Quidam was, by my reckoning, the sixth Cirque du Soleil show I’d seen Not because I can’t stop going back – although it is very good – but because it’s always a safe invite for press people who want to take you out.

Last time I went it was to Delirium at the Dome (O2 if you prefer), which was good but felt a bit flat compared to other performances. Quidam was back at the Royal Albert Hall and all the better for it.

Cirque du Soleil never does things by halves. This show, with its 51 cast members, 500 costume items and 200 pairs of shoes, took over the centre of the hall, with a massive metal arch curving up over the stage to hoist the acts high above the auditorium floor.

By far the best part was the young girls with diablos whose comparatively safe act was a demonstration of the kind of skill and speed of eye that puts the rest of us to shame. The least impressive, surprisingly, was perhaps the most dangerous.

Late on in the second half, a woman on a rope way above the audience’s heads performed the most death-defying flips and spins, twirling herself around the rope like a drunk canary falling off its perch. She span so much she couldn’t possibly have walked straight by the time she got down, and her act had so much potential for disaster that she wore a discreet safety harness.

Except it wasn’t discreet enough. We could all see it, and although it was always slack and never took the weight of her falling body, meaning she could have done the act without it, it somehow spoiled the effect. Cirque du Soleil performers don’t generally use safety harnesse – they’re far braver than me – yet there’s no reason why they shouldn’t. They have as much of a right to safety in the workplace as the rest of us, after all.

So why was her applause somewhat muted in comparison to the rest of the cast? What she did was more impressive, yet the presence of that little silver wire somehow made it seem less so.

When a Cirque du Soleil audience claps its hands, is it actually applauding the danger rather than the act itself?

It’s a couple of days now since Obama took office and the dust has settled. On the day itself, we watched the inauguration at work, sat at our desks with Sky’s excellent HD stream in a window in the corner as we got on with our work. Very impressive. It shamed the BBC.

Talk is that the event provided a much-needed boost in newspaper sales right around the world, probably on account of people buying extra copies to keep, but with newspaper circulations in seemingly terminal decline you have to wonder whether Obama’s will be the last-ever front-page inauguration. When more readers turn from paper to pixel every day, there can’t possibly be as many print-based news outlets left when president 45 takes the oath.

Does that matter? Probably not. There’s something nice about holding printed material, but you can’t beat the immediacy of the web and, let’s face it, news outlets are information producers at the end of the day, not printing firms. A lot of them don’t even own their own presses.

So if we’re going to start collecting home pages rather than front pages in the future, what does this year’s coverage tell us about the future?

The Guardian provided exceptional coverage, redesigning its front page around lunchtime to give the main story almost all of the space above the fold. This was updated throughout the course of the ceremony and supplemented by a slideshow gallery and an offer of live video.

The Guardian in the morning, and the afternoon

CNN did the same thing, but not to quite the same extent. It still changed its regular front page to give the main story more prominence but it didn’t have the impact of the Guardian’s approach.

CNN before and after the inauguration

Al-Jazeera didn’t give the story much prominence on its front page at all. You had to click through to the Americas section to find its full treatment.

Al-Jazeera relegated most of its coverage to a sub-page

Pravda, the most recognisable Russian news source, wasn’t entirely unbiassed in its coverage. Obama got the top billing on its English-language pages, but the tone was more opinion-led than factual:

Barack Obama takes office as Republicans’ scapegoat
USA’s new President Barack Obama is taking office January 20. George W Bush was a big headache for the whole world, although his successor does not seem to be a man who can become the saviour of the great nation. Those thinking that the USA will have many positive changes in its politics after Obama comes to power think it wrong. It touches upon the US-Russian relations too. The Republicans simply decided to move over to make Obama become an intermediate figure. John McCain was too conservative to win. If Obama does not manage to extricate the nation from the crisis in two or three years, the Reps will unveil their real candidate.
Obama can hardly be described as Russia’s friend

The next biggest story on the page was about Hillary’s appointment as Secretary of State:

Hillary Clinton to bring four years of war as Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton as the US Secretary of State will not change anything. The colour of the skin does not change the essence of aggressive politics. She definitely enjoys great respect in the United States as a woman who returned to big politics after the infamous scandal with her husband. Unlike Condoleezza Rice, Clinton has a more subtle perception of the moment. She realises that life is not based on the American dream but follows a completely different motto: ‘We either swim or drown’.

