit of Milton Keynes, and I shall be turning up wearing a helmet and cage for the duration of proceedings.

If you asked a random selection of Westerners what they thought government, schooling, social welfare provisions etc., were like in Hong Kong, I’m pretty certain that answers would include the following: democratic, aka Western governments, still carrying strong undertones from Imperial rule etc.

Would it cross people’s minds to consider the fact that Hong Kong currently petitioning for a democratic government? Although it’s one of the world’s fastest growing financial capitals it is suggested that increased housing costs, rising food prices and high levels of unemployment or temporary jobs mean that there are one million people living in poverty. Not only is the quality of life in poor households devastating in the sense that many are living in squalor but this section of society is, for obvious reasons, also socially excluded from the mainstream. It is a far cry from the towering chic office blocks and shops selling Versace, Gucci etc. The rights of the child (theoretically protected by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child) are also limited, with child labour high and very few methods of redress.

There are obviously politicians campaigning for change and yet although Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region (SAR) and thus has some degree of autonomy from China (until 2047 at least) in such matters Hong Kong is still subservient to the Chinese government. In a decision announced over the New Year, China has effectively blocked open elections in Hong Kong until at least 2017. Even then, all candidates for election will need to be approved by the central government in China. As a recent article (from which the title of this post is stolen) in the Economist states: Democracy, in short, only in name. It is predicted that only in 2020, at the earliest, that Hong Kong’s citizens will have the right to elect directly all the members of the city’s legislature.

There’s supposed to be a bicycle rally in Hong Kong today, campaigning for democratic change. Whilst this may raise the profile of the various movements for democratic change, I can’t help but feel this is merely the tip on the iceberg of what needs to be done. And who in Beijing will care or take notice anyway? It’s almost embarrassing, in fact, it is embarrassing to think that the British left Hong Kongers to this fate and that as a resident (albeit temporary) of the SAR it doesn’t make me feel particularly comfortable. I’ve a particular disrespect for the collective expat. population in this SAR anyway and the fact many happily live alongside the above does nothing to endear them towards me.

Yes, ok, you can stop laughing now. I didn’t actually become a nun for the day. I simply visited a nunnery.

Surprisingly, few guidebooks gush about the Chi Lin Nunnery. Described as “serenity in the midst of urban hustle and bustle”, the nunnery and the nearby Nan Lian Gardens are both serene and entirely beautiful.

This Buddhist nunnery dates from 1934 and is built in the traditional Tang Dynasty style. Rather incredibly, not a single nail was used in the construction of the monastery. In a throwback to my GCSE Woodwork days, only simple wooden dowels and bracket-work keep the wooden edifice standing.

Naturally, its architecture and location are governed by principles of Feng Shui. The buildings face south towards the sea to bring abundance; the back of the buildings are towards the mountain, provider of strength and good energy.

Despite the traffic roaring past below and the tower blocks of the City looming in the distance, it’s an incredibly tranquil and peaceful place to visit. The clean lines of the buildings are rather soothing – it’s a vast departure from the garishness of some of the other religious buildings I’ve visited. It certainly gets my vote.

Outside the nunnery itself are several courtyards and gardens. The most impressive of these is a courtyard full of lotus ponds. Surrounded by impressive bonsai trees, in the soft sun these lotus ponds were beautiful.

Found throughout Chinese paintings and literature, the lotus flower is said to inspire people to continue striving through difficulties and to show their best part to the outside work, no matter how bad the circumstances may be. Why? The lotus plant thrives in the murky darkness at the bottom of the pond and yet brings beauty and light, in the form of the lotus flower, from these dark depths. Any one who has ever watched the film about Tina Turner’s life What’s Love Got To Do With It?, will know that at the beginning Tina chants the Buddhist mantra loosely translated as the following: The lotus is a flower that blooms in the mud. The thicker and deeper the mud, the more beautiful the lotus blooms. Seeing them in such abundance today, it is easy to appreciate how people can be inspired by their beauty.

The Nan Lian Gardens nearby to the nunnery were also worth a visit. Bonsai trees, pools with koi, pavilions, small bridges, interlocking paths. Everything you’d ever imagine a traditional Chinese garden to include and, again, a sanctuary away from the bright lights and noise of the City. Rather surreally, strategically hidden speakers play soothing music throughout the gardens. Think of the sort of music played in beauticians. Slightly corny, but in this instance it works.

That's how I got to see Patrick Stewart today.

Well, that's not entirely true. He wasn't dressed as Jean-Luc Picard, he wasn't standing on the bridge of the Enterprise, and I wasn't reclining in the command chair of a Ktarian vessel (I'll put my encyclopaedia of the series away now).

But Mr Stewart was on a big screen in front of me, and not, alas, in person. As you can imagine, this was a crushing blow considering my enthusiasm a couple of days ago when I discovered that Stewart, as chancellor of Huddersfield University, was down to give the closing speech at the end of my visit today.

"I spend a lot of time," said the weary deputy vice-chancellor, "apologising that I am not Patrick Stewart." And with that, he pressed a button and the man, the legend, delivered a little video message. I will have to wait a little longer to breathe the same air. But there is time.

The visit itself went really well, including an incredibly productive workshop about our Olympic coverage. "That's the first workshop I've ever enjoyed," said one young attendee as he left. Job done there, then!

It must be said that Huddersfield, and particularly the university, is a credit to mankind. Lovely place - people were very friendly and food was delicious, university had all the technology we could wish for and it all worked first time, staff were completely on top of everything and couldn't do enough for us, and the hotel was amazing value! For less than fifty quid a night each we got a room in the middle of town, secure gated parking, all you can eat breakfast thrown in, and so many little touches in the bedrooms (so to speak) that I lost count. All stuff you can get in any good hotel - ironing board, nice selection of biscuits, free wi-fi, map of local restaurants with recommendations and sample menus, nice double bed, switch next to bed to turn all lights off at night, etc - but at an excellent price coupled with wonderful service.

Should you ever go to Huddersfield, and don't mock because you never do know, the hotel is called the Huddersfield Central Lodge. It has my wholehearted recommendation and even boasts a letter from a producer at Television Centre, dated 1988, claiming he had "never had such fun in a hotel before". I'm not entirely sure what happened there, but my stay was pretty good too.

Final order of business tonight (trying to get this in before midnight): I went to Nottingham in the driving rain and snow on the way home, to the National Watersports Centre, to meet a canoeist named Andrew. He's a top GB slalom kayaking star with an outside chance of making the Beijing Games and a very real chance of doing damage at London 2012, and I'll be helping him to produce articles in the run-up to this summer's Olympics.

He's also a very nice man (I'm full of praise tonight, aren't I!) and we were born just four days apart, which probably explains why we both have some strange astrologically-imparted hankering for website design. If you click here, the top link (at the time of writing) is his homepage, which he created himself, including embedded YouTube video, news and photos.

Slalom canoeing is an interesting sport, not least because it's almost exclusively held at artificially created venues. Whitewater rivers don't seem to exist in the correct size and dimensions for Olympic or international events, so they compete on specially designed courses using reservoirs and pumps - which somehow seems unlikely for a sport that gives the impression of being reliant on nature. And the boats are made from the same material as F1 cars! You learn something every day.

