There’s a pub in central Newcastle which has posters outside perpetually advertising appearances by the drag act Ophelia Balls. Thanks to my sweet innocence, it took me to walk past the pub many tens of times before – earlier this week – the terrible pun in the act’s name finally registered.

Having barely recovered from the shock, imagine my surprise at finding this new product on a visit to Ikea this weekend:

Apparently, it’s part of the bigger Ofelia Collection. Surely they must have noticed…

If you remember this site six years ago, in the days before the blog when Tilly O’Shea, The Corporation, and TOSSers reigned supreme, then this may be as much as blast from the past for you as it is for me.

Browsing the site’s external archives recently, I’ve unearthed a veritable mine of stuff that I haven’t seen in years – and frankly thought was lost forever. In fact, it came from the old simonhoward.co.uk, in the days before sjhoward.co.uk ever existed…

Perhaps the most startling find is this complete mock red-top newspaper report, which formed part of my A-Level English work, but also formed the centrepiece of a whole website about Tilly O’Shea and The Corporation – some of which still survives via the Wayback Machine. It’s amazing to look back at crap I wrote so long ago – and endlessly fascinating. Though probably primarily for me, I’d guess.

There are a couple of other things I’ve rescued from digital oblivion, primarily for the sake of nostalgia – a small collection of downloadable pub quizzes and lyrics to a few Lazlo Bane songs have both found a new home in the ‘Freebies’ section. And I guess no sjhoward.co.uk nostalgia-fest would be complete without links to the latest So It Goes column by Jason Love, and The View from Here column by Shelley Strauss Rollison, both of which were at one time popularly syndicated by this very site.

If that’s quite enough parochial navel-gazing for you, then you’ll be utterly dispirited to learn that this very blog’s fifth birthday is just a little over two-weeks away, and there’s bound to be more self-congratulatory whooping then. I can’t wait!

This decision over one’s own body is for the conscience – the conscience of individual citizens in this country. It is not for this Parliament, by free vote or other vote, to impose upon them a requisition of their bodies after death for the state.

So said John Reid, a little over three years ago. It would appear that Gordon Brown now disagrees. And, for once, I agree with Reid.

I have no moral, religious, or ideological issues with organ donation, and have been a registered organ donor for several years. I do, however, have a strong objection to the proposed suspension of the idea of informed consent – a guiding principle of modern medical practice.

There are so many deep practical problems with the idea of presumed ‘consent’ – not least of all that presumed consent in such a context is realistically no consent at all, and that once a mistake has been made, it cannot be undone.

But, most of all, we’re skipping steps. We’re going from a situation of maintaining a relatively little-known and little-promoted organ donor register to presumed consent, without trying anything in between.

For appropriate candidates, it should be made a legal requirement that relatives are asked about organ donation as part of the death certification. This would immediately increase the number of donations, as doctors are poor at asking such questions for fear of embarrassment, insensitivity, and upset. As a standard legal question it would be unavoidable.

This would be a simple, non-controversial measure that could be put in place very quickly and would increase the number of viable organs available for transplant.

Why don’t we give it a go?

The Guardian reveals today that, over the last seven years, the Government has spent £2bn on computer systems which have then been abandoned as they were not fit for purpose. Just to put that into context, it’s enough to have employed almost 20,000 nurses over for the same period of time.

This Government’s record on IT projects is abominable. From the CSA computer upgrade that didn’t work to the £12bn NHS computer system which is being rewritten as it was ‘not fit for purpose’, and from the loss of half the country’s personal data to the national police website which never worked, it seems that this Government is simply incompetent when it comes to the management of IT projects.

Even after condemning the MTAS computer system as useless and rapidly running away from it, this Government felt it would be a good idea to rehire the company which designed it for another NHS IT project.

Is there anything IT-related that this Government can get right? And in an ever-more technological society, can we trust this lot to represent the best interests of the citizens of the United Kingdom?

You can tell it’s Christmas, mainly because of the appearance Christmassy bits on this site, even though they’re new this year and completely different to every other year since the site’s inception.

Of course, it’s also clearly Christmas because of the sudden outbreak of peace, joy, and goodwill to all men. Granted, that might be difficult to spot in the overcrowded supermarkets full of harassed shoppers (not least of all me), but clearly in the good Christian churches of our nation, peace and joy have descended. Or not, as the case may be.

