In the Wolf's Mouth by Adam Foulds – review

February 15, 2014, 12:18 am

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Foulds' compassion for the singularity of each individual's suffering saves his characters from becoming caricatures

Stories of war lack conclusion. The Iliad ends with the burial of Hector, "the breaker of horses", but after the last line we know the victors and victims will continue to tell the saga in endless variations, from the days of Hector to our own bloody times. In essence, every war copies the argument of the war of Troy. Closer to our century, the second world war still provides material for the latest chapters, one conquering empire passing the crown to another, "hopefully without barbarians or dark ages", as an Oxford-educated north African aristocrat remarks in Adam Foulds' new novel. Foulds has chosen to set his story at the moment when the allied forces arrive in Sicily, bringing with them good intentions, greedy ambition and a new quality of suffering. As we should have learned by now, there never is liberation without destruction.

The two main protagonists here are almost staples of world war fiction. The first is a young English field security officer, Will Walker, a model of Anglo-Saxon attitudes: stiff upper lip in spite of lacking the "look of the officer class", thinking he can stop someone from shooting with an "I say!", introducing himself as a fellow "from the Midlands, Shakespeare's country". The second is an American soldier, Ray Marfione, "from Little Italy not big Italy", a quiet, thoughtful Hemingway type full of plots for the film scripts he wants one day to write, all with happy endings. The war zone is not a place for either of them.

The chronicle of the liberation of Italy by the allies, clumsily groping their way from Sicily northwards, attempting to push back the fascists' resistance and the German army, is not a glorious one, as readers have known since the fascist novelist Curzio Malaparte published his masterpiece The Skin in 1949. However, Foulds adds a fairly new twist to his story by interweaving the traditional account of the abuses and mayhem with the goings-on of the mafia, whose activities during the second world war have not been all that common fodder in fiction. As Foulds makes clear, the mafia held its power in every area of Italian society before and after the war, from the church and the aristocracy to the petty bureaucrats and the police, controlling with its laws of silence or reprisal the lives of almost every person. Among the mafiosi Foulds is again this side of caricature: here, the godfather who returns after years of hiding to find his woman married to another, promptly gets rid of his rival and marries the widow, has less a Richard III air about him than echoes of The Sopranos.

However, Foulds knows how to transform picture-postcard atmosphere into something else. Arriving in Sicily, Marfione is greeted by a cliche: "Passing through the liberated towns, the doorways were full of hungry children who came out to beg for food and cheer them. Their clothes and faces – they looked exactly like the children in the family photographs in the dresser in the hall, stiff cardboard images of rigid Pugliese families, dark eyes, moustaches and oiled hair, heavy beaded dresses, hands immobile forever on knees and solemn children standing in knickerbockers, thick socks and polished boots." And then, Foulds has the literary intelligence to turn the commonplace on its head. "Most of these clothes, his mother explained, would have been hired for the occasion. Here these children were now, famished in the middle of a war. On the walls behind them, already defaced, were posters of Mussolini. They shouted at Ray in his parents' language. Believe! Obey! Fight!"

What saves these characters from becoming caricatures is Foulds' sensitive understanding of war's horror, and his wise compassion for the singularity of each of their individual suffering: Walker losing his virginity not to the girl he has chosen but to a random other, "in exchange for a tin of mackerel"; Marfione making love to a prostitute and thinking "of the Germans in the trench wilting down into their own blood". And when these characters can catch their breath and allow their thoughts to surface in the moments of respite between the slaughter, and even in the battlefield itself, Foulds subtly shows their incomprehension of what is taking place all around them and in themselves as well.

Foulds' acknowledged narrative mastery as a novelist and as a poet (the list of his awards fills the whole of the back cover) is often apparent in this book: in the ambiguous dialogues between strangers revealing unspoken intimacies, in the delicately clipped snippets of everyday life recalled in the confusion of the war, in the lyrical broken-up sentences that mirror the physical and mental shattering of the ongoing slaughter.

As suits a war story, In the Wolf's Mouth concludes with a plea to remember: in technical terms, a debriefing. Standing in front of an official and his typewriter, Marfione is told to recall what happened. "Fine," says the official. "Tell me from the beginning.""We came through fighting," Marfione answers. "We got lost. We really got lost.""Okay," says the official. "Go on." With these words the novel ends and the story begins again.

• Alberto Manguel's A Reader on Reading is published by Yale. Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 days ago.

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Ben Watt | Getting to know my parents as people

February 15, 2014, 12:18 am

≫ Next: KM Peyton: 'I got the most vitriolic letters from mothers. They were shocked at Flambards. It was quite sexy'

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Musician Ben Watt's parents were divorcees from different backgrounds. It wasn't until after his father's death and his mother's lapse into dementia, that he found an envelope of private memories that told the story of their love

Soon after his father's funeral in 2006, Ben Watt found himself holding a sealed envelope. On it, in his mother's handwriting, were the words "Memories – Very Private – For Tom Only". His father, Tom, would never now read the contents. Ben's mother, who was living in a Bristol care home and had dementia, wasn't always aware that Tom was dead.

"I had to make a choice," says Ben. "Do I look at this or save it? I thought if I was to have any understanding of my father and a better relationship with my mother then what was to be lost?

"People get on better if they talk. Relationships thrive on a degree of transparency. I felt only good could come of opening it. Even if it was sad, it would be an insight."

Ben's new book, Romany and Tom, a memoir about his parents, is an account of what he learned when he opened the envelope. As a child, Ben had known, as most of us do, the bare facts of his parents' life together. He knew that his mother had been married before – he had four older half siblings. By the time of his father's death, Ben knew enough to see that the story had all the makings of a best-selling 1950s potboiler.

His mother, Romany Bain, trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art before an early career with the Royal Shakespeare Company was interrupted by motherhood. Then she met Tommy Watt, a working-class Glaswegian socialist musician and leader of London's most celebrated jazz big band. He, too, was unhappily married, his wife chronically ill.

Their thunderbolt first meeting, Ben discovered on opening the envelope, was at a New Year's Day party in 1957. Reading Romany's account of the affair wasn't easy – "like an exhumation"– but it opened a window on to the two people who were to be his parents.

For five years, as letters and diary entries attested, they conducted a passionate, frequently despairing affair before the divorce laws of the day (and their respective heartbroken spouses) allowed them to marry in October 1962, six weeks before Ben was born.

There were small heartbreaks of which Ben had been unaware (an abortion before he was born, for example), but the biggest revelation was how hard it had been for the couple to make it work, the overwhelming force that "compelled them to be together, leaving so much carnage in their wake".

