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… in which an ex-Cosmo centrefold, with a penchant for his pick-up truck, was elected to the US senate. Then again, his opponent couldn’t spell the State’s name (Massachusetts), so given the choice between the  ill-equipped and the illiterate, who would you choose?

…in which the British government sent £6.1m in aid to Haiti, while agreeing that the CEO of RBS stands to make £10m. Better to be on the bottom-line than a fault-line.

…in which Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant at Claridge’s lost its Michelin star. Fortunately,  he retained the one in f*ck.

…in which Sir Fred Goodwin was hired by architects RMJM to advise on international expansion. Right – and Jeremy Clarkson is joining Friends of the Earth to advise on carbon reduction.

…in which Geoff ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ Hoon and ‘I’m Alright Jack’ Straw played pass the parcel at the Chilcot Inquiry. When the music stops and it ends up with Blair (as it will) he’ll say that it’s ticking, clear the room, and have the bomb squad take it away. In 45 minutes.

…in which Mariah Carey said that she considers herself black. Of all the disadvantaged groups in America, why didn’t she choose mute?

Popularity: 35% [?]

Let’s start with the brief life of Amelia Maggs. Born 1885, she is the daughter of Ephriam Maggs – a plater – and his second wife, Sarah.

In the 1891 census, Amelia is listed as living at home in Southampton, the youngest of eleven children. We know very little about her circumstances, but can assume it is a life of poverty. At least she’s with siblings and parents; a decade later, it’s a very different picture.

The 1901 census lists her as an inmate at the Stoneham Union Workhouse. She is 16 years old and a domestic servant. We know that she marries three years later, and having survived the Great War, she dies on 22 February 1919 – aged 34 – a victim of the Great Flu Epidemic.

And we know one more fact about her; on 28 November 1918, she gave birth to a daughter. Gwendoline.

*

As we sit, well-clothed, well-fed and with loved ones both here and at home, it’s easy to forget the severity of the world into which Gwen / Mum / Nana / Great Grandma was born. It was not the most auspicious of starts. She was a link to a very different world.

For me, as an outsider to the gene pool now gathered in this room, it was learning about Amelia Maggs that set everything in context, and helped me truly value so many of Gwen’s qualities:

Her pragmatism. Her directness. Her belief that everything should be just so. Her generosity. And her appreciation of all the blessings that eventually came her way.

For, despite the difficulties of her early life, the second half was filled with happiness which she really savoured:

- Her love and friendship from Jan, her granddaughter – one of the most constant figures in her life;

- At 72, finding late love with John Day, her husband for the next 14 years;

- Reuniting and reconciling with sons Peter (living virtually around the corner) and Chris (with a life on the other side of the world), and seeing that they had found love, stability and companionship with their wives, Christine and Mary, and had thriving families of their own;

- Her good fortune at the care, comfort and shelter provided by her loving daughter Sue and Trevor here in Cornwall;

- And – what she considered her greatest good fortune – getting to know her six great grandchildren.

*

Of course, all of this is a two-way street – for every blessing she counted, so ought we for having known her. Over the past 10 days, you will have had opportunity to reflect, as you will continue to do over the coming weeks and months.

Here are some of the memories she has bequeathed me – for even the smallest actions can cause profound ripples across the pond of time.

*

Thanks to Gwen, I am a vegetarian.

More years ago than I care to remember, I was invited to lunch by my new girlfriend, Janice. We were teenage sweethearts, and desperately trying to make a good impression. I was introduced to Nana, who was busy in the kitchen, preparing the traditional Sunday roast.

Now, you need to know one piece of information about me to make this story work. At the time, my appetite for vegetables ran from potatoes to peas, via carrots. That was it. A limited basket indeed.

We sat to eat, and Nana started to serve. Chicken (that‘s OK), roast potatoes (check) , peas (check), carrots (check), swede (oh dear). The mashed orange turnip. I ate the rest of the meal with gusto, as teenage boys are wont to do, but left the swede to one side. At which point Gwen took deep offence, and adopting her best Lady Bracknell voice, said

“I hope you’re not going to waste that. Come on, eat up young man.”

