The IoS literary editor and judge Katy Guest reveals the winners of a new award for overlooked British novels

When 50,000 civil servants were told last week that they should work from home for the duration of the Olympics, I imagine their first thought was how relieved they'll be to avoid all that annoying office etiquette. You know, like when you accidentally catch the eye of a colleague on the Tube platform in the morning and you both realise you're going to have to make small talk with each other all the way to work.

I'm generally sceptical of blinding new insights from Universities of the Bleeding Obvious, but every so often a study is published that gives crucial scientific weight to what we all instinctively know. So congratulations not only to the doctors at Harvard Medical School who studied 4,000 obese adults and came up with the "Not Rocket Science Diet" (eat less fat and exercise more), but also to the team of researchers from Munich University who contributed further evidence last week to a growing hypothesis: modern life is rubbish, and it's making us ill.

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Hobbits have a clever way of dealing with useless objects and unwanted gifts. In hobbit speak, such things are known as mathoms, and kept in special mathom holes. Every time a hobbit has a birthday, he or she gives gifts to everyone who attends the party, and in this way mathoms are handed from hobbit to hobbit and make their way all around the Shire. Often, a mathom will find its way back to its original owner. Which, in a slightly less generous way, is what happened to the writers Sophia Waugh and Nigella Lawson last week.

Let me make it clear from the outset that I am not going to write about Samantha Brick, the woman who wrote in a newspaper last week on "why women hate me for being beautiful", and provoked the fury of a nation. I'm not going to rate her looks, her personality or her mental health (and anyone who feels the need to do so as a result of reading this column, please provide photos of yourself and a note from your psychotherapist so that we can all see what makes you such a perfect judge). But what I would like to talk about is who benefits from this bizarre news event. I want to ask, because seeing so many otherwise smart, feisty people being sucked into its vortex has made me want to cry.

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Katy Guest leaps to the defence of Britain's chewed postal workers