Not for the first time, I find myself at odds with the general view of a book. If you look at the Amazon reviews This Thing of Darkness by the late Harry Thompson, they’re mostly five-star raves – “the best book I have ever read” is a typical comment.

What puzzles me is the unanimity. This Thing of Darkness is 700 pages, a length to tax the most dedicated reader. And usually, I am that reader. I can persist where others fail – Daniel Deronda held no fears for me. But I appear to have been the only person completely bored by This Thing of Darkness, the only person to have heaved a huge sigh of relief as I put it down for the last time.

On the face of it, This Thing of Darkness has a fascinating subject: three fascinating subjects, in fact. It deals principally with the career of Robert Fitzroy, a remarkable man who, while still in his 20s, captained the Beagle on the voyage that took Charles Darwin to the Galapagos Islands and elsewhere. Not only that, but Fitzroy was also a brilliant mapmaker and the man who invented the shipping forecast (an innovation for which he was mocked and derided while alive, even though it was ultimately to save thousands of lives).

The second subject, of course, is that of Darwin himself, and the process by which he came to develop the theory of evolution by natural selection. Large chunks of the novel are taken up with arguments between him and Fitzroy about subjects such as whether the Biblical Flood really happened, and whether acquired characteristics can be passed to the next generation.

The third subject is British colonialism: a shocking, depressing and yet potentially engrossing story about how the British destroyed native populations – either intentionally, by shooting every man, woman and child; or unintentionally, by sending out missionaries who introduced diseases such as measles, which could wipe out every single inhabitant of a region.

The book fails (to my mind), principally because it can’t do justice to three big subjects in one volume. But it also fails because it lacks the key ingredient of a good novel, namely suspense: This Thing of Darkness merely recounts one event after another, at tedious length. Thompson must have done masses of research – on naval conditions in the 19^th century, on Darwin, on Fitzroy, on social history, on evolutionary debate, on the history of British imperialism – and he seems to have included every bit of it in the book.

And then there’s the characterisation and dialogue, which is unbelievably clunky and unconvincing. I’m sure Darwin and Fitzroy did have long conversations about evolution but I can’t believe they both kept to fixed, unchanging positions: the same argument is repeated again and again, and it’s particularly dull if you happen to know the answer (which, surely most readers would) to the question of why different countries are inhabited by different species.

I consulted the reviews from the time of publication, and discovered that Ruth Padel wrote in The Times that This Thing of Darkness “doesn’t work as a novel”. That was exactly my view. But I’m still mystified as to what everyone else saw in it.

I’ve been driving the same car for 10 years now. It was four years old when I bought it, which in car years means it’s the equivalent of about 89.

We’d been thinking about getting rid of it for a while, and replacing it with something a bit swisher, maybe two or three years old. The distance between thinking about something, and deciding to do it, and then between deciding to do it, and actually doing it, is quite long in this household, so by March, we were still in the vague “must get another car” stage. Happily, this coincided with Alastair Darling announcing in his budget that anyone who scrapped a car that was more than 10 years old would be given £2000 to buy a new one.

Imagine it! The government handing out free money. More particularly, imagine the government handing out money to a very small, select group of people, one of whom is me. It’s as if he’d announced he was giving £2,000 to Welsh people with short brown hair and Ph.Ds in the social sciences.

The upshot is that for the first time in my life, I’m getting a brand new car. It’s a Toyota Yaris TR3 (I have no idea what that means either) and I’m going to take delivery of it in about six weeks’ time. I’m not really one to get excited about cars, but after 10 years of driving the Escort, preceded by eight years of driving a very basic Fiesta*, it feels, well, quite nice. And how kind of the chancellor to think of me when he had so many other pressing issues on his mind. 

* The Fiesta model was called the Fiesta Popular Plus. It had a 950cc engine, three doors, a manual choke, manual windows, no reversing lights, no central locking and no passenger wing mirror. We often used to wonder what the “Plus” referred to. 

But the mysteries of genetics are such that, whereas I struggle to watch three hours of tv a week, my daughter can watch that much before breakfast. And so it was that last Thursday, while we were enjoying a brief break at a hotel in Brighton, my daughter asked to watch BGT, and, for want of anything better to do, I agreed.

The first thing that surprised me was how dismal some of the acts were. A septuagenarian breakdancer? A grandfather/granddaughter singing act, only one half of which could sing in tune? A dancing dog? I knew BGT had a reputation for novelty acts, but this was the semi-final, for goodness’ sake.

