One of our shiny new Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s cabinet appointments is the shiny new Foreign Secretary, David Miliband. His brother Ed has the delightfully silly job title of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office.

However, I’m sure most people are much more familiar with their older brother Steve.

What? You haven’t heard of Steve Miliband?

I’ll go and hide while you click on that link. Gag shamelessly borrowed from whoever said it on the radio the other day.

Aha! It seems all systems are go for the previously rumoured sequel to the rather superb Life on Mars. BBC News reports that Ashes to Ashes[1] will be set in 1981, and will star Philip Glenister in a slightly older reprise of his Gene Hunt role. This time, rather than dealing with John “Master” Simm, Gene will have a new challenge. DI Alex Drake, played by Keeley Hawes, plays a psychological profiler from around now who finds herself in the past in much the same way as Sam Tyler did.

Now that should be fun for Gene: she’s a woman and a psycho-wotsit type. Assuming that he hasn’t changed much[2], Alex Drake should rub him up the wrong way at least as much as Sam Tyler did.

All this raises even more interesting questions: how “real” is Gene Hunt anyway? A possible clue to why another modern police officer should be transported back in time is that in the final episode of Life on Mars, during his brief return to the present, Sam dictated an account of his experience for an officer who was making a study of some kind. Will that turn out to be Alex Drake? Or will it be a bizarre coincidence?

Either way, I hope it’ll be at least half as good as Life on Mars. That would still make it better than 95% of what’s on TV.

[1] If they keep using Bowie songs, they could keep this up for ages…
[2] And it’ll be no fun at all if he has

I took this picture back in March, shortly after I got the 50mm lens. It wasn’t a planned effect, just the result of pointing the camera down a sunny street with the aperture at its quite wide maximum. Looked at one way, it’s an over-exposed picture of the kind I’d usually pass over, but there was something about the way the people seemed to be almost floating that appealed to me. Then a few days ago, I saw a quite different picture which had a similar effect, which reminded me of this one, which I dusted down, tweaked slightly and uploaded to Flickr.

Art, apparently

And that’s where Flickr can be a really Good Thing. People look at your pictures, and sometimes comment. What hadn’t occurred to me, but did to others was that I’d accidentally created something reminiscent of a Lowry painting. And now it’s been pointed out, I can see exactly what they mean.