Grandad hands back marathon medal

Organisers of the London Marathon took a double take when ">checking the electronic tags of 69-year-old Anthony Gaskell. He ran the first 12.5 miles in about two hours, but apparently finished the rest of the course in just over an hour: a pace that would have smashed the world record.

In fact, he had pulled out of the race injured and skipped a loop in the course of 10 miles, making for the finishing line to retrieve his clothes. He didn't even stop to think he'd won.

Belatedly, he was disqualified.

Red faces all round, and not from the exertion of running (especially in fancy dress).


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Blowing their own trumpet

Nellie the elephant packed her trunk and said hello to the Circus: that's Piccadilly, Oxford and Cambridge Circuses, among others.

All over London, arty elephants have landed like a jumbo treasure hunt. It's not some much 'Where's Wally?' or 'Where's Waldo?' but 'Here's Barbar!'

It's all in the name of Elephant Parade, a campaign to highlight the loss of habitat for Asian elephants. The artworks will be auctioned at Sotheby's in July with a view to raising £2 million for the cause: all assuming trophy hunters don't cart the artefacts off to the black market before the game keepers can react.


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The British character ...

It's worth giving a wider airing to comedian Rufus Hound's dance routine for Sport Relief, reliving Cheryl Cole's moves for her single Fight for this Love. It's a microcosm of the British character.

What more could you ask? The British excel at poking fun at ourselves, blokes in frocks, raising money for charity, being rubbish at sports we invented, pricking pomposity, and putting full-on heart and soul into being incredibly silly.

Rufus Hound's routine ticks all the boxes.

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Sport Relief ... when it's over

Couch potatoes everywhere salute the crazy achievement of Christine Bleakley with a toast of 'Thank God that wasn't me'.

Mad dogs and Northern Irish women may go out for an early bath -- on water-skis in the English Channel -- but most locals would be content to watch her noble efforts from a distance on The One Show.

Miss Bleakley is the latest example of plucky Brits taking on eccentric challenges in the name of charity, or simply for the hell of it.

Sport Relief is a peculiarly British good cause.

Earthquake fatigue

Chile has just experienced one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history: 8.8. on the Richter scale. But it will soon fall off the news agenda.

Why? Because Chile planned for the natural disaster in advance. Buildings didn't collapse as they were constructed to be flexible, so the human loss of life -- though tragic -- was not biblical in scale. Lessons were learned from a similar disaster in 1960: and earthquakes seem to be a regular feature of life in Chile.

And the Chile event was the second international earthquake within a month, so the disaster didn't even have the merit of novelty. Unlike Haiti.

The international response? Call us if you need to, but you seem to be doing fine on your own.

Even the tsunamis passed around the Pacific Ocean without much of a murmur.

And the news footage often came with inappropriate, juxtaposed channel advertising. The world has already moved on.

You've gotta be in it to win it

To say Nigel Page and Justine Laycocks' bank manager is happier this week than last would be an understatement: the couple scooped £56,008,113.20 in the EuroMillions jackpot lottery. And Mr Page thought his luck was in when he won £55.00 in the National Lottery the previous day.

So, apart from getting married (which the couple announced today), how might the money be spent? Here are twenty ideas:

• Blow the lot on 206 Lamborghi Murceilago cars at top-of-the-range prices;
• Buy 9,460,830 copies of Stanley and Dankos' The Millionaire Next Door;
• Sponsor 1/10th the cost of the 2012 Olympic Stadium;
• Donate 1/250th of the cost of rebuilding Haiti;
• Run the economy of Tivalu for six years;
• Furnish UK hospitals with 13.3 new PET-CT scanners to fight against cancer;
• Play with 80,820 top end Apple iPads;
• Finance five seasons of Doctor Who (but not the Christmas specials);
• Buy three floors and a mezzanine of the most expensive house in London;
• Rehouse 589,559 mutts from Battersea Dogs and Cats Home;
• Wolf down 7,467,749 boxes of a dozen Krispy Kreme Donuts;
• Bid for two copies of Van Gogh's Irises at the 1987 world-record price;
• Re-run the wedding 5,091 times at the cost of the average UK nuptials;
• Give 91 pence to everyone living in Britain in 2008;
• Splash out on 87 per cent of Ronde Island, Grenada in the Caribbean;
• Finance 28.7 minutes of Avatar, the most expensive Hollywood movie ever made;
• Stock up on 3,833,055 Paracetemol tablets from Boots the Chemist;
• Enrol for 280,040 Tandem skydiving courses as a solo jumper;
• Contribute 1/9th the cost of developing and marketing a new drug to the marketplace;
• Sign the legs and torso of Christiano Ronaldo.

Live Ode for Haiti

The Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, has arranged a Live Aid-style poetry event to take place at Westminster's Central Hall on Saturday 30 January 2009. The poets taking part include Andrew Motion, Brian Patten, Roger McGough, Maura Dooley and Gillian Clarke.

