New Doctor Who Matt Smith clocks up hits

Darren, 35, was made redundant from his job as a Thorpe Park photographer in the Autumn and has fallen back on his talents as a digital artist. He emailed a link to his Doctor Who caricature at the weekend and we've written about him on our news pages.

Hopefully somebody will take a shine to dad-of-two Darren's work and offer him a job, which is what he hopes will happen. But in the meantime he's agreed to write a blog for the Herald & News about his quest for employment in these most difficult of economic times.

I'm hoping to get this off the ground shortly and I think his experiences will strike a chord with many Surrey folk who are either searching for work or fearing redundancy.

The story we published online has also been clocking up hits at a rate of knots, and at the last check (this morning) an impressive 30 users had rated the page a mark out of five.

From Doctor Who to the X-Files: we had some emails earlier this week from users who'd seen a UFO in the skies over Woking and Chertsey at New Year.

A lady called Barbara said: "It was an orange disc very bright, went smaller as if going away and then suddenly shot up into the atmosphere... there were no aeroplanes, stars or fireworks in the area...... would be interesting to know if anyone saw it."

My colleague, the Chertsey/Addlestone reporter Emma Heseltine, reckons it may have been a firework as she knows of one which creates an effect similar to the one desribed by Barbara.

She told me: "I think the 'UFO' seen above Chertsey was the light of a Chinese lantern firework. When the fireworks explode, there are small orange Chinese lanterns which slowly come out of the explosion and move slowly upwards before disappearing. From a distance, they just look like orange lights."

So there you have it. Case solved? Or is the truth still out there?