But what if you want to find conversations with multiple labels? For example you are interested only in messages labelled ‘Sales region 2′ and ‘Quarter 3 2010′.

Instead of going into ‘Show search options’ simply type your search into the search box at the top of the Gmail screen thus:

label:sales-region-2 label:quarter-3-2010

and click Search Mail. This will return a list of conversations containing both labels. Note that the label names are case insensitive, but you must replace spaces with a hyphen.

What if you are interested in messages with either label? Then you would use:

label:sales-region-2 OR label:quarter-3-2010

The OR operator must be uppercase. Alternatively you can use the pipe operator ‘|’ (shift+backslash on your keyboard) like this:

label:sales-region-2 | label:quarter-3-2010

You are probably three steps ahead of me here, and wondering about other compound searches. In fact you can choose from a long list of “query words” to build up a very specific search. In Gmail see Help articles › Using advanced search for the (almost) endless possibilities!

Unlike the Royal Exchange’s flaccid Blithe Spirit at Christmas, this Library company production is a cracker, bringing alive Wilde’s witty social observations with pace, timing and verve.

It runs until 3 July and tickets are selling out fast.

Now everything in the supermarket has its ‘organic’ alternative. Still more expensive, but within range of those people who are not on a tight budget and are keen to save the planet whilst eating healthy food.

But who defines what is organic and what is not? Shoppers who assume it means food grown without pesticides or fertilizers need to do a bit of checking if they are not to be misled.

Here’s an example: Morrison’s Organic Corn Flakes. On the box it says

Organic standards prohibit the use of genetically modified ingredients and seek to avoid routine use of artificial pesticides and fertilizers.

Such weasely phraseology would make a home-flipping MP blush.

They are so astonishingly lifelike that you almost wonder if they are actually not sculptures, but real people. Did he blink? This despite the fact that Wild Man, 2005 is a giant, and Spooning Couple, 2005 consists of two tiny figures you could hold almost in the palm of your hand. You want to go right up to them and examine every hair on their bodies, every fold of skin. Yet such is the realism, it feel intrusive to do so! Shh! Don’t wake them!

In the adjacent room, are ten works from the Frank Cohen Collection. There’s the haunting Between Men and Animal (2005), an oil painting of laughing, mocking faces by Chinese artist Yue Minjun. You can’t fail to smile at a life-sized polar bear balancing upside down nose to nose on a little boy in the sculpture The Big Kiss, 2007 by Chen Lei. Again, this exhibition finishes 11 April.

We settled in to our seats, and began the process of mentally zoning out all the distractions around us. The talkers, the texters, the sweetie rustlers. The latecomers, the ones making a dash out to the loo.

I had just about managed to achieve a state of zen when a young woman sat next to me and explained that she would be eating her dinner – a Nando’s take away.

Perhaps it was such external irritations and distractions which conspired to dampen my excitement for the film itself. For whatever reason I felt it to be a bit, well, flat. I don’t just mean that the 3D effects were quite subtle, but more that I didn’t find myself entering the fantasy world on-screen.

I could sit there appreciating the visuals and some of the acting, but nothing excited, delighted or scared me. Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole should have been a stomach-turning rollercoaster, for example. It went throught the motions, but was pretty unexciting. The colours are less than vibrant a lot of the time, and the musical score is an almost constant portentious drone rising and falling with the changes in dramatic tempo.

Johnny Depp is at his child-like innocent best of course as the whimsical Mad Hatter and Helena Bonham Carter does an entertaining Miranda Richardson impression as the Red queen. But overall, I have to say that Disney has done to Lewis Carroll what Nando’s have done to chicken. What you get from these large corporations is a product. Acceptable standard fare to a formula worked out by back-room teams with an eye on the bottom line. If you are looking for haute cuisine, then best to move along.

The film ends as he is preparing to go to Hamburg, and The Beatles are not mentioned by name, but they were about to shake the world in ways which nobody at the time could have foreseen. The credits soundtrack is Lennon’s Mother, an anguished elegy for his mum Julia. Her virtual abandonment of him caused so much pain, undoubtedly shaped his personality and – crucially – influenced his writing and his music. Perhaps this was the grit in the oyster, helping to produce the pearls which are the songs of Lennon and McCartney.

Of course it’s impossible to imagine how the world would look now if it hadn’t been for the impact of The Beatles. But whether you listen to their music or not, they were prime movers in a post-war revolution which changed Western society and the way we think about ourselves.

The film contained one or two anachronisms. Too much cigarette smoking, even for the 1950′s. Modern beer glasses, the word ‘band’ instead of ‘group’, and I don’t think ‘gig’ was in common usage. Also, before the sexual revolution, girls didn’t fuck boys, boys fucked girls. Some characters are completely omitted from the story.

However, Nowhere Boy does not try to be a completely faithful historical account. The actors are not made up to be look-alikes, and the locations are sympathetic rather than accurate replicas. This is an intelligent approach which works well, and avoids over-detailing which is inevitably distracting.

There are so many pitfalls when making a biopic, but Nowhere Boy avoids all of them. It’s incredibly moving, with an accomplished performance by Aaron Johnson as Lennon, and Kristin Scott Thomas as his somewhat repressed aunt Mimi. Anne-Marie Duff’s portrayal of the histrionic Julia Lennon, and David Morrissey’s Bobby Dykins are note-perfect too. A little gem of a film.

So every decade you have to spend £4 on some more photos and send one in with £20 in the supplied envelope (which isn’t even pre-paid) to avoid a Dorian Gray-type mismatch between your actual face and the one on your licence in the drawer at home.

And beware of sending off the renewal application sooner than you need because the new licence expires ten years from the date of issue, not ten years from the expiry of the old one.

So when the Tannoy in the foyer announced that the show would start half an hour late due to ‘technical difficulties’ I was not completely surprised. That would be the technical difficulty of ringing one or more absent cast members and persuading them that with enough strong coffee and paracetamol they would be able to get through the performance, and that remaining in bed would be a career-limiting decision.

Once it started, some 45 minutes late, the show was a gem. The multi-talented cast were all bright-eyed and the clever set looked like an illustration from a children’s fairy tale book. The production was pacy, fun and imaginative.

The Library Theatre is moving this year after nearly half a century located in the basement of the library. I just hope that they manage to keep doing what they do with the same sparkle in their new venue.

The story line is an uncomplicated allegory, but its simplicity is more than made up for in the incredible visual detail and chest-thumping soundtrack which draw the audience into a quality and richness of experience which is delightful, exciting, at times moving, and stunning throughout.

Who could reasonably ask for more in a movie? A 10/10 rating from me.