I know I offend my parents by liking this man, but Boris Johnson's (temporary) parting speech in the Telegraph today is worth reading. Find it here.

Boris is taking time off to concentrate on the election for London Mayor. I give you an extract from his closing paragraph below.

I am off to campaign for a clean, green, safer London in which children once again feel safe to cycle to school, and in which adults are not afraid of kids on bikes, buses or anywhere else; in which lovely old buildings are protected and beautiful new housing is built and in which taxpayers' money is not wasted on a load of politically-correct agitprop, including ubiquitous signs announcing that this or that has been funded by the Mayor of LondON.

It's that last phrase. For all who have sat on the tube and i) wondered at the idea behind LondON; ii) puzzled at the logic of LondON; (iii) been amazed at the vast array of things LondON funds; or iv) just generally thought it's rather naff, then there's only one way your vote should go.

Only a quick one tonight since I've got to hit the sack soon. Early start tomorrow - I need to get to London and back, then drive up to Huddersfield, where we're making a presentation at the university on Friday.

I was sent a copy of the itinerary for this trip earlier today, and most of it is what I imagine to be standard fare for your average presentation. Travel up north, find hotel, park, eat, sleep, set up, listen to speeches, make presentation, workshop, closing speech, home. Bob's your uncle.

But my eye was drawn to the closing speech, which is to be given by the chancellor of Huddersfield University, Patrick Stewart.

And yes, it is that Patrick Stewart!

I shall be in the presence of my hero, the actor I treasure above all others, and not just because he was Picard in Star Trek. I swear I've seen him in other things. I know I have. It just happens to be the case that my knowledge of Star Trek: The Next Generation is pretty darned good. I blame the fact that it used to be on Sky One when I got in from school... but let's be honest, I have no defence here. I'm a geek. We know this.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I remembered reading about Patrick Stewart being appointed chancellor of the university where he grew up, and you cannot imagine how thrilled I am that in under 48 hours, I'm going to have seen him in the flesh and who knows, maybe even had a chat. Perhaps Patrick is reading now, ahead of the event - in which case hi Patrick, I'll be the one in the blue shirt and shiny brown shoes with the relatively large brown hair.

Off to bed then. Next time I write it'll be from Huddersfield and you will be the very first to know what it's like to breathe the same air as the man, the legend. (God, if he does read this I'm going to look incredibly silly, aren't I? Still, I'm sure he appreciates the enthusiasm, if not the hackneyed tongue-in-cheek title. Best I could do in a rush, Paddy.)

Well, I may be the most unlikely Dayorama candidate to continue to report about the US election, but continue I shall. I did politics A level, which was 50% US politics, so that's some qualification. Maybe.

Damian Lanigan, here, in the Telegraph provides interesting comment on the fact that Obama is black. He notes that "a good proportion of Obama's superstar appeal is related to his racial origin" and yet adds that this doesn't mean that it's somehow shallow to vote for him. Further, "Obama is being given the responsibility for expiating America of its racial history, partly because he has self-consciously distanced himself from the blacks to whom that history is their raison d'etre. He doesn't trade on the civil rights movement, partly because he is too young to do so with credibility, but also because angry black men make voters feel bad about themselves. One effect of the Obama phenomenon is that it's OK to be white... Through his intelligence, charisma and preternatural skills as a politician Obama offers us something almost irresistible: a black man who through the means of his race allows us to regard race as irrelevant. No wonder he makes people feel good". Praise indeed.

In contrast, in one comment here, the Guardian makes a more entertaining observation about Obama: "His potential has emerged with lightning speed; he is the political equivalent of Facebook, another phenomenon launched in 2004 that feels as though it has been around forever".

And yet, even with the above, Obama has failed to sail through the New Hampshire primary and beat Hillary. I didn't reckon much to Hillary's tearful appeal though - It's surely not beneficial to have a future president who needs to resort to tears to get her own way. Would the Iron Lady have done this? Absolutely not. - so I'm mildly annoyed, on that basis alone, that she won. It was John McCain who came through for the Republicans. However, the fact that McCain beat Bush in the New Hampshire primary back in 2000 is a reminder that whilst these primaries are useful indicators of who may be nominated, no one is home and dry. Obama has cause to be alert to this fact. There's no reason to give up fighting yet. Particularly since, as the saying goes, it's not over until Hillary, sorry, I meant the fat lady, sings.

And with that attentions are turned to Super Tuesday on 5th February.

On another note, there's something vaguely amusing about how it's often the simplest things in life, beyond any candidates real control, that can make or break election campaigns. As the BBC notes, "turnout [in the New Hampshire primary] has exceeded expectations, helped by unusually mild weather for this time of year..." It's always down to the weather.

You may, though on balance almost certainly won't, remember that in September last year I was on a bit of a quest.

The BBC News and Sport websites are only a few articles away from ticking over to 7000000.

If you look at the URL of any BBC article, it contains a seven-digit number which in essence ticks up sequentially whenever a journalist fires up a new one.

The Northern Rock article dominating the news front page is number 6999615. Over on the sport front page, a Muttiah Muralitharan article on the ticker is 6999629.

By tomorrow late morning or afternoon, unless the numbering system used in CPS (the content management system news and sport employ) resets to some other figure, we should hit 7000000.

This was left abjectly unresolved, largely owing to the minor inconvenience that article number 7000000 never appeared.

So the answer to life, the universe, and which article would be number seven million on BBC News, drifted into the aether.

Until now.

It was only earlier today that I remembered this little fixation - and now, in my new role, I have access to the digital shrine in which this information is stored.

With renewed enthusiasm I hurtled through the database, came upon the mighty number 7000000, and double clicked to see what would emerge...

And what emerged was a tiny little link, in Spanish, which would have launched a selection of the day's best photos on the BBC Spanish website. For one day in September, before it died.

See, all the tiny little bits that make up the BBC News site (and counterparts like the foreign language sites) get their own number, and only a very few of those numbers are full-blooded articles. Many of them, like our little Spanish link, are just minor component parts, cogs in the great wheel. But they all need their own number to prosper and thrive in this harsh environment (been watching too many nature programmes on the bus into work, sorry).

And thus my rather exciting numerical quest ended as a bit of a damp squib. But I was earlier cheered up no end by my little brother Harry, now nearly six, who was having a tinkle on his toy piano in a strictly musical sense.

While it wasn't quite Mozart's second coming it was better than I'd have expected, so rather than pleading for mercy I let him carry on for a good ten minutes. Then he asked me if I knew what the song was called - and given he'd clearly been ad-libbing since the start, I didn't.

"Bleeding Scary," he said.

I was taken aback by this gratuitous language until it dawned on me that Leona Lewis has a lot to answer for. "Bleeding Love" has been top of the charts for ages, and Harry has simply assumed that most good songs require the word "Bleeding" at the start.

He played another song and asked me, again, to guess the name. Now I thought he'd summed up his style of music perfectly with the first title, but he surpassed himself with the sequel, which neatly encapsulated the rest of the household's opinion.

"Bleeding Piano!"

Well, despite an un-explained delay of 90mins to my flight out to HK, all seemed to pass rather effortlessly and regretfully I've slipped smoothly into another week.

