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Obama calls for Aung San Suu Kyi release

Justin McCurry — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 10:32:00 GMT

US president calls on Burma to release democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi during meeting in Singapore

Barack Obama today urged Burma to release the democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi in a landmark meeting with the country's prime minister, Thein Sein.

He made the demand during a meeting in Singapore with Thein Sein and nine other leaders of the Association of South-east Asian nations (Asean).

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters that Obama had "brought that up directly with that government", indicating that he had spoken directly to Thein Sein. Reports said the US president did not shake hands with the Burmese premier.

The demand is not expected to appear in a statement to be issued later today, however.

Obama was the first US president since Lyndon Johnson in 1966 to be present in the same room as a Burmese leader.

The meeting was also the first between a US president and the leaders of Asean, which was formed more than 40 years ago at the height of the Vietnam war. Obama attended the meeting as part of a nine-day visit to Asia that began in Japan on Friday.

The US and Asean have arrived at a rare consensus on the need to engage Burma in order to bring about political reforms and improvements in human rights.

Obama recently launched a new policy of engagement with Burma's military junta, while insisting that sanctions would stay in place until there were signs of real progress.

According to reports, the draft joint statement said Obama and his Asean counterparts hoped the new two-pronged approach would "contribute to broad political and economic reforms" in Burma.

"We also underscored the importance of achieving national reconciliation and that the general elections to be held in Myanmar in 2010 must be conducted in a free, fair, inclusive and transparent manner in order to be credible to the international community," it said.

Aung San Suu Kyi is serving 18 months in detention after a Burmese court recently found her guilty of allowing an uninvited American guest stay at her home in violation of the terms of her house arrest.

Critics of the dictatorship denounced the trial and verdict as an attempt to exclude her from elections due to be held next year.

Her opposition National League for Democracy won elections in 1990 but the result was never recognised by the junta, which has ruled Burma since 1962.

Aung San Suu Kyi, who has spent 14 of the last 20 years in detention, has said she supports the White House's fresh approach, and earlier this month met Kurt Campbell, Obama's top diplomat for east Asia in a rare trip outside her dilapidated mansion in Rangoon.

Speaking in Tokyo yesterday, Obama made a point of mentioning Aung San Suu Kyi by name, adding that Burma would only find "true security and prosperity" by releasing her and more than 2,000 other political prisoners.

He acknowledged that years of US sanctions against Burma, coupled with engagement by its Asian neighbours, had failed to bring about change.

"Despite years of good intentions, neither sanctions by the US nor engagement of others have succeeded in improving the lives of Burmese people," he said.

"So we are now communicating directly with the leadership to make it clear that existing sanctions will remain until there are concrete steps toward democratic reform.

"There are clear steps that must be taken."

Justin McCurry

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Brown to give help to army families

Toby Helm, Mark Townsend — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:05:14 GMT

PM to offer housing aid and job training in bid to win support over Afghan war

Gordon Brown has ordered a series of new measures to help military families get on the housing ladder and find jobs amid growing fears that the loss of public support for the war in Afghanistan could spread to the forces community.

In an unprecedented move that reflects deepening anxiety in government about low morale among soldiers' relatives, the prime minister has invited 80 members of forces families, including wives and grandparents of serving soldiers, to Downing Street this week for a private reception to discuss their concerns.

The meeting on Thursday will coincide with an announcement by defence secretary Bob Ainsworth and leader of the house Harriet Harman of government action to help them gain better access to childcare, training and education and to help them search for work. Ministers will also announce within weeks a new "shared equity" scheme to help forces families buy their own homes. Unlike other shared equity projects, the forces families will be able to switch the equity to other properties as they are transferred from base to base. Initially ministers will pledge £20m with a guarantee to extend the scheme if it were to prove popular.

The moves coincide with plunging public support for the military campaign and a round of fresh attacks from senior military figures, who yesterday even accused Brown of handing the Taliban a key tactical advantage against British forces. Former chief of the defence staff General Lord Guthrie said the prime minister's "dithering" over whether to send an extra 500 troops to Afghanistan had in effect bolstered the enemy.

"The longer we dither the more the Taliban get the advantage. The people of Afghanistan are going to begin to wonder just how serious we are," said Guthrie.

Colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, said the Taliban and al-Qaida had been given "encouragement" by the delays in sending reinforcements to Helmand.

Last night a poll for the Independent on Sunday revealed 71% of the public would back a phased withdrawal leading to an end of combat operations within 12 months, against 22% who disagreed.

The red carpet treatment for military families follows a week in which Brown had been accused by the mother of Jamie Janes, a 20-year-old Guardsman killed in Afghanistan, of showing disrespect by misspelling her son's name in a handwritten letter of condolence.

When the prime minister rang Mrs Janes to apologise, she attacked him for having repeatedly blocked more funding for the military, including equipment for soldiers on the front line.

Ministers are worried that if criticism of the government, and the war, were voiced by military families regularly, public support would collapse. Yesterday the first signs of cabinet unease over the government's failure to sell the Afghanistan mission surfaced when Welsh secretary Peter Hain called for ministers to be clearer about its strategy. "We need to get a grip on it," he said.

In an interview with the Observer, Harman, who is also minister for women and equality, said military wives needed particular help. "The army wives have to move around the country. They are often miles away from their family and they often are spending a lot of time on their own. We want to make sure that they have the same opportunities for work and training, that are made more difficult by them moving around."

But shadow defence secretary Liam Fox said the government action looked like a "cynical manoeuvre" in the run-up to a general election.

In a sign of increasing discontent, the federations representing service families have sent a letter to armed forces minister Kevan Jones complaining about the withdrawal of childcare vouchers, which they say are vital in helping military wives get back to work.

Brown had been due to attend the Downing Street reception but has asked his wife Sarah to do so as he has to attend a special summit in Brussels to choose the first permanent president of the European Council. , will attempt to shore up support for the Afghanistan campaign during his address at the lord mayor's banquet.

Among the measures to be announced on Thursday is a move by work and pensions secretary Yvette Cooper to help ensure that forces families have better access to job centres, childcare, transport and better advice on school places.

Jones, under-secretary of state for defence, said: "Support for families is support for those on the front line. If soldiers know that their families are looked after, then that is vital for them in the crucial role they perform."

US president Barack Obama is expected this week to reveal an extra surge of thousands – possibly up to 30,000 – more troops to Afghanistan.

Toby Helm

Mark Townsend

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Boyfriend speaks of his love for Neda

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:05:12 GMT

Neda was prepared 'to take a bullet in the heart' in fight against President Ahmadinejad

Read the full interview here

Neda Agha Soltan, the young Iranian woman whose face became the international symbol of protest against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, told her fiancé she was prepared to "take a bullet in the heart" in the fight against the president's regime.

The revelation comes as her boyfriend speaks out for the first time after being imprisoned following Neda's death last June, when she was shot by Iranian police at a demonstration in Tehran. Caspian Makan, a photographer, spent two months in prison for criticising the authorities after her death. In a moving interview, he told the Observer that far from being a bystander caught up in the demonstrations, she was committed to the overthrow of Ahmadinejad. As a result of her high-profile presence at the protests, he believes she was targeted by the regime loyalists who killed her.

Makan has fled Iran and given two in-depth interviews. His meeting with director Angus Macqueen, which is featured in today's Observer Review, will appear in a BBC film about Neda. In both interviews she emerges as a markedly different figure to the young woman depicted at the time of her death. Her fiancé describes her as politically active and assertive, convinced she was fighting for "democracy and freedom" for Iranians. Neda joined the first wave of protests. After the election results were announced, she headed to the Interior Ministry in central Tehran – a focal point for the emerging movement supporting Ahamdinejad's election rival, Mir Hossein Mousavi. Makan remembers telling her that the scenes she described to him would quickly lead to a violent response from the regime.

She said: "No, they will continue because the people are too many and the scale too widespread… Everyone is responsible for reaching democracy," Makan recalls her as saying. "If I get shot in the heart or arrested, it's not important because we are all responsible for our future."

Although he was nervous about Neda going to the demonstrations, Makan said she insisted on participating. The last time he spoke to her, they had an argument over whether she should continue attending, as the violence increased.

Neda refused to listen to her boyfriend's pleas and criticised him for not documenting the street scenes. "Neda was present at the front line of the protests from the very first day," said Makan. "She was a natural leader and attracted many [protesters] to her side. I think that is why she was shot. The Iranian state and its security officials did not want her, they wanted to extinguish her."

Makan also reveals that Neda had no sympathy for either of the main opposition candidates who were challenging Ahmadinejad's claim of victory in the election.

Makan was unaware that Neda had been killed until the morning after the shooting had broken out. It was only then that Makan watched online the video of Neda's death in a Tehran street that would become the symbol of the crushing of the protests.

His public criticism of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in an interview led to the inevitable. Three days later, he was arrested, according to his interrogators at Evin prison, "on the personal order of Khamenei".

Finally released after 65 days, he was asked to sign an undertaking never to speak about Neda's death again and never to leave the country.

Pretending to depart on a photography trip, Makan headed north, but then drove for two days to one of the country's borders where he had arranged to meet a people smuggler. His escape ended in an eight-hour hike through the mountains.

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Fake payslips in mortgage fraud scam

Lisa Bachelor, Rajeev Syal — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:06:41 GMT

Observer investigation takes just seconds to buy documents that can be used in home loans fraud

All it took was a few clicks of the mouse and a payment of £35 for an Observer reporter to obtain a counterfeit payslip over the internet which would allow her to commit mortgage fraud worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Dozens of websites are selling the high-quality documents which are being used as false "proof" of salary in applications to banks and helping to add to the tens of millions of pounds of mortgage fraud within the system.

The increasing use of these sites comes as mortgage lenders are being asked by the Financial Services Authority to become more reliant on documentation such as payslips. Police plan to launch a crackdown on the websites.

Obtaining the payslips takes just a few minutes. An Observer reporter entered "fake payslips" into a Google search, half a dozen possible sites were offered, and the top one was chosen. The site said: "Can't get a mortgage loan? Need Proof of Income? … We can supply you with genuine Inland Revenue [sic] approved payslips for Proof of Income, Guaranteed Next Day Delivery."

It offered a range of designs and asked the reporter to enter details including a company name, a notional salary, a national insurance number and how many payslips were needed. The website calculated the taxable pay and national insurance and even offered to add further details such as pension deductions and bonus payments for an additional £4.95 before offering a range of payment options. Three professional, authentic-looking payslips arrived two days later.

One businessman who sells fake payslips on the internet defended his trade. Dominic Green, general manager of one of the websites, Replicadoc.co.uk, said that he is offering a legitimate service for clients who wish to use them for fun, not to commit fraud. "The terms clearly state that work is produced for novelty purposes. What the client does with the work is their business," he said.

"It is easy to assume that all clients who come through the website use the documents in relation to fraud. However, there are lots of cases where clients are self-employed and don't issue themselves payslips and need quality replacements or where clients have online banking accounts and they don't receive paper copies of their bank accounts."

Anyone using a fake payslip to get a mortgage would be committing fraud by false representation, punishable by 10 years in prison; or posession of an article for use in the course of fraud, which can carry a five-year sentence.

The threat of imprisonment has not proved to be a deterrent, according to one former mortgage broker who said that he has suggested to customers that they should use fake wage slips if they lack proof of income. "No one came back to them about it from the banks. It goes on a lot, especially when someone does not know how to account for their cash," he said.

The Metropolitan Police is planning a crackdown on the websites. Once obtained, false documents such as payslips can be used for a host of crimes including immigration rackets, benefit fraud and applications for mortgages.

Detective Chief Inspector Nick Downing from the Met's economic and specialist crime command said that 30,000 false identities had been discovered after raids on ID "factories" across the capital. Now, depending on the outcome of a test case, the Met is planning to clamp down on the people behind the websites. He said: "We have disrupted over 30 of the more traditional ID factories in residential premises over the last three years. We hope that after an upcoming court case we can replicate this activity in the 'e-arena', as we call it.

"Often the servers are based abroad which means that we can't use the traditional policing methods we have used on the payslip factories, so we are having to tailor our policing accordingly," he said.

Police are also working closely with manufacturers and retailers of high-class laser printers after discovering they could be used to produce fakes. A £750 printer was withdrawn from sale at PC World after detectives revealed it could even produce replicas of the proposed new ID card and EU driving licences.

The cost of equipment needed to set up ID factories is falling, making them easier to establish. Scotland Yard, manufacturers and shops are working on a scheme named Project Genesius to keep such printers out of the hands of criminals.

Lenders admit the forgeries are difficult to spot and are concerned that their use could become more prevalent under new FSA regulations which require more physical documentation. Sue Anderson, from the Council of Mortgage Lenders, said that such rules introduced under the mortgage market review released last month will result in greater use of fake payslips.

Lisa Bachelor

Rajeev Syal

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Baby RB mother held him as he died

Peter Walker — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 10:12:26 GMT

Parents who fought emotional court battle over disabled son's life support both cuddled infant after machines switched off

The mother who fought an emotional high court battle with the father of her severely disabled son over the infant's fate, has described how both parents cuddled the child after his life support system was switched off.

The baby – who cannot be named for legal reasons and has been known as Baby RB – died on Friday, shortly after the machines which had helped him breathe throughout his 13 months of life, were turned off. Three days before that, the child's father withdrew his objection to pleas by Baby RB's mother and doctors that he should be allowed to die.

The dispute between the parents, who are in their 20s and are now separated, was argued before the high court in London for a week before the father changed his mind.

Expert witnesses said RB, who was born with a form of congenital myasthenic syndrome, a rare neuromuscular condition that severely restricted his ability to breathe and move, was not able to show he was in pain, despite undergoing regular intrusive treatment, notably the suctioning of his airways to remove fluid. The father argued that since the child had seemingly normal brain functions he should be kept alive.

The mother told newspapers that both parents had held the infant as he died.

"When they took his tube out, I was cuddling him. It was so amazing to see him without it – it's the longest we had seen his face properly," she told the Mail on Sunday.

She told the Sunday Mirror: "I have no regrets. I didn't want him to be in any more pain. All the tests he had to put up with. He was being prodded and poked. He must have been screaming inside, thinking, 'Mum, why are you letting them do this to me?'

"I'm grateful for every second we've had together. But it was time to let him go."

Peter Walker

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When Barack met Michelle

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:00:01 GMT

What's it like being married to the President? And can you ever be a private couple in public? Jodi Kantor on the Obamas' marriage

Another Washington dusk, another motorcade, another intimate evening played out in public. On 3 October, just a day after their failed Olympics bid was announced in Copenhagen, Barack and Michelle Obama slipped into a Georgetown restaurant for one of their now-familiar date nights: this time, to toast their 17th wedding anniversary. As with their previous outings, even the dark photographs taken by passers-by and posted on the web looked glamorous: the president tieless, in a suit; the first lady in a backless sheath.

The Obama date-night tradition stretches back to the days when the president spent half his time in Springfield, Illinois, reuniting at week's close with his wife, who kept a regular Friday manicure and hair appointment for the occasion. But five days before he ventured out for his anniversary dinner, the president lamented what had happened to his nights out with his wife. "I would say the one time during our stay here in the White House so far that has…" He paused so long in choosing his words that Michelle, sitting alongside him, prompted him. "Has what?"

"Annoyed me," the president answered.

"Don't say it!" the first lady mock-warned. "Uh-oh."

"Was when I took Michelle to New York and people made it into a political issue," he continued, recalling the evening last spring when they flew to New York for dinner and a show, eliciting Republican gibes for spending federal money on their own entertainment.

We were in the Oval Office, nearly 40 minutes into a conversation about the subject of their marriage. Watched over by three aides and Gilbert Stuart's portrait of George Washington, the two sat a few feet apart in matching striped chairs that made them look more like a pair of heads of state than husband and wife. The Obamas were talking about the impact of the presidency on their relationship, and doing so in that setting – we were in the room that epitomises official power, discussing the highly unofficial matter of dates – began to seem like a metaphor for the topic itself.

"If I weren't president, I would be happy to catch the shuttle with my wife to take her to a Broadway show, as I had promised her during the campaign, and there would be no fuss and no muss and no photographers," the president said. "That would please me greatly." He went on to say: "The notion that I just couldn't take my wife out on a date without it being a political issue was not something I was happy with."

Everything becomes political here, I offered, gesturing around the room. "Everything becomes political," he repeated very slowly. Then he said: "What I value most about my marriage is that it is separate and apart from a lot of the silliness of Washington, and Michelle is not part of that silliness."

Perhaps she is not. But the Obamas mix politics and romance in a way that no first couple quite have before. Almost 10 months ago, they swept into Washington with inauguration festivities that struck distinctly wedding-like notes: he strode down an aisle and took a vow, she wore a long white dress, the youthful-looking couple swayed to a love song in a ceremonial first dance and then settled into a new house. Since then, photograph after official White House photograph has shown the Obamas gazing into each other's eyes while performing one official function or another. Here is a shot of the Obamas entering a Cinco de Mayo reception, his arm draped protectively around her back. Next, a photo of the president placing a kiss on his wife's cheek after his address on healthcare to Congress. Poster-sized versions of these and other photographs are displayed in rotation along the White House corridors. It's hard to think of another workplace decorated with such looming evidence of affection between the principal players.

The centrality of the Obama marriage to the president's political brand opens a new chapter in the debate that has run through, even helped define, their union. Since he first began running for office in 1995, Barack and Michelle Obama have never really stopped struggling over how to combine politics and marriage: how to navigate the long absences, lack of privacy, ossified gender roles and generally stultifying rules that result when public opinion comes to bear on private relationships.

Along the way, they revised some of the standards for how a politician and spouse are supposed to behave. They have spoken more frankly about marriage than most intact couples, especially those running for office, usually do. ("The bumps happen to everybody all the time, and they are continuous," the first lady told me in a let's-get-real voice, discussing the lowest point in her marriage.) Candidates' wives are supposed to sit cheerfully through their husbands' appearances. But after helping run her husband's first State Senate campaign in 1996, Michelle Obama largely withdrew from politics for years, fully re-engaging only for the presidential campaign. As a result, she has probably logged fewer total sitting-through-my-husband's-speech hours than most of her recent predecessors. Even the go-for-broke quality of the president's rise can be read, in some small part, as an attempt to vault over the forces that fray political marriages. People who face too many demands – two careers, two children – often scale back somehow. The Obamas scaled up.

"This is the first time in a long time in our marriage that we've lived seven days a week in the same household with the same schedule, with the same set of rituals," Michelle pointed out. "That's been more of a relief for me than I would have ever imagined."

The couple now spend more time together than at nearly any other point since their early years together. On many days, they see Malia and Sasha off to school, exercise together and do not begin their public schedules until 9 or even 10am. They recently finished redecorating the White House residence, the first lady requesting a rocking chair for her husband to read in, the president scrutinising colours and patterns, said Desirée Rogers, the White House social secretary. The pair recently began playing tennis. (He wins, she admitted; for now, he added.) This summer, Michelle surprised her husband for his birthday by gathering his old basketball buddies for a weekend at Camp David.

Barack and Michelle Obama are also a more fully fused political team than ever before, with no other jobs to distract them, no doubts about the worthiness of the pursuit dogging them. Theirs is by no means a co-presidency; aides say the first lady has little engagement with banking reform, nuclear disarmament or most of the other issues that dominate her husband's days. But their goals are increasingly intertwined, with Michelle speaking out on healthcare reform, privately mulling over Supreme Court nominees with the president and serving as his consultant on personnel and public opinion. When they lounge on the Truman Balcony or sit inside at their round dining table, she describes how she believes his initiatives are perceived outside Washington; later, say advisers, the president quotes the first lady in Oval Office meetings.

If winning the White House represents a resolution of the Obamas' struggles, it also means a new, higher-stakes confrontation with some of the vexing issues that fed those tensions. Their marriage is more vulnerable than ever to the corrosions of politics: partisan attacks, disappointments of failed initiatives, a temptation to market what was once wholly private. Some of the methods the Obamas devised for keeping their relationship strong – speaking frankly in public, maintaining separate careers, even date nights – are no longer as easily available to them. Like every other modern presidential couple, the Obamas have watched their world contract to one building and a narrow zone beyond, but their partnership expand to encompass a staff and two wings of the White House. And while the presidency tends to bring couples closer, historians say, it also tends to thrust them back to more tradition-bound behaviour.

For all of their ease in public, the Obamas do not seem entirely comfortable with the bargain. As they talked about their marriage, they seemed both game and cautious, the president more introspective about their relationship, the first lady often playing the big sister dispensing advice to younger couples. Then I asked how any couple can have a truly equal partnership when one member is president.

Michelle Obama gave what sounded like a small, sharp "mmphf" of recognition, and the fluid teamwork of their answers momentarily came to a halt. "Well, first of all…" the president started. His wife peered at him, looking curious as to how he might answer the question. "She's got…"' he began, but then stopped again. "Well, let me be careful about this," he said, pausing once more. "My staff worry a lot more about what the first lady thinks than they worry about what I think," he finally said, to laughter around the room.

The question still unanswered, his wife stepped back in: "Clearly Barack's career decisions are leading us. They're not mine; that's obvious. I'm married to the president of the United States. I don't have another job, and it would be problematic in this role. So that – you can't even measure that." She did add that they are more equal in their private lives – how they run their household, how they raise their children, the overall choices they make.

Interpreting anyone's marriage – a neighbour's, let alone the president's – is extremely difficult. And yet examining the first couple's relationship offers hints about Barack Obama the president, not just Barack Obama the husband. Long before many Americans, Michelle Obama was seduced by his mind, his charm, his promise of social transformation; long before he held national office, she questioned whether he really could deliver on all his earnest pledges. For nearly two decades, Michelle Obama has lived with the president of the United States. Now the rest of us do, too.

Just before the Rev Jeremiah A Wright Jr pronounced Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson man and wife on the evening of 3 October 1992, he held their wedding rings – signifying their new, enduring bonds – before the guests at Trinity United Church of Christ. Michelle's was traditional, but Barack's was an intricate gold design from Indonesia, where he had lived as a boy.

Neither needed a reminder of just how fragile family could be. Barack Obama Sr's relationships, not just with his wives but also with his children, were fleeting; in 1982, he died at the age of 46. Michelle's parents had a long, stable marriage, but her maternal grandparents split without ever formally divorcing, and her paternal grandparents separated for 11 years.

Before Michelle, Barack had brought only one woman to Hawaii to meet his family, according to his younger half-sister, Maya Soetoro. He in turn was Michelle's first serious boyfriend, according to Craig Robinson, Michelle's brother: none of the others had met her standards. During their three-year courtship, the couple shared thrilling moments, like when Barack became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. But there were crushing ones, too. In early 1991, Fraser Robinson, Michelle's father, came down with what seemed to be the flu. Just a few days later, he was brain-dead, and his family had to decide whether to end life support, according to Francesca Gray, his sister. Barack was in the middle of classes, with no money to speak of, but he flew to Chicago anyway. At the wedding the following year, Craig Robinson took his father's place in walking Michelle down the aisle.

