Doing press-ups in its second burrow
All I want for Christmas is a six-pack
Tom Manion, chief executive of Irwell Valley Housing Association, clearly knows how to make Christmas fun. While Social Animal spent the festive season feasting on turkey and watching Bond movies, Manion dedicated his time to doing 1000 sit-ups a day.

Unfortunately, despite taking a 10-minute break between every 100, Salford's very own iron man pulled a muscle in his stomach. At least, that's his excuse for spending the past few weeks in the comforting hands of a masseuse.

Local area networking
Can't face speed dating? Why not try "speed networking"? It's already going down a storm with housing professionals in the East Midlands. Zeitgeisty John Sheil, who works on housing policy and research at Derwent Housing, proposed the idea for housing types who long to exchange ideas.

A successful evening at a Loughborough hotel seems to have won colleagues round. One attendee reports: "It's an enjoyable process that sidesteps the frustration and embarrassment of being stuck with just one person and unable to chat to the other people in the room." Who could they possibly be referring to?

He lives in a house, a very big house
Former housing minister Lord Rooker was apparently none too happy this week when details of how he manages to afford a second home were made public. Rooker's erstwhile secret is that he, like a number of his colleagues, benefits from a radical government initiative that enables ministers to maintain both a London address and a country pile. The modest annual allowance of £28,000 is available to ministers who sit in the Lords, even though they don't represent constituencies.

Thank goodness science minister Lord Sainsbury has done his best to spare the government any more embarrassment. He chooses not to claim the allowance to help with the cost of his three homes, despite only coming in at number 10 in last year's Sunday Times rich list.

Obfusc… you what?
The Housing Corporation came out rather well last week from a Public Accounts Committee hearing into improving public services. Chief executive Norman Perry was able to spend two hours filing his nails while members of the committee vented their fury at an unfortunate Treasury official.

Hapless Nick MacPherson, the Treasury's managing director of public services and one of Whitehall's most senior mandarins, was given the kind of savaging that was supposed to have gone out of fashion with the advent of the Hutton inquiry.

Indeed, the committee's chair, Tory MP Edward Leigh, delivered a classic coup de grace: "You are a master of obfuscation, Mr Macpherson. I have never heard such convoluted waffle in all my life."

Monster formula

Northern councils full of rage about the inequities of the “Barnett Formula”, by which central government calculates the subsidy owed to the regions, have received influential support from … Lord Barnett, the man who first gave life to the dread formula. He now says the system unfairly favours Scotland over northern English regions – and feels terrible that the monster he helped create still bears his moniker. “It is a great embarrassment to have my name attached to such an unfair system … it was only supposed to last a year, but it has lasted twenty,” he says.