Quantcast
Viewing all 17400 articles
Browse latest View live

Ben Watt – Hendra: New music

Former half of Everything But The Girl, Ben Watt, finally gets round to following up his 1983 solo album

Reading on mobile? Click here to listen
Since he stopped making music as Everything But The Girl with his wife Tracey Thorn back in 1999, Ben Watt's been keeping busy by running his own label (Buzzin' Fly) and establishing himself as a respected DJ. One thing he hadn't been doing, however, was getting on with his solo career, which had taken a bit of a backseat following the release of his debut album, North Marine Drive, back in 1983. So to rectify that he took twelve months off to complete two projects; his second book, Romany and Tom, and his second solo album, Hendra. Described as a "folk-rock record in an electronic age", it was inspired in part by the sudden death of his sister and a newfound desire to get back to working with words and music for himself and not simply helping to craft songs for other people. "Words, beats and notes - it's all we have. It's just a question of playing them in what feels like the right order at the right time, and at the moment, 'Hendra' just feels right," he explains. This melding of guitar and electronics is reflected in the album's two main collaborators, Bernard Butler and Ewan Pearson (there's also a cameo appearance from Pink Floyd's David Gilmour), and also in the album's title track, premiered here.

Hendra is released on 14 April via Unmade Road. Reported by guardian.co.uk 10 hours ago.

Joanna Dennehy: The girl from a loving home who turned into a serial killer

For a woman who professed to kill for fun, the business of murder for Joanna Dennehy was an intensely serious act. As she lifted the knife like Norman Bates in Psycho and plunged it into her final victim, she showed little emotion and appeared not to enjoy herself. “Oh, look, you’re bleeding,” she told John Rogers, who nearly died from his wounds. “I’d better do some more.” Reported by Independent 4 hours ago.

Fans sue over Michael Jackson's death – can I sue Oasis for Be Here Now?

Jacko's fans have successfully won a case for 'emotional distress' caused by their hero's death. So what other traumas could you seek compensation for?

Of course, we all grieve in different ways. And for some people, the only true way to alleviate the black suffering in their heart when someone whose albums they quite liked dies is to sue. At least, that's what 34 Michael Jackson fans in France did when their hero died in 2009 – suing his doctor, Conrad Murray, for "emotional distress". Amazingly, five of them won their case and now stand to receive a whopping payout of, er, one euro (88p) each.

Clearly, nothing can ever say "I'm sorry for the loss of the world's greatest popstar" quite like enough cash to buy a Toffee Crisp and still see change. But can events in pop really be traumatic? And if so, should I contact my lawyers about the following cases that soured my life?

**Oasis releasing Be Here Now **

Forget deaths or band breakups: few things have caused me as much "emotional distress" as wasting part of my teenage years listening to The Girl in the Dirty Shirt and pretending that it was an OK song. I plan to sue What Records in Hinckley for making me queue outside until it opened the morning it came out. And NME for giving it a good review. In fact, much like phone hacking or CIA rendition, the more you delve into this story, the more you realise everyone was complicit.

*How much could I win?*

Given that CDs were about £17.99 a pop back then, my money back would be fair recompense.

**Eamon Hamilton leaving British Sea Power**

* *

Like JFK or Diana's death, we all remember where we were the day Brooklyn Vegan blogged about British Sea Power's keyboardist leaving. The trauma was shortlived – Hamilton formed his own band and British Sea Power continued sounding virtually the same as they did before – but I won't mention that in court.

*How much could I win?*

If Jackson's death is worth 88p, then my lawyers might find it tricky arguing for the fortune I so clearly deserve from this.

**Moe Tucker joining the Tea party **

Maybe I shouldn't have been shocked, er, "emotionally distressed", to see the Velvet Underground's drummer appearing at a Tea party rally in 2010. It's not as if playing standup beats in an avant-garde 60s band means you should automatically be in favour of more progressive tax schemes, after all. But she once sent me a signed picture of her and ... I don't know, it just made me really sad, all right?

*How much could I win?*

A statement from Moe saying that it was all part of a subversive art project would be enough for me. Reported by guardian.co.uk 7 hours ago.

Girl Guides offers concession to Christians in row over dropping God from pledge

Christian members of the Girl Guides will be allowed to mention God before they take the organisation's new pledge in a compromise backed by the Church of England's Synod
 
 
 
  Reported by Telegraph.co.uk 4 hours ago.

My sister, the multiple murderer

BBC Local News: Cambridgeshire -- Growing up with the girl who would go on to kill Reported by BBC Local News 12 hours ago.

Lady Howard to talk love at charity event

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Lady Howard to talk love at charity event
LADY Sandra Howard is one of two east Kent authors taking part in a Valentine-themed evening at Folkestone's Oxfam bookshop tomorrow night. Love@Oxfam, at the Sandgate Road shop, will feature novelist Lady Howard discussing love through the ages with historian Amy Licence. Lady Howard, the wife of former Shepway MP and Conservative leader Lord Howard of Lympne, has had four novels published. Her forthcoming book, Tell The Girl, draws heavily on Lady Howard's experiences as a model in the... Reported by Folkestone Herald 8 hours ago.

Girl pulling rabbit faces is cracking China up. Odd rabbit-face post is currently the hottest trend on Chinese social media

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Girl pulling rabbit faces is cracking China up. Odd rabbit-face post is currently the hottest trend on Chinese social media
An absurd gif posted by a girl in China on social networking site Sina Weibo has had the nation in stitches.The series of animations show the girl pulling nine different ‘rabbit’ faces and is currently the hottest post on Sina Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter. Reported by MailOnline 21 hours ago.

'Nothing to eat but sugar beet, nettles ... and a pet rabbit'

This is Lincolnshire --

Next year is the 70th anniversary of the world's first humanitarian airlift, which flew from Lincolnshire air bases to drop food to the starving Dutch in The Netherlands. As a schools programme to mark the occasion gathers pace, Paul Whitelam talks to a retired Lincolnshire schoolteacher, who as a girl in 1945 war-ravaged Holland, witnessed the miraculous delivery of life-saving provisions...

Born in the same year Adolf Hitler came to power, Theodora Tielrooy grew up in a happy Dutch household in The Hague.

That was until the Nazis goose-stepped into The Netherlands in May 1940 and turned her world upside down.

Like other schoolchildren and their families across Europe, her life went from a succession of swimming and piano lessons to a grim existence eating sugar beet and nettles to keep hunger at bay.

Thanks to the Allied food aid, Thea survived the war and went on to enjoy a successful teaching career, including at Billinghay and Dogdyke from 1980 to 1994.

She married John Coleman and has a daughter, two granddaughters and a great granddaughter.

Now 80 and living in Rugby, Mrs Coleman will be forever grateful to the food drops by the RAF and the US Air Force and has written of her life during the war in a book called 'My Story - 1940-1945'

The RAF's Operation Manna took place from April 29 to May 7, 1945. This, together with the Americans' Operation Chowhound in the first eight days of May, 1945, saw in excess of 11,000 tons of food aid dropped over the still-occupied western Netherlands.

The missions came after between 16,000 and 20,000 Dutch men, women and children died of starvation in the winter of 1944/45.

At the time of the airlift, Mrs Coleman was living in the Dutch countryside to the west of Amsterdam.

She said: "We jumped up and down when we saw the planes dropping the food. We had been eating sugar beet for breakfast, lunch and dinner and stinging nettles for greens.

"I can still see to this day the sight of my pet white rabbit lying there skinned on the table ready for the pot.

"There was also one time when a cat was cooked – I refused to eat that.

"The Germans had to trust that food dropped by the Allies meant food and not hidden men or weapons.

"Anyway, after eight days there was peace and ships delivered food – from Sweden as well – beautiful white bread.

"Be assured that I and the Dutch population will never forget how you fought for our freedom."

Earlier in the war, Mrs Coleman's family had sheltered Jewish friends in The Hague.

Her father Dirk, an accountant, and sister Willy were members of the Dutch Resistance.

They went on the run after a sickening betrayal – the whole family had to flee and were separated for the rest of the war.

Mrs Coleman said: "There was always lots of people coming and going at our house.

"One particular Jewish man called Mr Sanders, who was very important because he helped other Jews flee to Switzerland and Spain, fell in love with a girl who was also hiding.

