It's all about the British news industry in the 21st century, and paints a sad and sometimes sickening picture of the press, which once could have been called it a public service, but has now become an industry in a 19th century sense.

Anybody without direct experience of the business will think the book far-fetched, reactionary and even a little bit hysterical, but some of what author Nick Davies exposes I have had personal experience of, and it is such a perfect representation of that reality that I can well believe the rest is equally accurate.

The book is basically about the way that newspapers that once stood for truth and justice have slowly been turned into ruthless commercial operations - and 'ruthless' is a fairly mild way of describing some of the practices that parts of the media get up to.

It starts by explaining how lack of investment and the pursuit of profits has decimated the local and regional press; then it explains how shameless and usually unskilled PR companies and the garbage they turn out have replaced real newsgatherers; and how propaganda at the highest levels has led to a world where misinformation is the norm. It also exposes the Press Complaints Commission as not only toothless but spineless, and the libel laws as totally inadequate in the face of the rich and powerful corporations that now rule the media.

If I have one criticism of an otherwise excellent, well-written and thoroughly researched book, it is that it dwells too much on political propaganda and distortion, which any (and probably all) politicians and their agents resort to, in all countries, and can hardly be related directly to the British press in isolation. But there is an eye-opener on every single page. Read it and you will instantly understand how the media works and why it churns out such drivel.

You have to read 356 pages of gloomy truth before Davies makes much of a mention of the Daily Mail, but then he lays into it in what becomes the finale to the whole sick opera. Just in case people still believe them, the book dispels some of the more straightforward myths that the Daily Mail has invented - literally invented - over the years, such as the ones about Hackney Council saying the word 'manholes' was sexist (it didn't) and the nursery class in Oxfordshire which banned Ba Ba Black Sheep because they thought it was racist (it didn't). These are only minor indiscretions compared with the systematic distortion of the truth in more complex and serious matters which the book deals with in page after page.

But it was another small example of the Mail's standpoint that I found the most chilling, which is contained in a single paragraph, and more or less says everything about what the Mail is about:

I spoke to a man who had worked for the Daily Mail for some years as a senior reporter. He said: "They phoned me early one morning and told me to drive about three hundred miles to cover a murder. It was a woman and her two children who'd been killed. I got an hour and a half into the journey, and the news desk called me on my mobile and said, "Come back." I said, "Why's that?" They said, "They're black."

The saddest thing for somebody who has worked in this industry is that the overwhelming majority of journalists I've worked with are basically decent people, and while words such as 'nigger' are, apparently, still banded around inside the Daily Mail offices every day (two centuries after the rest of the world realised how offensive that was), most of the honest, hard-working people I've come across in journalism are genuinely sickened by that sort of thing. If anybody had ever used the word 'nigger' just once in the newspaper offfices I've worked in, the rest of the staff would have refused to work with them. I expect the Mail reviles us for our liberalism humanity.

It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the Mail works to a party political agenda, but the book explains (for those who hadn't realised) that it is much more sinister than that. The paper seemingly never reports the truth, but exclusively deals in something much more powerful: it tells its readers exactly what they want to hear, regardless of whether that overlaps with thinking inside the Tory party (although, in practice, it often does).

Almost all of these readers are lower middle class or people who aspire to it, and they like to think that their lifestyle is under threat from such bogeymen as black people, poor people, immigrants, homosexuals, social workers, 'do-gooders' and possibly any other minority group worth hating. It's not just about picking on these people; it's about the way the readers are fed the idea that any disappointments or failures that they have experienced in their lives can be blamed on somebody else, even though they are actually among the lucky and most privileged people on the planet. It's the perfect drug for the never-satisfied, and the Mail sells them it like dealers sell to heroin junkies. If you asked them, they'd probably tell you, correctly, that they are simply serving their customers with exactly the product they want. This peddling of hate is what the Mail does, rather than toeing the Tory Party line. It invents scapegoats for problems that don't exist.

I don't want to sound too much like Basil Fawlty here, but this really isn't a million miles away from how Nazi Germany started.

