Yet again I forgot to lock the car on Friday night and yet again I found it ransacked on Saturday morning. Well, I say ransacked, but that is too strong a word, hinting at distressing damage and theft.

Actually my first reaction was the obvious default position - admonish my son for leaving the back of the car in an even horrendous state of God awful messiness than usual. On closer inspection the glove compartment was hanging open and CDs were scattered all over the drivers seat. Even my "spirited" nine year old would not have been so willfully naughty. Would he?

No, it was clear what had happened. Some optimistic numpties had seen the car vulnerable, had a quick rummage for sellable goodies, and I am glad to say, departed empty-handed. Actually am I that glad? I couldn't identify a single missing item, suggesting that the raiders had decided that the collection of Just William audio books and scratched driving CDs were, literally, worthless. What does that say about my taste?

If anything we seemed to be up on the deal. I found in the boot, bizarrely, an invitation from "Her Majesty's Representative" to apply for passes for the Royal Enclosure at Ascot and an unidentified car interior part that definitely did not belong to mine. It could be the only car break-in in history where the sum total of the contents were added to rather than depleted. Again I should feel relieved but how much of a compliment is it when one's car is treated as mobile neighbourhood skip?

It's now almost a month since Santa completed his rounds. Yet the streets of Hammersmith and Kensington are still littered with sad little piles of skeletal Christmas trees, unloved and abandoned in the gutter.

When will people finally get the message? No little council elves are going to spirit them away in the dead of night. There were a number of designated spots where Christmas trees could be dumped for collection, but otherwise they will lie there rotting until next December for all I know.

There is surely no other purchase that people would just chuck out into the street when they have finished with it after just a few weeks use. Imagine the uproar if everyone deposited their pumpkins on the pavement after Haloween. Christmas trees are clearly not the easiest objects to dispose of but most councils have arrangements for picking them up. Please fellow Londoners, make use of them or next year go for the tinsel option.

On my way up to my desk each morning I pass a huge video wall displaying the latest front pages of the papers produced by the publishers based here in Derry Street. One of them is the Irish version of the Daily Mail. One day last week its splash was about the general strike of public sector workers in Ireland triggered by deep cuts in Government spending. Today's banner read "Child Benefit Cut by 15 Per Cent."
I could not help feeling that what Ireland is going through now may be splashed all over our own papers in the UK perhaps a year from now.

Perhaps it's just me but I don't really understand why the shocking state of the public finances are not getting more coverage and attention than they are. One reason may be that the public still feels quite good about this recession and believes that the worst is over. Another is that the political parties have largely decided to "park" the issue of the deficit until after the election.

Ireland's recession was deeper than Britain's and our neighbour is not yet out of its slump. But our spending deficit this year will be far worse. There will be pain and yes, as in Ireland, major industrial unrest on a scale not seen since the mid-Eighties miners strike is surely unavoidable. You can already here the unions digging the trenches for the battle they know is coming. There will also have to be cuts in areas of public spending previously regarded as sacrosanct, like child benefit - as in Ireland.

I hear that one major City figure already believes that we are now so deep in it that only an IMF bail-out of the sort suffered by Denis Healey and Jim Callaghan in the late Seventies will solve Britain's problems.
Who knows, but if you want to get an idea of what life in Britain might be like next year...just glance over the Irish Sea.

I have been asked to be the star turn at my secondary school's speech day this year as a "distinguished" old boy. I can't tell you how chuffed this makes me feel, although slightly alarmed as well.

Back in the early Cretaceous period - or whenever I was a ragged arsed and actually rather undistinguished pupil at my Thames Valley comprehensive - I was an award winner a couple of times. Handing out the prizes then were the late theatre critic Sheridan Morley one year and the virtuoso pianist Semprini (also alas no longer with us) another.

I vividly remember sitting waiting nervously to pick up my prize for "trying very slightly harder than last term" or whatever gazing up at the impossibly ancient (certainly in the case of Semprini, born in 1908) figure on stage.

It is disconcerting to think that the ranks of pupils waiting to be handed their awards maybe thinking the same thoughts as the teenage me thirty odd years ago. "Who is this bloke, why is he droning on so long and couldn't they get someone younger."

But who cares, I am the guest of honour, it's my gig. For 15 minutes I get to do all the talking in a school hall when once teachers told me to shut up if my lips so much as twitched. It's an achievement of sorts and I plan to enjoy every ego-stroking moment of it.

It must be one of the oldest surviving pieces of health and safety advice: "light the blue touch paper and retire." If only it was that easy.

The words of pyrotechnic wisdom were playing through my mind as I fumbled for matches last night.
Having got home late from work and invited the neighbours and their children round for a firework show I was fighting against the clock. As I discovered when it comes to fireworks, ignite in haste, repent at leisure.

I thought I'd impress the assembled throng with a noisy rocket for starters. Match was duly applied to blue touch paper as per ancient instructions. Only one snag - it was the wrong end of said fuse and the blasted thing shot up almost instantaneously and blasted straight into the side of my face about an inch from my eye. I was lucky, it ricocheted off into the night leaving me almost unscathed. In the words of the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, "I've had worse." 