"The Germans were looking for Mr Sanders and somehow they got the girl and arrested her mother.

"They said they would release her mother if she played Mr Sanders into their hands.

"So they met in the main square in The Hague and she kissed him – like a Judas kiss – and he was arrested and taken to Gestapo HQ.

"Everyone then had to disappear. In the end, Mr Sanders was only recognisable by his teeth.

"Whether he'd taken his cyanide pill I don't know.

"The Germans were furious about what had been going on at our house.

"I went back a few years ago and I could see the indentations on the door from their gun butts."

Lincolnshire bases involved in Operation Manna included Wickenby and Scampton.

In September this year, between 40 and 60 schools across Lincolnshire and Holland are set to begin working together on history and arts projects in readiness for the 2015 anniversary, coordinated by Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire.

Aviation Heritage Officer Dave Harrigan said: "What we are hoping to do is have children in Lincolnshire researching what the RAF did, where the food came from and why it had to be done.

"The Dutch will look at why the people were starving and what they did with the food."

Food was everybody's main topic of conversation when meeting with friends and neighbours, always happy to suggest some different ways of preparing anything from tulip bulbs to stinging nettles.

Instead of potatoes we and sugar beets.

Nobody liked to eat cattle fodder by choice, except when starving hungry.

On April 29, 1945, we had all gathered to witness a miracle.

The Germans had been forced to allow the British to drop food parcels on pre-arranged locations.

We hoped to get a good view from the window in the attic. The planes flew over slowly and very low with their bellies open.

We jumped up and down with excitement and a few tears were shed.

This was the first of many deliveries of Operation Manna.

The strong tins withstood the impact.

They were collected before being allocated fairly.

The contents were delicious, especially the egg powder and the chocolate.

As a token of thanks to the pilots, people spread the Dutch flag on their flat roofs, well out of sight of the Germans. Reported by This is 17 hours ago.

Prayers for the Stolen by Jennifer Clement – review

Kirsty Gunn on an intimate blend of fact and fiction that captures the inexorable cycle of lives shattered by Mexican drug cartels

There's a particular kind of American writing that has never properly made it here. It started with Thoreau and Melville, developed in the 1950s with the Beats, and came of age in the seventies when the likes of Tom Wolfe and Hunter S Thompson hit the headlines with their "new journalism".

It's about reality, this kind of writing – on-the-ground and up-close documentary, reportage, interview – but with the writer bang in the centre of things, looking out rather than in, and flinging into the project all of fiction's colour and edge. We see it in such books as Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and later, George Plimpton and Jean Stein's Edie: An American Biography, with its jagged prose comprised entirely of tape-recorded voices. It's literature that is more like oratory in its construction and tone; it's fun, fun, fun to read. And, in its own way, deadly serious too.

One of the writers who does it best, now, is Jennifer Clement. Her first book, Widow Basquiat, was a fragmentary text of fact and storytelling about the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat's long-term partner and muse, set against the downtown art scene of 80s New York.

Then came the fiction. Her novels A True Story Based on Lies and The Poison that Fascinates both fizz along the boundaries of what did and didn't happen, reading more as factual accounts than stories. Now comes Prayers for the Stolen, also described as a novel, but that's much too simple a description for what Clement is doing with the genre. In this startling tale of a young girl abducted into the Mexican drug trade, the social history – the reality of the world from which the fiction comes – burns away anything on the pages that could feel "made up". This is like the new journalism made newer still.

"My name is Ladydi Garcia Martinez," the protagonist tells us on the opening page (she was born at the time of Princess Diana's engagement). "And I have brown skin, brown eyes and brown frizzy hair, and look like everyone else I know. As a child my mother used to dress me up as a boy and call me Boy. I told everyone a boy was born, she said. If I were a girl then I would be stolen. All the drug traffickers had to do was hear there was a pretty girl around and they'd sweep onto our lands in black Escalades and carry the girl off."

Every sentence in Prayers for the Stolen is direct, potent, unexpected; twisting on the page like a knife in the gut. Ladydi tells us about Paula, a pretty girl who, unlike all the others, has been released by her captors and is able to return home, now hollow-eyed and dead inside. Her story is the catalyst for all the girls' stories in this terrifying narrative that exposes the inexorable repetition of lives brutalised by the sovereignty and corruption of the drug cartels.

The writing is electrifying not only because of its subject matter – anyone could report the facts – or because Clement is so strong on the insider viewpoint that gives new journalism its kick, but because she is a consummate stylist who makes sure nothing is wasted. Every scene is related with her trademark concision and fastidious attention to detail, her prose a gorgeous amalgam of spoken Mexican English, prayer, repetitions, incantations and American dreck. "May a wind blow out the candle of his heart," says Ladydi's mother, cursing her father. "May a gigantic termite grow in his navel, or an ant in his ear, she said. May his penis be eaten by a worm."

So there's brightness, too, humour in the darkness of Ladydi's world – a tenderness and love that are glimpsed as possibilities of another life, like the plastic flowers and glittery tinsel decorating a roadside shrine. "Poor Mexico, goes the local saying. So close to heaven, and so close to the United States." The world Clement is describing may be the bleak reality of a country that has such softness of sensibility, it's little wonder it has been so abused. But this work also gives us all of a novel's pleasures – a story laden with significance and drama and meaning, a keen feeling of relationship between reader and characters, a fully realised world through which we may roam. It leaves its mark upon us as surely as the illegal crop sprays, heralded by helicopter drones, that soak children and smallholdings and animals in poison so that the poppy fields can flourish: "As I moved down the hill an army of ants was marching in several lines down the mountain toward the highway. Lizards were moving in the same direction, moving very quickly. The birds above me were also disturbed … And then I knew why. Way off, far off, I heard a helicopter."

Clement's authority comes from her deep intimacy with the subject matter of her books. She is a good friend of Basquiat's widow; and as a Mexican, the territory of her three novels is her home. For Prayers for the Stolen she spent time with the girls and women in prison whose only real crime was having once been young and pretty. When she writes: "The Santa Marta Jail in the south of Mexico City was the biggest beauty parlour in the world," it rings true because it is true. She hung out with all those daughters and girlfriends and mothers and sisters left behind by the drug barons who kidnapped them from their homes and families. Now they sit around waiting for justice that won't come, doing their hair and painting their nails and telling stories – stories that are real lives.

• Kirsty Gunn's new collection of short stories, Infidelities, will be published by Faber later this year. Reported by guardian.co.uk 16 hours ago.

Hayle man Christopher Prowse denied 1970s indecent assault on...

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Hayle man Christopher Prowse denied 1970s indecent assault on...
A 59-YEAR-OLD Hayle man has appeared before Truro magistrates accused of indecently assaulting a girl between 1974 and 1979. Christopher Prowse, of Riviere Towans, Phillack, indicated a not guilty plea at the hearing on February 6 to one charge of indecently assaulting the girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, at Newmill, near Penzance, while she was aged under 14. The case was sent to Truro Crown Court for a preliminary hearing on March 7 and Prowse was granted conditional bail. Reported by The Cornishman 9 hours ago.

How the prosecution case against Dave Lee Travis fell apart

Former DJ has been cleared after new evidence emerged during trial and ex-colleagues gave glowing testimony

On the maths alone, the trial seemed stacked against Dave Lee Travis: 14 charges and 11 alleged victims who claimed they had been groped or molested by the former BBC Radio 1 DJ over the space of 30 years. A further five women appeared as "bad character witnesses" who claimed they had been groped by Travis.

In most cases, the alleged victims had told someone at the time who – crucially – backed their story as witnesses in court.

The pattern of incidents, too, could have lent credibility to the prosecution case. The allegations were similar in nature: hands up skirts, breast and bottom gropes, and lingering bear hugs.

The allegations added up to what Miranda Moore QC, for the crown, said was evidence of a pattern of opportunistic behaviour towards vulnerable young women by a man who abused his fame over three decades.

That was fiercely denied by Travis.

Throughout his four days in the witness box at London's Southwark crown court, the veteran broadcaster conceded that his tactile habits could be misinterpreted in the modern era, but insisted he would never have acted in an inappropriate way.

He played pranks on his fellow DJs – setting fire to scripts on-air, throwing sugar lumps across the studio and placing glasses of water on top of doors – but would never have invaded a colleague's personal space, he said.

