There is perhaps an air of familiarity here for anyone who has already seen Amelie. Whether it’s the soundtrack, which borrows directly from that tale of a young French woman doing good in Montmartre, or the similar structure, which starts out with a not entirely relevant exposition before getting to the meat of the story is unclear. Either way, you’re overcome by a distinct sense of d

Last week was the 50th Anniversary Eurovision Show, ‘Congratulations’. We watched it on Sky+ today. It was very, very poor.

I’m not sure whether it was the programme itself or the fact we had to watch the Spanish version as the BBC refused to show it, so we’d taped it off TVE. The Spanish commentators were truly awful. A hundred times worse than Wogan, and that’s saying something. Perhaps the BBC had a premonition it would be far from good. Probably down to the fact that all the once-beautiful singers are now fat and wrinkled, and none of them were singing in person – they were just showing tapes of the original performances with Pans’ People-style dancers swishing around below the big screens.

And then, 153 minutes into the 160 minute show, the ‘End of Recording’ banner came up and slapped itself over Ronan Keating’s face. It happens every time we try and record from Spanish TV.

Fortunately I knew Abba had won already, so it wasn’t a disaster, but it was annoying. Jon had watched it on German TV, so he saw it all, but that didn’t stop him emailing the BBC:

I should like to complain about the failure of the BBC to cover the 50th celebration of Eurovision last night.

I was fortunately able to watch the programme on satellite on the German TV channel WDR, albeit with a German commentary over the English speaking presenters. It was extremely entertaining and provided an excellent opportunity to see again highlights of over 50 years of an European institution and I am sure would have been popular with many viewers. Considering the number of low interest programming the BBC screens, surely the BBC could have found a slot on one of its many channels? If it was not considered of sufficent mass interest for BBC 1 – why not the minority channel BBC 3?

Are there any plans to screen edited highlights as UK viewers have to date only been able to watch it on satellite on WDR or the Spanish channel TVE Internacional?

Your disappointedly

And the BBC replied…

Thank you for your e-mail.

I understand you are annoyed that the BBC did not broadcast the Eurovision 50th Anniversary extravaganza from Copenhagen.

The BBC has a long standing commitment to Eurovision, and it’s one which has increased over the years. BBC ONE now screens the hugely popular UK selection show, ‘Making Your Mind Up’, as well as the incredible final itself. Consequently it was felt that audiences would be better served for the BBC to concentrate all of its efforts on making these valued productions the best they can possibly be.

I have checked our programme schedules and there are no plans to transmit a highlight programme of the event.

For future scheduling queries you may find the BBC What’s On site of some use as it covers all BBC television and radio stations. The link is as below:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/whatson/

I hope I have gone some way into explaining the situation however I do recognise your disappointment.

Please be assured that your complaint has been registered and placed on an audience log which is made available to all members of the BBC including senior editors and programme schedulers.

Thank you again for taking the time to contact the BBC with your complaint.

Very diplomatic.

So we finally went to see Wallace and Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit last night. As usual we’d left it so late that booking was a waste of time, as we found we’d been shuffled into one of the smaller screens, and the few of us in there were left to rattle around in the middle of a dozen-dozen empty seats.

Half way through the ads, all the speakers but one at the front, to the right of the screen cut out, leaving a wimpish soundtrack all but drowned out by the crumple of popcorn wrappers behind us. Even the taco munchers resorted to sucking their crisps in the hope of still being able to hear what was going on.

It would have been OK, had it not been for the narrator sitting two seats away.

‘Oh, Smug,’ he said to his friend beside him when he saw the name on Grommit’s fridge. ‘That’s very funny.’

A HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!

‘M.U.T.T! Do you get it?’

HO-HO-HO-HA-HA BWHAHAHAHAHAHA!

‘Totti! She’s called Totti!’

O-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HO-HA

‘What’s up dog?! What’s up dog!!!!! That’s fantastic!’

HA-HA-HA-HA-HA

GAH!

I didn’t get to the Expo yesterday, in the end. Instead, I spent the morning in the officeI didn’t get to the Expo yesterday, in the end. Instead, I spent the morning in the office, signing off pages, and then headed off to the Hurlingham Club for rehearsals after lunch.

It’s a fantastic place, with a history that stretched back to before the Norman invasion, when the land on which it is built belonged to the Bishops of London. During the Second World War, it was used as a staging post for barrage balloons, and so was bombed 27 times. In between, it’s been the home of the governor of the Bank of England and the headquarters of polo for the British Empire, and is now a private members’ club.

