To gales of laughter from his company, he pointed out that he headed the entire ballet and opera company, a more senior post than Grigorovich had held.Grigorovich, who has refused to bow out quietly since his departure four years ago, is claiming copyright to the opening production of the classics La Bayadere and Spartacus, as well as to the rarely performed Raymonda.Yesterday, however, the 420 dancers, singers and musicians who flew to London on Sunday night were apparently unperturbed by the dispute. But he insisted that the show would go on – before aiming a sideways dig at the man often referred to as his predecessor.”I have never substituted [for] Mr Grigorovich because the person who substituted him was Mr [Alexei] Fadeyechev [the ballet's director],” he said. Having contacted the Russian Copyright Society, he appointed a London lawyer last Thursday. He is demanding about pounds 100,000 in royalties.Vasiliev admitted during the press launch at the Coliseum yesterday that Grigorovich might be entitled to the money and the matter was now the subject of negotiations.

But its former director Yuri Grigorovich chose the eve of the long-awaited London season to claim that three of the forthcoming productions were copies of his own work.Yesterday, the company’s new general director, Vladimir Vasiliev, was forced to admit that Grigorovich might be right.The 72-year-old former impresario, famous for his iron-fisted rule of the renowned company, had known about the planned performances for seven months, yet chose to make his claim only days before the first ballet is due to open at the Coliseum in London. Direct forensic evidence linking the men to the crimes is absent, with witnesses describing attackers as male, two white and one black. Their case was dismissed by the Court of Appeal in July 1993.. THE BOLSHOI Ballet’s triumphant return to Britain was marred yesterday by an unseemly squabble. The company had hoped to leave behind troubled times and recreate the excitement that reached its peak in the last Fifties when desperate English fans offered their homes in exchange for tickets.
After a six-year absence, and with its opera in tow for the first time, the Bolshoi was hoping for a rapturous and trouble-free tour. Clement Davis, Michael’s father, was “extremely disappointed”.The three black men were jailed for life in 1990 for crimes which left one man dead, but they have always vigorously protested their innocence.They were jailed at the Old Bailey for a series of attacks in December 1988, including murdering Peter Hurburgh.He was dragged from his car at gunpoint with his homosexual lover, tied up and beaten – which led to him having a fatal heart attack.The case mainly rested on three suspects turning prosecution witnesses.

The men, who have so far served 10 years in jail, will now continue their sentences.Family members and campaigners were “bitterly disappointed”.The judge, however, indicated the full appeal could be heard before the end of this year.Michael Davis’s brother, Lloyd, said: “It is extremely frustrating especially when you know Michael is innocent There is still a long way to go …justice will be done. Michael Davis, Randolph Johnson and Raphael Rowe have had their cases referred back to the Court of Appeal by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, the body responsible for reviewing suspected miscarriages of justice.
Mr Justice Smedley yesterday refused the application. THE M25Three – convicted of a murder and series of robberies near the motorway – were yesterday refused bail pending a full hearing of their appeals. No assistant housing officer to complete letting contract so she does the work.4pm: The 20 “overnight” cases still unfinished and now Mrs Lancaster must deal with the day’s mail of about a dozen inquiries from local MPs, Citizens Advice Bureau, complaints, requests for repairs, arrears and internal mail from housing director.5.15pm: Phones stop but work still outstanding so again Mrs Lancaster asks childminder to stay on.6.30pm: Leaves work.Gary Finn. Mrs Lancaster has appointment to show a family around a house. “They were usually pretty frustrated and became quite vicious.”1-2pm: Appointments each take up to half-an-hour.

Mrs Lancaster misses lunch.2.15pm: Cup of tea.2.30-3.45pm: Council priority is to re-fill empty homes. Mrs Lancaster has a queue of about a dozen tenants to see before office shuts at 1pm Deals with homeless first. Is abused on the phone by angry caller.9am: Front counter opens to callers. She cannot complete casework because she has no assistant to answer calls. Mrs Lancaster’s direct line rings every four to five minutes. There was no job share cover last Friday so up to 20 cases were left outstanding over the weekend.