Pravda’s approach was more opinion-based

Of the UK’s three main broadcasters, the BBC, ITV and Sky, Sky won out. Its top strip, which takes up roughly the same amount of screen space as the Guardian’s, was a bit uncomfortable as it didn’t really have enough content to fill it out, but it did make an ‘event’ of the story, unlike its competitors.

The BBC didn’t depart greatly from its regular template, which was a shame as it has knocked the right-hand section of headlines down to give important stories full width in the past, but I guess those headlines, relating to the inauguration, were still pretty important.

ITV’s showing was the poorest.

The best before-and-after changes were those on the White House website itself. At the end of the Bush era it was a boring Web 1.0 design where the content was fighting the boxes and furniture for attention. It lacked any clear heirarchy. Ugh:

With Obama installed it was colourful, inviting, and somewhere you might actually want to visit. There’s even a blog:

George W Bush’s personal site wasn’t much better than the White House one. You’d think that it would be trumpeting what he considers the best achievements of his time in office, but instead it was selling calendars. And it didn’t even have his name at the top of the page, opting instead for the Republican National Committee:

The scene at georgewbush.com

In all, I’ve got 80 screen grabs from the day of the inauguration itself, and others from the day before and the day after, and they’re interesting to look at now that it’s all over. Whether they’ll ever have the same meaning as a newspaper front page, only time will tell. At the moment, though, they do little more than illustrate how different outlets covered one of the most important stories of American history.

Walking through the station the other day I saw some people with signs that said if you didn’t want to be filmed you should inform someone in a yellow jacket. I thought nothing more of it and went down into the tube.

An hour later, this happened:

It’s been a quiet but busy start to the year. Somehow we’re already two weeks in – three weeks from Christmas – and half a page through the calendar.

It’s been bitterly cold. The hosepipe is frozen solid, and when you unhook it from the reel it stands up in mid-air with the spray on the end, like a cobra ready to pounce. Entertaining, but not much use when you want to clean out the chickens.

They don’t seem to have noticed it at all. We’re still averaging two eggs a day, which is a slight disappointment after we were briefly getting three a time. Gerry’s the lazy girl. We get one pink egg from here for every four or five brown and cream ones from the other two.

The trains, needless to say, haven’t enjoyed the cold. A breakdown or delay almost every day have made riding to work and back no fun at all. It wouldn’t be so bad if they told the radio, but the travel reports talk of gloriously empty and smooth-running lines every morning.

Not so.

Sometimes you only realise you’ve done something stupid when it’s already too late. Like entering the so-called Mad Maldon Mud Race. This year’s event, across the River Blackwater and back in front of a crowd of 10,000 at Promenade Park, took place this morning.

It was so cold. We arrived an hour and a half early, and even then we weren’t the first. As we stood on the icy riverbank looking back at the frozen boating lake, we were both very glad that we wouldn’t be plunging into the river like the 250 competitors mad enough to have signed up for this year’s event.

Now in its 36th year, it’s a big charity fund-raiser, and it attracts TV coverage from around the world. Japanese TV is a regular fixture, and dad says he always sees it on French TV in the new year under a snooty ‘only the Brits…’ banner.

As with many of these things, it started out as a dare that got out of hand. A local resident challenged the pub landlord to serve lunch on the opposite bank of the river. He did it, it was a success, and the following year he set up a bar on the spot. 20 locals dashed across for a drink, gulped it down and ran back through the river.

