A very worthy cause

Just spotted on Press Gazette's website that they are teaming up with the NUJ to launch an appeal to help journalists in Zimbabwe.

This is a very worthy cause to support and you don't need to be a journalist to help. If you have any unwanted mobile phones, laptops or cameras, or even stuff like Dictaphones, they can be donated. What's become obsolete here in the UK can make a huge difference in a country where journalists have a shortage of such things - without kit, they struggle to get the news out.

Please spread the word and help if you can.

Media Diet Week 38

Press: despite my best intentions, it was late Monday by the time I was back in the habit of reading the news again. And Tuesday by the time I was reading my usual daily round of papers online. There's been only one story all week worth paying attention to - the global financial crisis. I've been affected directly by this - I edit for overseas investment banks and my daily workload unexpectedly dried up when trading was suspended on the exchanges in some countries as their listed shares went into freefall. But I digress. What was most interesting was how the financial news seemed to be being driven by one man - Robert Peston, the BBC's business editor. His updates on the HBOS takeover by Lloyds were extraordinary by any standard, with hourly updates of the hottest gen ages before anyone else knew what was going on. It was fascinating and addictive to watch and no other news outlet was so on the ball.

Blogs: undoubtedly, the event of the week for me was tagging onto the back end of the Manchester Evening News' hosting of the Manchester Bloggers meeting. An incomplete round-up of the blog reports has already been posted. I was chuffed to see my pull quote, it certainly put a smile on my face. I still want a MEN coffee mug, though. It's always interesting to meet other bloggers - mostly they are faceless entities who draw you in with their prose and meeting them in the flesh can be a bit of a shock, but you get to see other sides of them than just the one that comes across in their posts. Web 2.0 and social networking are not to be sniffed at but human contact is important too.

TV/radio: another thin week for me given my busyness. I missed most of my regular TV fare and was reduced to catching up with EastEnders on iPlayer, godsend that it is as I refuse to subscribe to SkyPlus. I love the easy availability of online content, especially when it's live - I had an enjoyable afternoon today half-listening to and half-watching the Andy Murray Davis Cup rubber on the internet as I was hacking away with work stuff.

Books: sadly for Creditor, I'm still enjoying Piers Morgan's latest, Don't You Know Who I Am?, which is keeping me entertained on trains right now. Interestingly, at 40 or so pages in, he mentions the decision to buy Press Gazette with Matthew Freud (I wonder, Creditor, are you berating Freud too, or those who blog about him? Just curious...) but haven't got as far as the bit where he fesses up about how it all went to so wrong. No doubt I'll be wiser by the time I get back from my weekend away, which will include long hours passed on trains with books. Only then shall I pass judgement, if I need to pass it at all. The Blair Years is on hold for now. Must be because it's conference season, which is as good a reason as any to ignore politics.

Media Diet Week 35

Press: looks like I'll be banging on about Press Gazette yet again, as the new monthly edition plopped onto my mat yesterday. Despite me cancelling my subscription recently, it turns out that PG has a 30 days' notice policy. So, here it is. What's it like? It's now an A4 64-pager with a snazzy new design which looks good at first glance. And yet, flicking through the pages it seemed lacking in substance despite the plethora of lengthy features. The freelance section, one of the main reasons for buying the old weekly, has shrunk and what's left is, frankly, not interesting - 5 short interviews with a bunch of freelances on coping with challenges and an advice column on making it in Australia. Fat lot of use that'll be to most PG readers, who work in the UK. I'm glad I've seen PG in its new format. It's convinced me I was right to cancel my sub and I'll be using the website to trawl for interesting snippets.

Blogs: we are clearly still in the thick of the holiday season. The blogs I follow are irritatingly quiet apart from one or two. I hope things are going to perk up soon. I shall reserve tonight's comment for a quick rant about my RSS reader, Bloglines, which failed me earlier today. One minute I was reading new feeds, the next my entire list of subscriptions had vanished off the menu. I deleted cookies, logged out and logged in again, to no avail. The help section didn't cover the issue at all. I did discover I could still export my feed list, though, so I did and imported it into Google Reader as a back-up. Then I emailed Bloglines to ask how to fix it. Worryingly, after hitting Send the page told me I'd get a reply after the next two business days. Suddenly, I was looking at a minimum 4 days with no RSS reader and as I dip in several times a day that's no use to me at all. I panicked even more when I discovered that Google Reader had also gone blank on me - I mean totally blank. I was looking at an empty page devoid of anything. But then one of my Firefox plugins updated itself and I rebooted my browser - result! Normality restored. Sometimes a PC just needs the equivalent of a spot of percussive maintenance (I also ran the Dyson over my keyboard this afternoon to suck up the cat hair and then vacced my USB ports while I was at it. I definitely need to get a cleaner).

