Things we have learned this week

1/ Tony Blair's company had a turnover of £12 million last year and paid some £315,000 in tax - if you're anything like me [heaven forfend!] then you will have had to work it out - it's about 2.6% 

Think I pay I bit more than that actually, Tone

2/ In reaction to the Golden Globes menu consisting of edible gold leaf inparts it is worth reflecting that this Seasonal fare on offer in the UK included a cheese involving edible gold again that costs £608 per kilo but Harrods Food Hall also took stock of Swarovkski-crystal decorated boxes of 15 handmade, 24-carat gold-flecked chocolate truffles with a price tag of £190.

A pudding served this Christmas at a country-house hotel in Cumbria took the gold-encrusted biscuit, however. Costing £22,000 and shaped like a Fabergé egg glazed with edible gold leaf, it was also decorated with a two-carat diamond and infused with five grams of edible 23-carat gold. It took the record as the world's most expensive dessert from the previous holder, New York's Serendipity Restaurant, where the bill for the contending pudding was only £12,000.

I don't know about you but Tesco's individual Christmas pudding always does it for me (no-one else in Swappers Castle likes christmas pud - Hoorah!) 

3/ Plans to build a high-speed railway line look like costing £33billion! I don't know about you but having lately travelled to Portsmouth by rail and having to get up at 4.30am to get my connections to make a meeting at 9.30am it took three hours and three separate trains and frankly I would rather we spent more on getting what passes for rail travel in the UK a bit more user friendly. It cost me over £40 to get what would take 1.5 hours in a car in half the time. I also travelled back recently from Newbury on British Rail in what was one of the most miserable cold and generally unpleasant experiences of rail travel in my life.

4/ Yoga is bad for you

5/ 'Intelligent Design' (now there's an oxymoron if ever there was one) has had a set back, being challenged by the British Humanist Association, and could be prevented from being taught in 'free schools' as science

6/ The frankly delicious Kelly MacDonald thinks she is  ' so not a celebrity'

As she prepares for a new series, the Scottish actress talks about working with Scorsese and why the whole celeb thing is 'a wee bit silly' We LOVE her!

7/ Time is relative and then some! 

I have always struggled with time as a constant. A daydreamer by nature and believer in the therapeutic value of 'reverie', as a youngster at primary school I recall once arguing that it took me approximately 3 minutes to descend my home staircase. Seemed about right to me. At the time!  It could take an age to get to school from lunchtime break.....I have always and somewhat pompously repeated my concern about New Year's and Christmas day merely being celebrations of our further inability to count. 2011 since what? An historical figure called Jesus being born anywhere between 8 and 30 years adrift from the current calendar and certainly not on 25th December. If anything best guesses seem to point to 16th September. Making him a Virgo. But apparently we have to adjust the 'world clock' or Greenwhich Meantime by a second a year and we are considering stopping this since we invented the atomic clock back in the 50's as it could be dangerous to our important computer systems and banking arrangements (sic). This is all altered  or affected by the fact that the turning of the world is not a constant but fluctuates enormously and needs adjustment - hence leap years and leap seconds. The notion being that the world is pinning slower on its axis but no! it sometimes speeds up too! 

Jonathan Betts, senior curator of horology at the Royal Observatory. 

"The length of one day was one rotation of the Earth.

"However, these new, highly accurate atomic clocks also revealed that the Earth's rotation is slowing down because of movements within the core of the Earth.
"The rate of change is not constant, however; it fluctuates over the years. Indeed, sometimes it does not slow down at all."

BRILLIANT!

more about time leaping here....