He is not simply the Shylock stereotype we have known in the past. “The popular version of Fagin is Ron Moody’s from the musical Oliver,” said Mr Liddiment, “which, to be fair, is Lionel Bart’s version of Fagin Our Fagin is less of a caricature. This new Fagin will have a past as a magician and a family life in Prague.David Liddiment, ITV’s director of programmes, said most people’s image of the Svengali controlling a gang of thieving street urchins came from films rather than from Dickens so the adaptation was legitimate. Robert Lindsay will play Fagin as a more complex character with a background and history developed by Bleasdale. The new seven-hour drama is Bleasdale’s first work since leaving Channel 4, where he made his name. It will form the centrepiece of the commercial channel’s first autumn season without News at Ten.
The so-called “Bleasdale players” – Robert Lindsay, Julie Walters and Lindsay Duncan – will take leading roles in the production.

THE DRAMATIST Alan Bleasdale is updating Charles Dickens’ Fagin character in an ITV version of Oliver Twist that will dump Ron Moody’s “singing Shylock” in favour of a more rounded, less stereotypical Jew. He will emphasise the BBC’s responsibility to counterbalance the dangers of the digital age, in particular the emergence of an American global culture which is already apparent on satellite and cable channels.The BBC must become a digital “civilising force” which will act as a a cultural guardian of British values, he will say, repeating his his calls for an increase in the licence fee.. He anticipates the possible emergence of an “information poor” who are unable to pay for the “quality of information, insight and entertainment” enjoyed by richer viewers.Sir John, who will be replaced by Greg Dyke next spring, will voice his misgivings in the New Statesman Media Lecture in London. THE DIGITAL age will increase social division and undermine national culture, Sir John Birt, the director-general of the BBC, will warn tonight. Sir John, who has invested millions of pounds of public money into the BBC’s digital technology, will stress that “significant difficulties” need to be overcome if people and organisations are to benefit rather than suffer from the multi-channel digital revolution.
In a speech on the social, political and cultural consequences of the digital age entitled “The Prize and the Price”, Sir John will say that the instant availability of the “raucous, the vulgar and the sensationalist” will degrade the British national culture.While millions shared in the experience of watching events such as the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the Wimbledon final, the advent of multi-channel television could mean that fewer and fewer viewers watch the same programmes, Sir John will suggest.As viewers are forced to pay not only for sport or films but also drama and comedies, the digital age could increase social division, Sir John will say. An overhaul of the courts system for minors will see the time from arrest to sentence in England and Wales cut from 125 days to 71 days within the next 12 months..

But only 14 per cent of the respondents cited concern for the victims as the most important factor in persuading them not to take part in criminal activity.The board published the research with its first annual report, which claimed major successes in its attempts to speed the youth justice system. But the study also revealed a sizeable proportion of children who retained a deep respect for the law and a far more conservative attitude to sex, drugs and wild living than previous surveys.
Half the children surveyed said under-age sex was always unacceptable and seven out of ten questioned claimed that they could “say with absolute certainty” that they had never broken the law in any respect.Taking the drug ecstasy was seen as wrong by 84 per cent of youngsters and 71 per cent disagreed with taking cannabis.Respect for the law was reflected in the children’s fears of getting caught, with 75 per cent believing that a young person who stole a car was likely to be caught by the police. Mori researchers, who carried out the survey, found that 64 per cent of youngsters aged between 11 and 16 did not see under-age drinking as wrong and only 29 per cent thought that it was “always wrong” to use physical violence. FOUR IN 10 children aged 15 and 16 admit to having been involved in criminal activity in the past year, according to research released last night. A survey carried out for the Government’s Youth Justice Board found a high tolerance of under-age drinking and the use of violence as a means of retribution. I am sick to death of working in a healthcare system where we let patients down day after day,” Dr Neal said.The meeting of 550 representatives of 120,000 doctors voted overwhelmingly for motions condemning inequalities in the NHS and demanding that rationing decisions be based on an accurate assessment of patients’ needs and be subject to public debate..

It was their insistence on seeing people as groups or classes rather than as individuals. It was their desire to control from the centre rather than allowing decision- making to take place at a lower level.”This, she maintains today, is still the big problem with Labour. “He said: `You’re obviously a Liberal, why don’t you join the party and get involved?’ `Oh,’ I said, `but I’ve always voted Labour. I felt like I owned him, so I would write long letters to him all the time, about issues that were affecting me and my family – class sizes at the local school because my daughter was there; VAT on listed buildings because I lived in one; health because I had an aunt who hadn’t been admitted to an intensive care unit because she was over 70…”This went on for about two years, until one day the doorbell rang, and there was Paddy Ashdown.