A tradition was born.

The course itself is very short, and if you’re at the front of the pack you can make it across and back in about five minutes. If you’re not, though, the ground quickly gets churned up and anyone 20 or so back in the pack quickly stops being a runner and starts being a wader.

That hour and a half we waited went surprisingly quickly, despite the number of times we looked at our watches, and the 40 minutes it took the slowest competitors to finish shot by. As ever, some barely got beyond the water’s edge on their first crossing, and 45 minutes after the tape was raised they were being hauled out of waist-deep mud by men with ropes and carried back to the start.

It was only as we started walking back to the car that we realised quite how cold we were. Our legs had stiffened up, our toes were numb, and our fingers were red raw from where we’d taken off our gloves to use our cameras.

It was a fun morning out, but it did nothing to convince us that we should be taking part next year, and we happily retreated to the car for grey tea from our flask, half a Twix, and the warm embrace of the heater.

Wow – that fortnight went in a flash. And now I’m back to work. Well, riding back to work, to be precise. I’m on the train, which is usually rammed, and I have three whole carriages to myself. Very strange. It’s even running on time.

So, Christmas and New Year. Christmas was the usual carnival of over-eating and feeling very fat in return. Rich and I were both getting over colds on the day itself, and I popped cough sweets as fast as everyone else did turkey. An excellent day, though: the morning spent sitting around drinking gin and eating olives; the afternoon spent playing games and quizzes. No TV apart from the news and the Queen, looking from the smock she was wearing like she was half way through painting the Sandringham ceilings.

Boxing day, we hot-footed it home to be greeted by a miowy cat and three very excited chickens who had got a taste for being out all night. They’ve been almost uncontrollable ever since and now when we try and close their door at night they block it. Gerry is particularly adept – she put a foot on the runner the other night and actually held it back as I tried to pull it across. The night after, she bit me.

Anyhow, boxing day we were entertaining Bart, Sue and dad. We’d already cooked a lasagne as big as a bed and frozen it two days before, so baked that for lunch. Cheese and port then more games ensued and then we skipped dinner on account of our spacehopper waistlines.

By the start of this week, when everyone had gone home and things had calmed down again we were starting to crave fresh air, so we headed out to Thorndon Park where I haven’t been in a decade, most likely, but was a monthly weekend rendezvous for years as a kid. This time of year, of course, most of the leaves are off the trees, so it’s not nearly as beautiful as it is when the canopy is full and it feels like a big, dense forest.

No matter: we were there for geocaching, and the terracotta carpet we kicked through was as beautiful as anything you could hope for in winter. It was a successful outing – we found three caches, and although there was little in the way of treasure worth having, it made for a fun afternoon, and a welcome break in the cake eating.

We spent new year as we did last year – on a rug in the lounge with a bottle of champagne, a baguette, some camembert hot from the oven and the cat. Not long after midnight he started yowling that we should come to bed. By half past he was striding purposefully in and out of the room looking back over his shoulders. By 01h he was pawing at our jumpers and by 02h he had given up and flopped down on the rug on his side, no longer pulling up the edges in the search for monsters that might lurk beneath. We crept up at 02h30, leaving him where he was.

The cat wants to go to bed. Rich wants to watch Olivia Newton John.

It’s become a bit of a tradition that we should start the new year with a long walk, and so next afternoon – yesterday – we drove out to Highwood to find deer. There’s a circular route out there through the woods that we’ve walked many times before, and always seen one or two of them running through the trees. This time we hit jackpot and counted 46. We stepped out from the treeline and no more than 10 metres away the whole pack (herd / family / group / flock?) bounced across the field, almost silent as their feet sunk into the soft ground, squashing the sprouting crops into the mud.

An excellent start to the year.

And then today it was work. First day back, first day on a new season ticket, and a deserted train to boot. If things carry on like this, it could be a good year indeed.