"You just don't take chances like that," he said, adding that he would have been "hauled up before the big bosses" if he had jiggled the breasts of a Woman's Hour announcer live on BBC Radio 4, as she alleged.

Similarly, it would have been "suicide" if he had – as claimed – felt a journalist's breasts and asked her to pose for suggestive photographs during an interview at his home.

Another alleged victim's claim was "insanity", he said, because he would be "really asking for trouble" if he had groped a student in his American-style Winnebago while her friends waited outside.

He dismissed allegations that he told a 15-year-old girl that she had the "biggest boobs he had ever seen" at a Showaddywaddy gig in June 1978, saying: "I've never said that to any female … because for a fact it's not true actually."

As he was led through each charge on the indictment by Moore, Travis rubbished them as "made up", "outright lies" or the fantasy of women with little grasp on reality. And the jury clearly believed him.

But there were other signs that the wheels were coming off the prosecution case.

Halfway through the trial, a member of the public contacted the DJ's legal team after reading about the claims in the Sun.

He told them he had an amateur video, filmed at the opening of a hospital radio station where Travis was alleged to have sexually assaulted a carnival princess while they were alone, touring the wards.

The video was crucial, Travis's barrister Stephen Vullo said, because it suggested that at no time was Travis away from his wife, Marianne, and therefore he could not possibly have molested the girl.

In a separate blow to the prosecution, Travis's lawyers were allowed by the judge, Anthony Leonard, to tell the jury that one of the alleged victims had served jail time in 2010, in what they said was evidence of her unreliability as a witness.

The woman, a former BBC runner who said she had been groped by Travis in his Radio 1 studio, had pleaded guilty to threatening to kill her former business partner and attending her property with a knife to slash her tyres. She was jailed after breaching her bail conditions, the jury were told.

Whatever the jury thought of the prosecution witnesses, Travis's former colleagues gave glowing character testimonies.

A stream of ex-PAs, producers and even a Pan's People pin-up, Patricia "Dee Dee" Wilde, trooped into Southwark crown court in London to defend the elder statesman of pop.

Caroline Bondfield, a former personal assistant at Bedfordshire-based Chiltern Radio, said it was "totally ludicrous" to think Travis indecently assaulted at least two women at the station in an 18-month period.

Bondfield, a veteran of the station, told the jury: "When you have worked every day with someone you do pick up things. There was never any hint of anything untoward at the station and I would have picked up on it if there was."

Her testimony was in marked contrast to the three Chiltern FM journalists who had earlier told the trial that Travis targeted them constantly with inappropriate touching. "Whenever he would walk into the room we would look down praying it wouldn't be us," said one of the women, who cannot be named for legal reasons.

The Chuckle Brothers also gave Travis their support.

The double act, brothers Paul and Barry Elliott, said they had no recollection of anything untoward at a pantomime of Aladdin in the early 1990s, during which the DJ was alleged to have forced his hand down a crew member's trousers while trapping her in his dressing room.

Paul Elliott said he was "completely surprised" to hear that they had inadvertently stopped an attack when they shouted "All right, Dave?" while walking down a theatre corridor. "He was just a jolly great chap to work with," said Barry Elliott, before nodding and smiling at Travis as he left the courtroom.

Only the eight women and four men who sat through the four-week trial will know the full reasons why they chose to clear Travis.

The acquittal is sure to raise questions for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), including whether it is in the public interest to bring allegations of this nature to trial some 40 years after they allegedly happened.

This was the first Operation Yewtree trial to get a full hearing in a court of law, and the unhappy experience of the CPS will bring extra scrutiny of the cases to follow this year.

For Travis, the acquittal will bring little comfort. At 68, the former star of Radio 1 has already had to move out of the small farm he shared with his wife of 43 years, Marianne, in order to pay the legal bills.

He struggles with knee and back problems – the infirmity briefly halted his trial, it can now be reported – and his wife is recovering from breast cancer. As he told detectives after his arrest, the claims have left him ill, stressed and liable to cry at night.

Professionally, the trial is a cruel end to a distinguished five-decade broadcasting career. Little more than three years ago, Travis celebrated achieving a lifetime's ambition when he was inducted into radio's hall of fame. Now the star has been left to piece together what is left of his twilight years. Reported by guardian.co.uk 11 hours ago.

