It sounds like a joke out of Smack the Pony - a woman, nine months pregnant, goes into labour at work, and her employer won't let her go home until she's spent an hour and a half filling in forms. Accordingly, she gives birth in the street outside. Only this isn't a hilarious sketch show, the employer isn't Anna Wintour, high fashion is not involved, and the baby dies. This [...]

It's a conundrum - on the opening Thursday of any given Test match at Lords, there will be almost no women (no, no, this in itself is not a conundrum); there will be no children at all; and though the day isn't the coolbag free-for-all it once was, alcohol is readily available, in no way dependent on the state of play, throughout the day.

Thus, the factors militating against delinquency [...]

The government is peddling a new line about the health service. In précis, it is this: individual experience of the NHS is very good; it's just our overall impression of it that's poor. I've heard it from Patricia Hewitt and Andy Burnham, minister for delivery and quality at the Department of Health, but it's like an Arctic Monkeys song - if you listen to the radio long enough you'll hear [...]

I don't have children, but I've heard from parents that biting is the worst thing tots can do to one another. My best friend caught her daughter preparing her playmate for a bite. She had rolled up his little sleeve, gotten his forearm into a sturdy grip and, as a final precaution against having her moment curtailed, taken a deep breath, when my friend caught her. It's the premeditation, isn't [...]

Milton Keynes has always brought the middle classes out in a kind of lugubrious fatalism. I remember going on a walk with my mother in the not far-off hamlet of Battlesden, and her pointing at the somewhat samey countryside and saying: "Soon, all this will be town." I misheard "town" as "towel", but I was young enough to assume that she must have been making sense anyway. So that would [...]

By an uncanny coincidence, this year's National Men's Health Week focused on mental well-being, while also coinciding with the start of the World Cup. I personally think that devoting any week, or indeed day, to an "issue" is misguided, relying as it does on a sense of wholesomeness and community to bind us together against individual activities - such as smoking, say, or drinking oneself into a stupor - that [...]

Imagine my delight. Having weathered the body blow of being the last person in the country to discover the Radio 4 sketch show That Mitchell and Webb Sound - and not the first, as I'd previously supposed - I lit upon a genuinely new Radio 4 jewel. My friend used to define the pointlessness of stand-up comedy by the World At One joke. It is the observational joke that can [...]

It's often hard to tell what's going on with pop music superlatives these days. Parameters change and I am way too lazy to keep up. When a band has the most consecutive number one singles that any band has ever had, is that a spectacularly good thing? Or is it just much easier to get a number one these days, because only four people in the country still buy singles? [...]

It's like playing an obscure kind of parlour game, having a conversation with advertising guys where they're not allowed to use the word "branding". Sorry, to elaborate: Hoop Associates has been charged with the job of re-"We're not allowed to use the B word"-ing the Quakers. Paul Nunneley, the designer of the material, insists: "We're not branding them. We're just helping them speak with one voice."

A lot of it [...]

This lovely book has two subtitles - A six-string odyssey and You love that guitar more than you love me - of which the first, for the purpose of synopsis, is more instructive. Will Hodgkinson, a rotten guitarist, decides to seek a lesson from each of his guitar heroes, at the end of which he'll play a live gig. I should declare an interest here: my sister is a close [...]