I was really impressed by that, so in 1983, although I still considered myself a Labour supporter, I voted for him, the person, not the party.”When he got in, I felt like he really was my MP. Ballard realised that she could not, with the tools at her disposal, alter the course of this family’s lives.Disillusioned, she married, and the pair moved, inspired by the mid-Seventies television sitcom The Good Life, to the West Country, where they set about the great self-sufficiency experiment. As the pleasures of life as a wife and mother waned, a local wannabe MP started attracting Ballard’s attention. “Westland was wanting to sell helicopters to Chile and Paddy Ashdown made a principled stand against it, which could have been a big vote-loser as Westland was a major employer in the Yeovil constituency. She wasn’t quite sure what it was that repelled her, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to join the Socialist Club.After she graduated, she became a social worker in Waltham Forest in London’s East End. At 21, and with little experience, her job was to deal with at-risk children. She worked with a particular family which was headed by a single mother who at 19 had three children.

While she considered herself a socialist, something stopped her from joining the biggest, most influential organisation that was available to LSE students. Here she threw herself into the radical political ferment that suffused the place, campaigning against apartheid, against Vietnam, picketing Miss World, behaving in every way like the kind of student who typified the LSE of the late Sixties Except in one respect. While she recognised that she had been given a great opportunity, she felt that her privilege was a burden. Riven by the contrast between her own school life and that of the local children in state education, she became a rebel, taking it upon herself to challenge the complacency of the people around her who took so much for granted.In this same spirit she rejected English at Oxford, the course her teachers had mapped out for her in favour of psychology at the London School of Economics.

The family moved to Wales where Jackie embarked on her final year of primary education at a tiny village school.So impressed were her teachers by her academic prowess – a fact that, she is at pains to emphasise, had more to do with the superiority of the Scottish education system than her own genius – that they decided to do something they’d never done before, and enter their prodigy for a scholarship to the private boarding school, Monmouth School for Girls.Her attendance at the school was the catalyst which jolted her into political awareness At 12 she realised that “life was crushingly unfair”. Since, in the Fifties, the days of the independent forester were very much numbered, the family was already reduced to living in a caravan when it became apparent that there was no more wood to cut in Scotland. And so this woman, who has been in Parliament for only two years but is already certain that for the good of all she must become its prime minister sooner rather than later, starts to tell a story that is ludicrous in its exemplary depiction of a life that has been lived as a political journey.Raised for her first 10 years in rural Scotland, Jackie Ballard was born the daughter of a woodcutter. Jackie Ballard sounds far more like a socialist than Tony Blair does. Why is it that she defines herself as a liberal?This, Ballard admits, is a complicated question, one that can only be fully answered with a quick run through her life story. The truth is that Ballard, on the left of the Lib Dems, has far more in common with the Labour left than she does with the right wing of her own party. But it is worth noting that Ballard’s declaration that the coalition has stalled and her pinpointing of social justice as one of the key areas of her disagreement with Labour was made on the very day that 44 Labour MPs called for a rejection of the centre- left coalition with the Liberal Democrats, so that Labour’s future as a “democratic socialist party fighting for social justice” can be assured.These are funny old times for British party politics.

The nose of the car is perhaps a little aggressive looking, but at least it helps clear the fast lane.
Our 2.5-litre, straight-six 523i SE, with metallic paint, electric sunroof, on-board computer and alloy wheels, would set you back pounds 27,880 (the 5-Series starts with the pounds 24,000 520 and rises to pounds 43,000 for the V8-engined 540). That’s slightly less than the new Jag, a good deal less than a Mercedes E-Class, and on a par with the Audi A6.Having driven them all, as well as the Alfa 166 and Lexus GS300, the BMW is the car I would invest my own hard-earned cash in. On the head side of the argument are its legendary reliability, slow depreciation and exceptional build quality But the 5-Series will steal your heart too. Combining rear-wheel drive, a blissfully free-revving engine, acres of interior space and a ride that blends cosseting waft with sporty stiffness, the Munich-meister is a driver’s car that passengers will relish.There will be those who deride the BMW 5-Series for its Germanic perfection and middle-management aspirations, but nothing I’ve driven balances driver thrills (switch off the traction control and hang that tail out) and performance with comfort and practicality in a package this fiscally prudent.Road testIf you would like to take part, write to The Verdict, The Independent Magazine, One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5DL, giving a contact phone number, your address and details of the type of vehicle, if any, you drive. For most cars, participants must be over 26, and have a clean driving licence.Leonard Hollingsworth62, teacher, from Bexley, Kent.Currently drives a Rover 600″The acceleration is lovely and creamy, definitely a rival for the new Jaguar S-Type The styling is nicely understated, timeless. It’s probably a feature of most modern cars, but I don’t like the fact that when you are driving you can’t see the bonnet It’s nice and airy inside and the headroom is enormous. If I turned up at school in this I’d certainly get some playground cred.”Chris Cawte37, company director, from Sydenham, London.