A couple of musings from the journey to Heathrow though. First, you know the emergency telephones on the side of motorways? I wonder, given the prevalence of mobile phones, how often these are now used? Surely people just call the emergency services / roadside recovery from their mobile phone, rather than wander 1/2 mile (invariably in the wrong direction and risking life and limb in the process) along the hard shoulder in order to reach said telephone (probably to find it is our of order anyway). Although, I suppose the advantage of calling from the little orange phone is that the relevant service / recovery vehicle will automatically know where you are, rather than you either a) trying to find the little blue pole which tells you where you are; or b) saying you're somewhere on the M25, going around in a clockwise direction, somewhere between junction 5 and 7 and somewhere near a few trees and somewhere near a field with cows. Hmm, helpful.

Second, on the approach road to Heathrow - so, nose to tail traffic and airplanes humming overhead - was a road sign stating "Low Emission Zone", accompanied by a Transport for London symbol and then a yellow sign beneath stating, "in force 4 February 2008". Given the environment, it seemed rather ironic. I asked the taxi driver what this was, but he muttered he had no idea but that (said in a rather sarcastic and weary
tone) it was probably, "another of Ken's bright ideas". I thought it probably meant that when you're in a traffic jam, you're advised to turn your engine off - or something like that.

What the TFL website has to say is here - I've extracted a couple of sections below.

Have I missed something? For starters, the above doesn't make much sense
to me. And secondly, what?!

It seems to work like this:

And the rationale?

And another musing from Heathrow itself. I fancied some chocolate for dinner. Comfort food. The last act before a January "watching weight" period (necessary following my two-week indulgence in the UK). A snickers bar took my fancy. 59p. Since when did a snickers bar creep up to 59p? OK, so no doubt there's airport inflation on this, but 59p? I remember them being around 25p or 26p, and I think the last time I purchased one it was probably around 32p or 33p... but 59p? Blimey. Incidentally, along the counter in WHSmith were... wait for it... Cadbury's Cream Eggs. We hadn't even reached Epiphany, and already the Easter eggs were on display. No doubt valentines cards are already in card shops. In contrast, on arrival
back in HK, the shopping mall still had its Christmas decorations up and was playing "Winter Wonderland". Since I'd left Christmas well and truly in the UK, this struck me as pretty incongruous. No pleasing me, is
there?

I'm pretty sure it is.

At around 10.30 this morning I was in bed (listen, it's a Sunday, I need my beauty sleep) when I was woken by a pounding noise downstairs.

Imagine the police are very keen to get into your house, and have decided to start forcing entry by kicking your front door down. That kind of noise. Over and over again.

After about three minutes of this I decided I couldn't stand any more and went downstairs, hoping not to find an assortment of constables and sergeants parked in our living room.

Instead I found Toby, the above dog, hammering away on the living room door like a dog possessed. He didn't stop when I came into the room. Usually, when Toby lightly paws the living room door, it means he wants the loo in quite urgent fashion, and will burst out into the garden the moment we let him out.

But this time, when I opened the back door, the dog remained in the living room attempting a demolition act. He gave me the most cursory glance when I came back to enquire, and would not stop this frightening attack on a perfectly harmless door.

Above the din I heard my phone ringing upstairs. Cursing the dog for the missed call, went up to ring whoever it was back.

It was my dad, who told me that my stepmum and the three kids had just been in a car accident. Their car had left the road on black ice, and was more than likely a write-off. Could I go and collect the kids?

I threw some decent clothes on quickly and dashed out to my car, but as I opened the front door I noticed the hammering had stopped. The dog was now sitting on the bottom step of the staircase, perfectly calm, not in the least bit interested in going out the door with me. The living room door, a battered and bruised victim of domestic abuse, had been left to tend its wounds. No wagging, no barking. He just watched me go.

When I got to the accident the fire brigade, who'd been at another crash just up the road, were there, and everyone was fine - if shaken. I'm not convinced the car will ever move under its own steam again, which is not at all good, but at least there were no broken bones.

Now, I've seen it on telly before, and you read about it in newspapers and magazines of a certain calibre. But did the family dog, attacking the door and barking in a fashion never previously witnessed in all eleven years of its life, then calm as you like once action had been taken, know that something had happened?

I wonder.

And so I am about to disappear off for another 9 weeks. There was something silly in coming home - I now have to go away again. Yes, so 9 weeks is nothing and shall fly by and is generally going to be pretty cool (good work, looking forward to catching up with people over there, friend coming out, parents visiting, trip to Beijing planned etc.etc.)... but right now I reckon I'll suffer from a pretty rotten Sunday evening blues / Monday morning feeling. In fact, it's as though my commute to work is beginning now - but it involves taxis, check-ins, customs, trains, a plane, and the short matter of 6,000 miles.

Having said that, thanks to a lovely meal at The Narrow last night - there's a review here which, probably does it justice - it's well worth a trip, and then lunch with Anthony & OJ today, I'm suitably full of British puddings and red wine. I'll be t-total from both until 8 March so I had to be seen off well...

It's 'Manchester City', because they've created a lovely little Italian-Youtube montage of all the City goals this season, up til Christmas Day. I realise this may offer somewhat limited appeal to most Dayorama readers (themselves a niche audience!) but I cannot resist. Up til a couple of years ago my team were a byword for laughing stock, so allow me to indulge myself now that we are momentarily half decent:

Let us not forget it was only ten years ago that our defenders were pulling tricks like this (it's an own goal, despite what appears to be the crisp, precise finish of a top class footballing marksman):

We City fans have Sven-Goran Eriksson to thank for the miracles worked so far this season - half the time we've actually played quite badly but there is a certain something special which justs give us that extra edge, and even a bit of luck we never used to have.

Speaking of Sven, he is of course the top of any search for his first name, but look who comes in just a few places down the list. It's... lookalikey Sven!

Mr Svenalike, real name Derek Williams (no family relation, or at least I hope not), has apparently racked up countless hours of TV appearances. He promises 'sven-sational sven-tertainment', and urges potential clients to 'accept no (other) imitation'.

Go to his website, here, to view photos and laugh lots at a man whose entire career relies on the continued success of a balding Swedish bloke who's into his football.

The Bugging Parrot is my new favourite cartoon character. There he is, on the left, with his good friend and acquaintance the owl.

To think that before iPlayer came along, I'd have missed this stuff. The brilliant thing about iPlayer is that while most people will want to use it for the prime time shows, it also captures a good deal of morning and afternoon telly - so almost everything from CBBC is downloadable too.

When I had a browse this evening, I saw a little screengrab of a cartoon owl and had to find out more. Each episode only lasts a minute, featuring a long-suffering pink owl in one of a series of mishaps. In this instance, the Bugging Parrot's party mood results in a number of minor confrontations. I know exactly how the parrot feels. It is horrible when you're suddenly mindlessly optimistic about life, the universe and everything, only to discover that no one else in the room has been smoking the same substance.

Talking of mindless optimism, I've settled down in front of Big Brother: Celebrity Hijack in the hope it will improve on last night's launch.

