You learn a little every day (sometimes a bit too much) about blogs and blogging. In response to the Pan-demonium piece a bookseller wrote to point out an omission from my list of current great Pan books. This will take you to his excellent review of Bella Pollen's Midnight Cactus.

The bookseller in question is Mark Farley and he writes the Bookseller to the Stars blog. There is no link that I could find to where he works and a Google search on his name is unrevealing, although I suspect his bookshop is in West London. But none of that matters. His blog is brilliant and it's everything a bookseller's (or book trade person's) should be. I am green with envy.

Later today I'm going to be discussing the British Government's Creative Economy Programme at the Work Foundation, an organisation led by the well-known and successful author, Will Hutton. He has been invited to pull together the results of seven working groups and to write the first (and presumably the most important) part of the Green Paper which will emerge later this Spring. The process is described here. The problem as I see it (but doubtless I am wrong and will be corrected) is that the creative economy cannot be driven by Government to any great extent. 

Traditionally, political repression has been a stimulus to creativity but I don't think that's what Will and his team have in mind.

So what is the point of all this? A colleague suggested that the only way the Government could help aspiring artists, writers etc would be to advise them on how to avoid paying any income tax. I'm not sure that's what Will and his team have in mind either but it would certainly be worth a try and I'll suggest it. Any other ideas?