Currently drives an Audi A4 Quattro”It’s very accomplished, a fantastic engine, but I don’t think it’s as well screwed together as my car. It doesn’t scorch along and there’s a split second before the throttle takes up. It felt like the kind of car that someone a fraction older than me would own The interior trim is a bit plastic. I feel a lot of people who buy BMWs don’t know a lot about cars, but buy on perceived reputation.”Lynne Pearce43, health worker from Hayes, Kent. Currently drives a Ford FiestaSian Pearce16, Lynne’s daughterLynne: “It took a bit of getting used to after the Fiesta. The acceleration was wonderful but the driving position was uncomfortable because I’m quite short. The fixtures and fittings were excellent.”Sian: “It’s very smooth but, with the new-car smell and Mum’s driving, I felt slightly nauseous.

It’s got a very stylish image, though.”Patrick Reynolds52, accountant, from Sevenoaks, Kent. Currently drives a Volvo V70″As a Volvo driver I found the turning circle very good, but although it’s probably more powerful than my car, I didn’t drive it and go `Wow!’ It’s got lots of bells and whistles inside – there are all sorts of buttons on the wheel and the doors, no idea what they do. I like a sunroof and the air conditioning is good for my hayfever. It’s a nice ride, lower than my Volvo, but I wouldn’t buy one, because I need an estate car.”. Digital cameras promise quality pictures but without the use of film and and the hassle of processing.

You simply take the picture and then have the option of viewing it on a TV screen, printing it out (either yourself or professionally), or downloading it to a computer for storing or e-mailing. The camera can be constantly reused without its memory running out, and you can view pictures immediately after taking them. But are they as good as they appear? Our testers tried out a different camera each, and gave their opinion on the digital future. Sophy Rickett is an artist more used to using Bronica large-format cameras in her work. She went out and about with the Nikon Coolpix 950
“It looks great, and everyone was interested in it.

The Alternative Travel Group (01865 315681) offers a variety of trips for independent travellers with prices including flights from pounds 650.DO I HAVE TO GET DRUNK?There are no cellar rules as such, although a basic etiquette might usefully be observed. For instance, it may be a tribute to your host’s wine, but it is generally not wise to ask (as one customer did) if you can dig up a vine and bring it home with you. Nor would it be recommended to thank your host for his wonderful wines and in the same breath tell him that they’re much more expensive than you could ever afford. Try not to pour away samples of Batard-Montrachet or spit out into the producer’s new oak barrels. And, Germans, beware the little old French lady who, before you enter the low stone entrance to her cellar, only tells you to mind your head once she’s ascertained that you’re not German.If you swallow every sample offered at every winery visited, the chances are you’re going to end up the worse for wear, albeit pleasurably. It’s useful, though not essential, to learn a little bit about tasting wine beforehand by equipping yourself with one of the basic texts on wine-tasting (see below).

Failing that, practise by following these basic procedures: swirl the wine in the glass, look at the colour, sniff the wine, linger over the aroma, taste it by “chewing” if you can, and try spitting Practising in the bathroom with water is the simplest way It’s not rude to spit out Professionals do it all the time. But if you’re spitting in a cellar, look for a bucket or drain or go outside. It may be too late to ask once you’ve got a mouthful of plonk you’re not keen to swallow.You don’t have to buy and shouldn’t feel pressurised If you don’t like the wine, don’t buy it You won’t thank yourself when you get home if you do. If you do like the wine, and you have room, think about buying between six bottles and a full case of 12, bearing in mind that you may be visiting even better cellars. If your fellow travellers also like the wine, you can always split a case You may be able to pay with plastic but don’t rely on it Growers’ faces always seem to light up at the sight of cash. Something to do with tax, perhaps?DO I HAVE TO PAY DUTY TO BRING WINE BACK?Not any more The abolition of duty- free from 1 July makes no difference. You’re basically allowed to bring back more booze for your own personal consumption than you can carry without severely damaging the rear axle of your vehicle.

