I get heartfelt thanks from all kinds of people. Today I heard from a waitress in Georgia who has lost her job and is trying to figure out how her local bank can change the terms on her credit card and I heard from a physicist at a major research university who wants to explain a better theory of financial stress tests.

I think it true that you know sometimes things start to change even before a government changes and actually I think you can begin to see even the Labour machine beginning to understand that it has become over-reliant on targets and processes that local governments have been over-bossed and bullied.

Married couples who work together to build and maintain a business assume broad responsibilities. Not only is their work important to our local and national economies but their success is central to the well-being of their families.

I'm noticing a new approach to art making in recent museum and gallery shows. It flickered into focus at the New Museum's 'Younger Than Jesus' last year and ran through the Whitney Biennial and I'm seeing it blossom and bear fruit at 'Greater New York ' MoMA P.S. 1's twice-a-decade extravaganza of emerging local talent.

Mom and Dad were married 64 years. And if you wondered what their secret was you could have asked the local florist - because every day Dad gave Mom a rose which he put on her bedside table. That's how she found out what happened on the day my father died - she went looking for him because that morning there was no rose.

Is it not careless to become too local when there are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone.

It's not always possible to sit down and eat at home in this day and age of fast-paced living but if you are going to eat out do so as a family and support all the great local places in your areas. I'll still eat at the same diner I did as a kid with my parents.

As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well as it turned out I never wrote a great novel sadly and I never converted to Catholicism happily but I did do one thing he did. That is in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.