Bands often talk about breaking the expected boundaries of the rock concert. Usually, this means that a) the lead singer jumps off the stage and walks through the crowd, or b) really expensive pyro. So when a band really does snap you out of that rock-show routine, it’s a grin-inducing luxury.

Your father was a diplomat and you had lived in, by my count, seven different countries by the time you were an adult. Can you imagine a life without travel?

The hair/make-up

Chris Beetles Fine Photographs, London

1. Encounters at the End of the World

£10.99, hmv.com

Director Werner Herzog comes up trumps in this documentary about the polar explorers of the National Science Foundation Station.

The man who pays his way

Christmas books of the year

If he had only ever written Only Fools and Horses...John Sullivan would have ensured his place among the creators of classic television sitcoms.

The film-maker James Cameron, the ultimate technology geek, is building up momentum for Avatar 2.

Alberto Granado was the young doctor who accompanied his fellow Argentinian and childhood pal Ernesto “Che” Guevara on an idealistic motorcycle odyssey through South America in the early 1950s.

Cuba is mourning Alberto Granado, who six decades ago accompanied a friend on an epic journey across South America that was to awaken their political consciences and alter the geopolitics of a hemisphere. Mr Granado – his pal was Ernesto 'Che' Guevara – died in Havana at the weekend aged 88.

Tae bumped down on the bed frame and it cracked. Startled, he leapt up and uttered a deferential apology to the room. This was no ordinary bed but one belonging to a senior cadre of the Pathet Lao, the Laos communist leadership that had operated from a series of 480 caves deep in the north-east of the country to escape US bombardment between 1964 and 1973.

Famous reporter Murray Sayle tracked down Che Guevara in Bolivia. But ex-BBC man Clifford Luton lodged double PCC complaints against the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times because their obituaries of Sayle failed to say he paid for a plane to locate yachtsman Sir Francis Chichester in 1966, while Sayle was merely a passenger.