Alas, we're half way in and it's letting me down badly. So far all we've had is highlights from last night's show, the drudgefest in which Matt Lucas laboured the same horrible joke for more than ninety minutes.

I hate the way Big Brother always do this - showing the launch, then using the following night's show to air what is almost a clip show, with no new content. It gives them a convenient day's buffer of material for all their future shows but for anyone who steeled themselves and sat through the initial pile of shite, having it all hurled in your face for a second successive night is an appalling abuse. And it's that which often kills off any lingering enthusiasm I had been desperately nurturing.

This morning I wrote a quick piece about the boxer in the house, Anthony Ogogo, for the BBC's 606 website - you can have a read here. Some lovely, and indeed lively, comments as a result!

Now the new Big Brother stuff has started. God, it's so dull. I'm going to have to switch this off. I tried. I really tried. But I'd much rather watch the Bugging Parrot.

The front page (as of around 10am this morning) of BBC News Online (UK version) makes for interesting reading today. To begin, the top story is Obama's win in the Iowa caucus. Of course, it also reports that Huckabee has won the caucus for the Republicans, but I don't think anyone cares about this so much, do they? Certainly the Western press I've read (note this is largely constrained to the BBC, the Telegraph, the Guardian and the Economist) seem to have focused their attentions on the battle between Hilary and Obama. And rightly so, it seems. At least this is an interesting battle.

Reading reports though, what strikes me as rather unique is the fact that they're both battling to be the "first" at something - as the BBC report states, "Obama, [who] is vying to become the first black US president". In contrast, Hilary is determined to be the first female US president. Often you'd have a pretty run-of-the-mill candidate against someone who, perhaps, had a separate unique appeal or a separate reason / result that would occur as a result of their win. Think back, even to Blair in 1997. Not only was he going to be the first Labour leader for a good few years of Conservative rule but at 43 he was also to become the youngest prime minister of the 20th Century (Lord Liverpool - 1812 - previously held the title). So, vote for Blair and he trumps a record at the same time as becoming prime minister. In contrast, there was no such achievement to be gained by Major. Another old guy and a few more boring years of Tory rule.

And so with Hilary and Obama they both have something "extra" to achieve, aside from the small insignificant detail of becoming president of the United States. Both are capable of a form of sympathy vote for their cause - even a sense of romanticism. Arguably it would be pretty cool for a woman to become president of the US - ultimate pinnacle for feminism and a long way from the fights held for women to simply be able to vote in elections. At the same time, given the battles to combat racism that have taken place over the past few decades, it would also be pretty momentous for Obama to become the first black president. I doubt Luther King ever thought to dream so far ahead.

Is this what the Democrat nomination will come down to? Hilary and Obama's policies aren't dissimilar - in any event, they shouldn't be since they are going to figurehead the same party and technically should carry largely the same ideals - and whilst they come from different backgrounds and have different experiences, they're pretty equally matched. Is it ultimately a question then, for all those budding Democrats, of whether they want the chance for the first woman to become president or whether they want to give the chance for Obama to become the first black president?

Back to BBC online then. It's worth making a note of the fact that the above, the leader story, even on the UK version of the website is about the American election. American. Not British, American. And ok, so the caucuses / primaries are important in terms of party nomination and "where the race is won or lost", it isn't the election itself. I've just dedicated four paragraphs to it. A sure illustration of the role that America plays in our daily lives.

One of the other top stories is the fact that Darling is going to give more power to the FSA to regulate the banking industry. Now why is it not a surprise that in the entirety of the front page Gordon Broooown is nowhere to be found? We've hardly had a peep out of him for days - clearly it's the Chancellor holding the [purse] strings, so to speak.

Onwards onto the vomiting virus, reported by Ollie here and then the fact that train network is only just beginning to recover from the chaos created by over-running engineering works. The latter is hardly a surprise. Some things are a constant in this life. But the former? Isn't it a little ironic that our hospitals are having to close in preparation for the combat against the double v? For Ollie, I'd suggest he settle down and watch the film Outbreak. Don't worry about an epidemic - it's OK - a hunky scientist with marital problems and an attractive wife will come along soon enough to save the day (and his marriage). Just don't go touching any monkeys. I'm also slightly puzzled by the following statement on the BBC report: "And NHS Direct said calls about vomiting and abdominal pain had been the number two reason for people calling over the Christmas period." If this is number two - and this is affecting a significant percentage of the country - what on earth was number one?

Of course we then have the social responsibility offered by Weatherspoons - adults with children are only allowed two alcoholic drinks in a pub in order to limit their stay. Now ok, this makes sense in a way. Pubs can, by nature of their function in serving alcohol, be full of people who are edging their way towards drunkenness. It's also not exactly pleasant for children to see their parents drunk. Nor are, arguably, parents fully in control of their children's safety when intoxicated - they may be slower to react to dangerous situations / taking care of the child etc. So far, so good. But stop. Those aren't the reasons that Weatherspoons are giving. It's to comply with "child cruelty legislation". Although, hang on, this could, potentially, cover the above. But no, a spokesman for the company said it was "uncomfortable" with children being on the premises for long periods because of a lack of play facilities. Urrr, sorry? Play facilities? Isn't beer mat flicking a suitable game? If that's the reason (and it isn't for the social responsibility reasons advocated above) then why don't Weatherspoons just dedicate a corner of each pub for a children's play area? Or make sure that they have a play area outside? A box of toys aka a doctor's waiting room? That way a) families would continue to go to Weatherspoons pubs and b) Weatherspoons could sell more beer. Bizarre.

That leaves us with Murray getting through to the semi-finals of an obscure tennis tournament. I'm not meaning to lower his achievement, but it says something about the current status of sport in this country when celebrate a Brit getting through to the semi of the Qatar Open. And don't forget that Prince William is now going to train to be a pilot for the RAF.

The final article of note is the latest government initiative to provide free English language classes on migrants to England who have long-term needs. What long-term needs are is baffling. And there I shall stop, I've said enough controversial things for one post. But, can't we teach our own kids English first and only allow migrant workers into the country who can speak English in the first place? Sorry, I'm stopping, honest.
But what a display of news articles which seem to sum up many aspects of our everyday lives today. I'm sure someone out there could analyse it properly.

Clearly I have had too much time on my hands today. The penultimate day of rest and relaxation prior to flying back to Hong Kong tomorrow night for the final nine-week stint. I think I've done all that I set out to do in Blighty - I've seen green fields and blue sky (not to mention Hilarious Sheep Hill), visited friends and family, eaten well (perhaps too well), relaxed and, of course, had my washing done (thanks, Mum). All in all, a fabulous two weeks.

It would seem that we have entered a new era of round robin letters (and yes, I know I go on about these). I received a Christmas card a couple of days ago from a school friend. Now, think of the round robins from bonkers aunts and cranky, old family friends. You hear all about the lives of their perfect families - 2.4 blue-eyed, blonde-haired children; Clarissa's ballet lessons; little Jimmy's school report (apparently he has imaginative ideas but often fails in the execution); and the planned redecoration of the family home (sub-urban semi, double garage, 100ft garden and room for a pony).

