When I said that I had no plans for the weekend, I was in fact lying. As a surprise I took Kate to the Yorkshire dales for two days, which was very nice indeed. We stayed at a B&B in the sentence-defying Hawes, and had a very pleasant time. The only problem with the more ‘country’ towns and villages is that none of the shops open on Sundays. I know everyone needs a day off, and people do tend to be more religious in the countryside…but how much business must they lose? Never mind, we got some Kendal mint cake, which is the important thing

It rained a fair bit, so over the four days we saw Finding Nemo, Intolerable Cruelty and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The latter was based on a graphic novel, which I’m going to have to get to see how it compares.

We turned onto teletext at an unfortunate time over the weekend, to see the headline ‘Prime Minister Rushed To Hospital’. That’s not a headline you want to see! I read that it’s a stress related condition, which isn’t exactly surprising. It would be bad enough if being Prime Minister were just about the job, but coping with every aspect of your life being analysed / criticised / deconstructed can’t be easy. I keep hearing people saying ‘I don’t like Tony Blair’. How, exactly, have they come to this decision? You can disagree with his policies or the way he does things, but how anyone can claim to have any idea of the man behind it all I don’t know. Iain Duncan Smith suffers the same way. At some point politics became personal, and that sucks.

I notice that Charles Clarke has been touring universities, sitting in debates over tuition fees. Brave man. He raised some interesting points in an interview I saw, I must try to read up on it at some point. What does interest me is the universities clamouring for higher tuition fees, yet it’s the government who get all the attention from annoyed students and hence the media. While the Government certainly need to be questioned, whether their motives are good or bad, would it not be worth asking the universities why they want them raised? Or does that not get enough attention…

So how many books of the top 21 have you read? 9 for me, although I can’t remember whether I finished Wind in the Willows. Good to see His Dark Materials(ooh ooh, a new one!) in there, although somewhat surprising! I’m not sure which would get my vote for best ever, if you can even decide on such a thing. You can’t really compare 1984 and Harry Potter; they’re both great, imho, but for wildly different reasons. Incidentally, did anyone notice that BBC2’s recent George Orwell documentary clashed with Big Brother? That’s got to have been deliberate…

Off to watch CSI shortly, in the meantime let me point you in the direction of this. If you’re male and have any interest in computers whatsoever, let me offer my apologies to your bank balance.