* We must learn to do without the Tudors – in fact the term began as a form of abuse of the royal family. A fascinating piece from the TLS.

* A small sign of progress in Australia after the years of Howard regression: both lesbian parents can now be placed on their children’s birth certificates.

* A relatively unpatronising piece on female geeks from an unexpected source. It seems women students in non-traditional fields are getting more common, and doing well – until of course they hit the workplace.

* An analysis of the phenomenon of the cheerleader.

… well more or less.

I took this recipe, omitted the sultanas, and got something very close to gluten-free Anzac biscuits – I think that the keys are the tapioca flour, for chewiness, and of course the rice flakes for the fibre of oats.

Next time I think that I’ll omit the sugar altogether and just use golden syrup.

* More evidence of the basic unsustainability of Australian agriculture: you might have read about summer rains and floods, but they’ve utterly failed to replenish the water in the Murray-Darling basin, and another El Nino – which in Australia means drought – looks to be settling in.

* A fascinating reflection on life on other planets – and why finding it might be bad news. No not the obvious “they are smarter than us and might decide to eat us”, but a much more sophisticated argument about how if they died out, it’s not a good sign for us.

* Good news: the Christian church is dying out in Britain – now all we’ve got to do is disestablish it fast (so other religions don’t try to jump into its place), and stop news organisations regarding celibate old men as some sort of experts on social issues – and particularly on the fate of women’s bodies, such as in the abortion debate.

* An interesting piece on the history of cyclones and cyclone research, and on how Mauritius has learned to live relatively safely with them.

Given all of the Terminal 5 shenanigans, there’ve been many comments in the past week about the contrast to the St Pancras refurbishment, “on time and on budget” – well true in outline, but many months after the site opened, they have still not managed to put one single cash machine into the whole complex.

“Who knows?” said the woman on the Thameslink info desk, rolling her eyes, when I asked on the weekend when they were likely to arrive. “Everyone’s asking for them.”

Not so odd really – when you arrive at an international train terminal, you expect to be able to get cash.

And the taxi rank is still operating in “temporary facilities”, which means there’s either a long queue of cabs, or a long queue of people, but never both … this being a classic case of more order producing only chaos – the single line of cabs moving hardly at all when there are passengers. Hopefully when they finally manage to open the real facility it will be of a form that will join people to cabs a little more rapidly.

But lest you should think that this is only a British disease, in Australia they’ve designed a new underground train – just not allowed any time for it to stop at stations.

You’ll find me travelling with the RSC to Basra, in the excellent Days of Significance at the Tricycle Theatre, and getting softer and gentler, meeting butterfly man extraordinaire, Clive Farrell.

I am going to, in all too few hours, be jumping on a Eurostar, changing in Paris for Dijon, and on my way to what I hope will be a lovely little hut in the middle of a Burgundy forest. Internet access is likely to be intermittent at best… which will probably be a good thing for my body and my head.