And if that wasn't frightening enough, in December 2009, the Mail was one of only two national papers to report an increase in its year-on-year circulation (the other being the Daily Star, which is hardly a newspaper at all). The hatred it spreads - and hatred is the only word that fits - is bought by two million people a day. Here's the bad news on the Press Gazette website.

Ironically, the Mail adopts exactly the opposite economic policy to most owners of local papers, who have been bleeding the whole industry for the last 20 or 30 years, so that it is now on the point of total collapse. The Mail pays its (so-called) reporters over the odds, pays (in other words, bribes) people to lie by giving them vast sums of money, and when anybody tries to take it to court it will, if necessary, settle out of court with the tiniest flexing of its economic muscle.

Contrast the plight of the Mail with the Reading Evening Post, which I did some work for, three or four years ago. At the time it had been voted Regional Newspaper of the Year for the second year running, and I was amazed at the meticulous effort that the editor and the staff put into producing a really good paper, which included so few mistakes that I never actually saw one in print.

A year ago, it was still increasing its circulation, which, in an industry that is about as bouyant as the one that makes films for cameras, was little short of miraculous. Yet, last March, this five-day-a-week paper was slashed to a two-day-a-week paper as its owners, the Guardian Media Group, needed to cut costs.

To quote directly from HoldTheFrontPage.co.uk:

Mark Dodson, chief executive of GMG Regional Media, said: "The role of MEN Media and S&B Media is to produce great journalism for our readers and users. If we want to continue to be able to do this, we need to find a new, sustainable, lower-cost business model to support it. The economic viability of local and regional newspapers is under very real and imminent threat."

The first thing to say about this is the Reading Evening Post was producing "great journalism" - and the second thing to say is to translate what is being said in the rest of that quote,which is this: "We still think we can squeeze yet more profits out of it, and we are going to do it by turning something that the people of Reading liked into a lesser one that makes more money."

There are two tiny glimmers of hope on the horizon. If we are lucky, the internet will prove too big a body for the cancer of the news corporations to overcome. And if we are luckier still, the hidden agenda of those who want to commercialise the BBC will be seen for what it is.

Without the BBC, the sharks will be free to charge us to read news on the internet, and when that day comes - it's surely not a question of if - then the sharks will be free to say and do whatever they want, and we will have finally arrived in the information-distortion nightmare that is Nineteen Eighty-Four.

We were doing our weekly shop and had become separated, so I waited for Julie by a huge stack of toilet rolls on special offer (either they had grossly over-ordered or there's terrible trouble afoot that we haven't been told about yet).

As the aisle where the standard toilet rolls are kept is between this mountain and one of the main doors, it was inevitable that people had already chosen their toilet rolls before coming upon this special offer. So a few people decided they wanted these toilet rolls and wished they hadn't already selected others. What would you do in this situation?

I know what I would do because, just before Christmas, I trekked half way across the shop (which was the second biggest supermarket in Britain when it opened) to put a small jar of salsa back in its proper place, having been tempted by another of better value. But as I watched on Saturday, a man switched toilet rolls and dumped the original one where he was, apparently without a single thought of taking it back to its rightful place. I looked around and realised at least a dozen people had done the same.

I only had about two minutes to digest the social and anthropological significance of this before I saw something much more striking, in the milk carton aisle.

I just happened to notice a woman take a carton of skimmed milk off a shelf, at more or less waist level. Then she dropped it and it fell on the floor, but it wasn't damaged. She looked at the carton on the floor, sort of shrugged, and then took another off the shelf and walked off, leaving the stricken carton on the floor. She was a bit overweight, but definitely not disabled in any way, so bending down and picking it up should have presented no physical problem for her - apart from the fact that she was obviously too damned lazy to do it. There could be no other explanation.

OK, so everybody's lazy sometimes, although probably never to that extent. But what really annoys me about this is that the people who have to come along and pick things up for people who are too lazy to do it for themselves are just ordinary people like us, and probably get paid very little to do it. I just hate it when people create unnecessary work for other (always poorly paid) people, just through their own laziness and selfishness. No doubt the same woman expects people to pick up her litter, too.