I always though that Christmas was the particular time of year when Christians spread messages of goodwill, love, and faith. Yet I’ve seen so little of this that I’m beginning to wonder if that’s what the Christian church stands for at all. Instead of welcoming new sheep to their flocks, the Christian message of recent years appears to have become a rather aggressive one.

This is the week when Archbishops have started insulting ordinary citizens, phone-ins are dominated by Christians bemoaning the fictitious sensitivities of ‘immigrants’, and every tabloid worth its salt wants to tell us how Christmases aren’t what they used to be.

Just today, the Archbishop of Wales has ranted about ‘atheistic fundamentalism’ leading to the ‘Winterval’ rebranding of Christmas – a perennial myth, which you’d hope learnéd church leaders would know to be false. He claims that ‘virulent, almost irrational’ attacks have been made on Christianity, leaving no room for debate – then cites the example of British Airways’ uniform policy.

He goes onto say that Christianity has a ‘message of joy and good news for everyone’, and that ‘rational debate about the tenets of the Christianity’ is an undoubtedly good thing – then mocks those who view Christianity as ‘superstitious nonsense’ – apparently, such a view is disallowed in his debate. We can only debate Christianity from a starting point that ‘God is not exclusive, he is on the side of the whole of humanity with all its variety’ – except atheists, or so it would seem. That’s not what I call a debate.

This comes in the same week as Rev Jules Gomes called Richard Dawkins and Polly Toynbee the King Kerods of our age, despite the fact that the latter is quite happy to ‘Hail the incarnate Deity’ along with the rest of us, and that neither could be fairly described as a child-killing tyrant. Clearly, the goodwill doesn’t extend to them. And yet Christian leaders frequently tell us that Christianity is supposed to be the very model of religious tolerance.

You may have seen the headline news that a third of 18-24 year-olds couldn’t say where Jesus was born. You’re unlikely to have noticed that almost two-thirds of regular church-goers were also unable to show a basic grasp of the Christmas story – a fact conveniently omitted from the Mail’s report. Perhaps the Church should get its own house in order before attacking the rest of society for its so-called secularism.

And, just to top it all off, the good Christians of the Diocese of Manchester have been grossly insulted by the council’s insistence on calling Christmas ‘Decemberval’ in a recycling promotion. Perhaps they ought to have a word with the local Christian vicar that wrote the promotion, then, rather than moaning to the Mail on Sunday about ‘political correctness gone mad’.

Yet the issue extends further than Christianity. Only this week, a Jordanian website censored a reader who chose to wish others a ‘Happy Hanukkah’, after complaints were received at the thought of wishing Jews happiness – and there was me thinking Eid was supposed to be about forgiveness.

I’ve previously made my religious views known in detail on the blog – essentially, we’re so incredibly lucky to be alive that we’d better make the most of it before we die – and so am in no position to offer Christian philosophy. But it has certainly struck me this year that the Christian church is anything but loving and welcoming to all, and is certainly not as tolerant of criticism as it often likes to claim.

I am, however, in a position to wish everyone – reader and non-readers, supporters and detractors, those who celebrate Christmas and those who don’t – health, happiness, and a truly peaceful and prosperous New Year.

Yesterday was the sixth anniversary of ‘9/11’. After 9/11, Jon Stewart gave a speech to open The Daily Show, a speech which I posted here back in June 2006.

Such is the power of the speech that yesterday tens of blogs linked to it on this site, providing over 130,000 extra hits, and propelling it comfortably to the top of the ‘most popular posts’ league. When a speech that is six years old can still generate this kind of response, it surely must be a great speech.

What a shame that politicians have moved so far from their people that it was left to a comedy newsreader to truly speak to the nation in the face of its greatest tragedy in many generations.

From a great gallery of photographs on Guardian Unlimited: Reverent Humour. It’s great when religion feels able to take the piss out of itself, it kinda saves the rest of us the hassle.

I know I claim not to do this sort of thing, but just wanted to point you in the direction of this website, which is essentially campaigning for the creation of accommodation for families of those receiving long-term treatment in military hospitals.

It seems a worthy cause – I have slight misgivings about supporting the specifics of a planning application in an area I’ve never so much as visited, and was mildly insulted at the insistence that prefab housing equals “builder’s huts” which could not provide a “supportive environment” – I’m sure the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of British kids who grew up in such accommodation for a good four or five decades post-war (and those who still do) would disagree.

But while I might quibble about their tone, I do see their point, and their aim seems pretty worthwhile and unobjectionable.

It seems worth your time and energy to support – as of course are similar civilian schemes like this.