The second surprising thing was how generous the judges were. I kept waiting for Simon Cowell to be mean to someone, and he wasn’t. Compared with Mickie Most in his New Faces heyday, the judges were pussycats (especially the bland-faced Amanda Holden who, puzzlingly, seems to be modelling herself on Betty Draper from Mad Men).

The whole business struck me as rather sad. It rapidly became clear that no self-respecting adult with an ounce of genuine talent would want anything to do with the show, which means that the acts fall into three categories:

• Novelties and freaks
•  Children (for whom self-respect is largely an alien concept, bless 'em)
•  Adults who are long past the age when they might have expected to become successful and are therefore desperate enough to throw all self-respect to the wind

Suggestions that you should therefore ban children or vulnerable people from taking part miss the point: if you excluded the very young and the psychologically damaged, all you’d have left is the dancing dog and the 73 year old breakdancer. And who’s going to watch that?*

* Lots of people, obviously. But not me. 

Let’s face it, we’re spoilt for choice. But my favourite so far, for sheer chutzpah, is that of husband-and-wife team Andrew McKay and Julie Kirkbride. lHe said that his family home in Redditch was his main place of residence, and so claimed for mortgage payments on his London flat. She said the London flat was her main place of residence, and claimed for mortgage payments on the Redditch house. Not just mortgage payments of course, but beds, carpets, cleaners, curtains and food.

Mr McKay told the papers: “This was all transparent, it was all approved and until it was drawn to my attention, it did not occur to me that it didn’t pass the reasonableness test.”

Lovely, isn’t it? It didn’t occur to him. Perhaps at his school they didn’t learn the difference between right and wrong. Or perhaps he’s just not very bright.

McKay and Kirkbride aren’t the only husband-and-wife team to have difficulty understanding “reasonableness”, however. According to the Mail, other couples are struggling with the concept too. How strange that these people with their fine public school educations and Oxbridge degrees seem to have trouble with such a simple idea. 

·     Magazines closing

·     Sections on The Guardian and other newspapers putting a freeze on freelance commissions

·     Publications reducing their fees

The latest story was of someone receiving a freelance commission on a newspaper supplement, only to have it cancelled because the supplement hadn’t received enough advertising, and was therefore cutting some of its content.

So freelancers are suffering from a two-pronged attack: there are fewer commissions to be had, and because staffers are being made redundant, there are more journalists chasing them.

The interesting question is whether it’s all going to get better when the downturn ends, or whether it’s a long-term trend. Unfortunately, the problem predates the recession – the recession has simply made it worse. It probably seemed like a good idea for newspapers to make their content freely available online, but  the subsequent drop in sales of, and advertising revenue from, print editions hasn’t been matched by an increase in advertising revenue from online editions. The decline in income might be reversed if newspapers decide to start charging for access to online content, as Rupert Murdoch has announced he plans to do with News International publications. Then again, it might not.

In the words of Private Frazer, WE’RE ALL DOOMED. And nice to see that someone has set up this blog in acknowledgement of the fact. 

The worst aspect of all this, though, is the way that, as usual, the media has seized on an atypical occurrence to whip up support for a cause of dubious value – in this case, the idea that regular cervical screening should be made available on the NHS to women under 25.

It sounds so good, doesn’t it? We can all tut in outrage at the failure of the NHS to save lives by refusing to screen under-25s. Yet another example of this penny-pinching government’s desire to save money, we moan. In fact, the truth is much more complicated – as it is with virtually every kind of screening you care to name, including screening for breast cancer and prostate cancer.

Cervical cancer is relatively rare: it kills 1000 women a year in the UK. (That compares with 12,000 breast cancer deaths and 35,000 lung cancer deaths annually.) Fewer than 10 of those are women under the age of 25. About 20 of those are women aged between 25 and 30. The group that has most deaths (more than 100) is the over-85s.

Think about how much it would cost to screen all those thousands of young women, and the needless treatment of abnormalities that would never have developed into cancer (young women are much more likely to have “false positive” outcomes than older women from screening) – all in order to save 10 lives. Then think of all the other ways that money could be spent, whether it’s educating people about how to protect themselves against the risk of cancer, or providing better care for people who are genuinely sick. It’s a no-brainer, isn’t it?  

Went into the town centre on Saturday for the usual weekly shop. As I was walking over to John Lewis to buy a birthday present, my attention was caught by a long queue of people lined up in the street. In Hertfordshire town I live in, events that are interesting enough to attract a queue are rare. Indeed, the last time I remember seeing a queue of any length round here was in 2002 when the refurbished Early Learning Centre was opened by someone wearing a Bob the Builder outfit.

