When I was one of the people running the London Bisexual Group, so oooh fifteen or so years ago, they'd be forty or so people turn up each week including five to ten new people.

One week, someone came back for their second time and was most miffed that I couldn't remember his name from the previous week. So miffed in fact that they declined – no, 'refused' would be a better word – to remind me, and continued to do so ever afterwards. I soon stopped bothering to ask.

Today, I saw them again, with someone rather more sensible and now I know.

Not that I'm likely to remember, mind.

A friend was supposed to be on Five News this lunchtime, talking about the stupid proposals to criminalise – with strict liability! – buying sexual services from people 'controlled' (that doesn't mean coerced: if you chose to work for an agency and get told where a client is and you go there, or when your shift is, that's control) by others or who were 'trafficked' (even if they wanted to come here knowing exactly what work they were going to do).

But apparently Nicole Kidman not dyeing some grey hairs is a more important story, and there was only a few seconds on this one, complete with some classic 'women on street corners at night' shots…

We get into the nurse's room, and I get what I can only described as harangued about why she should have had it earlier in her life, why it was so important, why people who didn't have it were stupid etc. Read more

There's a mailing list which I think only one of you is on, where someone has asked – in all seriousness – "Does poverty really limit choices?"

My response:

"Let them eat cake" you mean?

I don't know if Amazon will publish it, so…

One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, by Melissa P.

Not hot enough for one-handed reading, not intelligent enough to need a brain

"A girl who loves herself doesn't let her body be violated by any man whatsoever without a specific reason and without any pleasure."

Quite: casual sex can be delightful, but if it contains no delights for you, don't do it! This is the big difference between this and, say, Catherine M's memoir that others have compared it to.

The problem is that it takes about two years into the diary for the protagonist to write that. Unfortunately, by that point I'd lost any interest in the characters. She's looking for love via casual sex, they're inevitably looking for a compliant set of holes.

Eventually someone decides they love her, but – even in such a short book – I had to skim backwards to work out which one it was, and didn't care enough to bother.

Cut tagged, so you still have time to guess

This picture:

What do you think the BBC News title is for it this morning?

This won't mean anything to people under, oooh, their early thirties, but Valerie Singleton shagged Peter Purves!

I never did believe the 'Val's a lesbian' stories, but I knew someone who swore that Peter brought his boyfriends into the pub they worked at…

The power went off just after nine this morning. A big plume of smoke could be seen towards Crystal Palace and we had a call from someone coming over that the trains weren't going along one of the two lines near us.

A call from someone closer revealed that it was an electricity sub-station going bang, and could he come over to do some washing because it looked like taking four or five hours before the fire was extinguished and – apparently – might be days before power would be restored.

Gosh that was frightening… Never mind having to do all clothes and dish washing by hand, with cold water (gas heating/hot water, but electric pumps), never mind quite probably no school for JA next week, never mind losing a recently refilled freezer's worth of food… no internet!

Fortunately, it came back a few minutes ago, so the power cut was about three hours long.

How long is civilization meant to be away from breaking down? As someone who grew up quite happily with power cuts in the early 70s (miners strikes leading to coal shortages at power stations) it feels like it got shorter.

January: PC Pro talks about Microsoft being the 'partner' digitising the entire 19th Century stock of the British Library – "Microsoft and Google have both been digitising books from US libraries and adding them to their rival online services for some time, and the British Library opted to partner with the former. Choosing Microsoft as a partner for any archiving project brings not only a wealth of experience and financial clout, but also a degree of controversy…"

May: Microsoft abandons the entire 'Live Search Books' project (and 'Live Search Academic'). But hey, they will start to "offer users cash back on their purchases from our advertisers", i.e. split ad revenue. If you're in the US.