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Friday 18 November
Properly see-your-breath cold now. Three below zero. Frost on the ground. I caught sight of the fox in the garden at breakfast time, snuffling around the spot where we chuck out the food. I felt moved to chuck out some more, even though it says in The Big Book Of Urban Foxes that foxes are never hungry. But I am a soft touch, and winter weather is here. While I was outside, through my breath I noticed that all three seed feeders were perilously close to being empty, with a lot of hungry birds flitting around them expectantly with cartoon speech bubbles coming out of their beaks saying, "BRRRRRRRR!" and "I COULD EAT!" I filled all three to the brim, instantly rewarded by the sight of the feeders alive with feathered visitors. (In fact, I was rewarded while filling them, as the world's friendliest robin came down to say hello. I love robins - they do not fear humans. I will make it my New Years' Resolution to finally get one to sit in the palm of my hand. It's not much to ask.)

A top letter in today's Guardian, moaning about the paper's obsession with blogs, in particular the cover story of G2 on Tuesday talking up the influence of certain political bloggers. This is the letter:

You write that "Samizdata, by some measure the nation's most successful independent blog, claims around 15,000 different visitors a day". This compares unfavourably with circulation figures of some 400,000 for the Guardian and 3,360,000 for the Sun . I wish you would stop being so obsessed with blogs - no one in the real world takes any notice of them. Yet you go on about how important they are. They are not. They have the circulation of a small town newspaper and are about as relevant.
Neil Knowles
London

On an unrelated matter, while staying at the Four Pillars Hotel in Witney, Oxfordshire this week I saw the world's most detailed instructions for how to use a rubber bath mat. They must have had a really expensive insurance claim against them or something. There were seven separate points in the notice on the bathroom wall.

1. Wet surface of bath before use.
2. Ensure suckers are in contact with bath, fully pressed down WITH YOUR HANDS , and that mat is secured firmly . . .

And so it went on. There was one about not using bath oils. The joke was, you had to contact reception if you needed a rubber bath mat. They didn't even come as standard. I'd stick one in every room if I was that scared someone might fall in the bath. Perhaps add a harness and a mattress too.

Nice curry tonight. Finally caught up with Peep Show , never having properly watched it before. It's very odd, and I like the writing very much, but the gimmick (the interior monologue and the close-up camera) is also its albatross. Still, you can't beat good writing. Still tired from the longest week of my life. Ow, my finger hurts. Rejoice, lads . . . we're in!

Saturday 19 November
Hey, haven't stayed in an English hotel for two nights! Better get down to Lyndhurst in the New Forest and the Forest Lodge Hotel. It's my dad's 65 th birthday tomorrow and it was his wish to gather his entire family around him for a nice meal in the middle of a forest. That's 13 of us in total: Dad, Mum, me, Julie, my brother Simon, his wife Lesley, their girls Charmaine and Natasha, my sister Melissa, her husband Graham, and their boys Ben, Jack and William. It was an historic summit, in that I don't believe all 13 of us have been in the same place at the same time, not since William was born. (It's always been difficult to get Simon to big family events, due to the unsociable hours of his jobs in the Army, then the prison service, and now the police.) Even though my family only live 6o miles away in Northampton , I don't see them as much as I ought, and it's always a big pleasure. We arrived in Lyndhurst - which is smack bang in the middle of the New Forest - in time to eat an omelette and some dry chips from the hotel bar and then go for a short drive to Milford-On-Sea and take in the sea air.

We enjoyed a bracing walk along the front, enjoying the merry sight of birds hopping along the rocks. (I didn't have my bird identification book with me, so I'm not sure which birds they were. Rock pipits? Grey wagtails? More unusual European visitors to our shoreline? It's very difficult to say after the event. We definitely saw a flock of handsome lapwings on an adjacent cornfield, which was a treat, as was the sight of all the cheeky rats eating the leftover corn, who ran to their holes at the slightest noise, only to emerge seconds later.) We'd checked out the small but cosy looking beachfront café before setting off and noted with satisfaction from their menu that they did cappuccino and decaffeinated coffee, so our walk was made all the more bracing by the thought that we could enjoy a decaffeinated cappuccino when we got back. However, having ordered two at the counter, we were crestfallen to hear this from the hassled looking woman behind it: "I can't do cappuccino and decaffeinated." They didn't do decaffeinated cappuccino, only cappuccino or decaffeinated - after all, who in their right mind could want both? The decaffeinated coffee came in sachets and she couldn't put it in the cappuccino machine. We settled for two sachets of decaffeinated coffee. (Having seen the woman squirt Anchor cream from an aerosol can into the previous customer's cappuccino, I'd gone off the idea of one anyway.) If I worked in a beachfront café or a hotel and my coffee was out of a sachet, I'd hide that fact, wouldn't you? Rather than advertise it to the world? Somebody up there is trying to tell me not to drink decaffeinated coffee. (Oh, and when I asked for milk, she said, "The bits and bobs are round there," gesturing with a sweep of her useless hand at the wide selection of plastic UHT containers. I reiterated that I'd like some milk , please, which, beaten down by my London ways, she actually provided in a small metal jug. (Who invented the metal jug? Metal teapot, yes, but not a metal jug. It looks like surgical equipment. The joke was on me, of course, as I shouldn't even be drinking dairy.) To compensate for the poor service, we were able to sit outside with our sachet coffees, where we enjoyed the air and the "magic hour" lighting while watching two jolly Jack Russells at play.