I forced myself to comply, gagging on every mouthful. Meanwhile Jan prayed for the ground to open up and swallow her too.

Yet without that moment, my diet would be very different today, and life wouldn’t be quite as interesting.

For that alone, I owe Gwen a considerable thanks.

*

Of course, food wasn’t the only platform from which Gwen could launch a major embarrassment offensive. Stealing from the National Trust and Municipal Councils was also a regular habit. As families tend to do, Sue and Jan created a friendly-sounding euphemism for this petty larceny: Wombling.

Picture the scene; an afternoon spent at a country house or park and gardens; then back to the car to go home. But where’s Nana? Back through said garden, looking high and low, to eventually find her “Wombling” amongst the bushes, taking cuttings for future propagation.

So, as we leave today, keep an eye on Jan. If she gets too near any flowers, and starts to open her handbag, please restrain her. We don’t want a scene.

*

It’s not just outdoor pursuits that Gwen has left me. Thanks to her, I am also a puzzleholic.

When Jan and I used to visit her in Shirley, there was very little for me to say or do. Frankly, it wasn’t easy to get a word in edgeways. So, like the patient in a waiting room, I looked for something to read. And in the absence of What Car or Digital Photography, I found myself flicking through The People’s Friend. Not perhaps a publication aim at 20-something males, but at least  it was reading material.

And there I learned the valuable lesson that you can find gold in the most unexpected places – because I discovered Gwen’s almost-finished crossword.

“Nana – I think I have 9 across. Do you want to know the answer?”

Thereafter, every visit to Gwen included a crossword completion test for me, and I got the bug. Most mornings now Jan and I compete to get the answers on The Guardian Quick Crossword.

Gwen would be proud: Jan usually wins.

*

So thank you Gwen, for the impact you had on me. While you may never have directly interfered – that wasn’t your style – your influence has been wide and long-lasting.

And it’s rather fitting that someone who spent their working life as a cook should leave behind such a rich recipe for a happy life:

· count your blessings

· eat good food

· do a crossword everyday

· and never, ever miss an opportunity to go Wombling.

* * *

CODA: I was due to give this at Gwen’s funeral, scheduled for 10:30 this morning, but the elements (and Cornish hills) conspired against us: when the hearse can’t get to the Chapel of Rest, you know you have a problem.

With her two sons in situ but with tight travel plans (the one from Australia happened to be in the UK for a wedding), the Minister conducted an improvised commemoration in my in-laws’ home, when Gwen had lived for the past 5 years.

It was one of the most intimate, meaningful services it has ever been my privilege to be part of. And three siblings – who had spent most of their adult lives not knowing the others even existed – shared a moment that, in some way, makes them more complete people.

How about that for a legacy?

Popularity: 67% [?]

I was a threat to National Security yesterday: I took a photo in a public place.

This time I managed to avoid detection, slipping the pocket camera back into my bag before the SWAT team swooped into action. Others haven’t been so fortunate, as The Independent reported on Thursday:

November BBC photographer Jeff Overs stopped and searched while he takes sunset photographs of St Paul’s Cathedral.

November Andrew White, 33, is stopped after taking photographs of Christmas lights on his way to work in Brighton. He is asked to give his name and address.

August Police order trainspotter Stephen White to delete images of train carriages taken during a holiday in Wales. CCTV near an oil refinery monitored him taking the pictures and alerted local police. Mr White refused.

July Alex Turner, an amateur photographer, arrested under anti-terrorism laws for taking pictures of two officers as they question him for photographing a fish and chip shop in Kent. Later released without charge.

April Two Austrian tourists told to delete pictures of Walthamstow bus station. Unaware that police have no right to enforce deletion of images without a warrant, they comply.

I have been stopped twice; once outside a  shopping mall (where the CCTV boys had ‘caught’ me and sent an enforcer, even though I was standing on a public highway) and once along the Embankment. In one case, I was trying to make art, in the other,  wanting to celebrate my culture. Fortunately, unlike Mr Overs, I wasn’t trying to earn my living.

