Gritters keep Lincolnshire moving

We're all thankful for the gritters out and about keeping our roads open in the recent heavy snow. I recently headed off to see how Lincolnshire's roads have been coping:

Gritters out in Lincolnshire from Calendar News on Vimeo.

Look after the pennies

I'm about to embark on my annual money-saving exercise. I think I go through this rigamarole most years. It's like my regular mid-year crisis. I take a look at my finances and decide too much of my money disappears on random direct debits that seemingly have little benefit.

Foolishly I currently pay a fortune for mobile phone insurance, yet have no contents insurance. Coupled with the amount I am about to pay for seldom-used breakdown cover and even more rarely used travel insurance I'm trying to consolidate the pain. Those neatly packaged, yet paid-for current accounts with loads of freebies are actually starting to look quite appealing and I'm trying to negotiate the ever more confusing list of gold, silver, bronze, platinum, diamond etc options to see which might save me a bit of cash and mean I can finally afford to insure all my worldly goods.

Either that or I'll just blow the money I've saved on some bit of electronic gadgetry I don't really need!

Daily Mail Readers

How stupid are Daily Mail readers? We already know they're filled with hate and bigotry thanks to the bile it pumps out through most of its pages. It's often said that a fool and his money are easily parted and if the Daily Mail's current offer for a digital radio is anything to go by you'd have to be a fool to sign up.

By collecting sixty tokens between now and September you are entitled to claim a digital radio worth £35. But taking into account the amount you have to spend on the copies of the paper plus the cash for post and packing you've parted with far more than £35. Can Daily Mail readers not add up? I'd rather just buy the radio and not have to be subjected to the vile small-minded writing that fills its pages to get my hands on the digital radio.

Or better still I'd splash out on an internet radio which is far better anyway!

When local radio works

Local radio is actually bloody good. Sometimes. When it's allowed to be local usually. And before I go into my reasons why, I need to declare an interest. While I do still do work for Real Radio, this post isn't just an excuse to blow their trumpet. It really is credit where credit is due.

If you, like me, are a news junkie, then last night would have been your idea of heaven. The breaking news coverage of the end of the Raoul Moat saga was gripping. I had Sky News and BBC News on picture-in-picture split screen with the radio on in the background flicking between Five Live and Real Radio North East. And Real Radio's live phone-in with coverage of what was happening in Northumberland was superb.

It's no secret that usually the Real Radio's English stations, along with Wales, all take a thinly-disguised network show from Manchester in an evening, but thankfully the infrastructure and staffing still exists to ditch the generic programme and replace it with local content and that's what Newcastle did. They went live with an entirely speech-based rolling news format throughout the evening, on several occasions getting eyewitness accounts faster than colleagues on Sky News who quoted what they were hearing on the Real Radio programme on air.

The highlight had to be Paul Gascoigne calling in when he turned up, sounding rather worse for wear, at the police cordon with a chicken, lager, dressing gown and a fishing rod for the fugitive who he used to know. Again this exclusive was quote extensively elsewhere.

At a time when so many radio groups are shutting down entire stations and buildings and so losing the infrastructure to ditch the piped network show when necessary, it's worth looking at this potentially award winning example of why local radio should exist and be invested in, not cut to its bare bones by money men obsessed with chasing profit but cost-cutting rather than by providing compelling content to drive up the audience.

And while the owners of Real Radio are themselves preparing for more networking on their Smooth  stations, at least the ability to still opt out of the networked programming will still largely exist for those occasions it is needed. I only wish the rest of the country on the Real network had been able to hear this great programming last night. It truly was a fantastic team effort.

I'm not fit to live here

We're constantly being told that the country is on the brink of being bankrupt. Public services are going to be cut. People are going to lose their jobs. We all need to save money.

Well here's my suggestion ... scrap the ridiculous citizenship test. I don't know how much it costs but a single penny spent on this worthless waste of time is too much. It's the test which people wanting to become UK citizens have to take to make sure they understand more about the country. Now in principle it's a great idea. But having just taken and FAILED the test I've got to question its validity.

I like to think that after living here for all of my 30 years I have a good grasp of the country and how it works. Working as a journalist I often pick up various scraps of knowledge that might pass some other people by, so I would have thought I'd have stood a good chance of passing the test. But no. I failed. Not just failed ... I failed by some margin.

Silly me. How foolish of me not to know in what year in the 1800s women got the right to divorce their husband, or what percentage of people (to one decimal place) were Muslim in this country in 2001. I jmean good grief, what absolute tosh. This is absurd. What are we trying to create? A nation of encylopedic bores who recite facts learnt by rote? Go on ... give it a go. See if you, like me, are also not entitled to call yourself a UK citizen ... http://www.ukcitizenshiptest.co.uk/

Limited wardrobe

There's no better advert for making sure you have a varied wardrobe than the Home Secretary Theresa May. I'm no fashionista but surely it's common sense that if you only own a few suit jackets, make sure they're not so quirky and out of the ordinary that people instantly notice when you wear it pretty much all the time.

Sadly Theresa May has fallen foul of this fashion faux pas. Her baby blue coloured stormtrooper style outfit makes an appearance far too often. With its very high round neck it's very distinctive and very over warn. Theresa ... it's very nice ...  but you need to hit the sales and get some more to go with it. How about you splash some of your expenses on something from TK Maxx?

Trading faces

"Tonight the role of Declan Napier will be played by Erin Mullally".

What actress Jane Hall didn't say at the start of the first of this week's episodes of Neighbours here in the UK was that the role of her son Declan Napier will be played by Erin Mullally not just tonight, but every night from now on, presumably until the character permanently leaves Ramsay Street.

Now for an Aussie soap this is nothing new. The saga of how many actresses played Lucy Robinson (three) is quite famous, not to mention Scott Robinson, Toby Mangel, Beverley Armitage, Steph Scully (admittedly the original actress was only half visible in one scene before she was re-cast - I'll stop now before I sound even more geeky) but it's not happened that much in recent years. There has been the odd recasting to cover for actors' illnesses (Libby Kennedy and Cheryl Stark come to mind) but a permanent recasting is very rare.

Apparently producers reckon they've invested so much time in the character of Declan that they didn't want to lose the character when actor James Sorensen decided to leave to join the army. I guess he has been through a lot .... his character's not out of his teens and he's married with a child, his wife has since died and he's not moving on with a new girlfriend, aside from the usual teen angst ... so you can kind of see the programme makers' point. But that first time you see the character with a different face is just rather tough to get used to. They don't look right. They don't sound right. The scriptwriters insist on making the other character's refer to "Declan" by name more than is natural to make sure people realise who this stranger is and you have to believe the other characters when they don't bat an eyelid at talking to someone who's had an inexplicable facelift.

Here in the UK it's a lot rarer on our home-grown soaps though EastEnders are apparently getting ready to do a swap with a couple of their child stars, something other soaps often do as well.

But it got me thinking ... if I was to suddenly become indisposed, or fancy a radical change of direction in life which involved moving away from family and friends ... who could I get to become the new James Webster? Now I've been told in the past that I bear a passing resemblance to Gareth Gates, Michael Owen and even Steven Gerrard (what's with all the footballers?!) but judging by how it works in soap-land I wouldn't need anyone who even looks like me to take over - the picture at the top showing the lack of resemblance between the two Declans from Neighbours.

So which well-known figure should I pick? Who would my friends most like to have in my place? Answers on a postcard. Meanwhile I'm off back to watch another episode of Neighbours and count how many times they shoehorn in a reference to "Declan".