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I'm not sure I could narrow it down to five. There's the entire Discworld series, for starters. And when I was a student, the Penguin Classics were only

I think it's a bit tricky because any parent who's just watched their child die is going to be angry, upset, and looking for someone to blame. I don't think it being an adult child makes it any easier. People expect to go before their children.

So while I see the point indizine is making, and I kind of agree with it, I don't think I could start shouting "shame on them" about bereaved parents handling their grief badly. Especially on the BBC site itself where the parents are likely to read it. I think one-to-one counselling and/or the support of family and friends generally helps bereaved people more than being publicly berated and denounced by total strangers on the permanent searchable archive that is the internet.

That said, Mr Scott does have a point about being *informed*. Major surgery is traumatic, time-consuming, invasive, upsetting, and extremely risky. I suspect there are people out there who would be happy to take on all of that for any transplant organ, no matter what condition it was in - the time off work, the expense of attending to an in-patient family member, the hours of waiting anxiously and knowing there's a 50% plus chance of a doctor coming in to tell you your daughter died on the operating table. But I suspect there are also people out there who, if they were told that a potential donor organ was "marginal", would feel that it wasn't worth the huge risk of surgery and that they would prefer to just live out whatever time they have left at home/in a hospice.

Yeah, I have a friend who does "sock clubs", where each month you get a new pattern and the yarn to knit it with. Usually there's a preview at the beginning, and at least four out of the twelve items have to seem like they're worth more than the average monthly price.

From the entrepreneur side, it's mostly about convincing people they're getting a good deal. This means things like:
- Previews. Often the "X of the month" is something that won't be available for normal customers to buy as an individual item, or at least not until the year is up.
- Bigger savings for longer-term signups. For instance it might be

I was naive enough to believe that we already had automatic enrolment into a basic survival-level pension scheme called "National Insurance".

Sometimes I'm so gauche I want to slap myself.

I don't know, this is my first Christmas as a business... I've been warned that one of my clients who has an online shop will need a bit more support keeping on top of their Christmas rush but at the moment things are just trundling along at a steady pace.

Unless, of course, we count my other half as a client in need of being organised. Our Christmas last year ran like clockwork despite the fact he was on a crazy work schedule. I had all the presents bought, delivered and wrapped by the beginning of December, as well as writing all the cards and stacking them up for him to autograph. I even sorted everything into plastic storage boxes so that each weekend of Advent when we went to visit family and friends there was no fuss, no stress, no last-minute present drama or frantically searching for small items that had been put "somewhere safe". We could just toss that weekend's box into the car knowing that it contained all the right cards and gifts. In the planning stages I did wonder if I was over-engineering a bit, but looking back I'm glad I did.

I think the only person I saw on Sunday was my other half. But we did that thing of going outdoors and marvelling at the enormous lightbulb in the sky, which is always nice while it lasts. I think it's definitely time to get the woolly hats out of the cupboard.

Yup, even cobbled together by the B-team, Auntie is still a preferred news source.

Speaking of, has everyone seen Proud Of The BBC? Comedy songwriter Mitch Benn wrote the song and cobbled together a video for it on YouTube and it's become a bit of a campaign, just lousy timing that the release coincided with the NUJ strike.

As one of the commenters pointed out, ITV and Sky would be hard pushed to put together one justified verse...

I'll have to let Rachel know there's such positive feedback for her work!

Ryan, I've sent you a PM - sorry I didn't see this earlier.

I suspect it may also be that as the world shrinks and weapons grow, France and England are forced to accept their proximity.

I don't have a great grounding in military history but as I understand it, just a century ago you basically had to be within visual range of each other to have a meaningful fight, using swords and guns and cannons and trebuchets (I did tell you my military history was ropey, right?). Civilians 10 miles up the road would be feeling the economic effects of their country being at war but were unlikely to be hit by shrapnel at that distance.

Whereas if we were attempt to nuke France off the face of the planet, the south-east of England could well suffer fallout, and vice versa.

With the six-months-to-go mark fast approaching, I need to kick my wedding planning up a notch.

Most things are in place - got the venue, got the registrar, got the catering (part of the venue contract), got the dress, got the website, and am in the process of getting the rings and the cake.

The two things I need to work on next are balloons and flowers. The balloons are mostly venue-decoration (table centrepieces, entrance decor) and the flowers need to be fake ones and are mostly person-decoration (corsages, boutonni