Reader's Digest January 2012

Readers .ccuges Tr,- „tam

Your happy New Year tarts here with:

•Good news about "bad" news

•Losing weight— without dieting!

•The smart way to exercise OW tc nd a good spa "t.1 L energy costs

• otect your back

ivorce well

From the Worldwide Our only triple protection hair colour

Helps protect before, during and after Up to 100% grey coverage. Rich colour.

JANUARY 2012 FEATURES

Digest uigest

"Despite playing Michael Heseltine in the new film about Margaret Thatcher," says journalist Richard Jinman (p32), "Richard E Grant is no fan of politicians."

Abb.

"The Arab Spring has raised hopes of a democratic revolution," claims Simon Tisdall (p24), assistant editor of The Guardian. "But in many countries, hope is turning to despair."

"Writing about museums was a real eye opener," says journalist Lola Borg. (p82) "I had no idea just how many we have in the UK, and also how many of them are free." All

Abandoned Detroit house turned into ice artwork! More frozen wonders: p40

2011 wasn't exactly the best of years—a melting pot of disasters, riots, scandals, global unrest, and woeful economic tidings. And with belts being tightened across the land, 2012 feels like a slog before it's even begun. But should it? By the time you've finished reading our Keep Britain Happy special (see page 50) life shouldn't feel quite so bad after all. We asked a team of experts to come up with some great ideas for giving us all a boost—from finding a diet that really works, to seeing the world in a whole new way. It marks the start of our Keep Britain Happy campaign—a determined attempt to stop the youknow-whats grinding us down. So start sending in your favourite ways to keep smiling through, and we'll print (and pay for) the most uplifting and inspiring. Here's to a VERY happy New Year!

SET FOR THE DAY. ALL DAY. FOR LIFE'S LITTLE DRAMAS SIMKRIN

WRITE ON...

Send us your stories, jokes and letters— if they're published, we'll pay

WE PAY £50 for the star letter, £30 for normal letters and £15 for short extracts. Email readers letters@readersdigest. co.uk or write to Readers' Letters, Reader's Digest, 157 Edgware Road, London W2 2HR.

WE ALSO PAY £70 for the true stories, anecdotes, jokes in Laugh! and You Couldn't Make It Up..., and contributions to endof-article fillers, Travel and Gardening.

Email excerpts@ readersdigest.co.uk or write to Excerpts, Reader's Digest, 157 Edgware Road, London W2 2HR

THE SMALL PRINT

Ensure submissions are not previously published. Include your name, email, address and daytime phone number with all correspondence. We may edit letters and use them in all print and electronic media. Contributions used become world copyright of Vivat Direct Ltd (t/a Reader's Digest).

SORRY! We cannot acknowledge or return unpublished items or unsolicited articlelength manuscripts. Do not send SAES. Article-length stories, poetry and cartoons are not requested.

Reader's Digest shortlisted—again!

SUBSCRIBE!

UK: £42 a year. Republic of Ireland: €74.39 a year. Europe: £50 a year. Rest of the world: £60 a year. Prices include delivery.

GIFT SUBSCRIPTION?

CHANGE OF ADDRESS?

Contact Customer Services for renewals, gifts, address changes, payments, account information and all other enquiries.

Phone:0871 3511000*

Email: cust_service @readersdigest.co.uk

Minicom: 0870 600 1153

It's difficult to stop patting ourselves on the back here at RD! First our ed Gill Hudson (right) picks up the Mark Boxer award for "outstanding achievement" at the British Society of Magazine Editors Awards in November (see footage at readersdigest.co.uk/magazine). Then our assistant features editor Ellie Rose (left) is shortlisted in the New Consumer Journalist category for the Periodicals Training Council New Talent Awards 2012, to be announced on February 1. We await the ceremony with bated breath (but we're raising our glasses to her already, anyway)! (

YOUR FAVOURITE MAGAZINE IS NOW AVAILABLE ON THE NEWcgTAND. THE APPLE NEWSSTAND, THAT IS!

All you need is iOS 5 on your iPhone or iPad and away you go! You can buy either single issues of the magazine for £1.49 or—for just £11.99—you'll get a whole year's worth. What are you waiting for?

DIR,gg

Online this month...‘

The Big Twissue! April's issue of RD will be inspired by your tweets. Maybe you've got a great idea for a feature, want to know more about one of your favourite celebrities, or have a question you'd really like to ask one of our regular writers—in which case, now's your chance!

If you're already a Twitter fan, then follow us @rdigest—and send your ideas by December 31, with the tag #RDTwissue in the message. Don't have an account yet? Then this is your excuse to set one up!

And keep an eye on our contributors, who'll be conducting idea brainstorms throughout the month: @jamesjamesbrown, @StuartMaconie, @Marthalanefox.

We think it's the first time that a magazine "Twissue" has been tried, so get online and help us make history by sending your ideas...but in no more than 140 characters!

DON'T FORGET to check out our fabulous apps! Go to the iTunes music store to download our iPad app and our new walking app.

WE'RE ALSO...

ON FACEBOOK.COM/READERSDIGESTUK 11 ON TWITTER.COM/RDIGEST

Visit our online shop, where we now have over 1,000 items available (plus p&p is free)

OVER TO YOU...

EMAILS, LETTERS, TWEETS AND FACEBOOK

£30 FOR EACH PUBLISHED LETTER, £15 FOR SHORTER EXTRACTS, £50 FOR THE LETTER OF THE MONTH!

SEE PAGE 4 FOR MORE DETAILS

LETTER OF THE MONTH

Your article "Untying the Knot" highlighted the social evil of forced marriages among certain communities in the UK, and the commendable role played by the Forced Marriage Unit in helping some of the victims.

But the writer made the mistake of confusing "forced marriages" with "arranged marriages", a mistake that's quite common among the general public ("there's still a long way to go before arranged marriages are tackled with the same urgency or seriousness as, say, other domestic violence"). An important distinction is that of mutual consent. The vast majority of Asian marriages are still arranged. The parents look for suitable partners for their children—they then meet each other, with the option of accepting or rejecting the proposal.

Having had an arranged marriage myself, I see nothing wrong with this practice. Forced marriages, on the other hand, shouldn't be tolerated.

Dr Khalid Shehzad, Luton, Bedfordshire

A TWO-TIER SYSTEM

I've been following the "Drugged-Up Britain" series with keen interest. However, towards the end of the final article, Dr Michael Dixon— alluding to proposed changes in the NHS—says, "One big idea of the new system is that we'll become responsible for everything that's spent on all of our patients, so we'll have a vested interest in doing things that are cost-effective." Isn't it possible instead that cost considerations in the new system will encourage GPs to choose whatever's cheapest for their patients as a short cut to quick profit? If this fear turns out to be true, the effects will be felt across all cross-sections of society.

Ananya Banerjee, Berkshire

SPIRIT OF FOOTBALL

I'd like to offer my praise to all the staff at Plymouth Argyle football club ("Keeping the Flag Flying"). It's so refreshing to read about how these devoted people worked for months without pay to prevent the club from disappearing completely—it makes a change from ludicrously overpaid professionals with no feelings for the clubs they represent.

Daniel Sumner, West Sussex ►

did the Germans really get as far as Normandy in 1918?

Alan Cameron, Perthshire

RD: We spotted that mistake, too—only to correct the wrong proof. Apologies!

Keep, Britain app?

No jobs, °E"`1. little money, poor pensions, no hope... don't you feel you've had enough bad news already this year? That's why we've decided to get the country smiling again with our Kee Britain Happy campaign, which we'll be running throughout 2012. And we'd like your help, please!

GETTING BACK TO WORK

Lee McQueen says in "If I Ruled the World" that JobCentre Plus offices are "more about how to claim benefits". But this isn't true. When I lost my job three years ago, I was required to show evidence that I was seeking employment—and if I'd been unsuccessful, I was given help to amend my CV and brush up on interview techniques. I also had plenty of advice on job hunting.

Karen Hale, Hampshire

Let us know something that cheers you up or gets you through the day—maybe a joke, a funny observation, a wise saying, or a favourit walk—that you think would cheer up other people, too.

Send your suggestions, thoughts or tips to readers letters@readersdigest. co.uk. We'll pay you £30 if it appears in the magazine which should put a bit of a smile on your face in itself!

To get you in the right frame of mind, start by reading our Positively 2012 section, which starts on p00.

C2=0111111111=11== 1111

Anyanwu Moses Chukwudi Great and educating, fun to be a fan of the Reader's Digest... 6 minutes ago

• Like

lk YOU'RE STILL TALKING ABOUT...

Fern Britton's contribution to "If I Ruled the World"

• Fern Britton is an amazing woman!

I'm glad that she's not content to settle into a rocking chair. She raised a family, worked hard and is enjoying middle age.

Deena Colworth, Huntingdon

• I agree with Fern that students should consider options other than university. Since leaving school, I've enjoyed a successful career without the debt worries many graduates have.

Jill Young, Perthshire

• I'm concerned that Fern says to her children, "Why don't you come and watch Coronation Street and have a cup of tea?" when they're struggling with their homework. I think kids need to face up to these challenges.

Frances Kirby, Dorset

RACE TO THE TOP

I think Sophie Robehmed should reread her Maverick feature—she might then realise how insulting it is. According to her, those of mixed race are better looking, higher achievers and have more to offer than the dull MacDonalds, Joneses or Smiths. They may also be genetically stronger. If I wasn't mixed race, I'd be left feeling inferior after reading this.

Seymour Veer, Somerset

NO CREDIT

Your "Instant Expert" asks if we "need to care" about Standard and Poor's credit rating. Given their role in the sub-prime-mortgage fiasco, we should be sceptical. Having issued favourable ratings to the "structured investment

vehicles" that invested heavily in such mortgages, I wonder how S&P and other agencies have any credibility left.

Tim Coles, Bedfordshire

NOT ACTING DUMB

I loved your cartoon "Dumbo's adolescence" in the letters pages. My daughter had a similar adolescence, with new rings in each ear every day. I assumed it was a fashion thing—until she told me that you were excused PE if you had studs put in!

Lucy Pesaro, London

AN OVERSEAS TOAST

In his Drink column, Nigel Barden imagines soldiers during the First World War enjoying a drop of Benedictine while "marooned in the Normandy trenches". But

"COME AGAIN?"

• "...In a small village in West Sussex, you will find 'North and South Barbers.' The mind boggles—or is it just me?..."

• "...FROGS trying to jump over us again. I hope they go pretty high and land on the moon and become ALEINS [sic]..."

• "...Nowadays I mostly write Haiku (English version) and also verses that one squeezes out of a tube—which usually don't rhyme anyway (very much)..."

• "...In fact, when fully grown, I took size nine in men's shoes! Unfortunately, I have NOT got clever fingers!..."

• "...Logical articles on various affairs of the 21st century are need to be published in Reader's Digest every month to keep frame it as modern life bible to have every solution for every problem in this universal show..."

YOUR SHORT, SHARP GUIDE TO JANUARY

Author and BBC2 Review

Show critic

The Artist. Now, I realise that it's only January, and telling you that this is the film of the year might sound demented, but please take my word for it. This story about a silent-film actor who can't come to terms with the arrival of the talkies will make you want to sing for joy. It's one of the funniest, most imaginative films I've ever seen.

Frenchman Jean Dujardin won the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival for his portrayal of George Valentin and, if it were up to me, he'd

take the Oscar home next month, too.

The Descendants.

With his wife in a coma following a boating accident, Hawaiian lawyer Matt King is forced to reconnect with their daughters, and himself.

George Clooney gives a funny, engaging performance as King—and who doesn't want to spend

Natalie Haynes on the new releases

Busby, Sandy Denny and Madonna go out on a hen night and get legless. I've been waiting for a proper Beth Jeans Houghton album for years, ever since the first handwritten demo CD-Rs I received from her. Put simply, she is one of the most dazzling talents to emerge recently.

The purity of her delivery is matched only by the charming wonkiness of her artistic vision. It's not folk, it's not pop, it's something entirely her own and entirely marvellous.

•

BBC 6 Music's Stuart Maconie's pick of the recent releases

50 Words for Snow by Kate Bush. Think Joni Mitchell during her jazz phase or a genteel, distaff Scott Walker. By Kate's own glacial rate of production, her last three albums have positively poured out—the last two within a year, for heaven's sake! And this may be the best of the lot.

Intimate and wintry, these chamber pieces put her voice and piano to the fore—along with Steve Gadd's drums—and unspool deliciously over the best part of ten minutes. The result is perhaps the most abstract and unusual record of her life. And wonderful.

Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose by Beth Jeans Houghton & The Hooves of Destiny. Think Kate

Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage: 1982-2011 by R.E.M. Think if The Smiths had wanted to be The Monkees. Rotten title aside, this greatest hits does a good job summarising the 31-year career of the most important US band of their generation, before Nirvana—from the opaque murmurings of, erm, Murmur to the earnest stadium anthems of their 90s pomp. And it ends with three new tracks, at least one of which, the lovely Jim Webb and Burt Bacharachinflected "We All Go Back To Where We Belong", makes you wistful to see them split up.

African Open golf, East London, South Africa,

The 2012 European Tour begins with an unashamed attack on cartography fans. To make matters worse, since this tournament's inception in 2008, every single winner has been South African. By the time the tour deigns to set foot in its supposed home continent, it will have also travelled to the UAE and India. Golf has many virtues, but it is alarmingly disrespectful of geography.

Kitzbiihel Men's Downhill skiing, Austria,

If plummeting two miles down a mountain in less than two minutes, while negotiating gradients of 85%, speeds of close to 90mph and 80-metre jumps, is your idea of fun, then

ALSO ON OUR A AR

ESPNcricinfo cricket blogger, broadcaster and stand-up Andy Zaltzman previews the best of the month's action

you should seek immediate help. If it's your idea of a job, then you should head to Austria for the 72nd running of skiing's most iconic race. To the annoyance of the locals, the past four winners have been Swiss. And three of them have been reigning world downhill champ Didier Cuche, who, at 37, really should know better.

AND DON'T MISS_

The Masters snooker, London January 15-22 African Cup of Nations football, Equatorial Guinea, January 21-February 12.

The London Bike Show, ExCeL. January 1S Golden Globe Awards, Los Angeles. January 30 Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day.

Tracy Davidson, 41, writer

VATCH I NG

Alias. I'm working through all five DVD box sets of this underrated spy series. I love the way double agent Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) kicks ass!

Greatest Hits I, II and III, Queen. I got the digitally remastered CDs for my birthday. I never tire of Freddie's voice. theanswerbank. co.uk. Useful for puzzle fanatics like me. Post any question and some kind soul will provide the answer.

In a Dry Season by Peter Robinson. The Inspector Banks books are so much better than the TV version. ■ Global Family Day.

The freshest, most inspiring touring lifestyle show is heading to London in February 2012. Buy your tickets today from only £7.00 and park for FREE!*

•

• Step into the latest motorhomes, campervans, caravans, holiday homes and trailer tents from the leading manufacturers - including exclusive spring model launches

Book your holiday from thousands of great value campsites and destinations across the UK and mainland Europe - Special offers apply!

Get the best deals on thousands of essential accessories and gadgets in the Accessory Megastores CALL 0844 858

• Compare award-winning towcars and find a huge choice of family and backpacker tents pitched and ready to explore

• It's a great value, family day-outl FREE archery, dinghy sailing, kayaking, caravan towing and motorhome manoeuvring lessons. Plus, cookery demonstrations, expert advice, competitions and more! Kids go FREE!

• For further Info and regular show updates register at www.motorhomecaravanandcamping.co.uk

a couple of hours in Hawaii?

Coriolanus. Ralph Fiennes makes his directorial debut with this modernday retelling of Shakespeare's tragedy, but it's shot so classily you'll wonder why he waited so long. He also gives a blistering performance in the title role of a Roman general who is banished by his people because he cannot show humility towards them. A salutary lesson for modern politicians perhaps.

DVDS

Troll Hunter. It seems only right to spend at least one January night watching a snowy film, and you can't get much more wintry than this Scandinavian cross between Jurassic Park and The Blair Witch Project. Packed with action, tension and an impressive array of troll myths.

Gadgets and Ga

Zeo Sleep Manager, -9. How well do you sleep at night? This new device will tell you. Slip on the elastic headband (yes, you look a wally, but who looks cool when they're sleeping?), and it tracks your levels of light sleep, deep sleep and REM. It then analyses just how much your shut-eye has been affected by your environment or behaviour (drinking lots of coffee, say), and what you can do to achieve "elite sleep". I've learned that, when I eat late, I don't sleep as deeply. But I'm turning a blind eye to that, because cheese dreams are awesome. Technology expert and Answer Me This! podcaster 011y Mann reveals the latest must-haves

AND CHECK OU1

These light, windproof gloves have metal-coated fingertips, so you can stay warm and operate touchscreen devices at the same time.

11- Herding cartoon sheep in this cutesy puzzle game is a great way to unwind. Unless you're a professional farmer. In which case, it's a busman's holiday. Read 011y's blog from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, from 10 January, at readersdigest.co.uk/magazine

Three MiFi, JI11 ,r,anth.

Spend a week with this nifty portable router and it's hard to remember how you ever crawled through life without it. It turns you into a walking wi-fi hotspot. Imagine! Suddenly, your laptop can access the web from ANY cafe, your car stereo can stream Spotify through your iPod, and you needn't miss emails because your mobile's 3G signal is out: 3's super-fast network almost always comes up trumps.

YOU COULON MAKE IT UP...

While watching a documentary with my girlfriend about the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, the narrator informed us that Dahmer's mother had at one stage sold her child for a pitcher of beer.

My girlfriend turned to me in shock and said, "How can any mother sell their own child for a picture of beer?"

Alex Buckley, Bedfordshire

1 I was working as a nursery nurse with preschool children, involving the kids in a project called "People who help us".

As part of this theme, I invited one of the mothers to talk about her job as a nurse.

Introducing her to the children, I explained that she was wearing her uniform specially.

"Oh, I know all about that," one of the children said. "When it's late at night and I'm supposed to be asleep in bed, my mummy dresses up in costumes for my daddy."

Lydia Winkworth. Wolverhampton

"Some people don't like working from home— they go a bit mad with the solitude. But I've got you, haven't I, Mr Floppy Ears?"

01AGNW.,, WITH PROS I E CANCER, I was asked to attend hospital for an MRI scan. I selected the music that was going to be piped through to me while the scanner operated, but I had to remove my two hearing aids due to the magnet within the machine.

As I was lying on my back, the technician handed me a press-button device with a lead, then the machine started the scanning process. Unable to hear my music selection, I pressed the device a few times to increase the volume. Suddenly, with much grinding and clanking, the machine stopped, and the technician's head appeared at the end of the tunnel looking extremely worried.

Apparently, the device I thought was the volume control was the emergency stop button.

Allan Wise, Wokingham

1 I reluctantly allowed my daughter to drive me into town a week after she'd passed her test. I soon regretted it when a car stopped suddenly in front of us. My daughter swerved sharply, jumped out and started giving the driver a piece of her mind.

This dried up rather quickly when she realised it was her driving instructor.

Marian Doyle, County Down

1 While queueing at a restaurant that didn't take bookings, I heard an elderly couple ahead of us being told there was a 40minute wait for a table.

"Young man, we're both in our early nineties," said the old gent. "We may not have 40 minutes."

With a smile, the waiter seated them immediately.

M 1mA iirLi 1, Cork

I My son's girlfriend ended their relationship after she found out that he'd been unfaithful. She returned some of his post, and

1 I WAS AT A PARTY where a very attractive girl was holding court to a group of admiring men.

She was saying that she'd just bought an album by the band PIG, and how

WIN £70 FOR YOUR TRUE, FUNNY STORIES. EMAIL excerptsCa readers digest.co.uk OR GO TO facebook. com/readers digestuk

I had to smile when I saw what she'd written on the envelope: "Second Class Male."

Josh Sumner, London

I My husband decided to get us a fish supper. He went upstairs for his coat and returned carrying our three-year-old daughter, still awake two hours after being put to bed. He decided to take her along to the chip shop.

As my husband was being served, the owner said to our daughter, "You're up late!"

Once outside the shop, my daughter asked, "Daddy, why did that man call me a plate?"

Joyce Yates, Hull

much she loved it. I sensed a chance to impress—I had a copy of their first single, which most people didn't know existed, yet alone what it was called.

"So," I piped up, "do you have 'S**t for Brains'? Because I do." You can imagine the looks I got! I didn't bother trying to explain as she stormed off to the kitchen.

Paul Rafferty. East Sussex

rVoadsik NIIVA Voic,096.

Getting it off my Chest

A Journey through Breast Cancer

Sandra Fikus

SOFTCOVER I $ 19.99

HARDCOVER I $ 29.99

EBOOK 1 $ 9.99

In January 2008, author Sandra Fikus had a lumpectomy and was told she had breast cancer. Getting it off my Chest records what happened to her from treatment to completehealing.