Valentine's Short Story - Plymouth writer's third triumph

This is Plymouth -- PLYMOUTH writer Alan Grant's humorous take on love has been selected as this year's Herald Valentine's short story. Alan was delighted his fictional tale A Wish Came True was chosen by author and creative writing lecturer Gavin Smith – especially as it's the second year running he's won. Last year, Alan's story Welcome Home was named as the best submission. He also has a spooky Halloween story selected in 2012, making him a three-time champ. "I'm chuffed," he said. "I got the idea of someone working in a big office, because that is something I used to do." A retired social worker Alan is a member of Plymouth Writers Group, which meet at Plymouth Arts Centre, has already had a book of short stories published and seen his work on book shelves in Canada and the USA. "I'm currently shortlisted for a BBC radio play competition," he said. He dedicated his triumph to Plymouth writer Roy York, a friend and former tutor, who sadly died in 2012. Plymouth author Gavin Smith, who lectures in creative writing at the Open University and penned the novel DogFellow's Ghost, judged the entries. He said: "It was a witty and entertaining story of love, romance and Valentine cards." Alan's story just pipped the tale Love and Literature, by Christine Wilson, from Tamerton Foliot. Gavin called that story: "Quirky and humorous. It reveals how the road to true love can lie in a chicken sandwich." Gavin also commended January Blues, by Bex Olver, from Tavistock, which he called a "bittersweet story of love found and lost". VALENTINE'S SHORT STORY CONTEST WINNER: A WISH CAME TRUE By Alan Grant I didn't get a Valentine's card last year, nor the year before. In fact, when I sat down and really thought about it, I realised I hadn't had one for nearly 10 years. Not since Jason and I split up. It was then, I decided to do something about it. In the office I've had the odd birthday card, and at Christmas we usually manage to exchange cards, however, Valentine's Day for me has always been a dead loss, a complete and absolute dodo. Have I really become that fat and unattractive? Don't get me wrong, I've met and personally "known" a lot of men since Jason and I finished. Some of them were absolutely brilliant lovers, far better than Jason, but unlike him, not romantic in terms of thinking about sending a Valentine's card. He always sent me one. I work on the twelfth floor at the council, and over the years, it's become a ritual for staff to exchange the contents of their Valentine's cards, no matter where they came from. People would even bring them in from home and open them in front of everyone. Shrieks and sighs would be the order of the day. If only the poor devils that sent them had known, they'd have died of embarrassment. "Oh Debbie. How sexy." They'd chorus as she carefully opened her padded card, releasing a few verses from Barry White. John would gently open his card from Janet. No sounds, but lots of romantic twaddle, which he dramatically read out to an adoring audience. Craig's was hysterical as usual, and inevitably rude. Matt's cards from his partner Tim were always, moronic, and from the most recent clear out sale at a pound store, with the price inevitably still displayed on the back. Claire's card was a serial repeat. In other words, I distinctly remember her coming into the office with the same one in previous years. I'm sure she simply glued the envelope down again. Was I the only one to notice? Nah! Basically, I never questioned their enjoyment, nor joined in. Cos I never got one. Although I knew they were mouthing to one another behind my back, "Ellie got nothing as usual." I don't know what changed my thinking and approach, but suddenly, this year, I knew it would be different. I bought the biggest blooming Valentines Card in the shop. It cost me nearly a tenner and weighed a ton. Sonia who runs my local pub on the Barbican, helped me fill it in. She understood some of the problems I was having, and was very sympathetic. In her own way, Sonia was an agony aunt for the various middle-aged men and women who frequented her bar. Always sympathetic, caring and available, but with strict house rules, especially with men. For Sonia business and pleasure didn't mix. She could listen to the most detailed and graphic explanations as to why a person's relationship had broken down. Sonia would sympathise. Sonia would empathise. But that's as close as any man ever got to her actual thighs. Me? I didn't even get the chance of a man fancying me. Nevertheless, Sonia was brilliant. So was her daughter Mandy who helped out in the bar. "Ellie," she said. "You've spent a lot of dosh on the card, but it needs a little extra oomph. Leave it to me." A few minutes later Mandy came back downstairs from her flat. She had a photograph in her hand, and said it was a former boyfriend, a Royal Marine called Nick. She passed it to Sonia who wrote a few words and some kisses on the back, then put it inside the card before sealing it, and addressing it to me at the office. Whilst it was only a brief glimpse, I personally believe that a man's assets are best displayed with a modicum of clothing, and with as much left to the imagination as possible. Mind you, I was quite looking forward to opening the envelope, and Sonia seemed to enjoy adding to the content. As an added safeguard I took the card into Dingles. Whilst pretending to put the smell on the back of my hand, I gave it a spray from a really expensive sample on the men's toiletries, then posted it to the civic centre. On Valentine's Day I deliberately took a day's leave. This wasn't unusual, but I wanted no other distractions. Next morning, I immediately noticed how quiet it was in the office. There was a distinct air of expectancy. I felt many eyes on me as I approached my desk in the civic centre. I nodded to the usual people that I nod with, and ignored those that I knew I could afford to. I looked down at my desk. There it stood. Propped up against my PC screen. Erect and alone, like the Statue of Liberty. My first office Valentine's card, even if it was from me. I slowly took my jacket off, put my sandwiches away on my bookcase, then placed my umbrella in the adjacent stand. Dame Helen Mirren would have been hard pressed to beat my performance. I sat down and casually switched on the PC, whilst, in the same movement removing the card blocking the screen. Opening it nonchalantly, I pretended to briefly study the content, whilst carefully palming the photograph so that I could glimpse what Sonia's daughter had enclosed. My God it was hot! I deliberately tore the card in two in a disdainful but precise way, and carefully placed it in the adjacent waste bin. I left the photograph face down on my desk, put my jacket back on, picked up my handbag and told the receptionist I would be back in an hour. After 45 minutes, the tension was too much. I stood up, massaged my numbed buttocks, opened the cubicle and re-entered the office from the adjacent toilets. There was a distinctly different atmosphere, particularly amongst the women. I strode confidently towards my desk, nodding graciously to the left and to the right. Even Sue the autocratic office manager seemed impressed. I felt like an empress returning in triumph. Helen of Troy! Cleopatra! Unusually and significantly, men were also deferring their gaze in my presence. Well that's what it seemed like. As I approached my desk I felt the ultimate surge of adrenalin. Clearly the photograph had been examined and the waste bin moved. My card had been read by some, but pronounced to many. Ellie reigned supreme. I sat down slowly, and opened my desk drawer to put my handbag away. "Oh my God." There sat another Valentine's card. The handwriting was totally unfamiliar, it was masculine, strong and bold, and clearly it hadn't been posted. An internal office Valentine for me! With trembling hands and whilst discretely enclosing it within a file on housing policy, I teased open the envelope and from a distance read the contents. "I've loved you from afar. No day has gone by As each night I cry To be with you To have you lie In my safe strong arms Our bodies would gel Ellie, Oh Ellie Will you please be my girl? "Bugger it," I thought. "Trust me to get it wrong. Ten years I've been waiting for a card. And now? Who dunnit?" It was then I realised that I wasn't just thinking to myself, but had begun to shriek, and loudly. Everyone was definitely paying attention to me now. I picked up the phone and rang the pub. Mandy answered. "I've had enough help from your mother," I said triumphantly. "Tell her thanks for everything, but I got my own personal card, as well as the other one. So there!" There was a long pause before Mandy responded. "Oh it arrived did it? Ellie, you were looking so nervous, we thought you might chicken out, and not send your own one to the office. So we left a spare with the reception, just for you, and just in case. Nick filled it in, and even wrote the poem.. Ellie can you hear me... Ellie... Ellie?" RUNNER UP: LOVE AND LITERATURE By Christine Wilson Last night, Jason had been watching a play adapted for television from the novel Pride and Prejudice (there wasn't any football on). Now that he thought about it, it was obvious Mr Darcy had been looking for love, just like he was. Darcy had been invited to stay at Bingley's place in the country, but there wasn't any talent in sight there, so he had to go out looking for crumpet at the Assembly, which was a sort of Regency dancehall. There wasn't a lot of crumpet there either. Elizabeth Bennet was the best of the bunch so he had made a play for her, but he was so subtle about it that not many people realised what he was about. Elizabeth didn't fancy him at first, but when he came out of the lake in his wet shirt she changed her mind. Jason thought it was the women who were supposed to wear the wet shirts, but it seemed to work for Darcy so it was worth a try. Co-incidentally, Jason had been invited to stay in the country, to look after his mate's dog. As there was a lake in the vicinity he decided to walk the dog round the lake so he could be in the right place at the right time. He hoped he'd get lucky and some bird would fall in the lake so he could rescue her and get his shirt wet to arouse her passion. Unfortunately, his dog had run off before he got a result so now, instead of looking for love, he was looking for Monty. Monty was the name of the stupid dog. Amanda had moved to the country to get away from her possessive and abusive boyfriend Darren. When she had found out what he was really like she told him it was all over between them, but Darren didn't get the message and carried on as if they were still together. He wouldn't leave her alone and he was beginning to scare her. In the end she had to move without telling him where she was going. Now she had a new home, a new life, and the sun was shining in through her bedroom window. What a relief it was not to be afraid to answer the phone in case she might be subjected to more of his crazy accusations and spiteful criticism. Now she would be able to go out without fearing that he would be lurking outside waiting to grab her. She showered, dressed and ate a hearty breakfast. Her job as an illustrator meant she could work from home and didn't have to keep regular hours so she was going to explore her new neighbourhood. With a chicken sandwich in one pocket and a carton of juice in the other she set off. She hadn't gone far before she came upon a beautiful lake surrounded by a variety of lush green trees and bushes. She watched a pair of swans skimming over the water. It was so cool and peaceful. She wandered along the path daydreaming about the kind of boyfriend she'd like to have now she'd finally got rid of Darren. Someone like tall, dark and handsome Mr Darcy, as portrayed in the television play she had watched last night. She smiled to herself. If she ever saw someone like him approaching she might well be tempted to fall in the lake and wait for him to rescue her. It was at this point she became aware that she was being followed. She could definitely hear someone behind her. She was petrified. Was it Darren? Had he found out where she was living and come after her? How could she escape? She walked faster. The person behind her walked faster too. She stopped. The person stopped. She ran. The person ran. She could hear heavy breathing. It was a nightmare. Finally she managed to conjure up some courage. She took a deep breath and turned round to face her pursuer. What a relief. It wasn't Darren. Her pursuer was extremely handsome and he was big and strong with plenty of black hair just like Mr Darcy. There was one minor problem. He was a dog. A dog who appeared to have fallen madly in love with her. He drooled and began to lick every exposed part of her. This wasn't how her daydream was supposed to play out. As she tried to extricate herself from his powerful overtures of passion, she heard a shout. "Stop thief! Here Monty!" She looked up. The dog, who she assumed to be Monty, did not. He continued his wet assault upon her person, much to her embarrassment. A very angry young man ran up to them. Amanda hardly had time to notice his striking resemblance to Mr Darcy before he yelled at her again. "Let go of my dog!""Tell your dog to let go of me," she yelled back. "He's followed me for miles. He seems to like me a lot." She was hoping the young man would also notice how likeable she was, but he didn't. "You encouraged him to follow you. You lured him.""I did no such thing.""You tempted him with titbits!""I most certainly did not.""Monty is not the sort of dog who would go off with strangers.""He didn't go off with me. He stalked me.""My dog is not a stalker.""Your dog stalked me and then he assaulted me.""And how did he assault you may I ask? You look all right to me.""He tried to lick me to death. I'm all wet." e produced a lead which he clipped to the dog's collar. "If I catch you trying to steal him again I'll call the police.""If he assaults me again I'll call the police," she countered. Jason snorted contemptuously and marched off, hauling a reluctant Monty in his wake. As he made his way home he began to regret that he had lost his temper. She was the prettiest girl he'd seen around here. He didn't like apologising, but maybe he would if he ever saw her again. Amanda watched them go. What a pity they got off to such a bad start when he looked so much like Mr Darcy. She would try to arrange another meeting under more congenial circumstances. Hopefully romance would blossom. Later, when her diaries were published, she would become half of one of the greatest literary love stories of all time. Up there with Romeo and Juliet, Scarlett and Rhett, Heathcliff and Cathy, and of course, Darcy and Elizabeth. On the way home she tried to work out why Monty was so attracted to her. Dogs didn't usually pay her so much attention. Then she remembered. The chicken sandwich! It was still in her coat pocket. She'd forgotten to eat it. She made a detour to the butchers and bought another chicken. COMMENDED: JANUARY BLUES by Bex Olver The alarm sounds and my eyes haven't even fully opened and already I know that I'm going to the bar. I ball my hand into a fist and bring it down in the vicinity of the alarm clock. There are a few misguided hits but the damn thing eventually shuts up with a particularly vicious, well aimed bash. It is January 2 today, the light filtering through the curtains is a weak grey and this will be the fourth consecutive day I will have spent in this bed and later the bar. I haven't changed the sheets since before she last spent the night here. Her scent is gone now, obliterated by my alcohol and sweaty stink, but the longer the sheets stay on the bed the more I feel she's still here. I press my nose to the fabric in the black of night when I can't summon tears to express my heartache. Sometimes I think her smell is locked deep in the fibres and if I inhale violently enough, I'll coax it out and be able to smell her again. If I'm really feeling sadistic I like to pretend that she's lying next to me in the bed and I torture myself with how she used to look with her head on the pillow, the morning sunlight catching the golden strands of her hair. It is a fruitless occupation for when I turn to see her, she is gone, vaporised by my movement and I am left with nothing but my breaking heart for company. I don't remember thinking that life was dull or lacking anything before she came along. But she exploded, like a firework, all over every inch of my existence fizzling, splattering and daubing bright colour everywhere. As soon as I knew she existed it was impossible not to think of the time before her as anything but grey and boring and deficient. She fell off a gate. Like a sack of potatoes she would later tell me, but I don't remember it that way. I watched her head, gracefully follow the rest of her body off snowy wood and onto the snowy pavement, with a thud that rang out against the white deadened silence. She fell off a gate and I fell head over heels in love. Of course, I took her to the hospital and of course she had concussion. The girl with no family nearby, no flat-mate and no one to call threw up on my shoes after I had been given strict instructions to not leave her alone and to bring her back to the harsh, silvery light of A&E if she got worse. The nurses assumed I was her partner. We didn't correct them. We got to her flat, after I managed to get the address out of her. Drowsiness isn't a good thing with concussion, but she was going to have to sleep at some point and she muttered something about her bedroom and asking me to stay as I de-booted her before she bundled herself under the coral flowery duvet cover. Her flat was silent and as I stood, I wasn't sure if this was really happening. It was like something out of a movie. She'd demonstrated nothing but clumsiness, concussion and an inability to hold onto the contents of her stomach. I knew nothing about her – not even her name or her age or anything and yet it was like she had hold of my heart in an invisible, captivating grasp. While the craziness of the situation percolated in my brain. I made a cup of tea with some on-the-turn milk I found in the pine green kitchen and then curiosity got the better of me. I did not know who this girl was and before I gave myself much time to think I was rifling through a dark brown handbag, looking for a card or something with her name on. I found a terracota coloured library card, dog eared, well used and I read the name written in black Biro, enjoying the sound of her name on my lips. January Blues. The name set me off and I browsed her book collection desperate to know more, I looked at the pictures of friends and family crammed into mirrors and picture frames which were all the colours of the rainbow. I went through her cream kitchen cupboards (two pot noodles, a Cadburys Boost and a can of baked beans are the only things I can remember), I opened the chrome bin in the bathroom and found cotton buds with translucent yellowy slicks at each end and an empty bottle of shampoo (which may have been tinged a pinky hue). An origami crane mobile hung from the living room ceiling, with shades of emerald, scarlet and sapphire that jolted my brain with their brightness. Mauve polka dot heels lay where they had been kicked off. I slid all over the wooden floor in my crimson socks as I took in as much of her as possible and when she eventually overwhelmed my head and each of my senses I slept on the tatty, faded jade sofa. In the morning, I went out to get her some fresh milk and bread, in an effort to catch my breath and to get away from the colours that dazzled and shook me and made me all too aware of my own dull existence. I had no idea if she would remember the accident the day before and I didn't know if she would remember asking me to stay. When I returned she was up and had a headache but she remembered the stranger who took her to A&E. With the dazzling morning sun flooding the front room, she sat in a vaguely cheerful mood and in a dressing gown of bright fuchsia; the colour instantly searing itself onto my mind. Whenever I think about her now my memories are painted with the most vivid of colours. Jan was a prettily coloured butterfly. The longer she fluttered about me, the more certain I became that she would eventually float off, away from me in search of sweet, summer air to frolic on. For those all too brief weeks she was my everything and I was all she needed. For that bizarre meeting snowballed into trips to the pictures, dinner, chilly walks in the park, days lying on her sofa reading or watching TV and in the inky black still of night she would lay on my sheets and in my arms and whisper words that alluded to forever but promised nothing more than that moment. On December 30, the weather grew stormy and the butterfly girl who had fallen off the gate and into my heart began to feel the wintry chill and fluttered away to warmer climes. It wasn't working, I wasn't what she needed, it was her (not me) and she was sorry et cetera. The recollection of that moment causes my heart to twist in a fresh spasm of pain. I decide that I will not achieve anything by staying in bed; the lure of alcoholic anaesthesia is too great. I stumble into stale smelling clothes, their colours muted in the presence of my hangover. I ignore my bleary eyed reflection and I wrap myself up and when I crunch over dirty frozen snow to the bar I wonder whether I could ever have kept her. I had known that January could not be tamed and in the end, somehow she would have slipped from my grasp and into the path of another unassuming mug, who would only realise how boring life was without her when it was too late. I heave open the door to the bar and I tell myself there are two days left. Two more days before I head back to work after Christmas. Two more days to wallow in self-pity and then I will stay sober, go to work and move on. I slide into a seat at the bar, which has a faded and cracked grey leather cushion and order a vodka. When the clear liquid is placed in front of me I knock it back and order another, straight away. "What you in for dude?" slurs the guy next to me, clearly recognising a kindred spirit with a need to forget. Picking up the refilled glass, I swirl the colourless contents. "January blues." I say matter of factly. He cackles a drunken laugh, "Man, they're a pain in the... ""You have no idea… " I tell him and clink my glass against his. Reported by This is 10 hours ago.