The Obamas were married just a month before the presidential election, a time of mounting excitement for Democrats in their neighbourhood of Hyde Park and beyond. Bill Clinton looked as if he might take the White House back from the Republicans. Barack was helping by running a voter-registration drive so successful he won notice in Chicago newspapers and political circles. (Clinton ended up carrying Illinois, then a marginal state.) Obama's efforts also helped make Carol Moseley Braun, a fellow Hyde Park resident, the first African-American woman in the US Senate. Suddenly politics seemed full of new possibilities. Barack had talked to Michelle about running for office; she had misgivings but thought the day was not imminent.

For the moment, he was enmeshed in writing his memoir, Dreams From My Father. He had retreated to Bali for several weeks to work on the manuscript and was still preoccupied with it after his return. "Barack was just really involved in the book. Michelle and I would do lots of shopping and movies," Yvonne Davila, a close friend, remembered. "Barack doesn't belong to you," she told me she warned Michelle.

In the annals of presidential coupledom, the Obamas more than slightly resemble the Clintons: a pair of Ivy League-trained lawyers, the self-made son of an absent father and a wife who sometimes put her husband's ambitions ahead of her own. But unlike Bill Clinton, who turned his wife into an unlikely Arkansan, Obama planted himself on his wife's turf. And while the Clinton marriage seems forged in shared beliefs about the promise of politics, the Obama union has been a decades-long debate about whether politics could be an effective avenue for social change. Even as a community organiser, Barack aimed to prod elected officials into action. His wife, who was more sceptical of politicians, tried to bypass them: when she took a job promoting community-organising techniques, she focused on what neighbourhoods could accomplish without their help.

In 1995, a State Senate seat was opening up, and Barack, then 34, announced his candidacy. "It allowed me to get my feet wet in politics and test out whether I could get something done," he told the New York Times two years ago. Because he wasn't from Chicago, had degrees from two elite schools and a background that others found odd, a friend said, he felt he had to begin by running for a relatively modest office.

As the Obamas sat with friends around their dining table, eating Michelle's chilli and planning the run, she was plainly hesitant. "She was very open about not wanting to be in politics," Davila said. Michelle had always wanted to be a mother, three years had passed since their wedding and now her husband – with his all-consuming memoir just finished – would be gone several days a week. Michelle "just wasn't ready to share", Carol Anne Harwell, who became the campaign manager, recalls. Besides, he was the former president of the Harvard Law Review, a writer and a teacher at a premier law school, the University of Chicago. Springfield was home to financial scandal so pervasive it was barely considered scandalous. "I married you because you're cute and you're smart," Michelle later told her husband, "but this is the dumbest thing you could have ever asked me to do." She became his most energetic volunteer anyway. "She did everything," Craig Robinson says. Every Saturday morning, she and Davila knocked on doors for petition signatures that would put Barack on the ballot.

As a first-time candidate, Barack could be stiff; friends remember him talking to voters with his arms folded, looking defensive. Michelle warmed everyone up, including her husband. "She is really Bill, and he is really Hillary," one friend recently put it. But like Hillary Clinton – and countless other political wives – Michelle sometimes took on the role of enforcer. If a volunteer promised to gather 300 petition signatures, "299 did not work because 300 was the goal," Harwell says. "You met the wrath of Michelle."

Harwell also noticed the candidate's wife was constantly trying to upgrade the campaign, eliminating anything that seemed tacky or otherwise redolent of the less-than-exalted standards of Illinois state politics. Instead of a beers-in-a-bar fundraiser, Michelle arranged a party at the DuSable Museum of African American History with a band and a crowd of young professionals. When Harwell found an inexpensive office space with dingy walls, Michelle vetoed it. "She was like, 'Oh, no, no, no,'" Harwell says. "'Why would we reduce ourselves to this?'"

One day last spring, I walked into the Hyde Park apartment the Obamas bought when they married, hoping to find clues to their old lives. Their unit, part of a complex of redbrick houses turned condominiums, had a few appealing touches – a green-tiled fireplace, a dining room with elaborate woodwork and a small porch in the back (where Michelle let her husband smoke, a friend said). But the apartment was narrow and worn, with fixtures that must have been ageing even several years ago.

The Hole – as Michelle called her husband's tiny, dark office – lived up to its name. The cramped master bedroom had a closet barely big enough for one wardrobe. The apartment was neat, friends said, but bursting with children's gear and toys. The dining table tilted so much food sometimes skidded south.

Barack would eventually learn to make his way in the State Senate, but his initial reports home were dismayed: Republicans held control, legislation he drafted was not heard and even some Democrats teased him about his name. "He would call me and say: 'This person is an idiot. They get an F,'" Harwell says.

"He went to Springfield without fully appreciating all of the consequences," said Judson Miner, Barack's boss at the civil rights law firm where he'd been working for several years. Shortly after arriving, Barack called Miner to tell him he was scaling back his legal work: he could not stay on top of it from downstate. Barack took on a heavier teaching load to compensate for the lost income. Michelle, who had given up corporate law, now earned less than $50,000 a year at her non-profit job training young leaders, a former colleague estimates.

For Barack's swearings-in, Michelle would travel to Springfield. Harwell remembers Barack calling up with a report from downstate: "'Michelle just couldn't believe it, she had to come down to see this mess for herself.'" As she heard Barack's tales from Springfield, Michelle learned "how good legislation vanished overnight for political reasons", Valerie Jarrett, one of the Obamas' closest friends, told me recently in her White House office, where she is senior adviser to the president. This, Jarrett said, left Michelle even more frustrated than her husband. "He's more of a pragmatist," Jarrett says. Michelle "takes a very principled position, and she thinks everyone should do the right thing".

If Barack's career was not going quite as he had hoped, Michelle did not seem settled on what she wanted to do professionally. She had taken a new position organising student volunteers at the University of Chicago. After she became a mother in 1998, she was tempted to stay at home, but like many political spouses, she felt financial pressure to work.

"Michelle would say, 'Well, you're gone all the time and we're broke,'" the president recalled when I spoke to the two of them. "'How is that a good deal?'"

"You do the maths," Michelle told her friend Sandra Matthews, one day as the two sat on a playground bench. "The time is coming pretty soon when I'm going to have to decide. I'm torn." When she was interviewed for a job at the University of Chicago Medical Center, her baby sitter cancelled at the last moment, so Michelle strapped a newborn Sasha into a stroller, and the two rolled off to meet the hospital president. "She was in a lot of ways a single mum, and that was not her plan," recalls Susan Sher, who became her boss at the hospital and is now her chief of staff.

In addition to serving in Springfield and teaching law, Barack Obama was making his first bid for national office, challenging Bobby Rush, a popular South Side congressman. The race placed further strains on the Obamas. Unlike the wife who smiles tightly and insists everything is fine, Michelle sent a clear series of distress signals not only to her husband but to everyone around her. "Barack and I, we're doing a lot of talking," she would say when asked how she was holding up, according to the Rev Alison Boden, a former colleague at the University of Chicago.

Barack initially seems to have seen his absences as a manageable issue, something to be endured, just as he had as a child when living apart from his mother. Entering politics would be hard on a family, he knew, but he didn't quite understand until he lived it, Jarrett told me. She remembers Michelle "talking to him, after the kids were born, about the importance of sheer physical presence, which wasn't something he was really used to. She talked about how important it was for them to at least talk every day."

Barack helped as much as possible: on top of juggling jobs, he paid the household bills and did the grocery shopping, often wandering supermarket aisles late at night. When business in Springfield was done for the week, he always drove home that same night, sometimes arriving past midnight. "As far as I was concerned, she had nothing to complain about," he wrote in his second book, The Audacity of Hope.

One day in July, sitting in Jarrett's West Wing office, I asked how the young politician responded to his wife's assertions that he was leaving her to raise their children alone. Jarrett, whose own marriage ended in part because of career-related conflict, not only recalled Barack's replies but she also started reciting them. "'I'll make it work,'" said Jarrett, speaking in his voice. "'We can make it work. I'll do more.'" It sounded as if she could have been describing the Barack Obama of today, certain of his ability to juggle an intimidating number of priorities.

Back in the Oval Office, I asked the Obamas just how severe their strains had been. "This was sort of the eye-opener to me, that marriage is hard," the first lady said with a little laugh. "But going into it, no one ever tells you that. They just tell you, 'Do you love him?' 'What's the dress look like?'"

I asked more directly about whether their union almost came to an end. "That's over-reading it," the president said. "But I wouldn't gloss over the fact that that was a tough time for us."

Did you ever seek counselling? I asked. The first lady looked solemnly at the president. He said: "You know, I mean, I think that it was important for us to work this through… There was no point where I was fearful for our marriage. There were points in time where I was fearful that Michelle just really didn't – that she would be unhappy."

Several years later, he devoted quite a few pages of The Audacity of Hope to the conflict. (Judging by interviews, more than a few Chicagoans knew that Michelle once openly resented what her husband's political career had cost her, so he may have been wise to raise the issue before anyone else.) In the end, what seems more unusual than the Obamas' who-does-what battles is the way they turned them into a teachable moment, converting lived experience into both a political message and what sounds like the opposite of standard political shtick.

"If my ups and downs, our ups and downs in our marriage can help young couples sort of realise that good marriages take work…" Michelle Obama said a few minutes later in the interview. The image of a flawless relationship is "the last thing that we want to project", she said. "It's unfair to the institution of marriage, and it's unfair for young people who are trying to build something, to project this perfection that doesn't exist."

In the history of Barack Obama, his loss against Bobby Rush is now regarded as a constructive political failure, the point at which he shed some early dreaminess and hubris and became a cannier competitor. For the Obamas, this period was also one of constructive personal failure, forcing them to reckon with their longstanding differences. Michelle accepted she was not going to have a conventional marriage, that her husband would be away much of the time. "That was me, wanting a certain type of model, and our lives didn't fit that model," she told me in an Iowa lunchroom in the summer of 2007. "I just needed the support. It didn't have to be Barack." Craig Robinson later told me he and Michelle had another realisation: if their father, a city water worker, had had the kind of opportunities their generation did, he probably would not have been home for dinner every night, either.

Michelle's mother, Marian, offered crucial help, often picking up Malia and Sasha after school. The Obamas' closest friends – doctors, lawyers, MBA types – also faced the strains of two-full-time-careers-plus-kids marriage. Now they banded into a kind of intergenerational urban kibbutz, a collective that shared meals and car pools and weekend activities.

Unlike many political wives, Michelle was almost never alone. And she mostly skipped public events. When Barack spoke at the 2002 rally protesting the impending invasion of Iraq, now considered a pivotal moment of his career, his wife was not present. "I've had to come to the point of figuring out how to carve out what kind of life I want for myself beyond who Barack is and what he wants," she told the Chicago Tribune during his 2004 US Senate campaign. During that race, Michelle was still a reluctant partner: they had made a deal that if he lost, he'd get out entirely. "It was a compromise," Marty Nesbitt, one of the president's closest friends, told me. ''OK. One. More. Try,'' he explained, banging out each word on a side table.

When her husband was far outspent by a local millionaire in the primary, Michelle "was almost like the ma ma cub coming to protect her young,'' says Kevin Thompson, a friend and former aide. By the time it became clear Barack might be the third African-American senator since Reconstruction, she was headlining a few campaign events herself. "It really clicked with her that this may be the destiny everyone was always talking about," Thompson said.

Michelle, wary of her husband's ambitions, may have also pushed him ahead with her high expectations of what he could achieve. "Forward propulsion'" is the quality Maya Soetoro says her sister-in-law brought to Barack's career.

Two years after the Senate race, despite lingering reservations, she helped her husband define his reasons for running for president. On an autumn day in 2006, the Obamas sat in the Chicago office of the consultant David Axelrod, surrounded by advisers, weighing whether Barack should move forward. "What do you think you could accomplish that other candidates couldn't?" Michelle asked, according to Axelrod. The question hung in the air. Clearly, an Obama agenda would not look very different from that of Hillary Clinton or John Edwards.

"When I take that oath of office, there will be kids all over this country who don't really think that all paths are open to them, who will believe they can be anything they want to be," Barack replied. "And I think the world will look at America a little differently."

A few days before the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, Anita Dunn, a political consultant who joined the Obama campaign, was reading the newspaper when a voter's quote, expressing surprise that Barack Obama was a good family man, leapt out at her. Ever since Obama made his debut on the national stage, he'd been a solo act, telling the story of his singular, even lonely-sounding journey. In Pennsylvania, where Obama lost, "the visuals of so many of our rallies was him alone," Dunn told me, which did nothing to allay voters' concerns that the candidate was too distant – too foreign, professorial or precocious. Now Michelle and sometimes the girls were appearing more frequently onstage with Barack. Dunn shared the quote about Barack being a good family man with advisers, reinforcing their growing view that he was a more appealing candidate when surrounded by his family. The candidate beat expectations in both Indiana and North Carolina, all but locking up the nomination.

The Obamas began the presidential campaign, it seems, still thinking of politics as Barack's pursuit, not Michelle's. She would need to participate heavily only at the beginning and end, and not much in the middle, Michelle told Sher. Despite her outward confidence, there were clues she was not entirely comfortable in her new role: staff members recall that of the 26 primary debates, forums in which he struggled, she attended only two or three. At the first, in Orangeburg, South Carolina, she sat frozen in the audience, so anxious she was unable to speak. ''It was like sitting next to a pillar of salt,'' says Melissa Winter, now her deputy chief of staff. She refused to even watch the remaining debates, avoiding television screens lest she catch a clip. She also struggled to figure out where she fitted in her husband's organisation. She had only two staff members and no speechwriter, and when she raised issues like the need to reach out more to women voters, she wasn't sure she had any influence on her husband's advisers.

Because the couple rarely campaigned together, interactions between them swelled with intermediaries. Winter would get a nightly phone call from Barack, then pad down a hotel hallway and tap on her boss's door. For Michelle's 44th birthday, Barack deputised Winter to prepare his gift, a silver pendant necklace. "He wanted to be sure I had it wrapped appropriately, that it had a ribbon on it," she told me. "There was a lot of back and forth."

When Jarrett officially joined the campaign, in addition to a long list of duties, she served as Michelle's representative, as well as a kind of marital guardian and glue. Michelle took her concerns about Barack – for instance, her worry that his schedule allowed him no time to think – to Jarrett, who passed them on to aides. Barack worried, Jarrett said, that his wife had taken on too much. "Was that OK with her?" Jarrett says he wanted to know.

From the beginning, Michelle turned Barack's courtship all those summers ago into a parable of political conversion, casting herself as a stand-in for the sceptical voter. When she first heard of him, his name and background seemed weird, she told voters who probably felt the same way. The first time Barack asked her out, she refused. He was a newcomer, her mentee, so it would be strange for him to become her boyfriend (or the president). But slowly he worked on her. One day she heard him give a speech and found herself captivated by the possibilities of what might be.

"When you listen to her tell that story," Robert Gibbs, the campaign spokesman and now the White House press secretary, told me, voters thought, "It's OK, yeah, this could work."

She also played a vital role in heading off the most promising female candidate in United States history. It was essential for the Obama campaign to present some sort of accomplished female counterweight to Hillary Clinton, to convince Democratic women that they could vote for Barack Obama and a powerful female figure besides. Consciously or not, Michelle made herself into an appealing contrast to the front-runner. She was candid; Hillary was often guarded. Michelle represented the idea that a little black girl from the South Side of Chicago could grow up to be first lady of the United States; Hillary stood for the hold of the already-powerful on the political system. And Michelle seemed to have the kind of marriage many people might aspire to; Hillary did not.

As the campaign accelerated after the first voting contests, Michelle went from headlining intimate campaign events to enormous ones. Television cameras appeared, and some of her more forceful comments were endlessly replayed. When cable shows, bloggers and opponents fixated on her – on her supposed lack of patriotism, her supposedly angry streak – Barack was irate. As unflattering reports played on TV, he'd tell aides stories about her parents, about her as a mother, as if defending his wife in private could somehow help. Barack even met with the Fox executives Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes in part to insist that they treat her more respectfully.

Michelle was annoyed that advisers – who had noticed for months that she could grow a bit too vehement in speeches – had never informed her of the developing problems, according to aides. Fearful of hurting her husband's chances, she even raised the prospect of ceasing to campaign. Jarrett recalls "she felt she had not gotten support." According to Sher, "She was hurt at the idea it was possible she wouldn't be an asset." It was almost as if she was reverting to an old pattern in her marriage: let Barack be a politician, and she'd stay out of it.

But unlike other times, Michelle did not withdraw. In fact, the woman who had once resisted campaigning now told friends she enjoyed the crowds, the laughs and the votes she was earning. Her husband promised that the staff could fix whatever problems she faced. And he clearly needed her help. After years of leaving his family behind, he now turned to his wife to help carry him to the presidency. "I've never done this before," she said to her husband's team, "I just need you to tell me what to do."

Campaigns often prove toxic to participants' personal lives, but Jarrett says the Obamas' relationship improved in the crucible of the race. "They both rallied to each other's defence and support," she says. "By having to work hard at it, it strengthened their marriage."

On a humid September day, Mayor Richard M Daley of Chicago stood on a platform on the South Lawn of the White House hawking his city's Olympic bid. The Obamas flanked him, consciously or unconsciously assuming a series of identical positions as he spoke. When Michelle Obama clasped her hands in a downward triangle, the president did, too. When he folded his arms across his chest, so did she. During their own short speeches they gave outsize laughs at each other's mild jokes and even mimed what the other was saying. As the president noted that the White House was just a tad larger than their home in Chicago, the first lady pinched her fingers to demonstrate. Milling around afterwards, watching judo and fencing demonstrations, the couple leaned into each other, talking and nodding.

Friends who visit the White House describe occasionally turning corners to find the first couple mid-embrace. They also seem unusually willing, for a presidential couple, to kiss, touch and flirt in public. It may be that they are broadcasting their affection to the rest of us, an advertisement of their closeness. Or they may simply be holding tightly to each other as they navigate new and uncertain terrain. "Part of what they provide each other with is emotional safety," Jarrett explained.

In many ways, the Obamas have made the White House into a cocoon of sorts, with weekends full of movie-watching (Where the Wild Things Are), Scrabble games and children's talent shows. They have surrounded themselves with those who have known them longest and best: Marian Robinson, the first lady's mother, has settled in (unaccustomed to being waited on, she won't let the staff do the laundry). Marty Nesbitt and his wife, Dr Anita Blanchard, left Chicago to rent a house nearby for the summer, while Maya Soetoro, the president's half-sister, and her husband, Konrad Ng, just moved here temporarily from Hawaii.

Though the president reads aloud with his children in the evenings – he and Sasha are finishing Life of Pi – parenting in the White House is more complicated. Because the first couple cannot move freely about, their relatives take Malia and Sasha to the bookstore, on a walk through Chinatown, to the multiplex to see Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. Last spring, according to Sher, well-meaning White House residence staff members tried to give the girls cellphones, so their parents could always reach them; the first lady stepped in to refuse.

Even the Obamas' jokes seem like coping mechanisms for the epic changes in their lives. They are still in their 40s, and they appear to deal with the grandeur and ritual of their new home with a kind of satirical distance that is hard to imagine coming from first couples of a pre-Jon Stewart generation. The president playfully addresses his wife using her official acronym, ''Flotus'' (first lady of the United States). She keeps up a running commentary on her husband as he navigates his new home, according to friends and relatives. Seeing him in the Oval Office cracks Michelle Obama up, she told me. "It's like, what are you doing there?" she said, gesturing to the president's desk. "Get up from there!" In September, as they waited to greet a long, slow procession of foreign dignitaries and their spouses at the Group of 20 Summit in Pittsburgh, the first lady whispered in her husband's ear about things "that I probably shouldn't repeat", he said.

"She can puncture the balloon of this," he added, making him feel like the same person he was five or 10 years ago.

Clearly, the Obamas prefer to think of themselves as largely unaltered. "The strengths and challenges of our marriage don't change because we move to a different address," the first lady said, the president studying the carpet as she answered. But even as they serve as sources of continuity for each other, their own partnership is undergoing significant change, not just in outward circumstance – the city, the exposure, the security, the staff, the house and so on – but far more fundamentally. Michelle Obama has gone from political sceptic to political partner to a woman with a White House agenda of her own, and an approval rating higher than the president's.

Initially, her office was seen as so peripheral by some in the West Wing that one aide referred to it as Guam [a US-owned Pacific island]: pleasant but powerless. Now Michelle Obama is towing the island closer to the mainland. In June, she appointed Sher – a lawyer, healthcare expert and member of the tight knot of hometown friends – her chief of staff. "The first lady wants her office to be fully integrated into the president's agenda," Sher says. Early this summer, for example, the first lady directed her staff to plan events that could help support healthcare reform and then volunteered to speak publicly on the topic. The president and first lady share a speechwriting staff, the East Wing's press and communications team attends their West Wing counterparts' meetings and every week, Dunn, Sher and Jarrett meet to discuss the integration of the president's and first lady's business.

When asked about how her insights affected the president's thinking, the first lady seemed to bristle at the question. "I am so not interested in a lot of the hard decisions that he's making," she said, drawing out the "so". "Why would I want to be in politics? I have never in my life ever wanted to sit on the policy side of this thing." Earlier in my conversation with them, the president faced forward, even leaning a bit away from his wife, but now he uncrossed his legs, swivelled and studied her, looking amused.

"Did she say she's not interested in policy?" Sher, who also attended the Oval Office interview, tried to recall the next day, shaking her head and smiling. "She always says that." (The first lady may have learned from Hillary Clinton's example the perils of appearing too involved with policy.) While her boss has a limited appetite for policy details on many subjects, Sher explains, she regularly reads briefing papers from her staff on social issues. Early next year, aides say, the first lady will become the administration's point person on childhood obesity, working with her husband's policy advisers as well as her own on a problem that has stymied public-health experts for years. While the overall success of the administration is Barack Obama's test, Michelle Obama is beginning to gauge her ability to affect public opinion and behaviour as well – which means risking criticism and failure.

The first lady also speaks to her husband about White House management and personnel decisions. "She is not shy about expressing her views at all," Sher told me, recalling a conversation last spring between Barack and Michelle about a personnel problem. "She was like, you should do this, dah dah dah dah and dah dah dah," Sher said, smacking the table. The first lady was so forceful, Sher said, that the president just grinned back until they both started to laugh. "It's probably great that she does get worked up about injustices," Sher went on to say. "It clearly seems to have an impact on him."

Michelle Obama is also one of her husband's chief interpreters of public sentiment. On almost every "domestic issue that's come up – up and through healthcare," the president told me, the first lady has offered "very helpful" insights on "how something is going to play or what's important to people".

"She's like a one-person poll," he explained. "Everyman!" the first lady called out.

