In October 1935 the Cambridge Daily News accepted his offer to provide a weekly cartoon, for which he was paid a guinea a week.

If we upgrade that by inflation we get to £80 to £150 a week as his fee. Depends whether we upgrade by retail prices or average wages.  That lower figure is about what you would get writing a column for a local paper these days.

The world is a better place for him having been in it.

Would that they will say that after the rest of us fuckwits pass on.

Vale, eh?

Vaclav Havel, died 18 Dec 2011.

He went on to serve as head of station in Bonn, and during the 1960s in Beirut, where he enjoyed skiing at The Cedars, a resort where, as he recalled, discipline in the lift queues improved dramatically after an attendant shot dead the two worst queue jumpers.

Swedish beauty whose affair with JFK began weeks before his marriage – and carried on just after

If we’re going to have newspaper obituaries for everyone JFK shagged we’re going to need several new newspapers, aren’t we?

Enlists at 26 in 1940.

Wins three MCs with the Paras.

End of the war, back to M&S as a store manager.

An extraordinary 5 years piece of Major John Timothy’s life.

“For the first half of my life I was always known as my father’s son, and now I am known as my daughter’s father.”

There are worse things to achieve in life.

Steve Jobs: co-founder of Apple dies aged 56

He really did work right up to the end, didn’t he?

But this price allegedly should have been $21.10, thereby incurring a taxable charge of $20 million that Jobs did not report as income.

Lordy, no, that’s not what the problem with backdated options was: although it’s a problem.

Jobs receiving $20 million and not declaring it on his income tax, well, minor. Apple paying Jobs $20 million and not including it as an expense, thereby reducing it’s profits, much bigger problem. That was the general problem with these backdated options.

You’re allowed to issue an option at absolutely any price you like as a company. You’ve just got to account for it properly. Which they didn’t….and nor did several other companies and that’s what all the fuss was about.

Issuing in the money options should take a slice off the reported profit. Not taking that slice off was the naughty bit.

Not a bad thing to have left behind.

More than 30 years on, the appeal of Dad’s Army endures. Repeats attract more than 10 million viewers, and the famous “Don’t tell him, Pike!” scene has repeatedly been voted the funniest television moment of all time.

More recently, in 2004, Kindersley went into his local branch of Waitrose . Asked by the checkout girl if he would like some cash back, Kindersley (who was unfamiliar with this transaction) replied: “That’s really awfully sweet of you, how kind.”

He suggested £50, which he took across the road to the betting shop, investing it on a 10-1 shot which duly won its race. He then returned to the store to tip the checkout girl £10 for her kindness. For good measure, he gave £10 to the other girls on the tills as well. It was only when his credit card statement arrived that he understood the nature of “cash back”.

That’s the photo to go with Jet Harris’ obituary.

I’m not entirely convinced that it actually is Jet Harris. But even if it were, bit odd to illustrate the obit of an iconic bass player with him holding a regular guitar, eh?

She swore that after Tony Crosland, she could never again experience a close relationship. But in the mid-1980s she struck up a friendship with Auberon Waugh that deepened until his death in 2001. She dedicated her novel The Prime Minister’s Wife (2001) to him. Waugh had no intention of leaving his wife, but the couple of evenings a week they spent together mattered to them both.

Eh?

Legend had it that he was once been consulted by a Ladbrokes manager who had been asked to make a book on the name of the next Archbishop of Canterbury, but did not know where to start. “You want a start, I’ll give you a start,” Stein replied. “The Chief Rabbi’s 1,000 to one.”

But damme, I do admire Allan Tibbels.

“My brother, Merrick, and I are, of course devastated by the loss of our father, but we rejoice in having been the sons of such an extraordinary man.”

Felix Francis

Not a bad way to be remembered after 89 years on the planet, is it?

By Mr. Toenniessen’s calculation, about half the world’s population goes to bed every night after consuming grain descended from one of the high-yield varieties developed by Dr. Borlaug and his colleagues of the Green Revolution.

I’m not sure that anyone, ever, has had that effect on the world nor that anyone, ever, will again.

Certainly that’s one bloody marvellous memorial to leave behind.

Vale.

If there’s something good that comes after this life other than eternal rest then there’s one candidate for the front of the queue for it. One of the few who needs not our prayers but definitely deserves our thanks.

"Webb: Monty once demanded his advice for curing constipation."

An interesting way to be remembered.

Her shamelessness never became her more than in the manner of her dying.

The first time she was mentioned in the press, in May 2002, Jade Goody was described as a "pretty dental nurse, 20, from London". But 24 hours later, as she began her gobby, ignorant trajectory in the Big Brother house, The People went on the attack under the headline: "Why we must lob the gob". Before long it was open season. The Sun called her a hippo, then a baboon, before launching its campaign to "vote out the pig". The Sunday Mirror rejected porcine comparisons on the ground that it was "insulting – to pigs".

Inside the "BB" house, Jade Goody found herself in bed with her male housemate, PJ, who ran away, shrieking. Her drunken striptease in a drinking game rigged by the male contestants ("Me kebab is showing!") forced even Channel 4 to blank the screen. "Here she is: fat-rolled, Michelin girl Jade in all her preposterous lack of glory," thundered the Daily Mirror the next day. "Naked as the day Dr Frankenstein made her." Jade’s then boyfriend chipped in: "She’s a sex-crazed, lying, two-timing drunken tart, and I hope I never see her again."

Jade Goody’s main function, as she put it herself, was to be an "escape goat".

…

Polls suggested that she was more unpopular even than Saddam Hussein (a boxer, said Jade).

…

For the next four years it was impossible to turn on the television without seeing Jade Goody on some reality show or other. She even had her own scent, Shh!, ("Not actually a smell of me, like. It’s not my BO or my feet cheese or nothing") which became a best-seller.

….

Jade’s schooling, not surprisingly, was chaotic. She was expelled from one school after her mother hit another mother, and from a second when her mother hit a teacher. "Most of my mates at school would arrive home to see their mum hanging out the washing or putting the dinner on," Jade recalled. "I’d come round the corner hoping not to see another police car outside the house."

It was not long before Jade began dishing out the bullying herself, once biting off a chunk of another girl’s earlobe ("It wasn’t a huge part of her earlobe or anything, just the tip").

…

She thought that a ferret was a bird and abscess a green French drink; that Pistachio painted the Mona Lisa; that Sherlock Holmes invented the flush lavatory; that East Anglia ("East Angular" in Jade-speak) was abroad; and that Rio de Janeiro was "a bloke, innit?"

….

She eventually attended Bacon’s College in Rotherhithe – one of Britain’s first City Technology colleges. Following her first appearance on Big Brother, the college felt constrained to emphasise that its exam results had improved since Jade left. She then attended a training course at the Bosco Centre, an institution set up to "serve some of the most disadvantaged and disengaged young people in the community". Again association with Jade caused embarrassment as the centre pointed out that some of its alumni had gone on to university.

…

Jade Goody opened a beauty salon in Hertfordshire. She chose the name Ugly’s, thinking it would appeal to the woman who thinks: "’I'm feeling ugly because I’ve got no make-up on, no nails and hairy legs,’ then they come into our salon and we make them beautiful." The venture rapidly went bust.

…

I didn’t pay much attention to her when she was alive and I doubt I’ll be laying flowers for her now she’s gone. Harsh perhaps, but true.

But I can’t help but have a not so sneaking admiration for the way she played the hand she was dealt and further think that we’ve just lost a bit of the gaiety of the nation.

Vale.