I can safely say that our kids have never dropped a single piece of litter in their lives, because we always instilled in them the philosophy that other people are not there just to be at their beck and call, and it's up to them to take responsibility for their own actions, however trivial. It was the easiest thing in the world to teach them, and they both understood the concept, completely, by the time they were four.

I'm not one of them.

Like moon landings and the Angel of the North, the Olympics are one of those beautiful things that are impossible to quantify in monetary terms, because the kind of benefits that come from something that inspires and unites your fellow human beings simply cannot be measured. They're worth every penny.

So, a year or more ago, when I heard they needed 70,000 volunteers to help make the London Games and the Paralympics a success, I went online to put my name down. Hold on a minute, they said, and explained that they're not starting the recruitment process until this year. But you could register an interest, which means getting emails, from time to time, to keep you up to date.

I've just received the latest email, which revealed something that should be headline news on every media outlet in the country, but isn't - because not many people are interested in reading good news, and even less in reporting it. I haven't read today's Daily Mail, for instance, but my guess is there's not a word in there about 280,000 people already registering.

That's already four times what they need - and they haven't even begun the process properly yet. We are talking about than a quarter of a million people who are prepared to travel to London and probably try to find accommodation at their own expense - just for the privilege of working and not getting paid for it.

My email also explained what is required from volunteers - going to a selection day and interview, attending at least three training sessions and then making a commitment to do at least 10 days' worth of volunteering. In other words, it's a big commitment.

Of course, when they get to hear about what's involved, some of the 280,000 will have second thoughts. But not many, I bet. The more I hear about it, the more determined than ever I am to be there.

910 days to go.

It was all about the Taj Mahal. Any programme about probably the world's most beautiful building is going to be worth watching, but I tuned in because the Taj is the subject of one of our most cherished family heirlooms.

Now, I am hopelessly attached to so many inanimate objects that I really should have some kind of therapy, but our model of the Taj Mahal is very high on up the lists of things I would grab if the house was on fire.

It's probably not worth much - maybe a tenner, if that. In fact, the glass dome it sits in is probably worth more, but I've always had an affection for it - even before we owned it.

It used to belong to Julie's great aunt Em, and when she died (in about 1984) it was passed to her nephew, Julie's father. And when he died in 2006, it was the first thing we asked the rest of the family if we could have. He always knew how much I liked it, anyway.

Funnily enough, we used to own one that was very similar, except it didn't have a dome. We spotted it in a so-called antiques market about 20 years ago. But within a couple of years, Julie dropped it while getting it down to clean, and it broke into a thousand pieces. Our current one is made from the same substance, which I think is probably gypsum, and it looks like it was probably mass produced for some cheap tourist trade.

The one we have now is not exactly in perfect condition. Not only does one of the corners have a large crack, which has been roughly glued, but each corner has been nicked off so that it fits inside the dome, which proves that the dome wasn't made for it (or vice versa). We don't care.

The programme was a bit disappointing. It was one of those hour-long documentaries that could easily have fitted in half an hour, and it made no attempt to investigate or explain what it is about the building that makes it so attractive. Is it the proportions? Is it the way it reflects the light? What?

Probably the most disapointing thing about it is it revealed that people have been banned from visiting the Taj because of security fears, although this ban seems to have been lifted since the programme was made.

It goes without saying that I'd love to go to India and see it in person one day, but for now the model is a more than adequate replacement.

The irony here is that, in the band I play in, me and Dave the guitarist have a running joke about us being forced to take up playing live music in a band because we don't have the vast experience and special training necessary to be DJs. Otherwise, we'd be running a disco. I mean, it must be really difficult to press a button and make a CD play...

But Chris Evans does much more than that. As my brother rightly observed, he is so enthusiastic that he presents the show like it's the first time he's ever done it. His choice of music is excellent too - all chosen because they are either interesting or because they are designed to get you out of bed with a smile.

What's really good about him, though, is he is so quick, so there is instant interaction with newsreaders, traffic news presenters and anybody who phones in, including kids. This is where his skill really shines through, because I have interviewed kids - not for radio but for newspapers, which is easier - and I know it's almost impossible to get anything out of them, but he manages it every time and never puts them down. Nor anybody else. He's just so sincere.

