If you’ve seen me on Myspace you may have noticed my “Hero/Person I’d Like to Meet” isn’t The Divine. It’s Beantown Boy Conan O’Brien. And FYI it’s not a coincidence that I just happen to be a member of Facebook’s Be Cool My Babies: A Conan O’Brien FanClub. (Yes, I’m a networking junkie…)

I’m not exactly sure what the Fan Club does. Or what they discuss when they discuss. But there’s just something about having that label slapped all over my profile that makes me feel like I’m part of a-big-special. Something knowing. Something wonderfully witty and all together awesome. It’s just one of those ‘Things About Me’ that everyone should know up front.

Why Conan O’Brien is a Stud: Reason #127 (Yes, I have a list. Yes The Harvard Lampoon and Saturday Night Live are numbers 1 and 2. And….Yes. This may trump “That incredible hair” for number 3.)

O’Brien helps staff during writers strike: ‘Late Night’ host pays salaries of 80 people.

I was on Facebook last night looking at a group called “I survived the 192″ – or something. A meeting point for 4000 strong; set up for anyone who ever took the 192 from Manchester Piccadilly to….well, to where ever it is the 192 ends up. (Hazel Grove?)

The 192 is a Magic Bus. A huge two-story blue contraption that always smells like hash and vomit. I only climbed aboard once but I took the 142 (Magic Bus too) enough to know the sort. Rode them through the week in my student days. Back then I didn’t mind the stink because I saw everything as ‘part of the experience’. Even if I was sick to retching by the time I got home every evening (I don’t do doob).

But the thing I remember most about the Magic Bus wasn’t the hash or the late night kebabs (bit of a staple on those things) or the grubby groups of boys who chose random victims to clobber over the head. It was this: That they ran over people. People in cars of course. Still.

You’d be in the middle of rush hour, trying to get down Wilmslow and onto Oxford (especially onto Oxford) and if you were on a Magic Bus it would just start playing bumper cars. Like it was tired of waiting. Like it had some kind of right to push everyone else around and out of the way so it could make it’s way through. I once saw a man get his fender caved in and he didn’t say a word. Know why? Cause most of the drivers were like their buses. They were big and blue (tattoos) and smelled like dope. People were afraid of them.

They were the bullys, those buses. The hooligans. The all things chavvy of the Manchester transit system. I wouldn’t ride one if you paid me. But you know what? I still get nostalgic. Every time I see one.

Go big blue.

I try to choose a handful of ‘unread-by-me’ books from this list every year. Novels I would have never otherwise been moved to try on. Like Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black, a 2005 listee. Or The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler which sounded a little too pink to pick up through any other recommendation. This year I’ll be making a selection from the Non-Fiction list. Leonard Woolf: A Biography by Victoria Glendinning, because I’ve recently developed an irrational fascination with Virginia’s husband. But back to fiction and poetry…

I ADORE this girl. Never mind the gorgeous hair and fabulous fashion sense, her voice makes you fall back into yourself. Pulls you apart and puts you back together again – all content and dream like. She’s also an amazing lyricist, leaving me the envy shade of green. Especially since she’s only seventeen. Horrah!

Jose Vanders. As-In-Josephine. Not José. And none of that Kate Nash lip please. Thanks.

A British national newspaper asked the question: “What does it mean to be British?”

Hundreds of readers responded…the most interesting reply came from a Swiss gentleman who wrote:

Being British is about driving in a German car to an Irish pub for a Belgian beer. Then traveling home – grabbing an Indian curry or a Turkish kebab on the way – to sit on Swedish furniture and watch American shows on a Japanese TV.

“What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself.”

-Samuel Clemens

He doesn’t like sleep. Doesn’t really see the point of it. Thinks it’s a waste of time. A waste of life. There’s too much to do to not be doing it.

Me. I adore it. I need it. I hunt it down and try to be it.

I once wrote over 10,000 words in bed. In half sleep. In my head. Got up the next morning. Typed it up. Every bit of it. There it was. Didn’t miss a beat.

I never think so well; as when I don’t think at all.

He died. He died and he reckoned, as a dead man does, that if he’d only had one more space of time, one more year to do it all again, he could set right that one thing he set wrong.

Bailey had always been the sort of man who missed the mark. Like when Joe Lambert tried to get him to go in and buy 200 acres on the back of Toler Mountain because Joe heard a rumor the road was coming through and if they bought now they could sell for a profit, a helluva profit, in a few years flat. Bailey said no. He wasn’t the speculating sort. Didn’t like to take chances. He was the kind of man who chained his tractor to a tree just to keep it from tempting his neighbour.

Holy Trinity, Stratford.

But Joe was right; and four years later when the State Road came through Joe and his family retired on the money made from selling off those acres. Money Bailey could have made too if he’d a been any sort of risk taker. But he wasn’t and he weren’t and and there aint no point going on about it now except to show how Bailey always missed the mark. Just like he missed it last February right before that tree fell on him and crushed or smothered – he still aint figured which – his life right on out.

If he’d just done what he had the chance to do that day. That very same day – instead of thinking he’d have another day and another time to make it right (like we all do, I suppose) then he wouldn’t be where he was – stuck somewhere between the now and the hereafter wishing he’d told Sullie about that thing buried in the back yard – and how it came to be there in the first place.

I adore this woman beyond words. I’m actually getting teary eyed. That’s how big of a dork I am. And P.S. – doesn’t she look just like you’d imagine Scout to look at this age.

Author Harper Lee has been presented with America’s highest civilian honour – the Presidential Medal of Freedom – by President George W Bush for her outstanding contribution to literature. Her only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird – a plea for racial tolerance – won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961.

Publicity Still from the 1962 Film: To Kill a Mockingbird

President Bush said medal recipients had “earned the respect of the American people” and held “a unique place in the story of our time”.

Lee, 81, stopped giving interviews after winning the Pulitzer Prize and seldom makes public appearances. In a rare article published in The Oprah Magazine last year, Lee said that in a society where technology prevails, “I still plod along with books”.

Platinum and diamond Edwardian pin picked up on Portobello Road.

Vintage Gucci wallet, 99p at Help the Aged in Cheshire – the elderly lady at the till imagined ‘pounds’ to be a misprint and sold it to me for the pence version. I let her. Because I’m bad. Bless.

Complete works of “Artemus Ward”. London. 1893. From my favourite Bond Street bookstore – Oxfam.

It pays to be discerning when it comes to second-hand perusing. Yesterday I brought home two Thonet chairs for a fiver each. I plan on distressing them and making cushions with fabric from the Designers Guild. Fingers crossed I wont run out of steam before the project’s complete. Because, you know, sometimes I do.