Keen readers of Thursday's nibs might have spotted the announcement that our parent company News Corporation has decided to redevelop the present 20-year-old Wapping site for The Times and our sister papers, rather than uprooting us all to a new building elsewhere in London (although we may still have to be uprooted to temporary accommodation nearby while they knock seven bells out of the place over the next four years).

I cannot resist describing to you the corporate presentation to staff about the new plans that I have just attended. The vast industrial space that housed until recently the printing presses and newsprint reels had been turned into a rock-concert-style venue complete with stage, big screen, rows of seating and banks of loudspeakers, to the extent that my chum from the legal department was disappointed when the Editor merely walked onstage rather than being lowered from a helicopter in a cloud of dry ice.

We had a little film charting the various homes of The Times from Printing House Square to Wapping via Gray's Inn Road, then lots of groovy artists' impressions of the new building with a soaring atrium and miles of glass and an improbably enormous spiral staircase and the biggest roof garden in the world (or maybe it was just in London), and an interview with the architect explaining how we'd all work better as a result, and I'm sure she's right.

It's just the thought of the intervening four years that daunts. I was brought to the brink of collapse when I had builders in to knock through my kitchen and dining room a few years ago, and that was an area about 20ft by 12ft; they've got 20 acres to play with here.

Old(ish) news

I have been asked to spread the news that we have extended the deadline for nominations for The Times/ Sternberg Active Life Award, celebrating the achievements of older people, to October 1. Readers are invited to nominate someone over 70 who is defying age to “assert the questing spirit of humanity”. The full terms and conditions can be seen at www.timesonline.co.uk/activelife, but to summarise, proposers must be 18 or over and nominees must be 70 or over. You may submit only one nomination with a summary in 500 words or less of the nominee's achievements, current activities and reasons why they deserve the award. Proposers must obtain their nominee's consent for their details to be published. The winner will be chosen just before Christmas and the prize is a cheque for £10,000.

Nominations can be made via www.timesonline.co.uk/activelife or by letter, including your name, address and telephone number, to Times Newspapers Limited Public Relations Sternberg Award, 1 Pennington Street, London E98 1TT.

Isle offensive

Derek Arthur writes from Peebles: “At least twice in the past few weeks a headline in The Times has used ‘the Shetlands'. I feel obliged to complain, if only on behalf of my late father who greatly disliked the usage. He lived there all his life; I left at age 18. Indeed, the Times style guide states: ‘Shetland or the Shetland Islands, not the Shetlands' [it does, it does]. What of dictionaries? My not entirely up-to-date Collins gives only ‘Shetland or Shetland Islands'. Chambers refers only to ‘the Shetland Islands' in defining Shetland as an adjective, though it generally doesn't do geography. The Oxford Dictionary of English lists all three usages, though that doesn't mean one isn't deprecated.”

Not drowning

A brief comment in a recent Weather Eye relating to attempts to slow the melting of glaciers - “But, like King Canute, these brave efforts to stem the flowing waters are probably doomed” - sent Eveline Hastings, of Southwold, to her writing desk: “Am I wrong in thinking that King Canute is one of the most maligned men in history? I had always understood that in order to shut up his smarmy courtiers, who told him he could control the sea, he took them down to the beach, sat down, waited for the tide to make his feet wet and said ‘So there' or some such thing.

“Again and again in the press he is saddled with the notion that it was he who thought he could be all-powerful in the weather/water department. Can you put this right for the poor fellow?” You just did, Ms Hastings.

On the bounce

Last month (you remember - August - it rained) I described Christian Bowman's quest, via the letters page of The Times, to meet any surviving Second World War airmen who might have flown the heavy bombers she helped to make as a factory girl, and its very happy outcome (“We are all now exchanging letters, and photographs, and memories”).

Now Commander John Lane, OBE, RN Retd, sends a postscript: “I have been in contact with Christian Bowman in recent years, and have learnt that as a result of her letter she was invited to attend the 158 Squadron (Bomber Command Association) 2008 Reunion Dinner and the Commemoration Service in Bridlington last weekend (sadly, the association anticipates that this will probably be the last such occasion).”

I hope a fine time was had by all, and if it's not too frivolous a thought for such an occasion, I'll bet Lady B led the conga after dinner.

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