To be precise, it’s 90 litres of table wine, of which not more than 60 litres may be sparkling wine, 20 litres of fortified wine, 110 litres of beer and 10 litres of spirits. If you want to bring back more, the onus is on you to show that it’s not for your own personal consumption or that of your family. To give you some idea of whether or not it’s worth bringing wine home, excise duty you save on table wine is pounds 13.47 a case of 12 bottles, pounds 17.97 on sherry, port and madeira between 15 per cent and 22 per cent alcohol, and pounds 19.19 on champagne and sparkling wine. With good cellar-door prices to start with, the champagne cellars of small growers can be particularly good places to buy. The saving on a case of spirits at 40 per cent alcohol is pounds 65.72.IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE I SHOULD KNOW?Key books include: Buying Wine in France, the Traveller’s Guide to Chateaux and Vineyards, pounds 7.99, Mitchell Beazley; Mitchell Beazley’s handy regional pocket-guides and the wine atlas series, which includes France, Spain, Italy, California. Beginner’s Guide to Understanding Wine by Michel Schuster, Simon & Schuster Amazon bookshop on the Internet.

Discovering Wine, Joanna Simon, pounds 14.99, Mitchell Beazley.HIGH FIVESMost attractive: the competition for this award is intense but my accolade goes to Rolfe and Lois Mills’ breathtaking Rippon Vineyard, whose vines skirt the shores of Lake Wanaka, one of the world’s deepest inland lakes, against the backdrop of New Zealand’s Southern Alps. The red Burgundy- style Pinot Noir in this up-and-coming region of Otago is pretty delicious here too. Fuller’s sell it.Most remote: a two-hour flight from Buenos Aires and a three-hour drive through the stunning rock formations of the Calchaques Valley will get you to Colome. At 2,400m, it is not only the world’s most remote vineyard but probably the highest too.

Ian’s dawn whimpering had saved us from a similar fate, but we were homeless and, because Dad had not been insured, penniless.The second event happened only a few months after that traumatic landslide incident and is more surreal. I remember telling my dad that I had seen some hippos walking across the golf course which led down to the shores of Lake Victoria, in front of our pink bougainvillaea-wrapped house in Jinja, Uganda. He told me that I was talking nonsense.Throughout my weird nomadic childhood, my parents, Donald and Luba, provided me with a series of stories about their lives which have contributed to what has become, for my family, a soap opera of epic proportions. Last year I was commissioned by the BBC to direct a very personal film which would chronicle my parents’ lives and, of course, my own upbringing This has taken me on an odyssey to Russia, China and Africa.

The extent to which I have embellished their stories over the years with my own romantic, and mischievous, imagination has been matched only by the wide disparity between their versions of their lives before they met and fell in love in Shanghai.I have often toyed with fictionalising the Donald and Luba story. This would have made the blurred facts easier to integrate; it would have made the embellishments simpler to disguise. Where the memory lapsed or the facts were boring, I could have just invented incidents to keep things interesting. But in choosing to make a documentary, I have been forced to arrive at some sort of truth – not least because I am featuring my mother, who is still alive, my immediate family, whose hungry curiosity has created much of the mythology, and my youngest brother, who has seen and heard almost everything I have.For this investigation into the murky areas of my family’s history, I have had a significant watchdog: my 21-year-old daughter Kate is my collaborator. Apart from her talent as a film-maker (she is in her final year at university studying film and television), Kate has been a crucial witness to my genealogical dig. She has pressurised me, sometimes unwittingly, to avoid doctoring the truth for dramatic effect and her reaction to our joint confrontation with the reality of our family’s drama has been a vital tool in telling the story accurately.I had never visited Kiev, where my maternal grandparents were born, nor had I been to Harbin in Manchuria, where my mother was born, nor Shanghai, where my parents were married. I was very young when we lived in Hong Kong and Uganda, and I yearned to make some kind of atavistic attempt to retrace my mother’s mysterious journey from Manchuria, through to its tragic denouement in a bedsit in Earl’s Court.

But there is a potential drawback. Such are the town’s attractions that its population has soared to 60,000 – nearly half the total for the entire borough – and each man, woman and child seems to drive a car.
However, Guildford is doing more than most towns to combat the problem.

