First find the funds, then we can find a cure

Medical research is being stifled by the cuts and the flight of the avaricious pharmaceutical giants away from R&D, leaving diseases such as Sohana's Epidermolysis bullosa, which causes the skin to blister and fuse, at the mercy of generous philanthropists.

But it's not just the rare conditions that are now threatened. Unless you are planning to die peacefully and disease-free of old age, this will affect you too. Know someone suffering from Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease? Last week Professor David Nutt of Imperial College said "draconian" funding cuts would have disastrous effects on research into this area of medicine.

Yesterday a begging letter dropped through the door from the British Heart Foundation promising that within 20 years, curing heart disease, our biggest killer, could be as simple as fixing a broken arm. "Could" being the operative word - the charity wanted £12 for half an hour's research.

Meanwhile every day thousands of London mothers like me (25,000 in Britain overall) wake up and immediately go in search of their Type 1 diabetes child, stab their finger, squeeze blood to test sugar levels and then stab them again with insulin, one of four such daily rituals.

"Did you find a cure?" asked Joe's sister recently after I spent a day at a Royal Society of Medicine conference on diabetes. Sadly no, but the potential is out there and "extremely exciting", according to Sarah Johnson of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. It's a small matter of "time and money".

Managing diabetes costs the NHS £10 billion a year - a tenth of its budget - and yet it spent just £51 million in 2009 on trying to find a cure. Talk about a false economy.

Despite thousands of Londoners raising £3.5 million for JDRF last year, the truth is we need billions, not millions, if the nut to crack is stem cell technology. And yet private funding for biotech in Britain and across Europe remains way behind the US.

Are we really going to let a golden era of medical research that began with Alexander Fleming discovering penicillin here in 1928 wither on the vine, losing our world-class researchers to countries with more foresight?

Yet the Government says it's bust, and Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca et al are in hock to their shareholders. Sharmila is right - it is down to private funding to keep our hopes alive of curing our children and the big diseases. Anyone know any billionaires?

In thrall to a Mad Men box set

Whatever you do, don't crack open that box set of Mad Men you got for Christmas. As one friend said, the Sixties drama set in a New York ad agency has "totally ruined our social life". An innocuous way to while away my winter evenings has turned into an unseemly obsession. By series two I'd moved Don, Joan, Peggy and co from the TV room and into bed on a portable DVD player. In more ways than I care to remember, the secretive Mr Draper reminds me of my Brylcreemed father who worked for an American company his whole life. Even as we watched The Children's Hour recently in the West End with Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) playing a Thirties teacher, I kept thinking, like a delusional soap fan, "What the hell did you see in that creep Peter?"

During my weekly one-hour wait in Chiswick while a child learns algebra, instead of reading my book, this week I was tempted to crawl into the back seat and squeeze in just one more episode of series three on the car DVD. I have to wait a whole month for my next fix - series four isn't released until March 21.

* Not content that today's children face unaffordable higher education and one in five 16 to 24-year-olds is unemployed, the publicly funded Westway Development Trust is set to close Bay 66, the skateboard park where west London kids let off a bit of steam. The WDT - ironically a charity set up to serve the interests of the local community - plans to turn it into office space and a garden centre. In the consultation document it describes the park in typically prejudicial language - claiming "it does not serve the needs of local youth and does not have a positive street frontage".

Rubbish. It's a great melting pot of vented adolescent hormones and one of the few places where you'll see five-year-old Rastas and 15-year-old public schoolboys all doing Finger Flips and Ollies and generally trying to fracture their arms. Naturally Daniel Moylan, the king of Kensington and Chelsea planning, seems keen on spoiling their fun if it makes more money for the WDT. Get your protests in now to his sidekick at ana.perezcalvo@rbkc.gov.uk before the next Planning Policy Board on February 28.

Council fat cats and untrustworthy "Trust" folk - they're almost as unsavoury as bankers.

Dare to wear spring shades

So bored with months of wearing black. So very fed up with grey. Now, just in time for London Fashion Week, which starts tomorrow, the shops are full of bright spring colours - magenta, gold, lime and tangerine. Resolving to shed my granite London office uniform, last week I bought a green top from COS. Every morning since, from the depths of my wardrobe, it coos "wear me" and every morning I contemplate it for a nanosecond, then move onto a darker, safer, easier shade of black, grey or dark blue. This season's moths, the first of whom I squashed the other day, may well get to it before I do...