Tinkerbell and the Pirate Fairy – review

The lastest swashbuckling mashup in Disney's girl-power series could use a little more pixie dust

This latest in the series, which began as euphemistically termed "DVD exclusives", before 3D made it theatrically profitable, strives to merge Neverland with another Disney franchise by pitting Tinker Bell against a flying Jacqueline Sparrow. The girl-power swashbuckling that follows might be cheering if it went beyond 60 minutes, or could offer anything more than smoothly indifferent animation and a new Natasha Bedingfield song. Business concerns sit close to the surface throughout, unmasked by much in the way of artistry: one image of its heroines hovering around a conveyor belt, stuffing pixie dust into jars, encapsulates something of the series, and Disney's apparently ceaseless ability to industrialise magic. 

Rating: 2/5 Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 hours ago.

Delaware doctor convicted in 'waterboarding' trial

GEORGETOWN, Delaware (Reuters) - A Delaware jury found a prominent pediatrician and best-selling author guilty on Thursday of endangering his stepdaughter in a trial featuring testimony that he subjected the girl to a form of waterboarding to punish her. Reported by Reuters 1 hour ago.

Self-publishing: is it killing the mainstream?

In genre fiction, going it alone is beginning to look a much more dependable route to success

Brenna Aubrey self-published her debut romance novel At Any Price on the Amazon Kindle on 9 December 2013. One month later At Any Price had netted a total profit of £16,588. Aubrey's success is far from unique – 2013 was a breakout year for "indie authors" led by the phenomenal success of Hugh Howey. But Aubrey is among the first in a wave of authors to do what, until very recently, would have been unthinkable; turn down a $120,000 (£72,000) deal from one of the big five publishing houses and decide to do their job herself.

"Ebooks have changed everything and the traditional publishing establishment is not quite keeping up," Brenna Aubrey answered when I asked her about some of the negative responses to her decision from traditionally-published authors. "I also think that in some ways authors who have been chasing their own dream deals take my rejection of the dream deal as a rejection of their core values and aspirations."