What clinched it for me was what he said a few months ago, when I was listening to his tea-time show. A woman wrote in and said she'd been a big fan for years, but her husband had always thought he was a bit of a plonker, until recently.

"Well," said Chris, "he's right. I did used to be a bit of a plonker." And he meant it. For somebody so successful, he is genuinely down-to-earth and modest, and I'm looking forward to reading his autobiography soon, which Julie has nearly finished and already recommending.

So if Chris Evans stood for President, I'd vote for him. Indeed, there are only two other people who I would consider voting for instead. One is Stephen Fry and the other is Rolf Harris.

As soon as earthquakes occur, you can guarantee that all the media channels will be running stories about "sniffer dogs" - usually British ones, who have been trained to help rescue people from collapsed buildings. And just as sure as the sun will come up tomorrow morning, it won't be long before you get at least one (and probably a handful) of stories about people being pulled from the rubble after days of being "buried alive" under a building.

Of course, this is good news, but it's only a very tiny fraction of good news compared with all the bad earthquake news, so hardly qualifies as news at all, especially as it happens after every single earthquake. It's just trivialising a grave situation. What's worse, though, is these stories are moved to the top of the bulletin when, really, the true awfulness of the disaster and what the rest of the world is doing (or not doing) to aid the situation is far more important and much more interesting, and should therefore be given priority.

In a similar way, millionaire film stars and billionaire record producers organising charity appeals and benefit records - partly to bolster their own egos and public images - is also a gross trivialisation. The amounts they raise are a fraction of what's needed, but give the impression that buying a record somehow solves something. It doesn't. If anything, it blocks further aid by giving a false impression to some people that a solution has been reached. Worse still, it provides an excuse for us to think that we've done our bit.

The worst exploitation of the pulled-from-the-rubble scenario I've ever heard, though, was on a BBC programme I was watching, this morning, called The Big Questions.

Nicky Campbell hosts this "series of questions on moral, ethical and religious debates" - and pretty interesting it can be, too. Although it can be a vehicle for people with some pretty selfish religious views, who do not deserve a platform, it is usually balanced, and was today, because there were several humanists and atheists invited on to debate the questions, which included the provocative "Does the earthquake in Haiti earthquake prove God doesn't exist?"

It seemed that many of the religious people there were united by the idea that the earthquake was some kind of test of faith - although it wasn't quite clear what kind of test the babies who died in the quake had undergone or whether up to 200,000 had been slaughtered just so God could test the faith of less expendable people like us in rich countries.

But the whole debate was blown out of the water for me when a lady from a scary-sounding organisation calling itself the Evangelical Alliance said there was evidence of "the voices of the believers" in Haiti - because one lady had thanked God that she was pulled from the rubble alive. From this, apparently, we can deduce that "God is with them" and "the faith of the people of Haiti will be strengthened".

As terrible as the earthquake was, Haiti has an even bigger problem: poverty. It is one of the poorest countries in the world, and this is at least partly due to the violent reign of 'Papa Doc' Duvalier from 1957 to 1971, which caused a 'brain drain' and a withdrawal of foreign (especially American) investment, from which it has never recovered.

And as one of the guests on The Big Question pointed out (it was Terry Christian, of all people), very few states recognised Papa Doc's government (and they even succeeded in providing common ground between neighbours Cuba and the USA, who both cut off diplomatic relations). But one state did recognise him. It was the Vatican.

There were crackers, 'secret Santa' presents and what could prove to be the only other roast dinner I will eat this year, apart from the one I am anticipating on December 25.

I am not a fan of traditional Sunday roasts on account of my genes give me literally zero appetite for all those horrendous cooked vegetables, such as carrots, cauliflower, sprouts, parsnips and - evil of evils - swede. My plate was saved by nice roasted half onions - the only other cooked vegetable I can stomach, apart from peas and spuds.

This one suddenly arrived up in the loft here, where I have my office, looking slightly groggy and presumably facing imminent death, as soon after I opened the window to let her out.

How did I know it was a 'her'?

