Fitness generally isn't the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the typical poker player. But the participants of the TV series High Stakes Poker know the advantages of keeping your body running like a fine-tune machine. We caught up with four of the show's top players to find out how they keep their bodies and minds sharp at all hours of the day and night.

Whether you're looking to chisel big, strong arms, get a ripped core, or just improve your speed and cardiovascular fitness, boxing training is an ideal option. The biomechanics of the sport require you to develop power from the legs on up, making for a great total-body workout.

Another night without sleep because of the upstairs neighbours' remarkable capacity for impromptu nocturnal romance. What I don't understand is, why do these people always end up living in the flat above mine? Everywhere we read about the declining libido of the human species, the fact that fertility is down, that people are too tired to perform, that couples are struggling to find time for romance. Not in the flat above mine they are not. Oh, no, they are bucking the national trend quite nicely, thank you. In my little corner of Balham you would think they had just invented it.

Last month saw the usual spate of newspaper articles ridiculing the circular letters sent with Christmas cards. A series of books by Simon Hoggart now documents the worst of these. Funny as his examples are, he'll be hard put to beat the instance sent in by a reader of the Daily Telegraph: 'I suppose the high spot of our year was John's Nobel Prize.' Even so, am I alone in being slightly uncomfortable with all this opprobrium? If you care enough to spend 50p sending someone a Christmas card, shouldn't you expect them to spend a minute or so hearing what's happened to you in the past year? Is it all that awful to hear that your children passed their exams? Why do we hate this all so much?

I'm in the barber's chair, getting a trim, studying the reflections of the waiting customers in the mirror. One man, about 60 years old, his head in the Daily Mail, looks vaguely familiar. We've met somewhere before, I think.

Maybe it was too soon for Saturday night's Archive on 4 to reflect on George W.'s reign as President of the US of A. After all, there are still three days left of his administration. But Bremner on Bush: A Final Farewell was a missed opportunity. Rory Bremner was presumably hauled in as presenter because of his sharpwitted impersonations of Dubya, a man so easy to lampoon Bremner must sometimes have wondered whether there was any point in making fun of him. But, surprisingly, he gave us very few of those infamous stutters and stammers, and instead we heard from members of Bush's White House team and a mixed bunch of commentators, creating a very different kind of programme. Maybe that was the problem. We expect the revamped Archive Hour to be an authoritative version of past events from old recordings. It's a radio buff's manna from heaven, the stuff of life, as we are taken back in time purely through the sounds and voices of the past, and through them can sometimes conjure up our own

Gstaad

One of my favourite spectator sports is sitting, glass in hand, watching Mrs Oakley in the kitchen. There will be a stock reducing here, a pan with a few chopped leeks and onions there. A pinch of this, a sprinkle of that. A handful of coriander and a scrinch of lemon, a shlurp of rather better wine than should really be devoted to culinary purposes -- and then probably another shlurp. It is all done with the confidence of a surgeon taking the first slice into a patient, the dexterity of a master cooper. There is no sign of the hesitation that seizes Mrs O when she is asked to choose from someone else's menu in a restaurant.

If your concert-going habits mean that you always attend the same kinds of venue in the same kinds of town in the same country, the equation I am about to put to you may strike you as being rather odd. But the fact is that on the world stage there are socialist concerts and capitalist concerts; and, although they overlap, in their neat forms they are astonishingly different.

Ian McDiarmid possesses a voice that, if he chose to let it, could curdle milk.

The Wrestler

BYRON IN LOVE by Edna O'Brien Weidenfeld, £12.99, pp. 240, ISBN 9780297855538 £10.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655

Beth Chatto - A Retrospective Garden Museum, Lambeth Palace Road, London SE1, until 19 April

Such knotty problems! Check your lists:

JOURNALS : 1952-2000 by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, edited by Andrew Schlesinger and Stephen Schlesinger Atlantic Books, £30, pp. 912, ISBN 9781843549789 £24 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655

THE DOG: 5000 YEARS OF THE DOG IN ART

ON KINDNESS by Adam Philips and Barbara Taylor Hamish Hamilton, £14.99, pp. 117, ISBN 9780241144336 £11.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655

2666 by Roberto Bolaño Picador, £20, pp. 898, ISBN 9780330447423 £16 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655

Hedge Fund Land seems to be in disarray. Investment losses keep mounting up. It would not come as a surprise to hear that fully 70 per cent of these often complex and sophisticated offshore investment vehicles have percentage losses running into double figures over the last year, with a large number down by over 25 per cent. This all seems to point conclusively to the fact that the majority of practitioners are unable to cope with market conditions and have failed to remember Investment Rule 1.01 for confronting losses: 'Get out, stop losing and live to fight another day.