So what was it? Perhaps a new shop had opened? Perhaps Bob the Builder had returned?

No. The queue, of about 30 or 40 people, was outside the recruitment agency – a place so small and unobtrusive that most of the time you’d barely register its existence.

Half an hour later, when I walked back from John Lewis, the queue was still there.

Ignoring the famous advice of Denis Healey – “When you’re in a hole, stop digging” – the Myersons have continued to make it worse for themselves. Yesterday, in The Guardian, Jonathan Myerson told us he published the book because it was an “emergency”. It’s a train of reasoning you’d only ever find in the liberal middle classes: “It’s an emergency – write a book!”

In the Mail, meanwhile, Jake Myerson has been laying his mother’s faults bare. One of the diversions of this sorry business has been the transformation of the drug-addled Jake, in the columns of the Mail, into a vulnerable youth, the innocent victim of his liberal mother’s bad parenting. (Presumably this is because the broadsheets had already bagged Julie’s side of the story, leaving the Mail to fill the unlikely role of drug addicts' champion.)

The only reason this has all got out of hand is the Internet. Years ago, the book would have been published, there would have been a tut-tutting column or two and a couple of letters to the paper. Now it all drags on, with hundreds of comments on the Guardian blogs, the Mail site, the Times’s AlphaMummy site, the Mumsnet forum (the  Mumsnet discussion is quite glorious) and so on. Jake Myerson apparently has a supporters’ group on Facebook, while someone is gleefully parodying Julie on Twitter.

I have to confess that I have long harboured a very mild dislike for Julie Myerson, mainly because I once went to see her give a book reading with Esther Freud. I’d read the first two of Myerson’s novels, which I thought were OK, if a bit insipid and bloodless. Someone asked Myerson to name her favourite authors, and she said, “I tend to like writers girls aren’t supposed to like – people like John Updike and Philip Roth.” It was that fey use of the word “girls” that did it for me – she must have been in her late 30s at the time. Also, I didn’t see why she couldn’t just have said “Margaret Atwood and Anne Tyler”, like any normal woman.

I can see now that it wasn’t quite enough to justify a 10-year antipathy towards someone. But I at least I can bask in the feeling that I've been proved right all along.

'Perhaps the most disquieting thing about the Bridgend cluster, and the aspect of it that has so far been ignored, is that it is unlikely to have been confined to Bridgend. "People have a greater understanding of what a cluster is now," says Anne Parry of Papyrus. "But they misunderstand it. They think it's a collection of people in a geographical area over a finite period of time. Whereas in fact it can travel across every form of barrier. We know from celebrity copycat suicides that geography is no boundary, or even time."'

If true, it's chilling. The press have a lot to answer for. 

"The HBR doesn’t mention any of the things about boxing that immediately come to my mind when I think of it. In boxing, you get beaten to a pulp – which must ring a bell with anyone who is now working on the economic front line. In boxing, you are quite likely to wind up with brain damage if you go on doing it for long enough – and, if things get much worse in the economy, this too may come to ring a bell."

The rest is just as good. Read it here.

Carrie Bradshaw inhabits a fabulous Manhattan apartment on the earnings apparently derived from one column a week. Sarah-Jane Smith in The Sarah-Jane Adventures carries out the occasional investigation but never files any copy. George Clooney as a foreign correspondent in The Good German isn’t seen writing anything at all. In fact, nobody came up with an example of a fictional journalist who has anything like a realistic workload.

I suspect this leads people to underestimate how much work journalists do, and therefore overestimate how much they get paid. I don’t have any evidence for this (I don’t go round asking my friends “how much work do you think I do?”) but from occasional remarks I think people imagine journalists writing a couple of leisurely features a month. (People assume, for example, that when you complain you have a deadline pressing down on you, it’s because you’ve left the work until the last minute, when in fact it’s because you’ve had deadlines stacked up next to each other for several weeks.)

So, if you’re interested, I reckon the average freelance journalist (by average, I mean “me”) writes about 2,000 to 3,000 words a week. That covers a multitude of sins, of course, such as feature-writing, news-writing and corporate copywriting. Some weeks you write much less, because you’re interviewing for one piece or setting up interviews for the piece after that, but equally there are weeks you write more.

