When I was a boy, my father, a plasterer who in his spare time played fiddle, banjo and accordion, would regularly invite his fellow musicians back to our house — often after the pubs had shut. Having had a drink and a bite to eat, they would sing for their supper.
Daryl Hall has a similar habit. He invites home his heroes and his contemporaries and younger players whose music he’s taken a shine to. The big difference is that Daryl Hall is the Hall of Hall & Oates, the duo behind such hits as Rich Girl and Private Eyes, and so his supper guests include Smokey Robinson, Nick Lowe and K T Tunstall. Those three are among the names that pop up in the archives of Live From Daryl’s House, a monthly podcast that Hall generously puts up online so everyone else can enjoy the fun. The latest, which went up yesterday, features the man I missed at the 100 Club on Wednesday: Eli “Paperboy” Reed. Eli at Daryl’s is not quite as electrifying as he was when I saw him on stage in London last year, but it’s still worth hearing.

And here he is live in a gig earlier this month in Mallorca:

Stuck at home with a cold (and prevented from seeing Eli Paperboy Reed at the 100 Club last night), I’ve been escaping outdoors through the pages of Roger Deakin’s Wildwood, his account of the mutually dependent relationship between man and trees. It’s partly natural history, partly travelogue and wholly delightful — a reminder of what we lost when he died in 2006 at only 63.
Here’s a a sample:

The wonderful thing about driftwood is the way the action of the sea etches the softer wood between the lines of grain, revealing the sinews, bleaching it to a pale grey, smoothing it, rounding all edges and corners. You want to pick it up and handle it. Responding to just this impulse, I lifted one side of a handsome slab of pine twice the size of a loaf, with beautifully sea-rounded corners. . . Beneath it in a hollow was a long-tailed field mouse and her nest. She stood her ground beside it as two or three of her young, half grown already, did just the right thing, escaping efficiently into the cover of the next-door clump of samphire. Embarrassed to have disturbed the family. . . I gently returned their roof into position, wishing there were some way of reassuring them that this was a genuine mistake and they were quite safe. The look of hurt, uncertainty and puzzlement in the mouse’s face has stayed with me. So has her courage in standing by the nest, decoying us from her young. It is salutary to be reminded of the extent of your own power and your potential for accidental brutality.

And here’s another:

I drive down Castle Cary, where the evening before had been calm, and I had witnessed a posse of badgers sauntering nonchalantly along the street beneath Lodge Hill, knocking the tops off dustbins like teenagers and rifling them, even pausing to tip over the ice-cream sign outside the newsagent’s. Emerging early from the snouting dingles of the town at dusk, they went their rounds with impatient efficiency, jogging from house to like council workers on some lucrative bonus scheme.

Everyone is predicting that 2010 will be the year of the Kindle, or of whatever easier-to-use device Apple comes up with. John Naughton, in The Observer, reckons that e-readers will be particularly popular among travellers. Why? “Because they offer the only way of taking a reasonable amount of holiday reading on a Ryanair flight.”

The Today programme on Radio 4 this morning, with the footballer Tony Adams as guest editor, had an item on football songs. They were all even more tuneless and witless than they seemed when first released. The only football song worth listening to, of course, was written by a woman: England 2, Colombia 0, by the late, great Kirsty MacColl:

One of the pieces I used in Last Call for the Dining Car was by Martyn Harris, whom I was lucky enough to commission when I was editor of the OpEd page of The Daily Telegraph. After Martyn’s death from cancer in 1996, the paper published a compilation of his work, for which Max Hastings wrote an introduction. Max said Martyn had told him several times that he, Martyn, could never do what Max had done and work as a war correspondent. Max’s response was this: “. . . it is far easier for a journalist to write about a great drama unfolding before him — a battle, an earthquake, a riot — than it is to conjure a brilliant literary souffle out of the commonplace ingredients of everyday life. . . ”

I was reminded of that remark when judging Telegraph Travel’s Just Back of the Year competition. Our top five included pieces on Mount Fuji, a ‘death’ on the Nile, the view from a window in Warsaw, and what one woman learned of Australia from a hospital bed in Melbourne. The one we chose as a winner, by Richard Lakin, was on an average day out with the family at a British beach.

