Now that you can buy garden pods in John Lewis, it's definitely the future. Some of us may have fallen behind and be living in the past with old-fashioned flowerbeds etc. In which case you need to catch up quick by updating your garden design.

I've pointed out before that you'll need an invisible shed.

Here are some other super-modern solutions to common problems.

1. Tiny plot

City gardens tend to be small, so consider extending upwards or downwards. You could try an underground lake, or planting vertically. Take a structure like this:

Plant strawberries laterally up the sides. Then slide down the chute with watering can in hand for efficient and fun irrigation.

2. Long, thin garden

Normal swimming pools simply waste space with unnecessary widths. If you're someone who only swims lengths, consider installing a Swimming Trench.

However thin your garden is, you've room for one of these. And for all weather swimming, the addition of a polytunnel over the trench will mean you can grow tomatoes along the side.

3. Shady beds

Make the most of what you've got. If a dominant tree eg a leylandii is casting a shade over your plot, just use it to your advantage to add an extra 'garden room':

4. No garden at all

Don't worry - in the future, even if you live in a tower block with no access to a lawn, you can still go camping:

Never mind Easter or street parties - don't forget that April 24 is St Mark's Eve, where if you sit in the church porch from 11pm to 1am you'll get to see the rotting corpses of all the people who are going to die in the area in the coming year. Fun! Although it only works if you do it three years in a row, so you have to be pretty dedicated.

Or alternatively you can see your future husband's face in your smock. All good info!

Fans of Georgian London, bawdy satire or fun in general will want to get hold of Regarding Thomas Rowlandson, an account of the rambunctious life of the great graphic satirist and watercolour artist, as quickly as possible. New facts! Colour illustrations! A few of them quite rude! (But 18th century, so it's all fine.)

(Declaration of interest: the authors are my father and brother. But don't let that stand in your way.)

Flicking through the NYPL's fashion plates reveals that for pretty much every era up until now, the Walking Dress was the most appealing garment in a woman's wardrobe. I'm worried that we may have let these standards slip: some people even make the same costume do for Morning and Afternoon walking. The slatterns. Don't forget an umbrella to peep out from beneath; if you are French you'll need a dog.

New Year's Eve, most sane people agree, is unsatisfactory, and I put it to you that this is because, as celebrated in Britain at least, it's at totally the wrong time of year. It's far too soon after Christmas, and only marks the beginning of the dreariest part of winter. What's so great about starting January? Nothing. The sales are plenty to be getting on with.

The ancient Babylonians had the right idea: New Year started on the first new moon after the vernal equinox, which in 2011 I make April 3. Perfect! Spring is springing, buds are budding etc. So can I take it that we'll all be implementing that change this year?

(And we won't have any of that Hootenanny nonsense either: there's no way Nebuchadnezzar would have stood for marking the new year by watching Jools Holland and friends milling about a studio on some Tuesday evening in September.)

The Young in Heart, 1938, as well as being a satisfying comedy about a family of spongers meeting their match in an innocent old lady, also features possibly the world's best car showroom:

The Flying Wombat was actually the 1938 Phantom Corsair, a futuristic prototype designed by Rust Heinz, the ketchup magnate. It's a beautiful-looking thing, but turned out not to be the car of tomorrow after all.

The film is bursting with up-to-the-minute Thirties style: a couple even have a date at Lubetkin's modernist penguin pool at London zoo, which had opened four years before.

There are many reasons to like Marianne Moore:
1) Her poetry - particularly her "love of intricately shaped animals".
2) Her uniform. Not enough modern writers realise that without a tricorn hat and cape in the poetry world you are nothing. "She liked the shape of such hats, she said, because they concealed the defects of her head, which, she added, resembled that of a hop toad."
3) The fact that when the Ford Motor Company hired her to think of names for their new model, she threw herself into the task with great enthusiasm: the Anticipator! Dearborn Diamanté! Turcotinga! The Intelligent Whale! Utopian Turtletop! I'd drive any of them. Mongoose Civique! Inexplicably the fools went with the Ford Edsel instead.

I love these pictures of the Soyuz descent module landing in a field in Kazakhstan on its return from the ISS (via goodmachine). And particularly for the chance to get a close-up look at space fashion.

Badges! Blue plug-in nodules! White canvas boots with toggles!

Even better are the ceremonial return-from-space outfits they wear. I hope the reason Tracy Caldwell Dyson doesn't get a special hat is that she's a Nasa astronaut rather than because she's female.

Here they are back in normal clothes - although as you see Ms Dyson now carries a flower at all times as lady astronauts must when on planet Earth.

Defence cuts? Don't worry - as usual, GK Chesterton has the answer:

"I for one will confess that the only thing on earth I am frightfully afraid of is a little girl... If the Prussians were invading England, and I were holding a solitary outpost, the best thing they could do would be to send a regiment of Prussian girls of 12, from which I should fly, screaming."

It's a good point: who here can honestly say they could stand firm in the face of an army of 12-year-old girls, all staring contemptuously, giggling and whispering to each other? Osama bin Laden himself would feel hot around the neck and find he had important business elsewhere.

The sad story of Annie Taylor, aka Queen of the Mist, featured in a recent episode of Radiolab. She was the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, on October 24, 1901, an incredible feat that should have won her fame and fortune - but unfortunately the public found that a 63-year-old woman, who emerged from her barrel proclaiming "Nobody ought ever to do that again", didn't quite fit with their image of a daredevil.

A widow who had fallen on hard times, poor Annie went to Niagara in desperation, in a last-ditch attempt to gain financial security. Instead she had to sit beside her barrel trying to sell her signature to an oblivious public, and finally died in poverty.

Whereas the second - guess what, male - person to go over Niagara Falls, Bobby Leach, made a career from lectures and tours boasting about his stunt. (Until he died by slipping on an orange peel, that is.)

This is an obvious WRONG that must be righted. I suggest that this should be Annie Taylor Day, to celebrate a brave and shockingly unappreciated woman, who was also sensible enough to point out that it was actually a really bad idea that should not be copied.

Perhaps, like me, you often find yourself unable to concentrate on the TV because you are so distracted by the presenter's clothes. The other day I couldn't take in a word of a programme about the Domesday book, thanks to the historian's badly pre-distressed jeans. And I don't believe a news broadcast has ever been listened to properly: viewers are too busy wondering why female newsreaders like to dress as if they're on Star Trek.

I suggest we put a stop to all this with The TV Uniform, which must be worn by all presenters of non-fiction programmes. It could be as above, a loose, practical unisex jumpsuit of some description. Failing that, a pair of jumbo cords and a really boxy shirt would probably do the trick. Finally, an end to the chorus of 'What on earth is that JACKET?' that rings out across the land every time there's a weather forecast.

Of all the many strange things in 'Gold Diggers of 1933', this has to be the strangest. Neon violins: fine. Incongruously downbeat ending with soldiers covered in wounds: OK. But this? "Say! You know this opening number? What would really put this across would be if Ginger Rogers starts to sing We're In The Money in pig Latin. And she sorta looms up and her face gets really big and threatening? It'll slay 'em!"