One of the side effects of not smoking is that I spend a lot of time in the gym. I have convinced myself that I will be less likely to start smoking again if I spend a lot of time running around, swimming and pushing weights. It's probably shoddy thinking. I'll only not smoke again if I don't have another cigarette. It's as simple as that. I'm a smoker like other people are alcoholics. There are no Twelve Step Programmes for smokers. I know that I'm only replacing one addiction with another but this one is much less likely to give me cancer.

I've lost half a stone since I started the Beginners' Running Club at the start of August. The trousers that I bought at the beginning of the year are now too large for me. I don't know whether I'm alone in not putting on weight after stopping smoking. I have more than compensated for the changes in my metabolic system by watching what I eat and taking lots more exercise. I feel more confident about my ability to run around the place now that I've been doing it for a few weeks.

I've noticed during my spells of public exercise that blokes come in all shapes and sizes. I know that's a daft thing to say but it hadn't really hit me before. You don't really think about other men's bodies, not when you're straight anyway unless they are really fat or exceptionally skinny. You see some poor bloke who is reduced to rolling around on a mobility scooter or the one whose Adam's apple seems to stick out of his pencil neck as far as his nose does from his face. Everybody other than them seems to be more or less the same. Judging from the state of the specimens in the locker room and pool however, I seem to be slimmer than most, a little shorter than most, with weedy little arms and a lot more hair. There are a number of mostly younger men who seem to be athletes in training but the rest of us are just trying not to die too quickly.

None of us look anything like the men on the covers of Men's Health or Men's Fitness. I used to get a glazed look on my face or harrumph when I heard feminists talk about body fascism, representations of women in the media and women's self-image. I understand more what they were on about now. I'm a forty-cough year old man. I'm never going to be an athlete or a sportsman of any kind. I have a diminishing paunch and the weedy little arms I mentioned earlier. I'm not broad-chested. My biceps don't bulge as much as my belly does. I've been looking at the two magazines mentioned above and not finding anything in either of them which remotely resembles me, my life, my body or my aspirations. I have the body of a Greek god. It's a small shame that god is Bacchus rather then Apollo but it's not too important. I'm bright enough to realise that, at least.

I worry about those of my brothers who aren't. Not my actual brothers. One is a former Army PT instructor, another has been working out since he was seventeen or so and the last is just too sensible. No, my figurative but stupid brothers who think they have to conform to the images that they see in magazines, pop videos and on advertising hoardings. I get annoyed by the ads for Just For Men hair dyes which suggest that a man with grey hair can't get laid or a new job. If you want to get laid, be nice to someone. If you want to get laid by the same person again, continue to be nice to them. If you want that job, do your interview prep properly and make sure you have relevant experience. It's not rocket science. Unless the job's at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in which case it probably is rocket science. Oh, and a decent haircut is a better investment than some hair dye.

It's bad enough that cosmetic companies prey upon the insecurities of women. I don't want to see them do the same to the other half of the population just to increase the sales of their patent potions. And in case anyone thinks that's dismissive of women's insecurities, it's not. I'd rather that Laboratoires Garnier and their ilk ceased to exist altogether and we all went back to using Vosene. The scientists there could then go and get real jobs curing cancer or something. I don't like that insecurities are used to sell anything to anyone. It's a pernicious thing to do. It eats away at lives in the worst possible way, telling people that they are less than they are because they don't have This Wonderful Thing Which Will Complete Your Life. If only you looked like this, you too could be happy. Go on. You're worth it. Bollocks.

I wouldn't mind consumerism as much if we weren't treated like idiots. The acquisition of more stuff doesn't make our lives better. We don't feel better because we're slimmer, more muscly, less grey-haired or wrinkly. We feel better because of the relationships we have with one another and the peace of mind we have in ourselves. This post has strayed somewhat off the topic I had in mind when I started but what the hell.

I like to think I'm an intelligent man so this article in the Independent depressed me just a little. One of the small joys of being a political junkie is that at election time you get to assess policies for yourself. Political parties being what they are, they deny us even that. The spin doctors have returned from their Christmas hols reinvigorated and as full of bile and cunning as I was of mince pies and port. We have charge and counter-charge and more rebuttals than any sane person can easily cope with and it's only the 5th of January. What's it going to be like by the middle of April?

