Where are you now and what can you see?

While more illustrious sides like Chelsea think about leaving their traditional home to solve the problem of only having a 42,000-seater stadium, a more modest football club faces being turfed out of the ground it has played at for almost nine decades because today marks the 21st anniversary of the death of the Norwegian King.

Wednesday afternoons in Primary 3 were given over to Free Writing. I remember this only because of one particular class. While the rest of us struggled to compose our stories, a boy whose name I forget was scribbling at such a rate he broke his pencil. He was given a new one, and he continued with furious concentration, even after the teacher had ended the session. What had possessed this otherwise unremarkable boy? What was his story? He had not been writing a story at all, we later discovered, but the same word over and over again.

I went to see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo the other day and was a little startled by how much smoking there was in it. Then I remembered that it was an 18 certificate movie and therefore licensed for the display of transgressive behaviour, whether that took the form of a violent rectal assault on an abusive therapist or the oral inhalation of burning tobacco. As it happens, films in which people smoke don't yet automatically receive an 18 certificate, though after watching Timeshift: The Smoking Years you wouldn't bet against it happening one day because, among other things, Borja Cantera's film was a study of how quickly the universally acceptable can flip into the untolerated. Presented as the evolutionary history of the smoker, it began with the democratisation of the fag with the invention of the first cigarette-rolling machine in 1880 and closed with a hideous vista of extinguished stub-ends, smouldering gently like a post-apocalyptic landscape.

Polo, the ski-shop manager at Les Barmes de l'Ours, Val d'Isère's swankiest hotel, is the kind of fellow one finds only in winter-sports resorts and Bond movies: charming, cooler than cool, with an impressive air of worldliness for a man whose horizons are all jagged and snow capped.

Where are you now and what can you see?

Have yourself...a very Thirties Christmas

A family recipe for creating tension

Millions of Britons have held a two-minute silence to remember the nation's war dead.

Rory Smith, a stonemason, puts the finishing touches to the refurbishment of the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner in London. The monument, designed by Charles Jagger and Lionel Pearson and first unveiled in 1925, has been repaired and cleaned in time for Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday.

A team of treasure hunters has discovered a vast haul of silver that lay on the North Atlantic seabed since the ship on which it was being transported was torpedoed by a German U-boat during the First World War .