Family trees

Readers may recall that a couple of weeks back I published a post calling for February 29 to be made a public holiday, in response to an initiative by the Big Green Switch website to encourage people to use the day to "do something green."

My employers, who also publish the BGS, kindly agreed to support that initiative and gave everyone in the office a couple of hours off on Friday afternoon to carry out a series of green pledges ranging from switching to low-energy lightbulbs to planting trees.

It gave me an opportunity to plant out two trees in our new garden - the old one, which was basically a paved area, didn't really allow for this - both of which have a special significance for me.

The first is a willow tree originally purchased on Good Friday, 2006. We had gone to our local garden centre that day to stock up on new plants, intending to spend a leisurely Easter Weekend in the garden. Things didn't turn out that way though, and ever since I have wanted to plant the tree as a memorial.

The second tree, pictured above, is a horse chestnut grown accidentally from a conker in the compost heap in the back garden of my old family home in the 1990s. Some of my happiest times were spent there gardening with my mum before the garden got too much for her, and it's nice to have the tree as a reminder of those days.

Many other people took up the Big Green Switch challenge, and the results can be seen here. You'll find me in that slideshow somewhere....

Cameron and Clegg v the system

My Saturday column in today's Newcastle Journal takes as its theme the current controversy over MPs expenses and the conduct of House of Commons business generally and the way in which both David Cameron and Nick Clegg have both sought to exploit that.

As the more perceptive observers of Tory politics have already noted, Mr Cameron is clearly seeking to position himself in the vanguard of a growing public desire for the modernisation of our political institutions. So, too, in his different way, is Mr Clegg.

In this sense they are both "running against Westminster" in the same way that Barack Obama and to a lesser extent John McCain are running against their own party establishments.

It's not good news for Gordon Brown, who fluffed the opportunity to seize the reform mantle last summer by bringing forward a rather timid constitutional reform package, long before the "dodgy donations" affair put paid to his ambitions to restore trust in British politics.

Woss a waste of money

I frequently find Jonathan Ross's Friday night chatshow required viewing, but as a BBC licence-payer who presumably contributes to Wossie's huge £18m salary, last night's dreadful interview with Ashes to Ashes star Keeley Hawes left me feeling distinctly shortchanged.

Hawes is one of the most talented young actresses this country posesses yet Ross chose to treat her with utter disdain. I don't blame Ross for the fact that he clearly fancies the arse off her - so do half the men in Britain between the ages of 30 and 45 as far I can work out - but as a professional interviewer, he perhaps could have made it a little less obvious.

The sum total of his interview was basically as follows: Do you and Philip Glenister end up getting it on in Ashes to Ashes, what was that "lesbo thing" you were in a few years ago (it was Tipping the Velvet), and do you feel any differently about enacting lesbian sex scenes as straight sex scenes - a crass question since Hawes is on the record as saying she is bisexual.

"We learned absolutely nothing about her," was my wife's comment afterwards. What we did learn was that Jonathan Ross, apart from being an overpaid oaf, clearly gets off a bit on the girl-on-girl stuff.