From the safety of the end of the garden the audience missed my brush with disaster (perhaps it should be 'light the blue touch paper and expire') and merely grumbled about the lack of end product. And of course the show must go on. Having worked out that it was best to apply the match to the end of fuse furthest away from the firework, the rest of the display went without further incident. Until the end. I looked on with horror as the last of the wretched things fell over and began spitting great gobbets of fire at the kids. Fortunately they fell just short, harmlessly landing at their feet. The kids loved it of course, thinking it was all part of the display.

As I accepted the half hearted round of applause my mind was fast forwarding to the next seasonal Dad task fraught with danger - placing the star on top of the Christmas tree.

The organic food industry may be looking in worse shape than a chemically enhanced death-burger but it does have one formidable advocate in Elizabeth Hurley.

The actress and model, who launches her own organic snack range at Harrods tomorrow, sticks her green wellies in the boffins at the Government’s Food Standards Agency who concluded - in effect - that organic food was just a gigantic con in a study published earlier this year.

Liz’s response: “I think that study was flawed and misleading. It didn’t deal with what isn’t found in organic food, namely pesticides, antibiotics, hormones and numerous chemicals. Neither did it mention the appalling conditions some animals suffer when intensively farmed nor that the planet simply can’t sustain the present levels of conventional, chemical agriculture.

“Of course, there are many responsible non organic farmers and many of them are in this country, but some of the meat which is imported into this country and sold cheaply has got a horrific history. I wouldn’t buy meat, organic or otherwise, unless I could trace it back to an actual farm.”

Well said Liz.

Sir Terence Conran's mould breaking Gastrodome restaurants of the Nineties brought much that was good and, alas much that was not so good to the London dining scene. It was Tel's establishments that lifted London's standard service charge from the traditional 10 per cent to the now ubiquitous 12.5 per cent. Word is that he wanted to go for 15 per cent but decided the punters would revolt and chose 12.5 per cent as a compromise. Whatever.

So there is a nice dollop of irony - which goes very well with humble pie I'm told - in his successor's announcement that the former Conran chain, now known as D&D London, is to axe service charges altogether. 

It would be nice to think others will follow but there are good and complex reasons -  the minimum wage and chip and pin among others -  why the "optional" service charge automatically added to bills has become embedded as the London way of handling the tip.

Most restaurant goers will welcome this change from D&D. It is quite right that diners should be able to show their appreciation for outstanding service, which makes a huge difference to the overall enjoyment of an experience that costs us ever more in London. Let's face it, service is still dire in many London restaurants where there is really no excuse.

For more than most it is a day that will forever be inextricably linked with tragedy at City brokers BGC Partners. The firm was formerly part of Cantor Fitzgerald, which lost all 658 of its employees working in the World Trade Centre on 9/11. So it is good to be able to report some genuinely uplifting news about the firm's annual 9/11 Charity Day, when it invited celebrities to take the phones to do deals on behalf of its traders.

I was lucky enough to be there this year and it is a mad, anarchic, good natured occasion, which combines the noise and confusion of a trading floor with the glamour and neck craning excitement of a celebrity event. 

On that day all commission earned on trades goes to the 26 chosen good causes. This year Sir Alex Ferguson, Jonathan Ross, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, Sir Ian Botham, many of the Ashes winning England cricket team and Rainbow TV stars Bungle and Zippy (I was particularly thrilled to see the Seventies childrens TV icons buying and selling swap options) were among those who helped out.

Across BGC's four offices - the others are in New York, Paris and Singapore - the firm raised a record $10 million. Well done.

I'm a hopeless and incorrigible optimist. In my universe England are always going to win the World Cup and slay Australia in the Ashes (you see, sometimes it works.) But I'm not buying into all this "phew, we got away with it" hysteria about the end of the recession. On the economy I am a fairly gloomy "double dipp-ist.".

Yes, the official figures will say that recession ended at the end of September but that doesn't mean the good times are back. After the V-shape, the U-shape and the bath-shaped downturns, some economists are now talking about the "square root sign" recession. That is a sharp fall in output followed by a small bounce and then a period of stagnation when GDP is flat for some time.

Personally I'm not sure the square root comparison works. The mathematical sign has a short downstroke followed by a longer upstroke, hardly the expected pattern for this recession. I prefer to think of it as the "heart-beat" recession. The classic ECG monitor of the rhythm of the heart shows a peak, a sharp fall, a small recovery then flat-lining until the next heartbeat. Got it?

Blimey all this heavy duty economics is making my pulse race. Anyway whatever convoluted comparison fits best my feeling is that Britain's borrowing addiction, which had remained remarkably unaffected for much of the year, finally ended over the summer.

The remorseless rise in redundancies and the huge competition for the few jobs that are out there means that more familes are asking the "what if" question. They will rein in spending and seek to pay down debt as a defensive measure  - just in case. Just look at the West End sales slump - the worst since 7/7 - reported in the Standard today.

This week will be a good reality check with the City braced for dismal figures on unemployment and the public finances. The Government might be giving the electorate the V-sign over the recovery. Me, I think these green shoots amount to the square root of sod all.