The six-figure deal has been the aspiration of many authors for decades. A major advance – such as the $2m deal announced for Garth Risk Holdberg – can cement a literary career. But the reality is that advances for mid-list writers are often no more than $5,000. Aubrey's deal of $120,000 was significant, but would have been split across three novels, divided with her agent and paid in instalments. When she cranked the figures Aubrey realised that – even as a debut author – self-publishing offered far more potential reward.

But it was the sticky issue of copyright that swung Aubrey towards self-publishing. "The clauses being written into contracts these days call for a reversion of rights if the yearly sales of an ebook are under a certain amount, and usually that amount is very very low." The effect of this for authors like Brenna Aubrey is that once you sign a publishing deal, you give up control of your work for up to 35 years. And three-and-a-half decades is a very long time in digital publishing.

The freedom indie authors have to market and price their own books has allowed them to dominate the digital marketplace for the last three years. As Hugh Howey observed in a typically contentious blogpost, a look at the Amazon Kindle bestseller lists in any key genre show them dominated by two kinds of writers. Established bestsellers like George RR Martin, and unknown indie writers like AG Riddle. Almost entirely absent are debut authors and mid-listers from the big five. Howey has built on this observation with the data-driven Author Earnings report, which suggests indie authors account for 39% of Kindle daily unit sales in the most popular genres of commercial fiction.

Publishers are now racing to recapture the digital ebook market from self-published authors, particularly in pivotal genres like science fiction, fantasy and romance that have proved so popular with ebook readers. New digital-only imprints like Hydra seem designed to compete in that space, but it's an open question why any author would sign deals that have been staunchly challenged by professional writers' organisations. The more natural strategy seems to be for major publishers to cherry-pick the most successful self-published authors and promote them to genuine bestseller status, as they have done with EL James and Hugh Howey. The "hybrid" author, who retains control of ebook rights while signing print-only publishing deals, may now become the new standard for publishing.

But it may be too little to late. Already this year Quercus – the successful independent publisher of Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – has placed itself up for sale citing "a lower than expected upturn in digital sales" among its reasons. It's a trend reflected across the big five publishers. Ebooks provided a much needed cash infusion for publishers struggling with a declining print market. But as the process of making backlist material available in ebook reaches completion, publishers need new bestsellers to keep their growth going. But the authors who could provide those new books, like Brenna Aubrey, are increasingly choosing to self-publish and keep both creative and financial control of their work. Reported by guardian.co.uk 5 days ago.

Lucius (No 1,700)

These identikit females with their moustachioed backing musicians are the missing link between Arcade Fire and Haim

*Hometown*: Brooklyn.

*The lineup*: Jess Wolfe (voice), Holly Laessig (voice), Dan Molad (drums), Peter Lalish (guitar), Andrew Burri (guitar).

*The background*: Lucius are an intriguing proposition, to be sure. They're fronted by identikit women in matching outfits who sing in unison but aren't twins, and backed by a trio of moustachioed males. Their music is exuberant, relentlessly melodic, epic country-pop, and they're fashion-mag stylish (all their own work) with a dash of wacky. They're surfing a tidal wave of Haim-like press in the States, but they might be a slower-build affair over here, more reminiscent perhaps of the way Arcade Fire crept up on people as Funeral slowly but surely sunk in. In fact, they're mooted to be touring with Arcade Fire and they describe themselves as "energetic, indie pop, rock… the B52s meets Arcade Fire" although we'd say they're more Arcade Haim with maybe some of B52s' zany modishness as regards their image.

The press, as we say, are going wild for them over there. Rolling Stone has called them "the best band you may not have heard yet" while Spin praised their "immaculate '60s girl-band harmonies, soaring melodies and stomping percussion" and Vogue likened them to a "'60s girl group transported to the modern day, [weaving] western and folk strands into their doo-woppy pop." Real people, not just journalists, are starting to catch up: they recently sold out two nights at New York's Bowery Ballroom, and although when they play live here in April it's only at the small (albeit painfully hip) Oslo in London, we can't help feeling they're going to be graduating to bigger spaces soon.

Reading on mobile? Click here to listen

Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig met at the Berklee College of Music and they share management and have performed with Wilco. They once decided to rearrange the Beatles' White Album, starting with Happiness Is a Warm Gun, and they've worked as jingle writers and in commercials - it was their voices in the Mercedes car ad with Willem Dafoe broadcast during the US finale of Breaking Bad. They don't cook blue meth, however, nor are they in cahoots with the Cartel. No, they're too busy writing fabulous high-gloss country-pop would-be hits. They've got a whole album of the stuff, titled Wildewoman (Laessig: "My mom used to call me a wilde-child, a wilde-girl…") and issued by Mom + Pop (Flume, Sleigh Bells, Polica, Wavves, Smith Westerns). It veers from the girl group sheen of Turn It Around and production overload of Hey, Doreen to the lush alt country of Two of Us On The Run. There are quieter moments where you can hear fingers scrape against fretboard, and moments of total pop bombast, there are '80s gated drums and electronics (synth'n'western, anyone?) but always they are supremely tuneful and utterly winning. How can they fail? They won't.

*The buzz*: "Luscious, luminous, lilting lullabies" - New York Times.

*The truth*: Ladies and gennulmen, it's… Arcade Haim.

*Most likely to*: Create pop magic.

*Least likely to*: Cook meth.

*What to buy*: Wildewoman is released on March 31 via PIAS.

*File next to*: Voice of the Beehive, Haim, Pierces, Arcade Fire.

*Links*: ilovelucius.com.

Monday's new band: Thief. Reported by guardian.co.uk 5 days ago.

Thrillers - review roundup

The Girl With a Clock for a Heart by Peter Swanson, The Strangler Vine by MJ Carter, Taking Morgan by David Rose, Mother, Mother by Koren Zailckas and Ripper by Isabel Allende

Peter Swanson's debut *The Girl With a Clock for a Heart** *(Faber, £12.99) is a tight, convincing neo-noir whose most obvious analogues are cinematic – Double Indemnity, Body Heat and especially John Dahl's The Last Seduction. Fall guy George is still obsessed, 20 years on, with his first college girlfriend, Liana, who supposedly killed herself after a single semester. (The twin-track narrative runs George's "college" story alongside his "contemporary" story, cleverly playing them off against each other.) One day he sees her in a bar and it's as if he's 18 again: naive, sexually inexperienced and ripe for exploitation by a woman who is emphatically not dead, but a clever sociopath who assumes and sloughs off identities with ease. Liana knows exactly how much she means to George and what she must do to secure his co-operation. George can be infuriatingly spineless, but Swanson knows this and gets round it by making him the mysterious Liana's intellectual equal. Fingers crossed for the film adaptation – James Shadow Dancer Marsh is slated to direct.

Another excellent first novel, *The Strangler Vine* (Fig Tree, £14.99), is credited to MJ Carter, who, as Miranda Carter, won a shelf-load of awards for her 1994 biography of Anthony Blunt. It blends John Masters, William Boyd, Wilkie Collins and the Conan Doyle of Brigadier Gerard and the more orientalist Holmes stories to create a witty and entrancing historical thriller set in 1830s Calcutta. Our doltish narrator is William Avery, a junior officer in the army of the East India Company. When Company-approved writer Xavier Mountstuart – "the very acme of Byronic manhood"– disappears up-country while researching a long poem about the murderous Thuggee sect, Avery is sent to bring him back. But he is answerable to the enigmatic Jeremiah Blake, who has gone native and can't be trusted to stick to the company's brief. An inspired mix of sensation novel and odd-couple road novel, The Strangler Vine has a smirking sense of the absurdity of the whole colonial project. It gives us the gilt and the grubbiness, in the prose equivalent of HD.

Morgan Cooper's habit of voicing her thoughts aloud whenever she feels anxious would seem to rule out a career in espionage. But this soccer mom from DC really is an undercover CIA agent on the Gaza Strip in David Rose's *Taking Morgan* (Quartet, £12.99). When she's taken hostage in the middle of a tryst with her Arab lover, her civil-rights lawyer husband Adam must work to get her out – on top of defending Guantánamo detainees, managing their anxious children, and dodging Morgan's mother and the suspicious attentions of a comely local widow … Rose shuttles frantically but effectively between these different worlds, ratcheting up the tension. Taking Morgan is set in the immediate runup to Hamas's takeover of Gaza in June 2007, and has its roots in a long piece Rose wrote for Vanity Fair the following year detailing a covert US plan to supply and train Fatah's forces in the area.

