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!

It’s not long since I reviewed the first in this series of books, Only Time Will Tell. If you recall, I gave that a rather positive rating, and praised the “phenomenal power of Archer’s storytelling”. I hope this demonstrates that, despite disliking the man, I’m not unduly averse to Archer’s writing, or even to this particular saga. But this second novel is terrible.

It seems to me that writing a series of novels is a difficult thing to do. There are, I think, two approaches. One can write a series of discrete plot-driven novels with connecting story arcs, whereby each novel – except perhaps the final few – stands alone, yet the sum of the novels is greater than its parts. Alternatively, one can write an epic story spanning several volumes, with small arcs satisfying the conditions of the multi-book format. What doesn’t work is splitting a continuous plot into several parts, with no obvious reason as to why the split has occurred.

This novel doesn’t stand alone, and has no more than a couple of chapter’s worth of plot in the context of the wider saga. Or perhaps 1.9 chapters, given that the single thread defining this novel is left incomplete. As a result, this book has more exceptionally dull filler than any other I’ve read.

I know that people are generally advised to “write about what you know”, but surely no-one can have failed to have groaned when a Jeffrey Archer protagonist wrote a prison diary. Nor when the same protagonist starts armed forces training. Nor when his first book sells wildly in North America, allowing a lucrative deal to be sealed for its UK distribution. Nor when a character becomes an MP. Nor when the plot moves to the House of Lords. It’s as though Archer has taken Private Eye’s Jeremy Longbow as inspiration rather than ridicule.

On a few occasions in the book, Archer seems to forget his own characters. One particularly memorable example comes towards the end, when the protagonist requires an explanation of the term “free vote”, despite displaying a voracious appetite for news and some interest in politics. Initially, I assumed that this was merely a badly deployed literary device used to explain an important plot point, but as the whole exchange was unnecessary for the plot, one can only assume that it’s another bit of filler.

The one advantage this volume has over its predecessor is that the repetitive structure, and the odd affliction of only the first chapter in each section being written in the first person, has been dropped. All other faults of the first volume remain: the ludicrous co-incidences, the politics bleeding through into the plot, the clichéd characters, and so on. Archer has promised “at least” five books in this series: at this rate, I can’t imagine there will be many readers left by the fifth.

The Sins of the Father is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

A few months ago, I tweeted this:

The response was comprehensive – everybody else in my personal twitterverse manages not to destroy them:

So take today’s photo-a-day as my defence! The pictured card is a little under three months old. It has lived in my wallet, I haven’t done anything other than use it to pay for stuff and to get cash out of cash machines, and yet already the plastic coating is peeling away. Within the next few months, the peeling will increase in size, the card will become a complete virtually unusable mess, and I’ll have to get it replaced.

I have no explanation for why this happens. It happens across all my cards, no one provider is worse than any other, and is but one of many problems I seem to experience with bank cards failing to thrive. Does anyone have an explanation? Or, for that matter, the same problem?

One assumes that customers weren’t asked to rate staff members’ knowledge of possessive apostrophes…! And I’m sure I can’t be the only one who thinks those teddy bears look slightly threatening!