One for cricket lovers: if you didn't hear the Archive Hour for the 50th Anniversary of Test Match Special on Saturday, then may I suggest you Listen Again for a real aural treat.

Johnners, Aggers, Blowers and CMJ - and the incomparable John Arlott - all contribute their voices to a wonderfully English feast of cricket, trivia and cakes. Switch on the radio, shut your eyes, and you can almost smell the grass and hear the thwack of leather on willow. Magic stuff!

As they often say - on radio, the pictures are so much better than on the TV - as this programme demonstrates in spades. The only annoyance is that Rory Bremner provides some entirely superfluous and distracting impressions in his narration - when the real voices do it so much better and more subtly. Apart from that, top marks BBC.

Warning: includes the (in)famous "Legover Incident" at the end - so make sure you are not drinking tea at the time, or snorting will inevitably result!

Contrast with:

The oikish TV commentary on Formula 1: lots of shouting, with semi-coherent speech and often tedious rambling - all heat and no light. Because the brilliant newcomer Lewis Hamilton came second on Sunday at Monaco, the gormless pundits are already forecasting doom and disaster. I really do despise the way they set people up and then gleefully tear them down again.

Look to the gentlemen of TMS for some inspiration, you numpties!

"Do we actually need biology in this technological age?" – John Humphreys on the Today Programme this morning.

My opinion of journalists is not high as you can tell from other posts here, but can Mr Humphreys really be that stupid – or is he just being deliberately controversial?

Perhaps because he only 'did' frogs, amoebæ and rabbits' naughty bits at school some time last century, he imagines biology is a cissy science that isn't fit for the world today. I suspect he is not alone in that – but where do these people think that modern advances in gene therapy and medicine comes from, for instance? Media studies?

Heard on the Today Programme this morning: a weedy article on social networking sites – done in the usual heavy-handed and jokey way that older people use to cover topics that only the young are comfortable with. John Humphreys mentioned Faceback in his intro to the piece – which got me thinking about silly names for such sites. Squitter and Bubo come to mind. One a site for mindless textual diarrhoea, and the other for teenagers to squeeze their virtual spots in front of the cybermirror.

There was me thinking that we had developed brains and speech to filter out the stream of consciousness into something approaching coherence – and there goes Twitter encouraging us to spew it all out regardless. How annoying is that?

First it was Princess Diana, then it was Our Brave Sailors in Iran, and very recently, Our Maddie (or Maddy - depending on which paper you read).

Am I alone in finding the mawkish coverage of this tragic affair distasteful in the extreme? The McCann family has been dignified about it, especially considering what has befallen it. If only the TV and newspaper coverage could be similarly restrained, instead of churning out reams of ignorantly over-familiar coverage, sentimentalised images of the mother holding a toy, gruesome piles of soft toys and yellow ribbons and so on.

What has happened to the English tradition of private grief for a private affair? Only someone who has gone through a similar experience can really feel for the protagonists, so why should we, the great unwashed, be invited to emote all over the place? Not only by the press - but by fading footballers, for goodness' sake.

I wonder if it is all of a piece with the consumer lifestyle that is supposed to be our crowning glory today - rather than living a decent life?

Much better to be seen by all and sundry to be buying loads of stuff, living in a tasteful magnolia, stainless and laminate "home" (not house - dear me no) and overtly proclaiming our solidarity with people we have never met, than actually getting on with our own lives quietly in the background.

I had a mild snigger on Saturday morning listening to the radio, when Ed Stourton was interviewing the actor Mark Rylance about men playing women and vice versa. He said what sounded to me like:

"of course that is the question mark, Rylance"

- which would have amused Lynne Truss no end if she was listening, as a sort of misplaced audio comma.

The other oddity in his interview was the way he pronounced "biopic", as "bi-opp-ic", rather than "bio-pic". I noticed as the first (mis)pronunciation was a family tradition - one of many word plays that we enjoyed. You can hear it pronounced properly here.

Does your family have silly sayings and puns - or were the Brethericks just odd?

Whenever I pick up a weekend paper, I often cringe at many of the "lifestyle" articles. I suppose the epithet is half-accurate: it is all about style, and very little about real life as she is lived by ordinary people like me. Food that costs more for a single meal than I spend in a week, outrageously expensive and hideously impractical clothes, wallpaper at £300 a roll - what planet do these people live on? Not mine, thank goodness.

Anyway, on to the main topic of this post. The Telegraph's last Shop Local column was all about Chelsea (home of the eponymous tractor, but one would think, few food producers). If you live in Chelsea, it seems that Kent is local - but even by these standards, I thnk it is stretching the point too far to include "Rainforest Creations (07985 235 219) [which] makes salads and cakes from raw foods that only grow in the tropics - a must-try."

I am fortunate enough to live close to Bridport in Dorset - where I can go on Saturdays and buy real local food - produced by farmers, market gardeners, cooks, apple and cider producers and the like, who all live a short drive away. Now that's what I call really local - but I'm not a London journalist - so what do I know?

(Locals are already up in arms about thowaway comments by other distant journos,as you can read on the local paper's web site. Bring on the pitchforks, I say!)