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Does royal fiancee Kate Middleton's roots lie in a fine Lancashire town near Manchester? Photograph: MCP/Rex Features Fellow subjects! There can be only one place to turn to at this joyous moment and that is … Middleton. Who can doubt that Our Kate's roots lie, way, way back, in this fine town near Manchester, or that its local weekly Guardian was her forbears' mentor.
It is a place of interest and history, home of the only surviving Peterloo banner and responsible in the past for producing many a cotton twist and bathroom flannel. It has its place in the pantheon of investigative journalism, too. During the Sudan campaign, in which Winston Churchill famously rode in the British army's last great cavalry charge at Omdurman, the Middleton Guardian reported on a Lancashire fusilier who had been ordered to bayonet every enemy survivor, dead or alive.
This week, its dramas are domestic: "A widow went on a drunken binge after work and crashed into two cars as she drove home." Fortunately no one was hurt by the antics of the mother of two, who underestimated the power of a bottle of wine. She was heard by neighbours shouting: "Everything will be OK – it happens."
This lifts an otherwise mundane account, although the paper also has quiet fun linking the police's subsequent visit, after the woman had "changed into her pyjamas", with her solicitor's comment in mitigation that the arrest was "a wake-up call". Her drunken cry might also make a good modern substitute for Middleton's motto Fortis in arduis, which up to now has been translated as "strong in difficulties".
The Guardian also has an excellent picture gallery, which features readers' photographs of Middleton and surrounding scenes. Some show the redbrick terraces becomingly wreathed in mist – almost like a bridal veil. Another has the sunshine of a new day streaming through woodland at Boggart Hole Clough.
There is also – rejoice, ye cliche-mongers of the North – an exceptionally fine pigeon hurtling towards the camera of Middletonian Mike McGrath. But my favourite in the 40-strong gallery is reader Anthony Jennings' photo of the moon. Photos, rather. He was so interested that he took one in January and another in August. It is the same moon that we have in Leeds, and that will shine over William and Kate's wedding night. But he has photographed it very well, and it made me think fondly of honeymoons.
There is only one pub in England officially named after our earlier Queen Kate, whose personal loyalty was a model, even if it led to the dissolution of the monasteries and the English Reformation. The Katherine of Aragon sits on a Yorkshire hillside at Osmotherly, the patch roamed by staff of the Northern Echo.
This week, they are more interested in Catterick up the road, where a metal detectrist has found a right royal mediaeval seal. Ivor Miller's silver trophy comes with all the enjoyable theorising which surrounds such discoveries underground.
"Some have speculated that a medieval farm labourer may have found the Roman jewel, a semiprecious stone, and handed it to their noble or lord, who placed it into their correspondence seal," says the Echo cheerfully, without fear of contradiction or correction. Equally, it may have been flung gaily out of a casement at Catterick's long-gone castle, by a young prince over the moon at his beautiful girlfriend saying "Yes".
Its mysteries are protected by an unknown jumble of letters, thought to be some sort of mediaeval code. Miller gives off nothing but simple contentment. He tells the Echo: "I had a feeling it was something nice. I can go out for months and find nothing but shotgun cartridges and ringpulls."
Note meanwhile, that Osmotherly's solitary Katherine of Aragon is also an exception to the many Elephant and Castle pubs, which are also named after the sad queen, but disrespectfully. The weird combo was the nearest English sots in Good King Henry's reign could get to Katherine's Spanish title, the Infanta of Castille.
I've had a jolly week myself, dealing extensively with the Twittersphere, a world into which I occasionally send fusillades of connected 140-word bits of pith. This method is cheating but I haven't got time for précis, and anyway the Twitter case involving Robin Hood airport was a bit complex to condense into the system's official requirements.
Like everyone else, I found Judge Jaqueline Davies a somewhat severe figure at Doncaster crown court, but the appeal by Paul Chambers, who made the notorious tweetjoke about bombing the airport, wasn't brilliantly handled for reasons I try to explain in my own tweets. It's interesting meanwhile to read the headline in this week's Doncaster Star: "Deadly haul of weapons at Robin Hood airport".
It shows why staff there can be twitchy. A crackdown operation by the UK Border Agency has found travellers armed with over 100 weapons, including stun guns, clubs and samurai swords (though unfortunately, given the airport's name, no bows and arrows). Some of the kit was plainly souvenir material, but what on earth were mother and son, Jayne and Jack Allen, doing on holiday in Bulgaria?
