Michael.Blackburn.Poet.

Tourists look at individually-painted dominoes along the former route of the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate. Photograph: Axel Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images

Update 5pm:
Here’s are some of the best quotes from the today’s events:

Angela Merkel: “Sometimes people forget today how many could not leave (the country) for years, how many sat in prisons … before the joy of freedom came, many people suffered.”

Mikhail Gorbachev : “My clairvoyant skills and those of (then-Chancellor Helmut) Kohl were up to nothing then. We did not think the wall would fall so fast.”

Hillary Clinton: “Now, we have to turn our attention to the challenges of the 21st century. A wall, a physical wall, may have come down but there are other walls that exist that we have to overcome and we will be working together to accomplish that.”

Gordon Brown: “The wall that had imprisoned half a city, half a country, half a continent, half a world for nearly a third of a century was swept away by the greatest force of all the unbreakable spirit of men and women who dared to dream in the darkness, who knew that while force has the temporary power to dictate, it can never ultimately decide.”

Update 3.30pm:

Today’s best Zelig moment comes from the French president Nicolas Sarkozy who used his Facebook page to suggest he was there 20 years ago.

Sarkozy, or a minion on his behalf, posted a picture of the young Nicolas chipping away at the wall, with a caption that reads: “Memories of the fall of the Berlin wall, November 9, 1989”.

The French media have pointed out that archives showed he was there a week later.

Meanwhile, back in Berlin “the atmosphere is fantastic”. Visitors to the city today tell Kate Connolly what the fall of the wall meant to them.

Link to this audio

Update 3pm: Under drizzly skies Merkel crossed the Bonhomer Bridge flanked by Walesa and Gorbachev. She paid tribute to the courage of both men and to the bravery of the people of East Germany.

She said: “This is not just a day of celebration for Germany, (but) a day of celebration for the whole of Europe.”

Residents remember the fall of the wall 20 years ago as politicians from around the world arrive to join in the celebrations Link to this video

Today’s events to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall will range from solemn reflection to high kitsch celebration.

Memorials are planned for the 136 people who died when they tried to cross the border while – in an event reminiscent of International It’s a Knockout – 1,000 foam dominoes placed along the wall’s route will be tipped over. Dancers dressed as angels will descend from prominent buildings.

At around 2pm, Angela Merkel, the first German leader to grow up in the communist east, will cross the Bornholmer Street bridge, where the first border post opened on the evening of 9 November 1989.

She will be accompanied by the former Soviet president Michael Gorbachev and Poland’s former opposition leader and ex-president Lech Walesa.

At around 6pm, Daniel Barenboim, who was in Berlin to witness the events of 1989, will conduct his Staats Kapelle orchestra on an outdoor stage at the Brandenburg Gate.

From 6.30pm, world leaders including Merkel, Gordon Brown, the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, will give speeches.

Afterwards, the dominoes will be toppled and there will be fireworks at the Brandenburg Gate at 8pm.

To mark the anniversary, the Guardian has put together a special Berlin Wall package including a series of videos, audio from those whose lives were affected and interactive guides.

• The historian and columnist Timothy Garton Ash remembers the mood in the German capital after the wall fell. “As as symbol, it lives on, above all, as a image of peaceful liberation,” he writes.

• Take a historical and geographical journey of the Berlin Wall through five videos.

• A gallery of images shows the wall from its construction to the commemoration of its demise.

• “Without the Leipzig demos and the will of the people, it would never have happened.” Author Anna Funder reflects on life since the fall of the wall in this audio.

Link to this audio

• Our interactive timeline guides you through the dates and events that shaped the Berlin Wall and finally brought about its downfall.

• Our Berlin correspondent, Kate Connolly, reports on today’s celebrations and the mood of anticipation in the city.

Link to this audio

The Berlin Twitter Wall provides live updates and thoughts from across the world. The subject is also trending on Twitter at #fotw.

For a historical perspective, the writer Gunter Grass has just published his diaries for 1990.

And writer Lisa Selvidge describes her experiences and how they inspired her to write her new novel, The Last Dance over the Berlin Wall.

You can see how the Guardian covered the events at the time on our digital archive.

