Yes, I was entertained reading John O'Farrell's collected columns from the turn of the century. They are pretty parochially British political but on the whole they have aged well, although I had a jolly good laugh at a piece on Ericsson the phone manufacturer's woes, saying that the love affair with mobiles was over and people just aren't that interested in surfing the net on the go. Ahem.

Occasionally I felt he'd wandered across the line between legitimate humour and just plain ad hominem nastiness but perhaps that is because the targets have, most bizarrely, since become National Treasures and/or private sadnesses revealed. I do remember feeling at the time that those individuals were pretty nasty pieces of work themselves. At one point he almost had me signed up as a party member and I did feel he made some good points about voting and coping with the fact that no party will behave as you would wish 100% of the time.

As this was my bag book, it has taken a while to read. I started round Thanksgiving. On 25th November 1999, John O'Farrell published the following prediction: Given current trends it is quite likely that Thanksgiving Day will be celebrated in this country within the next 20 years. It falls conveniently between Hallowe'en and Christmas and would fill a yawning gap in shop's promotional timetables that currently has Christmas stretching right back to early Autumn. American consumerism has always been one step ahead. Instead of spending eight weeks gearing their customers up to buy one turkey, they slot in an extra festival at the end of November so everyone has to buy another four weeks beforehand. It cannot be long before British shops try this scam on us" And so, in 2014, it has come to pass.

In a bagful of Bookcrossed books for Oxfam, handed in on a school snow day