It is a while since I've read anything as darkly funny as Koren Zailckas's *Mother, Mother** *(HarperFiction, £16.99), a portrait of extreme family dysfunction squeezed into the shape of a suspense novel. As the title hints, the Hursts are very much a matriarchy, and Zailckas's focus is on sociopathic narcissist Josephine and the damage she has inflicted on son William (for whom she invents disorders so that she can keep him at home), daughter Violet (an anorexic she claims is a danger to William and has had committed to a mental hospital) and alcoholic husband Douglas. The plot turns on eldest daughter Rose, who fled the brittle perfection of her mother's world – Josephine had ambitions for her to become an actor – but hasn't been seen since. Superbly paced and structured, with dialogue worthy of Lena Dunham, Mother, Mother is an engrossing, and finally shocking, read.

Isabel Allende conceived her first-ever crime novel *Ripper* (Fourth Estate, £12.99) as a collaboration with her crime-writer husband William Gordon. In the end she wrote it alone after immersing herself in the genre as it stood in 2012. The Scandi-influenced result is idiosyncratic, unflinching, glaringly contemporary (it is about a bunch of online gamers who end up tracking a serial killer in San Francisco) and obviously much better written than it needs to be. Allende excels at exacting portraiture and barbed asides: its 16-year-old heroine Amanda's grandfather is a novelist whose work is dismissed by critics as magical realist, "a literary style deemed passé". Ripper is something of a jeu d'esprit. Read it for what it is rather than what it isn't (The House of the Spirits, Paula) and you'll enjoy it all the more. Reported by guardian.co.uk 5 days ago.

Chelmsford man jailed for abusing girl, 14, he followed to...

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Chelmsford man jailed for abusing girl, 14,  he followed to...
A CHELMSFORD man who abused a vulnerable 14-year-old girl in Cambridgeshire for six months has been jailed for three-and-a-half years. Paul Mountain, 24, from Great Baddow, pleaded guilty at Peterborough Crown Court to having sex with the girl between December 2012 and May 2013, as well as obstructing an officer and resisting arrest. Detective Constable Dianne Booth, of Cambridgeshire Police, said: "The victim in this case was 14 and extremely vulnerable. "Mountain pursued her from Essex... Reported by Essex Chronicle 4 days ago.

Katie Hopkins interview: 'Can you imagine the pent-up rage?'

She used The Apprentice as a launchpad, and last week two million people watched her on The Big Benefits Row. With giggles and amazing frankness, Katie Hopkins explains why it's her right to say: 'This is how it should be'

Two million people watched Katie Hopkins' latest TV appearance last week, but I'm not sure how many of them would even recognise the woman I meet a few days later at her London hotel. The snarling aggressor we saw on Channel 5's Big Benefits Row has become a friendly Sloane who squeals "Lush!" at the waiter, teaches me how to talk about sex in "girl code" (a sort of exaggerated whisper that sounds like Miranda Hart playing a boarding school girl on her "PER-I-OD!"), jokes around, laughs at herself and is great company.

Viewers who have followed her TV career are unlikely to have formed this impression. Having distinguished herself as The Apprentice's most notoriously rude and ruthless contestant ever, the former business consultant has built a media career as a "social commentator", and is a regular fixture on TV studio sofas, scandalising audiences with a set of opinions typically held by mean girls bitching in the playground. When not on telly, she can be found calling Nelson Mandela a "cantankerous old git" in her weekly Sun column, or tweeting prolifically about her disgust for people who are fat, or unemployed, or badly dressed. Most famously, she has declared ginger-haired babies "harder to love", and forbidden her children to have friends called Tyler or Chardonnay, as these names are "lower class".

If you managed to miss all of that, you would get an idea of her style from her reply when I ask if she'd call herself a snob. "Oh, definitely yeah, 100%. I think it's really important to be snobby. Do I think social mobility policy will ever work? Absolutely not. Is social class a much more efficient way of getting people to the top? Absolutely. Social class has worked for years. Born into the right family, go to the right schools, even if you're not super bright to start with, you'll turn out bright. You go to the right university, you get the right job, you have the right connections, you'll make it to the top. Job done, very efficient."

Efficient at what? "Efficient at getting smart, well-connected people to the top. It is efficient, because what public money was required to move those people to the top? None." That would depend on whether we want the best people at the top, surely, or just the cheapest way to get some people to fill up the top? "Oh, for goodness sake," she exclaims impatiently. "It's this whole state school thing: 'Oh, there are a couple of bright sparks, let's invest £50m trying to get the two or three that might achieve to the top.' Or, shall we take really clever people and not have to spend any money on them, and get them to the top because they're connected and went to brilliant schools and their families will support them and they're fantastic? So why bother with social mobility? Why does it matter? Why? Why? I don't understand the obsession with it."

We could easily spend the interview arguing. I think Hopkins would quite like that – she tries to pick a couple of fights when I haven't even disagreed with her. In between the jokes and giggles she is coiled to spring from what she calls "girly chitchat" into TV studio rottweiler mode, but whenever she does, she stops listening, so it seems pointless. We already know what she thinks. I'm more interested to know why.

"But a lot of women think the sort of things I say," she protests. "You know, 'Oh God she's put on so much weight, she looks dreadful.' Well, I just say it." But that still doesn't explain why an apparently cheerful and successful woman would want to make herself a national hate figure. Rubbished all over the internet and booed by studio audiences, Hopkins seems to relish her reputation as a pantomime monster.

Some critics claim she doesn't believe a word she says, and peddles controversy for money. Others think she must be secretly horrified that so many people hate her. I don't detect an ounce of truth in either theory. It turns out Hopkins has never watched herself on television, never cries, is essentially immune to most human emotion, confuses public insults with compliments, and has kept secret the fact that she is hospitalised on average once every 10 days. The curious puzzle of Hopkins only begins to make sense when she describes the first 23 years of her life.

Now 39, Hopkins grew up in "a regular middle-class family" in a small Devon town, the youngest of two daughters to an electrical engineer and a housewife. Both girls attended a private convent school from the age of three to 16. "I don't mean some notion of a grammar school convent school, I mean proper nuns, nunned up to the max. The headmistress was called Sister Philomena, and she," Hopkins adds admiringly, "was mean." The nuns tied Hopkins' left hand behind her back to try and force her to be right-handed, and school life was highly regimented. "Oh, beyond! Whistle blows once: don't move. Whistle blows twice: into lines. Whistle blows three times: into class. Can you imagine," she laughs, "the pent-up rage?"

I can imagine, but it appears Hopkins can't. "Yuh, very exciting. I had a hoot at school, it was a blast, it really was St Trinian's – we were all girls together and it was really good fun." She can't recall any bullying or teasing, lost her virginity at 14 to a boyfriend "who looked like Tom Cruise", and had no teenage insecurities at all, on account of always getting As, mastering grade eight piano and violin by 14, and being picked for all the sports teams. "I suppose I was one of those girls that was just fine." Her parents were strict about exams and homework, but didn't need to be, because "I wasn't going to come second. One of the frustrating things with my children now is that I understood very quickly what you had to give the teacher to get a top mark. It's not rocket science, is it? It frustrates me that mine can't see that yet." Her three children are nine, eight and five.

She knew exactly what she wanted to do. "I was going to be the colonel of the forces. I loved the military. I loved the discipline, the rigour, the big shouty men. I love monosyllabic orders. 'George: Bed! George: Shoes!' That's how I talk to my children, yeah, and I love it. Love it!" She still likes to address her girlfriends by their surnames, "So you'd be 'Heads'", and the very thought of a man in uniform barking acronyms sends her into a schoolgirl froth. "Yes! Someone hot. With muscles. That you can clearly see, despite thick cotton. Definitely!"

