The look he gave me was probably best described as mid-way between bafflement and boredom. I can sort of see why: if you've never heard of Julia Child, or her book about cooking, and you're not interested in cooking yourself, and you're not a woman, then a story about a woman who does nothing more than cook the meals in a recipe book and write about them in her blog, probably sounds as compelling a plotline as one about a man who does nothing but go to Arsenal matches every weekend.

But I enjoyed Julie and Julia. It was a little arch, I suppose, but fun: I knew next to nothing about Julia Child before seeing it, so the storyline about her life was entertaining, and Meryl Streep, who played her, was at her finest and - in a very real sense - her Streepiest. Plus, there's always something gratifying about watching a complete beginner learn and perfect a skill, as fans of Strictly Come Dancing will testify.

The Julie plotline was more engaging than you might have expected, too; watching someone writing a blog rarely makes for gripping film, but her blog entries did go beyond (in the OH's words): "Blimey. Another rich meal". What bothered me a little was that the Julie character so precisely conformed to the prevalent Hollywood stereotype of modern young women: pretty, wide-eyed and slightly ditsy. (She has a particularly annoying habit of praising her husband for his “support”, when all he has to do is eat a delicious home-cooked French meal every evening. Surely not that onerous.) Now I don't know much about Julie Phillips, the original author of the blog the film is based on, but I'd bet my last dollar she's not ditsy. Ditsy people don't make good cooks, and in any case, after she finished her book, she went and trained as a butcher, which is surely not for the faint-hearted.

So here's the paradox: Julia Child, who lived in an era when women's lives were very restricted by social expectations, comes across as an independent-minded free-spirit: gauche, eccentric, and very much her own person; our modern woman, living at a time when women are free to do almost any job they choose, is portrayed as an identikit version of frothy girlishness that we've seen in almost every Hollywood romcom for the past 20 years. Odd.

From tomorrow, the iPhone will be available on Orange. I was terribly excited when this was announced, because I'd been anticipating it for ages. In fact, about 18 months ago, I was idly looking at the shelves in a branch of phones4u, when the assistant came over, and we had the following conversation:

 Assistant: Can I help you?

Me: I'm just looking for now. I think I'll wait till the iPhone comes out on Orange.

Assistant: The iPhone will never come out on Orange.

Me: Oh really? Don't you think so?

Assistant: Definitely not. My colleague Tracey used to work for O2 and she can confirm it.

Tracey: Yes, that's right. Apple has renewed its contract with O2 and the iPhone will never be available on Orange. 

Me: Hmmm. Oh well. 

 At this point, I smiled a knowing smile that aimed to convey the message, "But I am a technology journalist and have insider knowledge," even though this wasn't strictly true. It's just that anyone with a modicum of common sense could have worked out that O2 couldn't have exclusive rights to the iPhone for ever.

 Anyway, now it's here, I'm not so sure. I like the idea of gadgets, but I'm also good at talking myself out of them. I've only ever owned two mobile phones; I was given my first one in 1999, and by the time it was stolen in 2006, it had acquired the status of retro-chic (or so I told myself). The second one is slightly less basic but is still clunky and old-fashioned compared to the new models. On the other hand, it allows me to make phone calls and send texts, and I don't need a phone that does anything else.

My problem, really, is this: now that everyone has an iPhone, I like being the person with a rubbish phone, just as I rather liked being the person with the 14-year old Ford Escort held together with bits of black tape.  

As for the Kindle - finally available in the UK after what feels like years of waiting - I'm not sure I want one of those any more either. I love the idea of a Kindle, but would I really use one if I had one? I know exactly what I'll do: put off buying one until the price comes down and the technical hitches have been smoothed out, and by the time that happens, everyone else will have one, and the moment will have passed. 

I spend quite a lot of time arguing with people on the Internet. You could say that this is a waste of time, though whether it’s more or less of a waste of time than playing 30 consecutive games of Freecell (which was how I used to avoid working before the Internet came along) is debatable.

If you spend vast amounts of time engaged in discussion online, one of the things that becomes all too apparent is that rather a lot of people have no idea how to argue. They’re irrational, they’re angry and, above all, they miss the point. Over the years, I’ve come to realise that there are lots of different ways of missing the point on the Internet, so I’ve compiled a handy guide to the main ones:

So, that’s my 11 ways of missing the point. Have I forgotten anything?

Here on earth, however, you’d be hard pushed to find something that really was infinitely better than something else. The Beatles are not infinitely better than the Rolling Stones. Deep-fried chips are not infinitely better than oven chips. Martin Amis is not infinitely better than Dan Brown.

A good example of how “infinitely” is misused can be found in last week’s review by The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis of a Robbie Williams concert. Petridis writes: “The tabloids, overlooking the point that his defiant oddness might be what makes Williams infinitely more interesting then your average pop star…”

Hmmm. I think the word he’s looking for there is slightly. 

Yesterday, when I was reading the Times Educational Supplement, I had one of those “Is it just me?” moments.

If you read comments on the education stories in the Mail, or on the Times’s Schoolgate blog, it won’t take long to discover that lots of people regard teachers as lazy, feckless, ideologically-blinkered and only in the job for the long holidays.

Reading the TES provides an interesting counterbalance to that. A lot of it is taken up with education news and information about professional development, but every so often you get a hint of the darker side of teaching. One such comes in the form of a teacher-authored column entitled “My Worst Parent”: if you hadn’t already worked out that teaching isn’t quite the profession it was forty years ago, that would give you a big clue.

In this week’s column, the anonymous teacher recounts finishing his year group assembly to be greeted by his headteacher telling him, “Mr Wilson is here to see you about Justin.”

As the teacher walks up to Mr Wilson, the head whispers, “By the way, he’s armed.”