"We'll sit at the dinner table," the president said. "If our arguments are not as crisp or we're not addressing a particular criticism coming from the other side, Michelle will be quick to say, I just think the way this thing is getting filtered right now is putting you on the defensive in this way or that way." (Sometimes, Sher says, when the president is describing some complicated issue, his wife interjects: "You know what? People don't care about that.")

During the campaign, Michelle Obama made much of her regular-person credentials, but they may now be expiring. She has not only a personal trainer and a stylist but also a staff of chefs and gardeners. Her world is somewhat less rarefied than that of her husband: she can steal away with less fuss, and her events bring her into more contact with ordinary citizens than his constant march of briefings. But her celebrity is nearly as great as her husband's, her world nearly as artificial. (By the time of the Democratic National Convention, Michelle told friends, she stopped knowing what the weather was each day: she lived in the permanently controlled climate zone of airplanes, cars and hotels.) A year or two ago, when Barack Obama talked about staying grounded, he mentioned his wife; now he tends to talk about his children or his dog instead. All presidential couples experience this sort of isolation, which is part of why they tend to come to resemble each other more than they do the rest of us.

As the great experiment of the presidency rolls on, the Obamas may finally learn definitive answers to the issues they have been debating over the course of their partnership. The questions they have long asked each other in private will likely be answered on the largest possible stage. They will discern whether politics can bring about the kind of change they have longed for and promised to others, or whether the compromises and defeats are too great. They will learn whether they were too ambitious or not ambitious enough. And even if they share the answer with no one else, the two will know better if everything does in fact become political – if their marriage can both embrace politics and also at some level stay free of it.

Then, in three or seven years, the president's political career will end. There will be no more offices to win or hold, and the Obamas will most likely renegotiate their compact once more – this time, perhaps more on Michelle Obama's terms. The equality of any partnership "is measured over the scope of the marriage. It's not just four years or eight years or two," the first lady said. "We're going to be married for a very long time."

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Kosovo's Serbs boycott election

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:05:05 GMT

First elections since independence in 2008 will be all-Albanian affair as Belgrade's abandoned followers boycott polls

The threats came quickly over the phone and on the street when Jelena Vojinovic took the plunge and decided to work for the "enemy" in Mitrovica.

"They called me at home," said the 27-year-old former medical student, "and they confronted me when I went out. They were saying: 'Why are you working for the foreigners? Why are you acting like a traitor?' They were the hardliners of the town, paid by Belgrade, and they were protecting their pay packets."

Vojinovic had, in the eyes of her tormentors, performed an act of betrayal by taking a job with an international organisation that was committed to an independent Kosovo. Ten years after the war with Nato, most of her Serb neighbours still believe that Kosovo has no future other than as part of the motherland – Serbia. "Only a small minority," she said, "think, like me, that Serbs must engage with the new reality. And most of those are too frightened to say that publicly – to think like I think and say it is risky."

North Mitrovica, home to about 20,000 Kosovo Serbs, has become the "town that says no" to the combined efforts of the European Union, the United Nations and a host of satellite organisations that are spending €67m (£60m) a year to build a postwar Kosovo.

Today, south of the Ibar river that divides north Mitrovica from the Albanian side of the town, voters will go to the polls. With great fanfare, the first Kosovo elections since a unilateral declaration of independence was issued in February 2008 will take place in a country that is now 90% Albanian.

More than 6,700 candidates from 37 parties are standing as mayors or councillors. As a concession to Serbs living in the south, newly created southern electoral districts have been set up, designed to turn Serb minorities into majorities. An army of international observers will staff the polling stations.

Thirty-five kilometres from Mitrovica, in Pristina, the capital, billboard sites are plastered with posters for the first elections that Kosovans have ever organised for themselves. In Mitrovica there are flyers, too. But they relate to last year's Serbian national elections, the only ones that voters here recognise.

Representatives of the one Serb group to participate in this weekend's poll are terrified to walk the streets and Serb turnout is expected to be close to zero.

After the declaration of independence, the riots in Mitrovica were heavy and intense. Discontent is still simmering – in September there were violent protests against the construction of new homes for Albanian returnees.

But in general a sullen desperation has taken hold among Serbs. In the central square, a gathering place for protesters, a banner proclaims: "Russia is with us". But the diplomatic facts on the ground are multiplying. New Zealand has just become the 63rd country to recognise Kosovo's independence. And Belgrade is running short of both the funds and the will to bolster the fight of those Serbs who chose to stay after the war. A growing sense of isolation is palpable.

"For 10 years we have lived in a kind of hell here," said Aleksander Stojanovic, a 33-year-old lawyer who came to Mitrovica after his family was displaced from the south during the war. "We are not wolves or monsters. We are people in a predicament. If our only strategy is to boycott the elections and everything else, so what? We don't trust Pristina. We believe Pristina wants Kosovo to be part of a greater Albania. There are lots of nice words about equal rights and integration. But the words are never matched by actions."

The Kosovan government, under pressure from the international donors on which it depends, has pledged radical autonomy for Serb enclaves. But for many in Mitrovica autonomy is not the issue. "We want Kosovo – all of it – to remain a part of Serbia," said Srdjan Radulovic. "I will never accept an independent Kosovo."

At the town's university, which has no Albanians among its 4,000 intake, posters invite students to visit Barcelona, Paris and Berlin as part of Tempus, an EU-sponsored exchange scheme. Funded by Belgrade, like the main hospital, the institution has no links with the University of Pristina. Goran Lazic, who runs the Tempus programme, does not seem optimistic that it ever will.

"Most of the students here believe that this place will remain within the boundaries of Serbia," he said. "They are not interested in Pristina."

In May the EU will try again in Mitrovica, dividing the town into municipalities, one in the Serb north, the other in the Albanian south. Then there will be another vote. Stojanovic believes that maybe "60 or 70" Serbs will turn out.

Among EU officials, the hope is that a high turnout today in other Serb enclaves in the south will inspire Mitrovica to take its second chance in the spring. The stakes, it is universally acknowledged, are high. If the north remains, literally, a law unto itself, the spectre of partition and a new wave of population displacements in the western Balkans is real. But in the words of the Kosovan president, Fatmir Sejdiu, "it takes two to tango".

The bitter impasse provides constant temptations to seek violent solutions. For Jelena Vojinovic, young and ambitious, it means a kind of limbo, as for so many others in her generation. In June 1999, when she was 17, her family were "expelled" from the small town of Istog in western Kosovo, after the area suffered some of the worst of the Nato bombing. Many Serbs were murdered and most were driven from the region.

The Vojinovices were lucky. They lost only their home. Jelena's parents now live in Serbia, to which more than 200,000 people fled after the war. Ten years after that appalling summer, the fate of north Mitrovica has become a rallying point and a the focus of a last stand for Serb hardliners. A town that says no, but also a bleak no man's land; a place that "belongs" to both independent Kosovo and to Serbia – and to neither.

Unemployment in the town is around 65%. A tense calm is about as good as it gets between the Serbs, north of the bridge, and the Albanians to the south. Violence may break out again if international efforts to integrate the Serbs into postwar Kosovo continue to fail. And Belgrade, which saw a 30% fall in the value of the dinar last year, is running out of money and perhaps sees a bigger prize than Mitrovica in EU membership.

Despite the threats, Jelena is still in her job. And she is determined to stay. "It's not a question of being happy here," she said. "Serbs need to accept what the situation is and try to win the best lives for themselves within it. Mitrovica is where I am. And why should I go?"

Path to freedom

1989 Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic strips Kosovo of autonomy.

1990 Ethnic Albanian leaders declare Kosovo's independence from Serbia.

1991 Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia declare independence from Yugoslavia.

1992 War breaks out in the Balkans.

1998 Amid claims of ethnic cleansing, Nato demands Milosevic stop Serb violence against Kosovo Albanians.

1999 Nato launches air strikes against Serb forces. Milosevic withdraws troops and 200,000 Serbs flee Kosovo.

2008 Kosovo declares independence.

2009 Local elections on 15 November.

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Zetas: Kings of Mexico's narco-state

Ed Vulliamy — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:05:07 GMT

In his final dispatch from the drug-fuelled war along the US-Mexican border, our correspondent profiles the deadly army which rules its territory through murder and ruthless intimidation of public officials – with the multibillion-dollar narcotics trade as its prize

Gabriela was riding the Number 20 bus into Reynosa in north-eastern Mexico when the gang struck. Heavily armed men, faces hidden under ski masks, stormed on board, ordered its passengers off and swung the bus around to block a bridge, sealing off the route into the city.

"Although they wore ski masks, everyone knew who they were with their machineguns and uniforms," said Gabriela. This brazen display of strength was carried out by the Zetas, originally established as an enforcement wing of the narco-trafficking Gulf Cartel, but now a paramilitary militia in its own right, highly trained in combat and probably the most powerful drug-trafficking organisation in the world.

The cartel was founded in the 1970s but emerged in its modern form in the mid-1980s, led by Juan García Abrego (now in a Colorado jail) and thereafter Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, who founded the Zetas and who is now awaiting trial in Houston, Texas. The Zetas are now led by Heriberto Lazcano – "El Lazco" or "Z3" – wanted in both Mexico and the US. It is Lazcano and the Zetas who control the cartel's drug operations and exercise the savagery with which its power is enforced and its terrain expanded. Estimated by US intelligence to number about 4,000, its soldiers were recruited from the Mexican army's special forces units, some reportedly trained in the US, though this has never been proved. What has been proved time and time again is their deadly cogency. The cartel is the only one against which the Mexican president, Felipe Calderón, has thrown his army's full might. So far, thanks to the Zetas, the cartel is winning.

After two years of Calderón's military offensive against the cartels, and 20 years since their "federation" fell apart and they began fighting one another, no one can predict an outcome, but one partial result is clear: the cartel and the Zetas have held their terrain and are broadening it, despite the high-profile arrests of key members of the group such as Jaime González Durán, alias "El Hummer". A spokesman for Calderón, Alejandra de Soto, told the Observer that "the army is proud of what it has achieved in Tamaulipas" – where the Zetas are based – "there is relative peace in the area. It has been brought under control".

The crucial point about the "relative peace" in areas held by the Zetas is that it is a peace whereby the cartel controls every facet of life, is uncontested by its rivals and presides over an omnipresent reign of terror.

It is also punctuated by firefights and the brutal murders of police commanders who do not co-operate. Last week more than 20 men were arrested for the murder of the police commander of García, near Monterrey. A retired army general, Juan Arturo Esparza, was ambushed with a fusillade of fire and killed, said a message cited in the Houston Chronicle, for "disappointing the letter Z". Most of those arrested were police officers. Meanwhile, hundreds of officers dutifully turned out last week for the funeral of the state police commander in Veracruz, Casto Acevedo, reportedly killed by the Zetas for refusing to co-operate with them. His torso and mutilated limbs were stacked on a mattress and his severed head left nearby.

Zeta territory is markedly different from the notoriously violent Ciudad Juárez, where the cartel pyramids have collapsed and criminal anarchy prevails. There, newspapers can report the nightly atrocities. In Zeta country, killing is less common and daily life appears normal – but it is governed by fear.

Moreover, the Zetas are expanding. Determined to control a corridor of their own through Central America to the cocaine production fields of Colombia, Peru and Venezuela, the Zetas have fought for and won control of most of the Gulf coast – as shown by recent massacres in Veracruz and Cancún, where they murdered an army general – and are fighting an all-out guerrilla war against the Sinaloa Cartel's cocaine farms in Guatemala. They are contesting a rival cartel, La Familia of Michoacán, for lucrative markets of Mexico City's endless suburbs. In a reported alliance with a cartel called the Beltrán-Leyva brothers, they are fighting for smuggling routes into Arizona.

Crucially, the Zetas hold their terrain absolutely and its location in north-eastern Mexico affords access to Houston, which the FBI, briefing the Observer last week, called "the hub city" for alliances with local gangs – the old "Texas Syndicate" and loose-knit "Tango Blast".

Of all Mexico's cartels, the Zetas are the most internationally connected, allied to their counterparts in the Italian syndicates, the 'Ndrangheta of Calabria, with ambitions in the European and African markets.

A glimpse of the road leading to the ranch where Osiel Cárdenas Guillén was born and raised near Matamoros – a few ramshackle buses and a corrugated- iron shack selling beer on the corner – demonstrates the cartel's humble origins, without the political connections enjoyed by others, and defining what has become its insurgent nature, which is shared only by La Familia.

Uncontested Zeta territory is hard to define, but correlates with the tropical Rio Grande valley, beginning with the relatively peaceful cities of Ciudad Acuña and Piedras Negras. After them, as the river flows, come the twin cities of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo. These are the prize, for the freight and rail running across the four road and one rail bridges into the US are the spinal cord of pan-American trade.

Lorries arrive at the forwarding yards on the Mexican side bringing goods from Latin America and China, via the port of Lázaro Cárdenas, their loads shuttled across to be hauled on all over North America. The loads contain much of the 90% of narcotics consumed in the US, having arrived via Mexico. Within the US, the Zetas' influence is widespread – cells operating across the country, distributing drugs, their contacts laundering money through established banks and other channels.

At the Mexican army checkpoint and dusty truckstop called "El Veintiseis", 26km south of the border near Nuevo Laredo, an insect-bitten night at the Motel California and meals at the shacks by the road give some idea of how this happens. "Sometimes a container will be a clavo," said one truck driver, Antonio, referring to a vehicle chopped up to include hidden compartments. "Other times," said another over breakfast, "they just roll up with guns and say: 'Open the door!'" Then the drugs are put on board and the lorries are forced to resume their journeys. The drivers complain that haulage companies' efforts to outwit the Zetas are inevitably met with counter-measures. "They give us GPS systems to make sure we don't go anywhere off the route, but some people are told to switch them off. They have special seals now but the bad guys know how to break them and make them look as before."

A local journalist confirms: "They do not ask. Sometimes they do it at the bridge itself. They make a spectacle of it – AR-15 automatics and ski masks, right there at the customs post – who is going to refuse them?" The journalist spoke off the record as a matter of course in Nuevo Laredo, where the local paper, the Mañana, is unable to report the Zetas' crimes, having been, in effect, instructed not to do so by the murder in 2004 of editor Roberto Mora García and grenade attacks against its offices followed by threats to the Cantú family which owns the paper. Publisher Ramón Cantú defends his position: "This war is not going to be won by a newspaper. I am responsible for the lives of my employees and their families and there are other things to report in this town." In a recent incident when the paper was considering coverage of a murder, the Zetas kidnapped two reporters. "What am I supposed to do?" asked Cantú. It is hard to find an answer.

The Zetas' grip on Nuevo Laredo is so thorough, and their extortion rackets so pervasive, that they even shake down the women who deal in "ropa usada" – used clothes gathered at warehouses by the railway goods yards and Union Pacific depot on the Texas side and brought over for sale in front gardens. One woman said that the multinational billion-dollar gang extorts 8 to 16 US cents (4-9p) for every 100 pesos (£4.57) she makes.

Further downstream is Reynosa, heartland of the Zetas, where the militia's number two, González Durán, was arrested last November along with the biggest arsenal of weaponry ever seized by the Mexican army.

Here the Zetas are named euphemistically as "The Last Letter of the Alphabet", said Rebecca Rodríguez, who monitors abuses by the army, against which – to her outrage – the Zetas organise their own mass demonstrations. "They are not a social formation any longer, they are a militia," she said.

Just by discussing them, Rodríguez commits an act of bravery. "Look at us, how we live. None of us dare wear jewellery any more; the army and the narcos have taken to fighting it out across school playgrounds."

The Zetas exhibit themselves in town with brazen windscreen stickers such as that on a truck parked across the access road behind Rodríguez's office, with a crossed Kalashnikov emblem reading "Benvenido A Reynosa" – "Welcome to Reynosa". They display the sign of the cult they worship – that of "Santísima Muerte" – Most Holy Death – a hooded skeleton with a scythe, on their cars and mobile phone holders. And they make their presence felt with their periodic demonstrations of brutal force.

Across the Rio Grande, in the burgeoning Texan city of McAllen, a businessman with family roots in the area for 150 years said that not only had the Zetas sealed off the bridges around Reynosa, but international bridges into the United States as well.

"The Americans do nothing, the press says nothing, but they do it to show us all – this side and that – that they can control traffic across the border. I get a call sometimes, ahead of time, telling me, 'Get what you need shipped over before noon, we're shutting it down.'

"On this side, it is different, if you owe them in any way, if you have accommodated them or borrowed money, they will shake you down. If you are outside the system, you are OK. Soon, I think, working in this way they will grow up, they will become licit, rather than illicit, businessmen. But the fact is that no president of any municipality along the border can govern his town without some deal with the Zetas, some form of accommodation."

But life in Zeta terrain continues. In Reynosa the first day of this month, Mexico's Day of the Dead, was a resplendent occasion, families flocking to the cemeteries to clean the graves of their recently deceased, to pay musicians to sing them ballads and to picnic beside the headstones. At an international cultural festival in Matamoros, where most fear to tread, an Irish dancing troupe called Rhythm of the Dance was hugely enjoyed by an audience dressed as though for the opera in Milan. It happened at the Teatro de la Reforma, across the road from a restaurant at the back of which the old-time gangland boss in Matamoros, Juan Guerra, used to preside.

He was a breeder of racehorses and the restaurant has a picture of his favourite horse and Stetson hat on the hoarding. Guerra's nephew was Juan García Abrego, founder of the modern Gulf Cartel. In honour of Guerra, you suppose, the restaurant is respectfully renamed Don Juan's. The service is impeccable, but the dead eyes of the man behind the bar terrify, with a glare of steel and ice.

Amexica: War along the Borderline, by Ed Vulliamy, will be published next year by the Bodley Head, London; Farrar, Straus, Giroux, New York; and Tusquets, Madrid

Ed Vulliamy

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Belle de Jour unmasks herself

Paul Gallagher, Peter Walker — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 11:14:22 GMT

Research scientist Dr Brooke Magnanti announces she is author of mysterious call girl blog and says she has no regrets about working as prostitute

One of the best kept literary secrets of the decade was revealed last night when a 34-year-old research scientist, Dr Brooke Magnanti, announced that she was the writer better known as call girl Belle de Jour.

The author behind the blog turned bestselling series of books detailing her secret life as a prostitute decided to come out to one of her fiercest critics, the Sunday Times columnist India Knight, after claiming anonymity had become "no fun". "I couldn't even go to my own book launch party," she said.

It does appear, however, that Magnanti's hand was forced after a former boyfriend appeared set to reveal her secret: Knight's interview with her today refers to "an ex-boyfriend with a big mouth lurking in the background".

Until last week, even her agent was unaware of her name. But now Magnanti, a respected specialist in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology in a hospital research group in Bristol, has spoken of the time six years ago she worked as a £300-an-hour prostitute working through a London escort agency.

Magnanti turned to the agency in the final stages of her PhD thesis when she ran out of money. She was already an experienced science blogger and began writing about her experiences in a web diary later adapted into books and a television drama starring Billie Piper.

Magnanti says she has no regrets about the 14 months she spent as a prostitute. "I've felt worse about my writing than I ever have about sex for money," she said.

A month ago she revealed her secret to her colleagues at the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health, who were "amazingly kind and supportive". She was preparing to tell her parents this weekend.

Unlike some bloggers who achieve notoriety, Magnanti managed to protect her identity so completely that a series of professional writers were linked with the character, among them Rowan Pelling, former editor of the Erotic Review and – perhaps less plausibly – the journalist Toby Young.

Magnanti today defended herelf against the notion that she risked glamorising prostitution, a charge levelled by John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, last month.

Magnanti told Knight that she was "entitled to speak about it, or write about it, as I lived it". She continued: "Some sex workers have terrible experiences. I didn't. I was unbelievably fortunate in every respect. The people at the agency looked after us appropriately and instructed us appropriately and weren't going to put us in harm's way if they could possibly avoid it."

Magnanti said she was working on a doctoral study for the department of forensic pathology of Sheffield University in 2003 when she began her secret life. "I was getting ready to submit my thesis. I saved up a bit of money. I thought, I'll just move to London, because that's where the jobs are, and I'll see what happens.

"I couldn't find a professional job in my chosen field because I didn't have my PhD yet. I didn't have a lot of spare time on my hands because I was still making corrections and preparing for the viva and I got through my savings a lot faster than I thought I would."

Unable to pay her rent, Magnanti's mind turned to other things. She told the Sunday Times she wanted to start doing something straight away, "that doesn't require a great deal of training or investment to get started, that's cash in hand and that leaves me spare time to do my work in". Her solution was prostitution.

"I did have another job at one point, as a computer programmer, but I kept up with my other work because it was so much more enjoyable."

The Belle de Jour blog remains current, despite Magnanti's long absence from prostitution. In a post dated today, she wrote that "a perfect storm of feelings and circumstances" had drawn her out of anonymity, adding: "And do you know what? It feels so much better on this side. Not to have to tell lies, hide things from the people I care about. To be able to defend what my experience of sex work is like to all the sceptics and doubters."

While the revelation was unexpected, at least one Sunday Times reader claimed, in a comment on the newspaper's website, that it made perfect sense: "Given the state of funding in biomedical research, the low pay and poor career prospects in the UK and Europe, it's hardly surprising and she's probably not the only one."

Paul Gallagher

Peter Walker

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World Cup grass isn't green enough

Alex Duval Smith — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:05:09 GMT

Native kikuyu pitches are not bright enough for television, but the replacements will be little long-term use to South Africans

Millions of Africans have been saying it for years: the grass is greener in Europe. Now the world's football bosses have decided that Africa's indigenous grass is not bright enough for international television audiences.

In a major blow to South African pride in hosting next year's World Cup, stadiums used for top matches have been told to scrap their hardy African kikuyu pitches and switch instead to tender European ryegrass.

The decision comes amid mounting claims that the month-long tournament next June will be a "playground for Europeans'', providing scant long-term benefit to the largely poor country.

"Fifa decided that our pre-grown kikuyu pitch was not uniformly dark green enough for television so we have started again with ryegrass seed,'' said Pieter Cronjé, World Cup communication director for Cape Town where one of the semi-finals is due to be played.

Yesterday, at the startling £400m Green Point stadium in Cape Town, perky shoots of pale green ryegrass were pushing through the soil three weeks after the seeds were sown. But local specialists say ryegrass – a cold season variety suited to Europe – will not stand the test of time and will have to be replaced after the World Cup.

Julian Visser, the grass subcontractor at the stadium, admitted: ''The ryegrass requires more water, fertiliser and maintenance than kikuyu. There is a lot of talk of the World Cup's legacy to South Africa but in reality the priority is the matches next June and July. The switch from kikuyu will be a disadvantage to the African teams who are used to its bounce.''

At Groenvlei grass farm 20 miles from Cape Town, Visser's staff have for the past year lovingly groomed two pitches of kikuyu that had been destined for Cape Town's stadium. It has thick stalks, broad blades and is springy underfoot. One small area is blueish where it has been over-seeded with ryegrass, according to the original specifications for Green Point.