LOSLIV. Almost A Born Loser! mosinemme

Annis Gregory Aleck

SOFTCOVER I $ 23.99

HARDCOVER 1 $ 34.99

EBOOK I $ 9.99

Being a Canadian-Indian, it was difficult for author Annis Gregory Aleck to pursue his dreams. Follow his inspiring story of struggle as he made his way through life, against overwhelming odds.

".110110,111w4mw

Rendezvous at Château de Cando

Charles W. Clowdis Jr.

SOFTCOVER I $ 19.99

HARDCOVER I $ 29.99

EBOOK I $ 9.99

Waves Of Blue Light

l Heal the Heart and Free the Soul

M.J. Domet

SOFTCOVER I $ 19.99

HARDCOVER I $ 29.99

EBOOK $ 9.99

The first in the Cort Sanford series. Rendezvous Embark on an enlightening spiritual journey with at Chateau de Cando is a fast-paced story of love, author-poet M.J. Domet in Waves Of Blue Light. Let hate, deceit, nuclear weapons, and a fictional this collection of prose, pictures, and poetry heal character faced with multiple challenges. your heart and free your soul!

Since Way back When

Since Way Back When

Vicky.Vikki.Vickie.

SOFTCOVER I $ 19.99

HARDCOVER I $ 29.99

EBOOK 1 $ 9.99

Masai Man

Vastine East

SOFTCOVER I $ 21.99

HARDCOVER I $ 31.99

In Vastine East's Masai Man, a boy must triumph in Jackson Miller has lived a hard life, but he finds a life-threatening test to become a man. Soon to be sanctuary with his childhood friends, Demarcus and published is the author's second book, / SWAM Serenity Taylor. The trio remains close until a WITH AN ANGEL. devastating tragedy ends it altogether.

For specific title information contact: Xlibris I Channel Sales Department Victory Way, Admirals Park I Crossways, Dartford 1 UK I 0800-644-6988

www.xlibrispublishing.co.uk

WORD POWER

Harry Mount pulls on his fur-lined boots

One hundred years ago, Captain Robert Scott made it to the South Pole—only to find that the Norwegian Roald Amundsen had beaten him by a month. Two months later, Scott was dead. All of the words below would have been familiar to his team, but how many do you know?

Answer A, B or C.

1 narwhal (narr-wall) n

A climbing rope B small polar whale C fur blanket

harp seal n A Antarctic musical instrument

B mythical sea creature

C Greenland seal

3 langlauf (lang-lowf) n

A cross-country skiing

B ice bridge C long sledge

4 pemmican (pemmycuhn) n A small penguin

B dried meat in melted fat C fishing knife

5 pack ice n A solid mountain of ice B crowded

COVER STAR RICHARD

E GRANT'S favourite word? Olivia, his daughter's name

chunks of floating ice

C shards of ice

6 skua (skooh-er) n

A false horizon B rifle

C polar bird

7 parka n

A hooded jacket B small igloo C ice slicer

8 careen v

A to turn a ship on its side

B insulate with animal fat

C stitch tightly

9 alpenstock n

A muesli B mountain but C iron-tipped hill-walking stick

10 beluga (bell-oohgah) n A fat reserve

B fish egg C type of whale

11 harpoon n A ship's whistle B barbed missile

C grooved needle

12 theodolite (theeoddo-light) n

A warm spring

B Antarctic mineral

C surveying instrument

13 aurora borealis (aweroara boh-ray-alis) n

A Arctic foliage B northern lights C warm glow

14 schuss (shuhss) v

A to ski straight

B suffer from frostbite

C melt ice

15 husky n A fur collar B tea urn

C sledge-pulling dog

A word is born: mankle

The new Collins Dictionary has admitted "mankle" to its list of definitions, meaning an exposed male ankle. The term has grown in popularity with the spread of three-quarterlength trousers among British men.

RD Rating Useful? 8/10

Likeable? 6/10

WORD POWER ANSWERS

9-11 getting there 12-13 impressive 14-15 word-power wizard!

1 narwhal—B

small polar whale. "Narwhals were prized for their unicorn-type horns." Old Norse nahvalr (corpse whale).

2 harp seal—C Greenland seal. It got its name from the harpshaped mark on its back.

3 langlauf—A cross-country skiing. "They had to use langlauf skis on the flat, snowy plain." German (long run).

4 pemmican—B dried meat in melted fat. From Cree, the most widely spoken aboriginal language in Canada, pime (fat).

5 pack ice—B crowded chunks of floating ice.

6 skua—C Polar bird. "Skuas are predatory seabirds." Old Norse skufr.

7 parka—A hooded jacket. "Eskimos wore parkas." Derived from the Aleut people of the Aleutian islands of Alaska, who made them from seal gut.

8 careen—A to turn a ship on its side. "The boat careened

WHY CARTOON?

Cartoon originally comes from the Italian carta, simply meaning "card". This mutated into cartone, meaning a full-sized drawing on paper as preparation for paintings or tapestries—for example, Leonardo da Vinci's cartoons. Cartoon, the English translation of cartone, was then applied to a single funny drawing, or a series of changing drawings filmed together to produce animation.

through the freezing storm." Latin carina (keel).

9 alpenstock—C iron-tipped hill-walking stick. German (alp stick).

10 beluga—C type of whale. "Polar bears feed on beluga whales." Russian bely (white).

11 harpoon—B barbed missile. "They used harpoons to hunt whales." Greek harpe (sickle).

12 theodolite—C surveying instrument.

Play WP online: go to readersdigest. co.uk/wordpower

"The theodolite measures horizontal and vertical angles." Sixteenth-century Latin theodelitus.

13 aurora borealis—B northern lights. "The aurora borealis glowed and swirled in the Arctic night air." Latin aurora (dawn) and borealis (northern).

14 schuss—A to ski straight. "What a pleasure to schuss down from the Arctic hills!" German (shot).

15 husky—C sledge-pulling dog. "The huskies seemed impervious to snow." Eskimo. ■

MICRO-NUTRIENTS TO HELP MAINTAIN BRAIN FUNCTION

Neurozaneis an advanced, comprehensive formula to help safeguard your daily intake of essential vitamins and minerals, as well as providing specific nutrients to help maintain normal brain function and performance.

Neurozane Originalcontains a specially developed combination of nutrients including B complex, iron, zinc, magnesium and iodine, and is certified by Food For The Brain.

Neurozan• Plusdual pack is for even greater nutritional support with high purity omega-3 fromNorway.=

So if you're looking for a supplement that's different, keep Neurozans in mind.

INSTANT EXPERT

Simon Tisdall reveals the facts behind the news

The uprisings known as the Arab Spring began roughly a year ago in Tunisia and quickly spread to Egypt and other Middle Eastern and North African countries. In Syria, Yemen, Bahrain and Libya, initially peaceful protests spiralled into violence. The term Arab Spring echoes the so-called Prague Spring of 1968, when the people of Czechoslovakia sought to loosen the Communist yoke—Soviet tanks crushed the movement.

How did it all begin?

The upheavals were triggered by one man —Mohammad Bouazizi, an unemployed Tunisian graduate turned street vendor, who set himself on fire on December 17, 2010, in protest at his humiliating treatment by municipal officials. His self-sacrifice was widely publicised by word of mouth and through social media, and he became a symbol of resistance for young Arabs everywhere. When Bouazizi died of his injuries in January last year, a fierce public outcry forced President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to step down after 23 years in power. He and his family fled to Saudi Arabia, reportedly taking a fortune in cash.

What was the high point?

The most spectacular achievement came in February last year with the fall of Hosni Reginie Mubarak, who'd ruled Egypt with an iron fist since 1981. Eighteen days of mostly peaceful demonstrations, centred on Tahrir Square in Cairo, proved irresistible. -A key moment came when Barack Obama's administration switched sides and said Mubarak must go—Egypt's army, funded by the US, withdrew its support. Mubarak is now on trial for the alleged murder of demonstrators.

37,000 Number of people estimated to have been killed in the Arab Spring

€35,000 Cost of each UK Tornado air mission over Libya over a period of 242 days

Has the Arab Spring failed?

Autocratic Arab leaders and dictators, alarmed by the fate of Ben Ali and Mubarak, concluded that making concessions to the protesters was fatal. In Bahrain and Yemen, established ruling families, backed by conservative Saudi Arabia, used brutal violence to suppress unrest. In Syria, security forces commanded by President Bashar

The Arab Spring

al-Assad have killed at least 3,500 pro-democracy demonstrators, according to UN estimates.

But despite Arab and Western condemnation and sanctions, direct military intervention in Syria has so far been ruled out, partly because of the experience in Iraq. Successful Nato military action in Libya to help remove its dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi —who was killed by a mob of rebel soldiers—was the exception to the rule.

What's changed?

The uprisings have permanently changed Arabs' perception of themselves. The common spark was public anger at corrupt, unelected leaders—until now, democracy seemed to have left the region behind. But last year's events have proved that change will not come peacefully. Tunisia has held successful elections, but in most Arab countries people power has so far failed to dislodge entrenched regimes.

The upheavals have also shown the limits of Western influence, and how Western leaders may tacitly prefer the status quo. Many experts believe Syria faces a protracted civil war. In Egypt, the army is accused of obstructing democratic reforms. Libya is seen as a success story, but nobody knows whether the new leadership can hold the country together, or if Islamists will hijack the revolution. ■

IF I RULED THE WORLD Dr Simon Thurley

In his ten years as chief executive of English Heritage, Dr Simon Thurley's achievements include leading the restoration of the Elizabethan Garden at Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire, and the Great Tower at Dover Castle. He is a leading architectural historian and author of several books on the subject.

I'd plant a trillion trees. Big, deciduous species would be good, not just for climate change, but also because they make the world more beautiful. They're always moving and growing, mark the changes of the seasons, rustle when the wind blows and give shelter when the rain pours. Trees are the lungs of the world, and there aren't enough of them!

I'd make sure every child in the world had a sense of history, identity and belonging. I'm sure one of the reasons behind last summer's riots was that people didn't feel they had a stake in the society and place they live in—a lack of roots. Yet, if you know the history of a place, you value it; if you value it, you care for it; and, if you care for it, you'll enjoy it. One of our aims at English Heritage is to help people understand why the past

Kmatters and why things should be preserved, not vandalised. Everybody needs a sense of belonging, and a knowledge of historical background can make a big difference in attitude.

I'd reopen all our old canals and train lines. Before the Second World War, even the smallest villages had their own railway halts, and there was a wonderful country. We could canals all over the network of put freight back on barges and people on trains to their exact destinations, thus ridding the roads of some of the lorries and cars that pollute our lives. Traffic jams make people cross and ugly, but the reason we have become so dependent on cars is that there aren't enough alternatives.

I'd impose a punitive tax on any business that puts up Christmas decorations before December 10. Christmas is wonderful, but

it'd be even better if it didn't start in October. No one wants to listen to "Jingle Bells" for three months. People who don't have the money or opportunity to buy and do nice things end up feeling alienated by the frenzy.

I'd use the proceeds of my tax to fund presents and outings for less fortunate families over the festive period. It's a time that should be short and special.

I'd dig a whacking great tunnel under Stonehenge and run the A303 through it. This might seem a bit parochial, but Stonehenge is the most famous prehistoric monument in the world. People from Patagonia to Outer Mongolia recognise it, and it's a national disgrace that we have a very busy road that passes within 25 yards.

People say to me, "Oh, I love seeing Stonehenge on our drive down to Cornwall," but they don't appreciate the fumes and noise.

Imagine the atmosphere there without the constant stream of traffic—it would be amazing. A tunnel would cost a great deal of money, but then so does Trident. It's about priorities.

tt Trees are the lungs of the world, and there aren't enough of them!

For more information about the work of English Heritage, visit englishheritage.org.uk

I'd make sure that charities manage their money properly. We're very generous in this country—it never ceases to amaze me how much we donate to causes across the world. Charities have a responsibility to use that money for the purposes for which it was intended, to ensure administration costs are kept low and to create confidence that the money they receive is making a difference.

I'd stop people banning things. There are all sorts of things that people do in the privacy of their homes that busybodies are obsessed with making illegal. I'd repeal five banned things a year, making it easier for everyone to get on with their lives! Clearly, you need to stop people from murdering each other, but less interference in each others' business would be good.

I'd make it illegal for anyone to rule the world after I've had my day! Obviously no individual should ever have that amount of power—it's completely obscene. I might even abolish my own power to rule the world, because absolute power would corrupt me absolutely. • As told to Caroline Hutton

REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL 14. Bear with me...

James Brown finds an unlikely route to happiness while trekking in India—with a little help from Abba

This month's Reason to Be Cheerful? The speed with which we can change our location.

It's Monday morning in the small office at Hotel Eagle's Nest. I'm overlooking the Dalai Lama's temple in Mcleodganj, India, and wondering where the foal in the hotel photos has gone. "Oh the leopard took him for food," says our host Sheila, who seems both matter of fact and sad about it at the same time. "It killed him out there in the garden—he was nearly fully grown, too."

The presence of a leopard is news to me. In London the previous day, my biggest worry had been an MRI scan, but now as I prepare to do a little trekking with friends in the last foothill mountains before the Himalayas, I find myself forgetting about any health issues—before nightfall I could be leopard lunch.

"There's a leopard?" I ask dumbly, like Woody Allen questioning his Mafia captors in Broadway Danny Rose about their axe. "Yes, but you don't

have to worry about the leopards —they have the sense to stay away from humans—it's the bear you have to look out for."

A long, long time ago I used to fantasise about the way we travel now As a young man I'd look up at airport departure boards and imagine just turning up at an airport and getting on a plane to whichever destination I randomly chose. Once easyJet took off, that became a genuine option. I remember a local minicab driver telling me how he was loving spending every weekend visiting a new European city with £2 return flights.

While budget airlines now seem focused on bugging us and clawing back all the money we've saved in the past, just nine hours on a cheap long-haul flight can take you pretty much anywhere you fancy. That's what excites me. The internet helps you find a destination, first-hand testimonies reassure you it's the place for you, and images even let yousee the place before you arrive.

I spent 20 minutes picking up my Indian visa from one of their smaller visa offices. Twitter was full of people moaning about how long it takes to navigate the embassy and the length of custom queues in Delhi. But the truth is that it was easier and quicker to get in and out of India than it was

to get into Los Angeles last month.

And even though Hollywood can be quite thrilling, it's nothing compared to the view from the lovely Eagle's Nest, a homely seven-room hotel run by an English couple called Bo and Sheila. With its well-stocked library, I could happily postpone the trekking and stay for a month-long reading holiday instead.

But back to the wildlife. On any given day in Britain I could be

staring at the piles of junk mail in my hall, worrying about the ever-growing damp patch in the hall ceiling beneath the shower, and plotting that one last great cupboard declutter. Now, thanks to the immediacy of modern travel, I am receiving tips on bear avoidance.

"So long as you don't just bump into them you'll be fine. Oh, and make sure you don't stray in between them and their young," says Sheila, who retired from a life of working with rock stars like Alice Cooper and Lou Reed to spend time in woods full of less grizzly types. "The best way to let them know you're coming is to sing Abba songs. That's what I do."

Easier said than done. You try singing Knowing Me, Knowing You when you're rushing back along a rocky track at 12,000 feet as dusk descends and you only have a mobile phone to light your way.

You know that giddiness you had at school when you knew you were probably in trouble for being late, but hadn't actually arrived at the trouble yet? Imagine how that feels when, instead of an irate teacher, round the corner you fear there's going to be a bear "bigger than 0.s a beffalo", as our guide Sappoo pronounces it. 0.

gg Today I met a man who has lived alone for 16 years in a smoke-blackened bivouac selling crisps and blankets to fat Westerners

But then again that's all just in the head. If a bear could hear me and my friends breathlessly panting "A-haaa" it would probably laugh, then run off in terror of humans.

What I enjoy is the shift in the possibility of danger. Walking around the mountain towns and cities in India is exhilarating; the wild-animal phobia is funny, not terrifying. It's these shifts in our basic state of mind that make the journey so rewarding.

I'm 46. I've vowed to go and do something amazing every year from now on. I'm hoping that travel can

broaden my mind faster than food is broadening my waistline. Today I met a man who has lived alone for 16 years in a smoke-blackened bivouac he calls The Snowline Café, selling crisps and blankets to fat Westerners like me. He can tell the exact time by looking at the shadows on the mountains. There aren't a lot of people like that where I live. •

James, founder of Loaded magazine, now edits Sabotage Times—an online magazine with the motto: "We can't concentrate, why should you?" You can follow James on Twitter @jamesjamesbrown

BUDDING AUTHORS, TAKE A BOW!

This first-person narrative with a twist was submitted for last year's 100word-story contest—we're currently featuring one every month in the magazine. For details of this year's competition, go to page 90.

Roller-skating on thin ice

Rollerblading is not easy. It is about as hard as winning back one's ex-wife, on the birthday of your secretary who you left her for. You cannot be a wimp to rollerblade, perhaps contrary to popular belief (but these are reputations any hobby must endure when George Michael sings about it, and enjoys the activity with his friends).

The hobby is tough—the embarrassment, the many cuts, the frequent bruises; the list goes on in a story competition with a longer word count. But what really is the toughest thing about rollerblading? Probably telling your parents you're gay.

Submitted by Laurence Kelly, Weybridge, Surrey

Laurence says: "I'm inspired by not taking life too seriously. That's why short stories and poems are mediums I've always enjoyed— there's no need to conform. I'm currently studying at Rada, as I want to be an actor above all."

Laurence will receive a cheque for £70

Thank goodness some things don't change

THANK GOODNESS, in a changing world there are still some things you can depend on. The RSPCA has worked tirelessly to protect our loyal, loving animal friends from cruelty and neglect since 1824. In just one year, we were able to save over 146,000 abandoned, mistreated and neglected animals, but we rely on the kindness of animal lovers like you to do so.

You can help make sure we are here for another 180 years, by making just a small change to your will to remember the RSPCA. With your help, we will go on protecting innocent creatures from suffering for as long as they need us.

For a simple guide to making or changing your will, return the coupon below or call, quoting reference number 11NLO1 010 6

"I had to bite my tongue and think yesssf.

This was Richard E Grant's reaction on hearing that Margaret Thatcher had resigned. So perhaps it's no surprise that he's now playing Michael Heseltine in a new biopic about the Iron Lady

BY RICHARD JINMAN PHOTOGRAPHED BY JULIAN KINSMA

Actor Richard E Grant has mixed feelings about Margaret Thatcher. He was no fan of her policies, though he appreciates it took extraordinary guts for Britain's first, and as yet only, female PM to hold power in a male-dominated parliament. But on one issue, at least, the 54-year-old is unequivocal: he has never, ever, found her sexy.

"No!" he says, looking rather stricken at my suggestion that he might. "To be attractive you have to have some sense

of humour, a sense of irony or selfdeprecation. I was tortured at school by female biology and chemistry teachers and she reminds me of them. I know some people say she's sexy, but I've never got sex appeal off her. Have you?"

I have to admit that I haven't—though, as a teenager, I did find her interestingly strict.ButThatcher's allure is a pertinent topic given Richard's role in The Iron Lady, the new film about her rise and fall, starring Meryl Streep. He plays Michael Heseltine, the dashing cabinet minister who some say rather fancied the woman with the blue suit, the perm, the pearls and the sonorous voice.

Richard—who read both Heseltine and Thatcher's autobiographies to research his role—is sceptical, though. "I've no doubt she stitched him up over the Westland affair," he says, referring to Heseltine's 1986 resignation as defence secretary, after Thatcher allowed the British helicopter firm to be sold to US firm Sikorsky, rather than be kept in European ownership, as he wanted. "Later she went hell for leather to make sure he wasn't elected leader. I have the sense that he was robbed of becoming PM."

I meet Richard in his hotel room in Melbourne—where he's filming the movie version of Aussie sitcom Kath and Kim. He doesn't bear an obvious resemblance to Heseltine, so to play the role he had to dye his hair, and eyebrows, blond.

"Everyone else had wigs, but for some reason they wouldn't give me one," he says, rolling his eyes in mock disgust. "I said, 'Look, he's got more hair at 80 than I had when I was 20: But they said, 'No, you've got to dye it.' "

Me Tarzan: Richard E Grant as Michael Heseltine

Grant moved to Britain to make it as an actor. On the day he arrived, Thatcher sent warships to the Falkland Islands

The process took several attempts. The hairdresser called the end result "Honey Blond". "Albino," would be nearer the mark, chuckles Richard.

But preparing for his role forced Richard to revisit the 1980s, a formative period in his life. In 1982, aged 24, he left Africa—he was born and raised in Swaziland, where his father Henrik was a senior civil servant—and moved to Britain to make it as an actor. On the day he arrived, Thatcher sent warships to the Falkland Islands. The miners' strike followed two years later and Richard's opinion of the Tory leader hardened.

He recalls a televised encounter between the PM and Bob Geldof at a youngachievers awards do in 1984, during the Ethiopian famine. The Live Aid founder criticised her government's failure to do

anything useful with the EEC butter mountain. Butter, replied the PM crisply, wouldn't do much good in Africa.