Anyway, at least it is litle Jimmy's mother telling us about the school report - it isn't Jimmy himself. And it's understandable that Clarissa's mother is proud of her solo performance in the under-5's production of the Nutcracker. But again, Clarissa isn't telling me about her rose-pink dappled tutu herself is she? No. She saves that for her mother. People should be able to be proud of their families. In a way, it's rather sweet (albeit sickeningly sweet). But I appreciate it.

But what happens when little Jimmy and Clarissa grow up and move out. Should they continue to subject their friends to round robin letters? Carry on the family tradition? Should they tell their friends - their equals, people largely at the same stage in life as them - that they have purchased a pent-house flat, installed a fish tank, have a 46" widescreen tv on order, enjoyed their skiing holiday in the Alps and are looking forward to buying a multimixer? The answer is no. That's a no. Defacto. No. Definite, no. Got it?

Do my friends need a letter with this year's Christmas card? Should I begin making notes now, do you think? In January, I travelled back to Hong Kong. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, especially practising using chopsticks... I mean, do you care? No. Especially if you're in touch with me on a regular basis anyway and are well aware that I am now able to use chopsticks to pick up a single grain of rice. And if you did care, then you'd read the detritus I post on this website. But at least it's your choice to read it, isn't it?

Incidentally, if you're going through a northern English town (famous for having a University and rowing crew second-rate to Oxbridge) then apparently you'd have been able to see my friend's Christmas tree in their upstairs window. The things you learn from round robin letters. Perhaps they have their place after all... Dustbin, anyone...?

This is Dayorama's BBCH launch night live blog. Updates appeared at the top so start at the bottom if you want to read it as it happened. Don't forget to give us your comments on the housemates!

She's got more GCSEs and A levels than me, which as OJ will tell you really doesn't endear people to me, but she looks quite sweet and innocent, and hopefully Lucas will have John lick her or something. Ultimately, she's opted to go on Big Brother, so she forfeits any mental advantage immediately.

Looking a bit like Tarzan - alright, Jane - in her leopardskin outfit, she waves enthusiastically, giggles, burbles "I love you!" at the world and then disappears inside those doors.

Down the stairs, dress trailing on the manky carpet of doom, and inside the house. "John, this is the final hit," says Lucas, plotting something big. "I want you to gather everybody in a circle, ignore her entrance, raise your voice ... come on, you're on live TV John," he adds, as though that will help the poor boy focus.

Everyone is ignoring John, which Lucas can hardly complain about since he's the architect and executionist in all this. John only has three minutes of broadcast left but nobody is paying the blindest bit of notice, and Lucas admits a grudging defeat.

"John, crawl to the diary room please." If he does this slowly enough, they'll run out of time on the broadcast. Lucas has failed dismally tonight, and now he addresses the house as a whole for the first time.

"This is Big Brother, aka Matt Lucas. This evening I am hijacking the Big Brother house. John, please come to the diary room."

God, that kilt is still showing all sorts. Bad John! Now, the rest of the housemates finally get to see what's going on (and more, with the kilt).

So has John passed or failed? Lucas says he passed! Well by Matt's own abysmal standards I suppose he did, even though John chickened out of most of the weirder stuff as the evening went on.

And a round of applause for John from his fellow housemates. "I'm so sorry, everyone!" John says, running around undoing all the damage he spent the evening doing. Then he finishes with "I'm the chairman of the Scottish Youth Parliament", redoing all that damage in one stroke.

With that, goodnight. Your thoughts? Welcome in the comments. But first you must stand up and scream, "Cake!" until somebody notices and confronts you.

22:27 - Jay
Penultimate housemate and it's the token... well hold on, he might not be. Just because he's a fashion designer. Let's not draw conclusions, even though the accent would also strongly suggest... no, Ollie, come on, let the man flourish on his own merits.

This is Jay, who has well pruned facial hair and that annoying tone of voice which insists on ending every statement on a note slightly higher than the rest of the sentence.

"I first fell in love with fashion when I was about 13," says John. "I don't know what it was." Oh, John, I think I can guess.

Oh God, he just did a funny little shakey-head thing in his pre-intro video. Here he is then, in a white suit, looking absolutely chuffed with himself simply for being there - and well he might. Didn't they all do well!

Up the stairs he skips, shimmies up to the door, cheeky wave, and through the door. Down the steps where the white suit puts the carpet to shame, and already John is laughing - at the carpet, no doubt.

Immediately we get Lucas again, who I do wish would just bugger off now, cos I want to see the other housemates. Not Lucas, not John, the other lot. If I was John I would be making "pssssh" noises back down the line and feigning utter ignorance of anything Lucas says - maybe whispering "I wonder why Matt isn't saying anything" every now and again.

Lucas, bless him, is under the strain of having to be funny live and on demand, but then this is a peril of the business known as stand-up. He ought not to be flagging. How do we evict the hijacker?

22:20 - Latoya
Latoya, who's been in music videos for plenty of top names, certainly has a high opinion of herself but something tells me she's actually quite a nice lady. "Even though she's big time, she's still humble," says one of her friends. Not got a Wikipedia page, though, have you love?

Big time Layota steps out of her car wearing an all-white outfit which Dermot gives a big thumbs up, while reeling off her list of honours. Latoya, for one of Mariah Carey's stage dancers, looks a little overwhelmed by the comparatively small Big Brother crowd, but hsa a purposeful stride towards the house door.

"Look at my hair," says Latoya, who has done well to find something to distract herself from the shitty carpet.

John is still being abused by Lucas. This was initially a funny ploy but the problem is, we hardly get any time to find out about all these other housemates, because all we see is their entrance and then Lucas bollocking John down the earpiece. As a comedy device, it simply doesn't last for twelve different introductions. Lucas has jumped his personal hijacking shark.

22:13 - Fame
Interesting fact during this ad break: only Nathan and Jeremy have their own pages on Wikipedia. Poor show from geek Liam, who should have written his own, like a certain Dayorama contributor (no, it's not me!).

22:11 - Liam
Oh look, a web geek! You can tell because he's trying to do something different with his hair but just ends up looking silly. Which web geek do we all know who matches that description?

"I wouldn't say I'm a geek," says the geek, who also rates himself "the most ambitious person you'll ever meet". Au contraire. You haven't met my dog, Toby. He still thinks he can chase tennis balls for 24 hours a day, at the age of 80-odd in dog years. That, my boy, is ambition.

Geek boy nips up the steps with the standard issue toaster-cum-shoulder-bag, waves to the crowd like he's an Arctic Monkey, and trots merrily down the stairs.

"John, go and tell this man his hair is lopsided," says Lucas. By now, if I were John, I would be regretting the decision to take part in this show to such a degree that I would have to eat my own kneecaps.

I think there is a strong possibility that John - who is now being forced to tap people on the shoulder and say the word 'cake' - will lose his mind by the end of the evening. He may never be able to go out again.

22:06 - Nathan
Nathan, the miniature Dizzee Rascal, is next into the house, filmed with a mixing desk behind his back as though that somehow makes him cool by definition. Suddenly BBC local radio is the home of mojo, we must assume.

Nathan has funkier music to do his walk to than the rest of them, I swear. He's in all sorts of sparkly bling - it's toe-curlingly sad.