The Star reports that they were stopped at Robin Hood carrying three canisters of CS gas, four knuckle dusters, three batons, three finger- knives and a back knife. I know the Bulgarians carried out that weird umbrella murder of a dissident in London years ago, but they can't be that dangerous.
The Star can suffer Daily Mail-style hissy-fits, though, as it does with another headline which reveals excitedly: "Ed's grandad a communist". The piece about Labour's new leader, who is also MP for Doncaster North, goes back beyond his late Dad Ralph, a very well-known Marxist academic, to Grandpa Sam who actually "fought with the Red Army".
This would have been a badge of honour in Donny in times past. Maybe it still is, although the former citadel of mining and socialism elected an English Democrat oddball as its mayor in May. Judging by the thread beneath the piece online, everyone is staying calm. The first comment consists simply of the word: "So?"
From Donny to Scunny, and in my preferred role of bringer of joy from the North, I was genuinely pleased to read this: "Bumper pre-tax profits have led to a directive for production on the Scunthorpe Tata steelworks to be stepped up by 10,000 tonnes a week."
The report in the Scunthorpe Telegraph may be a surprise in the current climate of cuts and financial worries, but it suggests an underlying recovery. If steel is reviving, many smaller-scale business will follow. Tata reports that profits from Scunny and the rest of its European division in the first half of 2010 were £315m, compared with a loss of £512 million last year.
The firm has asked local staff for a 10,000 tonne increase of weekly steel production from the current 68,000 tonnes. Mind you, the group's net debt still stands at £6.7bn according to the Telegraph, so we'd best be cheerful but not too giddy.
Martin Wainwright recommends: on holiday in Slovenia, one of my sons inscribed the visitor-book at a local attraction with "A museum of cheese! What could more exciting?" I feel the same, albeit without his youthful cynicism, about the first-ever Encyclopaedia of Leeds, just published by an excellent local journalist called Mick McCann. Even if you couldn't give a toss about the city, your £9.99 buys an extraordinary Lucky Dip of fact, opinion and assertion, which reminds me of Dr Johnson's famous dictionary, additionally fuelled by some powerful local substance such as Tetley's ale.
You can get a copy from Armley Books via updateleeds@hotmail.co.uk and I will be dishing them out as Christmas presents.
On the outing front, why not pay a visit to dear little Kettlewell, either for a weekend meal at one of the three pubs, tea and a cake at the many cafes and/or a march along one of the lovely stretches of the Dales Way?
The other reason for going is to admire the impressively skilful scarecrows of children and their teachers which greet you to the village beside a "Save Our School" sign. More on this next week in Guardian Education; meanwhile make a long-range planning note of the Kettlewell Scarcrow festival one of the country's best, which runs next year from 13-21 August . If the school does shut, the festival could eventually be a victim too.
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Rapper Jay-Z gave a talk at the New York Public Library 5.30pm ET / 10.30pm GMT: Time to get into an Empire State of Mind and, yes, actually I did have to make that poor excuse for a joke: tonight Jay-Z will be talking about his upcoming and already critically lauded book, Decoded, at the New York Public Library with Cornel West, almost certainly the only Princeton professor who has collaborated on an album with Prince.I'll be there, liveblogging away. Well, I say liveblogging but there is a strong chance I'll be so starstruck by Mr Z that I won't be able to see my keyboard. But I'm a professional journalist and so I promise you this: if Beyonce turns up, I'm totally touching that booty.
6.34pm ET / 11.34pm GMT: Greetings everyone from the fourth row of the New York Public Library where, in just 30 minutes, Jay-Z will be discussing his upcoming book, Decoded, with Cornel West.Now, I'm going to lay my cards on the table with y'all from the start - I am stupidly excited. Tragically, I don't think I've ever been so excited in my life. Shawn Carter! 20 feet away from me! And the icing on the cake is West, a man as floridly outspoken as he is facially hirsute, and, most importantly, he appeared in The Matrix Reloaded. AND I have a copy of the Jigga man's book here and I can exclusively reveal that it is - and you can quote me on this - most interesting looking. Let's have a look through the book until the talk starts...