"It was grotesque," says Richard. "Her complete refusal to take on board what he was talking about... [Geldof suggested that butter oil might be a very useful source of nutrition in Ethiopia]. The way Spitting Image lampooned the government mirrored perfectly her advance into total megalomania."

On the day of Thatcher's resignation in November 1990, Richard was flying back from Budapest where he'd been filming Hudson Hawk, a f44m flop starring Bruce Willis. He opened his diary and wrote: "Joy to be Free! Of Hungary, Hawk and HER!!!"

"In the cab from the airport I was euphoric, but the driver was in a i

The lady's not for turning: Meryl Streep (right) gets Maggie Thatcher down to a "T" in the new film

IN THE FUTURE...

...we'll be growing blood, says Gary Rimmer

No more donors

American politician Richard Riley once observed that school prepares children for roles that may not exist yet, using technologies that haven't been invented, to solve problems we don't yet know about.

It'll be no different for the 135 million babies born this year. They will, for example, need to distinguish between "pharming" and "farming". Pharming is the genetic manipulation and cultivation of plants that "grow" pharmaceuticals. Chinese scientists have just grown rice that produces human serum albumin, a common protein in blood plasma. By 2030, blood donors may be redundant.

Field of research

"Precision agriculture" links GPS technology with satellite sensors, so a farmer can now tell exactly where crops need to be sown, harvested, watered or fertilised, almost on a plant-by-plant basis.

If an area's waterlogged, it won't need watering;

Change is on the way

This "0 drum" allows more water be nsported nces

This year, like every other, millions of children will be born into abject misery. So innovations that improve their lot are clearly desirable—whether they're low-tech, such as the "(;) drum", a doughnut-shaped water barrel pulled by a rope (nothing new, but add soap and it's a rolling laundry, too); or middle-tech like the Solar Aid from Botswana, a sun-powered charger for hearing-aid batteries.

Better still—more bio-tech than high-tech—is the cow recently bred by agro-geneticists in Beijing that produces milk containing human lysozyme, an essential component of human milk. For newborns born in 2020 and orphaned young by disease, animals such as this may be lifesavers.

if another is mineral-poor, it can be targeted.

Coupling this satellite power with driverless robotics means the drudgery of farming can be significantly reduced. Holding

a tractor to a straight line makes planting a big field exhausting. But by automating this process by 2025, Britain's recognisable patchwork of small fields may be unfamiliar to this year's newborns. ■

terrible grump that she was out; he said it was doomsday. So I had to bite my tongue, sit on my luggage and think yesssl'

Are there any politicians he does admire? He ponders the question then shakes his head. "None, I'm afraid. I think they're slippery eels. I'm sure they begin with the best intentions, but the job seems to require constant compromise and duplicity, making promises they can't keep."

He does have a certain sympathy for Heseltine, however. Prior to making the film he met the politician's daughter Annabel, and his former private secretary. Both described a driven man devoted to revitalising Britain's inner cities.

As a dyslexic, Heseltine had to

overcome his natural aversion to public speaking by taking lessons from a vicar's wife. The self-made millionaire was also treated as an outsider by many of his Tory colleagues, who were born into wealth.

"One referred to him as the sort of person who buys his own furniture," says Richard. As a blow-in from Swaziland trying to make it in London acting circles in the Eighties, Richard experienced that sort of snobbery first-hand.

Heseltine's unwavering commitment to his portfolios did little to shift public perception of him as vain and overly driven. One story suggests the politician

Two Sides to the Iron Lady

An insider's view, by Lord Fowler

It was June 15, 1982. The previous day, the white flags of the defeated Argentinian force had been raised in Port Stanley and the Falklands War had ended in victory for Margaret Thatcher.

The South Americans' invasion three months earlier had caught the government off-guard and she'd come under intense political attack—with her very continuance as PM brought into question. But, in the weeks that followed, she'd refused to compromise in her determination to win back the islands and, if anyone deserved a little time off after all that intense 24-hour pressure, it was her.

But that was not Margaret Thatcher's style. I was health secretary at the time and, during that day, received a summons to present myself at Number 10. We were in the middle of a pay dispute with most of the NHS arrayed against us and, for the next two hours, she put me and my ministers under an intense barrage of detailed questioning.

At one point, it came to light that I'd made a bad mistake. I hadn't cleared a proposal with her. "I didn't think you would want to be bothered in the middle of a war," I said weakly.

Norman Fowler with Mrs Thatcher in 1990

"I had such a long face, such a slim frame and was so odd-looking that I thought I should stick to directing"

sketched out his life on an envelope while still a student at Oxford: millionaire by 25, cabinet member by 35, party leader by 45 and prime minister by 55. But Richard confesses that he,

"Norman," she replied. "I took the chair at every meeting of the economic committee throughout the conflict."

There was, of course, no answer to that. Even as the guns were firing, she'd continued to oversee every other aspect of government policy, and the Falklands established Margaret Thatcher's reputation as The Iron Lady,

But this is an incomplete characterisation. A few months later, I received another summons to Number 10. I was at home and, untypically, babysitting my young daughter. I hurriedly made new arrangements, but arrived very late for the meeting.

"No apologies," she said immediately. "The most important thing in this life is the family."

That was her belief and it sustained her during some difficult times. Her husband Denis was her rock. They shared the same beliefs—and one or two of the same prejudices. At a dinner for the cabinet, she half-joked: "If ever I am tempted to say something nice about the BBC, Denis soon persuades me out of it."

Looking back on her term in office, the only sadness is that she left as a result of a traumatic leadership contest, rather than at a time of her own choosing.

Friend and foe are probably united by one belief—we'll be lucky to see her like again in British politics.

» Lord Fowler served in Margaret Thatcher's cabinet throughout her term as PM. His roles included secretary of state for social services and secretary of state for employment.

"Fear is a good thing. You have to embrace it otherwise you'd have a nervous breakdown"

when the money failed to come through. The credit crunch was partly to blame, although Richard is attracted to the kind of films that make financiers nervous. One was a comedy Western set in Britain in the 1870s. It was, he sighs, "hideously funny, but the money didn't come forth. I'm just grateful I have a day job."

The day job has its challenges, though. Despite his success, Richard still has to audition and cope with rejection.

"I recently got through to the third round [of auditions] on Jack the Giant Killer, a mega-budget retelling of the Jack and the Beanstalk story," he says. "I had to go and do the softshoe shuffle for [Hollywood director] Bryan Singer, but I didn't get the part."

In the age of reality TV and instant stardom, fame is increasingly fleeting. Actors, even well-known ones, are not immune. "There are people who once did three Vanity Fair covers but you'd be hard pressed to know what they've been

doing for the past ten years. There are a lot of casualties and you can't be complacent, because no career stays at the same level. You don't reach the plateau of success and stay there—there are troughs all the way."

When Richard's in a trough he plays tennis near his home in Petersham, southwest London, with a group of fellow actors. They enjoy "the yack, the crack and the gossip". He also travels with his wife, voice coach Joan Washington, and spends a lot of time at the theatre. Recently, he's been renovating his French holiday home, one hour north of St Tropez. Eventually, the phone rings, a script arrives and the fear subsides, at least for a while.

Richard rubs his nose. "I think fear is a good thing," he says, gazing into space with those remarkable eyes. "You have to embrace it otherwise you'd have a nervous breakdown."

The Iron Lady opens in cinemas on January 6.

SURELY IT'S NOT CALLED THAT?!

Does your home town or village have a funny or peculiar nickname? Reader's Digest wants to hear about it for a forthcoming article—and we'll pay £30 for any suggestions we publish. Please email placenames@readersdigest.co.uk, including your name and phone number, by January 20.

ICE CAVE, LANGJOKULL GLACIER, ICELAND

Iceland is well-known for its hot-water springs. But when they crop up beneath a glacier, they can bore caves into the ice that are hundreds of feet long, with curved ceilings and crevices. This one makes a stunning climbing wall. r.

The World's Best Frozen Wonders

Oh, the weather outside is frightful, but these icy gems are so delightful...

BY RACHEL SMITH

PERITO MORENO GLACIER,

As well as superlative football, Argentina is also home to the mighty Perito Moreno Glacier—a massive ice field that's three miles long, up to 560 feet deep, and has an average height of 240 feet above the surface of Lake Argentino. Tourists can trek over its surface—or watch from a nearby viewing deck or cruise ship as chunks break off, forming icebergs the size of houses.

Although its frequently

disintegrating form might seem alarming, it's one of three Patagonian glaciers that are actually growing, as it's constantly fed by snow-melt from the Andes.

In fact, every few years it gets large enough to stretch right across the lake, forming a dam that cuts it in half. The water on one side builds until it eventually surges through the ice with a thunderous crash and a small tsunami. The last time was in 2008.

STRIPY ICEBERGS

If you thought that bergs were always sparkly white islands, think again.

The whiteness is created by tiny trapped air bubbles in the ice that deflect the light in every direction. But blue stripes can occur when cracks in an iceberg are filled with water that refreezes too quickly for the bubbles to form.

Brown, black and yellow stripes—which can make bergs look like floating humbugs—are created when volcanic ash, other dust or sediment settles on the structure and is then covered by a new layer of snow and ice.

The berg opposite was photographed by Norwegian sailor Oyvind Tangen from a research vessel in Antarctica. ►

PAINTINGS BELOW ZERO

He was brought up in rural Ontario, where temperatures of minus 40°C are common, so it's perhaps no surprise that Canadian artist Gordon Halloran uses ice as his medium for public art installations.

Gordon's works, which he's been

producing since the early 1990s, include multicoloured skating rinks and "Ice Gate", the 100-foot-long entrance to a cultural zone at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.

He often creates his works by spraying large ice fields—such as

rinks—with paint. At other times, he floods water with coloured pigments, then freezes it and cuts it into big blocks for 3D paintings—such as the 2008 installation in Millennium Park, Chicago, shown above—or smaller pieces to construct mosaics.

SILO CLIMBING, IOWA

PE teacher Don Briggs is a keen mountaineer, but his favourite pastime was hampered somewhat by the fact that he lives among the flat fields of Cedar Falls, Iowa. So, for the past 12 years, he's been building his own mountains every winter—by hosing water over a series of grain silos.

The resulting 70-foot ice walls are up to four feet thick, allowing Don and his friends to strap on their crampons and climb to their hearts' content. Even more challenging, the structures are constantly melting, refreezing and changing shape. po-

SPINNING ICE DISCS •

UFO enthusiasts claim they're the work of aliens, while scientists say they usually occur at bends in rivers where accelerating water creates a force called rotational shear. But, whatever your favourite explanation, these discs have popped up everywhere from their usual haunts in the Arctic Circle to the River Otter in Devon, in 2009.

Though generally very thin, they can measure anything from one foot across to the astounding 650-foot-diameter disc that was spotted on Sweden's Ljusnan River. The disc above appeared in Liaodong Bay, China—the first time the phenomenon has been spotted there, according to reports.

CIRCLES IN THE SNOW ►

There's no mystery about the creator of these discs. In March 2010, American artist Jim Denevan—who creates pictures on sand and earth that are eventually erased by waves and weather—travelled to Siberia's Lake Baikal, the world's largest inland body of water. He endured blistering winds to inscribe the frozen surface with a series of circles based on the Fibonacci curve, a pattern found in everything from the shape of unfurling plants to the spirals of shells. Covering nine square miles (until they melted), they formed what's been called the world's largest drawing. ►

THE GREAT ICE STORM, MONTREAL

EISRIESENWELT ICE CAVES, AUSTRIA

One hour's drive south of Salzburg, high up a steep mountain road in the Alps, lies the biggest network of ice caves in the world.

Austrian natural scientist Anton Posselt officially "discovered" them in 1879— although local hunters had known about them for centuries. But, though he published a report on the 25-mile-long system in a mountaineering magazine, they soon slipped back into obscurity.

It wasn't until the 1920s, when renowned Salzburg caver Alexander von MOrk popularised them among adventurers by establishing various climbing routes, that their reputation started to grow. Then, when a road was built in 1953, they started to become one of Austria's major tourist attractions.

Visitors can now take a 75-minute tour through the 100-million-year-old rock-and-ice structures. Highlights include the Posselt Tower stalagmite and the 80-foot-high Great Ice Embankment. Von MOrk's ashes were scattered in a huge chamber known as the Alexander von MOrk Cathedral.

In January 1998, a seven-day deluge of freezing rain brought Montreal to a standstill by coating everything in a five-inch layer of ice.

Some 1,000 pylons collapsed under the weight (pictured left) in chain reactions, leaving more than four million people without electricity—for as long

as three weeks. Around 30 people were killed and hundreds of animals died, in some cases because barns collapsed on top of them. Streets became impassable because of the threat of ice blocks falling from buildings, and the total repair bill ran into hundreds of millions of pounds.

ZAO ONSEN, JAPAN

It's home to the country's oldest hot springs (discovered in AD110), but Japan's Zao Onsen ski resort is perhaps most famous for its "snow monsters". These eerie winter phenomena

t41 are, in reality, Aomori Fir trees covered in hard rime ice, which sticks to them for months on end. Visitors can even ski along trails running through the ghostly forest. ■

Enough doom and gloom!

After last year's tidal waves of depressing news, we've got to say, "We've had enough!"

You too?

In which case, share our New Year's resolution to Keep Britain Happy in 2012. Starting right here with...

X011: WAS IT REALLY THAT BAD?

Mark Stevenson, author of An Optimist's Tour of the Future, looks behind the gloomy headlines and finds that last year wasn't as awful as it seemed

TERRIBLE 2011? fib aitp Evil Facebook Fuels the Riots

Last summer's street violence is seen either as an example of mindless thuggery, or an understandable reaction against wealth inequalities from a marginalised minority. Mixed up in the debate is the role socialmedia technologies (such as Facebook and BlackBerry Messenger) play in such events. Are they much-needed oxygen for the true voice of the people, or do they provide an echo chamber

for extremists and organisational tools for criminals?

The truth is that all of these views are probably right at various times.

But are the internet, social media and mobile phones part of the reason the world is getting less violent?

The world is getting less violent? Am I crazy? No. It's an astonishing and underreported fact that violence is declining, and has been for centuries. The common perception is that humans were more peaceable in the past (when they were somehow closer to nature) and that we've been corrupted by modernity. But the historical record tells a different story. The rate of violence in tribal and feudal cultures was so high that the likelihood of you being killed by

4 someone was as much as 60 per cent. Today, according to the World Health Organisation, rates of such savagery worldwide are well below 0.5 per cent and falling (and that includes people killing themselves).

As Harvard University's Professor Stephen Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, writes, "The romantic theory gets it backwards: far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler."

He argues that a combination of government, increasing trade across cultures (which "makes other people more valuable alive than dead"), expansions of literacy, journalism,

Seven Billionth Person Born. There's No More Room!

It's a point that's been made in RD before ("Cheer Up: It Will Never Happen", Jan 2011), but it's worth saying again: population growth is not running away with itself. Nor is it unmanageable.

The important figure to keep in mind is 2.1—the number of children every woman should have to keep the population

history, science ("All of the ways in which we see the world from the other guy's point of view") and female empowerment ("By all measures, men are the more violent gender") contributes to this trend. And all of these factors are underpinned or encouraged by communications technologies, including Facebook and the internet. Today, if you take the world as a whole, violence and hatred are the exception, which is why we draw attention to them—we're outraged. This gives us the impression that things are getting worse. But violence wasn't news a few short centuries ago: it's what you did at the weekend. Things aren't perfect, but they're better. Tweet that.

static. According to UN estimates, the world birth rate will continue dropping (as it has been for decades) until it meets this figure sometime towards the back end of the century. So we'll probably hit around ten billion people, then possibly fall in number.

A key factor is growing urbanisation, as people in cities have fewer children —partly because of female emancipation and the lack of space. At the same time, the population density makes it easier and cheaper in cities than rural areas to provide education, health, sanitation, power and other services, and keep everyone safe and well.

Man Makes Body Parts and Angers God

In July, surgeons at Karolinska University Hospital, Sweden, carried out the world's first synthetic organ transplant. An international team built an artificial windpipe (a polymer "scaffold" that was an exact replica of the patient's organ) and then impregnated it with his stem cells, effectively turning it into his own tissue. This method means the patient's body doesn't reject the implant and there's no need for a donor. Elsewhere, the Wakeforest Institute of Regenerative Medicine in North Carolina is already growing 22 types of human tissue in the lab.

For some, this kind of tissue engineering, tied into a wider biotech revolution, is "man playing God". They call for us to slow down or return to simpler times, to step back from technology if we're to hold on to that which

This is who we are—we innovate, we invent, and we do it faster and faster as time goes on

makes us essentially human

Not long ago, IVF was seen as unethical. Yet public opinion has generally got over its qualms about helping couples conceive by this process—as soon as it started producing cute babies, the argument flipped 180 degrees. It became unethical to deny access to IVF.

Attempting to hold on to the "essentially human" by fighting against the very thing humans do best—evolving through technology and culture—is contradictory and ultimately futile. Whether we like it or not, this is who we are. We innovate, we invent, and we do it faster and faster as time goes on, as each invention provides a platform to create something yet more powerful. The thing that some people fear is eroding our natural state is, in fact, a wholehearted expression of it. ►

The sheer vileness of the UK phone-hacking scandal shocked us all. Hacking the phones of murder victims and dead soldiers' families finally brought into focus just how sleazy some of our papers are, as well as how entwined government, the police and Fleet Street had become. But there was good news.

Suddenly, the all-powerful News Corp was having its share price battered and its

Hacking Scandal Shames Britain

ego quashed—the previously untouchable looked pathetic rather than powerful. At the same time, the number of resignations from government, News Corp and the police was dizzying. It remains to be seen how things will play out, but a readjustment is in progress.

It won't, of course, turn Fleet Street, the police or government squeaky clean, but it might make the whole shebang a little less grimy.

Debt Crisis Threatens to Shatter Society

Is there anything good to say about the escalating financial crisis? Perhaps. As wake-up calls go, it's a big one—and way overdue.

Like many wake-up calls, when it went off the first time in 2008, the financial and political system hit the snooze button and went back to sleep. But the alarm is going off again, much louder, and this time we'll have to take notice.

It's all part of what might be called the "humanity stops being a stroppy teenager and grows up" phase. After years of reckless irresponsibility, we're finally realising that if something doesn't have sustainability built into it, by definition it'll fall over at some point. That we're no longer tenants on the planet, we're the landlord—and, as such, we have responsibilities.

So far, we've tended to exploit our resources to depletion, or stretch them way too thin. At the same time, a Westerner can see as many as 3,000 commercial messages a day. We're in debt—financially, socially and emotionally.

The financial and political system hit the snooze button and went back to sleep

Maybe Harold Camping, the US evangelist preacher who famously predicted the end of the world in 2011 (twice!), was half-right. It may not quite be the End of the World, but it may be the End of the World As We Know It—and perhaps that's a positive thing.

This year I got a call from one of the biggest companies on the planet, who said, "We want to change our business into a force for good in the world. Will you help us?" They're not the only ones —there's a new appetite for transparency, philanthropy and sustainable investment.

And the level of innovation going on—which could change fundamentally the way society works—is staggering. We're in the middle of a period of technological change that will make the Industrial Revolution look like a storm in a teacup.

The cost of genome sequencing is plummeting, potentially ushering in a revolution in healthcare, because medicine can be tailored to your genetic profile ("You don't need drugs, you need to stop eating bananas").

We're in the middle of a period of change that will make the Industrial Revolution look like a storm in a teacup

Nanotechnology methods are set to remove any fears of future wars over water, because it will be cheaper to desalinate than invade.

Even solar pessimists say some nations will reach grid parity (the point at which solar power is as cheap as fossil fuels) in ten years. There are factories already making fuels using bacteria that can eat CO2 from the air and excrete crude oil.

So, while we're not seeing the same level of innovation in our institutions, particularly our financial ones, when they fall over—and fall over they will—there are plenty of tools ready to build a sustainable, prosperous future. ■

» An Optimist's Tour of the Future by Mark Stevenson (£12.99) is available at anoptimiststourofthe future.com

NATURAL WONDERS: KINKAJOU

Also known as the honey bear due to its love of, erm, honey, the Kinkajou scores highly on the "cute" scale. Not surprisingly, these creatures are popular as household pets in Central and South America (their native lands).

But if you're thinking of placing an order for your child's birthday, beware—although docile and friendly, the Kinkajou is capable of inflicting a nasty bite when agitated. Kinkajous can also, like raccoons, be carriers of the roundworm Baylisascaris procyonis, which is extremely dangerous to humans. Not exactly Winnie the Pooh, then.

WI IY DI TS DO\'T WORK

DR JOHN BRIF A

Want to lose weight this year?

The good news is that you don't need to count a single calorie! The secret to long-term weight loss is surprisingly simple...

How often have you felt that you're in a losing battle with your weight, even though you're assured the solution to your diet problems is simple: just eat less and exercise more?