He was nominated for best R'n'B act at the 2007 Mobo awards, apparently. Big deal. I could have been, too. I just didn't fill in my application form in time. Too busy laying down some funky shit, brap.

Ahem. Down the stairs, then.

In he goes. "What a suit!" That's the Lucas reaction. He has to say everything twice before John reluctantly gives in and says whatever Matt is trying to get across.

Lucas is making John pretend he has cramp. John is almost beside himself on the floor, not through cramp, but through sheer deep-seated embarrassment and humiliation. Lucas wants him to make Nathan rub his leg.

"Go on Johhhhn!" Lucas is having to work hard, and eventually has to give up. Nice to see John show some spine! Dignity over the win, son. Dignity over the win.

22:01 - Amy
'Obsessive compulsive in a healthy way' is how Amy, who studied Fine Art at Oxford, describes herself. Prize this, prize that. Don't you just despise people who win lots of prizes?

Elsewhere I have read that Amy wants to enter her time in the Big Brother house for the Turner Prize. This speaks volumes for the Turner Prize. She'll almost certainly win it, the judges would love that.

Amy looks every inch a frazzled, psychologically crippled Oxford graduate. Here she comes out of the car, reminding me a little of my friend Hannah, which may thrill Hannah (who is eight years older) or may not (Amy is a headcase). Black and red number for Amy, who has a little nervous wave and ignores the wolf whistles.

Amy 'likes her food, and men, hot', says Dermot, who one assumes is not talking from experience. All the talk is that Amy's OCD will manifest itself in keeping the house clean. Not if she can't find the door, however, which eventually she does.

Down the stairs - clean that carpet, woman! - and into the house. Matt asks John to talk in a cockney accent, which John is completely unable to do. He's remarkably Scottish throughout.

"I'm psychic," says poor John, as Lucas changes tack. "Are you 21?" Lucas reads off the Amy cue sheet. "You from Oxford?"

Amy should see through this. Come on, love, you've got an Oxford degree. "You're not a natural blonde, either, are you?"

21:55 - Relax (don't do it)
Note, while we're in this ad break, that Lucas always tells John to 'relax' at the end of each housemate introduction.

a) As if the poor boy's going to relax
and
b) This clearly means John gets the ad breaks, and the breaks while Dermot chats shit, to somehow compose himself and talk normally to the rest of the housemates. How he must treasure every second Virgin Mobile spend trying to be a poor man's Carphone Warehouse. If I were him I'd pretend the radio link has gone down and start complaining that he can't hear Lucas. Perfect get-out clause.

21:50 - Jeremy
Jeremy, a budding F1 driver, says he's 'extremely competitive' and will 'do anything to win'. He'll fit right into F1 then. Have you met Fernando, Jezza?

Getting more than his fair share of booing on the way in, poor boy, and he has a rueful look back at the crowd as he wanders through the doors and down the crappy carpet.

So, into the fray. What's Lucas going to do? "Introduce yourself, John," says the hijacker.

Lucas: "Tell him he looks like Harry Potter." John did superbly well to mask this as a natural remark, so Lucas inflicts a little more pain. Every time John cleverly resists-while-complying, which is often, Lucas turns the screw.

John, under Lucas' control, takes Jeremy to one side and talks about snogging another housemate.

If John ever gets voted into parliament, Scottish or otherwise, we are all going to enjoy watching a lot of highlights of this evening.

21:45 - Emilia & Victor
Next into the circus it's... the circus acts. These two will be right at home, performing daft stunts in front of a deranged audience as they do. Emilia was born in Birmingham, apparently, although if that's a Brummie accent then I'm a German Shepherd.

"We do what we do together as two people working in one," says Victor. Always a recipe for Big Brother success. Emilia sometimes bleeds out of her eyes, apparently. She's been watching too much Channel 4.

Out the car they get. Emilia is the younger at 18, Victor is 19. Emilia has a fetching black top on with a fair bit of frontage on display, let's say. Victor is very smartly turned out! Shirt tucked in, even.

Down the steps they go and into the pit of Lucas mirth. What's the baldinator going to make John do? Poor effort from Lucas who's going on about hiding or something. A poor show compared with the latent homosexuality he was inflicting on John and Anthony a moment ago.

The thing with Lucas is once he gets onto something, he doesn't give up. That's the true horror of John's plight. Lucas won't let go. It's like owning a plump chihuahua with OCD. A plump chihuahua with OCD that has an earpiece installed in a local tomcat, then makes it prostrate itself in front of cars.

21:35 - Anthony
Anthony Ogogo does not mess about - he's still got the blood speck on his World Cadet Championships 2005 gold medal.

"Some people think I'm quite arrogant, but everyone who knows me knows I'm a nice kid," he says. "If I got big-headed or arrogant my mum would give me a bit of a slap."

He's got more trophies than Manchester United and here he is, getting out of the car in a very nice pinstriped number with open white collared shirt. Looking a bit like a footballer, in as much as he's gone for something posh but looks quite surprised to find himself wearing it.

"Incredible hair," says Dermot. What? His hair is pretty nondescript. Dermot's clearly stuffed for anything to say.

Down the steps, then, to funky Calista and the Lucascotsman. "Can I call you Tony?" Asks John under the bald one's direction.

J: "I do a bit of boxing, actually."
Lucas: "Touch his hair where he's shaved it." Alright, maybe the hair is a bit weird. "Give him a shoulder massage."

Oh he's doing it as well. This is a future political career going down the drain as we speak. I can hardly bear to watch. Matt Lucas, who has up til now been everything but funny, is now being downright cruel. A top boxer is about to demolish an affable young Scot.

21:28 - Calista
"I've written hundreds and hundreds of songs, from drum 'n' bass to garage to grind," says Calista, who says her song about bongos is "taking over the funky house scene". Can't say I'd noticed, love. Good skills on the piano, mind you.

Looks a bit like Holly Valance if her face were prised open slightly then some of those eye drops added which make your pupils go funny. Calista turns up in a silver sparkly number, oblivious to the fact that one half of Little Britain is in control of a gurt big Scotsman in full regalia inside the house. And that's all she'll have for company, initially.

In fact let's call it a day there. John (and Matt) and Calista. Get it on! (Not like that.)

In she goes... down the god-awful beige carpet with murky white lighting... and into the house to meet John, who is parroting everything Matt Lucas says.

John (seconds after Lucas): "I can pretty much just pick up an instrument and play it. I like to play the kazoo, I'm very good with the kazoo. I like your hair! I like some of it. I like one side. I composed the Sound of Music, do you know that?"

"What a git," says Dermot.

21:22 - 'Is that not David?'
John has worn a kilt. Bless his highly visible cotton socks. Lucas calls him to the diary room.

J: "Mr Lucas, how are ye?"
L: "Sure you want to be wearing a kilt tonight? Now I chose you to be first to enter the house as you are the person most capable of carrying out my secret task."

John opens up a box and finds an earpiece. Lucas tells him the earpiece means John is totally under his control.

There's a lovely little moment where Lucas and John get the earpiece volume right.

L: "I'm worried the earpiece may still be seen so I've provided you with a box of hats. Feel free to accessorise your head."

John chooses a tartan hat. I bet the box only has tartan hats in it.