It can even boast that rarest of breeds, a car-hating estate agent, in the person of Matthew Burns, who lives in Guildford “We do have a lot of traffic,” he admits. “But the council has launched a major drive to get cars out of the historic town centre.”And alleged traffic congestion hasn’t done much harm to the property market. Turnover has been brisk, says Mr Burns, a partner in Burns & Webber.”Values have increased about 10-15 per cent for cheaper properties and a minimum 20 per cent for family homes in the pounds 400,000 to pounds 500,000 range. Even in the 1980s recession, when other areas were suffering, Guildford was doing well.”A local resident for 30 years, Mr Burns also praises the area’s educational system: “My children attend local schools We have superb state as well as private schools. If a house just falls into the Guildford catchment area, it gets a higher price.”"This area attracts buyers moving out of south-west London areas such as Teddington, Twickenham and Barnes, where prices have gone sky high, and in relation to which Guildford looks very attractive,” says Keith Remington, the manager of Curchods. “We have lots of investors, many of whom buy one-bedroom units which offer an opportunity to commit a smaller amount of capital.

Being half an hour from both London and the coast makes it very attractive.”The town is also a great place to work in, as Michael and Marion Hardman can testify. They live in Bletchworth but have their business in Guildford and send their three children to school there.The Hardmans, who run a public relations and publishing business, used to be based in Dorking.”We moved our office to Guildford because it has a very vibrant centre, the shops and restaurants are magnificent, and the schools are bloody good,” says Mr Hardman. “Our sons are in West Horsley, and our daughter is in Bramley.”Mr Hardman frequently attends meetings in London and motors to see a major client in south-west London. “It’s faster to central London from Guildford than from many London suburbs.

The train takes only 30 minutes to Waterloo, and the A3 is very fast to Wandsworth,” he notes.He’s not altogether happy with the local council’s attempt to tame Guildford’s traffic congestion: “The traffic management system is not good. The high street is practically closed except for certain times, and the one-way system doesn’t work I park a half mile from the office. I could park closer but I enjoy the walk through the old town.”The soaring car population doesn’t worry him. “Traffic is not that bad anyway,” he says.The Low-DownOverview: For an introduction to the area, climb to the top of what remains of the castle for a panoramic view which reveals, among other things, rooftop flats atop a town centre shopping and car-park complex.Transport: The A3 links London with Portsmouth and, via the nearby M25, Heathrow and Gatwick. Train services include the Gatwick-Reading line as well as the main London-Portsmouth route. London Road station links Guildford with major towns en route to West Croydon.Prices: Flats are available for between pounds 50,000 for a studio, and pounds 95,000 for three bedrooms Houses start at about pounds 140,000. Larger country houses start at pounds 500,000.Properties: The range is from “modest to magnificent”, says Michael Hardman, editor of the recently launched Living in Surrey magazine.

“In the 1970s and 1980s many houses were converted into flats and bedsits, and many are now being converted back.”Wash-basin fetishists: Burns & Webber is selling a detached four-storey period house currently arranged as a B&B, with nearly two dozen rooms, car parking and a large, unused swimming pool for pounds 495,000.Newcomers: Milford St James in Godalming, four miles from Guildford, has refurbished flats in a Georgian Grade II mansion and new-build cottages, town houses and flats. A few virgin and second-hand (but never occupied) flats are still available from developer St James (Berkeley Homes partnered with Thames Water), from pounds 175,000. Phase 2 of Crest’s St Luke’s Park has five-bedroom detached houses and three-storey townhouses with four and five bedrooms. Lampard is developing 10 luxury flats near the river.Boomtown: Guildford businesses and employers include Cornhill, Guardian Royal Exchange, Ericsson, Colgate-Palmolive, Unigate, ARCO, the National Grid and the Government Office for the South East The University of Surrey anticipates rapid expansion. Nearly half (47 per cent) of the population is professional, intermediate or manual skilled, against a UK average of 40 per cent.Include me out: Yvonne Arnaud theatre features pre-West End shows. Organisations and events include the Rose and Sweet Pea Show, Ambient Green Picnic, charity duck races, model steam and canal boat rallies, and a folk and blues festival.Estate agents: Burns & Webber, 01483 440800; Clarke Gammon 01483 880900; Curchods, 01483 458800; FPDSavills, 01483 796820.. Location

797 3rd Avenue (on 49th), Tel: 00 1 212 753 1530
View and clienteleOn my visit, the scenery was pure midtown Manhattan.