TV/radio: The Archers, so good over the last few weeks, has gone off the boil again. There was Will trying to murder his brother for dating his ex-wife and it was all rather thrilling. Then the scripties packed him off to Gloucester for six months to work on someone else's shoot. Feeble. Now we''re back to Tony and Brian arguing over Tom's pigs, like anyone gives a toss, and Alan and Usha's horribly right-on wedding (Usha is the only Hindu in the village and thus the focus of all matters PC). Over on the telly, I watched a rather good profile of crime-fic writer Val McDermid, whose books I've been buying since her first was published in the mid-80s. Then I made the mistake of not watching Maestro so I could see the first episode of Mutual Friends, which turned out to be a lot of froth. Despite a good cast and a rather funny premise about the death of one of their crowd, Mutual Friends was a triumph of style over substance. It seemed quite good as I watched, then after I found I could barely remember any of it. Very unsatisfying. Programme of the week was undoubtedly Who Do You Think You Are?, with chat-show host Jerry Springer who learned how both his grandmothers were murdered in the Holocaust. It was almost unbearable to watch as Springer stood alone at the railway memorial in Lodz, Poland, where one of the two matriarchs was shipped out to be gassed in a van at Chelmno. The camera drew back from him as he stood in contemplation but his mic was still on and his sobs were clearly audible. It was brave and compelling TV, and I cried too. And there were more tears at the end when as Springer finished exploring the ghetto of Theresienstadt near Prague, where his other grandma died, he was introduced to a long-lost cousin from Israel who was also a descendant of this grandmother. It was a fabulous ending to a heart-breaking programme and I was overjoyed that Springer had some positive closure.

Books: Over the last week, I've read only slightly more of The Blair Years. It's been a week of late nights where I've flopped into bed and gone straight to sleep. So, I'm still reading the introduction. Only about 800 pages to go...

Media Diet Week 34

Press: not much to comment on this week. The postie delivered my mail on Thursday and the "flumph" as it landed on the mat was eerily quieter than previously. Probably because I've cancelled my subscription to Press Gazette. I'm still in two minds about having taken that drastic step as I miss it. However, the revamp of PG's website is looking promising, although it's disappointing to see the loss of the Knowledge section. I picked up a copy of Women's Fitness to read on the train the other day, drawn by the coverlines. Inside, though, it had no distinguishing features from any other fitness mags aimed at women. Just the same old, same old serving of diet, exercise and beauty. Even the exercise pages were woefully thin at just a page or two with not enough detail - the "drop a stone in 4 weeks" feature listed lots of exercises but no information on how to do them. Very helpful. And an article on swapping jogging for fell-walking will be useless for most readers, who probably don't live within an hour's drive of their nearest hills...

Blogs: well, the blog du jour of the past week was apparently this one, after my post on sub-editors. First, Greenslade picked it up, then it attracted attention here, here, here, here and here. Not to mention the comments on my original post by Jeff Jarvis, among others. Looks like I touched a nerve, then... I'm pleased - this is an important debate to have. I can see the validity of the argument that news blogging is about the here and now, the immediacy of getting the news out there, rather than worrying about the typos. But there's a deeper argument to consider, about the need to maintain literacy standards across the board, not for journalists so much as readers. Somehow, I don't think this topic is going to go away. On a different note, I'm really enjoying the emergence of the new TNTJ blog ring run by young journalists who are blogging on the future of journalism. It's got off to a great start and I'm looking forward to following these young hacks.

TV/radio: quite apart from the saturation coverage of a certain sporting event, the TV schedules have been really dull this week. Must be late summer, that limbo between some series ending and the start of the autumn season proper. I watched Boris Johnson discover his roots on Who Do You Think You Are? despite not being a Boris fan. It was unexpectedly interesting, despite Johnson's regular yelps of "Cripes!" and "Wowee!" I suspect the next episode, with Jerry Springer, will be a lot better, though, not least because Johnson has little charisma on camera.

Books: it's been a busy week, with little time for bedtime reading. I have managed to start Alistair's Campbell's The Blair Years, however, although I've only read the foreword to the paperback edition and the introduction so far. I suspect this is going to take me several weeks to get through, while I read other books alongside. But so far, so good (the book, not Blair).