It was only after Googling - to find out why there was one around, so early in the year - that I discovered she must have been a queen. I might have suspected this because she was slightly larger than you might expect a wasp to be, and it turns out that all worker wasps die during the winter, and only the queen hibernates. Somewhere up here there must be a small, golf ball-sized hibernation cell, made out of pulped paper (wasps can't produce wax like bees).

They like to hibernate in lofts, apparently, although insulation and central heating often wake them early, whereas they are supposed to come round in the spring. So, even though there's snow on the ground and even though it can be pretty cold up here after my fan heater blew a fuse, she got all her timing wrong and has no hope of making it to March or April to set up her new colony.

Most people will say this is a good thing, but for some reason I have a soft spot for wasps - partly because I haven't been stung by one for about 40 years, and also because, as I understand it, they do more good than harm, being excellent at eating unwanted bugs in the garden. When you see them up close, their heads also look rat-shaped - another animal I like.

My main reason for liking wasps, though, is because they seem such a beautiful example of evolution in action.

That's because I am feeling a bit like Ralph Melish at the moment, on account of nothing happened (Ralph Melish was the subject of a Monty Python sketch, which you can hear on YouTube, brilliantly delivered by Michael Palin).

Of course, it's not quite true that nothing has happened, just nothing out of the ordinary to warrant a single entry. The snow disappeared in a flash; me and Julie had a nice day out, shopping and doing not a lot in Reading, and came home with a new bath sheet and towel; and our band got to play at the Kingsdown Inn (last night), which was easily our best ever performance, and everybody there seemed surprisingly impressed.

I proved, once again, one of the annoying truths about drumming, which is: you can practise for hours, but it doesn't matter how well or how badly you play because nobody watching knows the difference, unless they see you drop your sticks. I was on a hat-trick, having dropped a stick in each of our last two gigs, so was very relieved not to drop one this time.

I chickened out of playing the proper drum part to Go Your Own Way (by Fleetwood Mac) which is difficult because it's unconventional, but sort of redeemed myself by making it up as I went along, which is, in itself, a skill - and still didn't drop a stick.

Another thing to report is we (me, Julie and Holly) did a long (55-minute) walk tonight which should be the first in a series that we are trying to do regularly to try to get fitter. During this I noted an interesting fact about vertical blinds and their relationship to human behaviour that I will share at some stage.

Geek alert: The Simpsons character Hans Moleman was called Ralph Melish when he first appeared in the programme, in honour of the Python sketch.

..and looking even lovelier in late afternoon...

Her latest school assignment was to draw a self portrait while wearing a hat - something that I would have found very difficult at her age. The result, above, is a pretty good effort in its own right, even though she never was satisfied with the eyes.

But the best thing about it is it is actually a really good likeness, which is difficult enough with somebody else's face and surely a hundred times more difficult with your own (although I've never tried).

Hopefully it will make her more confident about her art, because her main failing is she is too conservative, when, of course, the world's greatest artists became great by bending and breaking rules, not conforming to them. It's hard to be bold when you're 15.

I also read it because I have become fascinated by evolution just lately and wanted to put to bed the crazy notion that the eye was somehow 'proof' of the existence of a superior power, on account of something as perfect as that could only be a gift from God.

The book certainly did put that to bed - on two main counts, starting with the fact that there is evidence of the eye having evolved countless times over the course of the world's history, and in countless ways.

And the main conclusion from Simon Ings's often illuminating book is that the human eye - and all the others that God is supposed to have made - are all massively flawed and therefore a very long way from perfection. If anything, it is a primitive poor relation of that vastly superior organ, the brain. If God made the eye, he must have had an off-day, and evolution is still working on it.

What Ings does best is point out that the eye only provides very limited information and leaves the brain to fill in the giant gaps, which it does with incredible dexterity, massively and rapidly reprocessing to create an impression of what the eye would have seen if was anywhere near as efficient at capturing light as, say, a digital camera.

Only a tiny fraction of the viewpoint can be in focus, and yet the brain creates the illusion of a perfect picture, all the time performing its greatest trick, which is keeping a constant, self-levelling image in front of us which makes perfect sense. And before it does that, of course, it has to turn everything the right way up because the eye can only 'picture' it upside down.