This advice certainly seems to make sense. The trouble is, quite apart from our collective experience, a stack of studies confirm that applying the "calorie principle" hardly ever brings satisfying, sustained weight loss.

The fact that diets don't work is often assumed to be down to our personal failings, but science shows that conventional weight-loss advice usually dooms us to failure by causing the body to resist our efforts and "defend" its weight.

The same science, though, reveals a path to weight-loss success—and one that requires none of the calorie restriction, extensive exercise or hunger typical of traditional approaches. So what's the secret?

THE BURNING ISSUE

"Eating less" may be a key message of traditional weight-loss advice, but this ultimately puts a brake on the metabolism. Not only can this make weight loss slow going, but it also often causes it to stall at a level far higher than desired—the dreaded "plateau". Some claim we can counter this by upping our aerobic exercise efforts. In reality, though, activities such as brisk walking and running burn quite small numbers of

calories, and tend to make us hungrier, too. And this sharpening of the appetite, of course, only adds to the heightened hunger that comes as a result of consciously cutting back on calories.

It's not so much that diets don't work, more that they can't work.

THE FAT CONTROLLER

Another feature of caloriebased approaches is that they tend to lead us to spurn dietary fat in favour of carbohydrate. On the face of it this seems like a good ploy, given that a gram of fat contains about twice the calories found in a gram of carbohydrate. But biochemistry reveals that the forgoing of fat can backfire and actually jeopardise our weight-loss efforts.

The propensity of a food to

fatten is not solely determined by its calorie content—its effect on key hormones matters, too. A central player here is insulin. This hormone facilitates the taking up and storage of fat in the fat cells, and it also inhibits fat release. In short, insulin is fattening. Of the three "macronutrients"—carbohydrate, protein and fat—it's carbohydrate that causes the most insulin secretion. Disruptive foods in this respect are those with added sugar, as well as starchy staples such as bread, potatoes, rice, pasta and breakfast cereals—foods traditionally emphasised on reduced-calorie, low-fat weight-loss diets.

Crucially, while carbohydrate is the prime driver of insulin, fat has little, if any, effect here. What this means is that for a given number of calories, fat-rich diets have the

APPLES A\D PEARS

Many women lament the fact that while men seem to lose weight at will, they find their own slimming much slower going. At least part of the explanation for this phenomenon has to do with general differences in the distribution of fat in men and women.

Men, on the whole,

accumulate weight around their midriffs (so-called "abdominal fat"), sometimes said to give them the shape of an apple. Many women find their problem areas to be below the waist, leading to a body form more reminiscent of a pear.

These differences are not merely cosmetic, either:

potential to control weight better than those based on carbohydrate. Evidence for this comes in the form of several studies revealing that high-fat diets induce weight loss more effectively than those rich in carbs. This may appear counter-intuitive to some, but it's biochemical law that scaling back on sugar and starchy carbs will lower insulin levels, allowing fat to flow out of the fat cells.

But weight loss is not the only benefit of eating fewer carbs.

SATISFACTION GUARANTEED

Fat liberated through lowered insulin levels can be burned for fuel, and in this way represents food to the body—just like the fat that "feeds" a hibernating bear. This ability of liberated fat to feed us helps explain why

High-fat diets induce weight loss more effectively than those rich in carbs

abdominal fat is strongly associated with a raised risk of conditions such as heart disease and Type 2 diabetes, while fat found below the waist is actually linked with reduced disease risk. Some scientists believe the differing rates of weight loss in men and women are due to the fact that the body is generally

when individuals adopt a diet lower in carbohydrate, they often spontaneously eat several hundred calories less each day than they ordinarily would—but without any increase in appetite.

Plus, a lower-carb diet will contain proportionally more protein, and this macronutrient is known to satisfy hunger more effectively than either carbohydrate or fat. Protein, like carbohydrate, stimulates insulin secretion, though to a lesser degree. Crucially, though, unlike carbohydrate, it also triggers the release of the hormone glucagon, one effect of which is to stimulate the release of fat from the fat cells. So glucagon reduces the fat-forming effects of insulin.

BRAIN FOOD

There are yet more benefits to a diet emphasising fat -

happy to rid itself of "toxic" abdominal fat, but is less inclined to give up more beneficial "female" fat.

There's good news for both sexes, though: cutting back on carbs will see a satisfying shrinking of the waistline that's not just cosmetically pleasing, but signals enhanced health, too.

There's no need to be "all or nothing" —it's what you eat most of the time that counts and protein that relate to another critical hormone in body-weight regulation: leptin.

Leptin is secreted by fat cells and acts on a part of the brain known as the hypothalamus to speed the metabolism and suppress appetite. In theory, as we put on weight, more leptin is secreted to stop the rot. However, if for any reason leptin fails to do its job properly, the body can lose its natural ability to regulate weight. Some researchers believe that this state— referred to as "leptin resistance"—is a potent cause of obesity.

Leptin resistance can be caused by inflammation in the hypothalamus. Of critical importance here is the fact that spikes in blood-sugar levels encourage inflammation. And the foods most likely to induce these spikes are

WHAT TO EAT?

"Healthy" breakfasts are traditionally based on cereals and perhaps wholemeal toast, but the propensity of such foods to cause surges in insulin

those with added sugar as well as starchy carbohydrates—the very same foods that cause most secretion of fat-making insulin. Also, these foods boost levels of blood fats known as triglycerides, which, evidence suggests, impair leptin's ability to make its way into the brain.

By inducing leptin resistance, a carb-rich diet can lead to a sluggish metabolism and heightened hunger—not an ideal state of affairs for someone seeking to lose weight and keep it off! Of course, a diet more restricted in carbohydrate puts all this in reverse, thereby speeding the metabolism and curbing the appetite. Now we're talking.

STAYING ON TRACK

This sort of "diet" is not really a diet at all—more a healthy way of eating that has proven

and disrupt leptin make them nutritional disaster areas. A better option would be, say, some Greek yogurt with nuts (eg, almonds and walnuts) and some fruit (berries are best 4,1/4E BREAKFAST

on account of their low sugar and highly nutritious nature).

Eggs are also a great breakfast option, 0 particularly if coupled with ; some smoked salmon and tomato or wilted spinach. 0 Sandwiches are off the menu at lunch, and are ideally replaced with meat, 4

WHY THE SNACK ATTACK?

On traditional diets, snacks are banned or limited to a piece of fruit. The problem is, little or nothing between meals, particularly between lunch and dinner, can leave us famished, and not in the best state to make healthy eating choices. Once the appetite runs out of control, the drive is to make poor choices, and to overeat. Keeping hunger at bay is what makes

benefits not just in terms of weight control, but also disease markers, including blood pressure and blood-fat and blood-sugar levels. Occasional deviations from the path needn't derail you. There's no need to be "all or nothing"—it's what you eat most of the time, not some of it, that determines your

healthy eating easy. Paradoxical though it may sound, the less hungry you are, the more weight you're likely to lose.

Snacking has a part to play, but fruit is not the ideal snack at all. Firstly, it's generally sugar-rich. Secondly, for most people it fails to satisfy the appetite, and so does not tide us over to the next meal. Nuts make a much better snack. They won't disrupt hormonal balance like fruit, and they do a much better job of filling you up.

success in the long term. So don't beat yourself up over slip-ups and indulgences—put them into the context of your diet as a whole and see them pale into insignificance.

Dr John Briffa (drbriffa.com) is a leading authority on weight loss, and the author of Escape the Diet Trap (£14.99), out this month.

fish or an omelette with salad and/or cooked vegetables. Olive-oilbased salad dressing and butter on your vegetables are fine. This same format should be used for dinner. Other options include hearty soups, stews and casseroles, perhaps accompanied by more salad or vegetables. ■

YOR I T\ SS YEAR BO /K

Int to rev up

BY JANETTE MARSHALL.

TEENS

To lose weight without dieting, take a screen break. You don't need to abandon Hollyoaks or The X Factor to stay slim—just work some exercise into your viewing time instead.

"When watching TV, do push-ups on the stairs during the ads," says Neil Johnson, senior trainer at London's exclusive Chelsea Club. "Place your hands on the second or third step. Start with 10-15 repetitions and work up to 15-20. As you get stronger, move down a step until you have your hands on the floor, where you'll be supporting a bigger percentage of your bodyweight. Keep drawing your belly button into the spine throughout the exercise, inhale as you bend your arms, exhale as you straighten them, and avoid arching your back"

As well as burning fat, this routine targets shoulders, triceps, quads and core muscles in your abdomen, back, pelvis and ►

4 hips, which give you control when you do other exercises.

For a celebrity-style all-over-toned body. Do regular strength training (using free weights, gym equipment and exercises such as pull-ups that work against your own body weight), advises physiotherapist Sammy Margo. In addition, go running, cycling, swimming or take other vigorous exercise at least four times a week for 30 minutes.

To have the most fun and build bone density (it declines from your 20s onwards). "Organise a game of netball, rounders, football or swingball with your mates. They're all easy to play and don't need expensive kit," says former RAF fitness coach Stuart Amory of In-Kilter Fitness (inkilterfitness.co.uk), which organises ad-hoc military-style exercise sessions for youngsters that are announced on Facebook.

PICK YOUR TIME

Make exercising easier by scheduling it to fit in with your lifestyle, rather than the other way round, advises Stuart Amory. "I do 6am sessions with young professionals; 8am with 50- and 60-year-olds who want to 'get it out of the way'; and 9.30am is popular with mums after dropping their children at school."

fit, especially if you haven't done much exercise at college," says Matt Roberts, fitness author and celebrity personal trainer (mattroberts. co.uk). "Stick to singles—leave doubles for your 60s. Tennis provides interval training— alternating high and low levels of intensity—for fitter heart and lungs."

For better sex. Men and women can capitalise and improve on already-high testosterone levels by playing team games, such as football, suggests Roberts. The hormone helps the body build muscle, burn fat and increase endurance. In turn, exercise— particularly competitive sport—increases testosterone production, which boosts your sex drive.

Don't like team games? "Triathlon is one of the fastest-growing activities in the UK," says Roberts. "You're competing against yourself and your previous times. It also combines weight-bearing exercise (running) and lowor no-impact exercise (swimming and cycling)."

To meet new friends—or a partner. Play tennis.

"It's a nice way to get

For shapely legs and bum. Get on your bike. "Cycling uses the quads in the legs and the glutes in the bottom to shape and tone," says Roberts. "It

also helps stabilise the lower then relax for ten. Repeat ten back and pelvis. Once you get times. Follow with ten fast fitter, try a spinning class." squeezes. Breathe normally.

30s

For men to regain their mojo. Pump iron, says Roberts. "Men's testosterone levels start dropping at this age, and some people have self-esteem issues if they go bald, too. Plenty of slow repetitions with weights will build hormone levels and make you feel better about your appearance."

For a strong pelvic floor—to help men lift those weights and to help women after childbirth. Improving your pelvic-floor muscles is an important part of increasing core strength. It also helps prevent incontinence in women after having a child.

To find the correct muscles, imagine you are squeezing and lifting to stop yourself passing urine. Women will feel a lift inside and men a slight rising of the scrotum.

Work out how many times you can do this in a row and try to increase that figure by following this routine from Sammy Margo, three times daily: squeeze and lift the muscles as strongly as you can. Hold for ten seconds,

For better sex, play football! Competitive sport increases testosterone, which boosts your sex drive

To be a yummy mummy. "Women should get together with friends who have children around the same age for a general workout, covering everything from press-ups to a jog," suggests Amory. "For four years, I've trained one group of mums who meet at 9.30am after dropping off their kids. They say they come for the coffee and chat—and the group does offer support when life is tough—but, by arranging to exercise with others, they have to do it, as they don't want to let them down."

SFor faster fat burning. "Expect an impressive body change in just six weeks by doing 20-30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise after your weight-training or toning exercises four times a week," says personal trainer Mark Anthony, who owns the Mark Anthony Club in Notting Hill, west London (markanthonysuk.com).

For firmer abs and core. Try Margo's all-day core

too, is ambitious. "You can't possibly succeed or survive as an actor if you're not.

Unlike Heseltine, his career has far exceeded his expectations and defied his early critics. "When I left drama school, I never thought I'd be in a film," he says. "My final assessment was that I had such a long face, such a slim frame and was so odd-looking that I might have a chance as a light actor at best, but should probably stick to directing."

He set himself a goal: if he couldn't make it as an actor by 30 he'd do something else. Yet fate was kind. He was 29 when he landed his first film, playing Withnail, an alcoholic failed thespian in the black comedy Withnail and I.

His posh accent turned even the character's worst obscenities into punchlines. The film became a cult classic and the doors of Hollywood opened for him. Roles in everything from LA Story in 1991 to Gosford Park in 2001 and Tim Burton's 2005 movie Corpse Bride followed.

"The irony that my film debut playing an unemployed actor has led to all the work I've got since has not escaped me," he says.

More recently, he moved into directing, starting with Wah-Wah, the acclaimed 2005 dramatisation of his tumultuous childhood (his parents separated and his father descended into alcoholism).

He's tried to make two more films since then, but both collapsed at the llth hour

ADVERTISEMENT

SPECIAL OFFER FOR READER'S DIGEST!

THAT'SENTERTAINMENT

A CELEBRATION OF THE MGM FILM MUSICAL

The John Wilson Orchestra album luxury edition John Wilson leads an all-star cast of singers in this dazzling album of best-loved numbers from the MGM film musicals including Singin' in the Rain, The Trolley Song, I Got Rhythm and Steppin' Out with My Baby. This 14-track album comes together with a bonus DVD of videos, behind the scenes film and 'sing-a-long' tracks for everyone to enjoy — and all comes beautifully presented in a hard cover 84 page CD-book including song lyrics and photographs.

To order, call 0845 519 2151 or visit www.emioffers.co.uk send a cheque (made payable to Loudclothing.com) to Reader's Digest Offer, Loud, The Works, Park Road, Blaby, Leicester LE8 4EF

in the pushchair, which always collapsed. We'd "go on holiday" to the furthest lamp post in the street—Lamp Far!

...MY GODMOTHER WAS ONE OF MY PRIMARY-SCHOOL TEACHERS. I had to remember to call her Mrs Wild during the day, not Auntie Pam. I still have friends from that school—it's lovely to have that connection. I always enjoyed writing stories and poems—I still have them in my head—and I was happy, until I moved to Porthcawl Comprehensive. I was bigger than the rest of the girls, and there's a bitchiness about teenage girls that I wish one could eliminate. At the same time, drama became important to me.

...BEING IN SCHOOL PRODUCTIONS WITH ROB BRYDON—BUT BACK THEN HE WAS CALLED ROB JONES.

Left: In

Sparkes's

Nottage Primary, 1973, aged seven. This'll impress you-1 can remember every single name in that photo, give or take the odd surname! (See Ruth's complete list on our website)

Far right: Pembrokeshire, 1978. From left to right: Maria, Mum, me and Julian. Note that I was wearing a ballet leotard as a bathing costume, and also the Tandy beach ball, which was a rare freebie back in those days.

Right: At school in 1981. Oh, the smile of the underconfident teenager!

We did lots of musicals together [Rob was two years above her], put together by our brilliant drama teacher. The best teachers are those who don't look down on you.

...AN UNSUCCESSFUL INTERVIEW TO DO DRAMA AT MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY. In my day, it was incredibly left-wing and political. I remember standing outside the interview room with a girl wearing a beret.

She said, "I'm going to talk about Brechtian techniques. What about you?"

I said, "Well, I've just seen Cats, and I really loved how they appear out of the stage trapdoors..."

When I went inside, they asked me what I'd been reading recently. Heeding my father's advice to always tell the truth, I replied,"Hollywood Wives by

Mrs

class at

Jackie Collins." Unsurprisingly, I didn't get a place there—but, years later, I had dinner with Jackie Collins. She's a Gavin & Stacey fan. I told her that story, and she gave me a signed copy of her latest book—so that worked out alright in the end!

...BEING A HEARTBROKEN MESS WHEN I LEFT WARWICK UNIVERSITY. Not because of a man, but because I fell in love with the life there and made such amazing friends. I read drama and felt I'd ended up in completely the right place for me. At the end of three years, it was time to grow up, but I didn't feel ready—and I certainly didn't feel I was good enough to act professionally.

...DOMINIC COOKE PERSUADING ME TO TRY FOR DRAMA SCHOOL. Dominic was my friend at Warwick (he's now the hugely successful artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre in London), so I rather grudgingly applied and got into the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff. But my confidence was even lower when I finished there.

At one of our end-of-year showcases, all these agents came to visit, but none of

them was interested in me. I remember trying to be proactive and approaching one, saying, "Hi! I'm Ruth Jones," and him looking at me with an expression that said, "Why on earth are you interrupting me?"

...THINKING I MIGHT CHANGE TACK AND BECOME A LAWYER. I'd done a six-month tour in The Marriage of Figaro after Cardiff, but it wasn't an Equity job [a role that qualifies you to join the acting trade union Equity, membership of

With schoolfriend Wayne Forester Evans in the Porthcawl Comprehensive production of My Fair Lady, 1985

I burnt all my rejection letters but now I wish I'd kept them. Every actor has to deal with rejection

4 which is often required to get other professional work] and, despite applying for all sorts of other roles afterwards, I didn't get anywhere. I did some temping work and thought about giving up on acting altogether.

...I BURNT ALL MY REJECTION LETTERS, but now I wish I'd kept them. Every actor has to deal with rejection.

...BEING A NINJA TURTLE IN THE PORTHCAWL PANTOMINE IN 1991. Eventually, one of the many letters I sent out came good, and I worked as a stagehand and played a Ninja turtle—I had to fight King Rat. Not such a big role, but I was able to get my Equity card, and I was very proud of that!

...FAXING THE CASTING DIRECTOR OF THE NATIONAL THEATRE IN 1994. I'd heard they were putting on Dylan Thomas's play Under Milk Wood. I said, "I'm big, buxom and Welsh, and you should see me for the part of Polly Garter!" They did, and I got the role.

...TALKING TO GWYNETH PALTROW. I got a part in the film Emma in which Gwyneth was playing the lead. She was going out with Brad Pitt at the time. I

asked her if, with a name like Gwyneth, she had any Welsh connections. She wasn't terribly friendly. I thought, Where I come from, it's an old ladies' name anyway!

...LAUGHING WITH JAMES CORDEN UNTIL WE WEPT. James [pictured, left, with Ruth] and I met when we were both in Fat Friends. He'd had an idea about a Welsh girl marrying an English guy and, looking around at the guests at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Leeds, where we were staying at the time, we started to imagine what characters they might be at the wedding. We said, "We've got to write this down," and Gavin & Stacey was born.

....WE BOTH THOUGHT, IF NO ONE ELSE FINDS THIS FUNNY IT DOESN'T MATTER, BECAUSE WRITING IT HAS ENTERTAINED US SO MUCH. As it turned out, a lot of people did find it funny [the last episode of series three drew more than ten million viewers].

James is the dearest of friends, and I miss being with him and working with him. I really hope we get to write together again one day, because it was such a joy.

...FEELING RATHER OVERWHELMED AT THE SUCCESS OF GAVIN & STACEY. I scuffled back home to Cardiff

and tried to work out what to do with all the offers that were coming my way. But they would have meant spending long periods away from home, and I didn't want to do that. My husband David [Peet] is a TV producer, so we decided to work together and set up Tidy Productions. "Tidy" is Welsh slang for "excellent".

...BEING INSPIRED TO WRITE

STELLA. It was after Stuart Murphy, head of Skyl, suggested a series in the vein of a British Roseanne. I'm astonishingly proud of Stella because it's something David and I have made together. I liked the idea of this woman who thought her life was going in one direction but, because she gets pregnant, finds it going somewhere else entirely. Yet she isn't bitter about

putting her life on hold to care for her children—she's a very loving mum.

And when her past comes over the horizon to haunt her...I'm a bit obsessed with the idea of the past meeting the present. Imagine if we could communicate with ourselves in the past and say, "Don't do that, but definitely do this!" Our memories would be very different.

...ALWAYS LACKING CONFIDENCE.

Looking back, it's such a shame—I wish I'd had more self belief. Everyone should grab life's opportunities—what does it really matter if things don't turn out perfect? ■ As told to Caroline Hutton

» Ruth's new series Stella begins on January 6 on Skyl.

BACK IN THE DAY: STRANGERS IN A STRANGE LAND

"Britishers: Know Your America", published in RD in January1942, provides those travelling across the Atlantic with an essential guide

■ You will find plenty of sportsmanship, and a code of what is and what isn't done. But it's not always our code, and you may be surprised at some of the things that are done. Don't expect the stately minuet of cricket, with its elaborate etiquette, on the baseball field. The idea is to win, not just to have a game.

■ Americans do business as they play games—with great attack and vigour. Britain is a country where men of leisure often take to business, while America is a country where men of business take to leisure only occasionally and reluctantly. Culture and social activities are still mainly left to the women.