For staff journalists on a weekly or daily publication, it can be much more pressured: you may be expected to knock something out in a couple of hours, often on a subject you know nothing about. (A staff writer on The Independent told me she was expected to write 1000 words a day.) When readers complain that a journalist hasn’t done their research properly, the reason is usually because the journalist has had to produce a 1000 words in the short space available between writing two other 1000-word features on completely different subjects.

You can see why representations of fictional journalists are so unrealistic, though. A tv programme based around someone sitting at their desk all day, eating biscuits, making phone calls and typing furiously as the clock makes its way towards 5pm (in my case, 3pm) just wouldn’t be very gripping. 

The standfirst to the story begins thus:

“Herman Rosenblat survived a Nazi death camp.”

If true, that would have been remarkable in itself.  In fact, Rosenblat didn’t survive a death camp but a concentration camp. The reason this is important is that because it’s a common confusion, and one I’ve been particularly alert to ever since reading Into that darkness, Gitta Sereny’s extraordinary biography of Fritz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka, last year.

Auschwitz is the most famous of the death camps, but it was also a concentration camp – a place of forced labour.  But there were four other death camps, all based in Poland: Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor and Chelmno. In these, people were simply taken to the camps and murdered immediately, in their hundreds or thousands. The camps whose names we remember – Belsen, Dachau, and so on – were labour camps. A lot of people died there, but many survived.

The point about Treblinka and the rest is that almost no-one survived, because there was no opportunity for them to survive. A handful of people (usually strong young men) were spared the gas chambers and put to work in the kitchens; some of these were lucky enough to live to the end of the war. But most people who were brought to these camps had no chance at all: once you’d arrived at Treblinka, the likelihood was that you’d be dead within half an hour.

Which is why the names of Dachau and Auschwitz and Belsen are far more familiar to us than those of Belzec and Chelmno: in the death camps, there was literally no-one left to tell the tale, and thus no opportunity for Stephen Spielberg to turn their experience into an award-winning film with an uplifting ending. There is, in fact, not a single positive or hopeful message to take out of the stories of the death camps. And that is why The Observer’s mistake matters: for those who like redemptive stories about girls passing apples through fences, the stories of Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor and Chelmno offer no sustenance at all. 

The bear and I enjoyed an outing to see Oliver! yesterday. I’d booked it months ago, happily oblivious to the fact that it would coincide with Wales v England at the Millennium Stadium. As someone who has an aversion to musicals in general, and cheerful Cockneys in particular, it’s not the sort of thing I’d have chosen to see myself, but the bear had become hooked on I’d do anything! and so I thought it would be a nice treat.

Although she’d attended some local productions of plays and a few pantomimes, the bear had never been to a proper show in the West End before. And this was a full-on theatrical experience: the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane is a magnificent pre-Victorian theatre seating thousands, and this was a full house on a Saturday afternoon. The show was immensely accomplished, Rowan Atkinson was a brilliant Fagin, and the whole thing was a generally agreeable experience.  We had seats right up in the gods, which nearly made me dizzy, but enabled the bear to discover the joy of opera glasses, another new experience. (Her final verdict on the show was that it was “the best thing ever” in her entire life.)

So for once, an unqualified success. And Wales won the rugby too.

I thought Bridgend had dropped off the news agenda, so I was surprised to read an interview with the historian Niall Ferguson  in yesterday’s Observer in which he says:

“Civilisation is partly about restraining the male of the species from engaging in the violence of the hunter-gatherer period. But it doesn't take an awful lot to unleash it. Bridgend on a Saturday night has its temporary inflatable hospitals for the stabbings and glassings.”

Bridgend? It’s a long time since I went out on a Saturday night in Bridgend, but if there were stabbings and glassings, I’m sure I’d know about it. And this is the first I’ve heard of any inflatable hospital. Ferguson makes Bridgend sound like the Bronx or something – but here’s the thing: Bridgend is really ordinary. It’s quite small, quite unremarkable, and is inhabited by people doing ordinary things like going to work and attending school and doing their shopping on a Saturday. It really isn’t full of people stabbing and glassing each other. But with this kind of publicity, I don’t suppose anyone is going to risk going there to find out.

Aromatic – a gadget used by Robin Hood

Gripes – what Australians make wine from

Heathrow – Brief description of what a baggage handler does

Paucity - Liverpool

Pre-Raphaelite – one who leaves before the raffle

Soupçon – dinner’s nearly ready

Spectacular – a short-sighted vampire

Veneer – Flemish painter of floorboards