Flicking through The Guardian (to be fair, dear reader, I was in Leicester and there were no Posts to be found) I came across a picture of the new Doctor Who, Matt Smith, in his newly-unveiled trademark look. Aside from thinking that a bow tie and tweed jacket was the mode du jour for all Open University lecturers of my childhood, rather than time-travellers, my main response was "Is that really news?"

That's not a comment on the increasingly central role that Saturday night television is playing in defining our national culture, but because I'd already seen that image. Three days previously a friend in Cardiff had texted me a pic from her mobile phone and a formal BBC publicity shot was online the next day and highlighted in a Twitter feed.

My reaction to the Doctor's photo was a microcosm of the issue being faced by the Post at present. Printed media is simply unable to keep pace with contemporary news dissemination such as Twitter, websites and blogs.

For a musician, such as Sir Edward, losing first your sight and then your hearing must be devastating. Concerns about hearing loss have been exorcising the musical world for years now. Although one might think that rock musicians are at greatest risk, players in our finest orchestras suffer just as often. And recent research shows that you are probably at risk too.

I've had a good look at the claim forms, helpfully posted on the BBC website, for reasons I'll come on to. While some of the expenses seem rather petty (23p for parking? I'd love to know where that car park is), some rather unorthodox (spending best part of £500 on meeting expenses with future colleagues BEFORE he started work at the BBC?) - and others must be the result of some seriously robust negotiations over his contract (paying his annual congestion charge, presumably just so he could drive to work), the majority of the published expenses are pretty damn boring to my mind. Which is exactly why they've been released.

Firstly, many congratulations to Suzie Branch of BHMG Marketing on being crowned BYPY 2009. Clearly a popular choice, Suzie's citation highlighted both her skills as a business woman and her willingness to put something back in the community - exactly the combination of skills shown by our illustrious city forefathers such as the Cadburys, Lloyds, Chamberlains and Martineaus.

Birmingham Future, which runs BYPY, has emulated these laudable ambitions themselves by launching The Future Foundation, a charitable fund set up to support education, employment and training projects in Birmingham. Last night the 620 guests at the award dinner watched a short video about some of the work done by the Birmingham Foundation -the community charity which will administrate Future's fund - which showed some really tear-jerking projects and the differences they made. It would be a hard man or woman who wasn't moved.

Although there's been a lot written about the dire economic climate, it was clear that not everyone at the ICC was on their uppers: plenty of generous raffle ticket purchases should see many thousands of pounds more available to help train and support Birmingham's young people in the future.

Fundraising charities broadly receive their income from one of four sources: public sector support, trusts & foundations, companies, and individuals. Although Arts Council England has set up a specific fund to help arts companies through the recession, some other funders - local authorities, regional development agencies, etc. - have found themselves with dramatically-reduced resources and so have been forced to cut services and sector's support of charities has been cut back (or in many cases simply removed) and trusts and foundations have found their endowments somewhat shrunken in the face of Icelandic banking disasters and world economic turmoil. Fundraisers are now hoping that individuals will feel compelled to support projects close to their hearts - but wait, aren't these the very same individuals who are losing, or worried about losing, their jobs right now? That's right, it's the humble taxpayer who foots the bill. However, we are known as a supportive and generous nation when it comes to charity; as the phrase goes, charity begins at home and recent history seems to bear this out.

Or more accurately, people-listen. People are endlessly fascinating, with their foibles and stories and one-sided phonecalls.

Now, there's a lot of talk about role models, and some of it is tosh - speculation as to whether certain footballers, pop stars or soap actors are suitable role models for our young people following news leaks about their latest affair/nightclub brawl/pre-arranged photo opportunity at the local hospital is somewhat simplistic and naive, and underestimates our young peoples' intelligence. But in the course of a conversation with colleagues recently, I got around to thinking that many people growing up in the 70s and 80s - particularly those from non-white communities - could be forgiven for thinking that 'people like them' (and I use that term advisedly) did not fit into modern society as there was a distinct lack of role models who were anything other than white, middle-aged, middle-class men.

I should confess that I am a fully paid-up member of the Lynne Truss fan club and do get extremely irritated by poor punctuation, grammar and syntax, and careless typos. Recent signs on my local high street offering "Cut price CD's" and better still "Potatoe's" (not in the same shop you understand) had me mentally reaching for the Tippex. My English teacher always told us that the rule about apostrophes was "If in doubt, leave it out". Not foolproof, but certainly less irritating in the days where there was no spellcheck on a computer to point out your foibles (in fact, there were no computers in our school).

