Monday



I’ve never seen the attraction of awards events on TV. Especially when there is a new episode of Endeavour and a new series of Homeland starting on the other channels at the same time. So it wasn’t hard for me to give the Baftas a miss on Sunday night. There’s only so much confected hysteria I can take. And it’s all so predictable. First the shots of stars, whose faces are vaguely familiar, but whose names all too often escape me, arriving on the red carpet.

Then a celeb – sometimes two – come on stage to read out the list of nominations in a particular category to be followed by a 30-second trailer of each film, before the breathless winner appears to say how grateful he or she is to everyone involved.

Repeat for three hours. I can see people in the film industry care about the awards, but I can’t imagine anyone else really gives much of a toss if Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri edges out The Shape of Water, so why it’s considered essential TV by so many escapes me.

That said, when I looked through the list of winners the following day, I couldn’t help feeling Paddington 2 had been robbed. For me, that was by far the most enjoyable film of last year. And the only one, apart from Three Billboards, that I didn’t have a quiet snooze in.

Tuesday

There’s one set of statistics that hasn’t got nearly the amount of attention it deserves. And that was the chart showing the number of injuries per 100 athletes for Winter Olympic events in 2010 and 2014. Unsurprisingly, the snowboarding events and aerial freestyle rank as the most dangerous, but what does come as a shock is just how lethal curling is. It ranks just below the skeleton bob – the event in which Lizzy Yarnold won gold by pointing herself head-first down a twisting ice tube at speeds of up to 80mph – but above ski jumping, speed skating and the luge.

So what is it with the curlers that they are picking up career-threatening injuries that others who are doing things that appear more obviously suicidal are managing to avoid? Is it that hurtling down a near-vertical slope, leaning forward and flying 120 metres through the air is actually a piece of piss or are curlers living on the edge?

Is the sport so riven with tension and rivalry that curlers are assaulting each other with broomsticks? Or are they just clumsy and dropping the stones on the feet? Still, it does partially explain why a Russian curler was banned for doping.

Wednesday

I was very sad to hear of the death of fashion stylist and accessories designer Judy Blame. I last met him a couple of years ago at a party to celebrate London Collections Men, the blokes’ equivalent of London fashion week, after the Guardian’s fashion desk had thought it would be rather fun to get the least stylish man on the paper to write about the event.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Judy Blame in 1984.

It was a tough few days for my minders, as I was more excited by the free pair of socks I was given at one show than by the clothes, and when we got to the party I literally knew no one apart from the MP Damian Collins, who was there as the not-very-hotly-contested chair of the all-party parliamentary committee for textiles and fashion. It’s fair to say that Damian didn’t look entirely pleased to find a parliamentary sketch-writer on his patch. He must have been hoping for a night off. Then I spotted this fabulously dressed man, whom I vaguely recognised.

“That’s Judy Blame,” my minder whispered. “You can’t go and talk to him because he’s one of the most important men in London fashion.”

“That’s odd,” I said, remembering where I last met him. It had been a squalid dive in Kennington back in the early 80s. And back then he was called Chris. Anyway, I went and said hello and it was immediately clear he didn’t remember me at all, even when I mentioned some mutual friends. But he was extremely polite and we chatted for about 10 minutes. Just as we had 35 years earlier.

Thursday

So I haven’t been imagining things for the past 20 years. One of the largest and most comprehensive studies ever done, involving almost 120,000 patients, has conclusively proved that antidepressant drugs don’t just have a placebo effect. They really do work. Not for everyone, but for enough people to have a positive impact on their mental health.

As someone who has only managed to survive recurring bouts of depression thanks to medication and therapy, I have often been amazed at the negative press antidepressants seemed to attract. The attacks seemed so vicious that it was almost as if some psychiatrists and science writers took it as a personal affront if anyone said anything halfway positive about their medication.

A few years ago I was asked to second a debate at the Maudsley hospital on whether the long-term use of psychiatric medicines were doing more harm than good. I accepted because I thought it was a no-brainer. Though some people might suffer adverse reactions, it seemed self-evident that in more cases than not the benefits outweighed the harm.

Big mistake. In a hall full of psychiatric professionals, I found myself in a small minority as two-thirds thought the drugs didn’t work. Which left me with only one possible conclusion. That these psychiatrists spent most of their working lives believing they were harming their patients. And I thought I was mad.

Friday

The inner cabinet have returned from their awayday at Chequers in an apparent state of high excitement, having agreed on their negotiating position for an end-state Brexit.

The euphoria probably had more to do with the fact that they survived the eight-hour session with no one having killed anyone or threatened to resign from the cabinet than on the nature of the agreement itself which was described as “ambitious managed divergence”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Members of Theresa May’s cabinet at a meeting at Chequers.

As the former Labour MP Denis MacShane wittily observed, they would probably have been better off calling it “managed ambitious divergence”. Or MAD for short.

For what MAD seems to entail is that we will stick to all the EU regulations we want to but will be free to diverge wherever we fancy: a fudge that is unlikely to satisfy everyone in the Tory party, let alone the other 27 EU countries.

All that the meeting really seems to have achieved is to kick the can down the road a little bit further. Just to prove how little faith the government had in its own landmark achievement, Jeremy Hunt was sent out on to the airwaves on Friday morning to explain it to everyone.

As the health secretary was one of the few cabinet members not to have been invited on the Chequers outing, at least he couldn’t be accused of deliberately misleading anyone.

Digested week digested: MAD

