You get to play your favourite sport for a living (a very good living), even rising to captain your country. You are, generally, a good ambassador for England and you enjoy some success, with 26 Test wins in 51 matches. Michael Vaughan needs to gain a little perspectiveAnd then the captaincy comes to a quite natural end after five years. So what do you do? You start crying at a press conference, o...

A widespread cliché just now is that “we” have “all” been living beyond our means.  People who say this should stop we-ing, and speak more precisely, e.g. for themselves. Some weeks ago I had a recorded conversation about the financial crisis with a couple of mates, one of them being Michael Jennings.  Michael spoke eloquently about the social pressure that was p...

Michael Martin has made enough friends to stay on as Speaker, despite wading disastrously into the row over MPs' expenses Michael Martin failed his most serious test in the ancient office of Speaker of the Commons this week. With parliament facing its worst collective crisis of confidence in living memory he chose to make the bootlegged Daily Telegraph expenses CD the issue for outrage from t...

Michael McManus with a lovely joke… Who’s the greatest living Briton? 16 year old says Churchill… Um, I said living…..yes, Churchill. No, sorry, he’s dead……what, that cute little dog died?

Tomorrow is the birthday of local resident Professor Sir Michael Atiyah who is widely regarded as one of the most influential mathematicians of the 20th century. He is also described as Britain's greatest living mathematician and a series of events is taking place to mark his birthday. For the Edinburgh University news release see here and for the biography of your neighbour see here.

If the reality of Michael M Phillips – for a short period at least – was Jalrez Valley in western Afghanistan, defence correspondent Michael Evans has been living a different reality with "our boys" in Helmand. Published in The Times on 5 May, Evans gives as a quirky insight into one of the incidents briefly mentioned in the USAF "airpower summary" for 30 May. The bare bones of that in...

Following on from this talk with Tom Burroughes (mp3 here) and this talk with Antoine Clarke and Michael Jennings (mp3 here), comes this conversation, recorded last Thursday evening, between me and Michael J. What Michael thinks is now being done wrong and what Michael thinks should now be done instead didn’t take that long for him to say, or for me to agree about.  Basically, dump the ...

Earlier on Living TV: the Jade Goody protracted death show. Later on Living TV: Most Haunted. Next year on Living TV…

The brains behind the UK’s first i-House have won £1.5million of government investment and industry backing to create a fast track for assisted living products, in a bid to improve the lives of more than 17.5 million people living with long-term conditions in the UK.

Birkbeck University has given into campaigners and adopted a London Living Wage for its cleaning and catering staff. An email by Unison: Dear Living Wage campaign supporters, I am very pleased to announce that this evening’s meeting, Birkbeck Governors voted unanimously to implement the GLA London Living Wage (£7.45) to cleaning and catering staff, following recommendation from the