As Henry Porter in his Guardian blog today so eloquently puts it, this is an outrageous infringement of a civil liberty, and  – whether you’re a happy-snapper or a committed shutterbug – an issue that should concern everyone.

Popularity: 73% [?]

An astonishing piece of video collage created by Marco Brambilla. It’s teeming with much imagery you’ll recognise and even more that you won’t:

May not have ‘a message’, but as a calling card for the artist’s capability, it’s both powerful and memorable.

Popularity: 62% [?]

This may have escaped your attention, but November was National Novel Writing Month – NaNoWriMo.

It’s an online initiative run out of the US, to encourage would-be writers (aka slackers who talk a good story) to finally, finally, finally shut up about it and put words on paper.

The goal is straightforward : 50,000 words in 30 days. The route equally simple : 1,667 words a day.

After years of procrastinating at a world-class level, I bit the bullet on 1 November, got up an hour earlier than usual, and wrote my first slab of text. And that’s all it was, a slab. As Truman Capote said of Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ scroll: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

This morning, 29 days later without missing a day, I reached the finishing line. 50,482 words of typing. Bad typing.

Oh, there are a couple of moderately interesting characters; there’s a sort of plot; there’s the possibility of a resolution; there are some good jokes; there’s some musings on life and the world; and none of it is in any way related to what I had in mind when I set out.

And I don’t care. Like the runner who comes 8,234th in the London Marathon, all that matters is completing the race. I showed up, every day.

There have been some days when it has flowed like golden syrup; there have been a lot more when it’s been an utter, unforgiving slog. While I haven’t re-read any of it, I know that there are one or two really good paragraphs (they’ll be the first to go – ‘Murder your darlings’ advised Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch) and a lot of repetition. When the blue pencil comes out, I’ll be lucky if 20% stays.

And I don’t care. Every morning I have been down the ideas mine and cut out some raw material, blocks of words that now need shaping and honing and polishing. Somewhere in there are the notions of a book. And if not, then a LOT of blog postings (you’ll be delighted to hear).

So why go public with this; why bask in my own wonderfulness?

Because, as any regular reader knows, the standard form of ‘the novel’ is over 100,000 words. Even if everything created in the past month were the outpourings of a Pulitzer Prize winner, I’d only halfway there. In truth, I’m less than a tenth of the actual distance.

I don’t want to lose momentum. I shall be up tomorrow morning, doing my 1,667 words, and when I reach 100,000, it’ll be time for a break and a review: Is there anything worth keeping, or do I start afresh?

Douglas Adams was so skilled at missing deadlines that his agent once locked him in a room for three days to get a contracted book finished. Despite best of intentions, some of us need that sort of external threat to keep us on the straight and narrow.

You – dear blog reader – are now the other half of an emotional contract with me. I shall report back on 31 December.

I hope it’s not with my tail between my legs.

Popularity: 64% [?]

There is nothing more competitive than the Yummy Mummy.

This is where the one-upmanship of life starts. Watch a group of young mothers gather with their offspring in a coffee shop for that all-important display of early mother accoutrement – the most flagrant display of needless expense since Jonathan Ross’s contract.

Did you know that even the term ‘pushchair’ is SO yesterday? Pushchairs are for the  lower classes – those for whom sense and income might just about balance – and can easily be spotted by the small, round tubing of their construction.

Small round tubing; the  Ford Fiesta of baby perambulation. If you can pass the tubing of your pram through a  1cm hole, not only are you cheap, but you’re also putting your baby’s life at risk.

Not from physical harm. Just dying from embarrassment.

The pushchair has been consigned to the rubbish dump of recent history, along with leg warmers, shell suits and TV-AM.

A mummy can’t be yummy unless she has a buggy.

There are some very specific design ratios that must be applied to the yummy mummy and her buggy.:

1) Waist-to-Tubing ratio.  The thinner you are, the fatter the brushed aluminium of your buggy. The ultimate Yummy (Posh Spice) was actually the same circumference as the tubing of  the Beckham buggy.