6.43pm ET / 11.43pm GMT: So I should have said this event is packed to the max – and with a pretty diverse demographic, which, to say the least, is not something one sees at most New York events.Anyway, the book, Decoded. So it mixes up Jay-Z decoding (ah yes, we see what he did there) his lyrics, with tales from his childhood, explanations about hip-hop's connection to the ghetto and then a wider audience, and chapters that begin with sentences like "I met Bono years ago, in the cigar room of a bar in London with Quincy Jones and Bobby Shriver." So pretty much as expected but slickly packaged and a lot smarter than it could ostensibly get away with. In other words, it's definitely Jay-Z's book.
Beyonce update: no Beyonce. Yet.
6.47pm ET / 11.47pm GMT: Wonder if he'll talk about Big Pimpin'. He recently gave an interview saying he was ashamed of the lyrics and, yes, Andrea Dworkin probably would not have approved of the song's overall sentiment. But, purely from a rapping point of view, it probably was his high point. I have a girl friend who once took three days off work to learn those lyrics. True story.6.50pm ET / 11.50pm GMT: In Decoded, he says he uses the "most selfish, least romantic ways to describe sex" in Big Pimpin', which is true, although I must confess that I didn't even know the lines "need a nut" and "beat the guts" even referred to sex. What an innocent I am. I think this evening will be most educational.6.55pm / 11.55pm: Ooh here he is in the book, talking about when Noel Gallagher foolishly dissed him and said "I'm not having hip hop at Glastonbury." Classily, Jay-Z doesn't take the opportunity to diss the English embarrassment back but merely says that he played Wonderwall at Glastonbury and "it went over big": "The show was amazing, one of the highlights of my career. It was one of those moments that taught me there really is no limit to what hip-hop could do, no place that was closed to its power." Suck on it, Gallagher.7.03pm / 12.03am: Here's a story about the first time he met Barack Obama, before the primaries in 2008. He knew Obama was special because "he sought me out and then asked question after question... It was extraordinary." Um, OK.7.07pm / 12.07am: Apparently, before the 2008 election Obama called Jay-Z and said "he wanted to close it out like Jordan." Whether this was Obama's actual phrase is not specified but note, jumpy readers, this is not a reference to the Middle East nor coded confirmation that Obama is Muslim. Just to clarify. What it actually meant was that Obama wanted Jay-Z's help by performing some free shows to encourage people to vote. Which he did.7.07pm / 12.07am: Seven minutes late starting. Well, punctuality is SO uncool.7.11pm / 12.11am: Of the inauguration, which he attended ("needless to say, the first inauguration of my life"), he says "we all had chills", and yes, that means him and Beyonce.Beyonce update: still no sign.
7.14pm / 12.14am: He compares the line in December 4th "They say they never really miss you 'till you dead or you gone" to Joni Mitchell's line from Big Yellow Taxi "You don't know what you got 'til it's gone." Who'd have thought it, Jay-Z has Joni Mitchell on his iPod.12 minutes late now. There is some seriously baaaaad muzak playing. Jay-Z, I'm not asking for punctuality but could you at least sort out the tunes?
7.20pm / 12.20am: Jay-Z seems a bit meh about Obama now: "Since he's been elected there have been a lot of legitimate criticisms of Obama. But if he'd lost, it would have been an unbelievable tragedy." I'm guessing Obama won't ask him to rock the vote for him again in 2012. 20 minutes late and still no Beyonce. Or Jay-Z, for that matter.I'm guessing it won't start for another 20 minutes. Whole rows of VIPs haven't turned up yet.7.23pm / 12.23am: I've just been informed by Cornel West's friend who is sitting next to me that it's 'Dr West', not 'West'. So apologies for earlier faux pas, Dr West, any demotion was unintentional.7.27pm / 12.27am: Announcement: "Starting in about 10mins." Emphasis on "about", one suspects. And a room groans. Back to the book.7.27pm / 12.27am: Harry Belafonte just walked in! I don't know about you, but I think that's kinda awesome.7.36am / 12.36am: Yup, still waiting. To pass the time, I'm reading a story about how Biggie once tricked Jay-Z into smoking something unspecified and got him "high as shit." Not a story one usually finds in the New York Public Library, it must be said.7.38pm / 12.38am: Ooh, the music is stopping! Lights are dimming!7.39pm / 12.39am: Lupe Fiasco has just sat in front of me. He is wearing sunglasses but, as he immediately stresses to a neighbouring friend, they're prescription. No explanation on why he's wearing a hat inside. Yes, I know I sound like my mother.7.41pm / 12.41am: Predictably, they're now playing December 4th as the warm up track.7.43pm / 12.43am: The director of Live from the New York Public Library, a man who looks like a librarian, comes out and shouts "Are we excited? Are we excited?". Bless.7.44pm / 12.44am: Apparently, Keith Richards was here giving a talk a few weeks ago. Libraries are more exciting these days than they were when I was a kid.7.46pm / 12.46am: Cornel West comes out to a standing ovation and a little dance to Marvin Gaye.7.47pm / 12.47am: Jay-Z! The room, predictably, erupts. Jay-Z!7.49pm / 12.49am: He looks unexpectedly small next to Cornel, but that might be because Cornel's hair makes him look enormous. He also seems a little nervous, fiddling with his trousers. He's wearing a tie-less suit, by the way, fashion followers.
