Here are some presents, under our tree! Merry Christmas everyone… I hope you have a brilliant day!

I attempted a 6.30am trip to M&S for Christmas food this morning, reasoning that I might avoid the crowds. Unfortunately, it seems the crowds had the same idea…! I can’t believe how busy it was at that time in the morning! I’m now recovering in the cafe.

This Christmas tree at Newcastle Airport leans to an even greater degree in real life than appears to be the case in this photo…! But it made me smile with amusement, and I guess Christmas trees are, after all, supposed to make people smile!

I went with my sister and nephews to see some reindeer at a garden centre today… not a typical Saturday morning, but it is Christmas, and I think we all had fun!

I received the paper copy of the Christmas BMJ today featuring the article I wrote with Dr Jean Adams and Prof Martin White spread over three pages…! I’d assumed they’d pack it in to a single page, so it was quite a surprise to see it spread out!

I think I’ve talked more about this paper in a single week than I have about any piece of work I’ve ever previously done…! You can hear me talking about it on this week’s Pod Delusion, or you can listen to some of the radio interviews I did below.

It’s all been a very exciting week for me, having never published a paper in a peer-reviewed journal before, and having done very little media work before… though I’m now very well ready for a rest! And I’m sure that applies even more to Jean and Martin, who did far more interviews than me – and far more challenging interviews than mine! I definitely got away quite lightly…!

Alfie and Charlie on BBC Newcastle, 18th December 2012
[audio:http://sjhoward.co.uk/audio/bmj/newcastle.mp3]

Mike Parr on BBC Tees, 18th December 2012
[audio:http://sjhoward.co.uk/audio/bmj/tees.mp3]

Julia Hartley-Brewer on LBC 97.3, 18th December 2012
[audio:http://sjhoward.co.uk/audio/bmj/london.mp3]

Simon Hoban on BBC Radio Merseyside, 18th December 2012
[audio:http://sjhoward.co.uk/audio/bmj/merseyside.mp3]

Ian Timms on BBC Radio Cumbria, 19th December 2012
[audio:http://sjhoward.co.uk/audio/bmj/cumbria.mp3]

Another fascinating story this week: John Donvan and Caren Zucker tracked down Donald Gray Triplett for the Atlantic. He was the first child to be diagnosed with autism: he’s now 77. It raises interesting questions about the treatment of adults with autism, and is a generally quite heart-warming story.

I’m struggling to think of a photo for today… so here’s a bottle of Synergi, the contact lens solution that both Wendy and I use. I’ve no idea of the relative merits of solutions or whether using something like this is the ophthalmic equivalent of wasting money by buying branded paracetamol… I’m really totally clueless!

After spending yesterday lecturing the nation of the importance of a balanced diet, today was my work Christmas lunch at Colman’s Fish & Chips in South Shields – a restaurant apparently frequented by David Miliband. We had a great time – and I say that as someone who doesn’t even like fish!

‘Twas the week before Christmas… and doing a normal book review seemed a little anti-festive. So this week, I’m featuring a book by Dan Brown. He’s author who has been pretty universally panned by critics – including me – yet has sold millions of books that “promote spiritual discussion and debate” and act “as a positive catalyst for introspection and exploration of our faith”… according to him, at least. Whether those aims also apply when he’s pretending to be a woman, I’m not sure… at least cross-gender pseudonyms have a decent literary heritage.

So let’s turn our attention to Digital Fortress, Dan Brown’s first solo novel published in 1998. It has the geek factor in abundance – it’s about cryptography, tries to make arguments about government surveillance, and features a massive supercomputer. Given Brown’s ouvre, you’ll not be terribly surprised if I tell you it’s a codebreaking supercomputer. Called TRANSLATR. Yep, Dan Brown was missing out the final vowel years before Flickr and Tubmblr came along. But I digress.

This is a story about a code that TRANSLATR can’t crack, and a blackmail attempt on the back of that. It’s also about a frustratingly dim cryptographer who doesn’t know the etymology of the word “sincere”. And, this being Dan Brown, there’s a “dramatic” scene in a Catholic church. There’s no earthly reason why the scene has to be in a church, but I guess Dan Brown likes writing about them. And it does divert him for a little while from making irritating errors like confusing “bits” and “bytes”.

But, by some distance, the most irritating part of Digital Fortress was the final thirty pages, where the solution to the whole central conundrum of the book was glaringly obvious, and yet apparently the most accomplished cryptographers in the world were unable to work it out. And, despite having earlier demonstrated an intimate knowledge of obscure chemicals like freon (in a series of scenes that couldn’t have screamed “Chekhov’s gun” any louder had the phrase actually been included), the central characters are suddenly unable to recall basic facts about basic elements. For a military organisation, there’s an awful lot of insubordination and fraternisation – relationships which end up looking a bit freakishly incestuous (a fact that the characters appear content to ignore).

Now, without wanting to give the game away, how many top secret military installations do you know of which conduct their business under a glass roof? How many buildings do you know of which feature no emergency exits? How did the designers of a military base for cryptographers not see that securing the doors with passwords might be a little… insecure?

Look, I don’t mind suspending my disbelief to some extent when reading a novel. But the degree of idiocy in this book made me half-expect the final word to be “and it was all just a dream!”

Brown has a line he uses in interviews about readers “getting on the train”, by which I think he’s referring to suspension of disbelief. I sort of see where he’s coming from. I get that he tries to write forceful, driving plots where the facts around the edges don’t really matter. But in this volume in particular, the problems with the plot are so big that, to use his metaphor, my train was derailed. Repeatedly.

In the end, I guess one knows what one is getting into when one buys a Dan Brown book. It’s mind-numbing easy-reading tosh. Sometimes, that’s just what you’re after, just as sometimes, we all have a craving for a pot noodle. But good grief, you’re probably in as much trouble if you think this is good literature as if you think pot noodles are high gastronomy. But heck, it’s Christmas – and Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without one star.

If you have a masochistic streak, Digital Fortress is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

Note: Next Wednesday is Boxing Day, when hopefully you’ll be having too much fun to read a book review. So the next one will be published in two weeks, on 2nd January 2013.

This is one of my radios. I’ve spent a while “inside” it today doing interviews with BBC Tees, Newcastle and Merseyside, Real Radio and LBC today. It was my first radio interviewee experience, and I was talking about the paper I wrote with Jean Adams and Martin White of Fuse (they also did several times more interviews than I did!)

I think my interviews went okay, and I’d definitely be less nervous about doing them in future… which is lucky, as I’ve more lined up tomorrow!