I also learned something about colours, which is a subject that has always interested me, being colourblind. It has always been obvious to me that we all see colours with varying degrees of accuracy - colourblind or not - but The Eye neatly explains how our experience of colour depends as much on the way the brain compares different colours entering the eye as in the incredibly speedy way it recognises colours by analysing tiny fluctuations in the wavelengths of different rays of light.

The downside to the book is that it is at pains to tell the story of research into optics, spending too much time on what turned out to be erroneous theories and not always setting the proved ones far enough aside from these to make conclusions clear.

Then again, there are still plenty of things we don't understand about the eye, and at least I know much more than I used to.

But even I can see that this Van Gogh cake (as seen on Forgetfoo) is undoubtedly the best icing job ever.

After all, since 1966 ithe big question is not whether England will win the World Cup again after all, but what new method they will come up with to ensure they disappoint everybody in the long run. We've had bizarre injuries to crucial players, stars getting themselves sent off at key moments, bad refereeing, comedy defending, Hands of God, and my favourite: putting a Swedish con man in charge of our best team for years, even though he turned out to know almost nothing about football management. Or maybe it'll be that old banker again: getting all the way to the penalty shoot-out and putting the ball in row Z of the stand.

Swindon Town are also looking far too much like a team who could fulfill their potential for my liking - because experience tells me there's no point in getting too hopeful. They've never been any good at penalty shoot-outs, either.

Today I followed them to Fulham for the third round of the FA Cup - one of the few truly great football traditions left intact in the money-grabbing, success-at-all-costs capitalist game that it has become (yes, we're looking at you, Manchester City fans).

I must admit that I probably wouldn't have gone today if it wasn't for the fact that it was an excuse to have a day in London with my friend Steve, who is over from Sydney. We had a nice walk around the sights and stopped for bangers and mash in a pub before going to the match. But I'm glad I went, even though Town lost 1-0.

It was nice to be one of 6,000 noisy, good-natured and appreciative Town fans who gave their team a big ovation at the end for working really hard and - best of all - trying to overcome their in-form Premiership opponents by playing good football.

Although we just didn't have the same invention in front of goal that they had, we matched them on the rest of the pitch and had something to cheer when our goalie saved a second half penalty. It was just asking too much for us to snatch an equaliser at the end, which we probably deserved, but 1-0 is a creditable achievement on a ground where Manchester United were recently thrashed 3-0.

We'd planned it well before Christmas and were hoping for snow or at least a heavy frost to put us in the mood, but we got a cold, amazingly clear day instead. So we weren't complaining - and we felt as though we earned our dinner at the White Horse in Winterbourne Bassett.

Silbury Hill is the biggest man-made prehistoric mound in Europe and is reckoned to be 4,750 years old. Or, to put it another way, Christmas is a relatively recent invention in its history.

We walked from Avebury, around the hill and back, and then around half of the stone circle, marvelling at how impressive it still is, even after many visits during my lifetime, and even though it's so close to home.

The draw of Avebury is pretty strong. Drive through the village at any time during the hours of daylight, in any weather and at any time of the year, and you will always see people walking around the stones. And if you stop to watch anybody for long enough, they will also feel drawn to go up to one of the stones and touch it. While people with cameras feel compelled to photograph the stones...

Meanwhile, we are feeling pretty pleased with how bright and colourful our Christmas decorations look this year...

My faith has been renewed - not in Christmas (nobody could never accuse me of being 'Bah, humbug' about that), but in the cinema.

After two very disappointing experiences with the last two films I paid to watch (Slumdog Millionaire and the latest Star Trek movie), I was even beginning to wonder whether I might never pay to see a movie on a big screen ever again.

I absolutely loathe violence-for-its-own-sake films and/or pointless action sequences, and as it seemed that every film now made must consist entirely of one or other or both of these elements, I couldn't imagine why I would want to see another.

I understand this is the formula of the new Sherlock Holmes movie, for instance: a silly plot, endless unbelievable stunts and big 'special effects' - which, in my opinion, have now become so commonplace in movies that they couldn't possibly be considered 'special'. I've read the Sherlock Holmes stories - and they are absolutely crying out NOT to be given that sort of treatment.