Tom and Romany's relationship continued, volatile and dramatic, punctuated by rows, reconciliations, careers in ascendancy and decline (always out of synch) and steeped in alcohol until Tommy's death – a few months after Ben's own breakdown.

Losing his father was, he says, "a great emotional trigger point". He realised he wanted to understand Romany and Tom as people beyond their roles as parents.

"When you are young you are going through your own golden years. Then you reach the point where you see you, too, have crested the hill. Perhaps that is when you reflect. You look at your parents for the first time and see that the people we judge are just ordinary human beings trying to do their best, altered by all the experiences they have had, so many of which we have never known, still fighting their way through just as you are."

The notion that his parents were normal, flawed people never occurred to him in childhood. "I felt I was in the presence of two huge characters. My dad was only 5ft 6in but to me he was a titan," he recalls. "I remember getting into bed with my mother as a little boy and feeling as if I was in the embrace of a noble animal. They were big forest creatures that I lived among. They could flare up and then calm down and be so loving."

In the years before Tommy's death, Ben moved his parents from Oxford to a flat near his own north London home, stocking their fridge with ready meals, arranging his father's CDs. He hoped to engineer a comfortable, interesting old age for them – friends, music, theatre trips, family visits. "I thought I'd be close enough to deal with emergencies but also to free up Mum's life. Her cries for help were becoming so plangent. She was trapped."

Ben had bought Romany a fax machine to keep in touch when he was on tour – he is a musician. Interspersed with cheery updates on garden birds were despairing accounts of Tommy's worsening health and depression. It wasn't the fresh start Ben had envisaged. "I saw I couldn't actually have much effect. They were further down the line than I had realised."

This growing dependency wasn't always comfortable for Ben or his parents. "They were extremely grateful but I also felt strongly that it was demeaning for them. I often felt like the teacher of some naughty pupils on a school trip."

After two serious operations left Romany in no state to cope with an increasingly infirm Tommy, Ben twice arranged care home places for him. "I was wielding so much power and responsibility – it was very anxiety-inducing. When she was ready to have him back, it was me that went to get him. He was so grateful."

Ben found that alongside the decisions and logistics of their lives, his parents even seemed to have devolved responsibility for their feelings towards each other. It was only after learning more about them that he understood Romany's sometimes apparently cold attitude. Once a bad fall led to a hospital admission for Tommy. Ben had to cajole her into going with him. "Really? Do I need to … Oh, all right."

"Your allegiances can change. My dad could seem sympathetic and charismatic and my mum crotchety. As the story unfolded I realised what he had put her through – and what she had put up with. I felt a great deal of sympathy for her. That was one of the strongest lessons of my research. Perhaps I was too quick to judge."

At one time, arguments – fired by Tommy's drinking, his depression, his inability to cope with the demise of the jazz world he knew, the occasional cutting remarks – would be resolved with breezily conciliatory notes left on the kitchen table, but there were now perhaps "too many hard feelings". His parents were locked together, unable to live peacefully with or without each other. "That great tension – everything that drove them together also drove them apart.

"I just wanted them to conform and behave towards each other in a particular way. Why can't you just love each other and look after each other? You need each other as never before," he says. "Yet here life was, all still playing itself out."

In many ways it was easier for Ben to feel close to his parents as individuals than as a couple. "Three is a difficult number. You end up siding with one or the other. One to one, they could be more themselves."

These were the treasured moments of camaraderie with his father. "Whether it was taking me to the football when I was little or driving me up to university and smoking a joint going across the Humber bridge. He could exercise his armoury of jokes. We could be jazz musicians together."

Music – a shared passion – informed much of Tommy's relationship with Ben, who with his wife, Tracey Thorn, formed the 1980s duo Everything But the Girl – but in the early years it "disconnected" more than united them.

Feeling powerless as rock'n'roll usurped his beloved jazz, Tommy had turned down an offer to arrange music for the Beatles. "He just had this one idea. He wanted to be the leader of the best jazz band in the world. He didn't like the new sort of music, so why bother? I understand that now. Hats off to him – but, also, how bloody-minded."

Ben is accepting of the constraints on his present relationship with Romany. In 2009, she was diagnosed with a form of dementia that causes hallucinations. She recently asked Roly, Ben's half-brother, if he was real or just in her mind.

"Sometimes she is very responsive and other times not, but I am grateful she has hung on and I put a lot of effort into trying to get close to her. I enjoy it.

"I don't ask direct questions. I try to prompt her. I start talking. If I see her look up I ask what went through her mind. You just jump in and live in that moment with her. Sometimes she reveals the person I have always known."

His book is not a biography of his parents."It's just my take on them," he says. After reading a draft, Roly told Ben that it said as much about its author as it did about their mother and Tommy.

"They must be – or were – only ordinary people like ourselves," he writes in the preface. "Or the ones, as their kids, we may become. We all walk on common ground."

To read an extract of Romany and Tom by Ben Watt, visit tinyurl.com/pyeb47e

To listen to Ben Watt reading from Romany and Tom, visit tinyurl.com/nc3lpuq Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 days ago.

KM Peyton: 'I got the most vitriolic letters from mothers. They were shocked at Flambards. It was quite sexy'

February 15, 2014, 12:18 am

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Her novels about a horse-loving orphaned teenager became children's classics and this year KM Peyton has been honoured with an MBE. She talks to Susanna Rustin

KM Peyton's passion for horses dates "from the year dot", but she was almost 50 when she joined her first fox hunt. "It's called the Essex Farmers and it's not one of your posh hunts." By then, the author of more than 30 books, many of them about girls and ponies, Peyton had only recently bought her first horse, after her eldest daughter had left home and her ponies been given away. "I really missed them, he was away sailing all the time,"– she nods at her husband Mike, who sits on the opposite side of the wood-burning stove in the study of their house on the River Crouch in Essex – "I was secretary of the Pony Club so I knew all these horsey people, and I said, 'I can't go hunting, I can't ride well enough,' and they all said, 'Don't let that stop you!'"

And her first day hunting was "wonderful! You're not supposed to say that today, are you? At one time I went every Wednesday and Saturday."

Peyton, who is 84, was made MBE in the New Year honours for services to children's literature, and on 4 March will go to Buckingham Palace with her family. She treats it as a great joke and says she won't wear a hat, but has been delighted as well as surprised by the many cards, phonecalls and letters.

"I used to think it was a load of old tosh, all these honours, until they gave me one. I got a letter today from the secretary of state [for culture, media and sport], Maria Miller, congratulating me. I don't think the Queen does a lot of them any more, does she? It will probably be Charles. I like Charles. I shall say, 'I think you're a good chap, Charles.'" She laughs.