"We were pleased with the grass,'' said manager Rudie Fritz. "Kikuyu over-seeded with ryegrass is what you find on sports fields all over South Africa. The lawns are not a uniform green colour because they are sown with two varieties but they look and feel great. Our rugby players don't mind falling over on this grass, but it seems foreign soccer players do.''

South Africans are watching with increasing bemusement as the World Cup rollercoaster moves in before the draw in Cape Town on 4 December to determine the 32-team match schedule. Fifa has begun firing off lawyers' letters to guard its £600m sponsors' rights. In host cities, special Fifa bylaws prevent "unauthorised'' advertising in "exclusion zones'' around stadiums. Among the recipients has been a Pretoria pub that painted "World Cup 2010'' on its roof, in breach of Fifa's trademark.

The contractor building the rail link between Johannesburg and OR Tambo airport says it will not be ready until the second week of the tournament, unless the government finds an extra 1.3bn rands (£104m). Amid uncertainty over whether new bus routes will be introduced in time, Fifa has admitted having a "Plan B" for Cape Town transport .

Few people understand why kikuyu, a variety that can be found on every state house lawn in Africa, has suddenly fallen out of favour. Buck-passing began at suggestions that the decision had been taken purely to ensure a better television picture. Tournament spokesman Rich Mkhondo said the Local Organising Committee had taken advice from the Sports Turf Research Institute in Bingley, West Yorkshire.

"Ryegrass is better in coastal areas,'' said Mkhondo, adding: "African teams will get used to it, with practice. I grew up playing football with a tennis ball on gravel.''

Richard Hayden, a specialist from the institute, said ryegrass, directly sown, would have been the best choice in the first place. "June is a winter month in South Africa and kikuyu goes yellow," he said. "The decision is not a sinister European plot. We made our recommendations for the purposes of the tournament and they have been followed.'' But Cape Town's winters are wet months. The peninsula is explosively verdant in June and July.

Sowetan columnist Andile Mngxitama said the decision to plant European grass was clear evidence that the World Cup offers "nil legacy'' for South Africa. "The World Cup is a jamboree which will make money for a few South Africans who are rich already. It serves purely to show the Europeans that the natives are still here to service their playground. Taking our grass away is the biggest insult to date.''

Alex Duval Smith

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Catholic church stalls on £8m abuse claims

Tracy McVeigh — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:06:04 GMT

For 30 years, boys at St William's Community Home, near York, suffered at the hands of the De La Salle Brothers

Handed over to foster care when barely a few weeks old and then hauled through the care system's institutional layers, Graham Baverstock had few chances at a childhood. Now aged 51, confined to a wheelchair and reliant on local authority carers, benefit cheques and doctors, he is a damaged man who admits he is quick to anger and slow to trust. He has tried to kill himself twice and thoughts of suicide are never far from his mind.

There is one year of his life from which Baverstock cannot move on, when as a 14-year-old he was sent to the Catholic-run St William's Community Home for troubled boys in Market Weighton, near York. It was set up by a group of Catholic teachers called the De La Salle Brotherhood in 1960. Since 1992, when St William's was finally closed, close to 200 men have come forward and claimed to have been either physically or sexually abused or both. Now 142 are suing for compensation which could cost the Roman Catholic church in England £8m.

One man has been convicted over the hundreds of allegations. In 2004 the home's former head, Brother James Carragher, was jailed for 14 years for abusing children, all aged between 10 and 16. He was, said one of the detectives involved in the case, "the most evil of men" who had regularly raped the boys in his care. He had earlier served four years in jail for similar offences. Two of his De La Salle colleagues were acquitted and the cases against another three men were dropped before coming to trial.

But last week the legal wrangling over who was responsible for the failings that led to what is the biggest historical abuse claim against the Catholic church in England had looked to be finally resolved when Leeds crown court ruled that the Catholic diocese of Middlesbrough was liable for running the former children's home at the centre of the scandal. The diocese had claimed that the lay order ran it. Although the De La Salle Brothers were in senior positions, Judge Simon Hawkesworth found that they were not employed by the lay order and it was the diocese that had the power to appoint staff.

Dr Jim Whiston, Middlesbrough diocese company secretary, said the bishops and the trustees were very disappointed with the decision. But he dashed the temporary euphoria of Baverstock and the other 141 claimants when he added: "We understand our legal advisers are considering an appeal and we, therefore, intend to make no further comment at this time."

So the case looks set to drag on.

Some 2,000 children and 500 staff were at St William's over the 30-year period that has been the subject of two police investigations and several court cases. Not only the children but also some of the staff have claimed to be victims of what went on at the institution. A soon-to-be-published Independent Police Complaints Commission inquiry may, sources suggest, demand disciplinary action against named officers involved in Operation Aldgate, the second Humberside police investigation that looked at whether the abuse at St William's was a systematic and organised paedophile ring.

One former headteacher, Ben Mackay, told the Observer in 2005 that the charges of child abuse brought against him, which were later dropped, had left him living in "fear and distress".

"They talked of the trauma on the part of these former pupils. They have no idea what it did to us, and I don't think they cared," he said at the time.

But for St William's boys such as Baverstock the news that the diocese was likely to appeal against the judgment was a "slap in the face, a disgrace".

"This is the most horrific scandal, the biggest, the worst, the scale of it is just beyond comprehension. There are others who evaded justice and I find that offensive. But I also find it deeply offensive that the bishops and the priests of the Catholic church are continuing to ask people to come into their churches and pray and respect them when no one in that institution can face up to the reality of what happened here, can turn round and say sorry. It's not about us getting money, it never was.

"We were sent into their care and they should have cared for us. Not raped and abused and beaten us, punched and kicked us and forced cleaning fluid down our throats. We lived in fear and in silence and someone needs to acknowledge that.

"The scale of this is just so big, I have never spoken to anyone I was at St William's with since the day I left, but I saw the scale myself, it was clear. I'd be very surprised if there are any false claimants, it's not a bandwagon you want to climb on, is it? We'll likely all be dead by the time the Catholic church is forced to take any kind of responsibility.

"I need to be believed and children like me were never believed. That's why I need the church to say sorry. It's not going to change anything, my life is destroyed, it'll stay destroyed. But at least I'll have been believed."

Brother Aidan Kilty, Provincial of the De La Salle Brothers, said: "It has always been our understanding that the De La Salle Brothers were, neither in law, nor in practice, the responsible management of St William's. This has now been confirmed by the judgment of the high court."

A spokesman for the lay order said everyone had been left devastated by what had happened at St William's. "It's affected everyone, it's a terrible thing to have hanging over the order." But a source close to the Catholic church said there was a desire to see the case settled once and for all, although there was concern that many of the men bringing the compensation claim may not be true victims but are "jumping on the bandwagon".

"This is such a historical case in all senses of the word, it is a source of frustration that it goes on. It's just driven by outside forces, the insurers; court cases are just a big machine that no one can stop."

David Greenwood, the solicitor co-ordinating the men's action, said four new cases of former pupils claiming to have been abused at St William's had come forward since the publicity over the crown court decision. "These are men, often with very troubled lives, who are looking for some kind of validation. Many will never have spoken about what happened to them. The good news about this case is that they are coming forward and that the police have moved on sufficiently with their practices that they handle these cases well and with expertise that was lacking just a decade ago.

"The scenarios and the patterns are so familiar now that it's immediately obvious someone is speaking the truth. The sad thing is that there are so many more out there; the enormity of the case means there are a large number of men whose lives have been blighted by what happened at St William's and we will never hear of them, many will be in prison, many are dead."

Michael, 47, is another St William's victim. He is extremely proud of having managed to stay out of trouble since leaving the home, a beaten and abused young boy, and he now cares for his seriously ill father. "I'm going to the funeral of one of the boys next week; choked on his own vomit. I gave him a lift from town just the other day, he was pretty broken, you can see it. Another lad I knew committed suicide a while back. A lot more are inside, lifers. It ruins you, an experience like that, especially when you're struggling already," he said.

"A lot of the boys have dropped out of this compensation case, but I'm going to try to stay with it, no matter how long the church tries to stretch it out through the courts. It's the only thing we have left now really, trying to hold them to account."

Tracy McVeigh

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Murdoch dynasty battles Labour

James Robinson — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:07:33 GMT

The extraordinary run-in between the Sun and the prime minister over Afghanistan last week was a sign of a more aggressive approach from the tabloid as Rupert Murdoch's son James puts his stamp on the media empire.

In the 1990s, when the Sun enjoyed unparalleled influence, its editor Kelvin Mackenzie could tell the prime minister John Major that he was about to pour "a large bucket of shit" over him.

Last week's coverage of the Jacqui Janes affair suggests the paper has lost none of its power to intimidate, despite falling sales. Gordon Brown's correspondence with Janes, the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan, and his subsequent apology, which was secretly taped, dominated the headlines.

The growth of the internet may hasten the hour when the sun finally sets on Rupert Murdoch's tabloid, but it can still make the political weather.

Peter Mandelson took to the airwaves last week, claiming that Murdoch had done a deal with the Tories, promising slavish support – and unstinting criticism of Brown – in exchange for policy concessions.

Brown's phone call to Janes, meanwhile, was quickly followed by another to Murdoch, whom the prime minister described last week as "a friend". During that conversation, Brown told Rupert Murdoch that the Sun's vitriolic attacks over his letter to Janes had been unwise and unfair. He made his points firmly, but was careful to avoid sounding riled. There is a recognition in government that the electorate is unlikely to vote for a man who is bullied by a newspaper proprietor.

Brown and Murdoch have forged an unlikely friendship, based in part on a shared admiration for America, but the prime minister may have been appealing to the wrong man.

Murdoch has handed control of his British operation to his younger son, James, who now oversees the European and Asian arm of News Corp, the media conglomerate his father controls, and is being groomed to take charge of the company.

One senior industry source with intimate knowledge of News International, the Murdoch subsidiary that owns his UK papers, said that Murdoch senior is "not really interested in Britain" at all.

He has been based in America for many years, but his purchase of the Wall Street Journal, now the biggest-selling paper in the US, has kept him busy. He is also gearing up for a fight with Google over copyright, a battle he believes he must win to ensure consumers pay for his newspapers' online content.

Murdoch didn't phone the prime minister before the Sun loudly declared it had lost faith in Labour on the day of his speech to party conference, according to the source. That should not be regarded as a snub, he added. Murdoch is simply detached from events in the UK.

It was Rebekah Brooks (née Wade), the former Sun editor and now chief executive of News International, who delivered the news of the Sun's U-turn to Peter Mandelson after failing to get through to the prime minister.

Brooks's importance cannot be overstated. She acts as a foil for Murdoch, an American who can hardly be expected to share her instinctive understanding of the concerns of Sun readers.

She was also behind the paper's increasingly rabid attacks on the Ministry of Defence over the summer, which made the Janes controversy such a compelling story for the Sun.

Fleet Street sources point out that Brooks began an email exchange with the MoD several months ago, as her time as editor of the Sun drew to a close.

She wanted the department to give her reporters better access to Helmand province, where British troops were fighting and dying as they battled to regain control. The department was not keen on the idea but Brooks persisted. The email requests became demands, and their tone grew more belligerent.

Shortly afterwards, when it became clear that the MoD was not willing to cooperate, Brooks told it: "The gloves are off." The Sun's coverage has been hostile ever since, offering unqualified support for British troops while traducing their political masters.

Its subsequent decision to ditch Labour and back the Tories gave the Jacqui Janes controversy added impetus. Some senior executives who had not relished supporting Labour in the first place seized on the chance to mount a highly personal attack on a man who represents many policies they detest.

Murdoch claimed last week that the decision to abandon Brown had been taken by "the editors in Britain" who "have turned very much against Gordon Brown, who is a friend of mine. I regret it." The 78-year-old has always taken the major editorial decisions at the Sun, and to imply that its new editor, Dominic Mohan, could switch its political allegiance without his consent is, at the very least, disingenuous.

Crucially, however, it is James Murdoch who masterminded the timing of the decision to swing behind David Cameron, and set the hostile tone of the paper's coverage.

"James is behind the decision to make it tough and bloody because he wants to be like his dad," said one acquaintance.The problem, according to his critics, is that he has his father's aggression but does not share his political instincts.

Murdoch junior ran pay-TV giant Sky for five years before his promotion in 2007 and his business acumen is not in doubt, but when Rupert placed James in charge of his British operation, he was expecting him to spend as much time in Westminster as he had in the City.

Like his father, the 36-year-old James is firmly on the right, but he subscribes to a particularly trenchant form of free market orthodoxy. Those who know him describe him as a radical libertarian who believes that government should stay out of the public sphere, limiting its role to defence and policing.

The News International observer described last week's coverage as "bullying" and "mean-spirited", and suggested it was motivated by a genuine dislike of Brown. "The lunatics are now running the asylum," he said. "Back in the day, an editor might disagree with Rupert, but he was a serious person; there were proper checks and balances. If they went over the top Rupert would pull them back."

There is little doubt that the Sun's support will give Murdoch leverage over a Conservative government, and that power is already being used. Brooks is thought to have told Andy Coulson, the Tories' director of communications, that the paper could not back David Cameron while Dominic Grieve remained shadow home secretary. He was replaced by Chris Grayling shortly afterwards.

Few were surprised when the paper backed Cameron, but James Murdoch's decision to do so long before an election, and risk the ire of an administration that will still be in power for many months, was a bold move.

Government sources deny it took revenge on Murdoch last week by placing Ashes cricket matches between England and Australia — currently broadcast by Sky — on the list of "crown jewels" that must be broadcast free-to-air, but it was a timely reminder of how it can make life difficult for the Murdoch empire.

Nor is there any hope of a reconciliation. Brown has tried to woo James, said a senior political source, but with little success: "Despite Brown's efforts there is no personal connection between the two men like there was with Rupert."

Cameron, in contrast, was quick to cosy up to James, and cemented those ties by hiring the former News of the World editor Coulson, who is close to Brooks, and is also a friend of Mohan.

Along with Brooks's new husband, racehorse trainer Charlie Brooks, they form a coterie who occasionally socialise at weekends in north Oxfordshire, where the Brooks have a home – as does James's sister, Elisabeth, with her husband, Matthew Freud. Cameron's constituency is also in the county. The Labour party has tried to portray the Tory leader and his new friends in the press as a wealthy, impenetrable clique, although Labour's own relationship with News International is also built largely on a network of fragile friendships.

There are rumours of a loss of nerve at the Sun, meanwhile, following a public backlash over its personal attack on Brown. The fact that it spelt Janes's name wrong on its website is acutely embarrassing. Murdoch is heavy-hearted about abandoning Brown. He is not convinced by Cameron, but he know it makes good business sense to back him. In the end, that is the only consideration that really counts.

James Robinson

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Ashcroft inquiry may run into election

Rajeev Syal, Toby Helm — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:06:07 GMT

Labour MPs are demanding to know why the Electoral Commission's inquiry into Lord Ashcroft's donations to the Conservative party has dragged on for 10 months

Controversy over Lord Ashcroft's donations to the Conservative party deepened last night after Labour MPs demanded an urgent meeting with Britain's elections watchdog.

Placing more pressure on the Tories, Labour MPs want to know why the Electoral Commission's official inquiry into an Ashcroft-controlled company, which has given £3m to the party, has dragged on for 10 months and threatens to run into the general election campaign.

If the commission rules that the company was not trading, the Tories could be asked to pay an equivalent amount to the Treasury. The explosive issue of Ashcroft threatens to engulf the commission, which has been criticised before for dragging its heels while investigating serious complaints.

John Mann, the MP for Bassetlaw, has written to Peter Wardle, chief executive of the commission, requesting an urgent meeting to find out why the inquiry has taken so long. He asked Wardle to investigate in January whether Bearwood Corporate Services, Ashcroft's company, is trading in Britain or is being used to funnel money to the Conservatives from overseas. By law, a British political party can only accept a donation from someone registered to vote in the UK or from a company "carrying on business" here.

Paul Farrelly, the Labour MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme, has demanded to know whether the commission would complete its inquiries before the official election campaign because Ashcroft's money could be crucial to the result.

"The Electoral Commission needs to crack on with its investigation into the status of Ashcroft's companies to satisfy itself that all donations are not only legitimate, but transparent as well," he said.

"The danger is that the mismatch in resources is tantamount to the Tories trying to buy seats. For democracy's sake, I hope the electorate sees through this."

The commission began making inquiries into Bearwood's donations in October 2008 after concerns were raised that the company may not be a genuine UK trading company. Bearwood gave the Tories £1,600,893 in 2008 alone, making it the party's biggest source of funds that year. The company is known to have one UK client, because in 2008-09 the firm received $300,000 (£181,000) in consultancy fees from BCB Holdings, another Ashcroft company based in Belize.

Overseas residents can make donations to British political parties if they are made through British-registered companies that conduct most of their business in Britain.

The Lib Dems are also demanding action before the election. Lord Oakeshott, the party's treasury spokesman, said: "Democracy is in danger if Lord Ashcroft has been pouring millions into Conservative campaigns through an offshore pipeline from a Caribbean tax haven.

"The general election is already well under way, so the referee needs to say whether the Tory team is playing by the rules. It's pointless showing the red card after the match is over."

Ashcroft does not make donations to the Conservative party in an individual capacity because donors have to be listed on the electoral roll. He refuses to reveal whether he is registered to vote in Britain and he regards his tax affairs as private. Ashcroft is convinced that the commission will find nothing wrong with his donations to the Conservative party.

The Ashcroft inquiry is the second longest in the commission's history. It has also been criticised for taking more than a year to conclude its inquiry into a £2.4m donation given to the Liberal Democrats in 2005 by disgraced financier Michael Brown.

A spokeswoman for the Electoral Commission declined to say who was conducting the Ashcroft inquiry, or why it has taken so long. She also declined to say whether witnesses had been called, or if the inquiry would be concluded by May, when the general election is widely expected to be held.

She said: "We recognise that it is important to work as quickly as possible but our first priority is to conduct a fair and thorough investigation."

Rajeev Syal

Toby Helm

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Crowd injured at Birmingham lights switch-on

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 19:31:59 GMT

Reports indicate up to 20,000 people turned up to see pop acts including JLS and Little Boots - far more than the 5,000 fans expected

Four people were taken to hospital and scores more injured this afternoon during a crowd surge at a Christmas lights switch-on in Birmingham city centre.

According to reports, thousands more than the 5,000 fans expected at today's event turned up hoping to see acts including Tinchy Stryder, Chipmunk, Little Boots, Alexandra Burke, the Noisettes and Pixie Lott.

As X-Factor runners-up JLS took to the stage, a metal barrier penning the crowd in collapsed, leaving 60 people needing treatment, West Midlands Ambulance Service said.

The planned concert and lights switch-on were cancelled as paramedics set up a special unit to treat the wounded.

One woman in her 30s suffered serious crush injuries to her pelvis, shoulder and leg. Another woman broke her ankle in the surge, which happened at Millennium Point on Jennens Lane at about 1.30pm.

A teenage boy fractured his wrist, while a girl in her teens suffered crush injuries to her back and legs.

A ambulance service spokeswoman said: "The remaining 56 patients suffered minor crush injuries and a range of minor medical complaints. They did not require further hospital treatment and were all discharged by ambulance crews at the scene."

Joan Durose, head of events at Birmingham City Council, said: "At 1.30pm we reached capacity and closed the gates with just under 20,000 people in the square.

"At the end of JLS's performance a safety fence was breached, allowing too many people on the square.

"We are very sorry that the event has had to be cancelled. We know that people will be very disappointed, but the health and safety of the thousands of young people at the event was our prime concern."

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Inside Caster Semenya's training camp

Donald McRae — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:01:00 GMT

The Guardian's Donald McRae has been granted unprecedented access to Caster Semenya's training camp

Donald McRae

Reel review: 'Amelia is a tedious bore'

Xan Brooks, Henry Barnes — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:48:50 GMT

Hilary Swank whoops too much for Xan Brooks's liking in Mira Nair's biopic of Earhart

Xan Brooks

Henry Barnes

Audio slideshow: Safari without boundaries

Kevin Rushby — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:30:00 GMT

Kevin Rushby tries out a safari experience that brings local people, tourists and wildlife together

Kevin Rushby

Girl sneezes up to 10 times a minute

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:12:07 GMT

12-year-old Lauren Johnson from Virginia, US, is unable to stop sneezing and has doctors baffled as to why

Music Weekly: Mumford and Sons

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:14:01 GMT

Today's fresh instalment of Music Weekly features a band who we've developed rather a liking for over the last few months: Mumford and Sons. The London-based four-piece join Rosie Swash in the studio to talk about their place in the so-called "new folk" scene, their love of John Steinbeck and how it feels to miss the top 10 by one place.

Singles Club makes a welcome return after last week's inaugural Album Club, and Paul MacInnes is joined by Rosie and Observer Music Monthly's Gareth Grundy to talk about their favourite new releases. Paul plumps for Yeasayer's Ambling Alp, Rosie opts for Tune Yard's Hatari, while Gareth fancies a bit of Matias Aguayo's Rollerskate, leaving the panel to wonder if there's anything wrong with sounding like Level 42. What do you reckon?

Next up we hear from Portishead's Geoff Barrow, who was in town to play a show with new group Beak. Formed with fellow Bristolians Billy Fuller and Matt Williams, the trio wrote and recorded their eponymous album in just 12 days and are now taking the show on the road. We hear about why these strict guidelines worked and how Barrow feels about the succes of the Horrors' second album (which he produced, dontchaknow). He also lets slip that the new Portishead album will be out next week! Sadly, we think he was pulling our leg about that one.

There's just enough time for the Feature With No Name, in which Paul tells you all about his love for the late Michigan producer/rapper J Dilla.

As always, let us know your thoughts on this week's show in the space below, and befriend us at Facebook if you so wish. Until next time ...

Nilmar inspires Brazil to victory

Paul Wilson — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 19:12:11 GMT

If Fabio Capello can read anything significant into this game he should consider pondering tea-leaves as a sideline. That's if he can find any tea-leaves. These days they seem to be more of a rarity than fit England players.

England's second string came second to a Brazil operating at around half pace, so pick the bones out of that. Darren Bent did not make an irresistible case for further consideration, though neither did anyone else, and one or two defenders exposed by Nilmar's electric pace may have harmed their confidence if not their international future. Actually that is one thing England did learn that could stand them in good stead in South Africa: Nilmar is both quick and intelligent.

While John Terry failing a fitness test on his Achilles injury was not entirely unexpected, England supporters in Doha were greeted by the news that Michael Carrick had also dropped out with an ankle problem, meaning that even Capello's reserves are now crocked. That left Wayne Rooney and Gareth Barry as the only regulars in the line-up, the former promoted to captain for the first time in Terry's absence. If England followers were worried, they were probably not as daunted as Barry, who faced the prospect of containing Brazil in central midfield with just Jermaine Jenas for company.