It’s also the perfect venue for a party.

The afternoon flew by. It was six in no time, and I’d been to the hotel and back to change, and was drifting around the club’s grounds with a glass of champagne waiting for people to arrive. The whole place seems to be a mesh of tennis courts, but if you stride out across the rear lawns you find yourself on the banks of the Thames, looking across at the posh yuppie flats on the northern bank.

An hour later, there was about 400 people to share the place with.

My piece was mercifully brief. I wrote my own speech (and the rest of the script) so I could concentrate on shaking hands and drinking wine and doing a lot of smiling along with the rest of the team.

Dominic Holland hosted the rest of it, and was very good. I only had to do my Sale of the Century modelling bit for the charity auction.

I had a fantastic night. As things drew to a close at half two there was still a good couple of hundred people there, which is perhaps a benefit of holding the party outside of central London, and about half of them batted on after riding the bus back to town. I’m afraid I wimped out, along with the rest of the editorial team, and was in bed by three. Exhausted, but happy.

Except my bed was distinctly damp.

It still felt wet when I woke up this morning, which made me feel creaky as I stepped out and into the shower.

So today, then, was spent in Olympia at the Expo, flitting between our hospitality room and our stand. It’s always better than you think it’s going to be, and certainly being an exhibitor is better than being a general drifted mooching around the show floor. Particularly as you always have sandwiches, crisps and beer in your hosiptality room. I munched my way through too much unhealthiness in the eight hours we were open.

It’s just a shame it was all the way over in Olympia, which isn’t the best place for journeys. It took more than two hours to get home, sharing the tube with three kids bragging about the fact they didn’t have tickets, being pushed back through the ticket barrier at Chelmsford as I was trying to exit the station, by another fare evader coming the other way on my ticket, and then getting into an argument with the bus driver who insisted on charging me more than the advertised fare.

I’m so glad it’s time for the weekend.

I am very annoyed. I’ve lost my ancient silk waistcoat. Have you seen it? It’s about 50 years old; yellow, and with hand-stitched embroidery on the front. A hand-me-down, obviously, but very beautiful, and far too valuable to misplace.

It has to be somewhere in the house, as it’s never been taken away since moving in here. I can picture it now, hanging up in the cupboard among all the other clothes, but I’ve had every garment I own out of there and laid on the bed, and most of them off their hangers, and I still can’t find it.

I have found a lot of other clothes that haven’t been worn in a long time, though.

Hmmm.

It’s so annoying. I wanted to wear it tomorrow night for our awards but now, of course, I can’t.

It’s going to be a long, long day. I have to go to the office first, and then right across town to the Expo in Olympia. Ugh. Nasty journey. Spend half of the day there, then … taxi, I guess … to the Hurlingham Club for a rehearsal of the awards in the afternoon. When I’m going to have time to check into tomorrow night’s hotel, I don’t know. Hopefully not three o’clock on Friday morning when we’ve finished the party.

It looks like it’s going to be a good night. I’ll be giving the shortest speech in the history of mankind (about four minutes, by my reckoning), after which, kicking back to enjoy dinner and drinks and hours of fun.

But all without my waistcoat.

I really liked it, too.

I don’t reckon that was meant to come to me…

It was a very, very good weekend. Having dragged dad around Somerfield on Friday night I made him to it all over again in Sainsbury’s on Saturday morning, when it struck me that supermarkets seem to be the only places I spend money any more. It must be something to do with passing 30.

To rectify things, I drove us both into town to buy some picture frames in the sales, which fortunately matched the furniture almost exactly when we got them back home.

Sal and Dan came around at six and we drove out to Pleshey for dinner. The food was fab, and by the time we were done our table was shrouded in a vapour cloud of venison, rabbit, scallop, and shrimp.

I had nut roast.

I don’t know how we got onto the topic of the neighbour behind our house who urinates in the garden, but we did. He obviously thinks he can’t be seen from my window, but he can.

‘He’s keeping the foxes away,’ Sal said.

‘Really?’

‘Yes. ____ does it. She pees into a jug and then pours it around the lawn. When her son comes around she gets him to do it for her, because of course he can do it standing up.’