Peyton is best known for the Flambards series, originally a trilogy though she later added a fourth book, which begins before the outbreak of the first world war when orphaned heiress Christina Parsons is a teenager. Packed off to live with her uncle, who is squandering the remains of his fortune on horses and port while his younger son experiments with flying machines, Christina finds herself caught between the claims of old and new worlds. Impressed by the faded grandeur of her new surroundings and bowled over by the thrill of fox-hunting, she is also modern enough to feel outraged by her uncle's feudal domination of his family and household, and spends the novel wrestling with her emotions.

Flambards was recently singled out by children's author Meg Rossoff as one of her favourite books and has a Cornish theme park named after it (where the aircraft used to make the TV serial were displayed). The novel was pipped to Britain's top award for children's writing, the Carnegie medal, by Alan Garner's The Owl Service in 1967 – "which I thought was as it should be", Peyton says. But her sequel, Edge of the Cloud, which follows Christina and her cousin Will to early adulthood in wartime London, won two years later. Peyton was also runner-up six times, and is still annoyed she didn't get the medal in 1966 when the judges decided not to give it to anyone. In 1970 she won the Guardian children's fiction prize for the trilogy.

"That was our heyday really," she says. "Flambards has been my old warhorse, it made me a lot of money because it sold a lot of books. It's funny because I've written better books, but that's the one that keeps on going. Most of my others are out of print now."

So it's an irony that Peyton did not actually intend Flambards to be a children's book, but the first in a series of romantic novels. "The first one was definitely an adult book but it started with the girl at about 13, that was my mistake, and then carried on with her love life later on."

She recalls a tussle with her publisher at the time over how it would be published. She didn't want it to go out under a children's imprint. Her editor offered to give it a more adult cover, but the disguise didn't work. "I got the most vitriolic letters from mothers saying they knew what my work was like, and they were shocked at this book," she says. "It was quite sexy actually."

Nowadays Peyton's stories of adolescent romance would be published as teenage or young adult fiction. As these didn't exist as separate categories in the 1960s, the books were addressed to girls of indeterminate age, their burgeoning sexuality sometimes more or less buried in their passion for horses and at other times exploding out of the stable yard and into romances with a series of dashing young men. Sometimes the two go together, as in 1968's Fly-by-Night, where Ruth Hollis first experiences "hot pounding" and "a great flushing of gorgeous anticipation" about the prospect of owning a pony, and only later starts to fall in love – naturally enough, with the best rider she knows.

Kathleen Peyton, known as Kathy, eloped when she was 21. Her husband, Michael, was a miner's son almost 10 years her senior, who had joined the army and had what he calls a "very interesting" war, fighting in north Africa and Europe and escaping from prisoner-of-war camps before joining the Russian army on the eastern front. "He's quite lucky to be alive, I think," says his wife of more than 60 years.

They met at Manchester art school, and Mike asked her to marry him when he was on the brink of rejoining. "His proposal to me was: 'My friend Brian and I have decided we're going to join up and go to Korea next Saturday, unless you marry me. If you marry me, I won't go,' he said, can you believe it? I think he was quite surprised when I said yes, I would."

She took her birth certificate from her mother's drawer, they went to the register office and set off for the Alps where they spent their honeymoon walking. "I suppose it was romantic, I write rather romantic books, you know, and it makes me laugh because people think they're a bit soppy but it's all happened to me, I have had a romantic life."

Born in 1929, Peyton began writing as a child and published her first novel as a teenager, after an art teacher read it and got in touch with her parents. "There was a very good children's library in Surbiton and my mother took me at least twice a week. There was a librarian called Miss Smith, and I adored her. She picked books for me but I always wanted the same ones, pony books." Her favourite was Enid Bagnall's National Velvet, which she bought for sixpence at Wimbledon station on the way to school because it had a drawing of a horse on the cover: "I just adored it."

She says she was a late developer, "very backward, very immature", more interested in ponies and girl guiding than boyfriends or studying English. "I didn't read Dickens and all those things I'm supposed to have done. I have got around to Jane Austen, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre so I did grow up properly after the pony books. But I don't think Austen is for young girls. School put me off her in a big way." She still hasn't read Dickens.

Peyton has clear memories of wartime London – the bombed-out classrooms of Wimbledon High School, where lessons carried on for the girls who had not been evacuated, buzzing doodlebugs and squashed, damp nights with her brother in the garden air-raid shelter – and wrote about them in her memoir When the Sirens Sounded, privately published in 2012. Her own teenage romance, with an RAF pilot called John, nephew of the couple across the road, ended when his plane went down in a German forest.

After art college she taught for three years in Northampton, but by this time her writing career was under way. She used the name KM Peyton, with the initial M for her husband Michael, because he helped with the plots for the adventure stories she wrote for magazines, and she "didn't think boys would read books written by Kathleen". The name stuck and she kept it after her daughters Hilary and Veronica were born, and she turned to writing full-time, producing a book a year working mostly in the mornings.

In the field behind their house in Essex there was space for Hilary to keep a pony. Despite her horse-filled imaginative life – Peyton played truant to go to the first race meeting at Epsom after the war on her bicycle – she had hardly ridden, apart from three times a year on Wimbledon Common in school holidays. Now she embraced the country life and made friends with farmers' wives, "very down-to-earth, very hardworking", and with whom she now runs a book group ("We read Dick Francis," she giggles). At one time she owned five horses, though the last was sold years ago and the stables converted into a home for Hilary and her husband.

Horses, racing and hunting formed the backdrop to many of the books Peyton published from the 1960s through the 1990s. She spent 20 years researching the life of Victorian jockey Fred Archer in Newmarket. Archer shot himself aged 29 after his wife died in childbirth, and Peyton wanted to write the script for a biopic. In the end it was a novel, Dear Fred.

But she also wrote about non-horsey characters. Patrick Pennington, hero of the Pennington series of novels that followed Flambards, and which Peyton says are her favourites among her own books, is a troubled youth with a gift for playing the piano. A Midsummer Night's Death is about climbing. While researching it, she hired a guide and tackled the most difficult climb of her life in Wales.

There are shades of Downton Abbey in Peyton's sweep from the top of the social scale to the bottom: in Snowfall, a Victorian adventure, the Prince of Wales comes to tea when heroine Charlotte is staying with her brother's posh friend Milo – while in a wildly unlikely subplot, an unmarried teenage servant who conceives a baby on a climbing trip is allowed to bring it up in the kitchen.