Princeton professor Cornel West and Jay-Z at New York Public Library. Photograph: Kevin Mazur/WireImage 7.50pm / 12.50am: Librarian man reads out an excerpt from Decoded. It's a great passage but the librarian puts the emphases on all the wrong words, which is ironic for a book by a rapper.7.52pm / 12.52am: Jay-Z says he liked the way the librarian said "bounced." He seems so nice I don't even think he's being sarcastic. I would have meant it sarcastically, though.7.54pm / 12.54am: He says his parents liked all kinds of music so he "doesn't have those prejudices about different types of music" (take that, Gallagher.) He says he likes "anything from Thom Yorke to Ol' Dirty Bastard". "You will lose me at times," says the librarian, the whitest man in the world. Librarian says he grew up listening to different versions of The Magic Flute. "You will lose me at times," says Jay-Z.7.57pm / 12.57am: Cornel West talking about a conversation he had at Princeton with Jay-Z and Toni Morrison and Jay-Z said, "I'd been playing Plato to Biggie's Socrates". The whole room sighs appreciatively.7.59pm / 12.59am: Cornel West's question – which seems to be – "what are you up to now, Jay-Z?" has taken him about 7mins to ask.8.01pm / 1.01am: Jay-Z's answer: "Pushing the culture forward. That's more important than having 11 number one albums, though that's fun".8.03pm / 1.03am: Jay-Z gives a shout out to Belafonte, saying he had a photo of Coretta Scott King on his wall when he was a kid and Belafonte was in the background and this taught him that musicians could have a greater responsibility and part to play in the world. Belafonte takes a bow.8.04pm / 1.04am: Librarian tells Jay-Z he is like Ezra Pound because he criticises his lyrics in his book "in a Talmudic way." To Jay-Z's enormous credit, he does not laugh. Unlike me. He is definitely a nicer person than me.8.05pm / 1.05am: After the librarian's 10minute rant, Jay-Z says a simple "Thank you." This got a deservedly big laugh.8.07pm / 1.07am: Jay-Z says he wanted to give his "stories context. It was very important to have this conversation. Oprah Winfrey was a very important part about why I wrote this book." Apparently he and Oprah had "a conversation about the N word, but we came away from the table thinking we had more in common than we thought". I'm guessing Oprah is not a fan of "the N word."8.09pm / 1.09am: He also wanted to talk to people who "memorise the lyrics but don't know what they mean, and to people who think that rap is all about bitches and hos." The librarian says, "I must say, reading your book expanded my vocabulary."Cornel is now criticising Oprah, mainly because she liked the film Precious.8.10pm / 1.10am: The librarian keeps interrupting Jay-Z. It's really annoying.8.16pm / 1.16am: Jay-Z is talking about the verse in 99 Problems when the officer pulls over a car and about how this was about racial profiling as opposed to being about women. In that verse the "bitch" wasn't a woman but was the canine unit that turned up too late to cause him problems. Not sure if that argument would convince Oprah to put it on her iPod, mind.8.18pm / 1.18am: Dr West's approach to asking questions is to rephrase the same question in about thirty different ways before shutting up. "What is the connection between the hustler and the freedom fighter and the relation between freedom
fighting and hustling and" etc etc. Jay-Z's answer is that "the difference is the level of maturity." Which is a much better answer than the reiterated question deserved.8.22pm / 1.22am: Jay-Z talking about how he invited his mother to the studio in her booth without telling her he wanted to record her for the intro for December 4th because he thought she'd be nervous. "But once she got in there, we couldn't stop her. She told some stories that we had to cut out." Nope, he won't tell those stories.8.24pm / 1.24am: Lots of Jay-Z's childhood friends and cousins appear to be in the audience and he points them out from time to time. It's rather touching.8.27pm / 1.27am: Librarian reading out from the book again, after