My new word of the week and I coined it after a fantastic trip to LEAF in Heaton, a hairdressing salon who are trying their best to tame our tresses in a planet friendly fashion.

What with Northern Rock, the credit crunch, the floods and Newcastle United, it's been a pretty depressing few months. Just when you think things are going to get better, a dead whale washes up on the beach.

Every day at The Journal we go into conference - where we discuss the stories of the day - and share more bad news: people being laid off, energy prices going up, the value of your house is going down and so on and so on.

At this morning's conference there was more of the same and we discussed whether we could do a story with some reasons to be cheerful. We all agreed that we should...then couldn't think of any.

Commuters and visitors to Newcastle are being asked to leave the car at home on Monday 22nd September for In town without my car Day.

To help this along, a whole host of activities, from lectures to walking buses, have been laid on by the City Council.

While parts of the North East are still drying out, I was wondering if anyone has given any thought to the export potential of this most prolific natural resource?

While we've been trying to get rid of our surplus rainwater by allowing it to run off into our rivers and the North Sea, other parts of Europe have been facing near-drought conditions. Barcelona, in particular, is having a tough time.

There's a water pipeline that connects Kielder to the Tees, via the Tyne and the Wear. The pipe was built to take the stuff to the steel and chemical industries on Teesside. It can't be that difficult to put the water into tanker ships and send it off to the parched Spanish mainland and islands.

Now you may think that desalination of seawater might be more efficient, but apparently not. There simply aren't enough hours of sunshine in Spain to power a plant of the size needed. Shipping is an affordable way to carry drinking water around, and to, the Med. So, as we've got more of the wet stuff than we can ever use, perhaps we could see it making a valuable contribution to the region's exports in the not too distant future.

This happened on the Isle of Wight, unfortunately, but is clearly one of the greatest names ever:

"A medic told today how he saw a colleague called Clive Greedy eating a piece of celery as they were treating a dying man who had collapsed in his kitchen."

Slug and snails in the compost bin - is it ethical?

Or rather, Women, Cambridge knows your place. And no one else does. Researchers at the University have decided town planners are all too often carrying out gender neutral policies which fail to reflect that men and women use cities differently.

In a rather bizarre finding the report apparently offers the obviously helpful discovery that "Women's employment prospects can be limited because schools and shops are not within easy reach of jobs".

I haven't managed to get a copy of the report yet, so I can't tell you wether its title is anything along the lines of "Backup Jokes For Planning Conference Standup Night".

It must have seemed like such a good idea at the time. East Midland Trains, under pressure to provide extra seats between Nottingham and Skegness on summer Saturdays so that Midlands holidaymakers could reach the nearby Butlins holiday centre without using cars, took the innovative step of hiring in two locomotives and five carriages from West Coast Railways, better known for running enthusiasts specials.

The sad closure of Out of this World has left readers wondering where they can buy re-useable toothbrushes, but don't worry because I've travelled the length and breadth of the North East on a mission to track some down.

Slightly outside the scope of regional affairs, but never the less. To all those who compiled the endless reports about the Large Hadron Collider which began with the "if you can read this article", please note.

The LHC did not come with a big switch marked Death.