■ Your hosts may be rather afraid of the shyness and reserve that is, with truth, attributed to British men. There's no need for you to assume false geniality, and it won't be resented if you get into conversation without preliminary manoeuvres.

■ Apart from these quite obvious precautions, you have only to respond to the generous and kindly interest of your American hosts.

The Future

A computer simulation of how the FanWing Cargo Loader would look.

It's the plane's wings that provide lift and thrust

One day, Pat Peebl , an ordinary bloke with a wife and child, had a hunch—a hunch that could change the way planes fly f v

propulsion as far as possible over the aircraft. We take that to the extreme, sucking the air through the front over a rather large area, the whole width of the fan. This compresses the air as it comes through the fan, and it gets blown out at very high speed across the wing's trailing edge."

When he had his initial hunch, he says, he had no idea whether it would work or not. He tried many different geometries before arriving at one that kept the frail model in the air. He did the early trials in the car park of his local supermarket in Rome at night, to the embarrassment of his son, "who had to watch this absolute nutcase of a father going into the car park with this ridiculous machine, trying to get it to fly. And, of course, at first it wouldn't."

Finally, trial and error produced a wing geometry that worked. "It didn't go very far the first time," Pat remembers. "It went up, flipped over and crashed. But at least it got off the ground. We'd proved it was possible."

The working model might well have remained merely a curious one-off toy, like several of his previous inven-

"We had to come up with f20,000 for the first patents, and we had no money"

tions. But that would be to reckon without his British wife Dikla. As Pat continued to tinker with the plane, it became increasingly clear to both of them that this time he'd come up with a hell of a hunch. It was not the first attempt to use fans like this for flight, but it was the first that worked.

The next step was to patent it—but that was a major bridge to cross. "We found ourselves facing an enormous bill," says Dilda. "Suddenly we had to come up with £20,000 for the first patents, and we had no money."

"I was ready to quit," says Pat, "because I realised there was no way that I could raise that much money, and I wasn't going to put the family into that much debt." But then Dikla, a writer and teacher with broad experience of project and event management, threw herself into the task. "We took the decision to collaborate," she says, "and call round family and friends and say, we're starting a company, do you want to put in 'X'? The money came in: we got £21,000 a day before the deadline." And in 1999 FanWing, a registered British company, was born.

Next year, a pilot will be able to fly the FanWing Ultralight to show investors how the technology works. The twin tails are a new adjustment that make the plane fly faster

Pat tests the first verticaltake-off model of the FanWing for "lift"

Pat's invention was now protected, but this wasonly the first step down a very long road. As complete outsiders, with neither qualifications nor track record—Pat had previously worked as everything from a bus driver to a training manager—they had every-thing to prove in a fiercely competitive industry. David Nicholas, an engineer and naval architect known as "the inventors' guru" until his premature death in 2005, emerged to advise them, helping them obtain a grant from the DTI, which allowed Pat to make major improvements.

But getting the industry to take them seriously remained a major challenge, no matter how well the prototypes performed. "We found ourselves in a catch-22 situation," Pat recalls. "We needed the tests and documentation to prove we were sufficiently credible to gain the financing to provide the tests and documentation." Fund-raising, he says, remained "hair-raising"—and industry grandees were ready with sneering put-downs. At Farnborough in 2008, one renowned aerospace academic, asked to comment, said, "I don't mean to be dismissive, but the principle is so simple anyone could have done it." It was an ignorant and meaningless thing to say. This damaged Pat's credibility.

Then, out of the blue, came vital help.

One of the firms to which they had pitched the plane was British Aerospace. George Seyfang, the company's principal concepts engineer at the time, says now, "I was very interested, but there was one big problem: it wouldn't fly very fast." The company turned them down.

Buta while later, Seyfang got back in touch: he'd retired in 2005, and FanWing was one of several projects he was now interested in spending his new-found leisure assisting, for free. He put Pat's latest version through the wind tunnel in his garage. "I suggested they change the tail

The expert view is that the FanWing will be flyable in 18 months

How the plane will look in flight. Inset: engineer George Seyfang provided vital advice that boosted the plane's stability

arrangement," he says, "using twin tails instead." It worked: the new version flew considerably faster and was more stable. "We're still looking at a relatively slow plane," Seyfang concedes. "The next thing to look at is the fan— it could do with a bit of optimising. We'll try that later in the year." By tinkering with the blades—their number, angle, camber and size—he believes they can get the FanWing to perform even better.

Seyfang is also the source of the newest and most exciting twist in the FanWing saga. Pat—who in person displays a wary diffidence that belies his visionary ideas—considered that even with the latest tweaks his baby was still a long way from perfection. Not so George Seyfang. "George has assessed almost any aircraft I've ever heard of," says Dikla, "and he thinks the FanWing is basically ready to go, and will certainly be flyable in 18 months!"

Another of Seyfang's retirement projects was working on the British Greenbird land yacht, which with his help attained a new world speed record of 126mph in March 2009. Now he has brought engineer Richard Jenkins and the British team that developed Greenbird into the FanWing project, with the aim—given funding of around £500,000—of producing a two-person ultra-light version of the plane, to debut at the Oshkosh experimental air show in Wisconsin in July 2013. That would be the next crucial step towards developing the first commercial FanWing: in Seyfang's view a cargo carrier that would offer "helicopter versatility at aircraft prices—almost!" ■

» To see a demonstration of a FanWing model in flight, go to fanwing.com

WHO'S DOING WHAT AROUND THE GLOBE: SMART TRAVEL

The French equivalent of London's Oyster system is the Navigo, a swipe card used on the Paris metro. But now travel convenience is being taken one step further. Inspired by smartphone apps that map your route and update you on delays, French transport authority STIF plans to fully integrate the Navigo card into compatible smartphones. Parisians won't have to worry about leaving their card on the kitchen table—they can simply swipe their phone against a special reader. A trial scheme starts early this year and runs for 24 months. Boris Johnson will no doubt be watching closely.

A taste of tht 19th centur? at the Glasd Riverside Transport Museum

1 your interests, there's almost bound to be a museum somewhere in Britain to meet your nee S. Maybe it's one of these? P'

BY LOLA BORG

, ••

FOR PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES

Glasgow Riverside Transport Museum

Replacing the treasured Kelvin Transport Museum, the Riverside has been dubbed "Glasgow's Guggenheim" because it's housed in a quirky Ober-modern glass and steel "shed" designed by Zaha Hadid (the architect behind the Olympic Aquatics Centre).

Built on the point where the River Kelvin meets the Clyde, at least three-quarters of a million pairs of Glaswegian feet have tramped through here since it opened last June. The museum houses steam engines, motorbikes, Glasgow trolley buses and just about anything else that boasts a set of wheels, wings or sails. One of the last tall ships in existence is moored outside, and you can take a ferry there from Govan. For those not in love with transport, there's a recreation of a 19thcentury Glasgow street, full of traditional shops, tramcars and an old subway station. Entrance is free

FOR CHILDREN OF ALL AGES

The

Natural History Museum, Hertfordshire

The Victorians were mad about collecting, and this is essentially the personal taxidermy collection of just one home-educated boy, begun when he was five years old. But as a member of the Rothschild family, Walter, the 2nd Baron, had both the necessary funds and the impressive connections to build an extraordinary array of some 4,000 firstclass samples—and (bypassin family banking firm) took 40

g a career in the years to do it.

It's all housed at the site of home in Tring, Hertfordshire, the Natural History Museum.

his one-time family now an outpost of There's just about

FOR ARTY TYPES

The Pencil Museum, Cumbria

A museum all about the history of the everyday pencil—and who knew its origins were right here in the Lake District? Aeons ago, shepherds found an uprooted tree that exposed the underlying graphite, isouren

Got stuffed: a private collection with just a hint of Norman Bates

every stuffed animal you could ever imagine, and quite a few you couldn't: a polar bear (sketched by Raymond Briggs for his animated book The Snowman); George, a mandrill from

which they then used to mark sheep. From then, a collection of cottage industries morphed into the Cumberland Pencil company—which produces Derwent Pencils—and the first pencil factory in 1832. There are free daily artists' demonstrations and workshops, so you can enter quite literally not knowing one end of a pencil from another and emerge with a drawing. Add to this a lovely Lake District location and a wonderful shop—especially for stationery lovers.

Entrance: adults £3.75; children £2.25

London Zoo; a four-ton elephant seal; some 80 breeds of domestic dog; and even dressed fleas (yes, you read that correctly). Gawp in wonder. Entrance is free

FOR ANORAKS

The Time Machine Museum of Science Fiction, Hertfordshire

Incongruously housed inside a 400-year-old building in the pretty village of Bromyard, this is the result of 30 years of obsessive collecting by anorak (his word) Andy Glazzard. There are artefacts from other sci-fi classics (Thunderbirds, Red Dwarf), but most of the museum centres on Doctor Who memorabilia. There are three Cybermen (above) from different eras and, scariest of all, several Daleks, including one called Norman. Press the button to see it light up and shriek "Exterminate!"—enough to spark a million nightmares. With snaky corridors and atmospheric lighting, small children might find it creepy...rather like the series. *Entrance: adults £8; children £3

Style guide: check out fashions past and present

FOR FASHIONISTAS

The Fashion Museum, Bath, Somerset

Clothes, clothes and more clothes. The dresses date from as far back as 1660, go through to a contemporary Vivienne Westwood number, and cover all points in between (for men and women) including a fine collection of 18th-century court dresses, which prompt the question: "How did they move in those?"

One of the most popular exhibits is the "Dress of the Year", which starts with a groovy 1963 Mary Quant ensemble and includes an Eighties Katherine Hamnett "Stop Killing Whales" T-shirt, a garish Versace number worn by Jennifer Lopez, and a starry patterned Chanel trouser suit that somehow survived Kate Moss's 34th birthday party. Also hugely popular is the replica crinoline and corset —visitors can attempt to lace themselves into the corset Scarlett O'Hara-style (and remind themselves ruefully that her waist was reputedly a mere 18-anda-half inches...)

Entrance £7.25 (includes access to Assembly Rooms); children free

FOR THE BIZARRE

The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford General Pitt Rivers fought in the Crimea, died in 1900, and donated his private collection of archaeological and ethnographical items to Oxford University. Since then, various scholars, travellers and colonial explorers have added to it, and the result is this higgledy-piggledy jumble of exotic knick-knacks from all over the world, crammed into dimly lit glass cases. Get lost for a fascinating couple of hours exploring the three floors here, which contain everything you could imagine— creepy religious statues from the Democratic Republic of Congo, mummified crocodiles and a totem pole from British Columbia (pictured), as well as bits and bobs brought back from the South Pacific by Captain Cook. Items are arranged thematically rather than by region, so you get, say, all amulets and charms together.

Sigmund Freud had a low opinion of obsessive collectors; in his view, it suggested "abnormality and personal failure" (among other things). Leaving that aside, this really will make you wonder at the diversity of the world. 0-

Entrance is free

A jarring sight: exhibits include the false nose of a woman who lost her real one to syphilis

FOR THOSE WITH A STRONG STOMACH

The Hunterian, London Creepy and eccentric, the Hunterian is located inside the Royal College of Surgeons, a quiet spot in a beautiful Georgian square where you can step into the weird world of medical specimens. Named after its founder, the 18th-century anatomical expert John Hunter, the museum has had a sleek refurb but still gives off an aura of an old science lab, with its rows of jars containing the preserved remains of animals and humans.

FORA TRIP BACK IN TIME

Birmingham Back to Backs

The last surviving block of tiny terraced houses in Birmingham city—the sort that sprang up all over the country during the 19th century and were pulled down during the "slum clearance" of the Sixties —have been lovingly restored to give a real insight into living conditions for

More than just a freak show (though kids of all ages will be transfixed by the gruesome specimens, such as the fourlegged chick or Churchill's false teeth), it's also a history of illness and treatment. The visitor can only guess at some of the tragic stories behind the exhibits, especially those in the "morbid anatomy" glass cases.

Entrance is free, Tuesday to Saturday, and there are also free guided tours every Wednesday at 1pm

FORA HANDS-ON EXPERIENCE

Big Pit National Coal Museum, Blaenafon, South Wales

A Victorian-built working mine until 1980, Blaenafon is now an award-winning museum about life on the coalface. The big lure here is the extraordinary trip 300 feet down to the pit—guided by ex-miners happy to give you all the information you could working-class Brummies (cramped and often grim).

These houses present a snapshot of different periods, from 1841 through to a perfect recreation of one of the very last buildings—a 1970s shop owned by Afro-Caribbean tailor George Saunders, complete with groovy Seventies suits and Roy Rogers wallpaper. There's

ask for. Visitors wear helmets, cap lamps and 12 pounds of batteries to descend into the blackness. Upstairs, the museum concentrates on a history of the Welsh mining community—the friendship, the hardships, and the decline that began during the Depression, which eventually led to strikes in the 1980s and pit closures. Take a hankie. And wear flat shoes. Entrance and pit tours are both free also a 1930s sweet shop in the block with rows of bottled goodies for sale. The visit is by guided tour; avoid bank holidays if possible, as the tiny houses get very crowded. • Located on 50-54 Inge Street and 55-63 Hurst Street. Entrance: £6 (or £6.60 with Gift Aid donation); children £3 or £3.30

With thanks to: Jon Williams Heritage Lottery Fund; Richard Moss, Culture 24; the National Trust; and the Museums Association. To find out more about activities at museums all over the UK, visit Culture 24, which also has details of Museums at Night events that run over the weekend of May 18-20.

Have you visited a museum that you'd love to share with us? Then let us know. Send an email—with a picture if possible —to theeditor@ readersdigest.co.uk

There's more in our Best of British series—including other quirky museums—at readersdigest. co.uk/magazine

NEXT MONTH: MODERN BUILDINGS

1 WORD ST

After last year's 100-word story competition, lots of entrants said they'd been inspired to write much longer pieces. So if you've never quite got round to putting pen to paper (or hand to mouse) to write that bestseller, here's another chance to get those creative ° juices flowing. Off you go, then!

Er Send your stories —which should be original, unpublished and exactly 100 words long—to theeditor(& readersdigest.co.uk by January 31,2012.

*- There are three categories—one for adults, and two schools' categories: one for children aged 12-18, and one for children under 12.

In the adult category, the entry voted best by our panel of judges will receive £1,000, and two runners-up will receive £100 in book tokens.

In each of the school categories, the prize for the winner is £500 of high-street vouchers of their choice, and £500 for their school. Mark each entry either "Adults", "Schools 12-18 category" or "Schools under-12 category". Winning entries will be published in a future issue.

or To get you started, read this 100-word story by Felix Francis, author and son of Dick, written exclusively for Reader's Digest.

Felix Francis

Are you a policeman?" she asked the blue-uniformed man while sipping champagne.

"Security guard," he replied, not taking his eyes off her generous cleavage. "But I'm late." Was she wearing a push-up bra?

He should've been at work hours ago, and he'd just spent more than he could afford on her drink. But he could feel a familiar stirring in his loins. Perhaps he'd get lucky tonight after all.

"What are you meant to be guarding?" she asked, caressing his neck and running her fingers through his hair.

"An 'orse," he said.

"What 'orse?" she laughed.

"Some 'orse called Shergar." ■

■ Gamble is a Dick Francis novel written by Felix Francis (Michael Joseph, £18.99)

The perfect adventure on your doorstep— a 118-mile lap of the M25; (above) the Dartford bridge, marking both the start and end point

A Life Less Ordinary WishYouWere Here

Want to break your day-to-day routine?

How about trudging around the M25 on foot—and in the snow?

BY RACHEL SMITH

On January 4, 2010, Alastair Humphreys and Ron Lilwall strapped on their rucksacks and set off on foot from an industrial estate below the Dartford Crossing in Kent. It was the coldest week of the worst winter in 23 years—yet, beyond the clothes and jackets they stood in, all they had for extra warmth were bivvy bags and a few jumpers. Still, for seven days they trudged along the side of the M25, from hard shoulder to empty wasteland, under flyovers and along slip roads, determined to circumnavigate the London orbital motorway. For fun.

Often, the two 34-year-old friends were forced to bed down on the frozen ground for a night under a bush—guarding their food supplies from thieving foxes and trying to block out the constant roar of traffic. The weight of their rucksacks was only relieved when they found a discarded shopping trolley and, later, a child's broken sledge in a park near Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, which allowed them to push, then pull, their loads through the snow.

Just a few miles away, shoppers bustled round the Oxford Street sales, while families whacked up their central heating and nestled down

4 in front of the TV—but still the pair ploughed on.

"It was a pretty tough week," admits Alastair, from Longfield, Kent. "We were just following our noses, and the amount of snow made the terrain quite tricky"

But the challenging, yet accessible, 118-mile expedition was just what he'd been looking for to kick off a series of "microadventures".

Since then, Alastair has embarked upon ten further small expeditions around Britain to prove that adventuring isn't the preserve of Sir Ranulph Fiennes or Bear Grylls, but something that everyone can incorporate into their lives. We don't all have the time or money to go on massive, "whoopee-doo" expeditions, he notes. But we can still get out of our comfort zones with trips that are close to home, cheap and short—trips that get you close to nature and give you a real sense of achievement.

Despite having now cycled around the world, sailed the Atlantic Ocean, and walked the length of south India's 475-mile Kaveri River, Alastair started out as an unlikely explorer.

"I was rubbish at sport; I never got into any of the school teams," he admits. But when he began mountain biking and camping, something clicked. "They're egalitarian. There's no elitism in those activities—everybody can do it."

Since then, he's made a living as an adventurer through writing, film-making and giving motivational talks about his travels. His microadventures are designed to encourage all of us to share in his passion, ditch the TV remote and invest in some walking boots.

To stay true to the quickand-easy ethos, instead of climbing the Himalayas, Alastair settled for the Isle of Skye's Cuillin mountains; rather than exploring the Galapagos Islands, he visited the Shetlands; and instead of braving the Amazon, he swam along a section of the Thames. Nothing too stressful, but enough to depart from the daily grind.

"I'm aware that if someone's normal life involves going to the office, coming home and watching The X Factor at the weekend, it's difficult to persuade them that going to sleep on top of a hill, say, isn't just extra exhaustion," he admits. "But I think maybe they should try it. It's invigorating."

After kicking off the microadventure experiment last January by entering the Strathpuffer 24-hour mountain-bike race near Inverness—and spending a weekend in February mountain biking at Cwmcarn, South Wales—Alastair did indeed sleep on top of a hill. One night in March, he climbed Fairfield in the Lake District in the dark, slept out in the open, and returned home early next morning—his point being that a commuter could do the same without even missing a day's work.

Often going without sleeping bags and any clear plan, the trips Alastair's gone on have been about participation rather than the final result. A July expedition, "Source to Sea", saw him walk in the Scottish Highlands, find a random river on

"Quite often, ° 'Afas thinkir What am I doing? I'm such an idiot!"

the map (he didn't even know its name) and paddle downstream in a canoe. Reaching the sea was inevitable—but Alastair got there two days later via the wrong river, emerging at the Cromarty Firth, miles from where he'd expected.

"I was quite pleased by that. It emphasised my point that it really doesn't matter where you go or which river you paddle—you just have to go and paddle a river."

But the expedition took place at the height of the midge season, and it rained a lot. "There were clouds of insects and I didn't have a tent, so I couldn't escape," Alastair recalls. He admits it was one of

several points during his microadventures —which ran until August—when he got a little despondent.

"Quite often,Iwas thinking, What am I doing? I'm such an idiot! I started making excuses in my mind about how I could give up with my honour intact. But then I plodded on and on, and in the end I was always glad that I didn't give up. A bit of misery is healthy. It makes the beer taste better at the end of the day."

Microadventures, asAlastair hasfound, can be a good antidote to urban cynicism, too. He's grown closer to the pals he took with him, such as fellow author and adventurer Ron, and made many unexpected friends along the way.

"When I'm on an expedition abroad, I'm accustomed to random people 1/-

Alastair and walking partner Ron toast their brandy Samaritans in Rickmansworth; (below) 6am brings hot tea and boxer shorts

ALASTAIR'S MICROADVENTURE PLANNER

The lowdown on the explorer's mini-missions (should you want to follow in his footsteps)

January 2L.

M25 circumnavigation, seven days.

July 2010

Walked 80 miles along the Fosse Way Roman road, south-west England.

January 2011

Strathpuffer 24-hour mountain-bike race, Strathpeffer, Highland.

February 2011

Mountain-biking weekend, Cwmcarn, South Wales.

March 2011

Slept on a hill overnight, Fairfield, Cumbria.

April 2011

Starting at his front door, walked in a 30-mile loop for 24 hours.

June 2011

Travelled from the south to the north of the Shetlands, by bike and inflatable boat.

July 2011

• Source to Sea: followed a Highland river from

inviting me to stay in their houses. It used to make me think how nice everyone else is in the world—then I'd come back to Britain, get on the Underground and be taken aback by how miserable everyone was."