2) Wheel-to-Income ratio. The fewer wheels you have, the greater your display in wealth. Less is more. ‘Three Wheels on My Wagon’ may have been a joke song when I was a lad, but today a tripod arrangement says more about you than dungarees from Oskosh B’Gosh ever can.

3) Spokes-to-Social Awareness ratio. “Spokes are SO tacky;  they just aren’t aerodynamically viable any longer. Vance and I are trading off the carbon footprint on our Range Rovers by cutting down of the turbulence  that Troy’s buggy causes.”

4) Colours-to-Conscience ratio. Baby blue, OUT. Baby pink, OUT.  “We don’t want Kumkwat growing up with preconceived notions of his/her gender. So we’ve gone for taupe with a aubergine lining. Very eco, you know?”

It is now 10:15 in the morning and the usual suspects have gathered. All except Sally-Ann-Pixibelle. Surely she can’t be about the trump Phoebe-Pipette, who last week brought Savannah in what looked like a golf trolley? There is a commotion at the door. Heads swivel as Sally-Ann-Pixibelle arrives on the latest must have: the TrioBike

And I take my hat off to the genius designer who saw a gap in the market and married the two biggest drivers of Yummy Mummydom ; status-conscious baby paraphernalia and the obsession with keeping in shape.

So here is Sally-Ann-Pixibelle on her buggy-exerciser hybrid.

And despite the proportions of the door and the shop’s fire regulations, she is determined to fit it in – along with baby Cinnamon – for all to see.

And in a small corner of Berkshire, there is a faint green glow of envy.

Popularity: 81% [?]

A review of a play that everyone should read.

Want to understand how the financial crisis happened, how it unwound and the implications for us all? David Hare provides all the answers in “The Power of Yes” (National Theatre, London) – 100 minutes of light shone into some very dark corners of the City and government.

It starts with The Author (played by Anthony Calf, representing not just Hare, but Everyman) coming down stage and addressing the audience directly:

This isn’t a play. It’s a story. It doesn’t pretend to be a play. It pretends only to be a story.

And that ’s exactly what Hare has constructed. This is a three dimensional, many-voiced lecture. It is a revue, with lots of acts coming on to entertain us with the their jokes and their tricks and their cons, hosted my a man in a corduroy jacket.

In his research, Hare interviewed many of the major players: George Soros , Howard Davies (First Chair of the Financial Services Authority), Ronald Cohen (a doyen of private equity ), Adair Turner (Current Chair of the FSA), John Moulton (another leading private equity investor), Paul Mason (BBC Newsnight), along with lawyers, FT journalists, MPs and sundry others involved in the story.

He has woven together a linear narrative that is beautifully paced, and parses out the information in a model of clarity and precision.

BALANCE SHEET

For a man known for his left leanings, Hare seems fair in his treatment of all; no one – whatever their hue – evades his pointing finger:

Davies: Just before he became Prime Minister, Brown delivered a completely irresponsible budget, cutting tax, stoking the boom, all so that he could plan a an election that never happened

and

Cohen: You know that Greenspan made that famous speech in 1996, condemning irrational exuberance? But what’s far more interesting is the speech he didn”t make… In 2004 he didn’t make a speech condemning a gargantuan appetite for risk.

Mind you, one can’t help think that a few of the players used this as an opportunity to settle a few personal scores.

It is also full of astonishing statistics and facts:

Soros: At the time of its collapse, the Royal Bank of Scotland had assets of 1,900 billion  pounds. The gross national product of your country was only 1,500 billion pounds. In other words, RBS was bigger than the entire annual output of the British economy

and

Hammond: The whole Labour government was predicated on the prosperity of the City. Not only was it 9%  of the economy but it generated 27% of the take tax… Of course (Brown) wasn’t going to regulated it!

The ‘play’ is presented in 9 sections (not really acts) and covers all the usual suspects – subprimes, the FSA, Northern Rock, bankers’ bonuses. There are a couple of pantomime villains, but mostly Hare sets the personalities and their decisions in the context and conventional wisdom of the time.

CREDIT TO ALL CONCERNED

If you do have the chance to go to the National , you’ll see a stripped-down production without a set which lets  the characters tell the story. The performances are universally good, although none of the actors really get much chance to develop their roles, because none has an arc or a set of dramatic choices to make.