My nephew, Rich, highly recommended A Christmas Carol on his blog, and as it's made with computer graphics and was in 3D, we decided to go - only just making it to the start after we realised the final 3D screening before Christmas was half an hour away (Sean decided not to jump out of bed to come too, which turned out to be a big mistake).

There were times during the film when I was so mesmerised by it that I actually felt as though I could understand how it must have felt for people watching the first ever moving images. It is a sometimes breathtaking movie.

The scenes are rendered in incredible detail, but also very imaginatively, so even the fantastical aspects seem as though they are real. For instance, there are two sequences where the viewer is 'flown' over a snowy London landscape. These are so incredibly effective, there's almost too much to see and too much to take in - a bit like you feel when you're parachuting.

And this is before you take into account the impact of the 3D effect, which all works perfectly, all the time. It uses a few of the usual tricks that make the most of 3D - like things sticking out of the picture, into the audience - but it's much cleverer than that.

In many scenes, the viewpoint starts off, say, at ground level, and then rises slowly, until you are looking directly down on everything. Or vice versa. But the best bits are when the viewer gets drawn right inside a room, so you feel as though they've somehow drawn the wall behind you. And whatever room you are in is rendered with stunning backgrounds, details and textures. I came out wondering why every film isn't made in 3D, but I don't believe anybody has ever taken it to such artistic heights before.

OK, so it's technically brilliant, but the clincher is in the general treatment of the plot and the characterisation, which is nearly always true to the book. With so much technology at his disposal and so much creative Disney talent, it would have been easy for the director* to get carried away with the action, but he obviously realised that the action sequences must not be overdone, and that, ultimately, it's the dark and disturbing bits which make or break it - and that's where the true genius of the film lies.

It's a truly wonderful piece of art and entertainment, and I absolutely loved it.

*Robert Zemeckis (director of Forrest Gump and the Back to the Future movies, so I suppose I should have expected to be impressed).

I say 'enjoyed' because I've always loved the novelty that snow brings to everyday life, and especially at Christmas, and I have to say I've been a bit jealous of other places. For some reason that may be due to geography or just bad luck, Swindon doesn't often get its fair share of snow.

I'm too young ever to have known a proper white Christmas, and the moderate fall of snow we had during the night is therefore the closest I've ever come to seeing one. It's a shame that it came exactly four days too early, but it's very welcome and we can still keep our fingers crossed for more on Friday.

This is the biggest consumer victory since CAMRA*, and the fact that it prevents the latest X-Factor winner (whoever he, she or it is) from automatically topping the charts is the best news for music, culture and honest hard work since... since... well, I can't even think what.

I am told they are a heavy metal band, which is far from being the kind of music you'll find on my iPod, but the point is it is produced by people who love it for what it is and not its market value. It's not the type or quality of the music that is important here, but the integrity with which it was conceived, produced and marketed.

And maybe the best thing of all about it is it shows what can happen when right-thinking, imaginative and independent-minded people, empowered by the internet, flex their muscles.

Hopefully this will encourage them (us) to flex them some more.

*I was recently told that CAMRA (the Campaign for Real Ale) now has more members than ever, even though the campaign has been successful for years and they have surely achieved what they set out to achieve. There certainly has never been a better time to be a real ale drinker.

I didn't intend to go back to the County Ground for a very, very long time after that, but when your friend is over from Australia, en route to visiting his parents in Hartlepool for Christmas, and he hasn't had the benefit of seeing any of last season's performances so still likes going to football, you are more or less obliged to go along with him. Not even stepping off the plane from sunny Sydney on to snow and then driving to icy (albeit snowless) Swindon could put off Steve (pictured, looking extremely cold at half-time).

But I'm not complaining. The line-up was almost unrecognisable compared with last season, and the new players showed enough desire, speed and skill to win an entertaining game against a surprisingly up-for-it Brighton, 2-1.

In a funny kind of way, I even began to understand why I bought that blasted season ticket in the first place.

I nearly captured the Town's first goal (a Billy Paynter penalty)...