On the way to and from Milford-On-Sea we drove through the town where Leona lives. Luckily for her, I didn't have my mobile with me and was unable to call her up and drop in, unannounced. The light was fading by the time we got back to the hotel, but we still went over the road to see some of the famous New Forest ponies in a field. One of them came over to us, put its head over the fence and neighed, as if to say, "Have you brought any food?" I patted him gently on the nose twice, which felt lovely, but I think he was cross that we had acted like visitors with food without actually producing any. Feeling guilty for raising a pony's expectations, we nipped back to the hotel for two apples I knew I had in my bag and returned with the snack. But the pony wouldn't come back to the fence this time and pointedly ignored us, eating the grass instead. I expect he felt he had been stung once, and wouldn't get fooled again.

At 7.30, the Collins clan congregated in a private dining room. There was a cake with a little golfer on it, representing my dad. The meal itself was surprisingly good for an English hotel - I had the melon, the lamb and the cheesecake. None of the desserts came without wheat or dairy, so I threw caution to the wind in the spirit of a once-in-a-lifetime celebration. In this same spirit, I drank beer. It was, after all, Dad's 65 th birthday and I was among family. The odd thing is, I drank about four pints during the evening - perhaps even five - and I didn't feel drunk. You'd think I'd get more drunk, having been almost completely teetotal the best part of two years, but no. What a curious thing. As the evening wore on, after the food, the presents, the speeches, and once the kids had gone up to bed, we fell into conversation with Simon and Lesley, and even though he is a responsible policeman, he encouraged me to have a short with my pint. Because I am classy, I ordered a Cointreau. This, I must admit, made me feel a little heady, but not enough to make me run amok in Lyndhurst High Street and steal a traffic cone. The staff of the Forest Lodge hotel were excellent, especially the girl who was charged with looking after the Collins family. In all, a memorable evening and a fitting three-generational tribute to Dad, which ended at about 2am .

Sunday 20 November
A 6 Music listener called Phil Kemp has sent me a link to some Arctic Monkeys photos he took at the Underground Club in Köln (I knew he was going, as he'd emailed to tell me beforehand, but we missed each other on the night). This is one of his pictures, and this is the link. Not that I need much of an excuse to stick a picture in, but Arctic Monkeys did keep us entertained all the way home from the New Forest in the car this morning. I'll be honest, we had something of a singalong on the M3. We left the hotel at 9.30 and I was deposited on the platform at Redhill by 11.00, ready to commute to work. I could have happily gone home to bed, but duty called. Lots of fun with Richard Herring, as ever, not least with the story he'd found in a News In Brief round-up in the Observer about oral sex leading to mouth cancer.

Monday 21 November
Saw Michael Fish in Bentall's shopping centre in Kingston today. I refrained from saying, "Cold, isn't it?" to him, as I expect he must get that all the time. It was cold though, which is good news, inasmuch as I can now wear my combined hooded top and brown jacket with confidence. I'm never happier than when in multiple layers. We were in Kingston to see Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire . Even thought I have no interest in ever reading the books, which are for kids, and have concerns about the jolly-hockey-sticks public-school milieu of the franchise, I admire the films, which are well-made and do their job with skill and style. I also appreciate the way they keep small children on the edge of their seats for over two and a half hours, which strikes me as no mean feat. The fourth film, directed by Mike Newell, is the weakest, structurally, centred as it is around three stages in the Triwizard Cup, for which 14-year-old Harry shouldn't even be eligible - he gets in on a mysterious technicality, which saps credibility from the storyline, as there are four contestants instead of the prescribed three. No matter! At least we have a new thrill this time: puberty! Voices are breaking, hair is long and scruffy, the opposite sex gets noticed, it's a regular maelstrom of hormones. I don't know how this is going down with the actual pre-pubescent kids who watch these films, but I found it a little disconcerting, not least when Harry has a bath and Shirley Henderson's giggling ghost explicitly tries to look at his knob through the bubbles. I don't want that. It's a perfectly entertaining two and a half hours with some thrilling CGI and more distinguished British actors with tiny parts than in any major film since A Bridge Too Far . (Gary Oldman only appears once, in a fire, and David Tennant has little to do beyond gurn.) I fear for the next installment. Will there be masturbation and binge drinking?

