Jon Day

Bicycle road-racing has never been much of a spectator sport. Its origins lie in journalism, and the first great races, the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia, were designed to be read about rather than watched. The yellow jersey worn by the leader of the Tour is the same colour as the pages of L’Auto, the newspaper that first organised the race. No one really knew what was going on out on the road during those early races. Cheating was rife and Géo Lefèvre, the only journalist to follow the first Tour from start to finish (the race was his idea), was described by his son standing at night ‘on the edge of the road, a storm lantern in his hand, searching in the shadows for riders who surged out of the dark from time to time, yelled their name and disappeared into the distance.’

The organisers of the ‘Rally Against Debt’ on Saturday made a lot of promises. On their website the event was described as ‘a great networking opportunity’. There were to be ‘a fair share of journalists’ so any attendee stood ‘a good chance of getting your face out there'. The rally would give voice to the ‘silent majority'. Comparisons were made with the Tea Party movement. The organisers were pitching to an inexperienced protesting crowd. The website provided tips on how to make a placard, along with a selection of recommended slogans: ‘I understand economics’; ‘Stop reckless politicians spending our money’; ‘Mind the fiscal gap.' I didn't fancy getting my face out there, but was curious to see what kind of support a pro-cuts demo could muster.

Nathan Myhrvold, who used to be Microsoft’s chief technology officer, has just published a £395, six-volume, 2400-page paean to the type of cooking sometimes known as ‘molecular gastronomy’. Modernist Cuisine is a luxurious and slightly self-congratulatory piece of work: a section of the accompanying website outlines every detail of the printing process (stochastic screening using Chroma Centric inks, if you’re interested); publication was delayed in order to redesign the slipcases, which had ‘failed a rigorous series of drop tests’. It’s full of amazing food-porn photographs of dishes being cooked, as well as essays on such topics as ‘Vaporisation and Condensation’ and ‘Sublimation and Deposition’.

One of the most striking things about yesterday's student protests, culminating in the ransacking of Conservative Party HQ at Millbank Tower, was not the numbers involved (50,000 or so), or the violence (sporadic and quite heartening), but the shiny and sterile quality of many of the images of dissent we’ve been offered in today’s papers. This iconic moment of window smashing was a gift to the Daily Mail, but doesn’t exactly justify their description of ‘militants from far-Left groups’ who ‘whipped up a mix of middle-class students and younger college and school pupils into a frenzy’. The phalanx of photographers at the back clearly outnumber any militants or frenzied schoolchildren in the shot.