You can almost see up that kilt from the diary room chair, by the way. It's horrifying. Beautiful retort from John at the end, when Lucas says he's the funny one from Little Britain. "Is that not David?" Says John. I want that boy to win.

Quick thought though - if John wants to be a politician, he's going to live to regret this. Think about Galloway's Big Brother performance. If John becomes the next Alex Salmond, this footage is going to come back again, and again, and again, and again, and again...

21:17 - A complete John
Is anyone finding Matt Lucas even remotely funny? Poor boy. Saw David Walliams in the canteen at work the other day looking very happy with himself - he's well shot of Lucas.

Our first housemate is John Loughton, of the Scottish Youth Parliament. He wants the young people of Scotland to 'have a strong voice'. He looks a fine, upstanding fellow. He's clearly been chosen because he'll look like a wassock (and a ginger one, at that) up against people E4 reckons are 'cool'. Lovely. I hope he wins and shoves it down their throats.

21:10 - Give us a break
After what feels like four minutes - oh look, it was - we're into our first ad break. Channel 4! What are you doing! God, give me that bloody norovirus already, it's got to be livelier and more entertaining than this.

Housemate introductions coming up, which had better be good. We've had it explained to us that the housemates were handpicked by C4 - no, sorry, the ubercool E4 - this time around, without open auditions. It'll be interesting to see if that affects the quality of in-house action.

21:06 - Not good so far
Rubbish supposed-to-be-funny intro from Lucas and we're off. There's Dermot, who is neither pregnant nor Davina. It's all so disappointing.

Bless them for trying to make the decision to restrict this to E4 into a reason why E4 is cool. No, that is a reason why E4 is not. No bugger watches it. This is why this show is on it.

Dermot: "When the housemates are evicted, they'll be interviewed by me."

Emphasis Dermot's. He's loving the Davinalessness of it all. No swimming pool but a hot tub, and we have a ginormous Big Brother control room where we'll doubtless get to see our celebrities playing God.

Lucas has 'cheeky naughtiness' planned, including sending 50 dogs into the house, except 'the RSPCA weren't happy with that'. So he's secreting an earpiece in the ear of a housemate. Not exactly Pure Evil, is it?

21:02 - Here we go!
Yes, get excited, get pumped up, because a bunch of people you've never heard of are about to enter a second-rate Big Brother house for an unspecified but short period of time.

Except this time, they're all supposed to be successful and/or intelligent. Which is deeply troubling because if they are, they'll sensibly sit through it and do nothing even remotely untoward. What a let-down.

20:55 - Wan moment
Five minutes to air. Gok Wan (Fashion Nil) is finishing off showing the fatty bits of another poor woman, humiliated on national television, and we're almost ready to roll.

Let's not forget that the change in format is brought about by the racism scandal in last year's Celebrity Big Brother. Channel 4 claims this is sufficiently different that any such problem will now be avoided - by introducing people in their late teens into a house controlled by unhinged media luvvies. Can't help but wonder about the wisdom of this decision.

20:50 - Duhhhmot
Let's get the worst news out of the way early doors. No Davina. We're stuck with Dermot What's-his-chops because Channel 4 are sufficiently underwhelmed by the new format that they're only putting it on E4 after tonight. None of that digital-spinoff nonsense for Davina, who is probably off getting pregnant in time for this summer's Big Brother 9.

20:45 - Intro
Okay, so here we are again, gathered in front of the television to watch egotistical no-marks make fools out of themselves in front of the anonymous Big Brother.

Except the housemates aren't egotistical, they're not no-marks, and Big Brother is most certainly not anonymous.

Channel 4 have tempted a selection of the UK's Bright Young Things into the house, most notably the boxer Anthony Ogogo, who I'll be writing about in greater depth for the Beeb tomorrow. So we'll be keeping an eye firmly fixed on him.

There's also a ginger Scottish youth parliamentarian, a classical musician, a dancer, a pair of circus performers, and more besides.

Meanwhile, Big Brother itself takes the form of a different celebrity each day, with Matt Lucas taking the reigns to start with. The likes of Jimmy Carr are promised in future, all deciding their own rules and toying with the housemates' minds. Excellent. Nothing like turning up at a house to discover you must bow to the every whim of Matt Lucas. *Shudder.*

It's only when sat on a coach full of people sniffing, coughing, spluttering or chatting on their mobile phones that you become all too aware of the norovirus doing the rounds.

You know the one - always associated with cruise ships, the 'winter vomiting' bug which gives sufferers a 48-hour burst of violent sickness and diarrhoea. In dramatic BBC language it is sweeping the nation.

The sniffers, coughers and splutterers act as a potent reminder that someone incredibly ill with something is never too far away. The ones chatting on their mobile phones are the ones you wish were spending the duration of the journey vomiting and pooing in the coach toilet.

This is a transcript of the most recent conversation (or one inane end of it), in its entirety. I have not left any word out, nor added any in.

"I'm on the bus. Yeah. Yeah. Mmm, nothing. Err... bye. Yeah, no, I know, I will. Yeah. I might, like, be out. Okay. Yeah. Bye."

Jesus Christ, deliver me from this puddle of norolanguage. How much more pleasant my trip would be if, instead, the conversation were taking place in the downstairs vestibule:

"I'm on the BLAAAAAAAARGH! ... Argh ... Ah ... Ah ... Anyway, I'm BLAAAAAAAARGH ... Shit ... Ah ... What I'm trying to say is BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH omigod omigod oh ... Oh ... Listen I'll BLAAAAAAAAAAARGH!" *click*

There now. Feel better?

My only worry with norovirus, aside from erupting into karma-induced trouser-soiling agony in the next ten minutes, is this: what happens if it does one of those bloody annoying mutating tricks, meets up with something incredibly unpleasant, then kills us all?

I realise this takes the term 'scaremongering' to a whole new level, and that I'm therefore plagiarising tomorrow morning's Daily Mail, but all you biologists out there - is it feasible?

With bird flu we're always hearing about strain this, leaping-species that, and how we're one mutation from the end of humankind at the feathery hand of bird.

What's to stop the inconvenient, messy but ultimately rather benign and cuddly norovirus going tag team with H5N1 and wreaking havoc?

Go on, laugh. But in five years' time, when we're all on our knees and not simply through sheer force of bowel, my dying breath will be, "I told you so". And it'll be on the phone, loudly, in an environment where other people are trying to pass (in several senses) peacefully.

You will be delighted to know that day one of the Great Bread Abstention (or GBA, if you will, since that is how it feels) has gone rather well.

Despite my initial dream in which I nearly consumed a rogue baguette, I have avoided the temptation to become doughy eyed all day, and celebrated this with a little trip to Sainsbury's on the way home.

Now - do you ever, when you get to the till in a shop, look at your basket and wonder: 'What will the girl on the checkout think?'

Not about me, since that would be more than a tad egocentric and vain (and thus entirely out of character), but about the shopping itself. I sometimes get into a right fluster about the bizarre, motley collection of goods, to the point where I feel compelled to throw a few other things in so that it looks more like a general shopping trip, and less like I've specifically come out for a carrot, a pot of garlic sauce and some cat litter.