I'd like to make a small request. It will likely be ignored. May we have an election this year which doesn't treat the electorate as idiots incapable of assessing evidence put in front of us? Some of us can do that. Really we can. I don't want spin. I don't want lies or accusations of lies. I'd like each party to make its own case and not spend any time at all trashing one another. Turnout in the General Election is likely to be low enough as it is without the parties turning off sectors of the electorate by acting like a chimpanzee's tea party. Each party's core voters will continue to vote they way they have whatever happens and they're not going to engage those who don't intend to vote acting like this. The rest of us want to be treated like adults. We can pick out the information from each campaign which is important to us without prestidigitation from the politicoes.

While I'm on the subject, I don't think that the Chancellor of the Exchequer should be giving any attention at all on the Conservatives' election promises. That's not his job. It's his job to sort out the fiscal pickle he's got us all into. He has an entire party machine to take care of the politics for him. Unless, of course, he doesn't trust the Party to get the job done.

I used to suffer on Sundays from what Douglas Adams called 'the long dark teatime of the soul.' It was mostly because I always had work of some kind to hand in on a Monday. At school, all those centuries ago, I would have an English essay or some maths problems to do. At university, there were always bits and bobs due on a Monday which I'd not completed over the preceding week so I had to do stuff on a Sunday when I really wanted just to sit around and do nothing.

The problem is that Sundays are not really sit around and do nothing days, in spite of the Lord's admonitions. Many people spend Sunday mornings running around daft to church, shops, visiting wrinkly relatives and doing God alone knows what else. The more dissolute among us spend the time recovering from whatever excesses they inflicted on themselves on Saturday night. Both are usually finished doing what they're doing by about three o'clock and then have to come to terms with what to do next. You can't take on too much, especially at this time of year when there is so little daylight left and besides, tomorrow is Monday. (Sad face.)

It gets worse if you happen to pick up a newspaper. Sunday newspapers are uniformly dreadful. There must have been a law passed in Scotland which stated that every household had to buy a copy of The Sunday Post whose only redeeming features were the page which had the Oor Wullie and The Broons cartoon strips and the lack of any mention of meaningful politics whatsoever. There were no boobs, which made it safe to leave lying around. I can't think of a single reason to buy any other Sunday newspaper these days. The tabloids haven't moved on from sensationalism and the content of the so-called 'quality' Sundays is depressing. Every political, environmental or social problem is raked over in exquisite detail to the extent that I don't have anything to lift the gloom which inevitably descends as the light fails on a winter's evening.

My inner conspiracy theorist tells me that it's to provide me with an incentive to get up off my arse and get back to work on a Monday morning; after all, what else could better take my mind off the tedium of Sunday afternoons than the joy of work on a Monday? Well, lots could, if I'm being honest. My inner conspiracy theory is an idiot. I just want Sunday afternoons to be less dreadful and having a decent balance of information and entertainment from the papers might help a little. At least for the next few weeks I can look forward to Top Gear but that's not on for hours yet. Might as well go back to bed...

I came across this post by Salman Shaheen on The Third Estate blog via someone's Tweet. Unfortunately, I can't remember whose Tweet it was and it's lost in the feeds now. Thank you, whoever you are. I'm most grateful.

As I said in my response, I'm fed up hearing about Nick Griffin. It's not as if he's the only person with odious views ever to have appeared on Question Time, but I grant it's probably the first time that someone with officially odious views has appeared on the programme. While it's true that I have no wish to see Nick Griffin on Question Time, I have even less wish to see him in Parliament. Only the knuckle draggers and the mouth breathers really want BNP Members of Parliament, never mind a BNP government. The rest of the people who have voted for BNP councillors and MEPs feel excluded by the mainstream parties and that's the problem we all have to address.

If I'm hiding my head in the sand in wishing Nick Griffin just had never existed, so are the leaders of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democratic parties in thinking that the views of sections of the electorate can be ignored because they're unacceptable round the dinner tables in the sleeker parts of London or even sat on the sofa here in Cambridge. There are those from the mainstream parties who are challenging the BNP and are standing up for true British values of tolerance and respect and I thank them for that.

I'm also worried by the more outlandish anti-fascists who seem to spend quite a lot of money buying eggs to lob at the man some call Fat Hitler. They think that in shouting him down, they're denying him a platform. They're not. They're just getting hoarse and boosting egg sales. As someone who has a deep love for chickens, I'm pleased that the anti-fascists are so assiduous in their support of Britain's egg producers. I can only hope that all the eggs thrown at the leader of the BNP are organic, free-range eggs from happy, democratic chickens. It's probably a vain hope. It might also be a vain hope that they're buying the eggs. I hope that anti-fascists' consciences extend beyond political awareness to the point that they won't actually pinch the eggs they throw around the place. I might be deluding myself in this as in so many other things.

