Some books about the environment can be the modern day equivalent of the Pharisees. They tell you everything that you’re doing wrong and make you feel really guilty about it while not offering any help in solving the problem. When I come across books with words like eco in the title, I tend to get a little bit cynical and suspicious. Even the informative ones can be really dull. So it was a real pleasure to find one was that wasn’t preachy but left me feeling both educated and entertained.

What do most people think about when someone says East London? Pearly Kings and Queens? Jellied eels? Bobby Moore? Brick Lane curries? The Krays? The Blitz? Petticoat Lane? Maybe even Barbara Windsor in that crap TV soap? Thankfully, beyond the stereotyping and, despite cynical attempts by corrupt councils to gentrify parts of the East End, there is still a multicultural community fighting to thrive. Ok, so East London might still be more famous for Reggie than reggae but things are changing for the better, thanks to people like the Skints.

It’s a damp, cold November day in Northamptonshire, England. You’re with a bunch of mates outside a country pub which has a wide selection of drinks, delicious food and a roaring log fire. What do you do? That’s right, you all troop into the soggy garden and start reading poetry. Welcome to the world of local Greenpeace activists....

Someone had been hard at work in the lead up to Halloween. We left a dull Kettering street and entered through black bin liner curtains, past a toilet pan with decorative pine cone and onto a thick carpet of dry leaves. Through the wardrobe into Narnia or what? Well, what actually. Amputated hands poked through crates on the walls, foliage abounded, fake blood was smeared on the toilet walls, and bloody footprints led away from the toilets. Some creative fancy dress and the obligatory hammer horror films completed another normal night at Sawyer’s.......

The BBC’s Lack of Irony department has been at it again. On the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, one of Radio 5 Live presenters, Nicky Campbell, was remembering the momentous occasion and reminded listeners that the event had liberated East Germans, describing them as “the most spied upon people” in the world. It’s a shame that modern journalists seem to have lost the art of linking two very obvious stories......

I’ve been meaning to write this all down for a while and it’s probably quite apt that I’ve finally got started on 11 November, Armistice Day, a time set aside for remembering the war dead. Every year this day fills me with conflicting emotions. I feel huge gratitude to those who died in combat as well as deep sadness for those who are grieving freshly for soldiers killed in more recent times. Battling these emotions is a fierce anger against the stupidity of war, the folly of those who keep us at war and, worst of all, the companies which profit from the misery of war.

Some of us gullible liberals had the audacity to hope that the election of Barack Obama might signal a new start for democracy in South America. That slim hope is fading rapidly. While US authorities continue to snipe against democratically elected leaders like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia, they seem to be a bit more reluctant to speak out or take decisive action against the leader of a military coup which ousted the Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. We think we might know why.....

It was another of those Saturdays when the lie-in looked like it was going to have to be, as Scooby Doo would put it, a ‘racrifice’. Nottingham was calling and it was too big an issue to claim that the pillow had me in a killer headlock. Plus we had another reason to visit Robin Hood’s hood. Our son Billy was off to Trent Uni open day to check out the politics course. Happily our route to that fine city took us along the wonderful A453, right past the dirty beast that is E-on’s coal-fired power station at Ratcliffe-on-Soar.

There are so many quality bands out on the ska punk circuit that you can now get some serious money’s worth from loads of great gigs happening all over the country. About a week ago Gill and I were fortunate enough to get tickets to see Sonic Boom Six, the Skints and Resolution 242 on the same bill in Birmingham. Things got better when we timed our journey perfectly to arrive just as the doors were due to open. The only slight downer was that we turned up at the wrong venue...

There are a lot of efforts at humour on the internet but a lot of efforts fall short of the mark, perhaps causing just a wry smile. Occasionally something will make me laugh for real. But when I saw the picture of the Climate Rush’s stunt at Jeremy Clarkson’s house – dumping a whole load of horse manure on his driveway - it made me laugh out loud. Was it my male English weakness for toilet humour or a sense of justice that caused my response? Puerile or prophetic? You decide....