“Hey, I can do this after all,” says a grinning Damon Gough – more popularly known as Badly Drawn Boy – as he basks in the applause of an appreciative Union Chapel crowd towards the end of this feelgood-fuelled charity gig. “F*ck LA.” There’s a roar of laughter from the pews. The evening is a validation for Gough, who had a much-publicised meltdown at the Troubadour Club in Los Angeles last December, threatening to fight an unruly crowd and then publicly quitting the music business (“I’m never playing live again - this has been a disaster,” he said).

The Anglican theologian AM Allchin wrote prolifically on Christian spirituality and, in particular, the relationship between Eastern Orthodoxy and the Christianity of the West. During a distinguished life as priest and academic, he strove to foster an awareness of the underlying unity between the major strands of Christianity, throwing new light on our understanding of diverse traditions and belief systems. He travelled widely, making available what he had experienced in places like Mount Athos and Romania in lectures, conferences, pamphlets and a score of books that are among the most readable, and stimulating, studies in their fields.

In these cash-strapped times, astute house-hunters are looking outside the box at ways of creating individual homes in the most unlikely places. Jon Du Croz and his partner, Emma Lally, are a perfect example, having transformed what was once a dark and dingy Oxfordshire public convenience and electrical substation into a bright, open-plan living space.

Vocalist Lewis Bowman smiles wryly as he flexes his sinewy fingers, wrapping them tightly around his microphone. Starting a show with your best-known single is risky, but as Bowman delivers the gothic, melancholic lyrics of "Surfacing", which samples the 1930s classic "Dream a Little Dream of Me", he clearly relishes the challenge.

Heat from a crematorium will be used to warm a leisure centre and swimming pool in Worcestershire in a controversial green scheme expected to be approved tonight.

Last Sunday's opening instalment of BBC1's adaptation of Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen books, about an incorruptible detective in Rome – perhaps the incorruptible detective in Rome – got careful scrutiny in our house, because we'd only just come back from three days in the Eternal City. "That's where we had the ice creams," went up the cry, causing far more excitement than Zen (Rufus Sewell) being followed by a sinister fellow on a motorbike.

A bomb exploded during Christmas Day Mass at a chapel inside a police camp in the volatile southern Philippines, wounding a priest and 10 churchgoers.

A woman is believed to have killed two of her children before taking her own life.

Who would be a king? Henri IV of France, the first Bourbon monarch, converted to Catholicism to end France's religious wars. His reward was to be assassinated by a fanatical Catholic in 1610. Henri's body was embalmed, but the head was lost after revolting citizens, annoyed by the excesses of one of his successors, ransacked the royal chapel at Saint Denis in 1793.