Belatedly caught up with the final episode of Spooks , series 4, from two Thursdays ago, in which the gang were forced into a lockdown by Lindsay Duncan's rogue former agent. She wanted to prove that the MI5 had Princess Diana killed. Although it was hypothetical, they made a pretty convincing case. Naturally, it being the end of a series, they left the mortal fate of two regular cast members up in the air. I say: neither of them will die. But it will make contract renegotiations interesting for Peter Firth and Rupert Penry-Jones in the interim.

Must make note of a terrible documentary we caught on Sky tonight - a repeat showing of Kate Moss: Fashion Victim? , thrown together in the aftermath of her cocaine-fuelled "downfall" (which turned out not to be one) and stretched like old chewing gum over an hour of airtime. I know I'm always criticising talking-heads shows, even though I am on most of them, but the level of comment on this one was subliterate. I won't name names because I don't know who most of the heads were - apart from Dylan Jones, who should know better, and a rambling Christina Odone, former deputy editor of the New Statesman , who seemed to be trying to prove how with-it she can be - but I heard three made-up words in under two minutes: "realness", "streetness" and "debaucherous". Then I heard some dimwit say that "cocaine and drugs per se are endemic in society," and that Kate was "emblematic of grunge culture, which was emblematic of disaffected youth." Also, Kate was "crucified at the altar of the drugs problems in our society." It was, aptly enough, addictive television, but not in a good way. It made Girls & Boys look like The World At War . (I hope the two Sky documentaries I'm doing the voiceover for on Friday are better.)

Tuesday 22 November
A very productive day's writing with Simon Day, working on two treatments (a drama and a screenplay), neither of which I'm going to have any time to work on if scripts get commissioned but hey-ho. It must have been a productive day - we were finished by 1pm and I was on the 2pm train home. My "other comedian" Lee Mack should be heading off on his honeymoon today, having married in Mull on Saturday. Not that I can slack off - he's expecting a framework of the script of Episode 2 of Not Going Out when he gets back in two weeks.

Listened to Funeral by Arcade Fire many times on my iPod today. Even though I've heard pretty much every track off it over the 38 weeks it's been on the 6 Music Chart, and through the playing of the singles, I've never actually listened to it with intent, in the right order, sans shuffle, while looking out of a train window. It's superb. Bewitching. One of the best of the year. In this I am in agreement with my friend John Harris, who said as much in his bi-weekly Guardian column on Friday. (Does bi-weekly mean every two weeks, or twice a week? I can never remember? Once every two weeks anyway.) He blamed their lack of consolidated success on lack of airplay. Not on 6 Music, mate. They have been a staple all year, not least on the Chart. What a pity more people do not take us into account. If I were Arcade Fire's record company I'd re-promote Funeral and say that it's been a number one album, because it has. Several times.

Property Ladder was as tense as usual. A couple in Bedfordshire (woman who brayed like a donkey, man who didn't say much) decided to tear all the original lime plaster off the walls of a period cottage and re-do it themselves, which took months; and a woman in Norfolk who didn't know the difference between feet and metres, which became apparent when the carpets turned up. Sarah looks a bit knackered. I expect it's all the babies she keeps having. And the idiots who ignore her excellent property advice on a weekly basis.

Not sure about The Ghost Squad , Channel 4's new Between The Lines -style cop show. It stars Elaine Cassidy, who's very good, but it's a bit difficult to follow (I know that makes me sound useless, but it is). She works for an internal investigations unit which meant she was undercover twice, once as herself, and once as a non-internal-investigator with a group of undercover officers who were trying to crack a people-trafficker. I lost track of who knew what about whom by the end, and I couldn't work out why she took Ecstasy on the job - never mind that she was pretending to be a raver. Maybe it's realistic, but I didn't buy it, dramatically.

Wednesday 23 November   
Feeling a degree under the weather. Don't know why. A day at home writing my book was penciled in, although, wouldn't you know it, I hardly did any. The days just slip away. Left the house at 3.00 in order to swing by my agent's office to pick up a package on my way to record a column for Craig at Front Row about English place names in song. (This trip at least provided ample opportunity to listen to Funeral on a loop. It gets better and better. Just shows that you don't know an album until you listen to it on headphones.)

Caught up with Lost . Episode 17, it was the one in which Michael built a raft and Jin went bonkers in the nut. I'm still running with this programme, even the obligatory soppy montage bit at the end, which this week centred around Sayid and Shannon having a kiss. Actually, they subverted their own trope - the accompanying soppy music cut out when the batteries went on Hurley's Discman ("Son of a bitch"). The song was Delicate by Damien Rice. I looked this up on the internet.

