I have found over the years that papers like the News of the World and their ilk are viewed as like comics, nothing to be taken seriously, a little bit of idiocy on paper. There is a hell of a lot right about that, but a similar amount wrong – something which is becoming staggeringly more obvious as the days go by.

There are some sick individuals who believe that these things are ok, that these intrusions are somehow part and parcel of getting a story. Luckily most people don’t agree.

It is not enough however to accept what the rest of the media appears to be calling for, the usual sacrificial lambs and some supposed “closure”. If Rebekah Wade leaves her job I am sure that she will reappear in a years time still claiming innocence and maybe even trading on her history to get an even better paid job – more than likely helped along by the book she’ll have time to write. A loss of one job to people like this is nothing – these job losses won’t affect their ability to live day-to-day, we won’t see them down the JobCentre.

The culture that allowed the NOTW, and I am sure some other newsrooms, to find these actions to be fine, is the one that believes that profit is king. The same one that allowed Banks to gamble so recklessly with their customers cash, and their own cash, to a degree that all was likely to be lost.

Tabloid newspapers are a strange beast in that they purport to “report the news”, alongside comment and criticism while angling the whole newspaper towards being a product that sells. If a news story is horrific then this will be played up, dramatised, skewed. People, who may well themselves want celebrity or actually may not, are written about with little regard for truth and accuracy. Privacy is ignored until such time as it can be used as a dirty word, suggesting the hiding of illegality.

For the readers it may be amusing to read, it may seem like the tabloid is a comic. But the readers are not really important here. The subjects of the reports are the important people. Lies, intrusion and harassment can wreck lives, they also sell newspapers.

Maybe the time has come to re-examine the role of the tabloid, not by banning them as much as that may be a preferred choice of many, but by controls that hit them where it hurts whenever they have, or plan to, hit innocent people where it hurts.

Or shall we just give a well-paid woman some gardening leave and say that’s that?

After having some initial successes at blogging at fairly regular intervals, I managed to have the usual life backlash. In other words one, two or even all three of the baby, the missus and myself would be unwell for a time, sometimes one illness rolling into another.

Then we would have a return to the bad old days of cack sleep from the toddler, knackering everyone out. And of course when he got an illness we felt it best to keep him away as much as possible from the Nanny’s toddler. Which meant I was looking after him for more days – tiring me out even more. And so I would become susceptible to illnesses…. And the cycle began again.

It would be a little foolish to think that we’ve broken that (only last night he woke up at 1.30 and didn’t got back to sleep properly for an hour and a half), but I am going to schedule blogging a bit more to try and work around these problems.

Wish me luck!!

There have been ups and downs, of course there has, but we’ve ridden them all confident in the choice we made to be with each other.

We’ve not joined the ranks of the married couple as yet, but cannot rank this as being as important as our relationship and our child. I’ve always been of the same opinion, that marriage isn’t as important as the actual relationship.

I’ve seen and heard of relationships that get focused on a marriage, in fact focused on a wedding day, without first making sure that the foundations of their relationship are strong enough, that all the imperfections are not papered over, but accepted and known of. It’s sad when these relationships collapse, but it’s also easy to see the writing on the wall in hindsight when the focus is on a day, an event, a wedding – a celebration of something that barely exists.

Seven years ago Blair had just been to be buddy-buddy with Gadaffi. It’s amazing how the world changes.

It’s amazing how I look forward to the next 7 years, and more.

As a family we have been financially scraping by for a while, supported by family in no small part. These last few days have brought news that suggest that not only will the scraping by continue, but it may get worse.

With all these scrapes, things might be getting scrappy.

This is a lesson we learnt by the middle of the week. As the stay-at-home dad I treat weekends as a certain amount of a break. I look after the boy until 11am every weekday, and on all but 2 days a week I also look after him for the rest of the day. So on weekends I delegate responsibility, and I decided to continue that into the start of the week.

Unfortunately my version of delegation is a bit too subtle so we end up just drifting along doing very little, not helped by the little ones bad sleeping pattern at the moment.

We managed to get past all of that though and had a great final few days of the week, including a lovely time in Richmond Park that was only slightly spoilt by the failure of the sun to break through the clouds. My personal fave moment then was seeing the little one, recently found stick in hand, running towards the birds (not in a chasing way, just fascinated). He looked like a little savage stalking prey. That’s my boy!

We also managed to get to the Wacky Warehouse in Greenford on one of the days which was great fun. He generally loved all the soft-play things, clambering around, though wasn’t as happy with the deep ball-pools which he would slowly disappear into…

Rounding out the week with our usual visit to Monkey Music, but this time with Mummy, made it a good birthday week for me overall.