We'd played at their summer ball, at the same venue, and they must have been impressed because they invited us back, and therefore expecting great things.

It mostly went well - "You've done us proud again," said the organiser - and with several gigs under my belt, I should be thinking that it is all onwards and upwards from now on. But life is never that simple.

Over the last week I have realised what the real challenge is. The problem is adrenalin. People who have been in car crashes will tell you that a major crisis like that causes your perception of the world to go into slow motion because of the adrenalin that starts pumping when your brain senses you need it. This warping of time is great news if you are trying to handle a car that is skidding out of control, but not very good news if the release of adrenalin is irregular and you are trying to keep a constant rhythm.

The absolute fundamental bottom line of drumming is keeping good time, and although I'm not very good at lots of aspects of drumming, I've always kept good time. Actually, I find that easy if I am relaxed, but when you are playing in front of an audience and you know there is a difficult bit coming up or you dropped a stick the last time you played this song, then your sense of time - and therefore timing - is on the verge of going haywire.

Worst of all is the inclination to want to rush difficult things, which is only natural but absolutely disastrous for drummers.

And, by the same token, those little bursts of confidence you feel when things are going well also threaten to throw you off your timing by possibly over-compensating for the waning adrenalin. In other words, a little confidence can be a dangerous thing.

All this means the enjoyment I thought I was experiencing a few weeks ago is on hold while I try to get over the latest challenges of this fluctuating level of confidence.

Tonight we were able to pop into Rock School's end of term gig - albeit briefly - and although we weren't able to see the band Sean has been helping, we did get to see Guitar Stools and Cigarettes, a Swindon band with plenty of talent.

They played three acoustic guitars, did three-part harmonising and all three of them had good, strong voices, even though they are only about 15 or 16 (I think the bass player, who was good too, was only there for tonight). Not only did they sound really good, but obviously also had a really good attitude, wanting to produce something more ambitious, rather than standard rock.

I always hear snatches of my favourite artistes in others - probably wishful thinking - but I was sure I could hear Al Stewart-like strains coming from the guitars at times. Or, at least, it would have been great to hear them play an Al cover. What I had most hoped to hear from acoustic guitars and harmonising was some trace of Fleet Foxes, who have taken this sort of thing to new levels. I didn't hear that, sadly, but Guitar Stools and Cigarettes are highly thought of and look destined for bigger things. If they are, I can dig out this entry and say I saw them before they were famous, and I told you so.

Oliver! is definitely the family's favourite musical, all of us having watched the video of the classic Ron Moody/Jack Wild/Oliver Reed version over and over again, and this is also at least the fourth time we've seen it on stage.

This version at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, formerly starred Rowan Atkinson as Fagin, but now stars Griff Rhys Jones. In fact, tonight's was his first performance.

Very good he was, too. I've always liked Griff Rhys Jones (ever since the brilliant Not the Nine O'Clock News) and he mostly played himself tonight, putting in more humour than Ron Moody, but without reinventing Fagin too much. When it came to the real test - Reviewing the Situation - he was more than up to the task.

The next best thing about the show was the design of the scenery and the slickness of the scene changes, which were impressive and ingenious without being spectacular. The stage at the Theatre Royal isn't very wide but is pretty deep, and the designer had realised it was therefore important to get the vistas right, such as the London landmarks in the distance and the sunset for Fagin to walk into at the end.

I also thought the big numbers, featuring most of the company (Consider Yourself and Who Will Buy?), were well done.

Another little bit of excitement was three press photographers rushing in for the curtain call, because of Griff's first night, and snapping away, just in front of our seat (in the stalls). So the pictures they got (as seen here) were more or less from our vantage point.

There were three slight downers. Nancy (played by Jodie Prenger who was selected via a BBC TV programme that I never watched) was just a little too brash and Cockney (in other words, too mouthy); Bill Sykes (Steven Hartley) was menacing but not as menacing as Oliver Reed in the film (who could be?); and I would have liked to have seen more of Bullseye (Bill Sykes's dog), who only had a couple of very minor walk-ons.

Otherwise it was exactly the kind of thrilling night out that you would expect from a big West End show, which we would certainly make a habit of if we could afford it.