✒There is something hilarious about the Tories' anguish over their leadership, and especially hilarious that the stalking horse may turn out to be the backbencher Adam Afriyie, a half-Ghanaian multimillionaire. Somebody must have sat down in a bar, or perhaps a hotel room swept for bugs, and said "look, the public are fed up with the country being run by a wealthy smoothiechops. What we need to do is replace him – with another wealthy smoothiechops! That'll show how inclusive we are. When it comes to millionaires, we Tories are colour blind!"
✒It's one of those trick pub quiz questions like "into which ocean does the western end of the Panama Canal flow?" The answer is, surprisingly, the Atlantic, as the canal runs more or less north to south but on a slant. Another is "what is 10 in London, but only one in Warsaw?" The answer is the letter Z in Scrabble, a thought prompted by the startling fact reported this week that Polish is the most spoken language in the UK after English and Welsh.
✒Another report this week revealed that British children see very little of their grandparents, which seems a dreadful shame. I had no paternal grandparents as my father was an orphan, but I have only the warmest, most affectionate memories of my mother's parents. Grandad was a headmaster who had served in the trenches, an experience he refused to talk about. The memories had to be buried along with the men he fought beside. Grandma was loving and caring and warm. She had a repertoire of delicious dishes which didn't cost too much, and on the long, slow journey across the Pennines to their house near Manchester we would break off from squabbling with each other and feeling sick from the fumes of the lorries grinding up the hills, to think about the mutton stew that was waiting.
She would no more have thought she needed a fridge than we would want a Large Hadron Collider in our kitchens, so in summer she would boil the milk to stop it going off. By morning a thick creamy crust had formed, so you draped it on your cereal like a lace doily. It was far more delicious than ordinary cream.
I think the great thing about grandparents is seeing another home, realising that people you love can have different priorities, different diversions, different opinions and lead quite different lives from the ones you see every day, and that is immensely valuable.
✒Fascinating that the new high-speed line is to loop round George Osborne's constituency in the rich lands south of Manchester, so ensuring there will be no blight there and an easier life for the chancellor. (Of course it's denied this is the reason. Sure.) By coincidence, Knutsford, the main town, is the model for Mrs Gaskell's Cranford, in which the plot turns on the planned arrival of the railway. This is opposed by many locals because it will bring noise and dirt, and the wrong kind of person. It's about old money versus new; the modern against the old. Admittedly, the dispute these days is over the fact that the train won't stop there, but it is striking how similar the battles are.
✒To the Lloyd's building, the country's newest listed structure, for English Heritage's celebrations of a century of preservation. The movement began in 1911, when the 15th-century Tattershall Castle in Lincolnshire was sold to Americans, who stripped out the wonderful stone fireplaces. These were tracked down before they could be shipped abroad, but the lessons were learned and in 1913 parliament passed the Ancient Monuments Act. Now the EH protects hundreds of buildings, from neolithic burial sites to modernist insurance HQs. And they are not abolishing the blue plaque scheme, whatever you might have read. Harry Beck, who designed the London tube map, and Mendelssohn are to be commemorated soon.
But what struck me in the speech by EH's chief executive, Simon Thurley, was his rage against wind turbines, with their "devastating destruction of local and nationally loved views". Round about the time he was speaking, a wind turbine in Bradworthy, Devon, collapsed in flames because it could not cope with the high winds.
As I have said before, these structures are essentially religious in purpose, designed to demonstrate ecological faith, because as a means of generating energy they are nearly hopeless. But believers still believe, in the same way that no one would become an atheist merely because a church spire fell down.
✒Iain Dale, the publisher, blogger and broadcaster has added to my prized collection of Lady Thatcher's unwitting double entendres. As those who worked with her knew, you could never look remotely amused because she would turn on you and demand to know what was so funny.
She was being interviewed by Michael Aspel on TV and he asked what it was like living in No 10. She said it was ideal "because I am always on the job". The audience roared, but Aspel knew he had to sit stony-faced and carry on as if nothing had happened. It must have been very difficult.
✒The comedy Movie 43 has been described by many critics as "the worst film ever made", a title it will have to slug out with Ed Wood's Plan Nine From Outer Space. Richard Gere, Uma Thurman and Kate Winslet appear, for some unimaginable reason. It is, apparently, utterly tasteless and unredeemed by good jokes. (The two-minute trailer does have some tolerable gags, but I gather they're the only ones in the whole three hours.) But what fills my heart with joy is the fact that this uber-turkey, this celluloid train crash, is the first film made by Richard Branson's new firm, Virgin Produced. And possibly the last.
• This article was amended on 4 February 2013 because the original said that Polish is the second-most spoken language in the UK. Polish is the most spoken language in the UK after English and Welsh.