If ignoring him doesn't work and shouting at him and pelting him with produce doesn't work, what will? Challenging him in debate might. I have the feeling that he's not the crunchiest biscuit in the box. That's the purpose of Question Time. I hope it is. I really hope it is. I'm just not going to watch it. I don't want his smug, self-satisfied face on my television or his voice in my living room. I'm not going to write to the BBC in protest, because my inner democrat says that his voice should be heard (and if his face were punched shortly thereafter, I'd probably laugh guilitily about it). I'm going to exercise my choice and do something else instead. Read a book in bed, probably. I can thoroughly recommend my friend Alison Bruce's book Cambridge Blue. Probably the only time in her life Alison will be mentioned on the same page as Nick Griffin.

I'd like to think that when Question Time starts tomorrow evening, hundreds of thousands of people will just hit their remote button and turn the programme off. I really hope that quite a lot of them have inter-racial sex instead of listening to him try to justify himself and his pointless, whiny, dreadful little views. There's nothing quite like a spot of casual miscegenation to piss off the racists.

I've been somewhat exercised this week with the soddish tendency, my own in part but then there's nothing like an MP being a sod about expenses to bring out the sod in oneself. David Wilshire, the Conservative honourable member for Spelthorne in Surrey claimed £100,000 in office expenses to be paid to a company called Moorlands Research Services which wasn't publicly registered and which had never filed accounts. Oh, and in a final layer of soddery, the only partners in Moorlands Research Services were Mr Wilshire and his partner, Anne Palmer. Needless to say, David Cameron probably went slightly mental at him and now Mr Wilshire is to step down as an MP and will probably - possibly - repay the money. The office and staffing allowances are separate from the living expenses which gained so much notoriety earlier in the year. MPs staffs are small and generally over-worked and I don't begrudge them a penny of the money they earn keeping their charges on the straight and narrow. Moorlands Research Services is just a front for a bit of soddishness.

On the other hand, some politicians are just lovely. I've had a fine time over the last couple of days. Like most of the Twittering classes, I became very worked up over the Battle of Trafigura to the point that I did something I've never done before and wrote to my MP. I had what can only really be described as a delightful customer experience. James Paice MP is the Conservative member for South East Cambridgeshire and he responded to my e-mail within a few hours agreeing that what Carter-Ruck had attempted wasn't a good thing and noting that the injunction against The Guardian reporting Parliamentary proceedings was no longer in place. I was mildly surprised at the speed of response. It took me longer to find a reliable man to come and fix my central heating this week.

Then to add to my befuddlement, I've been having a very pleasant correspondence with Peter Bottomley. I e-mailed him in support of his complaint to the Law Society about Carter-Ruck's conduct in the Battle of Trafigura, he replied, and then I replied to his reply and it snow-balled. He is a very nice man and I've found I like him very much. It pains me now to remember just how much I took the piss when he was a minister all those years ago and I was both cynical and daft as a badger's codpiece. If you're reading this, Peter, I'm really very sorry. Really. I take it all back.

Two pleasant encounters with hard-working and diligent gentlemen have reminded me that it's always the arseholes that attract attention. The ones who just get on with the job and do it quietly and well seldom get attention or approbation. I suppose it's just not as much fun to pay someone a compliment as it is to call them a scheming, money-grabbing little shit whose economy with the actualité is breathtaking. It's so much less creative.

Alan Rusbridger has just announced that the legal firm Carter-Ruck has thrown in the towel. The social media have ridden to the rescue of the mainstream media and in so doing given a ridiculous law a thorough kicking. Journalists have to be able to report on proceedings in Parliament and elsewhere. It shouldn't take a Twitter campaign to allow newpapers to report on matters which already in the public realm.

About 8:30 yesterday evening, David Leigh of The Guardian, posted the following article on the newspaper's website. I quote it in full.

Guardian gagged from reporting parliament

• David Leigh
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 12 October 2009 20.31 BST
• Article history

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck. Photograph: John D McHugh/AFP

The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.

Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented - for the first time in memory - from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

The Guardian has vowed urgently to go to court to overturn the gag on its reporting. The editor, Alan Rusbridger, said: "The media laws in this country increasingly place newspapers in a Kafkaesque world in which we cannot tell the public anything about information which is being suppressed, nor the proceedings which suppress it. It is doubly menacing when those restraints include the reporting of parliament itself."

The media lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC said Lord Denning ruled in the 1970s that "whatever comments are made in parliament" can be reported in newspapers without fear of contempt.