John Prescott claims to be able to spot who attended public school by 'their confidence, the way they speak, and the way they dress'. Not sure what he'd make of me, but I suspect on first meeting that he'd pigeon-hole me as grammar school material. In fact, I had very much a Comprehensive education, albeit within a specialist music school, and I'm very proud of the fact that my granddad at various times in his life was a miner, worked in a Singer sewing machine factory, and ended up as a foreman in a Clyde shipyard. My grannie's best friends were the offspring of Red Clydesider - hardly middle-class credentials.

I received all my education in Scotland, which admittedly does have a different system, but my primary school was particularly progressive. As a new build school with hitherto-unknown delights such as a wet play area (in reality, a trough filled with water and a few models of water wheels) and a psychedelic Colour Room for us to chill out in (that can only have been thought up by someone after a chemically-enhanced brainstorming session), in hindsight I suspect that us pupils were used as guinea pigs in a range of pedagogical experiments. For instance, it was only in our final year of primary school when the inter-school netball league kicked in that we discovered that we were the only kids in the area to sit formal exam-style tests each October, despite being lead to believe that everyone had to do them; the sense of betrayal from those in a position of authority has never quite left me.

One of the particularly forward-thinking parts of our curriculum was to show us, as a class of eight year olds, a film of a woman giving birth. The footage was in very grainy sepia tones (which led to the rumour that babies were poo-ed out), but certainly left a very deep impression on us all. Scare tactics may not always the best way to work with kids but I've often wondered if my classmates at Craigdhu Primary School had statistically fewer children than the national average.

Perhaps if we had been part of a longitudinal research piece, the current Government would know whether their forthcoming ideas will work.

I've been musing on this all day, and I'm really not sure what I can add to other posts I've read on credit crunch, mortgage misery, or financial failings - maths was never my strongest subject.

But what has hit me is that poverty isn't really about money. Let me explain.

One of the most life-changing things I've ever done was to visit Khayelitsha, one of the massive townships outside Cape Town. Poverty doesn't even begin to describe the conditions that some of the locals were living in. We heard some horrific stories, including the women who insert Femidoms before walking home at night, figuring that they can't do anything to stop being raped but they could do something to stop them contracting HIV.

Nothing to do with 'All You Can Eat' Sunday lunch buffet specials, but more to do with people, statistics, world hunger, awesome events and a sense of common purpose with other Brummies.

I've seen a few Stan's Cafe shows over the years but Of All The People In All The World had taken on almost mythical proportions as friends and colleagues told me with pride that they'd seen the original shows in Coventry and Birmingham in 2003. Since then it's travelled and wowed the world, adding more weight to the idea that many Birmingham organisations are better regarded and celebrated outside of the B postcode catchment than within it.

Anyway, I'm not going to tell you much more about the show because, quite simply, you have to go. Don't be like me and spend the next five years kicking yourself that you didn't see its last local airing.

If you leave without being moved, you'd be inhuman. It should be compulsory for all politicians, local and national. In fact, we should try to get all delegates at next week's Tory Party conference to take an hour out of their drinking schedule - sorry, busy conference diary - to nip over to the Jewellery Quarter and see it.

My highlight? Some interesting stats on the number of British female MPs ever, set beside a sheet where three of our local female MPs - Lynne Jones, Clare Short and Gisela Stuart - were each represented by a grain of rice. Except there were only two grains.

One of our MPs is missing.

One of the speakers was a futurologist, who posed some very interesting thoughts about life for cultural organisations, and society in general, in the years to come. However, almost straight after that session I saw two friends who both, in different ways, showed me that it's hard to predict the future.

One told me that the husband of a mutual friend had been made redundant earlier that week, something that came out of the blue to him as he was a high flyer in his company's HR department and had assumed, therefore, that he would always have some advance notice of any cuts to be made. With one small child and another on the way, this wasn't in their life plans.

And then I caught up with my other friend, who I hadn't seen for about a year, our last contact being just before her wedding last autumn. Four weeks later her new husband died from a blood clot, completely out of the blue. What do you say to a woman widowed at 30?

One cannot fail to have been moved by the mix of joy, elation and often pain on the faces of our athletes over during the Beijing Games, whether they 'medalled' (since when was that a verb?) or simply completed their event. The UK has gone Olympic-mad with pride, and with great justification. All Olympians are very special people indeed.

Olympic medals.bmp

Much discussion has taken place over investment in elite sport, particularly in the disciplines where we've achieved such success, and it's clear that we have a winning formula: UK talent x investment = return. Injuries and illnesses aside, where the sports' governing bodies have got things sussed to identify upcoming talent and where money has been invested, we've won medals. Great.

Looking forward to 2012, there is already talk of even more medals in London as the home nation always has an edge with the opportunity to familiarise itself with the venues long in advance of the incoming nations, as well as the support of the crowds. But we do need to look at where the money to pay for this is coming from.