It appeared England might be upstaged by the light show that took place before kick-off, and when the stadium was suddenly plunged into darkness one wag wondered whether it might be a ruse to give Capello's players a chance. When the lights came back on, however, England made an encouragingly upbeat opening, with Shaun Wright-Phillips showing persistence on the right and sending over a dangerous cross that only just eluded Rooney. Playing deeper than Bent, without actually joining midfield, Rooney tried to play in his partner on the edge of the area after 14 minutes only for Brazil to intercept and show their strength on the counter.

That word is advisedly used, for though Kaká is normally more associated with touch and vision he proved sufficiently robust to hold off first Jenas then Barry as Brazil attempted to attack through the middle. England's central defence held out on that occasion, as it had a couple of minutes earlier when Matthew Upson underestimated Nilmar's quickness and allowed him to retrieve a ball he thought would roll into touch.

Kaká looked slightly heavy-legged and below his usual sparkling standard, yet he remains Brazil's go-to man and even at friendly pace he was causing England problems. A delightfully weighted lay-off to Bastos on his left brought a shot that only cleared Ben Foster's left hand upright by a foot or so, and the goalkeeper's first real save of the match came from Kaká on the half hour.

Before that Nilmar had again demonstrated his pace by outstripping Wes Brown in a race down the Brazil left wing, after Foster had invited trouble by aiming a long, high kick upfield in the direction of Wright-Phillips, the shortest player on the field and one all too easily blocked off. Brazil simply came straight down the field with the ball, finding little to halt them until they reached the back line. Again, they did not score, yet one had the feeling that in a real game they would have profited before half-time from England's casual approach to possession and undermanned midfield.

England did have one half-decent opportunity before the interval, when Bent reached James Milner's cross but was unable to keep his header on target, and they had grounds for complaint when Rooney was unceremoniously barged over by Thiago on the edge of the area. Not only did the defender not see a yellow card, England did not even receive a free-kick and had to be content with a corner. Strangest of all, there was no murmur of complaint from a crowd more interested in Mexican waves. Doubtless this exercise will prove of some value to Capello and England, but World Cup run through it was not. The referee was from Qatar, for a start.

The idea that Brazil had been playing within themselves in the first half was reinforced when they took the lead within a couple of minutes of the restart, and again Nilmar's speed took England by surprise. Elano's diagonal cross into the England penalty area did not look all that threatening until the Villarreal player darted between Brown and Upson to get on the end of it, finding himself with enough time to check Foster's positioning before beating him with an accurately placed header.

Brazil should have been two goals up nine minutes later, and England down to 10 men, but Luis Fabiano lazily flapped a penalty over the bar after the referee had unaccountably failed to dismiss Foster for bringing down Nilmar on the six-yard line. Robert Green was sent off in Ukraine for less, though of course that was in a real game. The troublesome Nilmar, needless to say, was again at the heart of the matter. Brown attempted to chest the ball back to his goalkeeper but sold him short, and once Nilmar had nipped in Foster could do little else but charge at him. As last man he would have been incredibly lucky to get away with only a yellow card in a competitive encounter.

Capello replaced the ineffective Bent with Jermain Defoe just before the hour, though the closest England came to an equaliser was when both their wingers combined, Wright-Phillips sending over another promising cross from the right and an unmarked Milner meeting it at the far post with a sidefoot volley that flew too high. Brazil came nearer to scoring a second. Lucio getting up from defence 12 minutes time to thump a 25-yard shot against Foster's upright. The goalkeeper did not know too much about it. Heaven help England should they meet an on song and in the mood Brazil side, though with any luck Capello might have 11 or so of his best players back by then.

Paul Wilson

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Morgan hands England impetus

Paul Weaver — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 23:16:41 GMT

• Unorthodox batsman hits unbeaten 85 from 45 balls
• England waiting on fitness of Collingwood and Anderson

The day after he had sent the ball flying in the thin air of the high veldt in the finest innings played by an England player in international Twenty20 cricket, Eoin Morgan struggled to explain the source of his unlikely power. As he prepared for tomorrow's second Twenty20 international at Centurion the batsman with the physique of a toothpick was asked was it timing, or wrist work, or bat speed?

"I haven't a clue," he said, shrugging bashfully. "It's just something I've done from a young age. I've struck the ball very well. I can't put my finger in it."

On Friday evening the 23-year-old Dubliner hit an unbeaten 85 from 45 balls, with seven fours and five sixes, and drove the South Africa bowlers to the edges of despair with his unorthodoxy. "I've been hitting a ball since I was four or five at home in Dublin," he said. "My dad's a massive cricket fan and I grew up in a big family. We all played cricket as youngsters.

"My two older brothers used to bowl to me, sometimes with a hockey ball. I've been working on deflections and reverse sweeps for four or five years, since I came into the Middlesex side.

"One of the reasons I started playing them was because I couldn't hit the ball out of the ground when I was 16 or 17. When I came into the Middlesex and Ireland sides. I found playing the spinners hard. So I used a bit of innovation and started playing reverse sweeps and found I was good at it and after a while I found it easy – well, not easy but natural. There has been a bit of progression in the last two or three years. I train pretty hard in the gym too."

Morgan was especially pleased with the six he scored when he flicked Dale Steyn out of the ground and into a block of flats overlooking the backward square-leg boundary. "The wicket happened to be good and I didn't think Steyn bowled particularly well. We didn't target any bowlers. I've only played a handful of games and I'm far from cementing my place in the side but this has contributed towards it.

"It was a good game of cricket and very exciting. We certainly have put a positive slant on the series to come, with the way we batted, bowled and fielded."

England will doubtless claim they have the impetus after their one-run win via Duckworth-Lewis while South Africa will say the match was meaningless in the context of the 12-week tour. But this was an immensely pleasing result for England who had been bowled out for 89 in a warm-up game three days before. "We said we weren't going to let it faze us. We play our best cricket when we're very positive, we look to be aggressive, and we can beat most sides on our day if we play like that," Morgan said.

Today, Jacques Kallis praised Morgan's "adaptability" and described him as "a tough guy to bowl to". Kallis was recently described by Kevin Pietersen as the best cricketer there had ever been. Thankfully, Pietersen is a better judge of line and length than cricket history.

England are worried about the fitness of captain Paul Collingwood (back) and Jimmy Anderson (knee) but Graham Onions (back) is expected to be fit.

Paul Weaver

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British Columbia: call of the wild

Ruaridh Nicoll — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:06:52 GMT

Make your Jack London fantasies come true on the ultimate fishing trip in British Columbia, 100 miles from the nearest road

I barely remember my grandfather – only that he would clap his hands above his head if I behaved well and, more hazily yet, him turning towards a river, a split-cane fishing rod resting next to his perfectly bald head. I recall my mother far better, although she's been dead these 20 years. I see her standing in another river, deep in the Scottish Highlands where I was raised, throwing long, looping casts through the September sky. They would ride out over the water and land with barely a ripple.

My grandfather was a talented fly-fisherman, but unlucky. My mother was superb, and lucky. I am a terrible fisherman, but lucky. Hearing that I was off to British Columbia, Canada, on the trip of a lifetime, my friend Olly said to another chum, "He probably won't catch, cos he casts like shite." But it doesn't work like that, as Olly well knows. There is more magic to fishing than skill.

So it was that I found myself knee-deep in the Bell Irving, a river not far from the border with the Yukon. To get in, I had stepped over the heavy footprints of a grizzly bear and her cub, and pushed through a log jam where a beaver was building its nest. The river flowed at walking pace, and when I launched the fly, it swung back across the stream with the smoothness of a hand across the face of a clock. In the way of a heron standing sentry, I let nature reassert itself. I watched a snow shower blur the sky upriver, a rainbow cast outwards over the white-topped mountains and the autumn yellowing of the forest.

And as I let the rhythm of casting lull me, I remembered how, as a child, I found fishing boring – the catching too infrequent and too dependent on the fish. Instead, I would sit on the riverbank with a rifle and try, unsuccessfully, to shoot the salmon when they jumped, while reading Jack London's White Fang and imagining places just like this.

Then the fly stopped and I felt the weight of a fish turning against the hook. One's focus shifts fast when fishing and so it was as I raised the tip of the rod. Used to salmon, I kept my hand close to the reel. That was a mistake. In a moment blood was spraying from my finger and the reel was, as they say, screaming.

A steelhead is a big fish, and this one was 7kg. Genetically, it is a rainbow trout but spiritually it is something else entirely. It has travelled out to sea and then swum back, climbing thousands of feet through waterfall and cataract and log jam in its desire to spawn, under the eyes of bear and eagle. Steelheads do not tire easily. Each time I brought her close she would run again, drawing the line swiftly across the pool, occasionally flashing into the air to spin, turn and tumble against the spike. The idea is to do as little harm to the fish as possible, so there was no barb on the hook.

When I was first pondering this trip, my editor, believing one big article on fishing was probably enough for a while, told me to chase my dreams. So I thought about it, and thought about Jack London: I wanted wilderness, powerful fish, and to be as close to nature as is possible. I wanted to be where people normally do not tread. "Puny adventurers bent on colossal adventure, pitting themselves against the might of a world as remote and alien and pulseless as the abysses of space," as London put it.

North Americans call steelheads "chromers", because they're so shiny some will reflect the mountains back to you. This was true of the fish I finally scooped out of the net beside that log jam. The barbless hook slipped easily from her mouth and, having gazed at her in awe, I put her gently back in the stream, a thin smear of my blood on her flank. She waited for a moment in my hands and then, with powerful strokes, beat back into the stream where, soon, she would empty herself of her eggs.

My brother Angus and I had taken a flight out of the horrors of Heathrow, with its shabby, money-grasping departure lounge, to Vancouver, all light, running water and polite officials, where the shops are dedicated to hockey, sailing and skiing. Crossing to the domestic terminal, with its departures to points north, we saw a different kind of traveller: rougher of skin, with heavy beards and wearing baseball caps advertising mining companies and tackle shops.

A two-hour flight, the setting sun reflecting off glaciers and fiords, saw us settle into the damp browns and greens of Terrace, a rough logging town close to the Alaskan panhandle. In the small airport, the car hire woman suggested we watch out for "bear and moose on the road" and laughed, a touch manically. So we set out in the last of the light, slowing only to watch a big bull moose cross the gravel expanse of the Skeena river. The drive to the lodge was four hours and for the last two-and-a-half, we passed no signs of obvious habitation.

The fish we were hunting had been approaching from the opposite direction. Having left their home rivers two to four years before, they had grown sleek and heavy out at sea off Alaska. Frighteningly few return to their rivers to spawn. Only 2,000 a year are counted into the Bell Irving, which, given that the average hen lays 10,000 eggs, is haunting. Our adventure came with a precognition of tragedy, that despite the conservation measures now in place, man-made factors, from climate change to logging, may soon see their extinction.

The Bell 2 Lodge was once a gas station but has grown into a collection of log cabins amid a dense forest of aspen, alder and mountain hemlock. Hunters, tourists and miners travelling the Alaskan highway stop for the superb food and, in winter, a substantial heliskiing operation. The fishing was an afterthought. The owners saw a market not only for taking people out on the Bell Irving, but also for flying them by helicopter to the Naas river, the upper part of which is 100 miles from the nearest road. The fish there are unlikely to have ever seen an artificial fly.

As we ate breakfast, our guides appeared. Steve McPhail and Michael Brackenhofer are dissimilar men. Canadian Steve brings a Zen attitude of "do no harm" to his job. Against attack by bear or bull moose, he carries a small can of pepper spray and what is, in essence, a party popper. Bavarian Michael, on the other hand, carries a short, ugly rifle of the sort the outlaw Jesse James might have used.

Steve took us down to the Bell Irving, reversing his metal-hulled skiff into the clear waters and then, with the outboard fired up, navigating through torrents and placid pools, past the remnants of log jams and under great cottonwoods, yellow in the late September sunlight, while Chloe, his princess of a Labrador, flinched against the freezing spray.

As we powered forward, I realised I was happy: as I get older, I find fishing brings me peace. And I was happy until 9.23am on that first day, because that is when my brother caught his first steelhead. I try to wish the best for my fellow man, but when it comes to fishing, I'm with Gore Vidal. Every time a friend of mine is successful, a little part of me dies.

A couple of days later we headed downhill from the lodge to the waiting helicopter, a Bell Ranger with room, at a push, for five. Angus, a fellow Brit called Nico and I stood nearby, kitted up in waders and the thickest woollens we could find.

"I'm not riding bitch," said Steve, jumping into the front seat. We packed into the back and lifted off, heading downriver and crossing the forest before climbing through a valley and up into the snow-covered peaks. Between the swirling clouds, we could make out mountain goats on their vertiginous ledges. As we crossed the high passes the tips of the rotors were only feet from the cliffs.

Soon, the weather licked at us and the pilot was forced to circle down a thousand feet into a thin layer of clear air above an exuberant stream.

"Do you think this is the Muskaboo?" he asked Steve. We explored on, across a landscape that may never have felt a human footprint.

"Imagine five guys smoking in here," said Nico, playing with the ashtray. When the view opened up, we saw a large meandering river, the Nass, and followed it until the water pooled on great gravel beds. Leaves and sticks scattered as we drew down to land. After dropping us, the Bell flew off to collect a raft left downstream by a previous party. "Juicy water," said Steve.

I wandered up to the neck of the pool, the opposite bank a thick wall of hemlock and cottonwood, and immediately found action. Then Angus connected with an astonishing fish that ran from him for 60 metres or so, before charging back, leaving my brother to grab handfuls of line in an effort to keep tension on the barbless hook. He looked astonished by the battle when at last Steve swept the fish into his net. "This knocks salmon into a cocked hat," he said.

We fished the Nass for two days, flying back to the lodge each evening. We drifted through pools and rapids on the inflatable, expertly guided by Steve, who also found time to barbecue steaks. Sometimes we would see a moose gazing at us from the bank. Otherwise we were alone. In places, the water flowed so smoothly over the uneven rock it left us awestruck. We could be certain of the presence of the fish in this, their perfect resting place. The fly, a pink piece of fluff I called a Barbara Cartland, would stop, and then everything would explode. If Steve was nearby he would whoop.

In the evenings, back at the lodge, having changed and warmed ourselves by the log fires in our rooms, we would have dinner together. Nico and I argued about global warming, listened to politely by the guides and Sid, the pilot. When we finally shut up, they chimed in, discussing the changes they had seen – from later winters to the way magnetic north has shifted. They spoke with a dignity and depth that made me feel like an urban blowhard.

(Sid would later tell me he had started out mining in eastern Canada, but given it up when two of his friends died below ground. Now his office is the vast expanse of the north beyond the screen of his helicopter. He exudes an extraordinary calm, and an odd politeness straight out of the Coen Brothers' Fargo. "Are you ready? Rightyo then.")

On our final day Michael stepped in as guide, taking us back on the Bell Irving. A true denizen of the mountains, he pointed out terrifying slopes high above us that he had skied. He is cutting a five-mile track through the forest so that he can reach the high alp and hunt mountain goats on the cliff edges. His knowledge is both profound and personal.

"The aspen is the world's largest organism," he said. "Many, many trees share a root. It is why whole woods can turn yellow at once."

Those dreams I had had as a child in the Highlands, reading Jack London, were embodied in the way Michael lives. Yet this lifestyle would have a catastrophic effect on most relationships, and certainly mine. The only alternative is to visit, and that requires wealth. Nico is rich enough to come here because he sold a large company in the late 90s. Yet, as Steve pointed out, it is only the money of well-off visitors that protects the life of these extraordinary fish. The loggers would come for the trees otherwise, and the spawning grounds would be destroyed.

On that last day, such privileged access meant we fished close to some extraordinary creatures. A black bear slowly crossed the river above us, looking back only once. At lunch – a picnic of soup, beer and sandwiches – we watched a curious ermine skip towards us through a log pile. It probably fancied a go at my jugular. I caught a final fish, bringing my score for the week to nine steelheads, along with a Coho salmon and a 3kg bull trout. Angus was close behind (ha!). For the salmon fishermen, used to days without catching, this was a dream.

Nothing however, compared with a moment up on the Nass a couple of days before. I had been struggling to keep my footing on a steep bank. The casting was difficult, left-handed into the stream, and I was imagining building a platform in the trees, setting up home, when a viscerally unsettling cry went up. It was the sound that Jack London described: "Palpitant and tense... It might have been a lost soul wailing, had it not been invested with a certain sad fierceness and hungry eagerness."

I gazed over at the opposite bank and out along the trunk of a long-dead cottonwood walked a wolf. It reached the furthest point and turned to stare over at me. In the face of this, the truest incarnation of the wilderness, I forgot my daydream. Another howl rose from beyond, and the wolf turned and, without haste, wandered back and out of sight.

Essentials

Ruaridh Nicoll's journey to Bell 2 lodge was organised by James Moreland of Elemental Adventure (020 7836 3547; eaheliskiing.com), which organises heliskiing trips worldwide. Bell 2's dedicated fishing site is steelhead-fishing.net.

A nine-night trip to Bell 2 costs from £5,000. It includes two nights in Vancouver, transfer from Terrace Airport, seven days of guided steelhead fishing including two days' helicopter fishing and five days' jet boat and raft access on the Bell Irving, Meziadin, Naas or Bear rivers, full-board accommodation in a single room, licences and use of fly-fishing equipment including spey rod or single handed rod and all flies.

For more information on the area, see Tourism British Columbia's site, BritishColumbia.travel.

Ruaridh flew from Edinburgh to Heathrow with bmi (0844 848 4888; flybmi.com, returns from £72) and from there to Terrace with Air Canada (0871 220 1111; aircanada.com/uk; returns from £769). He drove from Terrace to the lodge in a hire car from Budget Rent-a-Car (0844 544 4444; budget.co.uk) which offers car rental from Terrace Airport from £33 per day, including unlimited mileage.

Ruaridh Nicoll

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Party houses for New Year

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:15:00 GMT

From seaside cottages to hunting lodges we pick perfect holiday hideaways for gathering together a crowd of friends or family

HISTORIC

1. THE TOWER HOUSE, NEWBIGGIN-ON-LUNE, CUMBRIA

Rich in history – the house was once home to Elizabeth Gaunt, the last woman to be burnt at the stake, and a principal hiding place of Bonnie Prince Charlie – the Tower House was used as a lookout for raiders from the Borders. Comfortable furnishings with many personal touches blend well with original oak panelling, flagstone floors and exposed stonework.
• Sleeps nine

• One week from 28 December, £2,240. Cumbrian Cottages (01228 599960; cumbrian-cottages.co.uk)

2. GARGUNNOCK HOUSE, STIRLING

The frontage of this imposing Scottish country house looks Georgian, but the rooms are built around a tower that dates back to the 16th century. Period elegance dominates, with a beautiful drawing room, traditional vaulted basement, eight bedrooms and five bathrooms. The house is surrounded by countryside and immaculate gardens.
• Sleeps 16

• One week from 23 December, £4,617. Landmark Trust (01628 825925; landmark-trust.org.uk)

3. MEIKLE ASCOG, ISLE OF BUTE

Located on the sheltered east coast of the Isle of Bute, this 19th-century villa is part of the Ascog estate and boasts large, secluded grounds. There are two doubles, two twins and two single rooms – and it has an elegant sitting room and spacious dining room. Stroll to nearby Ascog beach or drive to the west coast to Scalpsie Bay, home to a colony of more than 200 seals.
• Sleeps 10

• Five nights from 30 December, £2,020. Landmark Trust (01628 825925; landmarktrust.org.uk).

• Getting there: there are two regular ferry links from the mainland: from Colintraive and Wemyss Bay. See calmac.co.uk for timetables and prices

4. NEUADD CWMYOY, ABERGAVENNY, MONMOUTHSHIRE

This stylishly restored farmhouse dates back to the 1500s and many original features have been retained: exposed stonework, deep-set windows with oak sills, and ancient beams. The kitchen is overlooked by a minstrels' gallery and stone steps link the ground and upper floors. The spacious kitchen is a particular strong point.
• Sleeps 16

• One week from 21 December, £2,000. Brecon Cottages (01874 676446; breconcottages.com)

5. ROUND ISLAND, THE LIZARD, CORNWALL

The Lizard Lighthouse was built in 1619, although the current towers were built in 1752. Round Island is one of six former lighthouse-keepers' cottages that perch on the headland amid breathtaking scenery. The property is sleekly furnished, with wooden floors and cool, cream bedrooms. The lighthouse is still in operation however, so be prepared for the foghorn.
• Sleeps eight

• One week from 20 December, £828. Cornish Cottages (01326 240333; cornishcottagesonline.com)

LUXURY

6. THE OLD VICARAGE, MALBOROUGH, DEVON

Recently restored, this gothic-style Victorian vicarage has a mix of luxury doubles and child-friendly bunkbed rooms. The house is littered with goodies; an iPod surround-sound system, three 50" plasma TVs, a PlayStation and a four–oven Aga, while the grounds include a spacious private terrace and lawned garden with lovely views. The owner also owns the nearby Lodge Hotel, which offers breakfast or full meals that can be warmed in the Aga.
• Sleeps 22

• Five nights, any time from 5 to 27 December, £6,250. The Wow House Company (01452 715373; thewowhousecompany.com)

7. CHURCH ELMS FARM, WOODCHURCH, KENT

An elegant farmhouse surrounded by four acres of land, Church Elms comes complete with its own tennis court and a games room with pool table and table tennis. The four bedrooms (and three bathrooms) are sleek and comfortable, with period touches and designer furniture, and there are three TVs, a DVD player, wireless broadband (payable) and a small conservatory.
• Sleeps eight

• One week from 22 December, £2,334. Rural Retreats (01386 701177; ruralretreats.co.uk)

8. CARRINGTON HOUSE, SNETTISHAM, NORFOLK

More boutique hotel than country cottage, Carrington House offers nine luxy bedrooms, resplendent in vivid wallpapers, rococo beds and hot-pink armchairs. The cosy kitchen has an Aga, but catering – and staff – can be arranged, to help make the most of the 60s-chic dining room and the "leisure lounge" – a soundproofed disco in the basement with decks, and an adjoining dressing-up room. There's a delightful walled garden, and Snettisham village lies just beyond the door. The property even comes with a beach hut on Old Hunstanton Beach, 10 minutes' drive away. It is booked up for for Christmas Day and New Year's Day, but there is availability for the period between the two, meaning you can do you family duties and then get all your friends together for a party.
• Sleeps 18 plus sofabed

• Three nights from 27-30 December, £2,600. Carrington House (0870 850 5468; carringtonhouse.net)

9. NEW COURT PARK, LUGWARDINE HEREFORDSHIRE

Houses don't get much bigger or more grand than this 18th-century, Grade II-listed manor. It has a portico entrance, reception hall with grand piano and rococo ceiling, morning and sitting rooms connected by double doors – perfect for a New Year's eve soirée – and a dining room that has seating for 24. Arrive early to bag the grandest bedroom in the house, with its four-poster bed. Chef hire and clay pigeon shooting are available for an extra fee.
• Sleeps 24

• Five nights from 29 December, £8,000, including welcome hamper. The Wow House Company (01452 715373; thewowhousecompany.com)

SEASIDE

10. BIGBURY ON SEA, KINGSBRIDGE, DEVON

Just 300 metres from the wide sandy beach that separates Bigbury on Sea from Burgh Island, this stunning house has been inspired by the beach houses of Sydney, with exposed wood, sliding glass walls and a sleek, open plan design. The upper floor rooms have beautiful sea views while the lounge has floor-to-ceiling windows to make the most of the proximity to the beach. Stylishly furnished with local artworks and designer furniture, this may not be the most relaxing option for families with very young children.
• Sleeps 10

• One week from 26 December, £2,435. Helpful Holidays (01647 434063; helpfulholidays.com). Quote L114

11. SUNRISE COTTAGE, SAUNDERSFOOT, PEMBROKESHIRE

This house couldn't be any closer to the sea. With direct access to Saundersfoot beach from the back garden, there are five bedrooms and a spacious open-plan living space with oak floors and folding doors across the width of the house, making the most of those glorious sea views.
• Sleeps 10

• One week from 23 December, £2,514, or 30 December, £3,014. Coastal Cottages (01437 772760; coastalcottages.co.uk)

12. SUNDOWN COTTAGE, NEAR LOOE, CORNWALL

Boasting views of the Rame Peninsula in one direction and St George's Island at Looe in the other, this spacious house is perfect for big gatherings, with a large kitchen/dining room and even a separate wine fridge for the Christmas bubbly. There's also a large sitting-room with a modern wood-burner and a double garage that houses table football and air hockey games. A gate at the end of the huge lawn gives private access to Downderry beach.
• Sleeps 12

• One week from 20 December, £3,003. Classic Cottages (01326 555555; classic.co.uk)

13. ORNSAY HOUSE, ULLAPOOL, SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS

Perched by the water in the picturesque harbour town of Ullapool, with stunning views over Loch Broom, this traditional Highland house was once an old manse. It has four double and two single bedrooms, and a cosy sitting room and dining room – both with open fires – as well as a family room and fully equipped kitchen. Walk off that Christmas pudding with a ramble over the mountains of Wester Ross, or fly a kite on the sands of nearby Achnahaird beach.
• Sleeps 10

• One week from 21 December, £995, or 28 December, £1,095. Unique Cottages (01835 822277; unique-cottages.co.uk)

14. CLAREMONT HOUSE, BLAKENEY, NORFOLK

A handsome Grade II-listed property, Claremont House stands among the narrow streets of Blakeney that run down to the tidal creek and marshes. The house has a cosy feel, with a small walled garden, well-fitted kitchen and simple furnishings, child-friendly bedrooms with bunks and a good selection of games. There are two comfortable sitting rooms and a sizeable kitchen-dining space, meaning even a large group will never be short of space.