They are witnesses on behalf of the prosecution, presenting information to make a case.

If the FSA was serious about financial education, The Power of Yes would be a  roadshow run in every town hall and community centre across the land.  But it doesn’t have any money, so that’s unlikely to happen.

Instead, a copy of the script – 76 pages that can be read in a single sitting – should be mandatory reading for every economics and business student, every bank employee and shareholder, every mortgage applicant and broker, every credit card owner and card issuer…

Have I missed anyone?

Popularity: 71% [?]

A rather youthful Willie Bain has just won Glasgow North East for Labour.

Is there more to his Party roots than officials are letting on?

I think we should be told.

Popularity: 75% [?]

An Open Letter to John Derkach, Managing Director of Costa Coffee (also sent to the company’s keep-the-customer-at-bay Contact Us page)

Dear Mr Derkach

I’m a fan of your product and a fan of your stores – so I was very disappointed this morning.

11:00 and no call from your staff in my local branch to observe the nation’s two minutes silence.

They are not to blame: low paid young women from Eastern Europe (indeed, low paid young people from the UK) probably don’t get the significance of the moment.

So I think the blame sits with a failure of leadership.

Your business has been quick enough off the mark distributing Xmas muzak (I think Stevie Wonder singing ‘Silver Bells’ in October is especially festive, don’t you?) but seems to have failed to provide the  instruction manual for this key date and time in our culture.

And if you did, you failed to communicate its importance.

To give the local staff credit,  they were happy to oblige when I requested the music to be turned off – although did look at me as though I had asked to wash my hair in a sinkful of latte –  and  so your customers did have the opportunity to pay their respects.

But as evidence of Costa’s brand values, I think you were found wanting today.

Yours sincerely

Paul

Popularity: 100% [?]

Morrissey walked off-stage in Liverpool last night.

Not due to a recurrence of his respiratory problems. This time the wailing one called a halt to proceedings midway through his second song because he was hit by a plastic bottle of beer, thrown from the crowd.

Too damn right. A ‘fan’ quoted in the attached story says that the singer should be used to that sort of thing now – but I’m struggling to think of any other line of work where being the target of beverage-based projectiles is part of the job spec.

Full marks to the moaning Mancunian for taking a stand on this. If fellow spectators are too intimidated (or apathetic) to prevent this sort of boorishness, then it falls to the object of their worship to set the standard.

What goes through the mind of anyone at a concert to think that throwing a bottle of beer is clever, a mark of adoration, or amusing?

Correspondingly, the individual concerned is probably stupid enough to be bragging about his (her?) achievements. With luck, it’ll lead to naming and shaming on the Morrissey fan site.

Morrissey joins a list of performers who have earned some notoriety – and my life-long admiration -  by hitting back (excuse the pun) at the selfish stupidity of audience members.

All hail Richard Griffiths – forever Uncle Monty in Withnail – who once ordered a woman from the theatre when her mobile phone rang. Not just once; it rang three times.

It is one of the great irritants of modern public life that, even in the most formal of circumstances, there will always be someone who will let their phone ring. And it’s always the person with the loudest, most irritating ring.

Just how stupid do you have to be to ignore the direct notice at the start of every performance, in every venue, everywhere on the planet, to turn off your phone?

More to the point, why should anyone have to be reminded at all?

“I’m going to sit in a room with 700 hundred other people, who have all paid a considerable sum of money to listen to a play – but I’m expecting an important call, so I’ll leave it on. With luck, at the moment that Juliet realises Romeo is dead, it’ll play Wipeout by The Safaris.”

Time to take a leaf out of the French script: they jam mobile signals in theatres and other public places. At present, jamming technology is illegal in the UK (under the Wireless Telegraphy Act 2006). The alternative, detailed by the extremely helpful Ofcom website is ‘by education and publicity in informing users to keep mobile phones switched off when requested to do so.’

Evidence that members of Ofcom don’t get out much. When they do, it’s to Morrissey concerts.

Popularity: 79% [?]