Last week I bought an iPhone cover from an assistant at White City’s Apple Store where we small talked briefly, wished each other well and I drove home. He emailed me next day after seeing my name on the receipt and looking at the photographs on my website, writing……..

‘As the cultural and historical zeitgeist changes and alters how we perceive reality, your pictures document and speak a language transcending the twisted form of rhetoric often served up as narrative.’

Blimey. The compliment of the Season.

With only twenty one days to go, Andrew Robathan MP is a shoo-in for the Crassest Comment of the Year title when comparing the Arctic Convoy veterans’ claim for an Arctic Star medal with authoritarian regimes such as North Korea, Libya and Iraq which “throw around” medals.
“We have taken the view in this country, traditionally, that medals will only be awarded for campaigns that show risk and rigour.”

Perhaps the Tory defence minister – and Minister for Veterans – needs reminding that in the four years of the Arctic convoys that supplied Stalin on the Eastern Front and arguably turned the tide of World War II, three thousand men were lost in freezing waters as over 100 merchant and Navy ships were sunk by German bombers, battleships and U-boats.

Rest assured he will mouth weasel words of ‘clarification’ once he’s removed his foot, but the worthy burghers of South Leicestershire should remember such crassness when the Minister next appears on their doorstep to silkily enquire if he can rely upon their vote.

They’ve just re-buried Frank Wild beside Ernest Shackleton in South Georgia, who was Shackleton’s right hand man through all the Antarctic heroics. When their boat was crushed by pack ice and Shackleton began his epic rescue mission, he left Wild behind with twenty one crewmen who survived on penguin, seal and seaweed for four months till Shackleton’s return, prompting Wild’s Woosterish comment, “I felt jolly near blubbering.”

He didn’t of course as it was the days when men were men, unlike today when our shadow chancellor Ed Balls admits to blubbering – not for polar privations but when watching the Antiques Roadshow.

The Leveson Inquiry current witnesses remain grotesquely watchable, as if some dark force fries their moral compass as they take the stand.

Yesterday, Paul McMullan, the former deputy features editor of the NoW described the hacking of Milly Dowler’s mobile as an “honourable” act, a “perfectably acceptable tool……for the good of our readers, for the public good,” claiming the NoW needed to step in to find her as the police were a “bunch of Inspector Clouseaus.”

Revealing how reporters traded ex-directory numbers, he recalled having swapped that of Sylvester Stallone’s mother for David Beckham’s which may be one of his smarter moves at the paper- while Beckham maintains his stainless global image, Sly’s Mum is reduced to selling rumpology readings of clients’ buttock prints at $300 per cheek – admittedly a higher calling than that of Mr. McMullan’s.

Suspicion that the whole bowl of spaghetti is about to unravel was highlighted yesterday when former NoW reporter Bethany Usher, now Senior Lecturer in Journalism at Teesside University, twittered, “For god sake paul Mcmullen, shut your sickening trap.”

Today she was arrested – not for her grammar but by police investigating phone hacking by the media.

Phaidon Press have followed up their best-selling brick ‘Century’, with a smaller brick called ‘Decade,’ billed correctly as ’500 painstakingly selected photographs, an extraordinary photographic history of the first decade of the twenty-first century.’

Yes, but who painstakingly took these photographs? There’s no mention in the first eleven pages of ‘thematic essays’ covering everything but photojournalism. So do the photographers get a mention in the accompanying captions? No. Then maybe up the side of the photographs? Nope. Instead, you must go to page 502, right at the end, where all the photographers are credited in type smaller than a telephone directory, crammed into less than a page so dense it is virtually impossible to discover who took what – and these are guys who’ve risked life and limb, marriages and relationships, to make the book possible.

What you do get is a couple of pages of potted biogs. Not of the photographers, of course, but the painstaking editor and authors of the waffle essays shipped in to lend gravitas.

And why are these photographers treated this way, by a publisher specialising in photographic books? The answer, I guess, is aesthetics – stick their identities away at the back and the rest of the pages look sort of…. cleaner.

Phaidon, who describe themselves as the world’s leading publisher of books on the visual arts, should be ashamed of themselves.

Done it! We’ve finally reached the end of ‘The Killing.’ Who would have thought that twenty hours of a throat-slitting, gloom-laden Danish whodunit television series set in a turgid deserted urban landscape could be so gripping, but such is the writing and acting you abandon plausibility to a plot that has more red herrings than the Bering Sea.

To be fair, amidst the succession of angst-ridden closeups there’s an occasional half-smile. Don’t be fooled – each invariably precedes something very nasty.

While Sofie Grabol deserves a Bafta as the investigating detective for her gum-chewing, clue-sifting silent longeurs, it’s the victim’s mother who almost steals it, maintaining throughout the look of someone who’s just sat on the trifle at a wake.

Though the ‘Visit Denmark’ website breezily describes Copenhagen as ‘open and easy-going’, according to ‘The Killing’ it is permanently bathed in a blue-grey wet dimness and overseen by City Hall politicians busied with hatred, deceit and nightly bonking.

Series Two is wildly anticipated by all except the Danish Tourist Board.

Mourners follow the hearse in a Mercedes thoughtfully equipped with three boxes of Kleenex. Chiswick, London. 22/11/11

James Murdoch’s current selective outpourings is at odds with his father who during my years at The Sun was kind enough to share his philosophy on life with me. Well, only once actually – it was early on a Monday morning in the Main Hall as he shouted, “You’ll spend the rest of your life waiting for a lift,” before running up the stairs two at a time to his office.

Wise advice indeed, just as some years later when The Sunday Times decided to publish the Hitler Diaries and paid a shedload to eminent Third Reich expert Lord Dacre who verified their authenticity. As a million copies of the first instalment rolled off the presses, the Editor phoned Lord Dacre to share the moment, and surrounding executives heard him say, “Well, naturally, Hugh, one has doubts. There are no certainties in this life. But these doubts aren’t strong enough to make you do a complete 180-degree turn on that? … Oh. I see. You are doing a 180-degree turn…”
As they slumped to the floor and pounded the table, the Editor swallowed hard and phoned Rupert who had the measure of the situation in a trice.
“Fuck Dacre and publish,” he ordered – the wisdom of such instant analysis proven later with the paper retaining 20,000 new readers from the circulation spike the diaries created.

The scene became Fleet Street lore, but for me a greater delight came when the Telegraph, revelling in their rival’s misery, published a list of the fake diary entries that might have alerted Lord Dacre to the possibility of forgery, including the immortal line, ‘Must get tickets for the Olympic Games for Eva.’

Atheists seeking miracles only have to watch David Attenborough where Nature throws in a jaw-dropper every episode. If his programmes have a fault – and they don’t – it’s that the public’s short attention span forces such miracles to be dealt with in seconds.

Last night’s throwaway whammo was the bombardier beetle which when disturbed forces two chemicals, (stored separately in its body), into a chamber of water and enzymes to create such a violent chemical reaction that the potent mix reaches boiling point before being fired 500 times a second at an assailant.

As Attenborough moves swiftly on, you dwell on the thought that thousands of years after this lowly beetle perfected the technique, (and a billion dollars of research later), Man came up with a cruder, simpler version for inkjet printer heads – and we call that a miracle.