Thursday 25 November 
Wrote a bit of my book. Major achievement. As a reward, we went to the cinema again in Kingston for an afternoon showing of Stoned . It was, as part of me feared, a film made with good intentions and a certain amount of style (by Stephen Woolley) that was hobbled by the conventions of the biopic. Concentrating on the odd relationship between Brian Jones and his builder Frank Thorogood during his last days, it slipped too readily into building-block biographical style, with helpful flashbacks for the hard-of-thinking, and featured some of the most glaring exposition I've ever heard in a major film. Example:

Brian Jones's Swedish girlfriend Anna (on telephone): "Mick and Keith? Coming down tomorrow? I'll tell him."

All in all, a bit obvious, and less than you'd expect from two seasoned screenwriters (Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, who wrote two Bond movies and Let Him Have It ), but rescued by Paddy Considine as the builder, who gave the only realistic performance. He really is a long-faced genius. (And he was in one of the few decent rock biopics ever made, 24 Hour Party People . It's all in the writing.)

Twenty-four hour drinking came in today and George Best "entered his final hours". He seemed to get on alright without 24-hour drinking, so what's the point of it? Let us not kid ourselves that the new licensing laws are about anything other than drinks companies making more money. If we behaved like the Italians or the Germans or the French or the Spanish then I'd be all for the utopian vision of making our "drinking culture" more European, but I'm afraid we don't.

I have been listening to a certain indie-based commercial radio station (who are so conservative they once played When Doves Cry by Prince during a request half-hour and the DJ said afterwards, "See? We'll play anything on this station!"), and as such have had my ears bombarded with the same, relentless, needy advert for Ghostfaced Killer, the new single by The Dead 60s - to the point that if I ever did like its ska stylings and its Wu Tang Clan-indebted title, they now make me want to run from the room. It was released on Monday. How desperate to get it into the charts do their record company actually want to sound? This is the band whose Riot Gun single got to an amazing number 30 in October 2004. Their next single got to number 28 so, as is now obligatory for small bands who've achieved a brief whiff of success, they reissued Riot Gun in September, and it got to . . . number 30. Let's all place our hands on the table and pray together that Ghostfaced Killer gets to . . . number 31. (I have nothing against this band, but I am getting increasingly bothered by the barefaced greed of this tactic. Maximo Park , having got to number 20 with Apply Some Pressure in March, reissued it earlier this month and got to . . . 17. Worth every penny of that marketing spend - take the rest of the afternoon off. I even heard a DJ voice the same complaint on xfm . . . I mean, a certain indie-based commercial radio station. Stop the madness.)

Plug: tickets have just been released for Banter , the new humorous panel show for BBC Radio 4 that I will be hosting. Regular panellists will include Richard Herring, Russell Howard (Radio 1's The Milk Run , "One of the hottest comedians
in the country" - The Mirror ) and Will Smith (not that one, the other one). It's basically a load of funny comedians debating the Top 3 of everything, with me adjudicating and handing out points. It went down well when we piloted it in Edinburgh , so if you're in the London area and fancy a free evening of fun, recordings will take place at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith on the following dates:

Mon 12 Dec 05 (Doors open at 18.45)
Tue 13 Dec 05 (Doors open at 18.45)
Mon 09 Jan 06 (Doors open at 18.45)
Mon 23 Jan 06 (two shows 17.15 and 19.45)
Mon 30 Jan 06 (Doors open at 18.45)

To book tickets please log on to http:// www.tvrecordings.com

Squeezed in another film tonight: Coffee And Cigarettes on DVD, the Jim Jarmusch film from a couple of years ago that I missed at the time. I was inspired to remedy that situation by Broken Flowers , and of course Bill Murray appears in one of this film's coffee-and-cigarettes-themed vignettes. As ever, Jarmusch proves himself the most European of American directors. This was a curate's egg - some of it great, some of it not. I really enjoyed the segments Cousins? , with Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan, Delirium , with Murray and RZA and GZA of the Wu Tang Clan, and Champagne , with Bill Rice and Taylor Mead, two old guys with, I think, an Andy Warhol connection. I noticed that nobody tried to order a decaffeinated cappuccino. But if they had, it being America , it would have been no problem, and it wouldn't have come from sachets.

Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys was number one in NME 's Cool List 2005, seeing off stiff competition from Brandon Flowers, who, if you ask me, hasn't got an ounce of style in him.

BLOG COMPETITION!
Word up, readers! Every week until I get taken off-air, I'll be inserting a line from one of my childhood diaries into the blog. This week's rogue quote comes from my diary of 1981, when I was 16 and had a New Romantic fringe. If anyone can correctly spot the sentence for a tiny prize, email the show via andrew.6music@ bbc.co.uk And please do post comments below, even if you're argumentative and you've got the face on.

The opinions expressed in this column are Andrew Collins' and not necessarily those of the BBC.