He said: "Four rebel MPs asked questions giving the identity of 'Colonel B', granted anonymity by a judge on grounds of 'national security'. The DPP threatened the press might be prosecuted for contempt, but most published."

The right to report parliament was the subject of many struggles in the 18th century, with the MP and journalist John Wilkes fighting every authority - up to the king - over the right to keep the public informed. After Wilkes's battle, wrote the historian Robert Hargreaves, "it gradually became accepted that the public had a constitutional right to know what their elected representatives were up to".

Having said I would spend a few days blogging about the Internet Manifesto, I've only gone and not done it again. I have been following the debate there with some interest for a change. Normally, the only things which keep me interested for more than a few minutes have either breasts or wheels. Quite pointedly, the Internet Manifesto has neither.

Anyway, I was talking about this to my boss during the week. We were at our quarterly sales meeting in darkest Oxfordshire and late in the evening we started talking tech and connectivity and the impact that the Internet (have to give it a Capital Letter, it's an Important Thing) is having on society.

A few years ago, I was living in a flat in Hull and I had no home phone. I used to go down onto the street and queue there outside the phone box in the pissing, cold rain to call my girlfriend in Dundee. She would arrange to be in when I was due to call and we would chat for a few minutes while the queue built up behind me. Someone at some point was bound to knock on the door of the phone box to get me to hurry up. I didn't have a lot of money at the time and a phone line was expensive. Now, I have a mobile phone for work, an iPhone with internet access, a laptop, a Mac in my home office and a landline. My wife is similarly tooled up and we can be in almost constant contact should we feel the need and neither of us needs to stand in a queue in the pissing, cold rain.

Should I wish, I can sit in the comfort of my own loo (the combination of wooden toilet seats, iPhones and WiFi is a truly wonderful thing) and interact with the world without actually having to face it. I can get information from local or nation government bodies without having to talk to anyone. It's possible that in the future, I'll be able to cast my vote without walking down to the Polling Station and all because I have some electronic bits-and-bobs, a phone line and the ability to read. It's also possible that those without those toys, a phone or reading ability could be disenfranchised because their voices will not be heard.

If you want to take part in almost any public discussion today, you have to use the Internet (Important Thing, remember?). BBC programmes are constantly referring their audience to further material available through their excellent website. Twitter has allowed a more immediate response even than e-mail and all of this is great as long as you have the technological and financial wherewithal to access it. Those who don't are losing out a little now and may lose out completely in the future.

I had intended for this blog to be a light-hearted little thing except when one or another politician got up my nose. However, I am aware that there are lots of serious-minded bloggers and citizen journalists out there, beavering away and doing their best to make the world just a little better for all of us. There are also proper, real journalists with proper, real, paid jobs and on a good day I am prepared to allow that they too just want to make the world a little better.

The Internet Manifesto was created by a group of German journalists and bloggers. It addresses some of the issues any thinking citizen of a technological democracy. It also lists the realities traditional media organisations have to face when coming to terms with a socially-networked bunch of consumers. I reprint it in full below.

I'd like to spend the next week or so looking in detail at each of the articles of The Internet Manifesto before I get on with the much easier task of being rude about Peter Mandelson and since this is my blog, that's what I'm going to do.

Internet Manifesto

How journalism works today. Seventeen declarations.

1. The Internet is different.

It produces different public spheres, different terms of trade and different cultural skills. The media must adapt their work methods to today's technological reality instead of ignoring or challenging it.  It is their duty to develop the best possible form of journalism based on the available technology. This includes new journalistic products and methods.

2. The Internet is a pocket-sized media empire.

The web rearranges existing media structures by transcending their former boundaries and oligopolies. The publication and dissemination of media contents are no longer tied to heavy investments. Journalism's self-conception is--fortunately--being cured of its gatekeeping function. All that remains is the journalistic quality through which journalism distinguishes itself from mere publication.

3. The Internet is our society is the Internet.

Web-based platforms like social networks, Wikipedia or YouTube have become a part of everyday life for the majority of people in the western world. They are as accessible as the telephone or television. If media companies want to continue to exist, they must understand the lifeworld of today's users and embrace their forms of communication. This includes basic forms of social communication: listening and responding, also known as dialog.

4. The freedom of the Internet is inviolable.

The Internet's open architecture constitutes the basic IT law of a society which communicates digitally and, consequently, of journalism. It may not be modified for the sake of protecting the special commercial or political interests often hidden behind the pretense of public interest. Regardless of how it is done, blocking access to the Internet endangers the free flow of information and corrupts our fundamental right to a self-determined level of information.