After A-levels she signed a 35-year contract with the intelligence corps, who sponsored her through an economics degree at Exeter University, where she spent her weekends with the Territorial Army – "really fun, lying around in forests with guns having a brilliant time"– before arriving at Sandhurst. "And someone starts shouting at you the minute your parents drive away. Put in a little tiny room and told to clean it with a toothbrush, that kind of stuff." Literally? "Yeah!" Her eyes gleam. "And you had to iron your pants into six-inch squares. I can still do it now. Everything in your wardrobe had to be a certain way. Brilliant!" She looks visibly excited by the memory. "Yeah I am, really excited."

Significantly, she was at her happiest when being publicly insulted on the parade square. "The drill sergeant majors are enormously funny individuals, with brilliant lines. To the girl with sticky-out teeth: 'You could eat an apple through a tennis racket with those teeth!' I can't even be half as witty, and everyone loves the guys, these are massive men who've earned their stripes, they're 6ft 4in, usually Welsh, brilliant! Utterly brilliant men." They mocked her ceaselessly for the size of her nose, but she never took offence, "because it's almost more like kudos – you're in the club and they know you can take it." No insult was off limits. "There is no line, no barrier, no nothing." She thinks every young person should have to go through something similar. "Wouldn't it be great? Do you not think we'd all learn a little bit of discipline?"

But Hopkins' military career came to an abrupt end days before the passing out ceremony. If I didn't slow her down she would have glossed briskly over the details, but it transpires that she had an epileptic seizure on the parade square. "It's not something I talk about," she says quickly, "because I see it as a failing. So it does annoy me a little bit when people say 'she failed at the forces', but of course I never respond. I never say why, because it sounds like an excuse, and I won't have that. I won't have an excuse."

She didn't cry when the army discharged her. In fact, in her whole life she "genuinely can't remember ever crying", and says she doesn't even know what fear feels like. The only failure she can identify was her first marriage, which ended within a year. "That was bad. But am I over it? Yes. Did it really matter? No."

Hopkins joined a business consultancy after Sandhurst, moved to Manhattan and began going out with the boss. When their first daughter, India, was born in 2004, she took two weeks maternity leave, and was away on business most of the time, seeing her daughter only at weekends. The couple moved back to the UK and got married before the arrival of their second daughter, Poppy, the following year. Her husband was present for the birth, but Hopkins had to get herself and Poppy home from the maternity ward 48 hours later, because by then he had left her for his secretary. Neither Hopkins nor her daughters have ever spoken to or seen him again.

She relays all this with the pragmatism of someone describing a little HR restructuring – and looks pleased when I say so. "Well, it sort of was like that, only in a life way." She says she doesn't experience "emotional stuff", has never known a moment's maternal guilt, and were I to ridicule her children in this article, "I would go, 'You know what, I put myself out there, so I have to accept what happens.'" Nothing anyone has ever said or written has hurt Hopkins, or caused her to reconsider, because no one else's feelings or opinions matter to her in the slightest, apart from her close family's. For Hopkins, being in the public eye is exactly like being on the army parade square. Anything is fair game, and anybody who gets upset is as pathetic as the women in her old platoon who couldn't hack Sandhurst and quit.

Deaf to distress, her indifference towards anyone else's feelings makes sense. But I'm confused about how she reconciles her contempt for emotional messiness with a private life so colourful that she once listed "stealing husbands" as her hobby on her CV. Her first husband was just one of a string of married fathers whom Hopkins seduced away from their families, including her second husband, the father of her five-year-old son.

How can someone so impatient with indisciplined self-indulgence justify wreaking havoc in so many lives, in of all things the name of love? "Oh, spare me the oestrogen tears," she groans. "We've all got skeletons in our closets. I couldn't be disingenuous enough to say I'm sorry for those women or children, because lots of us have done things wrong. When you look at the statistics for men and women having affairs, it's huge."

Lots of women are a size 18, but in Hopkins' book that's inexcusable. So why is poor impulse control acceptable in sexual behaviour, but not anything else? "For me there are certain standards of life. Intrinsic to my life are work, fitness, discipline." So if I was fat she'd call me disgusting, but if I tried to steal her husband she'd say: 'Fair enough'? "Yeah."

It must surely have struck Hopkins that her arguments about how everyone should be – slim, fit, punctual, organised, smartly dressed, hard-working – are just descriptions of her own preferences. We'd all like everyone else to abide by our personal rules, but most of us see that our rules are wildly inconsistent and wholly subjective, whereas she has invested hers with the certainty of universal truths. How can she be so sure her standards are objectively right? "Because when I look at the things I think are important, they're all things that don't ask anything of anybody else. If you are healthy and not obese you're not asking the NHS for anything. I'm not asking the taxpayer to fund my benefits. Because I'm not asking anything from anyone, I think that that gives me the right to say: 'This is how it should be.'"

I had put Hopkins' horror of being weak and needing help down to nothing too terrible ever having happened to her. But the horror is too visceral for that, and the real explanation is a revelation. She can see how some people have suffered awful things, "but I just don't connect with that, because I still have my thing going on." It takes a moment to realise she is talking about epilepsy. All of a sudden she speaks very quickly, as if the words were burning coals.

"When I have a fit at night, my arms come out. They dislocate. So I have to go into hospital to have them relocated. That's happened 26 times in the last nine months. So we all have crap to deal with in our lives. I'm hard with myself. Get on with it. Move on. Get your arms put back in." She never talks about it, she says, and as soon as has told me she looks as if she wishes she hadn't.

Has anyone ever suggested, I ask, that she is profoundly disconnected from her emotions? "No, I think I'm just very male." I think her emotional disconnect is quite extreme. "Do you?" She looks surprised. "I don't think it is." But being "very male" wouldn't explain her violent disgust for others' failure to live up to her standards, nor why women's failings upset her so much more than men's. It doesn't explain why she never watches herself on TV, not even her debut on The Apprentice. "Yes, that is odd," she concedes, when this curious fact emerges. "I hadn't actually thought that before, but I suppose it is." And it doesn't explain why the only response she seems unable to deal with is sympathy. If I glowered at her she would be quite impervious – but a sympathetic look is a kind of agony for Hopkins, making her literally squirm, and I think this has distorted her entire perspective on other people's problems.

Had she been born to a drug-addicted prostitute and an alcoholic pimp, and suffered unspeakable violence and neglect from infancy, would she expect herself to be as self-sufficient as she has been? "Look, there's always an argument for why people don't make it. Whereas I look at myself and go, you know what, I've had a fair amount to overcome. But I haven't allowed it to get in my way." So she would expect the same of someone born into addiction and abuse? "Yes. And I'm sorry, but they lose. They lose. The truth is, life is just not fair."

Isn't it interesting that people who say that are always at the top of the pecking order? "Yes, but isn't it interesting that people who work hard do really well? Isn't it interesting that people who get up at 5.30am to go running aren't fat?" Not really, I say. Those are just examples of logical cause and effect. The child I've just described didn't do anything to cause its circumstances – so why is it right for that human being to lose?

"I really don't have an answer for it," she admits. "But if you're the sort of parent who can't give a toss, then I can't give a toss about your child either." Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 days ago.

What I'm really thinking: the girl with the speech impediment

'I'm more than "the girl with the mouth problems", as one friend's mum described me'

Being born without a tongue, lower teeth and bottom lip causes your speech to have a constant underlying "ssss". Some words are more difficult to say than others: Ds and Gs sound like Bs; Cs and Ks like Ts. So, instead of saying dog, I call all dogs puppies.

I sometimes forget what I sound like until I hear a recording. As a researcher, I transcribe interviews in which I've tried hard to be clear, using techniques learned from childhood speech therapy. I still cringe when I hear myself pronounce certain words.

Repeating yourself is tiring. People I speak to often understand me better than those I speak to only once a week, such as my family. My mother's most used phrase is, "Sorry, I didn't quite catch that." Meeting people is difficult: they lose interest quickly when it's hard work for them to listen, so I overcompensate by being loud. It doesn't always work. One date with a deaf guy was a particular low: his hearing aids could pick up only so much and lip-reading was impossible.

I don't mind being asked about it, but it depends what you ask. A guy at work asks every six months – maybe he thinks something has changed. But I'd rather you asked than stared. If I notice, I'll stare back to make you as uncomfortable as you're making me. I'm more than "the girl with the mouth problems", as one friend's mum described me. Talk to me about something other than what I look and sound like.

• Tell us what you're really thinking at mind@theguardian.com Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 days ago.
Viewing all 17400 articles
Browse latest View live