The British ambassador to the United States is suggesting on his blog that one thing we bring to the special relationship is a bloody good bite. He is pointing out the history of British actors portraying vampires, most recently in the latest film in the Twilight saga.

Long before I arrived here, I was tickled by the way we are portrayed in popular American media. If a Brit is involved it's a good old British pound to a cent that if not a thinly disguised Mrs Thatcher, he or she is a toff, a con artist, a degenerate, or just someone with horrific teeth. Preferably all three, which could be why we score so highly in portraying vampires.

The vampire genre has rather taken off in a tweeny direction with Twilight. Close readers of this blog will know I am at home this week taking care of the children and so I can report that junior sources reveal that Robert Pattinson is exceedingly toothsome.

Vampires, are of course, sexy. In the original Dracula, Jonathan Harker's execution of the vampiric Lucy is either disturbingly Freudian or just plain funny, depending on your taste.

But if we play the undead sharply, Americans can tell the tales.

To me, the American vampire tradition reached its high with Anne Rice's sometimes magnificent Vampire Chronicles. Lestat, played by Tom Cruise in one film, is based in New Orleans, a city I long to visit and which seems to provide just the right gothic background.

Vampires are, to my mind, highly intelligent, masters of recondite knowledge, meticulous dressers, favouring a rather formal, old-fashioned style. They tend to have an aristocratic bearing and rather cynical detachment.

While sometimes tortured by what they do, they are basically amoral servants of a higher power. Where better to hide than in plain sight, in the upper echelons of the British foreign office ? Get out the garlic, Sir Nigel.

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It is rare that news stories are genuinely surprising but I was taken aback when I heard that the US Preventive Services Task Force had changed its official advice, recommending women NOT to get screening for breast cancer until they are 50.

They say that the net benefit from screening women between 40 and 50 is "small" - in other words, some more cancers would be detected but not that many.

"The harms resulting from screening for breast cancer include psychological harms, unnecessary imaging tests and biopsies in women without cancer, and inconvenience due to false-positive screening results."

They add that when it comes to training people to test themselves, the harms are often greater than the benefits. In other words, a few deaths would be prevented by testing, but that is outweighed by the worry caused by misdiagnoses, and in some cases unnecessary surgery.

The reason I am astounded is that while the NHS does not screen women until they are 50, every doctor I know (and admittedly this is anecdotal) seems to advise middle-aged women to "test and test often".

Cancer specialists and some survivors are outraged, fearing that in the US this gives insurance companies the excuse they are looking for to decline paying for such tests.

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Too many questions, not enough answers, might be a complaint levelled at many pundits, columnists and bloggers. Indeed, David Cunard complained last week that I often end this blog with a question. He asks if I want you to do my work for me. In a word: "Yes". But I make no apologies.

When covering Europe I learnt a lot about countries from the postings of people who know them better than me. I find the replies interesting, and just occasionally surprising and revealing. But it's not just about what is useful for my work. As a dedicated reader of the replies, I enjoy the sense of an evolving conversation, that often takes off, as conversations do, in unexpected directions.

More than that I think questions are essential to a certain type of journalism. It's true the BBC style guide says to avoid questions in straight-forward news stories. But I worked on Newsnight for ages and when we asked each other "What's the story?", we didn't mean we were unaware of the central facts of what we were covering but that we wanted to home in on the essential political questions raised by it. You can go too far: in the distant past the BBC avoided some news stories which were simply good yarns, because they raised no "ishyoos". But questions and a range of answers are one of the things this blog is about and that's the way it's going to stay.

One question I can't answer is why Squirrelists found his posts blocked. But I certainly hope we haven't lost his (or her) provocative postings for ever.

But there may be fewer postings from me this week, although I will try. For a week only I have been promoted to commander-in-chief, at least in my own home. That is because for family reasons I am taking a few days off to look after my children. So my weighty debates may be whether equality of all citizens is more important than seniority when it comes to bed time or how to fairly share scare resources, like time on the computer.

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