1. I’m pleased to see that despite even the most recent of the material being over ten years old, the Bill Hicks book ‘Love All The People’ is shelved in the News and Current Affairs section of WHSmith in Victoria train station. I think it’s what he would have wanted.

2. Despite the fanfare that accompanied its return to TV, no-one I know is watching Little Britain any more. Almost a shame, as I think the leads are very gifted comedy actors, but the scripts have become lazy and repetitive now to the extent that you can watch one episode and it’s as if you’ve watched the whole series. Which is, of course, the danger with ‘catchphrase comedy’ or ‘comedy characters’. As a non-watcher of the Catherine Tate show for just that reason, I wonder how long it’ll be before the audience starts losing interest in the same way.

3. Since I seem to be discussing things entertainmental at the mo, I recommend Rebekka Bakken’s CD ‘Is that you?’. No of course you haven’t heard of it, I’m a culture magpie whose eclecticity supply is never in danger of being cut off. Which is to say, she’s not well-known, but if you want some late-night jazz-style music, it’s spot on – for my money, the best track is ‘Didn’t I’.

4. The Conservative Party have elected David Cameron as their new leader. I think the degree of non-interest I have in this event is possibly the most interesting thing about it. It’s like Teflon to my mind, no matter what angle I try to find to make my attention or concern adhere, it just slides right off.

5. Stephen Hawking has re-issued his bestselling book ‘ A Brief History of Time’ in a new edition, supposedly easier to read (but no, I don’t suppose we can get our money back if we bought the first edition). I didn’t rate the book very highly in terms of readability, though I may be in a smallish percentage of people in that I’ve actually read it to the end. As presumptuous as it may be for li’l ol’ me to disagree with the current holder of the Newton Chair at Cambridge, there was one bit which I thought Hawking was very wrong indeed about, and that related to the idea of the ‘big crunch’.

Effectively this would be the opposite of the big bang, with everything in existence foldng back down to the single superdense point of time and space and matter that it came from (if you accept the big bang theory) – like a balloon deflating after being inflated. However, Hawking then does on to argue that if space effectively runs in reverse like this, then time will as well, with events happening in reverse, and the law of cause and effect as we understand it ceasing to work – you’d know the result of a horse race, he suggests, and then be able to bet on it.

Which sounds plausible, but for the fact that if the universe is running backwards and everything is undoing itself, this would also refer to the means by which we accumulate information – that is, the synapses and neural pathways of the brain creating the connections between subjects and events. So if everything is running backwards, your brain’s connections would effectively be unravelling, and the information which Hawking’s saying you could act on would be erased like a message wiped from a chalkboard.

I’d be interested to know if he’s changed his stance on this side of things in recent times, but I don’t intend on re-reading his book in its revised form, I have to say. If you read it, do feel free to let me know.

6. Whenever they refer to the ex-Prime Minister as ‘Lady Thatcher’ it makes me think of a depilatory product.

7. If Kurt Cobain hadn’t killed himself, would the Foo Fighters exist ?