Peyton is no radical. She thinks the hunting ban ridiculous and voted Conservative for the first time in 2010 (she doesn't like Ed Miliband or Ed Balls, she tells me in the car on the way to the station). But the admiration for the ruling class expressed in her novels, and their qualities of courage, ease and tradition (plus great clothes, houses and horses) is undercut and qualified by other feelings and observations, including of the dreadful lives of servants.

Her books, which have fallen out of fashion, will surely benefit from the decision to honour her. They are fairytales of social mobility, full of adventure, enthusiasm and her lifelong love of horses. Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 days ago.

Naughty but nice: chefs' guilty pleasures

February 15, 2014, 6:24 am

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Think you can tell what cooks like to eat from their Twitter feed or menu? Think again. Seven chefs reveal their cravings for Frazzles, chip butties and more

*Monica Galetti, sous chef at Le Gavroche and MasterChef judge
New Zealand Marmite*

I did try to get used to the English version of Marmite. And I almost did until a couple of years ago when my sister brought me some from New Zealand. I haven't been able to go back to the English stuff ever since. Ours is probably more salty and yours is maybe more bitter. Both of them are better than Vegemite, which is horrible, but I find New Zealand Marmite easier to eat, more moreish. I eat it on toast with lots of butter and almost the equal amount of Marmite. When I start, I find it very difficult to stop.

There was always Marmite in our house. Don't mess with the Kiwis and their Marmite; it's serious stuff. When the earthquake hit Christchurch in 2011, the factory that produces Marmite was closed for two years. The supermarket shelves were empty and people were selling jars for hundreds of dollars on eBay. It was absolute meltdown; we called it "Marmageddon". Even the prime minister John Key got involved. It's back to normal now, but I've just come back from New Zealand and I brought an extra jar, just in case.

Some people put Marmite on all sorts of dishes – I don't mind dropping a teaspoon into a pot of stew – but it's something I like to eat at home, on the sofa. I have to stick the jar right at the back of the cupboard or I'll eat six slices of toast in one go.

*Claude Bosi, chef patron, Hibiscus, London
Pot Noodle & Frazzles
*

It's quite a dirty pleasure: curry-flavoured noodles topped with Frazzles, a bacon-flavoured corn-based snack you only get here in the UK. I never had it in France, but when I moved here in my mid-20s, the girl I was seeing at the time told me: "You need to try this – this is a proper student meal." I thought to myself, "Well, you know, I'm in a new country, I should try new things." I'm very glad I did: it's heaven on earth.

It's a perfect snack. Back in 2000, when I started [the first] Hibiscus in Ludlow, we didn't have any time to cook for ourselves. So as a time-saving exercise I'd just boil up some water, add it to the noodles and sprinkle Frazzles over the top. For the first few weeks, this was my main meal.

You may laugh at me and say it's disgusting, but most people who try it admit it's quite nice. If you haven't tried it, well, maybe you need to move on in life. It's not all about fancy food, you know? You need something to bring you back down to earth, and noodles with Frazzles is a good reality check.

That said, I don't eat them much any more. Now I'm a bit older, I'll go for a plate of cheese. I've got out of my late-teenager phase and I suppose I've gone a bit more French. It's probably better for me, the cheese, but– and I'll probably get in big trouble back home for saying this – it doesn't taste nearly as good.

*Hélène Darroze, head chef, restaurant Hélène Darroze at the Connaught, London W1
Krispy Kreme doughnuts*

My friend [the great French patissier] Pierre Hermé got me hooked on Krispy Kreme doughnuts. We were walking through Harrods about five years ago and there was a Krispy Kreme stand in the corner of the food hall. We picked up a box to share and I have been completely addicted ever since.

They remind me a little bit of my childhood. My grandmother used to make them at home, but without cream inside. In France we call them pets de nonne, or nun's farts, which I've always found really funny. Also when I was a child, we used to spend our family holidays in Biarritz, and on the beach there were guys who would go from one end to the other selling doughnuts filled with apricot compote. I would have one every day. In fact, I lost my first tooth inside one of those doughnuts.

So my love of Krispy Kreme is probably related to these memories – although I do think they're really well done, even though they are a bit industrial. I wouldn't eat them every weekend, but I'd have them quite often. Usually it's when I'm with my girls. I'll buy a box to share with them, although really I'm buying them for me. One of my girls prefers Marks & Spencer's doughnuts – I don't know why – and I have to negotiate a lot with her to get Krispy Kreme instead.

*Simon Hopkinson, cook and author
Farrow's marrowfat peas*

It's the mealiness of a marrowfat pea that I like, and the slight sweetness of them. You can use them to make mushy peas, but I never eat them in that state: I only like them heated up whole. They are very big and tender and absurdly green – there's obviously some colouring added, which doesn't bother me in the slightest – and I could eat them with all sorts of things. Once, I served them up at a friends' dinner party with a very rich chicken pie, with a big knob of butter mixed in and lots of white pepper on top. The reaction was fairly good all round, apart from one person who maybe thought they were a little bit common.

There's definitely a snobbery against marrowfat peas – that lurid colour does shock a lot of people – but I don't feel guilty about liking them. If something's a pleasure, it shouldn't be guilty, unless you have too much of it. I will shop anywhere and I'll cook anything, as long as I like it. Marrowfat peas I'll have quite regularly – I'm never without a can or two in my cupboard. If I'm feeling in that Sunday-evening comfort mode, I could even eat a bowl of them like soup. And if I was to do that … well, it's a very northern thing, but I'd have them with a splash of malt vinegar.

The brand I discovered I liked was Farrow's and I've never touched another brand since.

*Tom Kitchin, chef patron, The Kitchin, Edinburgh
Chip butty*

It's a simple but important formula: chips fresh out of the fryer which melt the butter spread onto a soft, sweet Scottish bap known as a morning roll, all topped with salt and brown sauce. It fills me with deep nostalgia – a remembered wickedness, like slipping crisps into your lunchtime sandwich.

I take my son Kasper, now five, after he's played football or – last time – following a day of mackerel fishing. Our fingertips were stinging and our ears hurt from the cold. Chip butties were our reward. When I take Kasper for lunch at the pub, he'll order six oysters or a mallard, and I'm proud of him for that, but I still want chip butties to have their place in his life.

We go to Franco's chip shop, next door to our pub in Edinburgh. Italians run many of Scotland's fast food shops, and owners Nino and Franco are no exception. They are third generation, but their fundamental Italianness is still there; they take great joy in eating but have adapted this to the Scottish market, serving fish and chips, smoked sausage and, yes, the odd pizza.

Nino and Franco have become good friends. They sometimes turn up at my back door with bags of fresh porcini in the mushroom season. Most of the time we just chat football as Kasper and I eat our chip butties. It's good for me, a release and a rare treat, although I do have to stop myself taking a can of Irn‑Bru to go with it.