But the M25 adventure, in particular, has begun to change his opinion of British frostiness. "After a few nights sleeping in the snow, Ron and I were getting really miserable," he recalls. "So when we reached Junction 8, near Redhill, Surrey, we went to a pub. We started chatting to the barman about what we

its source to the sea.

• River Thames swim: six miles over two days, near Oxford.

• Found a point on a map and walked to it, over mountain and stream. Torridon Hills, Highland, two days.

• Cycled across the Isle of Skye, paddled across the bay to Loch Coruisk and the Cuillin mountain ridge, then climbed it.

were doing, and this couple offered us a bed for the night and a chance to dry our clothes on their radiator. It's an amazing feeling of gratitude to be offered a bed when you're psyching yourself up to go back out in the snow."

A couple of days later, the locals at a pub in Rickmansworth, near Junction 17, plied the men with brandy and serenaded them with "These Boots are Made for Walkin' ". A city trader who'd been at the bar invited the pair to camp in his garden. "He obviously didn't feel comfortable letting us in his family home, but he did

come out at 6am in his boxers with mugs of hot tea to wish us well."

In July 2010, Alastair walked 80 miles along part of the Fosse Way, an old Roman road running from Exeter to Lincoln, taking in Devon woodland carpeted with flowers, numerous ciders at country pubs, and even cakes from a WI coffee morning in Ilchester, Somerset.

But his favourite microadventure, so far, is his six-mile swim in the Thames, just west of Oxford, that same month—a leisurely expedition over two days.

"I'm not great at swimming, and I had to keep getting out to film because it was so beautiful. I had an untrendy 80s wetsuit that I'd borrowed, and I was dragging my camping gear in a waterproof canoeing bag behind me.

"I just loved it—swimming all day and

then sleeping on the riverbank. I didn't want to go home. It's stunning down at eye level. You can't see any houses or even footpaths by the riverbank. You're at the same height as the reeds and the swans and the bushes. It felt like I could be anywhere in the world."

For now, Alastair has put the microadventures to one side and is planning a trip to the South Pole this October. So is this a sign of a wider-ranging wanderlust after several months confining himself to these small islands?

"Absolutely not," he says. "I'll be back doing the microadventures. Even though it's great being able to go abroad on huge expeditions, there's a danger of getting stuck in a rut with that, too." ■

» To see footage of Alastair's microadventures, visit alastairhumphreys.com

FANCY THAT! WHAT MAKES A HUMAN BEING?

Sigmund Freud may have been overstating things. Forget all that stuff about id, ego and super-ego —these days, psychoanalysts boil down human complexity into just five personality traits (a range between two extremes): Openness Linked to the intellect or imagination, or having wide interests. Think Stephen Fry. Agreeableness Attributes such as trust, altruism, affection and kindness. Joanna Lumley, maybe? Extroversion Marks engagement with the outside world—enthusiastic and assertive. See Alastair Humphreys, above! Neuroticism Easily slips into emotions such as anxiety, depression or anger. The comic persona of Jack Dee, for instance (or that bloke you saw on the train).

Conscientiousness Exhibits a tendency towards self-discipline, and planned rather than spontaneous behaviour. They can become perfectionists or workaholics. The staff of Reader's Digest might fall into this category.

n If you want to evaluate your own personality, go to test.personality-project.org

THE MAVERICK

"TURN OUT THE TRAFFIC LIGHTS"

They hold us up, can make streets more dangerous and cost tens of millions a year. So, argue Ellie Rose why not remove most of these pointless signals?

When the world's first set of traffic lights exploded In a policeman's face in January 1869, just a month after they'd been installed outside the Houses of Parliament, we should have taken it as an ill omen.

Everyone finds red signals irritating—but, worse, I'd argue that traffic lights cause delays, reduce driver attention and increase aggression as we rush to beat them. So isn't it time we got rid of most of them?

There are an estimated 25,000 sets in the UK. Each one costs about £150,000 to install, has a lifespan of 18 to 20 years, and takes £5,000 a year to run. That's a hefty £125m a year in maintenance alone.

But this is almost certainly the tip of the iceberg; traffic congestion may cost the economy up to £2Obn a year in lost time. Although it's difficult to put a precise figure on it, hold-ups caused by lights—from pedestrian crossings on red when no one's crossing, to busy main roads slowed to a crawl by numerous side-road sets— will be a significant contributing factor.

Nor do traffic lights seem very effective at stopping accidents. In London, for instance, there are an average of L71 injuries per year at each signal junction, compared with 0.87 at each of the capital's roundabouts. ►

Bringing cars to a halt: the Traffic Light Tree created by sculptor Pierre Vivant, near Canary Wharf, London

i Yet between 2000 and 2008, the number of traffic lights on our roads increased by 30 per cent. In a recession, when money's tight and energy prices high, is that really the best option?

I grew up in Guernsey, where roads are narrow and traffic dense (the island has one of the highest numbers of cars per head of population in the world). But traffic lights are rare; people just filter across junctions. Drivers approach with caution, and, even at relatively busy intersections, traffic moves.

Light-free living works in the Dutch town of Drachten (population 50,000), too. In 1999, planners tore up 12 of 15 traffic-light sets—if drivers weren't so used to relying on them, they reasoned, they'd be more careful. "All those signs are saying to cars is, 'We've organised behaviour so that, as long as you behave this way, nothing can happen to you,' " said Hans Monderman, the engineer who pioneered the scheme.

as we made our way across a crowded pedestrian crossing.

Monderman argued that this kind of dangerous behaviour is due, in part, to a system that gives drivers a sense of entitlement, and the Drachten scheme was about equality rather than priority. Interestingly, accident rates in the town dropped from 36 in the four years before the experiment to two in the two years after.

"Wetalk about painful cuts, but here's something where cuts would actually make an improvement"

Similar trials have taken place in Britain, too. Martin Cassini, founder of the Equality Streets traffic campaign, instigated a lights-off project in Portishead, Somerset, in 2009. This was made permanent after journey times on some routes reportedly fell by more than 50 per cent, with no measured reduction in pedestrian safety—despite increasing numbers of cars using the route (more than 2,000 vehicles per hour).

I've seen that mentality in action. As lights turn amber, cars race to get through before red appears, a cause of many accidents. A year ago, I witnessed a black cab in the West End of London accelerating from stationary when the light went green and driving, very deliberately, into my tiny female friend (albeit slowly—she got a skinned knee)

Cassini predicts we could save the economy billions by ripping out nearly every traffic light in Britain. "We talk about painful cuts," he says, "but here's something where cuts would actually make an improvement." Yet council officials, he says, have been wary of change, with some agreeing to trials then backing out at the last minute.

Transport for London (TfL) do claim to be stripping out unnecessary lights as part of Mayor Boris Johnson's

"Smoothing Traffic Flow" agenda. In 2010, they reported that they were reviewing 145 sites across the capital to see if signals could be safely removed. Since then, they've turned out lights at 20 of these locations. But when you consider that there are 6,000 sets of lights in London— and that TfL put in 20 new sets in the same period—it doesn't seem quite the pioneering measure it could be.

Are traffic ights stemming the flow of progress?

Join the debate at facebook.com/readers digestuk or oin,111 readersletters a readersdigest. co.uk

if you remove them all, there will be a cumulative effect, with the new junctions working together to keep traffic moving and encourage more care on the roads. Meanwhile, priority paths with textured surfaces would allow those with disabilities to walk safely— with zebra crossings where absolutely necessary.

TfL's chief operating officer for surface transport, Garrett Emmerson, says it will continue to take out lights where possible, but cites the need to look not just at individual junctions but at traffic flow through the entire network.

I agree that the danger of removing lights in one junction may be that you cause a build-up of traffic at the next— but not in the way he means.

Except on a few multi-lane crossroads, traffic lights rarely help traffic flow, whether at a single location or throughout a town. If you remove them in one spot, you may improve things a bit—but

The latest development in the traffic-light saga is playing out in the town of Poynton, between Stockport and Stoke-on-Trent. It's chopped in two by a fiendishly busy junction, through which more than 26,000 cars pass per day. It was difficult for pedestrians to cross as cars thundered through and queued alternately. So, championed by Cassini, four sets of traffic lights have been removed, to be replaced with two roundabouts and a filtering system.

The junction is unveiled next month, and traffic engineers and policymakers will be watching closely. I hope it'll be a step on the way to a more democratic system, valuing attention, traffic flow and safety over blind obedience. ■

CASTING A LONG, LINGERING LOOK -•

Our largest goldfish, Livingston, had swimbladder problems. We were advised to starve all our fish for 48 hours, and this was how they looked after 24 hours when we turned on the light in the morning. Were they trying to tell us something?

Submitted by John Fisher, Swindon

We've paid out over £24.4 million in prizes to 364,365 winners ...

Congratulations to John Black, from Swansea, our latest Grand Prize winner.

John was delighted to receive a cheque for £100,000.

"This win will make such a difference to my wife and me, and our family."

... that's the equivalent of £50,000 every month since the launch of the Reader's Digest Prize Draw in 1971. In every draw, someone is guaranteed to win. YOU could be next.

Find out more today at: www.readersdigest.co.uk/prize-draw

HOW TO... BY LINDA GRAY I■111.„.

1,001 THINGS EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW

Welcome to the pages that help make life simpler, easier and—we hope—more fun!

How to BEAT RESTAURANT WEIG

Twothirds of us would like to know how fattening our choices are when we eat out, which we do on average at least once a week. If we lived in the US, it would be easy— restaurants with more than 20 outlets now have to publish information on calories. Here, only 40 chains have signed the Government's Responsibility Deal, which commits them to doing the same.

"We'd like it to be a legal requirement

because it's difficult to guess the calorie count," says Sue Davies, food policy adviser at Which?

Similar dishes vary widely—Which? found that a Burger King Whopper has almost a third more calories than a Big

Mac, and a Pizza Hut Margherita has 400 more calories than one from Pizza Express. There are a few simple rules to beat scoffing in the absence of a calorie count. Watch out for red-flag words—Alfredo, carbonara, fried, crispy, creamy and cheesy all describe dishes laden with fat. If there's a choice of portion size, go for the regular (ie, small) or share a course with a friend, ignoring the manager's glares. Ask for grilled food rather than fried, and see if you can swap chips for salad with dressing on the side. Also, sidestep restaurants with all-you-can-eat buffets, fast-paced music, or red or yellow logos. All stimulate the appetite, so we carry on eating even when we're full up.

How to MIND YOUR BACK

Feeling a twinge? As only two in ten people escape back pain, try these tips from experts to stay pain free.

1.Stand up to answer the phone "We're designed to move little and often, but we're sitting for longer than ever," says physiotherapist Sammy Margo. Ditch the remote, walk round with the phone, and try "deskercises" you can do at work (see backcare.org.uk).

2. Quit smoking It accelerates bone loss and increases the risk of chronic back pain, according to a recent review of 80 studies.

3. Avoid sloppy shoes Some fake sheepskin boots are no more than slippers, so the foot slides around, leading to back problems, says Lorraine Jones of The Society of Chiropodists and Podiatrists.

4. Buy a decent pillow It should keep head and neck in line if you sleep on your back, and fill the gap when you lie on your side, says Margo.

5. Calm down A study in Spine magazine found that highly stressed people are three times more likely to develop back pain.

6. Get better for free If you've had back pain for three months, you should be entitled to therapy on the NHS. Options include spinal manipulation, acupuncture, or a new Pilates-based programme Back4Good (back4good.eu/programme), available nationwide. 0,

How to WATCH CATCHUP TV

Missed any episodes of The Killing?

Never mind—there are now even more ways to catch up with your favourite programme. The easiest is to access YouTube or BBC's iPlayer, which links to most channels' playback services. Programmes on iPlayer are available for around seven days, but you'll need a broadband speed of at least 2Mbps to stream them (or download to your hard drive instead). Better still, watch iPlayer on TV. You can access it using a games console, an internet TV box (around £80), or by linking your laptop to the TV—for a full list, see bbc.co.uk/help/iplayer. Or invest in a smart (internet) TV. Top-end sets cost around £1,200, but prices are tumbling.

As you'll know if you have satellite TV, both Sky+ and Virgin's TiVo record. They also pause and rewind live TV, so you'll never have to choose between a cliffhanger and a cuppa.

How to DODGE DRAUGHTS

If you think the breeze on the back of your neck is chilling, just wait until you see your heating bill. Twenty per cent of that oh-so-expensive warmth seeps out through windows, doors and floorboards, wasting £269 of the average £1,345 spend. And the higher the temperature indoors, the faster the heat escapes. But you can save £55 by stopping up the gaps—plus £60 because you'll be able to turn down the thermostat, says the Energy Saving Trust—simply by...

...fitting compression, brush or wiper seals made to BS 7386 along the opening edge of windows, loft hatches and doors. Front doors also need a letterbox draught excluder and keyhole cover (every little helps).

...sending a balloon up an unused chimney. At only £20, it's an effective

way to stop draughts, and you can remove it if you want to light a fire. ...blocking cracks in floorboards and skirtings with flexible filler. It can also be used around pipes, though big gaps are best filled with expanding foam. ...calling in the professionals. Yes, you'll pay £240 as opposed to £120 for the DIY option, but the installer will fit the best excluders and guarantee the work—for up to 20 years in the case of Draught Proofing Advisory Association members.

How to CIVILISED DIVORCE

It's not impossible—ask Billie Piper and Chris Evans, Neil Diamond and Marcia Murphy, or housemates Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson. This month, an increasing number of couples will be hoping to do the same since divorce petitions reach a peak after Christmas. But how do you disentangle yourself with grace?

Being clear about your rights and obligations is key. "The law's not interested in blame, so you won't be compensated if your partner walked out," warns solicitor Jane Keir of London law firm Kingsley Napley. "The only criterion for divorce is irretrievable breakdown of marriage, whatever brought that about."

Other misconceptions are that maintenance is restricted to children

(stay-at-home partners are often awarded it, too), that mothers are bound to gain custody (the law prefers shared care), and that copying a spouse's bank statements is a fine way to prove their perfidy ("If you bring them to me, they may be confiscated," says Keir).

Once you understand the rules, do all you can to avoid going to court, which raises the cost of a divorce way beyond the average of £2,000. The Government insists couples have at least one session of mediation before going to court, a route many couples opt for. A middle way is the collaborative divorce, where couples sit down with their respective solicitors to thrash out a deal.

Throughout the proceedings, keep talking to each other, however gritted your teeth, and treat your partner with respect. "You'll need to communicate, long after the lawyers have gone," Keir points out.

Or simply sit tight until February—when, mysteriously, divorce numbers drop.

How to GIVE A SPELLBINDING PRESENTATION

Oh no! You're in a coffee shop for a meeting when your contact whips out his laptop and says, "I'll just take you through my presentation." Is it the most effective way to get the message across?

"Not if people feel uncomfortable," says Nick Parker of communication consultancy thewriter.com. "You need to read the room first. If you're not sure, give people the option. If they agree, keep it funny, interesting and short—that's the opposite of what they'll expect."

All you need is a few key points backed up by an engaging delivery. Set yourself a limit of ten minutes, and use PowerPoint slides to reinforce (not make) your argument. Then pick one forceful point as the title of your talk and put it on screen for people to think about as they walk in.

There's no need to be nervous. If you're asked to present, people want to hear what you have to say—unless you read straight from PowerPoint. "It's not an autocue; it's your partner in a double act," says Parker. "You could close by saying, 'There's one thing I want you to think about,' and flash up the punchline." It's more than likely you'll leave with a deal.

WHAT YOUR SPA THERAPIST WON'T TELL YOU

• You don't really want to diet. Seventy per cent of my clients want pampering, so that's what I give them, along with champagne and even cake. Research shows that your main concern is to have the best treatment, whether or not it has results.

• Tuesdays and Wednesdays are my quietest times. Special offers often include Sunday night, so Mondays can be as busy as the weekend.

• Ssh...this spa is an add-on. We're really a fitness club plus treatment rooms, which is why the changing room is packed. For the full spa experience, go to a retreat where you can live in your robe. Day and hotel spas range from the plush to those with little more than a pool plus massage couch, so check goodspa guide.co.uk for the ratings.

Count the number of treatment rooms. Fewer than one to every ten guests means you'll be scrambling to book treatments, and they're bound to run late.

• A spa is not a surgery. The accent is on well-being, not healing, so ask questions if you're ill. Diabetes, cancer and high blood pressure will restrict your access to treatments, especially those involving massage or heat.

I sometimes scrimp on treatment times. El a minute is the going rate, so if treatments are cheaper, they're often shorter. If you're not asked to arrive ten minutes

early, I'll use some of the session for form filling and you lose time on the couch.

• Please keep your swim shorts on, sir. I have paper pants for ladies who want to cover their modesty, but paper boxers are a rarity.

• Forgotten your flip-flops? I'll gladly give you a robe, but slippers aren't always provided (though I can always sell you some).

• A medispa won't treat your headache. Most specialise in cosmetic surgery.

• Fire and ice are free. That's spaspeak for hot and cold facilities such as saunas, steam rooms and plunge pools, which are included in the price. So are most classes, though some spas are now charging. If you don't want to be stuck with a bill for Bikram yoga, read the small print.

• Spot the towels on the changingroom floor. Along with discarded cups and scruffy staff, they're a sign that hygiene is not what it should be.

• You may regret that Groupon deal. That £10 voucher is worthless if you can't book an appointment, which happens when spas commit to more sessions than they can provide. Even if you redeem it, you may find the treatment is a 20-minute taster. So not exactly relaxing, then.

• Look for certificates on the wall. Beauty therapists don't need qualifications to pummel and prod you, so check

me out. If the spa is a member of the International Spa Association, you can be sure I've had 500 hours of training. Otherwise, look for a minimum of NVQ level 2 or a CIDESCO diploma, the gold standard for facialists.

• "Special nights" can mean swinging. "Private rooms" is another clue that it's a sex club, not a spa. If it's sensuality you're after, why not have a rasul treatment for two? If getting naked in hot mud doesn't bring you closer, I don't know what will. ■

MEDICINE WITH MAX PEMBERTON

THE LAST STRAW

When you're feeling under pressure, you have to keep a sense of perspective

"You are joking, aren't you?" I laugh. Mrs Green looks at me, ashen faced. "No, I'm serious." The smile slides from my face as I stare at her in disbelief. Please someone tell me this is a joke. Mrs Green's in her 50s, works in a local nursing home, has two grown-up children and is married.

Last night, she attempted suicide. For £20 (yes, that's right, £20) someone had injected her with a lethal dose of heroin because she was too scared to do it herself. Thankfully, the heroin Mrs Green had bought had been cut with so many other things its potency had been diluted and it didn't kill her. She'd lain in a coma in an alley for a few hours before someone spotted her and called an ambulance.

The thing I couldn't quite get over is that somebody had actually agreed to commit what is effectively murder for £20. Is life really that cheap on the streets these days?

"No creditcard bill is worth dying for," I say firmly

Mrs Green tells me it was all because that morning she'd got her credit-card bill. "I'll never be able to pay it all off," she says. "I knew that, and then my husband saw it and blew up at me. I felt like such a failure." Her bills have been mounting over the past few years and now she owes more than eight times her salary. There are lots of people that can be blamed for the situation Mrs Green got into, not least Mrs Green herself. Credit cards work on the idea of instant gratification, and what could be more appealing to someone like Mrs Green? She's doesn't have much fun. Her husband has MS, they live in a small council flat and she has a poorly paid job. She's run up huge bills buying things she can't afford to try to make herself feel better. In our society, to be someone, you must consume. ...V.14.1

Happiness is available at a store near you—with a price tag attached. But Mrs Green isn't the only one to blame. From the firms that allow credit to spiral out of control, to the stars who advertise the cards, they all have their part to play.

"No credit-card bill," I say firmly, "is worth dying for."

"I know, I can't believe I was so silly," Mrs Green says. I arrange for her to see the Citizens Advice Bureau and the hospital's welfare-rights adviser. The next day I go to discharge her and by her bed are her husband and two children, telling her how much they love her and not to worry. There are some things that money, or indeed a credit card, really can't buy.

Max Pemberton is a hospital doctor, and the Mind Journalist of the Year 2010

KNOW YOUR 'ORGANS

It's not just strong men whose muscles are important to them. In fact, muscles control every single movement that occurs in our body. However, there are actually three distinct types of muscle and only one of these is under our conscious control. / The first type is called skeletal muscle NMI —this is what It makes someone "muscly". They make up the musculoskeletal system and are held to the bones by tough fibrous cords called tendons. They are under conscious control and are responsible for giving your body the power it needs to do things such as walking or smiling. There are over 600 of these muscles in the body.

GLIDING AROUND

Then there's smooth muscle. This usually exists in sheets or layers and operates without you even thinking about it. When you swallow, it's smooth

muscle that contracts in waves to push down food. Smooth muscle is found in the stomach and gut, and also in the bladder and blood vessels. It's even in your eyes to help you focus.

