A week ago, my 13-month old nephew came to visit, with my brother and sister-in-law, which was lovely! Wendy thought that he might be entertained by stickers, and she seemed to have great fun playing with him and them. A week later, I’m still finding stickers around the house… but I’m not entirely sure which of them is to blame!

This book was a very pleasant surprise. I’d read reviews suggesting that this was “no children’s book”, and celebrating the swearing, and I expected some sort of horrendous easy-read chick-lit fantastical romp about caricatures taking wholly unrealistic actions to propel along a slightly crazy plot, with little touches of romance and the odd edgy sex scene shoehorned in to prove it wasn’t for kids.

The Casual Vacancy couldn’t have been further from that. It’s a proper state-of-the-nation epic, deconstructing the casual immorality of the middle-classes with genuine insight, razor-sharp wit, and an unshakable moral compass. Lesser authors make such points by viewing society as an outsider, or transplanting it to somewhere else. Rowling’s precise characterisations allow her to deliver a devastating socialist demolition of conservative small-town parochialism through simple storytelling dashed with black comedy. I don’t think it’s going too far to suggest that her approach is Dickensian, and there’s no question that its successful. I recently said that I was unmoved by One Day: that certainly isn’t true of The Casual Vacancy.

This isn’t a novel that’s thick with plot: it’s a ruminative characterisation novel. The plot, which is mainly driven by the younger characters, functions primarily to reveal more about the characters, especially the adults, through their reactions to events. In that sense, the structure is quite old-fashioned, written in the style that most books used to use before everything became short-chaptered plot-driven romps that make for simple scene-by-scene transitions to cinema. This has led to some criticism from those who expect something plot-driven from the Harry Potter author, but I found it both refreshing and brilliant. The authorship is something of a problem for this novel: I suspect it suffers poor reviews because people want Harry Potter 2, and this novel is simply not comparable. It is quite clearly aimed at a totally different audience.

A lot of reviewers have complained of difficulty keeping track of all of the characters in the novel. I can honestly say that I never found it a problem. Again, I wonder if that’s due to the recent proliferation of filmic novels withs casts of four or five making people unused to tracking wider ensembles. Or perhaps I’m just sympathetic to the novel because I loved it.

All things considered, it’s funny, it’s moving, it’s incisive, and it comes wholeheartedly recommended by me.

The Casual Vacancy is available now from amazon.co.uk in hardback and on Kindle.

You might have read that today M&S reported a £297m drop in profits for the first half of this financial year, with non-food sales particularly suffering (though admittedly improving somewhat towards the end of the period).

Mark Bolland is working on supply logistics, merchandise design and technology (including thousands of iPads) as the solution to these problems. There’s also, of course, the oft-cited problem of the M&S bust of the 1990s – over-diversification, especially of brands – which Mark Bolland is ploughing an awful lot of time and effort into repeating for reasons that frankly baffle me.

But I think there’s a slightly under-discussed problem: the state of the estate. Despite Sir Stuart Rose investing some £2bn in the estate only a handful of years ago, the estate is a mess. Here’s some pictures I took last weekend in the Newcastle flagship store:

The store has broken signs, patched up floors and fitments, the whole works. Note that these are not front-line problems – these are problems caused by poor quality, poorly designed store fittings. This despite going through Mark Bolland’s slightly half-hearted £600m store re-invigoration programme.

At heart, M&S is a premium retailer charging premium prices, which needs a premium retail environment – not shoddy broken fitments and badly scratched floors.

Clearly, the estate isn’t M&S’s biggest problem, but I think it needs further consideration. But then, when you’ve spent £2.6bn on refurbishing the estate in just eight years – the better part of £1m per day – how can anyone possibly convince shareholders that further investment is warranted? Does it start to look like serious mishandling of the original investment?

I don’t have the answers – and, frankly, I’m not convinced Mark Bolland does either. I’m obviously not party to the details, but I don’t think integrated multichannel retailing should be a massive priority – multichannel sales are increasing, but almost half of online orders are collected in store. In fact, if I were Mark Bolland, I would be trying desperately to retain in-store sales where service – M&S’s primary point of difference – is maximised. I’d be worried that one in five sales of men’s suits is online, not celebrating, as it puts customers a click away from, say, Brook Tavener, who compete strongly on price and quality, but without a bricks-and-mortar presence can’t hope to compete on service.

Why isn’t M&S pushing it’s service? If it wants to embrace multichannel, why not do it in a novel way that makes the most of bricks, mortar and service? ASOS famously advertises it’s free returns service, inviting customers to order clothes in a number of sizes and return the ones that don’t fit. Why doesn’t M&S push a similar order-a-range-of-sizes-to-store service, which could be a strong competitor, losing the complexity for the customer of organising parcel drop-offs and pick-ups? It’s a service which is pretty much already available under the current system, but isn’t pushed at all online.

Anyway, this is getting remarkably ranty for photo-a-day. I do hope you’ll forgive me! I’ll be back to normal service tomorrow, I’m sure!

I am not an MP for any reason other than because God wants me to be. I constantly try to do what Jesus would do.

So said Nadine Dorries in 2007. Obviously, Jesus has now recommended that Dorries abandons her constituents and takes a month off her regular job (while retaining a full £65,738 salary) to earn about £40,000 appearing on a tacky reality television show. God certainly works in mysterious ways!

This arrived today. Clearly, the news that the government has scrapped direct.gov.uk has yet to reach the government…!

This lamp in our living room spontaneously broke itself today while I was in the kitchen, very nearly causing me a heart attack! I have no definite explanation as to what happened… the bulb went, so that might have been connected somehow. Or it might perhaps have overheated? Who knows? It’s all a bit bizarre.

You can consider this photo as being in lieu of one yesterday, since I failed to post one then. This scene just felt appropriate given the news!

Vancouver is the only city in North America which has a legal supervised centre for IV drug users to inject themselves in safe conditions. This week’s recommended article by Paul Hebert from The AWL looks at how this works in practice.

I have an oddly large head, as proven by my inability to wear Christmas cracker hats or round neck t-shirts. At least it’s not quite as big as this artwork at Newcastle University!