• Sleeps 11

• One week from 23 December, £1,575. Norfolk Cottages (01603 871872; norfolkcottages.co.uk)

15. ELJAY HOUSE, WHITBY, NORTH YORKSHIRE

Set on a hillside overlooking the marina, this four-storey house makes a perfect base for exploring Whitby and beyond. Work off that extra slice of turkey with a walk along the three-mile stretch of beach to Sandsend; scale the 199 steps leading to St Mary's Church and the abbey ruins, or head to the nearby village of Robin Hood's Bay, built into the cliffs and renowned as a smugglers' haunt.
• Sleeps nine

• One week from 20 December, £1171. Cottages4you (0845 268 0760; cottages4you.co.uk). Quote 17825

BUDGET

16. AIKIN HOUSE, NEWLANDS VALLEY, LAKE DISTRICT

This former 19th-century barn was converted in the 60s, and offers a real sense of escape, tucked away in Newlands Valley. It's a little-explored corner of the Lake District that offers great walking. The property has its own half-acre garden, along with a working fireplace to curl up in front of after a restorative Boxing Day walk. The house is comfortably furnished, with three doubles and one triple bedroom, and although it's not the height of luxury, at under £100 per person for Christmas week, it's a definite bargain.
• Sleeps nine

• One week from 20 December, £880. Cumbrian Cottages (01228 599960; cumbrian-cottages.co.uk)

17. TOTLAND BAY YHA, ISLE OF WIGHT

Get the whole gang together and save funds for booze and food by hiring out a youth hostel on an exclusive use basis. The Isle of Wight is a great bet for a family get-together, and this youth hostel, formerly a large Victorian house, has a TV lounge, dining rooms and a fully fitted self-catering kitchen. The house is very spacious but is best for no more than 36, so everyone can fit into the same dining room at the same time. Other hostels are also available.
• Sleeps 44

• Five days from 23 December, £1,229, YHA (01629 592700; yha.org.uk)

18. HELVELLYN RISE, KESWICK, LAKE DISTRICT

Perfectly located for families – with pubs, restaurants, cinema and theatre on the doorstep – this traditional Lakeland slate town house has spacious rooms that are simply but comfortably furnished. The fully fitted kitchen and lounge with TV, DVD and video provide plenty of space for two families or a group of friends, and the views across to Skiddaw give a glimpse of the potential for walks.

• Sleeps eight

• One week from 20 December, £780. Cumbrian Cottages (01228 599960; cumbrian-cottages.co.uk)

19. HIGH PARKS HOUSE, NEWTON-LE-WILLOWS, NORTH YORKSHIRE

Boasting stunning views over the Vale of York, this 200-year old country house has shared use of 18 acres of grounds with fenced woods – perfect for letting the kids burn off excess excitement. It has a cosy sitting room with exposed brick and wooden beams and an open fire, and there's even a games room with snooker table. Several market towns are close by, including ancient Richmond.
• Sleeps eight

• One week from 20 December, £940. Cottages4you (0845 268 0760; cottages4you.co.uk)

20. 1 DUROSS POINT, ENNISKILLEN, COUNTY FERMANAGH

Perched on the shores of Lough Erne with its own private jetty, this house is a bargain, costing just £68 per person for Christmas week. That pays for four spacious bedrooms, a hand-built pine kitchen and great views. Cycling paths, long walks through mature woodland and pony trekking are on the doorstep, and the town of Enniskillen is 10 miles away.
• Sleeps eight

• One week from 20, 21, 22 or 23 December, £550. Holidaylettings.co.uk (holidaylettings.co.uk). Quote 29591

FOR ISOLATION

21. WYKE BAY COTTAGE, AMBLESIDE, LAKE DISTRICT

This has to be one of Britain's most stunning rental properties. At the end of a long driveway in Pullwood Bay, this newly built, architect-designed house is surrounded by 20 hectares (50 acres) of grounds and gardens, and has more than half a mile of lake frontage. It has four beautifully decorated double bedrooms (all with flat-screen TVs), a lounge with massive windows overlooking the water and a large terrace. The Drunken Duck Inn, serving real ales, is a short stroll away.
• Sleeps eight

• One week from 21 December, £2,495. Lake Lovers (015394 88855; lakelovers.co.uk)

22. STONEGARTHSIDE HALL KERSHOPEFOOT, CUMBRIA

Described as "arguably the most remote country house in England", Stonegarthside Hall is set within its own vast grounds and commands extensive views to the Scottish border. It could be mistaken for a castle, with its austere façades and single battlemented elevation, but is, in fact, a grand gentry house, with three adjoining wings, which feature an imposing dining room with wood-burning stove, a large billards room and seven spacious bedrooms, one with a four-poster bed.
• Sleeps 14

• One week from 21 or 28 December, £2,925. Vivat Trust Holidays (0845 090 0194; vivat.org.uk)

23. BUDDICOMBE HOUSE, NEAR ILFRACOMBE, NORTH DEVON

Located on a quiet lane a mile from Berrynarbor, and surrounded by acres of farmland, this fine house has four comfortable bedrooms. Open presents in the beautiful living room, with its floor-level arch windows and sea views, beamed ceiling and open fire. Then don woollies for a walk to the sea, half a mile away, or Combe Martin, two miles away.
• Sleeps 10

• One week from 19 or 26 December, £1,469. Helpful Holidays (01647 434063; helpfulholidays.com). Quote K2

24. UPTON FARM, TREBARWITH, CORNWALL

Alone amid rolling farmland high above the north Cornish coast, Upton Farm has panoramic sea views. There are two converted barns, housing eight and six, plus a studio annexe for three more. The nearest village, Delabole, is a mile-and-a-half away, and Trebarwith Strand, a beautiful beach backed by rugged cliffs is a 20-minute walk from the front door.
• Sleeps 17

• One week from 21 December, £2,600. (01840 770225; upton-farm.co.uk or see thebigdomain.com)

25. THE SHOOTING LODGE, WRACKLEFORD, DORSET

One mile from the nearest road, high on the Dorset downlands, this rustic lodge – complete with tower – is as remote and rural as it gets. There is no mains electricity and no telephone; instead, most of the utilities run on gas, and there are logs for open fires, wall lamps and lots of candles. There are five bedrooms, including a single room in the tower which is accessed via a steep spiral staircase.
• Sleeps nine

• One week from 23 December, £2,500. Stately Holiday Cottages (01638 674756; statelyholidayhomes.co.uk).

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A temple to Athena

Miranda Sawyer — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 10:01:00 GMT

The Wings of Love, Doisneau's The Kiss, Vettriano's Singing Butler… These prints have taken pride of place in millions of homes since the 70s. So what explains their enduring appeal? Miranda Sawyer celebrates the art that Britain took to its heart

Do you collect art? Of course you do. Not the bank-busting originals, the investment pieces bartered by hedge-fund analysts and arms dealers, secured by museums for the enlightenment of the nation. I mean the pictures you put on your wall to fill the space above the mantelpiece, to tone in with the sofa, to cover the stain and your first three attempts at drilling a hole to hang the thing up in the first place. Your art: the pictures and posters and objects that mean something to you, demonstrate your allegiances, history, hopes and taste, whether Sarah Beeny-approved or not.

It sticks to you, that kind of art, as you make your way through life. It makes you laugh, or it was a gift, or it reminds you of a particular time. Maybe you were collecting that sort of stuff for a while. Sometimes you might not even like it at all: in our flat, we have a water-colour of a gated field and trees, not particularly to anyone's taste. But my granny painted it, so up it went. And after living with it for a few years, I've grown to like its splodgy greens and browns, its smudged suburban calm.

What else do we have in our home art collection? Oh, you know: framed adverts for long-gone nightclubs, Soviet propaganda pictures, old Olympic posters, school diagrams, a couple of artists' limited-edition prints. Loads of family photos and silly second-hand knick-knacks: a board with numbers for scoring pool, a teapot that looks like a cat, Padre Pio as a snow-shaker, a Michelin man advertising board. Junk, really, but we like it. It's our art, the stuff we look at day to day. Some of it cheap, some more expensive (usually it's the framing that costs), most of it found in charity shops, on eBay, in markets. None of it valuable. It wouldn't justify a special listing on your home insurance policy.

But the art you want in your house is not the same as what you wish to see in a gallery. I love Mother and Child Divided, Damien Hirst's glass-enclosed halves of a cow and her calf, but I'm not sure where I'd put them in our place. Behind the sofa? You'd have to make your home in a warehouse in order to house them, with all the chilly discomfort that that would entail… I once went to an artist's party hosted by a patron in her gorgeous town-house in west London. When I walked in, I thought I was in a restaurant. It was the paintings on the wall: so impressive and gallery-esque, I'd automatically dismissed the idea that anyone could exist happily alongside them in real, everyday life.

This difference, between "proper" art and your own beloved tat, was made explicit by Alan Kane at Frieze this year. In Frame, the new galleries section, he showed his mother's art collection. He took the stuff his mum had in her lounge and displayed it all in correct gallery manner. Separate plinths were given to a funny clay sheep, a Virgin Airways commemorative thimble, a collection of three china Japanese ladies. On the walls leant a chaffinch embroidered on to Binka, a framed picture of his mum and dad meeting the Pope and one of those photo-collages made up from cut-out snaps of the kids and grandkids. The presentation gave each piece a new status, made you look at them in a new, starry light.

Kane is a regular collaborator with Jeremy Deller, and together they run the Folk Archive, which collects and collates art ignored by the contemporary art world: embroidered wrestler costumes, hand-crafted protest banners, photographs of sound systems, or revellers on Bonfire Night. It's art that comes from ordinary people's passions: the archive forms and honours a history of everyday life. If an alien from the future were to get their sucker pads on it, they'd find such folk art far more revealing of who we are and how we live than any feted contemporary artist with their oblique references and conceptual thinking.

Similarly, the art you have in your home tells a visitor much more than you may want it to. When I first met my husband, he had on his shelves four of the exact same black-and-white postcards that I had on mine: a young George Best, a youngish Richard Burton, a → ← smoke-drenched Lee Perry and Phil Daniels as Jimmy in Quadrophenia. Perhaps it showed that we were meant to be together. (We both like coffee, too: amazing!) Or perhaps it shows that we both grew up in a time of fewer cultural references, a smaller range of postcards.

Images from music, film and football aren't quite art, though. They're part of popular culture, something that is foisted on you from outside. You're a fan, so you show that by getting a postcard of your hero. But there is another type of popular art, that sells in its millions, that isn't imposed upon the public by corporations or taste-makers, but chosen by ordinary consumers of their own free will. Stuff like the pictures illustrating this piece. No one quite understands why these images are so loved, what made us buy them in their millions to decorate our homes across the world. These are not works of critical acclaim – quite the opposite – yet they're as well-known as the Mona Lisa, as home-friendly as a kettle. As popular as toast.

Art On Your Wall, part of the Modern Beauty Season, on BBC2, which starts on 14 November, examines seven of these pieces of mass-market art. Four are very familiar: the Green Lady, Tennis Girl, Man and Baby, Jack Vettriano's Singing Butler. Less well-known, though still amazingly popular, are Ullswater, (a photograph of a jetty extending into a lake, available at Ikea), Doris Earwigging (like a greetings card: two fat-bottomed ladies and a fat-bottomed dog) and the truly astonishing Wings of Love, quite possibly my favourite. What a picture! Hunky fella, gorgeous girl, both turned away so you don't see their naughty bits, and also so they can simultaneously contemplate the unfathomable sea, universal metaphor for life and death, lapping across what appears to be the floor tiles of the world's most enormous public convenience. There's a vast, Dalí-esque, dream-like space around the couple, but they themselves are encircled by the wings of an enormous swan. The swan is gently depositing the man to earth for his lady-love. The swan's tender trap, as well as the realistic detail, transports the picture from mere poster into the heady realms of late 70s double album cover. Swoonalicious.

Wayne Hemingway, designer and connoisseur of mass-market art, owns Wings of Love. He genuinely loves the picture: "Who wouldn't want the love of their life to arrive on the wings of a swan?" He tells me that it was in Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party and, he insists, there was a version in Saddam Hussein's palace: "In those photos of American soldiers sitting in his pool, you can see a massive mural of it behind them." Apparently, the picture is particularly popular among Middle Eastern and Russian people; anyhow, it's one of the biggest-selling prints in the world. Even in 2000, 28 years after it was first painted, it was still selling at a rate of 200 a day.

Despite this, I can't say I remember it decorating many of the homes of my youth – unlike the trailblazer of popular art, the iconic Green Lady, aka Chinese Girl. She was everywhere when I was young. She was a real person (though not green) called Lenka, a girl spotted by the Russian painter Vladimir Tretchikoff in a New York restaurant in the late 1940s: they ended up having a long-term affair. Tretchikoff was the world's first mass-market artist, deciding to mass-produce his prints in 1952, when he was 39. Though he lost his cachet among rich collectors almost instantaneously, his print sales made him the most highly paid artist in the world after Picasso. Even now, the Green Lady remains one of the three bestselling prints ever.

Lenka's portrait has long been reclaimed by the cool, with its burnished 70s colours, its spooky atmosphere and acceptably kitsch air. But back in 1970s UK, it represented something else: the tingle of the exotic. Those who displayed a Green Lady showed sophistication: in an era before package holidays, when your summer holiday was in Rhyl or Skegness, a Green Lady was shorthand for well travelled, racy, open-minded.

The Green Lady, in fact, was the epitome of romance; and romance is the signature quality of all these mass-market works. A snatched kiss outside a French café, a dinner dance on a windy beach, a tender yet masculine male model able to hold your baby without dropping it on its head: all adorably romantic ideas brought to life by these pictures. Call it sentimentality, call it hope – either way, it's notable that most of mass-market art is bought by women. Even the Tennis Girl, a bachelor's poster if ever there was one, was, according to its creator Martin Elliott, mostly a feminine purchase. "We put it down to two things. One: by buying it, it showed that the lady was a good sort. Two: it kept their men's minds off the dirtier stuff."

Back in the 70s and early 80s, prints were sold like 7in singles – on the high street, a new → ← one issued every week. You could pick one up at Woolies or Boots on your Saturday shop. Many were sold via catalogues like Freemans, which accounts for the Green Lady and Wings of Love having a working-class/aspiring middle-class clientele. As did all those funny pictures of scruffy, big-eyed street urchins, often crying, or with a small dog pulling down their pants. I'm not quite sure what the romance was in those. Perhaps they just reminded their owners of a time when their kids were cute. Or perhaps it was in the idea that you could rescue these poor mites, who were often from foreign climes, or past times: dressed in Spanish flamenco outfits, or Dickensian rags. Like the Green Lady, they showed that you knew about places other than your local town.

They also had a cheeky quality, which much of popular art has, in Britain at least. I speak to Katy Elliott, commissioning editor of the Art Group, which operates under an Art for All philosophy. The Art Group has been going for 22 years and offers greetings cards and "wall art", supplying much of today's high-street shops with their artistic offerings, from John Lewis to Argos to Tesco. If you've bought a framed print in Ikea or a canvas from Habitat, the likelihood is that it came from The Art Group.

Katy tells me that the British are less prudish than both the Americans and the Scandinavians. Which fits in with the silly, saucy element of our preferred mass-market art, the flip to our romantic side, seen in Sam Toft's chubby-bummed ladies, or Arthur Sarnoff's pink-potting hounds. Martin Elliott regards his Tennis Girl as his "photographic interpretation of the saucy seaside postcard", which seems about right.

Anyhow, Katy is up on current trends in popular art. "There's a lot of positive slogans doing well at the moment," she says. "That kind of 'make-do-and-mend' idea, spin-offs of the Keep Calm and Carry On poster. Also, nature is massive, including natural materials. Especially wood. We sell so much artwork with wood in it."

All very sensible: a far cry from the daft romance of Wings of Love or Man and Baby. Actually, when you look at what the Art Group sells, what's surprising is how middle class it all is. Cool Manhattan skylines, Hockney-style LA, black-and-white photographs, old Guinness ads, tasteful abstracts with 50s textile print references. Very nice.

But not, sadly, as extravagant, as polarising, as outrageous as some of the mass-market art of the past. Now we're all encouraged to see where we live as an investment, rather than a home, it seems that some of the fun has gone out of our popular art. We choose our pictures to blend into the tasteful whole, as just another part of the neutral, careful décor that will impress neighbours as much as prospective buyers. We don't want to be exotic, romantic, silly any more; just cool and discerning. What a shame.★

The Art on Your Wall is part of the Modern Beauty Season. It will be shown on BBC2, on 16 November, 9pm

Miranda Sawyer

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Revival of Britain's regional theatres

Kate Kellaway — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:07:18 GMT

The story of regional theatre in recent years has been bleak, with some of Britain's oldest venues facing closure. But as Kate Kellaway discovers, a new crop of creative directors are making local heroes of themselves

This week, Stephen Daldry, interviewed on Radio 4's Front Row, was asked whether he would like to run the National theatre – to which he replied that what he actually wanted was one day to take on a regional theatre "because the relationship you have with a town can be so dynamic". To some listeners, it will have seemed an incredible answer – and 10 years ago, there is no way that he would have been thinking it. But this is an extraordinary moment for regional theatre. Everyone knows the background – how "provincial" theatre became a thing (and a word) of the past, thanks to directors such as Sam West and Michael Grandage who turned Sheffield's Crucible into a leading venue with shows that transferred to London (and could compete with anything the capital had to offer). But then, two years ago, there was a troubling setback: Derby and Exeter were threatened with closure. Sheffield went dark (for redevelopment). And, most alarmingly – and with much acrimony – Bristol Old Vic closed down, ostensibly for "refurbishment".

It is with this as a backdrop that the cause for celebration is now all the more intense – along with a sense that regional theatre is on the edge of a new era. Sheffield and Bristol are reopening with artistic directors typical of a new breed – dynamic, original, cosmopolitan – determined to reinvent regional theatre. Six months ago, super-talented actor and singer Daniel Evans took over at the Crucible. And this week, Tom Morris, described by Nicholas Hytner as "the most brilliant producer in the country", announced his first season at Bristol Old Vic. Morris has given up his job at the National (where, as an associate director, he co-directed War Horse and helped make the theatre experimental) to make the move. The feeling is that if anyone can revitalise the Bristol Old Vic, he can.

I meet Morris in the theatre's cafe and find him in enthusiastic mode – emphatically not a man who is going to sit still over a cup of tea. He suggests that we take a tour of the theatre. I follow but can hardly keep up with him, scribbling as I go. He sees possibilities, performance spaces and new talent everywhere. (Might that fly tower make a new space? How would the theatre feel with an extended stage? Might a ground-breaking French video jockey perform under his roof?) He is running on adrenaline.

But before we look ahead, I need to look back. The theatre's problems clearly went beyond its ancient electrics. I want him to explain what went wrong at Bristol Old Vic. Morris is carefully non-injurious: "It was a mutual loss of faith between the executive board, the Arts Council and other funders." Later, I speak to Dick Penny, chair of the board, who explains that the need for electrics was for real (the theatre was not safe) but that "the theatre wasn't making money and there were hiccups with audience response. Artistically, it wasn't in good shape". When it closed, it seemed "from the outside" that there was "total panic and no cogent plan – the theatre had been in steadily worsening straits for 20 years". It was reported, at the time, that its artistic director, Simon Reade, walked out without announcing the theatre's closure to staff – many of whom were made redundant.

Morris acknowledges that what he has walked in on is akin to a "grieving process. Some people are nervous about what might happen next. Yet the acceptance that something wasn't working has made people open to a new approach." Bristol's crisis is Morris's opportunity – an atmosphere in which he can work. And his track record inspires confidence: it was as artistic director of Battersea Arts Centre (1995-2003) that he not only made his mark but saved the organisation from near bankruptcy. His particular innovation was the "scratch programme" where artists could "find their own voices" and work could be tested in its early stages on audiences. Jerry Springer: The Opera began at BAC. Complicite, Frantic Assembly and Told by an Idiot all developed work there (Morris is a skilful artistic matchmaker, a talent pouncer). In Bristol, he plans a "raft of work with opportunities for local artists. Scratch work will begin in January."