Fortunately it was busy, so nobody could over hear. Neither did they hear ‘Well, you know – by the end of the week we just wanted some plain English food, so we went out to get pizza.’

Hmmm…

Sunday, they came around again for lunch, and I did a repeat of last week’s fish pie, and an apple and apricot cake, and we sat around playing Perudo, which turned out to be very excellent. Dan won one game and Paul won the other.

I need to practice my lying.

The sixth installment in JK Rowling’s apparent seven-part series was much anticipated and, as with previous entries had been kept under strict guard to stop the storyline leaking out before its official publication date.

Nevertheless, the latest adventures of the now-maturing boy wizard were revealed when bookmakers stopped taking bets on which ‘major character’ had been killed off when there was an unusually high number of bets placed in the town closest to the printing works putting the pages together. Needless to say, those predictions were correct.

Below this point, this review will reveal key plotlines, including the identity of the unfortunate character.

The book opens, as previous form would have us believe, with Harry spending an unhappy summer holiday at the Dursleys, and follows on seamlessly from the fifth book. Re-reading that earlier instalment may be beneficial since this storyline frequently refers back, and many people I’ve spoken to about this book remember little if nothing about book five.

It starts out well. Very well, with three exciting chapters to kick us off, and an air of menace as Voldemort’s power continues to grow. But it takes an age for Harry and his friends to reach school and, when they do, the story takes a serious dive.

There is much going on here. Dumbledore is frequently leaving the grounds to go on secret missions, but we do not follow him. Harry finds a book full of curious and highly useful spells, but when he is eventually found out, it is a serious anti-climax. Malfoy is getting up to mischief, but we do not see anything happening – instead, when he had been getting up to is eventually explained to us in the closing pages, when it has all happened with us totally unawares. There are barely even any clues as to what he is doing, beying Harry’s suspicions.

But it’s a book worth sticking with. The closing third recaptures the excitement of the opening – and indeed goes much further. Dumbledore takes Harry off on a mission, on which the former is so weakened that he cannot defend himself when he returns to the school. There are shocking revelations about Snape, which will finally confirm or deny where his loyalties lie, and then there is, of course, the death of the ‘major character’ Rowling had promised.

Perhaps it is because this death was so widely trailed, though, that it comes as something of an alti-climax. You can see it approach a good 20 pages in advance of it taking place, and as such it is neither a surprise or a shock. Even the after-effects, and then funeral, feel long and drawn out, and somewhat unnecessary.

And then comes the real surprise. Hints that Hogwarts may not open for business in the next year, and a vow from Harry that even if it does he will not return but will, instead, head off on his own to hunt down Voldemort once and for all. Hermione and Ron intimate that they will come with him.

So the reader is left to ponder what will come next. We have always been led to believe that book seven will be the last, but there seems to be a lot of ground to cover, even within the pages of one of Rowling’s perennially weightly tomes. Could it be that Hogwards will indeed close for a year, giving our characters time to complete most of their mission, and then return to the school for one more year in an eighth book? Could the next story really take place ourside of the school grounds, and still retain the flavour of the earlier entries.

We will, in time, find out, but Rowling has done well to leave the reader on a curious high, despite the gentle lull into which the book sinks, like a sagging tight-rope in the second and third quarters.

This last week has shot by. It feels like only a couple of days ago that I was cooking up a gallon of soup on Saturday morning and fish pie for Helen and Mike coming around for dinner on Sunday night. And now it’s Friday and I’ve picked up dad from the station and brought him home via Somerfield and will be doing the whole cooking routine all over again.

For simplicity I might repeat the fish pie.

I don’t know where the time is going at the moment. I have a long list of people who I need to send emails to, and it’s growing by the day. I’ve still not really done anything with the holiday photos apart from pick out a few to drop on here. None have been printed. There are only three working days in the office next week, with two being gobbled up by the MacExpo and our Awards, for which we had the stopwatched run-through earlier this week, and all went well.

And somewhere in among all that I need to fit in a trip to the dentist. I have a small pulsing toothache on the left-hand side, and what looks suspiciously like a little hole in one of the less accessible recesses, which will not be fun to fill. Very annoying since I have no fillings at all to date. Now it looks like I’m heading for my first.

So much for being a part of the flouride generation. I thought we weren’t supposed to get cavities.

What a strange email I got on Monday morning.

This is ____ ______ emailing from the Letters page of the Evening Standard; hope you don’t mind