Here's a feeble addition to the cause:

Port-au-Prince had a terrible quake

That caused politicians to make

Promises galore

Of aid to the poor --

And artists sped to the wake

Not exactly Edward Lear, but the event itself will have inspired oodles of heart-felt scribbling. I feel a book of the gig will follow pretty soon chasing the charity dollar ...

Branding celebrities

The News of the World's recent headline about the state of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's relationship is the latest example of celebrity profiles behaving like brands. Brangelina is like a corporate entity for which rumour and gossip does not allow for the fact that the partners are actors with professional engagements, separate job roles and PR responsibilities, as well as needing downtime away from the media.

So what if Brad and Angelina didn't go to the Golden Globes? Who cares that Brad supported George Clooney's 'Hope for Haiti Now' charity musical extravaganza with Angelina less prominent and that Jennifer Anniston was at the same event? Who knows (or minds) if Angelina has depression, which is surely a private matter?

The tabloids and the blogosphere care, of course, because celebrity brand stories sell newspapers. But my guess would be that the human beings behind the stardust don't read the press, or at least employ people to sift out the rubbish. I suppose occasionally star couples really do split up, but that's life -- and only every blue moon when it comes to the number of times the media predicts such break-ups.

Tinseltown is only reality with tassles.

I'm a Celebrity revamp

So Gino D'Acampo, a TV chef, was crowned King of the Jungle in 2009's I'm a Celebrity, who made his mark by cooking a rat when rations got low. So last month, and the format's looking a bit tired, too.

How about swapping the Bushtucker trials for some really impressive stunts?

• Base-jumping off the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai;
• Marrying Piers Morgan in Vegas;
• Competing in the Ironman Triathlon;
• Running the gauntlet of the 38th Parallel;
• Duetting with a Chinese Idol contestant, who makes Jedward sound like the Everly Brothers.

In reality, ITV have bought format rights to 71 Degrees North, a survival show where celebrities brave Arctic conditions in Norway: I'm a Celebrity on Ice meets Comic Relief's climb up Mount Kilimanjaro looks like a genuine feat of endurance and bravery.

Bordering on the edge

Borders (UK) Ltd has just gone into administration, appointing MCR to manage the job with the likelihood of 45 shops in the UK turning to dust, or maybe a few more of those Everything-for-a-Pound establishments that grace our high streets. In the US, Oprah Winfrey has sobbed goodbye to her iconic show, Richard and Judy's UKTV show was not much Watched, and Amazon -- currently with about 15 per cent of market share for book sales in the UK -- has launched the Kindle ebook device with a fanfare matching increasing demand from readers for the electronic format: yet oodles of new books are still published every year, 120,947 in 2008 according to Nielsen BookData.

So what might be the medium-term trends? It seems a no-brainer for Apple to launch some kind of iProduct to hoover up loads of technophiles not geeky enough to adopt a Kindle (maybe by launch a smaller, portable version of the iBook laptop computer as a bespoke reading device with nifty applications for downloading content that don't get publishers into a copyright lather). Current demographic studies of reading behaviour show that young people are increasingly used to getting their content on-screen, and although they read books they are tending not to purchase paper-based products as much as before. So, publishers may come to see hardbacks and paperbacks as record labels see vinyl and CDs: as heritage formats for niche markets. All well and good if you have access to the latest computer technology.

But what about the billions of potential readers in the world without internet and/or computer access. Such people often have mobile phones, and internet access is growing, but electronic readers are expensive and may be difficult to replace if they break down. And will currently available ebook readers work in tropical climates and desert heat (i.e are they waterproof and does sand clog up the works)? If publishers produce fewer paper-based titles in the future, how will charities like Book Aid -- committed to getting books into the hands of nascent readers in sub-Saharan Africa -- have enough of the right titles to send? Or will the likes of Amazon and Apple agree preferential contracts to get their electronic readers in African hands in sufficient numbers? Future global literacy projects face new threats and opportunities.

Me and Mrs Janes

Jacqui Janes, I feel your pain. Or at least a tiny sliver of it.

The media world has moved on since Gordon Brown penned his heartfelt, misspelt letter of condolence, with The Sun getting the larger portion of egg on its face for neglecting to remind readers of the PM's partial blindness and for its own website blunder expressing dearest sympathy for "Mrs Jones".

But today I'm encouraged by my Alma Mater to tithe my modest income to help fund budding academic boy geniuses, which might be understandable if they'd sent the begging letter to the right person. The sheen of alumni status pales somewhat if the school can't get your name right. I clearly made so great an impression on the esteemed establishment that, when some years back I pointed out out their mistake, they insisted there were two of us by the same name in the same year and told me my middle name was Andrew.

So I'll leave the philanthropy to the Phils and Annes until someone cleanses their database, or probably later on the parallel logic that charity begins at home (at least, it does on my meagre annual crust).