*Jeremy Lee, head chef, Quo Vadis, London
Wine gums*

It started years ago with raiding the waiters' tips. After a busy Friday lunch, the chefs would say, "What are your cash tips like?" They'd be like, "What do you mean?" And I'd say, "Come on, share!" Then we'd go running down to the newsagent's to buy some sweeties and bonbons for the afternoon, just to give you that last little burst of energy. It was very funny and naughty.

Why do I love wine gums so much? Ooooh, they are just the best buck-you-up ever. As chefs, our palates and our appetites get annihilated, because we are taking little tastes of things all day long. Our stomachs go into somersaults and you need something that cuts through it. A cake is a bit much, a biscuit not quite enough. Fruit pastilles are coated in sugar. Chocolate is just instant bleurgh! It tends to be either too rich or just rubbish. But a wine gum delivers very, very well on the tongue.

For me, it has to Maynards. And in the kitchen we favour the bag over the rolled packet, which is too small and the wine gums can be quite tough. The bag is more yielding and fresher. The perfect combination is a yellow one, an orange one, a black one, a red one and a green one. I've been known to guzzle them Billy Bunter-style, just sheer greed, unashamed.

Maynards did a bag of reds and blacks and it was horrid. You've got to go through the yellows and greens and oranges to get to them.

*Nathan Outlaw, chef patron, Restaurant Nathan Outlaw, Rock, Cornwall
Tinned hotdogs*

When I was a kid we'd go to Maidstone United games. That's my local team and my father's a Chelsea fan, so we would go to their matches as well. It wasn't like it is now, with all the money; back then Chelsea was a normal football team and as you walked to the ground you could always smell the hotdogs and the burgers. If you were wearing a scarf on a cold night, that smell stuck to you. Fortunately I like it, so it's all right.

Even now when I cook hotdogs at home, that smell is exactly the same. It's one of my happiest memories. When I started training as a chef in London I couldn't afford to eat out or do anything really. My first job, back in 1995, I was earning £7,000 a year at the InterContinental on Hyde Park Corner and then I'd go home to the bedsit in Earl's Court and eat my tin of hotdogs. Ideally, I'd have them with onions, ketchup and mustard or just rolled up in a slice of white bread. Hotdog rolls were a treat – you were celebrating if you had proper hotdog rolls!

Even now if we went camping with the kids, I'd take a tin of hotdogs. My wife will eat them with me, but my kids hate them. They'd say, "Can't we have some real sausages, Dad?" Things move on. Jamie Oliver did a lot of these things where he showed people what's in those products, but I didn't watch that show! I didn't want to see; I don't want to ruin my nostalgia for something I used to love. Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 days ago.

How visualising data has changed life… and saved lives

February 15, 2014, 4:14 pm

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From John Graunt's 'bills of mortality' to Florence Nightingale's revolutionary 'rose charts', the distillation of information into graphics has been a vital tool for scientists

Big data, infographics, visualisations – the pop words of a modern phenomenon. But while information accumulation has become a 21st-century obsession, our generation is not the first to discover that a picture is worth a thousand words, as a new British Library exhibition will reveal.

Revelling in the power of illustrations, tables and figures, Beautiful Science charts the course of data dissemination across the centuries, from the grim ledgers of death recorded by John Graunt in the 17th-century "bills of mortality" to the digital evolutionary tree dreamt up by an Imperial College researcher, complete with a mind-boggling zoomable function. "You can use almost fractal-like patterns to explore all of life on Earth," says Dr Johanna Kieniewicz, lead exhibition curator.

But diagrams can also be agents of change. Indeed, Florence Nightingale's talent at wielding data to push for health reforms shows she was not only the lady with the lamp but the girl with the graphics. "She was actually a very eminent and hard-nosed statistician," says Kieniewicz. The brutal message of her "rose" charts of mortality, constructed using data from the Crimean war, was both informative and highly influential, showing in stark, uncompromising terms that the numbers of soldiers dying from disease and squalor far outweighed those dying from battle injuries.

And other vivid illustrations are also on show. A map of Soho bearing neat black marks holds the clue to a devastating cholera outbreak that hit the area 160 years ago. Created by medical man John Snow, the black marks track the deaths street by street and, combined with Snow's theory that cholera was waterborne, pinpoint the root of the outbreak: a contaminated pump in the centre of Broad Street. "One thing that's incredibly interesting about John Snow's cholera map is that, in a sense, it's a tool of discovery as well as communication," explains Kieniewicz. "This is a way through which he could actually test his hypothesis and show what was going on."

Split into three sections – public health, weather and climate and trees of life – the exhibition also boasts examples of more contemporary techniques, including the specially commissioned "Circles of Life", revealing the similarities between the human genome and those of chimps, chickens and platypuses. It is a reminder, perhaps, that diagrams are not only helpful in public communication but are often vital tools for sophisticated research.

From scientists to consumers, there's no escaping the onward march of big data. But as Beautiful Science shows, if we embrace the power of graphics, fresh insights to modern challenges may be glimpsed. And that could be massive.

Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight, runs from 20 February to 26 May at the British Library Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 days ago.

How supermodel Waris Dirie saved girl from female genital mutilation

February 15, 2014, 4:17 pm

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Somali model insisted Safa Idriss Nour, the child who played her suffering FGM in biopic, had to be spared the same fate

When she was three years old, Safa Idriss Nour received something no girl in her slum in Djibouti had been given before – a signed contract from her parents stating they would never inflict genital mutilation on her.

In Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa, an estimated 98% of girls and women have undergone female genital mutilation (FGM), a procedure that usually involves cutting off the clitoris and some of the labia, so this was a remarkable event. Equally remarkable is the story of how Nour came to get the contract and, indeed, of her battle to ensure that her parents stuck to the terms of the deal.

Nour starred in a film adaptation of Desert Flower, the international bestselling autobiography by Somali model and anti-FGM activist Waris Dirie. Published in 1997, her first book follows Dirie from her birth into a nomadic family in Somalia – from whom she fled, aged 13, after her father attempted to marry her to a 60-year-old man – to her becoming an international supermodel.

In 2007, Nour was asked to play the young Dirie as she undergoes FGM – on condition that her parents sign a contract agreeing never to perform the same ritualistic operation on her.

Nour's experience reflects broader tensions that affect communities and activists involved in FGM around the world, and her story has now been documented in Dirie's latest book, Safa: The Rescue of the Little Desert Flower, first published in German and due out in translation in the UK later this year.

The book also provides compelling evidence of the pressures within particular groups, including those in England and Wales, where more than 66,000 women are thought to have undergone FGM and 24,000 girls under 15 are believed to be at risk.

