Seeing Manchester City win over QPR was exciting enough (and I’m not even interested in football anyway…), but even better was seeing the explosion of happiness on MC fans’ faces when they realised that “44 years of hurt” were over.

Having a great time through sport is a point that Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker @GaryLineker touches in our latest (June) issue – in the long run, you get better, more motivated (and better-behaved) players.  (It seems especially pertinent following the post-match Twitter spat where QPR midfielder Joey Barton had a go at commentator Alan Shearer for criticising his red-card behaviour during the match.)

Gary Lineker’s biggest bugbear is parents who think it’s ok to scream at their kids from the sidelines: “We end up with kids who think winning is more important than technique. Kids should be playing to enjoy the game.”  Hear, hear.

John Prescott has a point in our latest (May) issue when he says that social media tools such as Twitter are able to create checks and balances on the worst excesses of the media in a way that the Press Complaints Commission often doesn’t. But some of the limitations of Twitter are very evident when it comes to a breaking news story. Yes, you can find out what’s happening, and fast – and very often faster than any other media. But as I’m writing this, there’s a siege going on in Tottenham Court Road, which is quite near to our offices (helicopters have been circling for a couple of hours now). Twitter was great, initially, to find out what the hell was going on. But then there’s only so much of “OMG wots goin on in TCH? I woz there  last year!!!!” and people confusing Tottenham with TCR that you can take, and despite the 20 new tweets every 10 seconds, in the end it was Sky News where we found basic factual details, as well as regular updates. It just highlights the importance of having trusted sources (and that usually means paid-for, properly funded journalism) to fall back on that make sense of all the babble.

Yes, there’s going to be a deluge of Jubilee-related features and photos and “special issues” – but few, I suspect, quite as special as the one from Reader’s Digest this month.

While other commentators will look back and review the past 60 years of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign through 21st-century eyes, RD — launched in the UK back in 1938 — has been able to capture what it was all like at the time, through the eyes of our Royal reporters of the day, thanks to some determined rummaging through our archives.

There’s so much material, in fact, that it’s become a book in its own right – Reader’s Digest and the Royals (see readersdigest.co.uk/royals). Read some of the highlights for yourself in our May issue.

NB:  it’s the kind of thing that once you start reading, you just can’t stop. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Favourite letter of the week has just come in from Rob Lane of Derby:

“In a country beset by cuts and disquiet, all credit to Reader’s Digest for rising above this relentless doom and gloom with its inspirational campaign to Keep Britain Happy. Your fitness yearbook in January showed that no one, young or old, male or female is excluded from your magnificent mission to get us all smiling.

Your current run of health tips and plethora of suggestions to tweak lifestyles are practical and motivational. The whole mix is pitch-perfect to get us feeling better about ourselves.

I’ve been reading a guide which suggests people avoid news in the morning becuase it starts the day in a negative way. I’ve amended the advice and keep RD by my bed to flick through with my first cuppa. As as result I meet each new day enlivened, stimulated, amused and, yes, smiling. Keep up the great work, RD!”

All part of the service, Rob. Look out for our “Stay Calm” feature in the April issue, and, in May, some clever new ways to boost happiness!

Our April issue will be delivered in just a few days’ time, and with it, one of my favourite “how to” snippets on how to get out of a rut (see our 1,001 ideas section):

“A sure way to spot stuck thinking is if a problem keeps recurring—so if parking tickets or hangovers mount up, it’s time to act. Going without a watch, sleeping
on the other side (or end) of the bed, changing your home page and walking down an undiscovered road disrupt set patterns of behaviour. It’s easy, fun and psychologically powerful, because small changes lead to big differences.”

It reminds me of a woman I met years ago who said that the jump from “my small, daily routine” to “chucking it all in and going to save the world in some dark corner of the planet” was just too big, so she stayed in her small, daily routine and just made very, very small changes indeed: a different breakfast; taking a different route to work; reading a different newspaper one morning, and so on. She became so comfortable with the idea of change – interesting and enriching rather than threatening and disruptive – that within the year she had upsticked and is now running an organic business in France and having the time of her life. Yay!

Fascinating piece in latest (March 2012) issue about what really happened on the Titanic, written by TV producer Nigel Stafford-Clark, whose latest project, “Titanic” starts on ITV1 this month. One of his findings is that the people most likely to have died were not in the men in third-class, as was previously thought, but those in second-class, only 8% of whom survived—about half the rate of those in steerage and a quarter of those in first class. Why? Seems it was a mix of first-class sense of entitlement, nabbing the lifeboats for themselves, and those in steerage just  scrambling for any boat they could – while the second-class dutifully did what they were told and let women and children go first.

We’ve included a menu from a second-class dinner menu planned for  April 14 – which was never eaten, as the ship went down on the 12. Might have passed on the ‘tapioca’ or ’sharp sauce’, but glad to be reminded that curries have been part of our staple diet for so long: in among the Spring Lamb and Roast Turkey is Curried Chicken and Rice.

I was with a group of magazine editors (what’s the collective noun – a proof?) who met Nick Clegg last night down in Whitehall. These functions tend to be a bit of a bland meet-and-greet, where you clutch a glass of indifferent wine in one hand, try to grab a passing canape to help stave off the hunger pangs—and just when you’ve crammed that cube of tuna sprinkled with stick-in-your-teeth sesame seeds into your mouth…is the exact moment when the guest of honour is introduced. One determined swallow later, and I was able to ask Mr C – who turned out to be very engaging and friendly – whether he was a magazine reader or not (he’s not – but he’s always got a book on the go), and where he gets his info from (bbc and Guardian online sites). But there are clearly limits. He’s only allowed to use a specially vetted Blackberry – nothing else, it seems, is safe enough – so access to information is more limited than it was in his pre-Cabinet days. Climbing the greasy pole – it’s an efficient way to free yourself from gmail, Facebook et al, I suppose.

When it came to The Speech, he stuck to safe ground – how to improve social mobility, and especially in these tough economic times while the government puts the “economic jigaw” back together again. One can but hope.

It felt like a major effort to drag myself into town on a Sunday night…surely the night to have curled up on the sofa instead with a glass of wine and to watch Birdsong. So even more respect to the performers at the Women in Journalism/Funny Women event at the Leicester Square theatre last night, who appeared for free in aid of Jo’s Cervical Cancer trust.

Favourite joke of the night? Helen Lederer: “Joan Collins has just been into hospital…to check up on the birth of her next husband.” Also appearing: Lara A King (who had us all singing her Dementia song, as well as all the things her kinesilogist – me neither – had told her she couldn’t eat). And Shazia Mirza talking about her days as a teacher in a tough East End school, and how the 16-year-old boys – “who looked 25″ – all wore their trousers down by their knees, held – just – in place with a belt. “Don’t you just want to pull them down? No wonder I had to stop teaching…”

Great evening, and a tribute to Lucy Maxwell, whose mum, Jo, died of cervical cancer, and who is now a trustee of the charity.

2012, huh? So we’re all going to be worse off, with zero employment prospects, and with high-speed railtracks running through our vegetable patches. Enter the Reader’s Digest Keep Britain Happy campaign…it’s time to haul our spirits out of the dump with some reminders of why life might not be quite so bad after all, and how to make it better.

Some great ideas in our February issue: the five key mistakes that people make at work – crack these and we’ll all be working much more effectively, and much more rewardingly; how the time of year can affect your mood, often in unexpected ways, and what to do about it; and how the basic principles of neurolinguistic programming (NLP) can profoundly change how you feel about your past, present and future.

Keep your ideas coming in  - we’ll be featuring our pick of the best throughout the year.

Happy new year!