The headteacher then walks off, leaving the teacher to take Mr Wilson to his office. Mr Wilson, it turns out, has a large kitchen knife concealed up his sleeve. In the column, the teacher then recounts amusingly how he persuades Mr Wilson to put the knife down before engaging him in an amicable conversation about his son.

So here’s my question: is it just me, or is teaching the only profession where a senior manager would allow an armed person to walk onto the premises and have a one-on-one conversation with a member of staff? Is there any other profession where such an incident would be used as the basis for a humorous column rather than a reason to walk out of your job and sue for constructive dismissal? Because if there is, I’d love to know what it is. 

So last Saturday, my 10-year old and I made our journey. Geel is off the beaten track, as far as tourism goes. None of the guidebooks I consulted mentioned the town at all, and only one even made reference to Belgium’s Second World War cemeteries. The train ride, which involved a tranquil journey through miles of picturesque Belgian countryside, reminded me of what rail travel in Britain used to be like before overcrowding, mobile phones and endless delays. (Though I’m not really sure this time ever existed outside of my imagination.)

We arrived about mid-day. Geel station is a small, old-fashioned, two-platform affair, the sort of station that always reminds me of Edward Thomas’s poem, Adlestrop, and thus, inevitably, of Dannie Abse’s parody, Not Adlestrop. (A literary education can be a curse in this respect: there are times when I’d just rather think, “Oh, what a nice small station.”)

There was a taxi rank but, it turned out, no taxis. The clerk in the ticket office didn’t speak English, I don’t speak Dutch, and when I said “taxi?” to him, he simply pointed at a phone number on the wall. I’d already established from a phone call to the tourist office that there were no buses to the cemetery, so we had to walk.

Luckily, this was an eventuality I’d prepared for, with a little help from Google Maps. It seems amazing to me that, sitting at a computer in Hertfordshire, you can print out precise, accurate directions from Geel station to Geel war cemetery – directions that give you the length and time it takes to walk each stage of the journey, with a little map to accompany each stage.

And so we walked, in the warm mid-day sun, for half-an-hour, until we arrived at the cemetery. It’s a low-key affair, cited incongruously in a quiet residential area, with no sign to announce its status as a war cemetery. There’s not even a wall, or a gate: you just walk in, off the pavement.

There are only 400 men buried at Geel, and we found Cliff’s grave easily enough. To my surprise, it had no inscription on it, just his name, age (30), regiment and date of death. Almost all the war graves have a few words, chosen by relatives, on the headstone. But Cliff’s headstone was blank, and I’ve been wondering ever since why his parents hadn’t written anything for him ­– whether, perhaps, they just didn’t have the words.

While we were there, we looked at the other graves. The men buried at Banneville had all died between June and August 1944; in Geel, they all died in September and October. Each war cemetery, I realised, represents a stage in the Allies’ progress as they marched through France, then through Belgium and into Holland.

A look at the visitors’ book showed that Geel cemetery is largely left alone by the outside world. Banneville receives visitors most days, and in the summer it sees several visitors a day. But in the period from August 2008 to now, there were only about 60 entries in the Geel visitors’ book – just one or two a week.

The idea behind the war cemeteries was that men should be buried alongside their fallen comrades, rather than brought home (though no doubt the cost would have been a factor too). But I felt sad that in 65 years, Cliff, who died unmarried and childless, has been visited only twice, and that in this tiny corner of Belgium, he lies almost, but not quite, forgotten.

A bit stuck for something to read, I went into town today to visit our local bookshop. There’s never a great range to choose from, but today was particularly frustrating. There were several books I’m keen to read – Juliet, Naked (the new Nick Hornby, published yesterday), Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel and The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, among them.

But they’re all in hardback. And the price is ridiculous – the Hornby book is £18.99, and though our bookshop is offering it at a £3 discount, that’s still pretty steep. The others were similarly priced. The paperbacks will cost less than £10, but The Little Stranger, for example, doesn’t come out in paperback until April next year – 10 months after first publication.

It isn’t just the price, it’s the format. You can carry a paperback around in your handbag or read it in bed. Hardbacks are much too heavy to carry anywhere and are awkward to hold – my copy of the 600-page-long Austerity Britain is a hardback, and it’s taken me several weeks to complete the first volume because my opportunities for reading it are limited.

What’s the point? I understand that publishers get two lots of publicity for their books, but I can’t believe it makes that much difference. If you’re that excited by the reviews of the hardback, you’ll be more tempted to take the book out from the library. And if you’re just mildly interested, then you might have forgotten all about it by the time the paperback comes out.

It’s not even as if hardbacks sell that well – most will only sell a few hundred copies. Admittedly, if the book is shortlisted for a major prize, that will change: Wolf Hall has apparently sold 20,000 copies while the Little Stranger has sold 33,000. But imagine how much better sales would be if publishers capitalised on that shortlist position now, and published in paperback.

And now I’m off to the library…

But it’s worth remembering that not everyone greeted the NHS with delight when it was founded. David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain provides a snapshot of people’s feelings at the time, through the observations of JG Ballard, visiting Britain in 1946 after spending the war in a Japanese civilian camp:

“All these middle-class people, my parents, friends and relations and the like, were seething with a sort of repressed rage at the world around them. And what they were raging against was the post-war Labour government. It was impossible to have any kind of dialogue about the rights and wrongs of the National Health Service, which was about to come in, they talked as if this Labour government was an occupying power, that the Bolsheviks had arrived and were to strip them of everything they owned.”

In the face of so much opposition (from doctors too, of course), it seems astonishing that the NHS ever came into being, let alone that it worked so well. I wish President Obama luck in pushing his reforms through: he will certainly need it.  

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.