Media Diet Week 33

Press: no contest this week, it's been Press Gazette all the way. I was infuriated by the paper's lackadaisical attitude to its subscribers, so I took my fury to the editor and his blog. I was not alone. Irritated hacks were busy venting on Twitter and Journobiz, where it also transpired that Thursday's letter from PG to subscribers, in which the editor-in-chief Tony Loynes went in for the hard sell to persuade people to stick with the new, enfeebled PG, came in several versions. Some subscribers were being offered free entry to PG's freelance database (which was launched only in June and was being offered back then for £62.50). Others were offered a free copy of the Hollis media directory for 2009. Curiouser and curiouser. It then turned out that the Hollis directory has always been offered to subscribers, although never to me, and that a number of journalists never received it at all despite chasing for it. I made the difficult decision last night to cancel my subscription - I'd like to support the industry paper, but not at that price and not as a monthly. And especially not when it's now such poor value. The subscriptions office showed no surprise when I asked for a refund - clearly, many others have too (I know personally of quite a few who have cancelled). So farewell PG, I wish you well but seriously doubt your chances of survival now.

Blogs: I won't bore you all further with Dominic Ponsford's blog (see above), which occupied so much of my time in the last few days. Say hello instead to Joe's Blog, in which our eponymous blogger has been posting some interesting stuff on technology, particularly in a social context. It's still notably August and holiday season - the blogosphere is pretty quiet right now.

TV/radio: I am still glued to House of Saddam, which has turned out to be absolutely gripping stuff, surely one of the best dramas in ages on the TV. I was also delighted to discover that BBC4 had decided to repeat Sleepers, a comedy drama first shown in 1991 in 6 30-minute episodes. The premise was simple - two Soviet agents were secreted into the UK in the 1960s and told to integrate until called into duty, then forgotten about. Until 25 years later, with hilarious consequences as the KGB, MI5 and the CIA race all over the UK hunting them down. Why it has never been reshown earlier is a mystery - Sleepers has not dated at all and there are fine performances from a very much younger and slimmer Warren Clarke and a seemingly ageless Nigel Havers as the two hapless agents. My other TV fix this week was Andrew Marr's Britain From Above, which was beautiful and fascinating, and demonstrated just how thinly our infrastructure is stretched and how close to falling into chaos it is.

Books: I decided I'm not quite ready for Alistair Campbell's diaries so this week I opted for something a lot lighter - Jessica Callan's Wicked Whispers, her account of life as a 3AM girl on the Daily Mirror's gossip column. A very entertaining read, with a lot of insight into how this particular type of journalism works behind the scenes.

PG Tits

The appalling manner in which Press Gazette continues to treat its subscribers continues apace.

I won't bore you here with the details. I went one better and took my fury direct to the editor, Dominic Ponsford, who blogged about the change from a weekly to a monthly. I have at least 2 comments on there already - more may follow.

I hope they have the guts to respond and play fair with subscribers. So far, they've failed to do either.

Unim-Press-ed Gazette

If there's one thing I really hate, it's crap customer service. And I'm not the only one when it comes to Press Gazette keeping its subscribers in the dark. The weekly hack rag has a lot of very pissed off readers right now.

As I've already blogged, PG has been in trouble a while. It took the national media to break the news that the UK's only weekly industry magazine was to go monthly. This was a week ago. PG responded last Friday by publishing a statement of sorts on its website, but there was no mention in the print edition (which arrived belatedly on Saturday because of technical glitches). The comments underneath indicate how annoyed subscribers are at being kept in the dark.

Now it's Monday and there have been developments. Once again, Media Guardian broke the news that PG will publish its final weekly edition this Thursday. Over on Press Gazette's own website, there is no mention of this latest twist. Did they learn nothing from the comments on their website that readers would like to be told by PG itself what the current state of play is, instead of hearing it elsewhere?

Ex-editor Ian Reeves mentioned in his Guardian piece the thorny issue of subscription refunds. Last week, I was firmly in the camp of "I've paid for my year's sub, I'll give the new format a chance". Today, like many others, I feel infuriated that PG's owners lack the courtesy to tell us what's happening. I'm so exercised about their contempt for their loyal supporters, I am indeed tempted now to ask for a refund. We have paid up and supported Press Gazette through all its recent ups and downs. We deserve to be told first. I'm struggling to understand why PG can't publish news on its current status on its own website. It's supposed to be a journalism publication for journalists, after all. So why is everyone else but PG keeping its own readers better informed?