HEART TO HEART

The final muscle type is cardiac. This is highly specialised and exists in the heart. It forms a thick layer that causes the walls of the heart to contract and therefore pump blood. If cardiac muscle Is starved of oxygen—for example, in a heart attack lir when a clot I4r4 j forms in one of i, the arteries supplying the heart muscle—it can die, and the heart may stop if the damage is extensive. Nerves control the actions of the muscles. Most of the conditions that affect muscles, such as stroke, actually affect the brain and the nerves that tell them to work. Without nerve impulses, the muscle will fall into disuse and shrink. If a condition affects the nerves controlling the smooth muscle, the consequences can be severe. •

NEXT MONTH: the thymus

HEALTH WITH SUSANNAH HICKLING

THE NITTY GRITTY

Head lice? Not nice! But here's how to get rid of them

because they'll be soaked through.

f‘So if I find some little bugs, does that mean going to the chemist for a load of expensive and aggressive nit lotions?

QYou have to have dirty hair to get lice, right?

AWrong. Anyone who has hair—washed or not, child or adult—can get these little parasites.

Ql check my child's hair regularly; that's good enough, isn't it?

ASorry, no. It's very difficult to spot lice in dry hair as they charge around the head. And they don't always itch. The best thing is to wash hair as usual, then apply an ordinary conditioner and run a special bug-busting comb through your wet locks before you wash it off. That way the hair is tangle-free and the lice can't move

A Not at all. Just do the same thing all over again on days five, nine and 13 and that will catch the ones that have hatched before they have a chance to lay eggs and climb onto the next victim's head (lice don

and instructions) developed by the charity Community Hygiene Concern (CHC) was found to be four times more effective than overthe-counter insecticide treatment in an independent randomised controlled trial. The Department of Health now recommends it.

QWon't any comb work just as well?

AAfraid not. First off, you need a comb with a gap of less than 0.3mm between the teeth; and secondly, the Bug-Buster comb works so well because the teeth have a comb deeply bevelled Buster co edge, which is ideal for hoicking actually out the lice.

Catch all: the Bugjump!). In two weeks you should have got the lot. ^Really? Give me proof Ilathat this low-tech method works.

AThe Bug-Buster Kit (incorporating combs

CA

So where can I get one?

A

From some pharmacies or CHC's website (chc.org), where a reusable family kit costs £8.30, including p&p.

3 SUREFIRE HANGOVER CURES

1. Bacon butty. Newcastle University scientists have approved this classic hangover cure. It works thanks to the carbohydrate in the bread, and the protein in the bacon, which breaks down into amino acids that help clear your head.

GET FRAMED!

How to pick the glasses that will suit your face shape:

OVAL Almost any frame will look good on you, though round frames could make your face look heavy. Top tip: to look more youthful, choose frames with an "uptick" on the outer corner.

HEART-SHAPED

Aviator glasses are ideal for you. Rimless styles and frames with an uptick at the outer corner are also flattering.

—0)

2. A coffee and an aspirin. Researchers at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia found a major cause of hangover headaches to be the chemical acetate, which is dissipated by caffeine and some painkillers.

3. Honey. According to scientists from the Royal Society of Chemistry, the fructose, sodium and potassium in honey help convert hangover-causing acetaldehyde into less-toxic chemicals, speeding recovery.

SQUARE An oval frame with some uplift will help draw attention away from a strong jawline and give a softer look. Top tip:frames should be wider than the widest part of your face.

ROUND Create angles with rectangular or angular frames. Top tip:consider a metal frame—the adjustable nose pads will keep lenses from resting on fuller cheeks.

OBLONG A square frame can look great if your face is longer than it's wide. Top tip: to add width, try decorative contrasting temples or frames with strong horizontal lines.

THE DIET DOCTOR

Forget about slogging it out in the gym, says Dr David Ashton, of Healthier Weight. Little and often does work

This is the time of year when the overindulgence of Christmas makes itself felt around the waistline. The average person will gain 2-3lbs, although for some it will be much more than that.

Part of the New Year ritual is to go on a crash diet, even though most of us know it won't work—at least not in the long term. And another example of the triumph of hope over experience is joining the gym. Surveys suggest up to £200m is wasted in the UK each year on unused gym memberships—and if you live a busy life, a gym session is the first thing to fall off your schedule. It's a highly disposable behaviour.

Instead of making big

WHAT HAPPENS IF... YOU DON'T TREAT A VERRUCA?

gestures that have a high probability of failure, why not choose a more realistic goal for 2012? A brisk daily walk is one option. I tell all my patients the same thing: walk to the gym, don't bother joining, and walk home.

Lots of websites will tell you how many calories you burn when walking. Unfortunately, many overestimate the effect because they don't take into account the calorie burn that would have occurred had you just stayed on the sofa. This is important if we're to understand the true impact of walking on body weight. For example, if you weigh 200lbs and walk for 20 minutes at 3mph, your total calorie burn is 106. But if you'd stayed on the sofa, your calorie burn would still have been 46. So your net calorie burn is 60. That might not sound like much, but a daily 30-minute walk has also been shown to improve general fitness and muscle strength, lower blood pressure and reduce the risk of diabetes and obesity. You should still lose between 60-100 calories a day—and over a 12-month period this will equate to a fat loss of 6-10Ibs. So for 2012 make a good walk part of your daily routine, and save your gym fees!

Not very much. In fact, doctors now recommend leaving these little viruses well alone unless they're giving you grief. But here's the bad news: they don't vanish overnight. "In some people it can take as long as ten years," says consultant dermatologist Dr Bay Shergill. That said, most go within two. Occasionally, though, they spread and become a "mosaic wart", where lots of verrucas are packed together. "But they're usually painless and clear up on their own like single verrucas," says Dr Shergill. ■

SYDNEY IS 89

WE'RE HELPING HIM FIND HEALTHY

Healthy is emotional as well as physical. That's why, when someone lives in a Bupa Care Home, we work with them and their relatives to find out about them as individuals. We ask about their past, their interests and their dreams. This helps us understand them better, so we can offer the activities and care that are right for them.

To find out more or to receive a free guide to staying healthy in later life, visit bupa.co.uk/sydney or call 0800 00 10 10

Bupa. Helping You Find Healthy

BEAUTY WITH JAN MASTERS

ftt

IN WITH THE NEW

Start the year as you wish to go on with a well-planned regime

It's a funny old time, early January. There's a dismal feeling that the party's over. Yet as you clear the decks of decorations, there's a pressure to freshen up your act. So here are some mini motivations to help you beat the moody blues and get your well-being regime back on track...

• Spruce up your work space before the holiday. Returning to tired tinsel atop piles of clutter is a downer. A tidy desk puts you in the right mindset for a new start.

• Beware of "Christmas-lag", the result of shifting your holiday sleep patterns until

you're in sync with New York, so resuming your workday schedule feels alien to your body clock. Sure, enjoy lie-ins. But vary them. Towards the end of the holiday, arrange a couple of early walks or days out. This way, you won't find that first day back such a shock—and the alarm will have less of a negative association.

• Personal trainer Tom Oliver (tomoliver. co.uk) says: "Energy begets energy. You tend to be more productive in mentally demanding tasks when you've taken time out to be physically active. Even a 20minute brisk walk is time well spent—for your physical health, too."

• Stella Photi, founder of the spa and well-being holiday experts Wellbeing Escapes, says: "I think January is the worst time of year to detox. The body is tired and cold and needs to be warm and rested. However, reducing alcohol is a good idea. If you're hoping to lose weight, nourish, don't starve, yourself. Go for a simple, healthy diet with fresh fruit and vegetables, stews and soups."

• "Avoid focusing on the quick fix," advises Oliver. "It takes time to form a new habit, so resist short cuts and adopt a balanced approach

that will pay dividends over the longer term.

Remind yourself you're working towards a new you', not a 'January you'."

• It can help if you pair resolutions that reinforce one another—for example: meeting more new people and getting fit by signing up for dance classes; or walking, rather than driving, to the local farmers' market and eating more fresh fruit and vegetables.

• Treat yourself to a new skincare collection (or ask for one as a gift), but wait until January to make the switch. You're less likely to appreciate it during the excess of Christmas. But come the New Year, it will feel like a treat, encouraging a born-again complexionperking ritual.

NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS

To inspire you, here are the beauty, grooming and fitness resolutions from some of the top gurus in the business.

Nicky Kinnaird, president and creative director of Space NK.

To make time for two yoga classes a week. I currently work out most days—a mixture of running, tennis and weight training—but I rarely do enough stretching or meditative work. Yoga always gets put on the back burner in favour of more aggressive exercise. I also intend to keep regular deep-tissue massage appointments to soothe the kinks in my travel-weary limbs.

Lulu, singer and founder of the Time Bomb beauty line (lulusplace.co.uk and QVC). After Strictly, I'm more determined than ever to take Brucie's advice and "keep dancing". So I'll be taking lots of different classes in 2012. Another resolution is to have fun with beauty. Because I run my own brand, I sometimes forget I'm not splitting the atom! So a few girly, pampering evenings are on the cards.

Shaun P, inventor of the Tangle Teezer, the detangling hairbrush declined by Dragons' Den... a success that got away. My resolution is to buy a Boston Terrier—my favourite breed of dog—and go for long, daily walks. I owned two of them some years ago and I never felt fitter. For me, walking is the best exercise, and with the responsibility of a dog comes the motivation. As for grooming, I'm going to visit my hairdresser Willie Smarts more often. When I come out, people always tell me I look ten years younger!

Kay Montano, top make-up artist and creative director of myface cosmetics.

I already spend time looking after myself by taking exercise, practising yoga, drinking lots of water, and eating healthily (and not after 8pm!). So every year my resolution is to continue with all of this to help me stay healthy. While there's a lot you can do on the surface with make-up and a great blow-dry, a good base is important. •

CONSUMER WITH DONAL MAcINTYRE

RADICAL RETAIL

Shopping is dead. Long live omni-channelling!

On Darwin's evolutionary tree of shopping, you could say we started off with markets and fairs. Then—as consumers emerged from the primordial high street—we branched out into revolutionary mail-order retailing in 1872 thanks to Ward Montgomery in Chicago, whose first catalogue comprised a single page of "city goods", such as clothes and perfumes.

Another great leap in retailing came in 1994, when a pepperoni pizza with mushroom and extra cheese was purchased online from Pizza Hut—and in one single bite the online shopping revolution began.

But now it seems that the digital and the physical shopping experiences are so integrated that it's given rise to a new word. We consumers are no longer simply "shoppers" or "online surfers"— we're now all "omni-channellers". It's all because consumers and retailers now interact with each other through such a wide variety of contact points— from Twitter to high-street stores; from coupons on our mobile phones to online reward schemes—that the physical and electronic shopping experiences are increasingly morphing into one. This has generated the next great

evolutionary leap in our consuming lives, according to the Harvard Business Review.

I figure it's a bit like being an extra in the film Avatar—with the computer-generated and physical worlds interacting seamlessly. It sounds a little overwhelming, but I shouldn't be too worried (unless, of course, you start to turn blue).

Happy omni-channelling!

IF YOU DON'T ASK...

Donal answers your questions. Please email queries to excerpts @readers digest. co.uk

Can I complain VII on behalf of a family member if their funeral arrangements fail to meet their declared expectations?

A

A A funeral is just like any other service: it must be of a reasonable standard, quality and price. If it fails to meet any or all of the above, the executor of the deceased's estate can complain and seek redress (in the courts, if necessary).

Q What protection do I get if I buy goods on eBay?

A Consumer protection is still in place for purchases on eBay as much as in any high-street shop. The goods must be as

described—and this applies to secondhand goods as well, especially if bought from a trader. The smart thing is to buy with your credit card, because that gives you extra protection.

Can I get Via refund if a washing machine I've ordered is installed unduly late?

AIf you pay for installation as part of the full purchase price and its delivery and installation is late—or damage is caused during the installation —then compensation should be due. The key to the success of the complaint and redress is "reasonable expectation" of timely delivery and correct installation.

DO BOYS COST MORE?

Donal MacIntyre is an investigative journalist and a former presenter of ITV's London Tonight

After two girls, the Maclntyre family has a new addition and it's all to blue! Yes, here's a boy in the house. It got 1 me thinking: which are cheaper to rear, boys or girls?

A child costs an estimated £211,000 to raise from birth to 21, averaging just over £10,000 a year, but one study suggested that girls could cost up to 7% more-04,770 over 21 years.

When you take into account clothes, make-up, toiletries, dance classes and weddings, boys do seem inexpensive by comparison, even though they eat more and are more expensive to insure when they come of age.

But then, as my mother pointed out, consider breakages over a lifetime and girls are a bargain. What have I let myself in for? •

4 work out. "Suck your tummy in as far as you can, then release it halfway out and tie a piece of string around it. Spend as much of your waking time as possible holding your stomach at that point. Try starting with one hour and working up to all day."

To make the most of your spare time in a busy schedule. "If you have half an hour, go power walking; if you have 20 minutes, go for a run; if you have ten minutes, do circuit training," says Anthony.

Stuart Amory suggests the following five-minute routine, which works several muscle groups and is perfect for a bit of downtime in the office or at home. Repeat each movement as many times as you can.

Squats: pretend you're sitting on a chair, then stand up and sit down again.

Step up and down on a stair. Do stationary or walking lunges. Lift hand weights at the same time, if you like.

Do press-ups against a cupboard or counter.

50s

To lose middle-age spread. As well as eating less, do more abdominal

THINK SPECIFIC

Start with exercising the part of your body you want to change the most, says Mark Anthony. You'll have more energy to devote to it than you will to later exercises.

exercises. If you're obese, you should also do an hour of aerobic activity a day-30 minutes will do for everyone else.

"When you're in your 50s or overweight, a crosstrainer puts less strain on the joints than brisk walking," advises Sammy Margo. "Professionally fitted trainers also reduce impact. Warm up and down to avoid damage to muscles, joints, tendons and ligaments."

Stronger muscles also use oxygen and nutrients more efficiently so they help regulate blood-sugar levels, reducing your risk of Type 2 diabetes—a major problem among older, larger people.

For a more relaxing, pastoral—but still healthy— life."Try hiking or biking somewhere challenging like the Lake District or a coastal path," says Roberts. "Walking on this type of terrain gets you into aerobic overload—puffing, hot and sweaty—but with a nice view to take your mind off it!"

To prevent seizing up. Practise bending, reaching and lifting, says

MC WITH JASMINE BIRTLES

LEAN AND GREEN

Ten ways you can save money and help the environment

1.Swap and share. Life is both greener and cheaper if we share things with friends and neighbours rather than buying our own all the time. You could share power tools, lawnmowers and even cars. Or have a swap shop where you exchange clothes, books, toys—anything you don't want any more. There's also ecosharing.net where you can swap with your Facebook friends. You can share skills, too: if you're good at ironing, you could do a few hours for a friend, and in return they could babysit.

"The service is terrible, the place is filthy, and don't get me started on the standard of food!"

2. Recycle your drinks cans. Go to thinkcans.com to find the nearest recycling centre that'll pay you a small amount (around 40p) per kilo.

3. Make your own compost. Get a wormery (wormcity.co.uk does them) and use up kitchen waste by feeding it to the worms. They digest it and, hey presto, free compost!

4. Send an e-card. Save some trees, and money, with e-cards. Be careful, though— some e-card sites just want to spam you.

However, jacquielawson.com has some really lovely designs. For £7.25 (the price of about two shop-bought cards) you can send as many e-cards as you like for a whole year.

S. Recycle your printer cartridges. Make huge savings and avoid adding to the estimated 57 million cartridges that end up in UK landfills every year. At stores like Cartridge World, you can have your inkjet cartridges refilled for half the price of a new one. Alternatively, you can sell your used cartridges to a company such as cashforcartridges.co.uk.

6. Make your own cleaning products. Chocolate stains can be removed by mixing egg yolk with lukewarm water and rubbing it on the stain. To remove coffee stains from cups or counters, try a paste of baking soda—while cold soda water is ideal for wine stains. For mildew, pour strong soap and salt on the spots, or spray with vinegar and place in sunlight. Keep the spots moist and repeat as often as necessary.

7.Get thermal curtains. These make it virtually impossible for heat to escape. You can make them yourself simply by lining your curtains with an insulating material—such as foil insulation from a DIY store.

8. Use up those leftovers. In the UK, 6.7 million tons of household food waste is thrown out every year. If you've cooked too much, save the extra in the fridge and use it up the next day. Stews, stir-fries, curries and omelettes are all good ways to use up leftover vegetables and cooked meat. You can get great recipe ideas at lovefoodhatewaste.com.

9. Join a car-sharing scheme. Save money by sharing a car to work with another person. Liftshare.com lets you register your journey and see others who are travelling the same way. Then all you do is contact one of them, organise the lifts and share the costs. It's like a 50% discount—and you get to reduce your CO2 at the same time.

10. Use a Remoska electric oven. This uses 80% less energy than most standard ovens and is so compact you can scoop it up and take it on your travels. What's more, it cooks just about anything to perfection, even cakes and bread. You can get one from lakeland.co.uk for around £100.

GET CHRISTMA 2012

I know! You've barely got this Christmas sorted. But when it comes to saving money on the festive season, January is the best time to do it. Get well ahead of the game with these tips:

Get your Christmas shopping now for half price. It's a frustrating fact that after Christmas all those expensive gifts are massively reduced. However, you can still take advantage and net some bargains for next year. You might not feel like heading out to the high street so soon after the December frenzy, so why not shop online from the comfort of your own home?

(Christmas Day is the busiest day of the year for online shopping, as so many eStores start their sales then.) Also, it's not just gifts you can shop for—get stocked up on decorations, and keep an eye out for great deals on food, wines and spirits that can be put away for 12 months.

Set up a Christmas savings account. Rather than let cash sit in your current account, why not put it in a savings account and have it work for you? The money you put in—plus the interest— could be used for next Christmas. You should set up a standing order for whatever you can afford and remember to have the money transferred on payday, so it goes straight into your savings before you're tempted to spend it.

Savvy supermarket saving. Make all those trips to the supermarket help towards next Christmas by saving up loyalty points. Get your card swiped every §,

Roberts. "If you can, do Pilates workouts on a Reformer bed (which has straps and pulleys that allow you to do resistance exercises finely tuned to your ability) to develop core and lower-back strength, flexibility and body alignment for good posture."

60s+

To be a potentialStrictly star. If trying ballroom dancing appeals, you need toned hip-flexor and frontthigh muscles so you can swivel your hips.

From a kneeling position, move your foot forward so that your knee makes a 90-degree angle and is directly over your foot, says Margo. With your body upright, press your rear hip forwards. Repeat on the other side. Repeat five times, building to ten.

To work out while sitting down (and probably watching Strictly). Protect your knees and strengthen your thigh muscles by sitting upright on a chair so that the backs of your thighs are supported by the seat. Fully extend your legs, hold for five seconds, then slowly return to the start

position. Repeat 12-15 times, up to three times daily.

Try hiking somewhere tough— this will push your body into aerobic overload (that's a good thing)

To help you carry the shopping, and do the gardening or DIY. "If you've got wear and tear on your joints, you need an activity that strengthens and improves flexibility" says Margo. "Stretch classes or t'ai chi are great for learning rotational movements such as arm circles, shoulder circles, knee bends and ankle circles. Once you know how to do them correctly, practise throughout the day."

AT ANY AGE

Maximise your life span. "The bottom line is, even if you've not been physically active before, now's the time to start—because you'll die younger if you don't," says a tough-talking Matt Roberts. "Three or four 30-minute aerobic sessions a week are the equivalent health boost to stopping smoking up to ten cigarettes a day. That's significant!". ■

D To see Mark Anthony's threeminute 90-calorie workout, visit readersdigest.co.uk/magazine

MONEY

time you shop and watch the points rack up. Look out for chances to get double and triple points—and don't forget you can claim points on fuel, too. That soon adds up. Consider credit unions. Set up a Christmas savings account with a credit union. Their rates are pretty competitive and you can invest as little as £1 with each deposit. Credit unions are generally run by and for local people. They're managed on sound principles and work on your behalf rather than trying to get your money. As with banks and building societies, your money is protected under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. To find your nearest one, go to findyourcredit union.co.uk.

THIS MONTH'S GREAT DEAL

The MeCard is a credit card for teenagers. You decide how much money goes on it, and you can log in and check how the money is spent. Go to mecard.co.uk/ readersdigest to get £12.50 preloaded on the card and 20% off purchases at dotcomgiftshop.

HE ON ING !IR THI ONTH...

...is keep a "spending diary". Carry a notebook with you for a month and note every single thing you pay for. Then, arrange the entries by subject (food, coffee, etc) and add each subject up. The totals will clearly show you where you could be making savings.

SHOULD YOU SWITCH ENERGY PROVIDER?

If you're on a standard tariff for your gas and electricity—and 46% of households are—you could save as much as £389 a year by switching your provider.

Energy prices have been going up horrendously in recent years, but there's a lot of competition among the big providers. If you haven't switched for over a year, you can certainly save money by doing so now. It's also worth going for a capped rate, if possible, so that even if prices keep rising, you won't have to pay more than a certain amount each month.

