Did my first (and who knows – maybe my last) piece of broadcast on Thursday as part of a BBC Five Live discussion on the future of newspapers. The editor was ruminating on redundancies at the Manchester Evening News just round the corner from the Five Live studio, and I put in my two ‘penneth. It’s listen again-able until this Thursday at 10PM…

New York Magazine looks at the uproar in the publishing industry caused by Google’s plans to scan loads of copyrighted material from books without asking.

Pat Schroeder, head of the Association of American Publishers is reported as saying: “Alan Murray wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal that called Google’s business model a new kind of feudalism: The peasants produce the content; Google makes the profits.

“Do we really want one corporation controlling all the content in the world?”

We may not have much choice. Can I assume Ms Schroeder uses Yahoo! search instead? Isn’t it like those people that protest about mobile phone masts but all use mobile phones?

Incidentally, it was Schroeder that reputedly made the Regan/Teflon quip: “He’s like Teflon – nothing sticks to him”.

Snack food this week:

Tinned sweetcorn
Tinned haricot vert
Tinned petit pois
Tinned baby carrots
Raw baby sweetcorn
Raw babies (only joking)
Pears poached in red wine with creme fraiche and flakes of Green & Black’s Espresso (really quite delicious if I do say so myself)
Walnuts
Prawn cocktail crisps
Cheese & onion crisps
Apple
Belgian biscuit assortment (left over from Christmas)
Fruit & Nut
Toasted crumpets with butter and Marmite

This is like ‘You are what you eat’, only the wind changes leaving Gillian Mackeith’s face stuck with one eyebrow quizzically raised and completely unable to comment. I’m not letting her anywhere near my stools.

FOUND: £50m in used bank notes. Belong to anyone?

My new iTunes playlist is called Misery. Call a spade a spade, I say.

Opens with the glorious Burning Benches by Morning Runner. Landslide by Fleetwood Mac and The Ballad of Richie Lee by the painfully under-rated Spiritualized, etc etc. Ironically Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now is blissfull happiness in sonic form, but it’s in there.

It’s snowing. I’m braindead. Umbilical computer.

So this is it. One year on. I’ve somehow ended up on the same train line again, Ravilious views and bleeping doors. But I’m on my own this time and going the other way.
I’m still thinking how dare the sun shines, just like this day a year ago. Has nothing moved on?

More discussion today with the Online News Association. This is a US-based trade group but orientated more towards individual web journalists, and with plans to do more in the UK. So we’ve started by meeting up to consume alcohol which is usually a good place to start.

The last booze gathering was at Clerkenwell House in, erm, Clerkenwell. Write up on the ,a href=”http://web.archive.org/web/20060303030910/http://journalist.org/news/archives/000428.php”>ONA site. And more tomorrow night – this time a nostalgic trip down Fleet Street. So not much chance of running into any journalists…

Jim Carrey loses job and goes downhill. Rather like his career evidently, because this is tripe.

I learnt a valuable lesson though; never compromise. It just means no-one getting what they want. The boys wanted to see Munich, and the girls wanted to see ,a href=”http://web.archive.org/web/20060303030910/http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/memoirsofageisha/”>Memoirs of a Geisha. This is the resulting debacle.

2/5

I have a confession. I absolutely cannot eat a pack of mixed sweets without organising them. Dairy Milk – no. But M&Ms, and (more challengingly) Revels – yes! Is that wrong?

Obsessive preoccupation:

This time yesterday.
This time last month.
This time last year.
This time last year:
Last meal we had – thought I might lean my head against your shoulder and say you were lovely, but held back.
Last walk we had – you disappeared around the cliff, never content, always curious, explaining colour theory to me, said you’d had a strange pain in your foot for days.
Last lift to the station – the same see you soons, but the last, ordinary moments now the last ones.
Last phone call – missed it, probably online as usual, didn’t hear my phone ring.

Always an anniversary of something. Those words you left us with about your mother: “I don’t know how we are supposed to come to terms with the stunning finality of death”.

But you had warning though, didn’t you Dad?

Listening to: Hunter by Björk, from Family Tree

Natan Sharansky on Radio 4 this evening. He said that when he was in solitary confinement in prison he played chess in his head. The good thing is that you always win.

Amanda Platell on how men don’t like successful women.

She said that after her divorce she just couldn’t find the right man – anyone interested was either too old or too young. So she conducted an experiment on holiday, ditching the power suits, six-figure salary and mantle of ‘assistant editor on a national newspaper’. She became Mandy from the library and had no trouble pulling at all.

That is so depressing. Maybe she just wasn’t looking in the right places. All the good ones are gay, married or dead anyway. And I personally wouldn’t trust anyone you meet on holiday, especially if they like you even after learning that your name is Mandy.