It is obvious the young and beautiful are favoured in our times and the growing numbers of the old are a problem, encouraged to work but with an unspoken assumption that what they have to offer is of inferior value. But why should it be so in the arts and literature, where the products of age have traditionally proved to be a positive contribution?

How many literary prizes are there for the under-thirties or similar? Yet I have not come across any for the products of age. One of my previous publishers is on record as saying of the publicity photograph of a well-known author that she “could never publish a book by someone looking like that”. He was, of course, oldish and not beautiful. And I recall one poetry reviewer, a friend, castigating me privately even for writing about age.

Yes, physical frailty precludes much. But in the world of the imagination it can offer more than it takes away. William Blake described himself before his death in 1827 as “an Old Man feeble & tottering, but not in Spirit & Life, not in The Real Man The Imagination which Liveth for Ever. In that I am stronger & stronger as this Foolish Body decays”. The decaying body might affect stamina but has no other influence on artistic product.

Blake was then nearly 70, an age we could now easily boast “life begins” at, much as we used to argue life began at 40. What is our expectation of these modern long-livers? Is it only to set them up to be armchair-soporific, with a free TV licence? To keep them cosy and out of sight? It seems to me just as likely that a talent may emerge at the age of, say, 60 — with experience behind it — as at 20.

Yeats speculated that everyone “has one myth…which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought”. (He was referring to Shakespeare.) It is cruel to amputate the later part of life from expression through a silencing prejudice. Artists themselves can be defeatist and support the prejudice. Martin Amis claimed recently at a literature festival that “all” writers “go off” in age. Yet to complete the cycle of work at the end of life — his or her “myth” — should be an artist’s aim; and a poet, artist or musician who does not achieve anything especially marvellous in their latter years perhaps wasn’t so certainly in the first rank earlier. Prominent examples of late achievement are Rembrandt, with his penetrating self-portraits, Titian, who in old age painted virgins with a love more sensuous than many young men could achieve, the older Michelangelo, and Beethoven in his late quartets. Thomas Hardy was thrust from disappointment at his “failed” novels into writing poems that surpassed everything he had written before, and WB Yeats would be remembered as a minor poet were it not for his later work.

These works show not just a stupendous development but a quantum leap on the verge of age, as if they had crossed over and experienced in a short time a transformation of the spirit through a lifetime’s experience of their craft.

Yet we persist in looking for the “cutting edge” rather than the wise. Because of it, writers and artists at mid-stretch grow coy about mentioning their age. People still assert that “poets die young”, even though it is clearly nonsense. Of course, many were cut off too soon (as were many who were potentially great in all fields): Keats, Dylan Thomas, Shelley, Chatterton, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen. Maybe it is true that the “gods choose first those whom they love best” — but how well would they have survived my test?

For one can soon add up those who didn’t. How difficult it is to achieve that final glory is shown by the low success rate. One great poet, William Wordsworth, turned into an unreadable bore as he wheeled the remnants of his muse figure, his sister Dorothy, in a bath chair up and down a terrace in the Lake District. (He was an exception to my general thesis, because his poetry followed a disastrous social course.) Philip Larkin complained that “poetry has given up on me”.

Older artists often give up from weariness, or from feeling deserted, and settle for pensions and royalties if they have them. Some, like Hemingway or John Fowles, batter with preposterous late ambitions at the windows of the infinite, like ignorant flies against a window pane. Job-like, they have achieved all that their ambition desired and yet have nothing; the muse deserted them, or they did not deserve, or prepare for, the later muse.

I do not think it coincidental that a lack of interest in the creativity of the old comes at a time of equivalent scorn of spirituality. I can hear the word “spiritual” dropping like a stone in a dark well, dear reader. But do not confuse it with religious attendance. In our century, thrown into intellectual freedoms (and loneliness) unknown before, the spiritual might find its home more easily in the free and lonely range of what Blake called the “divine” imagination — in art that comes from the experience and wisdom of age.

Publishers — especially of poetry — and gallery directors, as well as writers and artists, should endeavour to pierce that screen of prejudice, which, from experience, is directly linked with our sceptical lack of expectations. As in all great and previous societies, while our hope is in the young, our primary expectation should be of the old s

Glyn Hughes’s autobiographical poem, Life Class (Shoestring Press, £13.95), is available at the Sunday Times BooksFirst price of £12.55, including postage and packing. Tel: 0870 165 8585

Maybe I’ll get it right this time.