Media Diet Week 32

Press: this week's bad news was the announcement is that Press Gazette is to stop being a weekly publication and go monthly instead with a focus on features rather than news. The rumours were already circulating in late July that this might happen, so it's not a surprise. A monthly is not going to be much use to journalists, though, in today's fast-moving media environment. It's only a few weeks since I renewed my annual subscription and I feel a bit short-changed. Editor Martin Stabe was quickly challenged on Twitter by readers and said he would try to find out what the situation for subscribers is... Well into August now and the silly season is upon us again. And (you couldn't make this up, honestly) who should pop up from the past but Joyce McKinney. What perfect timing!

Blogs: seems like everyone is on holiday right now, the blogosphere is so quiet. I'd like to draw your attention, though, to my friend Craig McGinty for his wonderfully thoughtful post on the internet and creativity. There's a lot to consider in what he says and it's certainly a call to action of sorts.

TV/radio: it's begun. Saturation coverage of the Olympics. I suspect I'll be listening to Radio 4 a lot more than usual over the coming fortnight in an attempt to get away from it (and isn't The Archers brilliant right now, with Will Grundy missing after attempting to murder his brother because they both love the annoying Emma). Fortunately, China's massive time difference (7 hours ahead) means the evening TV schedules shouldn't be too disrupted.

Books: I'm still reading Mark Billingham's fabulous Death Message, although I hope to finish it tonight. That'll be followed, I think, by Alistair Campbell's diaries, unless I'm tempted by something else in my to-read stack.

Media Diet Week 31

Press: it was with something approaching alarm that I read Press Gazette's report on the magazine-sharing site, Mygazines.com (and I'm not linking to it). It's another route to infringing copyright of writers and I sincerely hope that it will, indeed, be taken off the internet asap. Bad enough that we have to google ourselves regularly to see who is stealing our work and not paying us for it, then serve DMCA notices, but I imagine copy theft on Mygazines.com won't show up so readily in the search engines. Incidentally, Charles Arthur of the Guardian regularly takes a pop at copyright infringers on his blog. It's top stuff.

Blogs: Daryl Wilcox, who runs the very useful ResponseSource resource for hacks has written a fantastic post on the transparency of his company's database. This was in response to Sally at Getting Ink, who noted that Cision are trawling again. I was among many (probably thousands) who received the email from Cision requesting my details. I've yet to respond as I fear receiving yet another deluge of unwanted PR spam. I get quite enough already. And I don't like being on databases where I have no control over the integrity of my entry. So I guess for now I'll be giving Cision a wide berth. The public discussion is really important, though, so thumbs up to Sally and Daryl for initiating it.

TV: programme of the week was, for me at least, House of Saddam. Critics were comparing it to The Sopranos in both the previews and reviews. I've never watched the Sopranos so can't compare, but this was fantastic telly - intelligent, well-scripted drama that was absolutely gripping, with quality acting and a sense of real insight (allowing for the fact that obviously artistic licence has been taken, although the Radio Times for this week carried a feature that noted the amount of serious background research that went into it). I was disappointed that Kelly won Missing Top Model as I'd really expected Sophie to triumph, but the judges never seemed sure whether they wanted a model who happened to have a disability or a disabled role model who could model. Whatever, it's been an intriguing look at notions of beauty and disability and raised a lot of important issues.

Books: it's been a slow week, so I'm still on Mark Billingham's Death Message. I had an Amazon splurge last weekend, though, so I have a nice, shiny stack of new books to keep me entertained over the summer, so I'll be reviewing them here as usual. When I finish Death Message, anyway...

Press Gazette in trouble?

Roy Greenslade of the Guardian reported this morning that the Press Gazette may go monthly and possibly be taken over. This is worrying news. PG is an essential weekly read for journalists, providing news on the state of our industry, gossip, masses of useful features for freelances and more. What possible value could a monthly edition have for us? The media is a fast-moving industry and monthly just doesn't cut it, especially when Media Guardian is updated daily.

So why support Press Gazette? True, it's not particularly cheap at a cover price of £3 (although an annual subscription works out at about a third off). But it's more focused than Media Guardian, which covers a wider range of media issues than just journalism. That narrow focus means PG covers a lot more issues related to journalism than any other media publication.