5. The Internet is the victory of information.

Due to inadequate technology, media companies, research centers, public institutions and other organizations compiled and classified the world's information up to now. Today every citizen can set up her own personal news filter while search engines tap into wealths of information of a magnitude never before known. Individuals can now inform themselves better than ever.

6. The Internet changes improves journalism.

Through the Internet, journalism can fulfill its social-educational role in a new way. This includes presenting information as an ever-changing, continual process; the forfeiture of print media's inalterability is a benefit. Those who want to survive in this new world of information need a new idealism, new journalistic ideas and a sense of pleasure in exploiting this new potential.

7. The net requires networking.

Links are connections. We know each other through links. Those who do not use them exclude themselves from social discourse. This also holds for the websites of traditional media companies.

8. Links reward, citations adorn.

Search engines and aggregators facilitate quality journalism: they boost the findability of outstanding content over a long-term basis and are thus an integral part of the new, networked public sphere. References through links and citations--especially including those made without any consent or even remuneration of the originator--make the very culture of networked social discourse possible in the first place. They are by all means worthy of protection.

9. The Internet is the new venue for political discourse.

Democracy thrives on participation and freedom of information. Transferring the political discussion from traditional media to the Internet and expanding on this discussion by involving the active participation of the public is one of journalism's new tasks.

10. Today's freedom of the press means freedom of opinion.

Article 5 of the German Constitution does not comprise protective rights for professions or technically traditional business models. The Internet overrides the technological boundaries between the amateur and professional. This is why the privilege of freedom of the press must hold for anyone who can contribute to the fulfillment of journalistic duties. Qualitatively speaking, no differentiation should be made between paid and unpaid journalism, but rather, between good and poor journalism.

11. More is more - there is no such thing as too much information.

Once upon a time, institutions such as the church prioritized power over personal awareness and warned of an unsifted flood of information when the letterpress was invented. On the other hand were the pamphleteers, encyclopaedists and journalists who proved that more information leads to more freedom, both for the individual as well as society as a whole. To this day, nothing has changed in this respect.

12. Tradition is not a business model.

Money can be made on the Internet with journalistic content. There are many examples of this today already. Yet because the Internet is fiercely competitive, business models have to be adapted to the structure of the net. No one should try to abscond from this essential adaptation through policy-making geared to preserving the status quo. Journalism needs open competition for the best refinancing solutions on the net, along with the courage to invest in the multifaceted implementation of these solutions.

13. Copyright becomes a civic duty on the Internet.

Copyright is a cornerstone of information organization on the Internet. Originators' rights to decide on the type and scope of dissemination of their contents are also valid on the net. At the same time, copyright may not be abused as a lever to safeguard obsolete supply mechanisms and shut out new distribution models or license schemes. Ownership entails obligations.

14. The Internet has many currencies.

Journalistic online services financed through adverts offer content in exchange for a pull effect. A reader's, viewer's or listener's time is valuable. In the industry of journalism, this correlation has always been one of the fundamental tenets of financing. Other forms of refinancing which are journalistically justifiable need to be forged and tested.

15. What's on the net stays on the net.

The Internet is lifting journalism to a new qualitative level. Online, text, sound and images no longer have to be transient. They remain retrievable, thus building an archive of contemporary history. Journalism must take the development of information, its interpretation and errors into account, i.e., it must admit its mistakes and correct them in a transparent manner.

16. Quality remains the most important quality.

The Internet debunks homogenous bulk goods. Only those who are outstanding, credible and exceptional will gain a steady following in the long run. Users' demands have increased. Journalism must fulfill them and abide by its own frequently formulated principles.

17. All for all.

The web constitutes an infrastructure for social exchange superior to that of 20th century mass media: When in doubt, the "generation Wikipedia" is capable of appraising the credibility of a source, tracking news back to its original source, researching it, checking it and assessing it--alone or as part of a group effort. Journalists who snub this and are unwilling to respect these skills are not taken seriously by these Internet users. Rightly so. The Internet makes it possible to communicate directly with those once known as recipients--readers, listeners and viewers--and to take advantage of their knowledge. Not the journalists who know it all are in demand, but those who communicate and investigate.

Internet, 07.09.2009

• Markus Beckedahl
• Mercedes Bunz
• Julius Endert
• Johnny Haeusler
• Thomas Knüwer
• Sascha Lobo
• Robin Meyer-Lucht
• Wolfgang Michal
• Stefan Niggemeier
• Kathrin Passig
• Janko Röttgers
• Peter Schink
• Mario Sixtus
• Peter Stawowy
• Fiete Stegers

Translated from the German by Jenna L. Brinning