A campaign to persuade the education secretary, Michael Gove, to help end FGM by ordering headteachers in England to educate parents and children about the practice has gathered more than 203,000 signatures since it was launched the week before last. It is backed by the Observer, the Guardian and a range of campaigners.

Dirie's new book begins in 2011, four years after the contract with Nour's parents had been signed, when she received a letter from the girl that suggested her parents were having second thoughts. "I was shocked and I was very angry," Dirie, 48, said. "I decided I had to fly to Djibouti immediately to save my little girl from this brutal crime."

Once in Djibouti, she realised that the family were being ostracised and Nour's fear of being forced to undergo FGM, rather than diminishing, had grown. Then seven, Nour told her: "Grandmother carried out lots of circumcisions in our house. The girls screamed so loudly, just like I did in the film."

Nour's parents confirmed that pressure from neighbours and others for Nour to undergo FGM was weighing heavily on them.

In such places the cutting of a girl's vagina is considered to be a symbol of purity, a sign of commitment to a future husband over a desire for sexual pleasure. In severe cases, the remaining outer labia are sewn together, often without anaesthetic, and only reopened after marriage, to "protect" a girl's virginity.

Traditional or spiritual motivations aside, the procedure is deemed a practical necessity for many parents – without it they cannot get a high bridal price when their daughter is married – if she can get a husband at all.

This is a fear shared by Nour's parents. They told Dirie that her daughter and the family were being treated as outsiders and neighbours were jealous of the financial and medical support they were receiving from Dirie's FGM campaigning charity, Desert Flower Foundation, in return for upholding the contract.

"Safa's family is surrounded by others struggling every day to survive. Even though the families have very little money, they save what money they have to cut their daughters, because otherwise they will not get a bride price from the future husband," Dirie said. "Because of our support, Safa's family is completely independent and the first family in the area to stop the vicious circle. This is a breach of their tradition, and people have big problems with this."

Dirie spent time with the family and took some of them to Europe to show them campaigning work and talk about the corrective surgery carried out by the Desert Flower Foundation. The experience was a turning point, particularly for the father, who once argued strongly with Dirie over cutting Nour. He now works as an activist for the charity.

"Safa's father has even invited neighbours to participate in our programme and the reactions were positive," Dirie said, demonstrating the difference that can be made when campaigns are led from within the communities they are trying to change.

Although the case of Nour's father was a success, trying to encourage broader behaviour change through education is not easy. "Educating communities is very difficult as people are very stubborn and not willing to change their habits even if it is against humanity," says Dirie. Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 days ago.

Women needed to engineer a bright future for British industry

February 15, 2014, 4:17 pm

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With Europe's lowest percentage of female engineers, the UK needs to work at attracting girls to the profession

For her 18th birthday, in 1981, Carol Marsh's parents gave her a ZX81 computer. The ZX81, a small black box with four chips, a single kilobyte of memory and a tendency to overheat, was the first mass-market computer, and got a generation hooked on messing around with circuit boards.

"You could buy it as a kit. It came with instructions so I put it together. I never thought anything of it," she says.

Marsh went on to become one of the first women to gain a higher national diploma in electrical and electronic engineering at Napier University, in her home city of Edinburgh. The first in her family to go to university, she fell into the world of logic gates and binary numbers, discovering "the thrill of designing things and seeing them work".

When she got married in her third year, her tutors assumed she would leave the course. "Not only did I stay, but I got a distinction," she says, matter-of-factly.

Three decades on, Marsh has a doctorate in engineering and a senior job at Selex ES, the international defence engineering firm, where she oversees the design of digital chips used in radar and lasers in commercial and fighter jets.

Although not as scarce as a ZX81 is these days, Carol Marsh is still in a very select group. Only 8% of British engineers are women, the lowest proportion in Europe, and well behind Germany (15%), Sweden (25%) and top-performing Latvia (30%). A growing number of companies are saying this is a problem not only for them, but for all of UK manufacturing.

The manufacturers' organisation EEF reports that four in five firms are struggling to fill their vacancies. "That is because the talent pool is pretty much half of what it could be," the EEF's Verity O'Keefe says. "If we are not really tackling that [gender] issue, we are going to have larger skills gaps than other industries that have done something about it, such as medicine."

Dave Dalton, chief executive of the British Glass Association, says UK manufacturers could lose their competitive edge, as the battle for brainpower intensifies. "I know the future is not going to be about physical endeavour; it's going to be about mental endeavour, and 50% of the population are female. Why are we not attracting that potential?"

The problem starts long before people pick a career. Too many youngsters are ditching maths and science as soon as they can, a trend especially marked for girls. Almost half of mixed state schools in England failed to enter a single girl for A-level physics. And when it comes to careers most valued by parents, engineering is right at the top – for boys. But teaching and nursing come top of parents' wish-lists for their daughters.

Elena Rodríguez Falcón, a professor of enterprise education at the University of Sheffield, thinks the problem starts in the nursery. "Children's books are filled with social constructs: the girl is a nurse; the boy is a firefighter." Another storybook fable she wants to demolish is that "engineering is a dirty, badly paid profession". Many people misunderstand what engineering is about, she says. They associate it with car mechanics, rather than well-paid graduates designing ultrasound scanners or smartphones.

Engineering and manufacturing firms have to compete with medical schools for the tiny pool of women who have done maths and science A-levels.

Katrina Love, 18, from Sheffield is studying A-levels including maths and chemistry: she is just the kind of bright student they hope to attract. She had looked at doing medicine and dentistry, but says recent open days have opened her eyes to mechanical engineering. Her younger sister Sarah, 16, is thinking about an apprenticeship, but has run into scepticism: "[People] start to question why you are doing that – why you don't do a more feminine role, like nursing."

Julie Watson, 50, says she has seen little sexism in her 30-year career at a bottle plant in Knottingley, West Yorkshire. When she took a summer job at the plant aged 17, in 1983, she was set on a career in fashion, but discovered that "glassmaking was in my veins". By age 25 she was a supervisor, overseeing bottle production, at a time when most women at the plant were assembling cardboard boxes.

The "gender thing" came up only once: when an all-male panel was considering her application for a five-year training course in glass technology and engineering. "They asked: 'Why do you want to apply for something like this? Wouldn't you be more suited to a secretarial position?' I found myself convincing them that I could actually spray-paint my own car."

Today she's operations director, overseeing 260 employees. She likes to invite schoolchildren into the plant, to show them how piles of grey sand are transformed into clinking bottles.