What this delightful old lady made of me – a middle-aged man with a shock of unkempt white hair, eyes permanently glued to an electronic device, carrying a furry pole in his left hand and babbling excitedly to his tall and very blonde daughter, also training an electronic device on me – I will never know.This was a bizarre, moving encounter. I couldn’t help imagining my mother crying in a room like this when she learnt that her brother Alex had died of cancer. Their father dead, their mother thousands of miles away in Harbin. No more Alex to share her rickshaw ride to school every morning. No more Alex to keep her company at night while her sisters danced with strange men in the nightclub down the road.Amazingly, there are still nightclubs lining the Avenue Joffre.

We tracked down the Casanova Club – another name from my mother’s past And we saw the classrooms where she learnt to speak English. According to the schoolmaster we talked to, nothing has changed there in 75 years. Roaming around its corridors and peering into the rooms, with their rows of wooden desks, I could believe him. Apart from one or two portraits of Chinese heroes on the walls, the school reminded me of the classrooms of my own Scottish boarding school. The Russian Orthodox church Mum visited is now the Shanghai Stock Exchange, but the church she seems to remember most from that era is the Anglican Cathedral, which has now been converted into the legislative meeting room for the provincial government During the Cultural Revolution it was a cinema. The fantasies and propaganda of Chinese “liberation” cinema were played out in the holy venue of Luba’s most poignant post- war memory: her wedding.By a quirk of fate, Luba met Donald after the Second World War in the offices of BAT, where they were both working in 1947. He had returned from his intelligence duties in Hong Kong, which had included the supervision of war crime executions.

To understand the bartender’s lot, you have to understand one thing: while you are relaxing, they are working as hard as anyone in the country You unwind; they walk (and run) several miles an evening. You have to decide where to eat dinner; they have to make hundreds of perfect drinks, some requiring lengthy preparation and microscopically fine judgement. You’re drinking with friends; they stay sober and have to be nice to dozens of strangers – even the loudmouthed Jerks In Suits who demand instant attention and then leave a pounds 1 tip on a pounds 150 tab.
Drinking culture in Britain has come a long way from beer and Babycham, but bartending remains a social, service-based job. Good publicans, in the old days, were treated with respect by their customers. In many of the hippest bars, newly affluent drinkers may treat the people working there as servants. Despite the rise of cocktail culture, the creativity of bartenders has yet to be widely recognised.Yet they’re expected to do more than ever, and above all they must be quick This is easy for an order of a beer and a G&T.

But when the drinks are complicated, speed requires dexterity, precision, encyclopaedic knowledge and boundless physical stamina. They must retain their composure under working conditions that make a trading floor look like a Zen garden. And they must be polite even when the customer is unbearably loud, unspeakably rude, or oafishly sexist.These pictures show the glamorous world of modern bar-life from a different perspective – the perspective of sobriety, hard work and economic necessity. If you ever go to bars, you owe them your full attention.Captions: Where: Leisure Lounge, Holborn, LondonWhen: 26 March, midnightBehind the bar: Eddie Santos, 20″It’s a Sixties, Seventies theme night A lot of drunk people Good atmosphere. They love drinking, man! They love to dress up Sixties and Seventies style as well The majority come in wigs, flares and so on It’s a fun night They’re a lively bunch actually. They like to chat when they’re drunk, but mainly they come just to have a dance and get drunk on vodka and Red Bull Some crowds you get, they’re a bit funny, rude as well But most of them are all right.

You don’t really deal with people on a one-to-one basis because it is quite busy and you don’t get that much time to mix with them. The only time you ever chat is when they come to you for a drink: you might have a two-minute conversation. At the time this picture was taken, things were starting to warm up. Most of them had probably just come in.”Where: Floyd’s Sports Bar, Charlton Athletic FC, LondonWhen: 3 April, 1.45pmBehind the bar: Kelly Luby, 19″Before the match they come in and then again after the game to drown their sorrows or celebrate. They’re like, `I knew it, we’re useless.’ They often cheer up after a few drinks They drink more when we win If we lose, they’re normally gone by eight or nine But if we win, I’ve seen them staying right till close.