His way of saying hello to the city was with a superlatively innovative week in October, dubbed the Bristol Jam, which he intends to make an annual event. "There is no festival anywhere like it in Britain," he says. It involves "improvisation in all the arts". It included an "improvised musical" and an "art school version of consequences", in which passers-by were invited to join in and splendid canvases were produced in 24 hours (they look fantastic in the upstairs foyer. I'd thought they must be by Bristol's Jackson Pollock). Morris explains: "We are not running this theatre in the way traditional theatre has been run in the past. We have to be honest about what we are doing by doing it. It's a form of improvisation." No wonder the board asked him: "How do you marry this experimental approach with the demands of the marketplace?" But his answer has the authority of experience: "You structure the developmental process according to the needs of the experiment. You don't take risks until you are confident you can."

Morris's readiness to say he is improvising requires nerve. But anyone fearing a rash adieu to tradition should not fret. He is not about to abandon Shakespeare or classical theatre. And what is especially attractive is his regard for audiences. "One of the distinguishing characteristics of my work is that you don't pretend the audience isn't there. That for me is one of the clearest features that separates theatre from film. It is one of the reasons I'm here." He believes audiences will "evolve with the work" and quotes from Henry V about audience imagination : "Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them/ Printing their proud hoofs i' th' receiving earth;/ For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings…"

But Morris will never be tamely traditional. He reveals that, in the new season, he will direct a Romeo and Juliet set in an old people's home. The idea came from Talkback Thames producer Sean O'Connor. "Romeo and Juliet are in their 80s. It is a world a bit like our own, where children are worried about the cost of care. Juliet's meddling daughter wants to marry off her mum (on Capulet ward) to a rich bachelor; Juliet prefers penniless old Romeo…"

Morris also has a refreshing attitude towards the theatre itself: "I want people to understand the space through the performances that happen in it." He loves Bristol Old Vic's 1766 wood-lined auditorium: "It's like a violin, a resonant chamber." And he hopes to invite "music-makers with a theatrical instinct" to perform in it (he has booked folk singer June Tabor to perform stories about the sea). He also plans to catch Magnetic Fields, Divine Comedy, Bellowhead. But he is determined the Old Vic should be a "Bristolian theatre" and not "London's hardest-to-get-to theatre." He wants to capitalise on the city's cultural richness: the Watershed Media Centre, the Cube, the Arnolfini, the Tobacco Factory. He introduces me to his colleague, "producer of artist development" Kate Yedigaroff, who explains that they want the Old Vic to become a "creative sanctuary" for Bristolian talent.

Already, every corner of the theatre is buzzing with creativity. Morris takes me to "the Paintshop", a performance space where Kneehigh are preparing Hansel and Gretel – the Christmas show – and to the studio next door where Firebird are rehearsing The Tempest. He introduces me to surnameless "Tid", director of the theatre's 450-strong "Young Company" who tells me (out of Morris's hearing): "The theatre changed within a week of Jam. It's become a place where curiosity, play and theatrical invention is genuine – and comes from the top."

Eventually, I sit down with Morris. Just as some babies are born looking middle-aged, Morris, 44, will always look boyish, but his energy will stop that seeming anomalous. He tells me about his failed attempts at acting. At Cambridge, while his contemporary Sam Mendes knew where he was going, Morris found the theatre scene "rather frightening". But his charming self-disparagement is not the whole picture. He may not be much of an actor – but in his new role he is an outstanding performer. I end by asking what Battersea taught him. He pauses then says: "We sometimes tried to run before we could walk." And then we look at each other as the same thought forms. For "Run before you can walk" could almost be Morris's motto: "If I rejected that, I wouldn't get anywhere."

DANIEL EVANS Artistic director, Sheffield theatres

Daniel Evans is proud to be taking on the Crucible as part of the Grandage tradition. Like his accomplished predecessor Michael Grandage, Evans is an actor (he was Peter Pan at the National and won an Olivier award for Sunday in the Park with George) and he is delighted to be following in the distinguished footsteps of Sam West. He is also bowled over by the theatre's £15.3m rebuild. He praises everything from the smallest details – its "automated flying" (as a former Peter Pan) to its more earthbound consideration for audiences – new lumbar support for every seat.

But most of all, he is grateful for the architects' fidelity to what worked best in the old building, while at the same time acknowledging that "the thrust stage and studio space have a new dynamic". The retention of the old personality even includes, he is at pains to point out, an attempt to echo the "iconic 70s carpet" – of which Sheffield audiences are, apparently, peculiarly fond.

Evans knows it is essential to open the new theatre with a bang. He has always wanted to run a building and loves the idea of the "privilege of being able to imprint a tone on a place and a season of work". His programme is a refreshing blend of the classical and the unexpected. He wants to make shows relevant to Sheffield, "to engage with the region", but is keen this should go beyond "tokenism". In the opening season, Sheffield itself will get star billing with a "radical response to Alice in Wonderland", adapted by Laura Wade, a Sheffield playwright who has always wanted to write for the Crucible. Alice will be "a disturbed girl from Sheffield who goes on a crazy redemptive journey in Wonderland".

Evans also wrote to Antony Sher to ask him to be in An Enemy of the People and was thrilled when Sher accepted. Also beckoning is Sisters, a piece of verbatim theatre by Stephanie Streetcorrect based on interviews with 40 British Muslim women after the London bombings of July 2007. She put to them "the sort of questions you might want to ask a Muslim friend". The result should make gripping theatre. Evans explains that when he arrived, there was no money set aside for new writing. He has "fought hard" for a "small commissioning pot".

His "manifesto" is that he wants "the people of Sheffield to feel the theatre is theirs. We are not creating art at them – I want them to have an emotional investment in the place". What is touching is the way he sincerely wants to reach people who have never enjoyed theatre before in their lives, believing, with a convert's passion, in what it can do. "I came from a small Welsh mining valley. I was shy and bullied… theatre changed my life."

GEMMA BODINETZ Artistic director, Everyman and Playhouse theatres, Liverpool

Gemma Bodinetz runs the Playhouse ("historically considered distinguished and conservative") and the Everyman ("counter-cultural"). It is a "wonderful job" – or jobs plural. Liverpool audiences, she says approvingly, after six years at the helm, are drawn to "full-blooded drama". They favour the "four-course meal" – not mere "tapas". And she adds: "It is lucky I am so full-blown myself. I am not a pastel-shades person."

She describes her own theatrical tastes as usefully "catholic". She is strongly committed to new writing, enthusing over a "major new play by Jonathan Harvey" coming up next season. And it was under her leadership that Liverpool put on Unprotected, a ground-breaking verbatim piece about Liverpool's prostitutes – a debate about whether they should have a safe area from which to operate.

There has been judicious star casting too: Jonathan Pryce in Pinter's The Caretaker, Pete Postlethwaite as King Lear (both of which originated in Liverpool before moving to London).

She says there is a lot of red tape involved in running two theatres, but she hopes that now the two theatres influence and support each other: "I may be wrong but I think the Playhouse is re-energised by association with the Everyman. I like to think they are having a conversation." She loves it when people greet her in the foyer and say: "What have you got for us next…?" in a tone of voice that means "Bring it on…"

SIMON STOKES Artistic director, Theatre Royal, Plymouth

Simon Stokes believes change does not happen overnight. That is why he has been in Plymouth for 10 years. "You name it, we do it," he says. "Opera, ballet, drama, new writing…" He relishes the "straightforward, honest" character of his audience. "You can trust them."

He is interested in the "cultural experiment and the time it takes to lead audiences down a path of excellence". Plymouth Theatre Royal is vast (1,300 seats). There is also a large studio theatre – the Drum – and a third space called TR2, built five years ago, "a huge production and creative learning centre". They can rival the Royal Opera House for scale – with the result that Cameron Mackintosh often develops work in Plymouth.

Stokes once worked at the Bush theatre in London and is passionate about new writing: "I put on work that I think is good – after all, I am not unique in this world."

He regularly breaks with traditional expectation, most recently staging a grand guignol play by Carl Grose who has worked with Kneehigh. Audiences might not always find a show to their liking but he is concerned that they should at least be clear as to why he put it on. His worry, when contemplating the future of regional theatre is that the recession will prove "destructive" of the "quality" that matters to him so much.

JONATHAN CHURCH Artistic director, Chichester festival theatre

Jonathan Church feels regional theatre could almost be his subject on Mastermind. "I've worked in Birmingham, Nottingham, Derby, Sheffield, Salisbury, Leeds…" He sees Chichester, where he has been artistic director for four years, as a special case because it was "built without public subsidy" in the 1960s and was the vision of one man – Leslie Evershed-Martin.

Church believes its beginnings (even though it is subsidised nowadays) define how Chichester theatre-goers feel. There is a "sense of ownership" that is "pretty unique". The scale is uncommon too. "Compare it to Birmingham which has a population of two million and a theatre with 800 seats. Chichester's population is a mere 25,000 but its theatre has 1,400 seats." And it is distinctive in being open only from April to September – a gloriously extended, theatrical summer holiday.

Church believes that regional theatre has changed out of all recognition over the last 10 years, with dusty rep a thing of the past. And Chichester is constantly evolving, as the exemplary Minerva studio (where Lucy Prebble's play Enron had its debut) proves. But the national picture has, Church argues, been complicated by lavish lottery funding. Expansion can distort regional character: "Some theatres have grown from corner shops to huge civic supermarkets and lost their identity."

He suggests our emphasis is misplaced: "Theatre is never about buildings, it is always about the work – you forget that at your peril." He has built his success (audience figures have soared during his directorship) on encouraging terrific, varied work from Rupert Goold's Macbeth to the hit musical Calendar Girls. Musicals are a "revealing tool" because, if you judge it right, you catch more than one audience. "Calendar Girls sold out before we had even opened."

But how does he make such calculations? He adopts Sir Laurence Olivier's maxim, he replies, who used always to claim: "I do three shows for the audience – and one for me."

Kate Kellaway

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Scientists aim for low-carbon coal

Alok Jha — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:06:16 GMT

Millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide could be prevented from entering the atmosphere following the discovery of a way to turn coal, grass or municipal waste more efficiently into clean fuels.

Scientists have adapted a process called "gasification" which is already used to clean up dirty materials before they are used to generate electricity or to make renewable fuels. The technique involves heating organic matter to produce a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, called syngas.

However gasification is very energy-intensive, requiring high-temperature air, steam or oxygen to react with the organic material. Heating this up leads to the release of large amounts of carbon dioxide. In addition, gasification is often inefficient, leaving behind significant amounts of solid waste.

To find out how to make the process more efficient, researchers led by Marco Castaldi, at Columbia University, tried varying the atmosphere in the gasifier. They found that, by adding CO₂to the steam atmosphere of a gasifier, significantly more of the biomass or coal was turned into useful syngas.

The technique has a double benefit for the environment: it provides a use for CO₂ that would otherwise escape into the atmosphere and, after the hydrogen is siphoned off from the syngas, the remaining carbon monoxide can be buried safely underground.

Castaldi's results will be published this week in the Journal of Environmental Science & Technology. His team calculated that using CO₂ during gasification of a biomass fuel such as beechgrass, in order to make enough biofuel for a fifth of the world's transport demands, would use 437m tonnes of the greenhouse gas. Preventing that entering the atmosphere would equate to taking 308m vehicles off the road.

Replacing 30% of the steam atmosphere of a gasifier with CO₂ ensured that all the solid fuel was turned into syngas. Castaldi's process reduces the amount of water that needs to be heated, thereby saving energy, and is 10 to 30% more efficient than standard gasification.

"If I operate at 1,000C and don't use CO₂ I'll have some residual carbon left over, which could be a fuel – that's an efficiency penalty," said Castaldi. "Using about 30% CO₂, for that same 1,000C you get the complete gasification of the carbon into the syngas."

Applied to a modern IGCC (integrated gasification combined cycle) power station, which gasifies coal, this can lead to an efficiency gain of up to 4%. "While that may not sound like much, for a power plant producing 500 megawatts of energy, it is significant," said Castaldi.

Alok Jha

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Clone-makers have no legal resource

Charles Arthur — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 21:43:06 GMT

A legal finding determines that selling PC clones of Apple machines is illegal - just like the licence suggests

Psystar, the little company in Florida that seemed for a while to be based in the back of a truck while it made Apple clones based on PC hardware, has lost all its claims against Apple in a legal victory that is an important ruling against would-be clone makers.

The company had already filed for bankruptcy - specifically, Chapter 11 protection, which protects a business from creditors while it restructures - back in May. But in the ruling (via BusinessWeek, via Groklaw) Judge William Alsup ruled that Apple's end user licence agreement (EULA) on its Mac OSX software is legal and can be interpreted broadly - that when it says you can't install on non-Mac hardware, that's what it means; it doesn't mean that you could argue that it's a bit limiting on you.

The PDF of the ruling explains that the problem comes down to this line: "Psystar has modified Mac OS X to run on its computers and has sold them to the public."

Psystar had claimed that "first sale doctrine" in the US means that the buyer (Psystar) can sell something on, regardless of whether the original owner (Apple) likes it. But the modification - "Psystar then replaced the Mac OS X 'bootloader'", to quote the finding of facts - means that first sale doctrine doesn't apply any more.

Bzzt. Psystar loses.

Psystar infringed Apple's exclusive right to create derivative works of Mac OS X. It did this by replacing original files in Mac OS X with unauthorized software files. Specifically, it made three modifications: (1) replacing the Mac OS X bootloader with a different bootloader to enable an unauthorized copy of Mac OS X to run on Psystar's computers; (2) disabling and removing Apple kernel extension files; and (3) adding non-Apple kernel extensions. These modifications enabled Mac OS X to run on a non-Apple computer. It is undisputed that Psystar made these modifications.

And finally, "Apple's licensing agreement is not unduly restrictive" - and the judge then offers an example of a licence that *is* too restrictive, from a company called Lasercomb:

The language employed in the Lasercomb agreement is extremely broad. Each time Lasercomb sells its Interact program to a company and obtains that company's agreement to the noncompete language, the company is required to forego utilization of the creative abilities of all its officers, directors and employees in the area of CAD/CAM die-making software. Of yet greater concern, these creative abilities are withdrawn from the public. The period for which this anticompetitive restraint exists is ninety-nine years, which could be longer than the life of the copyright itself.

(Intrguingly, Lasercomb still seems to be in business. We hope it's changed its licence.)

So that's it for Psystar. But more importantly, it's the end for would-be companies aiming to make cloned Macs running on PC hardware. Apple has proved that it can sue them and it does have the law on its side.

Charles Arthur

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Can you please everyone in Katine?

Joseph Malinga — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:58:57 GMT

Over the past two years Amref has clearly made significant improvements in Katine. So why are some of the community unhappy? Joseph Malinga explains

It is now two years since the launch of the Katine project, with its aim of improving education, health, livelihoods, water and sanitation and community empowerment in the rural sub-county.

While the African Medical and Research Foundation (Amref), which is implementing the project, has made significant improvements over the last two years, some sections of the community do not seem entirely happy with the project. There are probably many reasons for this. One is perhaps related to the region's history.

Amref's work is designed to help the community recover from more than two decades of conflict and cattle rustling that has rocked the Teso region in which Katine is found.

Mistrust and security concerns following Yoweri Museveni's seizure of power in 1986 (Museveni decided to disband local militias that had protected the region against cattle rustlers, which had blighted the area for years), forced many in Teso to pick up arms to protect themselves, their properties and their livelihoods. The rebel group became the Uganda People's Army (UPA).

The region soon became a battlefield between the UPA, government forces and the Karamojong. Around this time Alice Lakwena formed the Holy Spirit Movement, a rebel group that would become the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), which attacked Katine in 2003.

Teso had embraced the idea of rebellion not so much to gain political power but to avoid economic loss. Desperation and frustration had set in, explaining why the young people who joined the rebellion sang songs with the words: "Mimi na yenda mistuni, juu ya mali ya baba. Kazi yetu ni shida shida. Mimi nakula kibawo juu - ya-mali ya baba kazi yetu ni shida shida..." The Kiswahili song could be translated into both local languages, Ateso and Kumam. It meant: "I went to join the bush war because of my father's wealth. Our job is troublesome. My father's wealth has made me starve - our work is trouble."

Impact of conflict

The impact of all the fighting has been telling on the community. Many people witnessed horrific scenes – loved ones murdered, families torn apart – which have not only left the region socially and economically stunted, but has also entrenched political hostility towards central government.

The conflict destroyed the region's economic base. Before the fighting, Teso was a prosperous area, rooted in agriculture. Children were educated to university level and people had sustainable incomes.

But under Museveni, national industries, such as cotton and coffee, were privatised, which affected the local cotton production. Dairies, local electricity systems, railways and schools were damaged in the fighting, which resulted in job losses and a collapsed infrastructure.

More recently, the raids by the LRA forced many families into internally displaced people's camps and saw people killed and kidnapped and homes destroyed. People in Katine had to pick up the pieces and start again.

Natural calamities have exacerbated the situation. In 2007, the region was hit by torrential rains and more recently a severe drought, both of which have destroyed crops and led to serious food shortages.

During the period of conflict, floods and drought there is little evidence that local leaders or the government did much to rehabilitate the community in Katine. Improvements have been largely down to NGOs.

Amref's intervention, of which the community has high expectations, has resulted in significant improvements in the sub-county.

A new school has been built, another is under construction and other schools have had classrooms and offices built or repaired. Desks and textbooks have been distributed to schools and teachers have received training.

Boreholes have been drilled, shallow wells constructed and pit latrine coverage in the community has improved.

Village health teams and health workers have been trained, anti-malaria bed nets have been distributed and a new lab has been opened.

Farmers groups have been trained and supported and a new strain of cassava grown. Building work has begun on a produce store to allow farmers to store crops and sell in bulk, and share market information.

Village savings and loans associations have been established.

Community dissatisfaction

So why are some sections of the community unhappy with the project? The biting poverty resulting from conflict and the reliance on assistance from NGOs has created a dependency culture and an individualistic attitude among the community.

Amref's work focuses on developing the community rather than benefiting individuals. As a result, a number of villagers have brushed-off the project's achievements. While they appreciate the clean water and the improved school structures, they still say Amref is not doing enough. When you ask what they mean by "not enough" it seems to come down to the fact they haven't benefited personally.

For example, some members of the community who visit the media resource centre in Katine hope to get something more from their visit than computer training or the chance to go online. Someone asked me whether visiting the media centre would lead to a job. I told him no, and since then he has not been back often.

People seem to compare Amref with ChildFund International (formerly the Christian Children's Fund), an NGO working in Katine that does support individuals. The organisation has a focus on child sponsorship so has paid school fees, and it distributes animals to individuals. The Transcultural Psychosocial Organisation (TPO) also helps individuals, although it does try to strengthen community structures.

In some of the community's eyes, Amref was meant to build them houses, educate their children and provide them with all basic necessities. These ambitions have not been realised and the question they ask is when will this be achieved?

This raises the question of how aware the community is of the aims of the project and the work being carried out.

It seems to me there is clearly a need for Amref to better explain the reasons for the project and its methods of operation widely to the community. And Amref needs to ensure a constant information flow between itself and the community if its work is going to be owned and sustained after it leaves.

Reversing the effects of more than 20 years of conflict is not going to be easy, but this may be a necessary step if Amref wants to avoid criticism that it's not doing enough.

Joseph Malinga

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We don't want to be led by pity

Andrew Rawnsley — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:07:30 GMT

Gordon Brown has attracted near-universal sympathy after the attack by the Sun, but it won't be worth a single vote

It's now got this bad for Gordon Brown: his enemies are feeling sorry for him. For the first time since he arrived in Number 10, he is the object of pity.

Since his premiership started to unravel, a process of attrition that began when he flunked having an early election in the autumn of 2007, he has been portrayed with ascending levels of vituperation as dithering, cowardly, mendacious, useless, unstable and generally unfit to be prime minister. He has generated anger, ridicule, loathing, spite and despair. It got to the point where he couldn't even go jogging without being lampooned for looking like most men of his age look when they put on trainers. I remarked a few weeks ago that there was a flavour of the blood sport – the spectacle of the once proud bull being speared and slashed to death – about some of the media coverage of his premiership. He had brought a lot of this on himself, but that did not make it terribly pleasant to watch.

In the past few days, we have witnessed a wholly novel phenomenon: the prime minister receiving near universal sympathy.

The paradoxical prompt for this change in the script was the Sun. In its ruthless and attention-seeking way, the weather-vane tabloid ruined the night of his speech to the Labour conference by choosing that moment to announce that it was switching its allegiances back to the Tories. I can't say I have a great deal of general sympathy for the prime minister about being burnt by the Sun. He and his predecessor truckled to the right-wing tabloid when it was on their side. Neither he nor Tony Blair complained when the Sun scorched Tory leaders. Labour rubbed its hands with glee when the red top portrayed William Hague as a dead parrot. But there is widespread agreement, across the political spectrum, that Mr Brown has been the victim of a nasty campaign in respect of his badly written letter of condolence to Jacqui Janes, whose 20-year-old son died of the horrific injuries he sustained in Afghanistan.

It is entirely understandable that the grieving mother was made incandescent by a letter that looked to her like "a hastily scrawled insult" to both her and the service and sacrifice of her son. Number 10 should never have sent out a letter of condolence to a recently bereaved mother with her name misspelt and the name of her son apparently corrected with a scribble.

This is not evidence that Gordon Brown is a bad man; it is evidence that Number 10 cannot aspire to even the most primitive levels of competence. It is not quite good enough to excuse it on the grounds that the prime minister's eyesight is poor, he works all hours and his handwriting is notoriously messy.

In fact, the letter to Jacqui Janes was unusually clear by his epistolatory standards. One member of the cabinet once described to me trying to decipher Mr Brown's handwriting and said it was like trying to read "ancient Hittite". The prime minister's nearest and dearest know that his penmanship is terrible and it makes his spelling wayward. If the letter was not checked before it went in the post, it should have been.

If Number 10 staff did look at that letter before it went into the envelope, why did no one gently prompt the boss to bin his first effort and do it again? Are his aides too terrified of the prime minister to suggest that the utmost care needs to be taken with a letter of condolence to the mother of a dead soldier?

Gordon Brown was fortunate then that the Sun went so far over the top by adducing this as evidence not of incompetence at Number 10, but of Mr Brown being callously indifferent to the deaths of soldiers. If he were truly that, he would not bother to hand write letters at all. He would do a Donald Rumsfeld and use a pen machine to fake a signature on a processed mailshot to the bereaved.

