Paper Monitor
10:31 UK time, Friday, 17 December 2010
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
No sooner has fortune snatched one prize from your grasp, then she delivers an unexpected bounty with her other hand.
And so, as Paper Monitor struggled to contain its disappointment to find the Guardian's weekly Lost in Showbiz column strangely absent from the paper's G2 supplement, it resigned itself to looking elsewhere for its Friday fix of wit and whimsy.
But.
What's this? A pressie?
In its place, the newspaper has provided .
PM's heart usually sinks at the thought of calendars, the Crystal Palace FC 1980 vintage excepted, of course.
But this one has not a farmyard animal or waterfall in sight, pleasant as they are.
Instead, the pictures are supplied by readers, who followed the brief that each photograph must contain a G and a 2. Although this being the Guardian, they can't resist the odd political barb too.
And the words for each month are reflections written by authors like Fay Weldon, Lionel Shriver and Alain de Botton, who has this to say about June:
"By the middle of the month, one might have had five days of meaningfully warm and clear weather, and stepped out without any socks on. Suddenly all kinds of emotions that we'd resigned ourselves to, no longer seem to fit quite so well: being sad, for a start, but also living huddled in layers of clothes, shutting yourself off from nature, longing to live in Alicante. The weather gives us something to emulate. To think of going abroad now would be insanity. It's a dereliction of duty to leave. Stay and dare, for once, to be happy in Britain.
Uplifting stuff, especially as much of the UK finds itself frozen, and Magazine readers can look forward to more from De Botton in the coming weeks, because in the new year he takes over the A Point of View column on Sundays.
The 