interrupting Jay-Z, again. His increasingly hyper reading suggests that this librarian needs to reduce his caffeine intake. He also needs to let Jay-Z speak, for gawd's sake.8.28pm / 1.28am: Jay-Z: "Words saved me. We enjoyed the records we had – Jackson 5, Curtis Mayfield – but they weren't speaking our language. Rap told our stories in a way that made things new. And I was mesmerised."8.30pm / 1.30am: Cornel gives a shout out to Lupe Fiasco, as well as to "Kanye and the other folk". Kanye does not seem to be here, presumably because he couldn't walk to the library because his foot is permanently stuck in his mouth.8.33pm / 1.33am: Jay-Z says his role is "to expand the genre, explain it as poetry because it is poetry". He particularly cites Lupe, saying he's "extraordinary". Young artists "shouldn't be afraid of using their own voice" and not to copy something else just because it's popular. I'm guessing he is not a fan of Pixie Lott.8.35pm / 1.35am: He says he was lucky that his first album didn't come out until he was 26 so he had already a lifetime of experiences to draw on and had the maturity to know what he wanted to say and how to say it. See earlier reference to expectations about Jay-Z's feelings about Pixie Lott.8.36pm / 1.36am: The librarian is now telling us his life story. It's lasting about 118 hours. Even Jay-Z looks embarrassed.8.37pm / 1.37am: For a librarian, this man sure talks a lot. Jeezus.8.39pm / 1.39am: Jay-Z is talking about his first notebook in which he used to write lyrics and - oh, yes, the librarian has interrupted him again.8.41.pm / 1.41am: Jay-Z says, "Big Pimpin' is not profound at all. But it is fun." So not ashamed anymore, I guess.8.41pm / 1.41am: Librarian asks, "Were you surprised by any of your lyrics when you were writing Decoded?". Uh, no, is Jay-Z's answer.8.44pm / 1.44am: Both the librarian and Cornel have the same approach to asking questions: bang on for hours about some theory they have about Jay-Z's music, and not actually ask a question. You usually see this technique in questions from the audience, rarely from the moderators. Jay-Z seems to mind this less from Cornel than the librarian, who he doesn't look at so much.8.47pm / 1.47am: Cornel now onto religion and how the death of Biggie "unsettled" Jay-Z's faith. Jay-Z says he does believe in God and that everything happens for a reason "but you have to question everything about life".
"Do you still hold onto your religious faith?" Cornel pursues. "I believe in God and that all religions pray to the same God." "Do you think the people in the Ku Klux Klan pray to the same God as us?" asks Cornel, somewhat randomly. "Uh, yes," says Jay-Z.
8.48pm / 1.48am: Jay-Z says he spoke to Biggie the night he died and he was so happy being back in LA and "that everything is great. One hour later, he was gone."8.51pm / 1.51am: Jay-Z: "Everyone always wants you to make your first album 11 times. But you have to move forward." He says this is what On To the Next One on his last album was about.8.53pm / 1.53am: Jay-Z now telling about how much he related to the Annie story, in reference to the earlier mentioned Hard Knock Life. "Annie affected my life," says Jay-Z.8.59pm / 1.59am: They're playing some Lauryn Hill now. The whole room bobs their heads in time, including Jay-Z, Cornel and, yes, the librarian.9.02pm / 2.02am: Jay-Z: "it's not enough to have talent, you have to have control", something he definitely has managed.9.05pm / 2.05am: Jay-Z talking about how rappers like Scarface and Lauryn Hill inspired him to talk honestly about his life in songs. Cornel now banging on about love. Or something. It's kinda hard to tell, despite his expressive hand gestures and, in particular, eyebrows.9.07pm / 2.07am: Jay-Z saying Mohammad Ali is one of his heroes because he said "I'm pretty" at a time when black people were not considered pretty.9.08pm / 2.08am: Cornel and Jay-Z talking about ghettos and crack. Librarian, wisely, is staying out of this conversation.Oh, spoke to soon. Librarian butts on in, with an unformed question about
Jay-Z's mother.