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You may, if you are paying close attention (although I’d settle for just some attention), have noticed that the cerebral challenges list is considerably shorter than the physical challenge list. That is not because I have focused on the physical side of this but rather because it is far easier to identify a specific date when a physical tasks is attempted and completed.

You may, if you are paying particularly close attention, have noticed that there has been a recent addition to the Cerebral Challenges list. Tomorrow I will have completed the “Article in the National Press” Challenge. It seemed to me that there were two ways to do this, either I file an article for free or I make up an ailment for Deirdre to resolve. I went with the former. This was made somewhat easier by The Independent helpfully having a daily section called “You write the Review”. I did. I submitted a review of a live music show I went to last Saturday – UNKLE at Somerset House. I submitted the review on Monday and on Tuesday got an email telling me it had been selected for publication.

So set aside your prejudices and political leanings and buy the Independent tomorrow (to the cheapskates, I am afraid that I do not think it is available online). Somewhere towards the back of the Extra section you should find my review. I hope you enjoy it and even if you don’t you can show it to people and say “I know the pretentious arse who wrote this” and you can laugh together at the grammatical typos that I have just noticed are in there. But I’ll have the last laugh because another challenge will be complete.

And Finally…
A connected newspaper issue came up at the back end of last week. I was quoted in this newspaper article about a case I was working on. You’ll see that this caused the News of the World to release an impressively bitchy statement against me. I was trying to decide if this meant I had completed another challenge. It is, after all, a pretty good achievement to be the subject of a national newspapers press release. Sadly I think that I cannot allow it. To be a challenge it needs to have been set as a target before hand. I had wondered if a challenge would be to be written about in an article but that does not require much skill – any fool who falls asleep on a train line can do it. It does make the “First Time at 30” list. And it’s a first of which I am particularly proud.