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On the morning of Margaret Thatcher's funeral, I awoke a little broken. I didn't awake "to find myself" a little broken – that took two days, and several bouts of vicious denial, to realise. I just couldn't properly use my right arm.

I put it down to having slept too heavily on the arm. Yet something was off. I seesaw-grunted out of bed at 8.30am and had a bird bath, soaping mainly the naughty bits, for I was in a hurry that Wednesday: it was the day I filed my Observer TV review. About 1,500 words to do by 2pm, two hours max for rethinks.

I dressed, all the while a little conscious of how my hand wasn't still doing quite the things it wanted to do, particularly when it came to the zip and the shirt buttons – infuriating, and I left them half-done. I yawned, shook my head, still obviously just short of the first of the morning jags of coffee. That was when it became interesting.

The arm, the hand, simply wouldn't make coffee. I actually giggled, albeit laconically. I went to fill, from the cold tap in the kitchen, the glass percolator, and my cuffs (now I come to think about it, they had been a real bugger) managed to catch two plates from the night before and send them, breaking, to the floor. I was rubber man, seven-leagues-boots boy: my right arm could, for all I knew, have managed to snag every twitch of crockery and jibble of condiment in sight other than the correct ones. I concentrated, with my left hand and some faint nagging worries, on getting java bubbling.

I took the seven steps to the computer and powered up. That was pretty much when I realised that something was very wrong with me, though it took two whole days to acknowledge it.

Nobody would call the National Theatre a homely place but it has been my artistic home for 25 years and for that I count myself very lucky. I have met nothing but kindness and co-operation, not least, of course, from Nicholas Hytner but at every level. It has enabled me to go on working much longer than I could have imagined through turning up with a play every three or four years. I am happy not to have acquired any dignity in the process. When I came in for the first rehearsal of Peoplesomeone at the stage door said: "Oh hello. Still hanging on then?"

"I really don't think about my performance," she tells me in her grand office – two sofas, Pugin wallpaper, river views – at the Palace of Westminster. "It works best if I'm authentic." But then she adds: "We do think about the theatre, of course. We always work out what our first question will be, and what the key questions are after that."

Her colleagues have been known to urge her to play things straight, but sometimes instinct gets the better of her all the same. When Matt Brittin, Google's boss in northern Europe, was recalled by the [public accounts] committee after being accused of misleading it over the company's tax affairs, one of Hodge's fellow members told her not to do anything over the top. "So I was completely calm right the way through. Only then, at the end, I was too tempted. I couldn't resist."

It was at this point – by way of making reference to Google's "do no evil" company motto – that she famously told Brittin that his company did "do evil". She coughs. "I don't know what the other members felt about that. They're too kind. But that became the headline. A bit unfortunate."

The voice is a touch sheepish, but the expression on her face is, it has to be said, gleeful.

Hodge, it is clear, loves her job. She tells me with some pride that she is up every morning at six, and doesn't go to bed until midnight (and boy, she looks good on it, all shiny-eyed and perky, like a squirrel). And she is grateful for the distraction the huge workload provides too: her husband, Henry, a high court judge, died of leukaemia in 2009, and she misses him dreadfully. "I'm on my own," she says, in a flat voice. "If my husband were alive it would be a different kettle of fish."

Jay Rayner on why he hates picnics

It's impossible to look elegant while sitting on a sloping hillside or beach, especially at my age. Bits of me are always trying to make a bid for freedom. Sod muffin tops; I'm packing half the cake counter at Greggs. The kids are either punching each other or poking a dead, maggot-infested bird with a stick, and granny's going into advance stages of anaphylactic shock having been stung by the wasp that got bored of divebombing the last mulched-up strawberries that didn't fall out of the picnic bag when it opened accidentally.

Gethin Chamberlain on India's child slave workers

When the trafficker came knocking on the door of Elaina Kujar's hut on a tea plantation at the north-eastern end of Assam, she had just got back from school. Elaina was 14 and wanted to be a nurse. Instead, she was about to lose four years of her life as a child slave.

She sits on a low chair inside the hut, playing with her long dark hair as she recalls how her owner would sit next to her watching porn in the living room of his Delhi house, while she waited to sleep on the floor. "Then he raped me," she says, looking down at her hands, then out of the door.

Outside, the monsoon rain is falling on the tin roof and against the mud-rendered bamboo strip walls, on which her parents have pinned a church calendar bearing the slogan "The Lord is Good to All". Elaina was in that Delhi house for one reason: her parents, who picked Assam tea on an estate in Lakhimpur district, were paid so little they could not afford to keep her.

There are thousands like her, taken to Delhi from the tea plantations in the north-east Indian state by a trafficker, sold to an agent for as little as £45, sold on again to an employer for up to £650, then kept as slaves, raped, abused. It is a 21st-century slave trade. There are thought to be 100,000 girls as young as 12 under lock and key in Delhi alone: others are sold on to the Middle East and some are even thought to have reached the UK.

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Every tea plantation pays the same wages. Every leaf of every box of Assam tea sold by Tetley and Lipton and Twinings and the supermarket own brands – Asda, Waitrose, Tesco, Sainsbury's and the rest – is picked by workers who earn a basic 12p an hour.

Victoria Coren on Justin Bieber

Justin Bieber's problem is that he is a children's entertainer. That's a different job from "rock star". Justin Bieber is, at all times, wearing an implied fez covered in spangles. He might as well be called Mr Magic.

When he goes on stage two hours late (as he did to much parental rage in London last week), it's like being two hours late to shout: "Who's the birthday girl?" and pretend that a felt monkey is too shy to emerge from a suitcase.

It's no good being two hours late for a children's party. The window has closed. The kids have all drunk too much orange squash, run around screaming, had a wee on the floor, pushed a sausage into someone's eye, burst into tears and fallen asleep.

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