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

As you spend November writing, you can draw comfort from the fact that, all around the world, other National Novel Writing Month participants are going through the same joys and sorrows of producing the Great Frantic Novel. Wrimos meet throughout the month to offer encouragement, commiseration, and—when the thing is done—the kind of raucous celebrations that tend to frighten animals and small children.

In 2008, we had over 120,000 participants. More than 20,000 of them crossed the 50k finish line by the midnight deadline, entering into the annals of NaNoWriMo superstardom forever. They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists.

So, to recap:

What: Writing one 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month’s time.

Who: You! We can’t do this unless we have some other people trying it as well. Let’s write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together.

Why: The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of our era’s most enchanting art forms! To write without having to obsess over quality. To be able to make obscure references to passages from our novels at parties. To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work.

When: You can sign up anytime to add your name to the roster and browse the forums. Writing begins November 1. To be added to the official list of winners, you must reach the 50,000-word mark by November 30 at midnight. Once your novel has been verified by our web-based team of robotic word counters, the partying begins.

Still confused? Just visit the How NaNoWriMo Works page!

National Novel Writing Month - go on, you know you want to do it.

The plans are part of a consumer revolution in higher education to be unveiled by Lord Mandelson on Tuesday. Photograph: Fiona Hanson/PA

University courses are to be tagged with their drop-out rates, graduates’ future earnings and the number of contact hours students can expect with tutors. The move, which will be modelled on a food-labelling system, is part of a consumer revolution in higher education to be unveiled this week by Lord Mandelson, the universities secretary.

Students should be treated more as paying customers and given better information about the quality of their courses before they embark on a degree, the new government framework for universities is expected to say on Tuesday.

The plan aims to set out the future priorities for universities before a major shake-up of the student funding system. It is also expected to recommend greater business involvement in universities and new admissions systems to identify talented applicants from poorer backgrounds in an attempt to break middle-class domination of the top institutions.

But the heavy emphasis on providing better value for money to students by making it clearer what their contribution is being spent on will fuel speculation that the government is paving the way for a rise in fees after the general election. Universities are lobbying to be allowed to charge more in top-up fees to increase their income – or protect it against looming public spending cuts. Ministers have already indicated that they will expect both students and employers to pay more towards the cost of university studies.

Under the plans for England, each course will come with a list setting out what the subject involves, how much teaching time students can expect, how often they will have tutorials with star academics and how much work they will be expected to do independently. It will also state the assessment methods and how often they will be examined.

Drop-out rates and statistics on employability of graduates will be given for six months and three years after they complete their studies. Future earnings could also be factored in to calculate the premium of studying high-intensity courses such as engineering and medicine. The government is expected to launch a consultation about how the system would be introduced. There could be a central website or universities could be expected to publish details in their prospectuses.

The National Union of Students said the system could warp universities’ priorities in the way that school league tables have encouraged schools to focus disproportionately on Sats tests.

The plan reflects the fact that there is growing anger among undergraduates about how their £3,225-a-year fees are being spent. In May this year undergraduates at Bristol University staged a tuition fees rebellion, complaining about reduced teaching hours and attempts to have essays marked by undergraduates instead of lecturers. Some 600 students reading economics and finance signed a complaint arguing that the university had failed to improve since fees were raised to more than £3,000 in 2006.

By clearly labelling each degree course, it is thought students will have more realistic expectations and universities will be forced to improve how they operate.

David Willetts, the Conservative shadow universities secretary, is working with Microsoft on plans to set up a Wikipedia-style guide to universities that would draw together data on graduation rates and job destinations and encourage students to give feedback to help other applicants. He has said universities should not be allowed to charge more in fees unless they can prove students are getting better value for money.

Wes Streeting, president of the NUS, said: “There is a balance to be struck between transparency and really commodifying higher education. There needs to be very good data included otherwise universities will offer more hours in huge lecture halls and cramped seminars when fewer hours with smaller groups would be much better. The benefits may force universities to drive up quality but it is riddled with risk.”

Just what is needed in higher education: more pointless bureaucracy, cost, time-wasting, paper-shuffling, fabrication of statistics, mendacious PR, and distraction from the activity of teaching.