The signs that it's in trouble have been there a while. It changed hands around a year ago. Colleagues report problems with very late payment for commissioned features and the fact that a private equity company may take over the publisher indicates major financial problems.

If it goes monthly, I wonder what will happen to my subscription. It's not very long since I paid up for a year's worth of weekly editions (48 in total) starting from July. I don't want a monthly - it's not much use unless there are radical changes to the content so that there are more features (and they are less likely to date). Will subscribers be offered a partial refund? Or will we all be cancelling in droves?

Whatever, I hope PG will have the decency to tell their loyal readers asap what is going on...

Media Diet week 29

Ten shocking weeks since I last did this. Ok, ok, I have the excuse of a house move and a mountain of work, but...

Press: here we go. Not much has changed on my reading front. My daily newspaper round is still the Guardian, the Sun and BBC News Online. I hate the Sun's online revamp - you can tell it's been tweaked yet it doesn't look radically different. In fact, the left-hand menu makes it even harder to locate sections now and the whole site remains frustratingly slow when it comes to loading pages. Methinks they wasted a lot of money for nowt. Elsewhere, I have a pile of unread Press Gazettes building up. I simply haven't had time. Will try to blitz them this weekend.

Blogs: I'm enjoying Neil Baker's return to form after a long silence. He always has interesting things to say (see his post on why he never reads his work after it's been published, for example. I've also discovered the blog of a colleague who, like me, both writes and edits for a living. Check out Ms_Well.Words for her take on the news.

TV/radio: so, no more Doctor Who, the Nancys are finished, the Apprentice has been picked and the evenings are looking decidely quiet. If it wasn't for EastEnders, I'd be down the pub 7 nights a week. I toyed with watching Bonekickers, but managed to miss both the first two episodes. On the other hand, I stumbled into Britain's Missing Top Model and am really enjoying it. Usually, I find BBC3 irritating and dumbed down but for once it is screening an intelligent insight into the reality of living with a disability and the prejudices the disabled face on a daily basis. We could do with more telly like this. (I want Sophie to win, btw.)

Books: as with the press, there's not been a lot of spare reading time for books. Suffice to say I've just finished a crime novel so bad I contemplated lining the cat tray with the pages. I vaguely recall reading a review of In Cold Daylight somewhere, that insisted it was unputdownable. Au contraire. It was clichéd, badly copy-edited (I was endlessly distracted by shit punctuation) and the plot was based on conjecture in the protagonist's head. Thank gawd I have the latest Mark Billingham to get stuck into...

Media diet week 8

Press: my copy of Press Gazette arrived on time yesterday, thank gawd. Last week's issue still hadn't arrived by Monday so I had to phone PG to request another and of course they were out of stock. I've been promised a back issue though, so I can't wait to catch up on out-of-date news. Not yet had time to do more than glance at this week's, though. My favourite story this week was run in the Guardian, a hilarious and true story of a Turkmen TV station and a humble cockroach. Obviously, it's not funny for the poor 30 hacks and editors and other staff who were sacked as a result of the starring début of an insect. But really, you couldn't make it up...

Blogs: the main blog story this week has been the sorry tale of Max Gogarty's travel blog in the Guardian, which I refrained from commenting on at the time as the rest of the world was busy doing so. (Just google Max Gogarty for the whole story if you're desperate to know what I'm wittering on about.) Suffice to say that Charles Arthur, tech editor at the Guardian, has pretty much summed up my views on the matter. I'd only add to his remark about the Guardian's "duty of care" in that Gogarty should have been warned before publication that blog comments can be brutal. Announcing a duty of care after the event is lax, to say the least. It was still a crap piece of writing, though, and one that has damaged the Guardian's strong brand.

TV/radio: call me easily amused but I love Hotel Babylon, so I was glued to the screen when series 3 kicked off on Tuesday. I know it's escapist nonsense, but at the end of a hard day, sinking onto the sofa with a glass of wine and an episode of trash tv can sometimes be just the ticket. And Torchwood's still on, too - this week's episode had a shock ending that left me open-mouthed. I'll say no more, in deference to fans who have yet to see it.

Books: I ordered a huge stack of stuff from Amazon last week and it's all arrived. I now have 3 crime novels to devour (including one I bought on a whim as it's set in Cheshire), a book that used to be a blog (more on this when I read it, and yes I still live in hope that some kind publisher out there will offer me a deal for this wretched blog, not that it'll enable me to retire) and John Barrowman's autobiography. And while we're on the subject, is it me or are we seeing the start of the Barrowman backlash in the tabloids? The Sun's run two stories in two days - one on him kicking shit into a theatre audience and one on him exposing himself. Shurely shome mishtake? I'm currently racing through Ray Robinson's Electricity, which is brilliant. The anti-heroine has epilepsy, but it's incidental to the plot and while it's not "my" epilepsy, it's a damn accurate portrayal of life when your brain short-circuits...

