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Field Day favourite, author and Farms for City Children Founder Michael Morpurgo is in the spotlight again today.

He's come up with a story for the 2012 Olympics about the games' mascots.

Set to be unveiled on Wednesday (19 May), the mascots are apparently two drops of steel from some of the steel girders that make up the Olympic Stadium.

According to Sebastian Coe, who's king of the Olympics, or something like that, the story tells of the steel droplets going on a journey.

"It is a journey between now and London," he said. "And they are fun - they are aimed particularly at children."

Apparently the first official Olympic mascot was Waldi, a striped dachshund who hung out at the 1972 Munich Games.

But this being Field Day - aka Cat Chat - I thought I'd share a picture of Hodori, the mascot of the 1988 Games in Seoul:

London's 2012 mascots will be unveiled on Wednesday's The One Show on BBC1 at 7pm.

The last time a film-starring farm went on sale the FW team used it as an excuse to spout our favourite Richard E Grant lines ("I demand some booze" and "Here, hare, here" were quoted for days).

Now we have a chance to practice our American accents with the news the farm from Field of Dreams has gone on the market.

For a mere £3.7m, fans of the Kevin Coster film can nab the 193-acre Iowa farm, complete with farmhouse and the baseball diamond that was cut into the cornfield.

As a free extra, the lucky buyer can also get the 65,000 tourists that visit the film location every year. Ray Liotta will cost extra.



If rumours are to believed, you might have to move quick to buy it though - Kevin Costner's supposedly interested in the farm. Maybe he wants to reprise his role and tell all those visitors: "This is my corn. You people are guests in my corn." 

Two Field Day favourites are pictured with no clothes on in The Daily Mail.

The good news is that Julia Bradbury is one of them. The bad news is that Christopher Biggins is the other.

When a colleague claimed earlier that they had a picture of Julia Bradbury dressed as a fairy with walking boots on, I was interested. Very interested. For purely professional reasons, you understand.

It turned out not to be a hoax. The TV presenter (she fronted the wonderful Wainwright Walks) was dressed in the fairy costume over the weekend to launch National Dairy Week.

And I couldn't let a picture like this pass without giving you the chance to come up with a witty line or two - so it's also the subject of this month's FW caption competition, which you can enter here.  

It's my (current) dirty secret. I'm addicted to The X Factor.

I'm afraid I'm firmly in the "hate Jedward" camp, though. But I was still interested to see this story (and short vid) on The Sun's website about how they're helping up yields on one farm.

Just heard my Game Fair buddy Bernard Cribbins (there's a particularly unflattering picture of me with him here) is going to be in the Christmas episode of Doctor Who. How exciting...

Remember Mat Follas, the guy who won MasterChef? Well there's a review of his new restaurant in The Guardian.

Victoria Beckham has forked out £1,400 on two nine-inch, 13lb micro-pigs.

The miniature pot-bellied animals - fast becoming the latest must-have celebrity accessory - were a present for hubbie, David.

The pampered pets will be lapping up a life of luxury at the family's "Beckingham Palace" in Herts.

Press reports say Posh wants to name them Elton and David after Sir Elton John and David Furnish, while the football star prefers Pinky and Perky.

Here are some pictures of micro pigs in the Daily Mail.

Farmers Weekly's fame spreads even wider. Not only are we all over the airwaves because of our Britain's Sexiest Farmer competition, but we even popped up on Around The World In 80 Days last night.

The programme, which is part of the 2009 Children in Need campaign, follows six pairs of celebrities as they race against the clock re-enacting the epic odysseys of Phileas Fogg and Michael Palin for a 21st-century audience.

Last night Countryfile presenters Julia Bradbury and Matt Baker took up the baton travelling 3700 miles from Kazakhstan to China in just 14 days.

And what better way to break the boredom of a long train journey than reading a copy of FW?

It certainly worked for Biggins...

Another foodie is in trouble.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall got it in the neck a while back for admitting to having tucked into a giraffe (got it in the neck, geddit!) and now it's Sunday Times columnist AA Gill who's facing criticism after shooting an inedible baboon.

Personally, I never trust anyone who uses initials in that way. Pretentious tosh, if you ask me.

The latest celebrity (OK, sort of celebrity) to endorse food/drink is Donna Air.

Another TV chef in the headlines. After hearing that poor old pickled Keith Floyd has stuffed his last sea bass (he'd have probably done it with lemon, fennel and sweet sea salt) I now read that Clarissa Dickson Wright (she of the full name: Clarissa Theresa Philomena Aileen Mary Josephine Agnes Elsie Trilby Louise Esmeralda Dickson Wright) could soon be the subject of a Hollywood film.

Meet Derek. He's the guy who'll appear in the first episode of the new series of Farmer Wants a Wife.

The show, which is presented by Louise Redknapp and airs at 9pm on FIVE next Wednesday, will follow the 30-year-old's romantic endeavours.

A master cheese grader is set to insure his biggest asset for £5m - his nose.

Nigel Pooley who works at Wyke Farms in Somerset uses his expert sense of smell to select over 12,000 tonnes of cheddar every year.

Good news for Katie Price (aka Jordan).

She may be getting divorced from Peter Andre today, but she will be able to take solace from the fact that she made it into Country Life's 100 Most Powerful People in the Countryside list.

She crept into 100th spot with the mag (which I've mentioned before because of its bizarrely posed ladies) declaring her "an ambassador for the 2012 equestrian sports" and citing the huge queues at her stand at Badminton and Burghley as evidence of her "drawing power".

Alongside the usual suspects, the list has some surprising inclusions, such as Bear Grylls in his role as Chief Scout (24th), explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes for "putting the backbone into Britain" (35th) and Hay Festival founder Peter Florence for showing that "rural Wales can be as intellectually powerful as London or Manhattan" (52nd).

Quite what Lib Dem MP Lembit Opik is doing in there at 46, I can't imagine. Whatever next? Katie Price as a Country Life frontispiece?

Couple of TV programmes to look out for.

The painter Sir James Guthrie, a man who had a strong affinity for the countryside, will be discussed in A Portrait of Scotland next Monday (September 7) at 9pm on BBC Four. The 90-minute programme sees Peter Capaldi explore the story of Scotland's art.

Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones is not your typical farmer.

He came to Britain, aged four, from Jamaica in the 1950s with his parents and grew up in inner-city Birmingham.

One of nine siblings living in a two-up-two-down, he found himself retreating to his father's allotment which he called "an oasis away from the misery of my surroundings". And it was there, age 11, that he made a promise to himself that one day he'd own his own farm.

Remember the story about the commanding officer who banned sprouts from his ship? Well the much-maligned veg has found an unlikely ally in the form of none other than Prime Minister Gordon Brown. He recently disclosed he liked them as a child.

"I never had a problem eating my greens and my favourites are probably sprouts," he said, talking about his childhood in a contribution to a new charity cookbook, Haste Ye Back, by Sue Lawrence.

Reminds me of a former PM, John Major, who once mentioned that peas were his favourite food - a comment that Spitting Image never let him forget.

Picture just in of Julia Bradbury at the Game Fair. She obviously heard something she approved of (sadly, it wasn't something I said).

And do you remember this guy, too? He used to present One Man and His Dog.