Chippenham & Beyond

Get snapping with one of these wonderful camera accessories.

Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens and James Fenton are lined up against a balcony, high up in Paris – the rooftops are visible. It is 1980 and they are young, wearing dark suits. Fenton is well groomed, although Hitchens and Amis have unkempt hair that hangs down to their shirt collars. They look handsome, bohemian and intellectual. Each man takes on the lens with confidence, a direct and focused stare straight into the eye of the camera. There is not a flinch of self doubt between them.

Darwin to start off the new year, and you'd better get used to it, because there's a lot more where that came from, at least between now and his birthday in February. The main event this week is four programmes following Darwin's progress, misleadingly labelled In Our Time (Monday-Thursday, Radio 4), misleading because although the series is presented by Melvyn Bragg and has the usual band of academics chatting about the chosen subject, the feel is completely different. Bragg and his dons (spearheaded by the geneticist Steve Jones and Jim Moore, one of Darwin's biographers) are out and about in the places Darwin knew. On Monday, they were walking about Cambridge: Christ's College, where he was an undergraduate, the fens round about, where he studied and sometimes shot the wildlife, and St Mary's church, where he listened to sermons.

Spiritualists never die. As if pickled in formaldehyde, they simply "pass to spirit" or "go to Summer Land", an ethereal kind of heaven. Arthur Conan Doyle, in thrall to spiritualism, called for a new science of the paranormal and, in 1925, opened the Psychic Bookshop in London. The best Sherlock Holmes stories were written before he converted to spiritualism in 1917. It flourished amid the bereavement of the First World War, in which the writer lost his adored son, Kingsley.

Have you heard the story about the beautiful but poor girl who lived with her father? One day her father met a nice woman who went on to become her stepmother. She helped the girl with her homework, encouraged her to achieve all that she could and bought her lovely clothes, even doing her hair nicely with ribbons for the local ball where she fell desperately in love with a prince.

Chickens on tiptoes, pig complaining, taps jammed, puddles petrified, water butts frozen solid. We're in a deep, deep freeze the likes of which I can't remember. We'd been parked inside a chilly cloud for a while, a waxing, waning mist, but it was much colder in this morning's wide-open crisp cracker: cold gold sunshine and distant horizons in place of the vague, mystic silvery haze of the last few days. There's a fine, lingering dusting of snow here and there on other hilltops round and about, but even before the snow, the frost hadn't left the grass, the roofs, the flower-beds for days.

Charles Darwin would probably love the fact that the 200th anniversary of his birth is being celebrated with radio shows, documentaries and exhibitions, but he might not have enjoyed the way that furious Christians still despise his theories and try to prove the Bible is more reliable.

A successful publicity campaign ensures a masterpiece by Titian will remain on public display in the UK. Diana And Actaeon, one of a pair of Titians being sold by the Duke of Sutherland, (whose assets are said to be worth around £230m) had been on loan to the National Galleries of Scotland since 1945. The Duke had asked £50m for each picture, and the first instalment has been raised from galleries, the Scottish Parliament, the National Heritage Fund, the Art Fund and individual donations. Both these paintings are great works of art – but not everyone thinks we should be bailing out the Duke of Sutherland. We have other Titians – maybe not of this quality – and wouldn't it be better, as some critics suggest, to learn how to appreciate them instead? And why is Titian considered such a key part of our heritage? I ask because another equally remarkable part of our culture is vanishing into oblivion- the pottery industry. This week saw the third of our iconic brands – Wedgwood – follow Spode and Royal Worcester into administration.

Nicolas Guillén's masterly verses synthesised what the January 1959 triumph brought to our people. "I have what I was meant to have," he said in one of his poems, referring not to material wealth but to being the masters of our own destiny.

Vincent Ford is listed as the composer of the most recorded and acclaimed song in reggae music, "No Woman, No Cry", although the provenance of the song remains keenly debated. The song, made famous by Bob Marley & the Wailers in 1974, though since covered by scores of acts, including Joan Baez, Jimmy Cliff and the Fugees, is a depiction of what life was like "in the government yard in Trenchtown" where Marley spent his teenage years.

There is often a huge discrepancy between the mediacoverage and attendant publicity generated by fashion shows and the visibility of the couturiers' designs on the street. Ted Lapidus aimed to bridge that gap and make haute couture more affordable,believing that, "with the right workforce, there is no reason why a factory-made garment should not be aswell-produced as one coming out of a fashion house."

The playwright Dale Wasserman adapted Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as a Broadway play in 1963, and wrote the libretto for one of New York's biggest musical hits, Man of La Mancha, which opened in 1965 and ran for 2,329 performances.

Dinosaur rock fans aged 45 and over will remember the pulsating, eerily monotonous yet pioneering electronic sound of the smash hit "Autobahn" that launched the German band Kraftwerk on to the popular music scene back in the 1970s.

The departure of Florian Schneider from Kraftwerk marks a significant shift in the pioneering electronic group's musical chemistry. After a fruitful partnership lasting almost four decades, the creative core of Schneider and fellow founder member Ralf Hütter has been broken, which to electronic music aficionados is the equivalent of Lennon and McCartney splitting up.

Demand for gas in the UK soared to the highest level in five years yesterday as a result of Russia's stand-off with Ukraine and the cold snap.

A French sailor who was trapped in an air pocket inside his capsized yacht in the freezing, storm-tossed waters of the Southern Ocean for 16 hours was rescued yesterday after a fellow competitor in the round-the-world Vendée Globe race went to his aid.

The cosmetics company Estée Lauder was not justified in claims it made about one of its anti-wrinkle skin creams because research carried out on the product was seriously flawed, according to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).

It remains to be seen whether the civilian carnage which culminated in the attack on a UN school yesterday will bring the end of the war any closer – or dent the determination of those in Israel who would like to press on with it until Hamas is not only damaged but removed from its control of Gaza. Certainly a relatively incoherent international community has been slow in producing a credible mechanism for ending it.