On reaching the till tonight, exactly the same sensation. I looked down and in the basket were two bottles of wine (my turn to replenish the stock in the fridge), some Coco Pops (I've had a craving for Coco Pops for ages, and at last this presented a chance to get a box and make tomorrow morning that much more exciting), and some bin liners (all the better for keeping one's humble abode tidy).

You are the lady on the till. The gentleman in the large black coat with the green scarf and the funny hair pops his basket down next to you. You briefly scan the contents, and discover that he intends to buy two bottles of wine, some Coco Pops and bin liners.

What on earth is he going to do with them?

See, my overriding fear is that she's going to conjure up something a bit like this:

1. Man takes bottles of wine home and consumes them both, alone, simultaneously.

2. With two bottles of wine safely downed, man chugs entire box of Coco Pops in one go, eschewing advice that they taste better with warm milk. (Bollocks to that, by the way. Heresy.)

3. Man waits a number of minutes for mixture to take effect, then vomits profusely into wisely acquired bin bag.

So by the time the nice lady, in a heavy Polish accent, has asked me if I'm having a good day, I'm reduced to the appearance of a tramp reliant on a kindly cartoon monkey and cheap Australian plonk to get me through my miserable existence.

Still, at least I'm getting by without bread.

For 2008 (Matthew), I'm going to... live without bread.

I have known for a long time that if I didn't eat bread, my daily meal choices would suddenly get a lot more complicated. It's so easy to go and grab a sandwich, or a wrap if you're feeling daring, that bread becomes a ubiquitous part of the diet. Scarcely a day goes by without bread in some shape or form.

But at the same time, I know that removing bread from the options will probably make me eat a much healthier diet. I'll have to think about what I eat and put in something bordering on aforethought - perhaps preparing food at home to take to work, or relying on fruit during the day then eating a heartier meal at home.

Plus there will be no more lying around on days off and sticking a pizza in the oven to tide me over. Go on, make a salad, Williams. Impress yourself.

"But," I hear you say, "a pizza base is dough, which is not strictly bread."

You're probably right, but if I start allowing myself doughy loopholes, who knows where this will end. What about toast, for example? If toast gets the nod, all I have to do is stick my purchase under a sandwich toaster for a couple of minutes and I'm in the clear. It'd be too easy.

The really tricky part is when we get to breadcrumbed food. Now most breadcrumbed food is not by definition over healthy in the first place, but I may find it difficult to navigate my way through social gatherings when I insist to the organiser that they must not only keep me off the bread, but also forget that chicken kiev and dispense with any vol-au-vents that look like they might have seen dough.

For the time being, the list looks like this:

NO bread on its own, sandwiches or wraps, toast, croutons, or any products with uncooked 'obvious' bread in.

Allowed: Breaded or battered products where reasonably unavoidable.

Tomorrow, my first day of 2008 in work, is the big test. No more sneaky bacon and egg McMuffin on the way in. No chicken sandwich for lunch. No pizza for dinner. Crumbs!

Edit: So it's Wednesday morning and already, the bread ban is having a psychological effect. When my alarm clock went off, it woke me from the middle of a dream where I was back in Oxford taking a break from studying.

I went to get some food and ended up outside an M&S, where I discovered to my horror that I was about to eat a sandwich. On dispensing with the offending item I went into the shop and found some prawns wrapped in lettuce (naturally), then ate them. Without paying for them. I then spent ten minutes trying not to look shifty before deciding to pay using the empty wrapper and a bit of sheepish mumbling. Thank goodness I woke up just before reaching the counter...

I promised / threatened to Ollie that I'd post a picture of the Dodo. Or, as Ollie would rather call her, Dido the Dodo. The Dodo was the product of: i) one of those gifts that only your father can buy you... in the hope that picking up a Dodo-making-kit in the gift shop of the Science Museum (or equivalent) and giving it to his 23 yr old daughter will be a valid excuse for him to spend time making the Dodo; and ii) the aforementioned activity that can only take place with a stomach full of bird on Christmas Day as father and daughter bond (not that we need to bond) over balsa wood. I took control of the instructions (!) and handing the relevant pieces to my father in the correct order. He actually made the majority of the model. It looks easier than it was - especially after a couple of drinks... No wonder the Dodo is dead.

I'd forgotten that I used to post so much about Daisy, the Kennedy family cat. Now 3 years old and clearly no longer a kitten, Daisy reigns supreme in the household. If there was a feline equivalent of the human body mass index, she'd certainly be bouncing around the border between the "overweight" / "obese" categories. Weight-loss inducing exercise clearly far from her mind, all this moggy has done today is collapse, in spectacular fashion, in front of the fire:

It's the beginning of 2008, and that means it's time for my traditional look back at everything this weblog did in 2007, in numbers format.

First up, here is the big number for 2007 - the total number of posts for the year. In previous years, this figure has been...

• 2002: 61 posts
• 2003: 68 posts
• 2004: 365 posts
• 2005: 800 posts
• 2006: 816 posts

As you can see, there's been an upward trend ever since Dayorama started. We launched in August 2002, spent much of 2003 in a sort of blogging hibernation, and launched ourselves into the fray with renewed vigour in April 2004, posting every single day for more than a year and a half.

2007 will go down as the year that things became a little more reserved in the Dayorama camp, because we cruised to a calm and considered 348 posts in the year just gone.

That's fewer than the 2004 figure, even taking into account one spectacular (and still unexplained) day when Amy posted no fewer than 15 consecutive updates. But we'd like to think the quality has maybe upped itself a little in the absence of quantity.

Speaking of the legendary 'Day of 15', here is how things look on an individual basis:

Looking at the right-hand edge of this chart tells its own story.

A slight tailing off from myself (green) and Amy (purple) has been halted with a little kick up the backside in December.

But OJ (light blue) and David (gold) have, it is fair to say, flatlined in 2007.

OJ managed just one post this year, and though David reached 43, his last was in July and just three came after April.

At the other end of the scale Amy recorded 109 posts in 2007, and I put together a total of 193 entries for the year.

We're all down on previous years - I somehow produced a whopping 526 posts in 2006, a figure which suggests I wasn't being kept busy enough elsewhere.

Amy has dropped 81 posts on 2006, OJ reached a creditable 50 that year (though just five of those came after leaving Oxford!) and David matched him with a half-century between joining in September and the start of 2007.

This next chart shows the breakdown by author per month - the early period showing a final flicker of life from OJ and the steady demise of David's appearances on the blog.

Hmm, you see I tried to post this from my mobile and thus enter into a new era of posting for 2008, but I failed and ended up only posting a title with no text... ooops. This possibly means I also risked breaking my promise to Ollie i.e. to not screw-up the site anymore...

Anyway, what I wanted to say was that it's rather ironic that we (as a population) all begin the new year feeling exactly how we don't wish the year to continue. E.g. with a headache. Here we all are, making resolution after resolution to eat healthily, drink less, exercise more, and we actually begin the year on a back foot. I suppose this is part of the point - one last act, so to speak. But it would make more sense to do this on the day before, so that in 2008 you actually woke up feeling sprightly, rather than rather rough. Incidentally, my resolution is to be happy.