Media diet week 7

Press: no Press Gazette this week, grrr! It's supposed to plop through my letterbox on Thursday. Occasionally it arrives on a Friday instead. So I was not pleased when the postie didn't bring it this morning (although I did get another, tiny, win on my premium bonds so I don't totally hate Royal Mail). PG had better arrive tomorrow. Or else. I'll catch up on the internet otherwise. But it won't be the same. I picked up a copy of Dare last Sunday while in Superdrug - it's their freebie mag. Have only had a brief flick through but it looks ok. Not sure I'd read it regularly though, it seems aimed at people at least 20 years younger than me. Surely not all Superdrug's customers are fashion victim 20-somethings?

Blogs: Sally at Getting Ink launched Getting Ink Requests, which I mentioned earlier in the week. But I'm happy to plug it again because it deserves it. And has already spawned an imitator over at Journalism.co.uk. Dave Lee, the nation's most famous student blogger, also blogged about Sally's experiment and caused a small furore.

TV/radio: I still miss Pandora. I'm struggling with Last.FM. Inputting favourite artists was so easy on Pandora but seems really difficult on Last.FM, which is neither intuitive nor user-friendly for the over 25s. And it keeps banging on about scrobbling, which sounds extremely painful but is apparently something to do with selecting music based on what you play on your PC. I hate the assumption that you have an MP3 player of some sort. I don't and am unlikely to ever get one, so scrobbling is lost on me. Sanity was restored with TV - EastEnders has been reasonably good this week, Torchwood is at last really developing the characters (especially Ianto), Mistresses had a rubbish ending but satisfied my need for some trash telly and, er, that's it. I don't watch a lot.

Books: I've read very little this week. I'm about 30 pages into Playing Away by Adele Parks, a ghastly chick-lit novel that came as a free cover mount on January's Eve and has failed to engage me so far. I'd throw it in the bin but I was brought up to revere books, so I'll give it to the charity shop instead. John Barrowman was on Front Row on Radio 4 this week, talking about his autobiography - normally, I'm too tight to shell out for hardbacks and am happy to wait for the paperback, but after listening to him talk about the writing of Anything Goes, I decided I couldn't wait. I ordered it from Amazon and it arrives Monday. So that's next week's book sorted.

Media diet week 3

Press: the Press Gazette was back in publication this Thursday after the Xmas break. What a relief. I'd really missed it. My favourite section is "The Knowledge" - always crammed with masses of great features on freelancing and thus a good source of tips and advice. I had a mini-skive from work on Wednesday morning to do a few errands, so I popped into WH Smith to buy some new magazines, purely for research as I plan to crack some new markets if I can. I came out with copies of The Oldie, Psychologies and Tastes of Britain, none of which I've had time to read yet, which means some of the weekend will be spent lying on the sofa - coffee in one hand, mags in the other. I already have a pitch in mind for the foodie mag.

Blogs: Bloglines is turning out to be the new Facebook for me. It's only been a fortnight since I tripped over this site but it's rapidly turning into my no. 1 procrastination toy. I just can't resist adding new blogs to it to read. I've discovered the blog of novelist Anne Brooke, which is witty, slightly bitchy in an ever-so-nice sort of way and covers a huge range of minutiae. Fascinating stuff. Another novelist whose blog I follow is Martin Millar. This cult writer loves football, lying on the sofa and drinking tea, in between playing computer games and watching Buffy reruns. I normally read hack blogs so reading about the lives of those who write completely different stuff is a refreshing eye opener. It's good to get out of the rarefied world of journalism now and again.

TV/radio: I watched The One and Only on Saturday. I have a weird fascination for the BBC's talent shows. And watching people pretend to be Elton John, Cher and (a truly rubbish) Rod Stewart was about as weird as it gets. At least Torchwood was back on Wednesday and lived up to my expectations.

Books: would you believe I am STILL ploughing through Attention All Shipping? My excuse is that bedtime is the only time I get to relax with a book but the past two weeks I've been so tired that most nights I've only managed half a dozen pages before I had to switch the light off. The end is in sight though. Only about 30 pages to go...