O'Keefe thinks such female role models will be a big help in closing the gender gap. A decisive factor in girls' take-up of apprenticeships is whether a "key influencer" showed them what was possible, she says.

However, it is not just attracting women into the workforce that is crucial, but keeping them. In a report last year, John Perkins, chief scientific adviser to the business department, called on employers to spend more on helping women return to work after a career break. At Selex ES, Marsh says employers should do more to help women – and men – resume careers after time out: "Engineering is difficult to come back to because it changes so quickly. You have to retrain, and you can lose confidence."

But can these measures make a difference before manufacturing, now reduced to just 10% of the UK economy, shrinks even further?

Rodríguez Falcón sees a link between female participation and a strong manufacturing base. "When you are surrounded by engineering, you can very clearly see what it is and what it can do in your life," she says. "Unfortunately, in the UK, industry is disappearing, slowly but surely." Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 days ago.

The Rising Star of Lupita Nyong’o: Film Star and Fashionista

February 17, 2014, 8:09 am

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If there’s one name you need to remember for this awards season it's12 Years a Slaveactress Lupita Nyong’o. The Oscar nominee is the girl... Reported by ContactMusic 1 day ago.

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The Saturdays preview new 'Not Giving Up' music video - watch

February 18, 2014, 5:07 am

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The girl group will premiere the full visual on February 19.

 
 
 
  Reported by Digital Spy 11 hours ago.

Jealous yob left his victim suffering wound in Plymouth bar...

February 18, 2014, 5:51 am

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A JEALOUS thug left his victim needing several stitches after being told the girl he fancied was taken. An 18-year-old man – who is around 5ft 4ins tall – and his girlfriend were in the upstairs bar of Cuba in North Hill at around 2.40am on Sunday February 16 when the incident took place. The suspect approached the teenage girl and began to chat her up, but after being informed that she was with her boyfriend, he became insulting. Investigators say the suspect turned on the young... Reported by Plymouth Herald 11 hours ago.

Girl 'stoned to death by Syrian fundamentalists for having a FACEBOOK account'

February 18, 2014, 10:03 am

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The girl, named as Fatoum Al-Jassem, was reportedly sentenced to death by a Sharia court in Al-Reqqa after it ruled having a Facebook account was immoral behaviour (file picture of ISIS militants). Reported by MailOnline 7 hours ago.

Man, 31, arrested on indecent exposure charges

February 19, 2014, 12:17 am

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A MAN has been arrested on suspicion of indecent exposure following two incidents in Bodmin.The first alleged incident occurred on Friday between 4-4.30pm when the man, 31, followed an 11-year-old girl before exposing himself in the alleyway next to Sainsbury's supermarket.The second incident occurred on the same day at Wallace Road between 4.15-4.45pm, when a 14-year-old was walking up a flight of stairs before the man walked past her and exposed himself.After the girl ran away the man then... Reported by Cornish Guardian 17 hours ago.

Two-year-old girl dies after fall from window in Bradford

February 19, 2014, 2:01 am

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Mother fights for her life in hospital after also falling from rear upstairs window of terraced house

A community has been left "shocked" by the death of a two-year-old girl who is thought to have fallen from a window.

A woman, thought to be 36, was found alongside the girl and is fighting for life in hospital.

Police said they are not looking for anyone else in connection with the incident in Bradford.

Officers were called by paramedics after reports that a woman and child had been found unconscious outside the back of an address on Tuesday morning.

Sher Khan, Labour councillor for Little Horton, described the incident as "unbelievable".

He told the Telegraph & Argus newspaper that neighbours said the girl had fallen from the upstairs window of a terraced house and the woman had fallen afterwards.

"The family had just recently moved into the area," he said. "It's unbelievable. Apparently, the woman had recently moved from somewhere else – another city – to this area. My understanding is that nobody knew her that well.

"It happened at about 9.15am. Everyone is so shocked."

Detective Chief Inspector Jon Morgan said: "Police were called by paramedics to Delamere Street, Bradford, at 9.15am today, following reports that a woman and child had been found unconscious outside the back of an address.

"The child, a two-year-old girl, was taken to hospital with serious injuries but was sadly pronounced dead a short time later.

"The woman, who is believed to be 36, was also taken to hospital where she is currently being treated for her injuries. She remains in a critical condition.

"A forensic postmortem is due to take place tonight.

"Inquiries into this incident are at an early stage but we are not looking for anyone else in connection with it. I would ask anyone with information to call the police on 101." Reported by guardian.co.uk 15 hours ago.

Critically ill mother, 36, arrested on suspicion of murder after two-year-old girl fell to her death from a window

February 19, 2014, 4:05 am

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The girl and her 36-year-old mother were found unconscious outside a house in Bradford, West Yorkshire, at around 9.15am yesterday. Reported by MailOnline 13 hours ago.

Mother arrested on suspicion of murder after daughter falls to her death

February 19, 2014, 4:42 am

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West Yorkshire police launch murder inquiry after two-year old girl dies falling from a house in Bradford

A 36-year-old woman has been arrested on suspicion of murdering her two-year-old daughter, who died after falling from a house.

West Yorkshire police launched a murder inquiry following the death of the unnamed child, who was found unconscious with her mother on Tuesday outside a house in Delamere Street, in the West Bowling area of Bradford.

A spokesman said both were taken to hospital where the girl died a short time later. Her mother remained in a critical condition.

The spokesman said: "The girl and a 36-year-old woman were found unconscious outside an address in Delamere Street at around 9.15am yesterday. Both were taken to hospital, but the child sadly died a short time later.

"A post-mortem was carried out last night, which revealed that the girl died of injuries consistent with a fall. A 36-year-old woman, who police can confirm is the child's mother, has been arrested on suspicion of murder."

Detective Chief Inspector Jon Morgan added: "We are not looking for anyone else in connection with this incident, but are appealing for anyone with information to contact the police on 101 or Crimestoppers on 0800 555111."

On Wednesday morning, a single bunch of flowers had been laid outside the modern end-terrace house, just off the busy Manchester Road in the city.

Labour councillor for Little Horton Sher Khan described the incident as "unbelievable".

He told the Telegraph and Argus that neighbours who live in the street said the girl had fallen from an upstairs window of a terraced house and the woman had fallen afterwards. Reported by guardian.co.uk 12 hours ago.

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Court hears of victim's anger over alleged years of abuse

February 19, 2014, 6:15 am

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A WOMAN who claimed she was raped by a Helston man has told a court how years of abuse have left her angry because people "let it happen". Terrence Williams, 68, of Trengouse Way, went on trial on Monday at Truro Crown Court, accused of 12 counts of indecently assaulting and raping a girl between 1988 and 1996. The girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, told the court the abuse started when she was aged under-10 and continued for a number of years. The woman, who is now in her 30s,... Reported by West Briton 11 hours ago.

