Cafe Highlights: Peace protesters and celebrity memoirs

There is no escaping the phenomenon of the celebrity memoir... Christmas time heralds a veritable tsunami of the things when A-Z listers spill the beans about their fascinating lives. We reflected on this in Monday's Book Café. Before I get accused of trashing an entire genre, I admit there are some notable exceptions (Take a bow Mr Fry and Lee Evans!) but the vast majority of celeb autobiographies haven't been written by the person in question. Think about it... what time does Katie Price have to sit and tap out her life story when there's a global brand to develop? And hey, if you thought that in order to write your "life story" you'd have to have LIVED one, forget that. James Corden is scarcely out of shorts (in comparison to me, that is!) and we have his "childhood to stardom" story. The one who calls himself "The Chunky Unit" isn't the worst offender, but you wonder what these books are for. Obviously the celebs in question make cash and a media splash for a few weeks at a critical time in the consumer calendar. It's win-win. Publishers rake it in because this is the kind of stuff we opt for when we've lost the will to shop and are staring down the barrel of an empty Xmas stocking. Can it be that this trade in autobiographies is all a humungous ego trip? Little to do with providing a truthful, entertaining and heaven forbid, thought provoking narrative? I'd still put my money on David Niven's memoirs for laugh (The Moon's A Balloon and Bring On The Empty Horses if you're interested - published eons ago!) Today, I'd plump for I, PARTRIDGE: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT ALAN. It's funny, well written and I do believe a certain Steve Coogan ghost wrote it.

If Celebrity memoirs are often nothing short of printed ego trips, take heart. Not everyone with a book to sell feels like a master of the universe. Take Jeff Kinney- American author of the fantastically successful Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. His sales are on a par with J K Rowling yet he claims no one in his home town even knows what he does. His stick cartoon figure protagonist Greg Heffley is so popular that he's appeared in two movies. And all this from the pen of a man who didn't think he could make the grade as an illustrator. Pu-leeze.

Another modest soul crossed my radar this week. She had a lot to say but you won't find Sheila Skinner sitting quietly alone with her thoughts. This feisty 86 yr old pensioner from Leith prefers to take to the streets of Scotland, as a campaigner. She's a more or less constant presence on the capital's Princes Street where she protests for peace. Sheila's been doing this for decades and when I visited her at home, I had trouble locating her amongst the towering piles of pamphlets, banners and memorabilia, each item with a story to tell. Forget slowing down in your 80s- this is a woman who has more than enough to keep her busy all day, every day. A short squint at her diary had my eyes blurring... the schedule is more crowded than a D-Day landing battle plan. Talk about living your life! She made me feel positively sloth-like.

Don't know if Sheila has a CD player in her home. It's hard to tell with all the other stuff in there, but we were getting quite nostalgic on the Culture Café over the possible demise of the CD. This shiny silver disc may be about to disappear with some major record labels threatening to stop manufacturing them. Digital music is the thing now and I plead guilty to buying in to it. Yes, it is convenient and quick but there is some inexplicable emotional connection with an object in your hand that you load onto a player. We got some good tweets on the subject with most in agreement that the CD had its place and shouldn't be ditched in favour of digital music. In fact why couldn't the two coexist? An elegant and practical solution to the problem. To think that we now play and access music out of thin air... when broadcaster and music journalist Paul Morley floated this idea about eight years ago on our Arts show, I thought he'd taken leave of his senses. I'm not sure I could do without music at the touch of a screen now.

One thing that remains constant and has survived millennia, is the Christmas story. Well, at least I thought that until I met Carey Morning, an American children's author who's just written about THE LITTLE SHEPHERD GIRL OF BETHLEHEM. The premise is simple... it introduces us to a little girl who follows her shepherd father to the manger where the baby Jesus is, in the dead of night when she was supposed to be tucked up safe and warm in her own bed.

We invited Carey and two parents to the studios to talk about the enduring appeal of the nativity story and this new take on it. Anna Wood a mum of two boys aged four and two, takes them to the German Church on a regular basis. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the father of a three year old boy, Tom Watson, a staunch atheist with no religious influences in his life. What did they both get out of reading this enduring tale of the little king with no crown who was born in a stable to their small children? Anna loved it, so did her children who fell for Carey Morning's fresh approach... Not so for Tom who found the book troubling. His small son had been brought up without religious beliefs, so wasn't the nativity just another story- even a fairy-tale? Our discussion continued long after the microphones were turned off and we talked some more about how spiritual or religious stories could help some to make sense of the world. That's something Tom was grappling with; he'd recently had to explain to his son that a much loved grandparent had died and wasn't coming back. He balked at telling him she was "in heaven" but found it hard to be reassuring without referencing something he didn't believe in.

Maybe by telling stories, we can address difficult issues in a gentle way and offer a few crumbs of comfort. It's Christmas time after all - a good time to reflect on the things that really matter in life.