You can still rely on The New York Times not to get carried away. Here’s a headline from today’s paper:

Web Site for Woods Is Drawing Attention
By RICHARD SANDOMIR
Tiger Woods’s personal Web site has had an increase in visitors since he issued a statement about his car accident on Nov. 29.

Lovely story in the New York Times today about a man who has earned half a million dollars over the past 10 years in the betting shops of Manhattan. But he’s not a bookie or a punter. He’s a stooper: he picks up the betting slips that others have thrown away.

It was instructive to be in India in the run-up to the  anniversary of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. I was attending the conference of the Association of Independent Tour Operators, in Cochin, Kerala.

On my way to the airport for the return flight, I was given a gift-wrapped package by the tour rep who had organised my outing the previous day on a houseboat in the backwaters. “It’s a miniature houseboat, a souvenir of your trip,” he told me. And so it was, I discovered, on suspiciously peeling back the wrapping inside the airport.

The houseboat went through the x-ray machine without problems, but my backpack drew the attention of a security man. He wanted me to open all the pockets, and discovered a bottle of water that I had forgotten to take out. Instead of telling me I would have to dump it, as security jobsworths do in Britain, he asked me to take a few sips from it. Then he let me take it with me.

When I moved on to passport control, dropping my half-wrapped parcel on the desk while I fumbled for my passport, the immigration officer quipped: “Ah, this one’s bringing us a present.”

Why can’t they be as sensible and good-humoured everywhere?

The Daily Telegraph had a story today about “the giant private train set” kept by Kim Jong-il, the paranoid and aircraft-fearing leader of North Korea.

It’s not the first time Kim and his travels have featured in our pages. In Last Call for the Dining Car, I’ve included a quirky account that John Simpson, the BBC’s world affairs editor, wrote for The Sunday Telegraph about a trip Kim made by armoured train to Moscow in 2001:

He brought all his own water, and he has a hundred security men to guard him. Also ten sniffer dogs. If you are Kim Jong-il, the peerless leader of North Korea and the great successor to the revolutionary cause, you probably need all the sniffer dogs you can get.

Recent correspondence with Mr Simpson prompted me to open his book News From No Man’s Land, which my wife bought a few years ago but I had not read myself.  I’m devouring it now, swept along by his enthusiasm for the trade of journalism and for what it can do and be at its best.

He writes:

It always used to irritate me to hear journalists referring to real incidents in the lives of real people as “stories”, with all the connotations which the word brings with it: dramatic incident, neatly rounded narrative, a satisfying ending. Gradually, though, I came to realize that the most important function people like me could perform was indeed to tell stories . . . Because “good” doesn’t have to mean sentimental or phoney or stupid; a good story can be something which illumines the real world, so that it stays illumined permanently.

This morning’s Today programme on Radio 4 had a representative of Survival International talking about how seven Yanomani Indians in Venezuela have died from a suspected outbreak of swine flu.

I was reminded immediately of the great Norman Lewis, whose article in The Sunday Times in 1969 about massacres, land thefts and genocide in Brazilian Amazonia led to the founding of Survival.

Lewis remained committed throughout his life to the rights of tribal people, and in his writing about them regularly challenged clichés and preconceptions.

In one of his last books, A Voyage By Dhow, he wrote of a swamp-dwelling tribe in Mexico: “The Chontals inherit elaborate social graces from noble forebears, and they are saturated with the sly, defensive humour of the underdog. When I asked the man in charge of this party what the goings-on on his Tarzan T-shirt were all about, he displayed the ruin of his teeth in a stealthy grin and said, “These are the legends of a primitive people.”