Girl, 14, 'cannot remember' texts from accused sex offender

February 19, 2014, 6:19 am

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A GIRL who is alleged to have been in text contact with a 45-year-old man banned from messaging children has told a court she cannot recall the messages.The girl, who is now 14, gave evidence via video link at the trial of Mark Rayworth yesterday at Derby Crown Court .Rayworth, of Inglewood Avenue, Mickleover, is accused of attempting to communicate by text with a girl under the age of 16.In March 2012, Rayworth was convicted of sexually grooming a 15-year-old girl and given an order which... Reported by Derby Telegraph 11 hours ago.

Stromae – the Europop megastar you've never heard of

February 19, 2014, 9:04 am

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Hip-hop's new philosopher king talks about the Belgian art of compromise, finding inspiration in his African roots and why he likes to ego trip on stage

• Stromae: European youth's favourite misery muse – review

Europop is often exactly what it sounds like: a fizzy, sugary confection for hot days by a Malia swimming pool, trying to burn off the previous night's foam party. These songs revel in their own blitheness and, while they occasionally sound a melancholy note, they dare you to accuse them of having anything but the sunniest of dispositions.

Not so with Belgian pop star Stromae, whose tracks blend the corn-syrup pleasures of continental pop with tough lyrics about disease and the drudgery of work. But far from clearing the dancefloor, he's galvanised it. Two of his songs were in the top five biggest sellers in France last year: one, Papaoutai, fused Congolese rumba with piano house on a song about absent fathers, while the other, the ballad Formidable, imagined a drunk bum pathetically addressing a beautiful woman.

"I'm sure, ever since I was really young, that happiness is not a bottle of champagne and a girl and a limousine and a swimming pool," he tells me. "It was obvious for me to talk about real life, even if its not the thing we want to hear."

Reading on mobile? Click here to view Papaoutai video

Half Rwandan and half Belgian, Paul van Haver grew up rebelling from his classical music education in favour of hip-hop, but increasingly drew on the African music his parents played – an inversion of tradition that suits his stage name, a scramble of Maestro.

"Hip-hop, pop, dance – the common point is melancholy. That's international, and I like this word because it's not only about sadness or happiness – it's both at the same time. And that's human and that's life," he says in a melodious tumble of accented English. "The fact that I'm coming from Belgium helps me to be like that. Because we are known to be in the middle all the time, between Flanders and Wallonia – we say in French, compromis à la Belge, compromise like a Belgian." He says you can hear this as far back as Belgium's 1980s new beat style: "It's not really Afrobeat, it's not dance music, it's more downtempo. What kind of music is it actually? We don't know, but we dance to it. And that's the way I work in my music also."

Papaoutai is staggeringly powerful, as Stromae again compromises like a Belgian by palpably shifting from philosophical wondering to anger and back, all around the knotty issues of fatherhood. "I'm 28, and I have to have a baby now, in a normal way of life," he says, implicitly acknowledging that hundreds of millions of views of his videos on YouTube mean he is far from it. "As I say in the song: everyone knows how to make babies but nobody knows how to make fathers." Quand C'est, meanwhile, literally addresses cancer ("I talk to him: leave us, please, just go on holiday or something") while Moules-Frites uses Belgian's national dish as a metaphor for sexually transmitted disease, with its protagonist enjoying too many mussels – but not the kind you have with fries and mayonnaise.

Stromae's videos and live TV performances, made with graphic and fashion designers creating an aesthetic informed by MC Escher and Africa, have approached high art. For a performance of Papaoutai at a music awards show (featuring a cameo from a witless will.i.am), he adopted a cadaver stiffness with a grotesque smile, so immobile he was carried on stage like a prop; for a TV performance of Tous les Mêmes, he made one half of his head female and the other male to act out the quarrelsome couple in the song, even conducting an interview with Eurotrash's Antoine de Caunes as the pair.

"It's about cliches in the relationship," he explains. "Of course he's rude, because that's the cliche of a bad man in a relationship, but the girl is stupid also ... It's just a fight between a man and a girl, which is lovely, beautiful – that's love, actually." For the video to Formidable, he set up hidden cameras in a busy street, then acted drunk as he staggered around singing the song and attracting the attention of the starstruck police.

Reading on mobile? Click here for video

This play-acting is the opposite to the Adele school of pop, where realness rules, and Stromae has learned it from the French greats. "Piaf, Aznavour – I'm a fan of the old generation, and the way they act on stage. Am I trying to be myself? No, just doing my job, which is acting characters from real life. To personalise the work or think that it's your life … Your life is not interesting – talk about a vision more than that." He says this drama stems from intense, day-to-day shyness. "You have to express everything that you kept in all the time when you are so shy in your social life – you have to go on stage and do something totally ego trip, megalomaniac, the opposite of your everyday personality."

Back and forth he goes: shy, bold, angry, happy, sad, shy. "Who do you want to be: the radical man who can make a choice in one second, or the man who never takes decisions?" he wonders. "That's the question: who's the best? Actually, there is no best. I'm more the kind of man who never makes decisions. But impulsivity is not the opposite of courage; I think it's possible to do both. Maybe I'll find another way of doing a compromise." Spoken like a true Belgian.

Stromae's second album Racine Carrée is out now on Universal. He plays Koko in London on 20 February as part of an 80-date European tour. Reported by guardian.co.uk 8 hours ago.

Thinking Day plea by guild chairman

February 19, 2014, 10:49 pm

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DRAKE Trefoil Guild is appealing for volunteers to help commemorate World Thinking Day.Chairman of the guild Angela Thomas is seeking volunteers to help raise the Girl Guide World Flag on Plymouth Hoe at 7.30am on Saturday.Those who attend traditionally donate money to assist Guiding in poorer countries, especially to help with the training of leaders.Thinking Day is commemorated worldwide by the Girl Guide Association and remembers those Guides in parts of the world who meet under difficult... Reported by Plymouth Herald 18 hours ago.

Helston pensioner Terrence Williams denies sexual abuse...

February 20, 2014, 1:27 am

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A HELSTON pensioner accused of indecently assaulting and raping a young girl, has told a court he would never harm a child. Giving evidence on the third day of his trial at Truro Crown Court on Wednesday, 68-year-old Terrence Williams denied that he had touched the girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, indecently. Williams, a former electrical fitter's mate at RNAS Culdrose, is accused of 12 counts of indecently assaulting and raping a girl between 1988 and 1996. Adrian Chaplin,... Reported by West Briton 16 hours ago.