He rises every morning at 3.30am for the first of his four daily training sessions, and is driven on by what his mother told him two years ago, that he would one day beat Rhodes and become world champion.
Matthews stepped into the fight on Monday when the World Boxing Organisation middleweight champion, Bert Schenk, pulled out of his defence against Rhodes because of injury.Confusion reigns as to whether the full title or an interim version will be contested on the night. What is certain is that Matthews – nicknamed “The Method Man” after one of the members of his favourite group – intends to seize his opportunity.”The Method Man had always got a different style, he’s a one-off,” Matthews said “That’s me I’m going to box and punch. I’m going to grind Rhodes down and knock him out.”Matthews, beaten just once in 21 professional fights, is looking forward to fighting Rhodes “I jumped at it I can beat him. Ryan Rhodes is a good fighter, he’s a good puncher, but he’s no good on the back foot I’m going to come forward and get him.”. UNFANCIED BELGIUM made an excellent start to their Davis Cup World Group quarter-final against Switzerland in Brussels yesterday as the 18- year-old Xavier Malisse earned a straight-sets victory against Lorenzo Manta in the opening match. Malisse took two hours to beat Manta, who reached the Wimbledon fourth round last month, 6-4, 6-0, 7-6 .
After taking the first set 6-4 with a single break of service, Malisse sped through the second set but eased up in the third.Manta broke him for a 3-1 lead, but Malisse swiftly broke back and went on to win the tie-break 7-1 after the Swiss man served three double-faults.”I didn’t play my best tennis but at least I was fairly consistent,” Malisse said.”Winning the first match is very important and I hope my victory will give the rest of the team confidence.”Russia took a 1-0 lead over Slovakia in their quarter-final in Moscow when Marat Safin came from a set down to beat Karol Kucera 2-6, 6-4, 6- 2, 6-4.Slovakia’s top player, who is ranked 13 in the world, started powerfully, breaking the 37th-ranked Safin twice to take the opener 6-2 in 25 minutes.But the big Russian fought back with his serve and a solid game from the baseline. He took advantage of some sloppy shots by Kucera in the ninth game of the second set to edge 5-4 ahead and held on to level the match.After trailing Kucera 2-0 in the third Safin reeled off six straight games to take control of the match.Kucera again took an early lead in the fourth set, 3-0 and 4-1, but the 19-year-old Russian refused to be rattled and, cheered on by a partisan 5,000-strong crowd, broke back and went on to win the match in two hours and 10 minutes..

A HARD day’s night was in store for the Champagne Mumm Admirals Cup crews yesterday as they began a 36 hour, 225-mile slog down and up the south coast. There was an air of grudging reluctance to leave their berths just after lunch and line up for a beat into the 12 to 15 knot breeze just south of west, but there was no shortage of typical cut and thrust as they zig- zag tacked their way westwards close to the Isle of Wight shore. Gear- changing between medium heavy number one and number three headsails kept foredeck men busy.
The first leg to keep them cold and damp on the windward rail was nearly 60 miles to the East Shambles buoy off Portland Bill, but however many fillings had been rattled on the upwind way, they would rather that than no wind at all. A big softening-off was a real possibility.The Royal Ocean Racing Club management was ready to shorten the course at any one of several points as the fleet returned up-channel.

With every place in each of three classes costing 2.5 points, that is a serious chunk from the total of 12 on offer from eight races. Britain was leading the nine-team event, though the French are running only two boats by just 5.5 points over the defending champions, the United States, with the Netherlands and Germany also within 10 points. And well in the hunt are the two rival teams from Italy: the pre-start favourites, Europe, just pipping their home rivals on Italy.On their own home water, the Chernikeeff team did not look like England’s glory in the opening tussle. The Dutch, on Innovision and the Italian- Kiwi line-up on Brava, sailing for Europe, were in front by the time the big boats reached the Needles.

But they had been shown the way by Jo Richards and Graham Deegan, sailing for Peter Harrison, sponsor of the British team but competing against them under a Commonwealth flag in his own boat, also named Chernikeeff.Nor were things much better in the Sydney 40s, where a dour Chris Law was struggling in sixth at the Needles in Nautica, as were the boys on the Mumm 36 Barlo Plastics.Stevie Benjamin on America’s Blue Yankee was leading the 40s, Tony Gale had a handy lead for Germany on the 36ft Jeantex.n Vincenzo Onorato has replaced Enrico Chieffi, skipper of Europe’s 36- footer Moby Lines, with the 1986 America’s Cup skipper Mauro Pelaschier after a dispute.. NEW TESTING methods designed to detect the use of a life-threatening drug among cyclists is to be implemented during the Tour de France, which was described yesterday as “almost clean” of doping. Perflurocarbone (PFC) is dangerous because “it can destroy the body’s organs,” said Dr Leon Schattenberg, head of the anti-doping commission of the Union Cycliste Internationale, the sport’s governing body. He added that, with the approval of the French sports ministry, riders would be tested on Monday.
The president of the UCI, Hein Verbruggen, said that it should be made clear, however, that this was not anti-doping but a health check.