After an illustrious pre-war history, tomorrow sees the capital's first fully professional match for almost 40 years

LIKE MANY people, I have mixed feelings about bondage. Of course, it's fashionable. In certain circles, I accept, you take a pair of handcuffs with you on a date as matter of course. It's regarded as perversely unworldly not at some point to have been led around in a dog-collar or wrapped up in cling film or stood in a corner, roundly insulted and made to cry. But having been thrashed black and blue only once, and then when I was seven, I feel somewhat out of my depth.

Paul Gosling on the airline's recent jobs exhibition

Although I'm not a poet myself I've always enjoyed poetry, having been lucky enough to have been introduced to poets such as Philip Larkin by a teacher when I was at school. I studied viola at music college and went on to work with the City of London Festival as PA to the Classical Music Director, but left when another director went to run the Poetry Society and asked me if I would come with him.

revelations: harvey goldsmith

Mark Hayman abandons the terraces of Burnley FC for the delights of `Aida' in Zurich, his first ever opera

It's a well-known factoid (looks like a fact, smells like a fact, isn't true) that people are resistant to change - a line wheeled out regularly by the BBC when announcing schedule changes. Of course, if resistance to change were so firmly rooted in human nature, then we'd still be hanging around the Olduvai Gorge sneering at this trendy stone-tool rubbish and pining for the good old days, when people lived in trees and kids showed some respect.

You may have read a book - but you haven't experienced it to the full until you've discussed it with another reader. Or so say members of the increasingly popular readers' groups.

This year's water extravaganza features more than 1,000 boats (ranging in price from pounds 300 to more than pounds 1m), the latest in marine equipment technology; and Aquadance, a dance celebration synchronised with water fountains, music, lasers and indoor fireworks.

Of all the great relationships that never happened, few are so fascinating as a near-miss in the 1930s between two men who respectively became the leading English poet and composer of their time. The poet was Auden, who did all the running. The composer was Britten, who held back. And the evidence of what was going on survives in Auden's "Lay your sleeping head my love", which he scribbled down for Britten at a teatime assignation in a Lyons Corner House. Such was romance in pre-war London. Innocent but keen.

Margaret Beckett last night said she would keep a "blind trust" unless Sir Patrick Neill, the watchdog on standards, rules against the practice in his review on party funding.

You probably won't stand a chance of blagging a ticket for tonight's Earl's Court extravaganza but if you need a fix of Oasis, head for north London where you can view the boys Gallagher almost in the flesh. Noel Gallagher is rumoured to have come up with the title for Jill Furmanovsky's photographic tribute to Oasis, for which she was allowed unprecedented access backstage. The Was There Then exhibition features more than 200 shots of the band live in concert, in the studio and in private. In response to fans' insatiable desire for still more background to the band's activities, Furmanovsky has used the most up-to-date technology to produce images that are the closest you'll ever get to the band in real life. Be here now.

A "zero tolerance zone" will be set up to trap ticket touts who try to target fans at three Oasis concerts, police warned yesterday. Sergeant Dick Sutton, who is leading policing of the concerts on Thursday, Friday and Saturday at Earls Court in London, said he wanted to deter fans from turning up in the hope of buying black market tickets.

If you look in the index of Eric Partridge's Usage and Abusage, you will find nothing between "apology" and "applicable". Similarly, the third edition of Fowler's The King's English has no entry between "anyway" and "appendicitis"; and Robert Clairborne's The Life and Times of the English Language leaps from "anvil" to "apple". What is wrong with the apostrophe that all these worthy men choose to ignore it?