I have been puzzling during the winter holidays over Pope Benedict XVI's Christmas message. You may remember that it was interpreted as an attack on homosexuality, provoking the usual outrage. Most people, it seems, saw the response. Few bothered to study the message itself.

Sir: Charles Moore alleges (The Spectator's Notes, 20-27 December) that there is a police campaign to target muddy 4x4s after lunch.

Sir: Of course unicorns existed (Books, 10 January). But as everyone who has read C.S.

Sir: I can add a couple of tips to Robert GoreLangton's guide ('Sellotape and string pants', 10 January) to keeping warm on the cheap.

Sir: In response to Meg Hillier's wholly unconvincing letter (10 January), may I focus on one point in particular? If the cards are to be 'entirely voluntary', does that mean there is no truth in reports that the provision of a UK passport will be conditional on the production of an ID card? This outrageous practice would effectively make ID cards mandatory for large numbers of the very people who would reject them, given a free choice.

Sir: As Theodore Dalrymple says, the objective signs of heroin withdrawal are modest compared to alcohol (10 January); but the (subjective) symptoms are more severe. For more than 25 years I have been responsible for an alcohol and drug detoxification centre which uses very little medication. People withdrawing from heroin stay half as long as those withdrawing from alcohol. Methadone and buprenorphine treatment of heroin dependence has been endorsed by the World Health Organisation, UNAIDS and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. There is increasing evidence that the benefits of methadone treatment in prisons are similar to the benefits from this treatment in the community. Methadone treatment commenced in prison and continued in the community also reduces recidivism.

Sir: I assume your distinguished opera critic was given a free pair of prime stalls seats (cost £360), presumably so that he could review the performance of Turandot for your publication (Arts, 10 January). Because he did not like Elizabeth Connell (the last-minute replacement in the eponymous role, much lauded by several of the national broadsheets) and detected oncoming hoarseness in the tenor, Michael Tanner decided not to stay for Act III. How can a critic write any review of this opera without experiencing how the tenor meets the challenge (and expectation) of 'Nessun Dorma', the death of Liù (some of Puccini's most beautiful and moving music) and the soaring challenges for the two main singers that climax this great work? How can anyone interested in opera not want to stay to the end of this work? Mr Tanner's feeble joke about going one better than the composer (who did not finish Act III) does not make up for this irresponsible -- and I would have thought unprofessional -- attit

Sir: Paul Johnson (And another thing, 10 January) writes that, 'In 1947 C.S. Lewis told me. . . ' He goes on to say, 'The surest sign of a failure in sophistication is name-dropping.

Sir: Matt Ridley's article on Darwin's vision ('Natural selection explains everything', 10 January) omits one simple but very important fact, namely that Darwin did not originate natural selection. How do we know?

Margarito-Mosley in L.A. offers cheap seats, HBO access. In an event that?s being hyped ? accurately ? as the first ?megafight? of the year, Antonio Margarito puts his welterweight world title belt on the line against former world champ Shane Mosley next Saturday in Los Angeles.

Should blacks be allowed to adopt healthy children? Or should they be kept as an emergency reservoir of care for the damaged or ill children nobody else wants? It is time we got a little more rigorous about who we allow to adopt the kiddies, don't you think? Black people are slightly less likely, on average, to abuse their children sexually than are white people -- however, that's pretty much their only plus point. They are slightly less likely to stay together as parents and disproportionately more likely to have been involved in some form of crime. Black fathers will be less well-educated, on average, than their white counterparts and black families are more likely to be wallowing in the lowest income quartile. None of these indicators bodes well for the adopted child.

GOING UP

First Prince Harry, and then his father, Prince Charles, discovered that last week was their septimana horribilis and that they had both made the kind of gaffes for which the Duke of Edinburgh has gained notoriety.

So there was this symposium this week here put on by

Short of wearing a stove-pipe hat, Obama could not make his desire to be compared to Abraham Lincoln any more obvious. He plans to travel to his inauguration via the same route that Lincoln did, be sworn in on the Lincoln Bible and eat lunch off replicas of the Lincolns' White House china. Michelle and the girls must have wondered if he was going to change their name when he took them to the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday night.

