Damon Albarn takes his latest opera, Dr Dee, to London's Covent Garden in June. Yet before the work about the mysterious Elizabethan alchemist and scholar opens at the Coliseum, the Blur frontman takes a short detour to Wiltshire with a band that includes Guinean musician Madou Diabaté.

March is with us and a countryman's thoughts turn to his vegetable patch. There is a lovely old medieval poem which assigns a certain outdoor task to each month, and the line for March is: "Here I sette my thynge to sprynge," which means, "Now I sow my seeds." For the full jaunty early-English effect, by the way, make sure you pronounce the final "e" in "sette", "thynge" and "sprynge".

A drugs gang "Mr Big" who smuggled £25 million of cannabis into the UK from Holland in lorry loads of flowers has been ordered to pay £2.6 million.

Paolo Di Canio won just as many friends as enemies in a playing career full of contradictions. Anyone at the County Ground who saw him mastermind taking the FA Cup scalp of Wigan will see he remains that animated human firecracker ever ready to explode. Management has yet to mellow the 43-year-old. But perhaps there is more than meets the eye with the mercurial Italian.

Japanese car giant Honda is creating 500 new jobs to meet a forecasted increase in production at its UK factory.

For complicated reasons, I found myself on a ferry in rural northern Italy this week. I struck up a conversation with a friendly middle-aged Italian lady who was travelling the same route as me and after small talk about the weather, the region and where we were both headed, the conversation turned to politics.

I'd rather hoped that Kevin's Grand Design would turn out to be a personal project, but although he seemed to have heavily invested in it, both monetarily and financially, we aren't yet to find out what the Nit-picker's Nit-picker would actually produce if he self-built a home for himself. Instead, this was to be an exercise in exemplary development: "I want to do everything," he said as he embarked on a project to produce low-cost, socially mixed housing. "I want it to be the best, I want it to be the cheapest, I want it to be the most sustainable, I want it to be the most exciting, the most architecturally inspired, the most contextual, the least mediocre." He also wanted to be the "Heston Blumenthal of housing", which sounded a little ominous. You expect an en suite bathroom, but you actually get a playroom-cum-kitchen, connected to the dining room by a playground slide.

Chelsea have failed in their attempt to sign a 12-year-old from Swindon Town. Jordan Young, who lives in Chippenham, came to the club's attention with his performances for the Wiltshire side's under-13s.

Gloucester have secured the future of one of their most promising young talents with centre Henry Trinder signing a two-year contract extension at Kingsholm.

Full production at a major UK car plant hit by the effects of the Japanese earthquake will not resume until September, it was announced today.

A taxi driver appeared in court today charged with the murder of Becky Godden-Edwards.

Rant

Five British soldiers shot dead by a rogue Afghan policeman were unlawfully killed, an inquest ruled yesterday. David Ridley, Coroner for Wiltshire and Swindon, recorded the verdict after a four-day hearing in Trowbridge, Wiltshire.