How important is it to be widely read?

I’ve decided there are far too many classics that have passed me by and now I’m on a mission.

I blame it all on the News of the World. When the paper closed, we reviewed our Sunday paper options (quite an important task in a house with two journalists).

After much deliberation, we opted for the Sunday Times, much to the dismay of our newspaper delivery man who said he feared for the suspension in his car with the mountain of supplements.

Apart from making me realise that there are women in this world who think nothing of spending £400 on a pair of shoes (there’s never any Primark in their fashion spreads), it did make me think about the things I had – and hadn’t – read.

The complete works of Shakespeare has been sat on my bookshelf since I was a teenager, with scribbled notes in the margin from A-level Macbeth and The Tempest, but the others barely touched.

My goal is to work up to those, but to start with, I thought I’d have a go at Lord of the Flies (another school leftover, this time from my hubby’s collection).

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s beautifully written. I can appreciate William Golding’s attention to detail.

“Not a lot happens, though, does it?” I said to hubby. “I’m half way through and so far, all the boys have done is kill a pig, let the fire go out, and talk with a shell.”

He tells me that’s not the point. It’s about how people react when thrown into a desperate situation, and how society develops. The killing of the pig, he says, will become significant later.

I’m reserving judgement but if I’m honest I’m missing a bit of gritty Martina Cole, or the pure escapism of the Shopaholic series. Even if I learn to love the classics, I know I’ll always much rather be tucking into a biography.

What’s wrong with accepting that you can take it or leave it when it comes to some books? I’m ploughing on but making it through to Romeo and Juliet is looking a tough task.

We've had some journalism students in the office over the past few weeks for a spot of experience.

They are an absolute whizz on putting together video and audio and think nothing of sourcing stories from websites, Facebook and Twitter.

Nothing wrong with that, but sometimes the good, old-fashioned method of wearing some shoe leather out on the streets is the only way to get things done.

And that inevitably ends up with the likes of me, and one or two others, harking back to the days when we were trainees.

One of our students couldn’t quite get their head around how we used to get a paper out without modern technology. And, to be honest, by the end of the history lesson, neither could we.

When I first started as a cub reporter, computers weren’t part of a newsroom. Reporters wrote on typewriters, everything double-spaced and in triplicate – top copy for the editor, second copy for the subs and a copy for you.

When computers arrived, the screens were clunky. All you could do was type green letters on a black screen and how it ever appeared in print, with pictures alongside, I never really understood.

By the time I joined the KM Group, computers were part of everyday life, but technology was still a shadow of what it was today.

We worked on the daily paper, Kent Today, and would dash out first thing to a job, phone our copy back from a phone box (when was the last time you called the operator and reversed the charges?) and any borrowed photos had to be driven to our head office in Larkfield and put through the company’s only scanner.

And we were ahead of the rest. Just how did we do it? With grit and determination and the fear of missing a deadline.

On Friday, I stood watching HMS Ocean sailing up the River Thames. We had three reporters on scene – one taking pictures, two shooting video on smartphones, and, within a very short space of time, it was published on our website.

So what’s changed? Just the deadline. The grit and determination is always there. It’s just the deadline that’s moved.

My hubby bought me a camera for my birthday.

My husband must really love me, because he’s put up with an awful lot the past seven days.

I’ve been ill for over a week now, and while I’ve felt like death warmed up, at least I’ve been able to take time off work.

Him, poor thing, has had several sleepless nights while putting up with me coughing, spluttering, moping around the house, and waking up every hour or so, making the sound of a fog horn.

I’m not a great patient. I’m OK for a day or so and then I get angry. It’s probably the control freak in me – if I can’t make myself better by day three, I’ve had enough.

This all began the weekend before last with a bit of a sniffle, a bit of a temperature and a pretty sore throat. They quickly went, but were replaced by a cough that I just cannot shift.

Drugs from my GP have helped, along with menthol steam, my own body-weight in lozenges, throat sprays, hot milk with honey and paracetamol.

I swear I now have a haze of mint, honey and lemon around me – I daren’t walk near any bees.

It also meant dinner out with my family had to be postponed – I’ve had better birthdays. I felt like I had a severe hangover with none of the alcoholic euphoria beforehand.

Still, it has made me appreciate the smaller things in life, rare treasures such as sleeping more than two hours at a time, being able to taste food and laying down – any sleep I’ve had in the past week has been sat bolt upright. Lay me down, and the coughing starts all over again.

I’ve also retreated back to my childhood as out came grandma’s sick blanket (one of those wonderful multi-coloured crocheted affairs), and in the early hours of the morning I discovered one channel was re-running episodes of The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie.

If I’d found a few episodes of The Clangers and Bagpuss, I’d have been even happier.

I shouldn't really complain because it’s hardly something to get grumpy about, but my husband is annoyingly good at buying presents.