Tennessee disaster should bring added regulation, move toward renewable energy. Most of the sites are near rivers or other waterways because they need water to operate. That should send a chill down the spine of anyone living downstream.

My wife tells me, and so it must be right, that now that we are retired we must beware of the involution of our habits and interests. It is all too easy for old people to live the petty round, in which a visit to the grocer seems an expedition of some magnitude, and not to change their clothes for weeks on end.

Oh, the fun we've had. Not since the Reverend William Spooner dumbfounded Oxford undergraduates have we been so entertained by the garbled syntax and grammatical infelicities that have been one of the more diverting features of the eightyear presidency of George W. Bush.

SUNDAY Totally shattered. Up at dawn doing Dave's bookshelves for Marr with Wonky Tom. He brought a heap of boring stuff and wouldn't let me put Katie Price's Perfect Ponies out.

No matter how excited you may be about Barack Obama's inauguration on Tuesday, I bet you're not as pleased as I am. Never have I wished more devoutly for a presidential victory than the one won by this mighty intellect-cum-healercum-fashion-model-cum-general-all-roundMessiah -- a man so conscious of his own merit that, unlike any president before him, he plans to swear his inaugural oath on the Lincoln bible.

Is it just me or is Fiona Bruce incredibly, incredibly annoying? I only ask because I didn't have a view on the subject till I was watching her present The Real Sir Alan Sugar (BBC2, Sunday) and on at least two occasions found myself so cross it was all I could do not to smash my TV to tiny pieces with a claw hammer.

Manon

THE OUTLANDER by Gil Adamson Bloomsbury, £12.99, pp. 389, ISBN 9780747595922 £10.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655

David Cameron has long been keen for his shadow Cabinet to exude greater empathy with recession-struck Britain -- and he has inadvertently succeeded in one important regard. Most are now fearful of losing their jobs. The coming reshuffle is being spoken of like a vicious redundancy plan that could claim any scalp at random. Frontbenchers anxiously read and decode newspaper stories -- particularly for the latest word on Ken Clarke's potential return and what that might mean. The suspense is agonising.

Watching the BBC's excellent dramatisation of Anne Frank's diary last week, I was struck by the family relationships depicted. They reminded me strongly of another family. Otto Frank, Anne's father, was the dominant and admired figure in the household. He ran a small business supplying pectin for jam-making, but his intelligence fitted him for greater things which circumstances prevented. He had two daughters, and no sons, and was very ambitious for his younger, livelier daughter, Anne. His wife, Edith, was much more withdrawn, and Anne felt that her mother did not understand her. Anne, though she loved her family, had the self-absorption of the clever teenager. She longed for a different, wider sphere of life, and dreamed of fame as a writer. At much the same time as the Frank girls were growing up in Amsterdam, the Roberts girls in Grantham were doing the same. Alfred Roberts was a small grocer, who had had to leave school at 14, but was highly self-educated. He had no sons, and he p

St-Emilion, France

It is human nature that some of the most red-blooded capitalists, who during the good times used to froth at the mouth at the thought of any kind of public expenditure, are among those now shouting loudest for help from the taxpayer. The most vociferous criticism of Lord Mandelson's plan to guarantee loans for small businesses revolves around the assertion that it does not go far enough, promising £20 billion worth of capital compared with a similar, £50 billion scheme proposed by the Conservatives last month. There has been rather less complaint about the principle of bailing out private businesses and what it means for the future of enterprise.

Clinton makes sense in how she plans to deal with Iran. It will be 37 years next month since President Richard Nixon made a historic trip to communist China to meet with its leaders. The visit with what was then one of America?s most bitter enemies was shocking on a number of levels, including the fact that Nixon had been an ardent foe of communism and had used that issue as a platform to get elected to Congress. Historians look back at that visit as being chiefly responsible for normalizing relations between the two countries.

The military has a surplus of what it doesn?t need, but not enough of what it does. Congressional investigators say the Army has a serious supply problem. Surveying four fiscal years ending in 2007, the Government Accountability Office reported that on average the Army had about $3.6 billion in excess spare parts. It said about $900 million worth of equipment will never be used.

He calls for optimism despite economic woes. At a time when North Las Vegas is trimming $15 million from its budget and a foreclosure crisis is tearing its way through town, Mayor Mike Montandon preached optimism in this week?s State of the City address.

As local officials seek money for projects in own areas, competition could get intense. As debate over the size and scope of a federal stimulus bill intensifies in Washington, regional leaders could soon be engaged in a fight for their piece of the pie.