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The Australian-born chef is i's TV Dinners columnist, and author of 'Bill's Basics'. Here he chooses the places, products and people that he's loving right now.

Seven quangos attached to the Department for Education will disappear under the reforms, while the future of another nine bodies remains uncertain.

Islington might be a byword for north London middle-class smuggery, but one thing N1 residents can't feel too smug about is the local food scene. There can be few areas which offer so many restaurants, and so few decent places to eat. Since the demise of Granita, where the Blair/Brown deal was famously (and it turns out mythically) struck, there hasn't been a new arrival to generate more than local interest. Ottolenghi is clearly fab, but not suitable for all occasions, or pockets.

They're eating out of his hands

Prince Charles is a fan. Jamie Oliver urges his readers to seek him out. Elton John even paid him £2,500 for a steak. So what is it about the Dante-spouting Dario Cecchini that has the carniscenti queuing up outside a provincial butcher's in a tiny village in Tuscany?

You have to question the motives of those women you see in glossy magazines with their collection of 500 pairs of shoes, grinning beneath a headline saying, "I'm London's answer to Carrie Bradshaw." Maybe they occupy the same planet as those celebrities who confide in interviews that they "simply can't pass Liberty without dropping in to pick up a darling little silk scarf". Yup, we all have our little sartorial OCDs, but keep it under wraps if you can – and pity those of us with little choice but to wear our weaknesses for all to see.

Daft names are not clever, they're cruel, says David Randall

Delighted father Jamie Oliver proudly showed off his first son today and said he was "shocked" to have a little boy.

Simon Kelner, the editor-in-chief of The Independent, has been named Newspaper Editor of the Year at GQ magazine's Men of the Year awards.

The first major retail development in central London since the financial crisis will open its doors on 28 October to many of the high street's biggest names, and see the country's two most famous celebrity chefs going head to head with new restaurants.

Apart from the odd lard-chomping American telling him just where he could put his recent healthy eating campaign, Jamie Oliver's culinary empire has continued to expand with little trouble. Yet I hear Oliver could have his work cut out convincing some potentially troublesome natives in St Albans, where he's just bought The Bell pub – nostalgically renowned among local romantics, I'm told, for its trademark aroma of "stale lager and cheap perfume".

Remember when Jamie Oliver first came into the national consciousness, with that debut love-it/hate-it television series where he bished, bashed and boshed out stylish, accessible and wholesome food for his stylish, accessible and wholesome friends in his stylish, accessible and wholesome warehouse pad? His lifestyle was enviable and, even though a television show, lack of unattractive pals and a Shoreditch loft apartment were out of reach for most viewers, the Oliver style – letting you into his world, including you in the banter and jokes – made it all feel somehow attainable. And thus the sprawling Oliver brand, fingers in more pies at every step, was born.

In his rollercoaster career at the BBC, Jonathan Ross made it his personal mission to prick pomposity and court controversy. So it was perhaps fitting that, after a decade of trashing chatshow etiquette, he should bring down the curtain on his Beeb career by meting out the same treatment to his studio set.