It was our sixth wedding anniversary on Friday. When you reach 50 years, it’s a golden anniversary, 25 years is silver. Six years is, apparently, iron. I warned him if he went for the obvious, he was likely to have one extremely grumpy wife.

I think, for a moment, he was tempted to run the risk – just for a laugh – but thought better of it.

It’s been driving me bonkers, because for the past few weeks, I’ve known that he had my present all sorted, and I knew it was going to be different.

Last year, our fifth, was wood. He bought me a necklace with a wooden heart on it, and our initials engraved on the back.

And so the competition was on, to make my present to him better than his to me. I tried, to coin an awful phrase, to think outside the box.

I was pretty pleased with my final choice – a non-iron shirt, and a branding set for your barbecue. You choose the message you want on your meat, put the letters in the holder, heat it up on the barbecue and stick it into your steak.

For a man who loves cooking, I thought it was quite inspired. But he still managed to top that. My present? An iron horseshoe. Along with a riding lesson at our nearby stables, something I’d said last year I’d love to learn, and he’d remembered.

Thoughtful, probably, but maybe he’s just after a good laugh. “Good luck with that,” said my mum, when I told her. “All I can say is, stay away from water.”

She’s right, because the last time I got on a horse, I promptly fell off it and found myself up to my waist in a muddy river – and spent the next hour glaring at my husband as he tried to contain his laughter.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before one of the greatest collection of books fell victim to the digital age.

In my job, you have to love words and I do. Newspapers, magazines, booklets, parish magazines, pamphlets – you name it, I love browsing through them.

I also adore books. Christmas and birthday lists are full of new titles I want to delve into, and we have more bookshelves in our house than anything else. My husband’s even boarding over the loft so we can put more shelves up there.

He refuses to buy an e-reader because, he says, there is nothing like a proper book.

And he’s right. I even love the smell of them (I’m sounding weird now, I know). When I heard the Encyclopaedia Britannica will no longer be printed in book form, but as a digital edition only, my heart dropped.

I still have the burgundy leather-bound volumes that my dad bought soon after I was born. It was THE addition to any sideboard, and the tomes stood proudly in our dining room for years.

We knew they were precious but as I grew up, I was allowed to use them for research for my homework.

I can remember carefully turning each delicate page, anxious not to tear it. There was no internet; this was our window on the world. Progress is good, but it’s sad to say goodbye.

Talking of sad goodbyes, there have been plenty of tributes pouring in for Edwin Boorman, and all the good work he did for our county. But he probably didn’t know how far he touched people’s lives.

Edwin and the KM Group have played a huge part in my family’s life. My brother was a paper boy for the old Evening Post; I met my husband, then a fellow KMG journalist, who proposed to me in the KM hot air balloon. Even our wedding invites were mock-ups of the KMG’s What’s On magazine.

Edwin sent a hand-written note when we suffered a family bereavement, which meant a lot.

My mum worked for a charity he was involved with, and he always welcomed her with a cheery hello. He never forgot her name and she has always spoken fondly of him.

He’ll be sadly missed.

The first nationwide countdown to London 2012 started over the weekend.

Music Nation saw more than 100 live events across the UK and featured more than 10,000 people and 18 new works.

It was a cultured start to the festivities, but I have just one question – where’s Spandau Ballet?

Log onto the official 2012 website and they’ll tell you all about the must-haves: the parade of athletes, the speeches, receiving of the head of state, the oaths, the anthems and the raising of the flags. All grand stuff and traditions that should not be missed.

But what we really want to know is how the Olympic Cauldron is going to be lit (who can forget Paralympic archer Antonio Rebollo, who shot an arrow into it at Barcelona 1992) and who’s headlining the big bash.

There’s been plenty of speculation, but nothing’s been confirmed, although Sir Paul McCartney did reveal he was in talks to do “something”.

What we do know is that film director Danny Boyle, who’s leading the creative team, pans to incorporate a 27-ton bell, nurses – to celebrate the NHS – and 900 children among a cast of 15,000.

What I want to see is someone back flip their way down the stadium, land on a trampoline and somersault their way over the top of the cauldron, lighting it with their outstretched hand as they fly over the top. And all to the strains of Spandau Ballet belting out “Gold” from the top of a London bus.

You cannot have an Olympics without them. Ever since the BBC used it in their coverage of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, you can’t watch an athlete run around the track without inwardly singing, “Cos, you are gold (gold); always believe in your so-oul, you’ve got the power to know, you’re in-de-struct-able, always believe i-in......”

Amazingly, it only got to number two in the UK singles chart, pipped to the number one spot by KC and the Sunshine Band’s Give It Up.

So now’s the time to put that right. Get Spandau Ballet to number one and have them perform at the opening ceremony. It’s about time the rest of the world had that song buzzing around their head all day, and not just us.