The viciousness of the red top's attack rather than the sloppiness of Number 10 turned into the story. The feeling that the Sun was crudely exploiting a mother's grief to humiliate the prime minister became widespread and won him sympathy even from his natural enemies. Iain Dale, the right-wing blogger and aspirant Tory MP, came to the defence of Mr Brown on the grounds that "the prime minister was probably dog tired when he wrote this letter and we should cut him some slack. No one can surely really believe that he intended to insult the soldier's memory".

Matthew Parris, the former Conservative MP and brilliant polemicist who is usually unmatched in his scorn for Mr Brown, listened to the recording of the prime minister's 13-minute telephone conversation with Jacqui Janes. The Times columnist told his readers: 'As I listened to Mr Brown's painful attempts to make headway, I experienced what is for me a new, strange and unsettling sensation: sympathy for Gordon Brown."

The Spectator magazine, no friend to either Labour or its leader, editorialised that "only the coldest heart could fail to feel for the Prime Minister". The overall response from voters, including many who posted on the Sun's website, was to express sympathy for the prime minister.

At the beginning of the week, the letter and Mr Brown's failed attempt to appease the bereaved mother by arguing with her on the phone was turning into another horrific public-relations disaster for Number 10. By the end of the week, his staff were quietly pleased that it appeared to have rebounded to the prime minister's slight advantage.

They were also buoyed by the easy margin of Labour's win in the Glasgow North East byelection, a result that Mr Brown celebrated as a "tremendous" victory. In normal circumstances, this would be nothing to get excited about – Labour holding on to one of its safest seats in Scotland. It is significant because last year Labour lost neighbouring Glasgow East, a similarly deprived seat, and because the win has been a rare shaft of light for the government in the encroaching gloom.

In Glasgow North East, the sympathy vote appears to have had some effect in helping Labour's performance. The byelection was triggered by the defenestration of Michael Martin as Speaker of the Commons. Some Labour tribalists in the seat saw their former MP as the victim not of his own monumental incompetence, but of metropolitan English snobbery towards a former sheet metal worker.

Nothing else seems to be working for Mr Brown, so I can see a temptation to think that salvation may now lie in pursuing the sympathy vote. There is a sort of fit with the broader strategy, advocated to his colleagues by Peter Mandelson, of Labour fighting the election as the "underdog".

At his most recent Number 10 news conference, Mr Brown asked for people to accept his sincerity in regard to Guardsman Janes by alluding to the death of his baby daughter. Questioned about Afghanistan, he replied with a non sequitur which again asked for our sympathy when he said: "I am a shy person."

This is a 180 degree change from how he was sold first to the Labour party and then to the country. He was the strong and experienced leader. He put the fear of God into colleagues and was the remorseless destroyer of opponents. He was the "Great Clunking Fist". Pity? That was for wimps. At the time of the financial crisis last autumn, this was again how he wanted us to see him. He was the statesman who acted while others flinched, he was the tough guy with the plan, he was the man of steel who boldly saved the world.

He asked us not for our pity. He craved not our sympathy. He demanded our respect.

And he and his image handlers were right to strive for that. Authority was his brand strength. Gordon Brown never had a hope of being one of those leaders who are loved. They come round very rarely in modern politics and he will never be one of them. His best approach was always to try to convince the country to give him its grudging respect.

You don't achieve that from having people feel sorry for you. Voters want a leader who feels their pain, not one who asks them to experience his. Countries do not want to be led by people they pity.

A man to ask about that is Sir John Major. A lot of people felt sorry for him – I felt sorry for him – as he trudged out his final months in office before the landslide defeat of the Conservatives in 1997. Even political opponents sympathised with his predicament, as he presided over a party that was tearing itself apart over Europe and ruining its reputation with sleaze. To the end of his time in office, many voters told pollsters that they thought of John Major as a fundamentally decent man "whose heart was in the right place". That didn't mean they were going to give a moment's thought to re-electing his government. Leaders who arouse our pity simultaneously attract our disdain. We do not want our prime ministers to be pitiful.

What threatened to be another awful week for Gordon Brown has superficially turned out rather better than it looked at the start because he has attracted sympathy. I can tell him now that it will be worth precisely nothing when it comes to papers in ballot boxes. There are no votes in pity.

Andrew Rawnsley

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The SNP suddenly looks vulnerable

Kevin McKenna — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:05:12 GMT

Labour's byelection win was a blow to Alex Salmond's party ahead of the 2011 election

An icy breeze is making the Scottish National party shiver and gather its cloak more tightly about itself. A question is being asked that previously no one dared whisper: has Alex Salmond lost his mojo?

When he has tapped his conjuror's hat recently, only plums have emerged. Not long ago, he walked on water and everywhere his gaze fell there was healing and bounty. Now, and for the first time since his party's Holyrood victory in 2007, his omniscience is being questioned. In the wake of Thursday's shattering byelection defeat in Glasgow North East, a second term in government following the 2011 Holyrood election does not now look as certain as it did in the summer.

Glasgow's SECC, where the voting count took place, is a cavernous and unforgiving arena when you've just been humiliated in a byelection by a record majority. And it was hard not to feel for David Kerr, the SNP's beaten candidate, as he gamely tried to keep a desultory conversation going with his listless supporters just minutes after being told he had been beaten by more than 8,200 votes by Labour's Willie Bain. It wasn't far away from 2am and Kerr, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for his entire doomed campaign in one of Labour's Glasgow redoubts, suddenly appeared tired, vulnerable and out of his depth. Twice now he has been beaten by wide margins in byelections and it may be that even the continuing obsessive patronage of Salmond may now not be enough to insinuate him on to future SNP lists.

The nationalists have comprehensively been escorted from the premises in the last two Scottish byelections, and at either side of the country, but they will persist with their claim that little can be read into the latest defeat in a socialist enclave and on a 33% turnout. Last night, though, party activists, particularly on the west coast, were looking for answers to some questions that even Salmond's political legerdemain cannot simply magic away any time soon. For an unpopular party in government, in the midst of a recession, to achieve almost 60% of the vote and enjoy a swing in their favour, is almost unprecedented in recent UK political history.

No one expected the SNP to win in Glasgow North East, but privately they were hoping for a Labour majority of only 3,000 at the most. Such a number would have reinforced the nationalists' old war cry that Labour is still on the run in some of their heartlands. To have lost by almost three times that amount in a two-horse race has rent the cloak of invincibility that up until now has wrapped itself so comfortably around the Holyrood party.

Why, some activists, are asking, did the party almost entirely extinguish any talk of independence on the doorsteps of Glasgow North East? "It's not as if we had anything to lose here," said one, "and as public revulsion at the antics of Westminster has grown we would have been on safe ground talking up the benefits of going it alone. Yet it was hardly mentioned."

Others have gamely tried to adopt the lexicon of a provincial football manager who has just seen his team draw against Celtic after surrendering a two-goal lead: "We've won one and lost one in two of Labour's urban fastnesses. That would have been unthinkable three years ago." But what is three years in politics if a week is a long time? For, as gloomy SNP strategists know, the political terrain has changed, and changed utterly in the last year.

Salmond, previously the master of all he surveyed in the Holyrood chamber, has been well beaten at First Minister's Questions by Iain Grey in recent weeks. The Labour leader has nailed his SNP counterpart on the cost of an independence referendum and on Salmond's failure to turn up for any meetings of FiSAB, the group charged with looking for ways out of the recession.

Grey no longer approaches FMQs with the hapless demeanour of a Bedouin window cleaner. He was also a relaxed and welcome presence during the byelection campaign. As one senior source confided on Friday night: "The Jim Murphy effect is having a very positive effect on Iain." Murphy, whom the SNP now view as a Scottish Mandelson, was all sweet reason and Buddhist calm as he dominated BBC Scotland's excellent byelection special.

If something approaching mythical status has been conferred on Salmond, then the same has attached itself to the SNP campaign machines. From out of the mist in previous campaigns, it seemed, armies of fresh young volunteers would suddenly appear to save the day just as it seemed the separatist army was about to be engulfed by the fell forces of the union. But Labour's operations in Glasgow and in Glenrothes last year are now just as slick and in 2011 their war chest will not be three times lighter than the SNP's, as it was in 2007.

This is troubling news for the SNP at the next Scottish election. In 2007, Labour's complacency and strategic weakness handed the Nats the slimmest of victories. There are signs, most evident in Glasgow North East, that Labour has found ways of targeting its core support a lot more effectively.

Salmond and his cabinet, none of whom has been removed in 30 months, may not quite be in retreat. But with barely 18 months until the next Holyrood election, Labour may have timed its reawakening to perfection.

Kevin McKenna

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Nigel Slater's lentil and bean feast

Nigel Slater — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:07:28 GMT

There is no fresh veg and the fridge is bare. But with lentils and cans of beans, Nigel Slater conjures up a magical feast

I don't want any fresh food left in the house while I'm away. There are few things less welcoming to come home to than half a cabbage that has seen better days. Though it is marginally better than unpacking your suitcase only to find something you left in the oven. (I have done that, too.) Suppers before I travel tend to be designed to use up every scrap of anything that may wilt or shrivel before I go, with the last one or two generally made up of anything I can find in the cupboards. The final pre-trip meal is usually a bit of a can fest, though none the worse for it.

I love the technology that allows you to print out your boarding pass and even your train ticket before you go. It makes having to stand in a queue while everyone takes their shoes off and shuffles through security almost bearable. Almost. Travelling even the shortest distance makes me hungry, so the last meal before I leave the house tends to be something hearty and filling. This time it's a great fat bowl of waxy butter beans in a darkly sweet sauce thick with black treacle and chillies. Its mellow flavours and substantial qualities will keep me going for hours.

The larger the bean, the better it survives the canning process. Butter beans, red kidney beans and chickpeas all seem to emerge from the process almost as complete as they went in, while the softer cannellini and the exceptionally fragile green flageolet can often resemble lumpy hummus when you finally extricate them from their little aluminium home. Lentils cook so quickly I have never understood why anyone would want to use a tin anyway.

The butter bean is the granddaddy of them all. Fat, smooth and creamy, it's the Werther's Original of the pulse family. To my mind it is happiest in a parsley sauce with a side order of thick slices of warm and wobbly ham, but it does well in a last-minute beanbake with tomato sauce and herbs. I keep a can or two in the house and toss the beans into salads with masses of parsley and bits of chorizo. They also make a stunning soup with onions and maybe a little mustard.

It is mustard that I am stirring into my pre-flight supper, along with a Tetra Pak of passata, some black treacle and a few sprigs of thyme. This is bonfire food, really, or for one of those winter parties when you know everyone is going to drink slightly too much. There is nothing elegant about this – it is about as rough-edged as cooking can get.

It is rare for me to eat a meal without at least one spanking-fresh element in it. With the frosty weather not far away, I find myself turning to lumpy piles of shredded emerald greens or a crisp salad of shredded carrots, cabbage and sprouted seeds and nuts. A few curls of crisp white lettuce with mint leaves and shredded chillies, or even a red cabbage salad with salted almonds and blue cheese. Yet right now there isn't so much as a radish in the house, let alone a bag of sprouting mung beans. Fridges are empty, the veg rack is naked, not even so much as a tomato on the windowsill.

Some bean dishes, particularly those involving tomato sauce, can be as good cold as they are hot. A lidded tub of them could be travelling fare if you didn't fancy taking your chances with what might be on offer. Or, on a rather more everyday note, a good packed lunch. History shows that we are not good at the humble bean unless it comes in a turquoise tin with sweet tomato sauce. Yet what could be simpler and cheaper than using some sort of bean or chickpea or lentil as the heart and soul of a meal? Ideally, I cook them from scratch, but that doesn't have to be the case. Sometimes a can will get me out of trouble.

Most of you will know I am less of a fan of the freezer than most, but bean dishes often freeze very well. A richly herbed stew of bacon and butter beans can be made in advance and split up into small, meal- sized packs and tucked away for rainy days. A welcome-home dish if ever there was one.

Of course, I am not that kind of cook. I rarely think further ahead than the next meal. And I am sure I will return, as always, to an empty fridge and the prospect of another supper made out of desperation and imagination.

BUTTER BEANS WITH MUSTARD AND TOMATO

I am very happy to eat this as it is, but it also makes a cheap and warming accompaniment to grilled bacon or sausages and especially to a boiled bacon joint. Serves 4 as a main dish.

3 medium-sized onions
3 large cloves garlic
3 tbsp olive oil
a few whole sprigs of thyme
2 bay leaves
2 x 400g cans of crushed tomatoes (or passata)
2 x 400g cans of butter beans
2 medium-sized whole chillies
2 tbsp black treacle
1 tbsp grain mustard
1 tbsp smooth French mustard

Peel and roughly chop the onions and the garlic, put them in a heavy-based casserole with the olive oil and leave over a moderate heat till they are soft. An occasional stir will prevent them from sticking to the pan.

Add the dried thyme and the bay leaves, the crushed tomato, 250ml of water and the drained beans, and then bring to the boil. Season with salt and black pepper, the two chillies, treacle and the mustards.

Partially cover with a lid and leave to simmer gently for 30 minutes or so – you want the sauce to thicken a little. Serve hot.

SAUSAGE AND LENTIL SUPPER

I make bean and sausage hotpots for winter weekends, leaving them to putter away in a slow oven until everyone comes in, freezing and begging to be fed. During the week I'd like to come back to that sort of thing, too, so I use this quick version. The parsley is crucial, as is a good meaty sausage. Serves 4.

2 tbsp olive oil
120g streaky bacon, diced
1 onion
1 large carrot
a rib of celery
300g green lentils
1 litre chicken stock
2 bay leaves
8 plump pork sausages
chopped parsley

Warm the oil in a deep, heavy casserole. Put the bacon in and let it cook over a medium heat so it colours lightly. Meanwhile, peel the onion, chop it finely and add to the bacon. Cut the carrot and celery into rough dice, and stir them in, letting them soften a little. Don't let them colour. Tip in the lentils, pour in the chicken stock, then tuck in the bay leaves and sausages, cut into short lengths if you prefer, and bring to the boil. Turn down the heat so the liquid simmers gently, season, then leave it for 30 minutes, stirring from time to time. Check the seasoning (I like it peppery), and stir in a handful of chopped parsley.★

nigel.slater@observer.co.uk

Nigel Slater

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What happens when you win

Kathryn Flett — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:05:39 GMT

Envious friends, grandiose homes, a few cars (obviously)… But how many headache pills does a £45m lottery win buy you?

Hm, by the time this column is published perhaps we will all know the names of the shell-shocked couple from Gwent who won half last week's £91m EuroLottery. Maybe, even as I write, they are busy purchasing an island and setting up charitable foundations with which to dispense their cheaply bought largesse to the deserving poor while preparing to live on the (very manageable, frankly) 152K per month interest? But you know what? I bet they're not doing any of that. Though I wouldn't necessarily rule out signing up for the ultimate (p)lottery-tastic reality TV show – a telly formula even Simon Cowell might envy.

For most people, £45m is too much money, other than (ironically) the super-rich, who – having either already stepped up to the consumerist plate, à la the Beckhams, or having a sideline in charitable spendaholicism (and freshly gilded lilies in their hallway, daily), à la their mate Sir Elton – would at least have some idea what the hell to do with it all. For the rest of us it's merely a mind-bendingly, panic-inducingly large amount of cash to be gifted overnight, and arguably much less of a gift than a monumental headache, what with suddenly becoming the CEO of Entirely & Undeserving PLC and then having to learn, just as fast, who your friends really are.

This would make your average cruelly ejected X Factor wannabe's emotional journey look like those of Janet and John (and Edward), because even with all the gratifying potential for Secret Millionaire-style cheque-writing, 5m quid, with which you could do nice, kind, generous local things, is probably the perfect lottery win; just enough to take care of business without the spending of it actually becoming the business. Which is why I'd rather be a member of the eight-strong Liverpool BT call centre syndicate who'll be taking home £5.5m each. But with 45m you'd have to go global, wouldn't you?

For example, once I've handed in my notice and handed out £1m with no strings to the 10 loveliest and most deserving souls I know (and another £1m to Thingy-Watserface, as long as Thingy W promised to leave the country immediately and for all-time. Control freak? Control freakery is a major part of the whole devilish pact, goddamit), and after I've bought myself some absurdly grandiose design in the country and filled it with the requisite amount of It-Won't-Make-You-Happy-But-Neither-Will-It-Make-You-Sad shiny shit and some proper art (and for a moment it's tempting to blow the lot on a Rothko), and then when I've built another house somewhere hot and islandy with an infinity pool on the cliff (just because) and after I've picked up a funky little – OK, make that big – penthousey-type affair in London, what with having also taken a lease on that nice office-suite nearby… And bought a couple of cars, obviously (and a driver, too, because who needs the grief of trying to park near the office?) And after I've invested in some top-class non-snooty education for the spring-offs and (sod it) maybe a really cracking racehorse, or two (National Hunt, not flat), and, er… by then I'm down to, what, my last £25m? Which is when I set up The Flett Fun Foundation for the execution of many and various good works. Yes, I'm really pleased I've got it all so impressively sorted.

But after all that's been done it's mostly gone, isn't it? With just enough left to ensure the kids are cushioned through their terribly traumatic and debilitating eventual divorces from that pair of gold-digging minxes, and they've been encouraged to explore in therapy, at length and vocally, what an exceptionally rubbish mother I was to bring them up with the hideous burden of all this bloody money, then what's left, frankly?

See what happens? The stress is already getting to me, so I'm going away for a few days, just to clear my head, and then I'll start looking for a great PA I can really trust… Sorry, what do you mean by "But you haven't actually won the Lottery, have you?" OMG! Haven't I? Thank Christ! Mind you it's a shame about the infinity pool/racehorses/Fun Foundation, and the PA. Though I was starting to worry about how £45m doesn't really go very far these days.★

kathryn.flett@observer.co.uk

Kathryn Flett

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How to dress: draping

Jess Cartner-Morley, Lindsay Poulton, Michael Tait — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:05:00 GMT

Fashion editor Jess Cartner-Morley guides you through the latest trends

Jess Cartner-Morley

Lindsay Poulton

Michael Tait

Welcome to Somalishire

Lindsay Poulton, Michael Tait — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:31:00 GMT

Somali teenagers Nura and Ilias visit an authentic Somalian camp at Degmo in Wales

Lindsay Poulton

Michael Tait

John Lewis uses Guns N' Roses

Julia Finch — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 23:30:00 GMT

Retail chain chooses soft, folky version of the rock anthem Sweet Child o' Mine as the theme for its Christmas adverts

It's enough to make Guns N' Roses frontman Axl Rose's trademark bandana slip: the US rock supergroup's 1988 anthem "Sweet Child o' Mine" being used to sell fluffy sheepskin carpet slippers.

The stadium rock staple, ranked 196th in Rolling Stone magazine's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, has been chosen as the backing track to the John Lewis department store's Christmas TV advertising campaign, which gets its first airing – in a prime X Factor slot – tonight.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, John Lewis has not selected the original song, with Rose's rasping vocal, but an altogether gentler version, recorded by Swedish folk group Taken By Trees. It has spent £5m on the adverts, slightly less than last year, but a spokesman said the decline in the cost of advertising meant it had been able to purchase the same amount of media space as in 2008.

The 70-second ad, which will also show in 90 UK cinemas, features children unwrapping presents aimed at adults and magically transforming into grown-ups.

Retailers' Christmas TV campaigns are now well under way. Marks & Spencer, which is spending £10m, launched last Wednesday with an advert featuring a raft of celebrities including Joanna Lumley, Jennifer Saunders, James Nesbitt, Stephen Fry and Philip Glenister, reprising his role as Ashes to Ashes' Gene Hunt.

Tesco, which also went on screen last week, is using its new "family" fronted by Cold Feet actor Faye Ripley and Mark Addy of Full Monty fame. Morrisons is pinning its hopes on Top Gear's Richard "The Hamster" Hammond, while Sainsbury has a new Jamie Oliver advert. Asda has spurned all celebrities in favour of an altogether lower-cost alternative – adverts starring its own staff.

Iceland also goes on screen tonight with Jason Donovan and Coleen Nolan, having ditched its usual Iceland "mum", Kerry Katona, after she was pictured in a tabloid snorting cocaine.

Fashion group Next, however, has abandoned all TV advertising this year. Chief executive Simon Wolfson said he had decided against an expensive telly ad because "they get lost in all the noise" – and shoppers simply don't notice them.

Julia Finch

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Rail upgrades facing £750m cuts

Dan Milmo, Tim Webb — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 23:30:28 GMT

Thameslink and Crossrail services through the capital could be hit by Treasury crackdown on infrastructure projects

The £5.5bn Thameslink programme to upgrade one of Britain's busiest rail routes is facing £750m worth of cutbacks in a Treasury crackdown on costly infrastructure projects.

Senior Treasury mandarins have carried out a "value for taxpayers' money" test on the programme and believe that it should be scaled back. According to rail industry sources, the number of trains passing through central London at peak times could be cut from 24 services per hour under the original proposal to 20.

The cutbacks could have serious implications for the £16bn Crossrail programme to run trains from Heathrow airport to Canary Wharf under central London. Its future remains uncertain with the government under pressure to slash public spending, even though preliminary work has begun on the project. It is understood the same Treasury mandarins reviewing Thameslink are also examining when the "point of no return" for Crossrail will occur – the latest stage ministers could feasibly delay or redesign the project.

Officials are still committed to the Thameslink project. However, it is understood they have raised concerns that aspects can no longer be justified because of the economic downturn, which has reduced demand for rail travel. Looming cuts in public spending are also forcing officials to review all major public infrastructure projects, even those that are under way. "It's a question of common sense," one senior government source said. "You might not end up needing everything that was planned before the recession."

A recent answer by the junior transport minister Chris Mole to a parliamentary question has indicated problems with the programme, which will provide direct trains from south-east London and Kent into the capital and beyond, as well as increasing the frequency and size of the services. Mole said last week that an order for 1,100 new carriages on the route would be awarded next autumn, surprising industry observers who were expecting an order next summer. In a further answer last week, Mole indicated that the cost had risen, quoting a budget of up to £6bn.

According to one cost-cutting scenario being discussed, £400m could be clipped from the carriage order by reducing it to 950 units, with a further £150m saved by removing the automatic train operating technology that is needed to send 24 trains per hour through central London. Another £200m would be saved by redesigning the development work around London Bridge station, a major interchange. However, it is understood that these cutbacks would be needed to stop the project from exceeding its original cost of £5.5bn and will not lower the overall budget. Commuters would still get a better service under that scenario, because even with 20 trains per hour it would nearly quadruple the amount of space available for commuters.

Stephen Joseph, executive director of the Campaign for Better Transport, urged the government to protect public transport. "We need to give priority during a recession to supporting funding for sustainable transport and this move would take us in the wrong direction."

A DfT spokesman said the department remained committed to the 24 trains per hour target. "The DfT is fully committed to offering a 24 trains per hour Thameslink service through central London, and we continue to work with our project partners to deliver this."

Dan Milmo

Tim Webb

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