Compare costs. Many people haven't switched because it seems complicated (unsurprisingly given the ridiculously complex nature of energy bills) and they don't believe they will save money. In fact, the majority of people who switch do save—and it doesn't have to be complicated. Even if you don't have all the details of your usage (those pesky kilowatt hours and the like) you can still find a better price just by putting your postcode into a comparison service.

Many such services, like Energyhelpline,

uSwitch and which.co.uk/ switch, even have a phone number you can call to get them to do the switching for you. (The Which? site also donates E10 to the RNLI for every customer who does switch.) You don't need to change meters or wires, as the new supplier uses the same ones.

When you go to a switching service, there are a few options you can choose from, once you've entered your details:

M You can view gas only, or electricity only, or the dual-fuel option. Sometimes it's cheaper to get gas and electricity from the same supplier as they offer discounts (but not always).

You can arrange results by service rating from poor to very good. It's as important to get a good supplier as it

is to get the cheapest tariff.

You also have a sevenworking-day cooling-off period to cancel the switch if you change your mind.

Once you switch, you'll receive a welcome pack within a week—and after four weeks the new supplier will let you know when the switch will take place. On that day you'll need to give them a meter reading and they'll contact your old supplier to arrange your last bill and close your old account.

Monitor your usage. Another way to cut fuel bills is to get an energy monitor. The OWL monitor, for example, sends information to your computer about how much energy you're using and on what—helping you to find where to save.

DID YOU

The number of drivers switching their car insurer has increased by 50% since December 2009, according to GoCompare. However, a third of Brits have never switched any of the 20 most common financial products—such as bank accounts, savings accounts and mobile phone tariffs. This means people are losing money just through inertia. The beginning of a new year is always a good time to review your bills, savings accounts and main bank account. So switch to betterperforming products and you could save yourself hundreds of pounds over the next 12 months. ■

Jasmine Birtles is a personal finance writer and the founder of moneymagpie.com

Ruth Jones

member..."

...GOING TO SLEEP TO THE SOUND OF THE SEA. Growing up in Porthcawl in South Wales was magical. In the summer, I'd go down to the beach and sit at the end of the promenade wall with my grandmother. I feel so lucky to have grown up there—it has a real sense of community.

...MY

PARENTS

WERE REALLY GOOD AT

MANAGING OUR HOUSEHOLD. They both worked—my mum as a GP, my dad as a legal executive at the steelworks—and there was me and my two older brothers Mark and Julian, and my younger sister Maria to look after. Both of our grandmothers lived round the corner, and they'd take turns to be there when we got home from school. We'd have marmalade sandwiches and tea.

...THE

DISTINCTIVE SMELL OF THE PRESSURE COOKER. My mum would get home from work and put on our meat and two veg, and the steam would fill the kitchen. When my dad took early

retirement, he'd cook for us. He was good at it, but a typical man—we'd always have to compliment him profusely.

...BEING

ALLOWED TO WALK TO THE NEWSAGENTS BY MYSELF. I was about six and had to go along two lanes to get there with my five pence of pocket money. I'd buy Shiver and Shake comic, which was, rather randomly, about the adventures of a ghost and an elephant. When I was a bit older, I bought Jackie magazine, but I felt like I'd done something really wrong when I read the problem page. We were a churchgoing family, and reading about heavy petting felt akin to looking at porn. I loved that newsagent!

...THINKING

IT

WAS

AMAZING I COULD LIFT MY DAD UP IN THE SEA. I literally thought I had performed a magic trick. That was during our family holidays, when we'd all go camping. Kids don't know they're born with the gear you can buy now, but in our day it was rather different! The tent would go up from scratch in all sorts of weathers, and it was tiny. There was only one Calor gas lamp and our evening entertainment was playing cards or reading. My mum cooked on two

FOOD WITH MARCO PIERRE WHITE

A RARE TREAT

If you're going to eat meat, you might as well go for the best

People say that as you get older you tend to eat less meat. Well, either they're telling lies, or I'm getting younger—because I can't get enough of it. I don't need much, but every little helps, as that annoying ad keeps telling us. The key is quality. Look for cuts with plenty of fat streaked through them. That will give you the flavour and the tenderness.

This simple recipe recommends fillet steak but use rump or rib-eye if you prefer. Just make sure the heat is high, then cook the meat for no more than three minutes on each side. The key with meat is letting it stand, for as much as ten minutes if necessary. During that time, all sorts of chemical reactions are going on. Don't ask me what they are, but those minutes will make all the difference.

I like vegetarians and I respect them. (I have some wonderful vegetarian recipes that I'm going to tell you about over the next few months.) But, to me, meat brings with it something sacred. You should eat an animal respectfully and with a certain ceremony. This goes back to my childhood when we couldn't afford meat every day. We tended only to eat it when we'd killed it ourselves, so that meant mainly game. We thought steak was posh. And you know what? We were right. Fillet steak is the poshest meat of them all and deserves to be treated as such. When I sprinkle the rocket over it, I like to think I'm paying my respects, making the whole dish as beautiful as possible. Cooking meat brings out my sensitive side.

Marco Pierre White, the "godfather" of modern British cooking, is a restaurateur and TV personality

E WITH VINTAGE BALSAMICO (SERVES 4)

2 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil

4 fillet steaks, about 180g each 3 or 4 handfuls of rocket

Pecorino cheese, thinly sliced Vintage balsamic vinegar

1. In a heavy-based frying pan or saute pan, heat the olive oil and fry the steaks for about 3 minutes on each side, turning them only once. For this dish, the steak is best cooked rare.

2. Remove the pan from the heat and allow the steaks to rest in the pan in a warm part of the kitchen for 5-10 minutes.

3. Serve the steaks on a platter with a scattering of rocket on top of and around the beef; then add a few slices of the pecorino. Finish with a splash of olive oil and a drizzle of the vintage balsamico. ■

MARCO'S MAGIC

Serve with creamy mashed potatoes rather than chips— you won't regret it.

little rings for the six of us. I loved waking up in the morning to the smell of the tent, grass and bacon cooking.

When I was about six, we went to France, and going on the ferry was such an adventure. Even today I love a ferry— it reminds me of such happy times.

...PLAYING CAMPING GAMES BACK HOME WITH MY SISTER MARIA. We invented a ridiculous one called Lamp Far that involved making a caravan out of a doll's pushchair, tied with a dressing-gown cord to a tricycle. I'd ride the tricycle and Maria—five years younger than me—sat 9

Top left: Having a cuddle with my nana, Christmas 1966. I was ill with the croup. Look happy enough though, don't I?

Top right: Rest Bay, Porthcawl, 1968. Julian, me and Mark sit in front of Dad's Wolseley. Note that even then I was fond of a pasty.

Bottom left:Ibiza, 1969. From left to right: Mark, Mum, me, Julian and Dad. My dad was pioneering the socks-and-sandals back then, and Mum made me a matching towelling dress so I could look like her! How cool is that?

Bottom right: At my first home on Picton Avenue, 1973. From left to right: Maria, Julian and me. See that watch on a chain around my neck? I bloomin' loved that. I think I tried hypnotising people with it.

DRINK WITH NIGEL BARDEN

NEAT VODKAS

Why

roast, boil or bake a potato when you can distil it instead?

VIVA

Despite the renaissance in gin, vodka is still the biggest-selling spirit on the planet, with lots of talk of smooth "triple distilled grain spirit". But for me, the finest is made from the humble spud.

Apart from a host of grains (barley, rye, maize, wheat), vodka can be distilled from pumpkin, apple, beetroot, onion, carrot, molasses and even chocolate. High starch content is the key. Potatoes produce a creamy, gently sweet brew—for a long time my favourite has been Luksusowa from Poland.

The humble potato has yo-yoed from being an expensive, novelty import for 17th-century Russian aristocrats to a widely planted crop regarded rather sniffily as a cheap substitute for grain. But now potatoes are more labourintensive to harvest than grain, with only a third of the yield.

Thankfully, we don't have to import potato vodka—after flogging his Tyrrells crisps empire, canny Herefordshire farmer William Chase decided that his starchy spuds would also produce great vodka, and he isn't wrong. Chase vodka is so smooth you can sip it chilled and straight.

With Brazil's population consuming a measly two litres of wine per person each year, and well-off members of the world's seventh-largest economy turning to top-notch European labels, there's an un-drunk bounty for the rest of us.

Rio Grande do Sul in the south, near the border with Uruguay, is home to which is made from red grapes synonymous with port: Touriga Nacional and Tinta Roriz. Weighing in at 14% abv, it could be a gutsy Spanish or Portuguese red. Decant it a couple of hours before your dinner party and play the "where's this from" game.

More familiar grapes are also emerging, so look out for Riesling, Pinot Grigio, Shiraz, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon. Prices kick off at £6-ish from Bibendum Wines and Go Brazil. ■

Nigel Barden is the food and drink presenter on Simon Mayo's show on BBC Radio 2, and chairman of the Great Taste Awards

Award-winning Scottish butcher and Royal Warrant holder Donald Russell brings you this amazing offer direct to your door...

WITH BOB FLOWERDEW

LESS IS MORE

Keeping it simple saves a whole lot of time

QMy neighbours put me to shame —their front gardens are riots of colour, with masses of plants in tubs, planters and hanging baskets. How can I compete, especially as I work and they're both retired?

AYou're quite right—all those plants in containers are easier for someone at home all day, as they require almost non-stop watering in hot weather. So you either need an automatic watering system or to grow "in the ground" where the plants are less stressed.

You might do better to take a different approach: rather than masses of colour, try simplicity and contrast. For example,

an all-gravel area with just one trough of similar hue, planted with select alpines or with sempervivums (left). Or perhaps a chipped-bark mulch and a few very choice specimen plants, perfectly spaced —maybe three Daphne odora or Somerset Gold Edge. (Either are gorgeous in bloom, gloriously scented, compact, and have attractive foliage.)

MOON-RAKER

ciMy neighbour says he always sows and plants by the moon. Does this work? And if so, how do I do it?

AThere's a long history to this, but little scientific evidence. And it's quite complicated—some plants apparently prefer waxing and others waning moon days, depending on the final results required. So leaf crops need different treatment from seed crops. In trials I conducted, there were certainly major differences between sowings made only three days apart. I think the moon

is indeed having an effect, but confusion arises if you try to follow interpretations from different practitioners.

I now take less notice of the exact "appropriate" moon phase and try to sow and plant in several batches, each a few days apart to ensure at least one hits the right window—whenever that may be!

FRESH AND TASTY

I don't have much spare time, - but I want to grow some of my own food. What can I start with that would be good for my health and save me money?

A Start off with a .small number of crops. For economy, grow those you already eat that cost the most. For health benefits, little would

•

'

I"! oil ingredients. But, for least get three I recommend you three dwarf apples: an early, such as Discovery; any midseason; and a late storer (Winston, Wagener or Tydeman's Late). Then grow carrots, cabbages and onions from sets.

Concentrating on these four widely useful crops, you can also have fresh coleslaw throughout most of the year—there's not much that's healthier or tastier.

Bob Flowerdew is an organic gardener and a regular on BBC Radio 4's Gardeners' Question Time. Send your gardening questions to Bob at excerpts@readersdigest.co.uk

Make sure you pears and shrubs, have all your but it's best to seeds, bulbs and leave evergreens, sets ordered, if not roses and tenderer bought already specimens until —otherwise you later. By the may have limited way, if you love choice (spring is homemade chips, not that far away). order some Picasso Likewise, prune potato sets—my soft fruit, apples, current favourite.

Protect terracotta planters that can't be moved indoors in frosty weather by enclosing them in boxes made from old cratewood, and packed with straw. •

» There's more advice in Care-Free Plants (Reader's Digest, £14.99), published next month. Send your tips and ideas—with photos—to excerpts@readersdigest.co.uk. We'll pay £70 if we use them on this page.

WITH MARTIN HUGHES-GAMES 113

DEER PRUDENCE

When the cold sets in, Roe deer wisely decide to ditch their solitary ways

I have the stuffed head of a male Roe deer (the "buck") in my hall —which is odd for a vegetarian! The poor thing was run over outside my house and I simply couldn't bear to bury it. Throughout the summer, Roe deer tend to be quite solitary. But now, in deep winter, they often group together—I once saw around 30 in one field.

It's estimated that there are now half a million Roe deer in the UK, and you can see them practically anywhere. But it hasn't always been so. The Roe became extinct in England at the end of the 18th century —all the deer we now see are the result of just a handful of reintroductions in the 19th century. Since then, this adaptable animal has spread across the country. In

summer their coat is a beautiful, almost "foxy", red. But in winter they turn dull grey with a noticeable white patch on their bottoms. The bucks shed their antlers in early autumn and grow new ones over the winter (these are quite small, with no more than three "tines" or points).

As I write, six of them are lying in the grass by my window, looking very content!

ETERNAL LOBSTERS

Wish you could live forever? Actually, it seems one familiar animal already can—the lobster.

Lobsters are wonderfully weird, with three stomachs (one with teeth) and blue blood due to having copper instead of iron in the oxygen-absorbing molecules. They're known to live for 50 years, even 100, but some scientists think they might be able to live indefinitely. While our own DNA starts to accumulate errors with age, lobsters seem to get stronger and more fertile thanks to an enzyme called telomerase, which is extremely good at repairing their DNA and keeping it in tip-top shape.

Go to readersdigest. co.uk/magazine to see the latest wildlife video from Adam Canning, a film-maker with "a passion for the natural world".

Have you seen a Short-horned Hootlet lately? That's the delightful Scottish name for the Short-eared owl. These large birds are sometimes surprisingly visible this time of year, both because we receive an influx of winter migrants from Scandinavia and because they often hunt in daylight.

I'd argue that they have the most dramatic face of any of our six British owls, their fierce, bright yellow eyes surrounded by a ring of "mascara" (actually small black feathers). This gives them a permanently cross expression. That said, they hunt not so much with their eyes as with their fantastically sensitive ears, flitting low over grassland like a huge moth, then plunging dramatically onto the faint rustle of an unsuspecting vole. It's hard to say exactly where hootlets may turn up—if they find a vole-rich piece of grassland, even on a rubbish dump, they'll stop and hunt. This is probably the best time of year to get a glimpse. Once seen, they're never forgotten.

By the way, the "short ears" are really tiny tufts of feathers used in owl-to-owl communication, and are usually all but invisible. ■

The mascaraeyed Shorteared owl PAUL HOBSON /NATU REPL. COM

Martin Hughes-Games is a host of BBC2's Springwatch and Autumnwatch

DIGITAL WITH MARTHA LANE FOX

APPY NEW YEAR

How technology can help with all those resolutions

Most people tend to wake up on New Year's Day with a sore head and an ambitious list of plans and good intentions to improve their health, wealth and happiness.

The web is now the fastest way to up your chances of achieving more in all three areas—but don't take my word for it. If you've never been online, there are hundreds of ways there to help you stick to your resolutions. So vow to yourself—right now please, ladies and gents—to get down to your local UK online centre or library and do a little taster course. Or ask a family member or friend to show you how.

Give an hour of your time to help an internet beginner. Go to go-on.co.uk for information. Or to find an internet taster session near you, call freephone 0800 77 1234.

If you already know your mouse from your monitor, pledge to show someone you know a few specific online ways that people have found to be healthier and happier...

Over-indulged in the festive fare?

Lots of dieters use the Meal Snap app to reveal more about what they're eating. Take a snap and, like magic, it divulges the good and the ghastly

facts and stats about your food's ingredients. You could also try DailyBurn, an app that lets you scan barcodes,

calculate and log your calories, find exercise regimes, and track your weightloss progress to boot.

For a full diet overhaul, bbc. co.uk/food offers healthy recipes, tips and cooking tricks. Or you could head to weightwatchers. co.uk for heaps of online plans and

exercise advice. Of its two million UK members, those who combine meetings with online tools lose, on average, 50% more weight than those who don't—and there's even an app to help keep you focused.

Health pros always say the best way to lose weight is through both a healthy diet and exercise. But if the thought of jogging makes you sweat, get your trainers on with the Couch to 5K app. As the name suggests, it aims to get you off the sofa and running 5K in a matter of weeks.

Prefer a ramble in the great outdoors? Use the Google Maps app and start walking— a pedometer app like Walkmeter will track your progress.

For a more Zen-like approach, the Pocket Yoga app intends to improve your body and mind. And while you're at it, chart your worries and find ways to relax with the Stress Check app.

If memories of one tipple too many over Christmas make you cringe, the NHS Drink Tracker app is worth a try. It can't erase the past, but it will make you more aware of your units from now on—and get you to think twice before reaching for that bottle.

Another great app for helping with common

vices is the NHS Quit Smoking app. Try it out and you might finally be able to give up giving up. Resolve is the key, so if perseverance is your Achilles heel, sharpen your determination and train your brain to think more positively with witty wisdoms from great thinkers, brought to you by the Quote 5000 app. Remember, for reliable healthcare advice on the move, you can't beat the NHS Direct app. For the best of the rest, head to the NHS Choices website. This is the online "front door" to the NHS—and seven million of

us take advantage of its advice and support every month. While you're there, try a few of its top tools, such as LifeCheck, which provides free advice tailored to your age, sex and lifestyle.

While a degree of savvy is always needed, there's so much fun to be had trying weird and wonderful tools that could help you pack more punch. Those whizz-kids in Silicon Valley haven't come up with an AlkaSeltzer app yet, but we're sure somebody somewhere's onto it.

Happy New Year everyone! ■ Martha Lane Fox is the UK's digital champion and founder of race online2012.org

MOTORING WITH CONOR McNICHOLAS

BACK TO SCHOOL

Is it time all motorists went on a Speed Awareness Course?

classroom, from the white-van driver to the wealthy middleaged lady in country togs, to an old war veteran who kept interrupting the day's presentation by shouting out baffling non sequiturs.

itMeasuring motorists' speed with a radar gun

A few weeks ago I attended a Speed Awareness Course run by Thames Valley Police. I'd love to say it was for research purposes, but it was actually because I was clocked doing 55mph in a 50mphzone while helping my wife catch a plane.

Many of us have experienced the dreaded speeding charge landing heavily on the doormat, and three points on your licence is no laughing matter when car-insurance premiums are so high. I opted to pay £90 and attend a fourhour course rather than take the points.

So one Friday morning a group of reluctant students arrived at the disused RAF Upper Heyford airfield where Thames Valley Police have some offices. We eyed each other up, looking slightly shifty. Every age and class was represented in the

I approached the course with an open mind—and actually found it very interesting. A retired policeman talked us through a series of slides and scenarios, passing on some fascinating facts and discussing roadscene photos where we were asked to list potential hazards. Example accidents became harrowing as we pored over the details. I learned a lot. (Did you know a single death on a British road—aside from the personal tragedy of the event—costs taxpayers a total of £1.5m?)

I'd recommend the course if you have the option—arguably all British drivers should attend at some point. Here's a final fact: Thames Valley Police have 297 speed-camera boxes but only 29 contain cameras, and not all of those are working all the time. So, while it's never worth the risk, you have to be pretty unlucky to get caught. More fool me.

ONE ONE u

(from £19,285) Spanish SEAT and German Audi are both part of the same VW company, and VW likes to -41414 share things around. SEAT's Exeo is actually last generation's Audi A4, so that means a lot of car now available for good money. This updated 2012 Exeo looks sharper, is more efficient and has more power. Definitely one to have on your list.

Chrysler Ypsilon (£10,695) I was harsh on the new Chrysler Delta in this column a few months back and I'm still not struck on Italian Lancias turning up as faux-American imports. But the little Ypsilon was always Lancia's best car, and this Chrysler version is a distinctive, highly specced small car that is a welcome addition to the UK small-car scene.

TO DREA

ABOUT

(It's a one-off) This Lambo ski-special gets a mention for just how bonkers it is. Designed exclusively for the Swedish professional freeskier Jon Olsson, it features a special ski rack and an Alpine snow-camouflage paint job. This is absolutely the way to arrive in Chamonix this season.

T

DARK SIDE

Fancy sharing a car with Homer Simpson or Darth Vader? The VoiceSkins company is licensing famous voices to load into your satnav so you can be instructed by someone a bit more interesting.

Download Darth Vader and you get phrases such as "Depart. Your destiny lies with me," or "Turn around when possible. I find your lack of faith disturbing," complete with lightsaber noises and the Star Wars "Imperial March" when you arrive. Start getting more from your satnav at voiceskins.com ■

TRAVEL WITH KATE PETTIFER MY GREAT ESCAPE

Jackie Hamblin bobs merrily along the Norfolk Broads

My husband Ken and I married in 2004. The following spring he introduced me to the Broads, his favourite holiday spot. I fell in love with it as well, and we spent five idyllic holidays there over the subsequent four years. On each occasion it was just the two of us, hiring a luxury cruiser from Richardson's boatyard in Stalham.

The first visit— and, for me, the best —was in the spring of 2005: we spent two blissful weeks on the Broads in April that year. The sun was out, and we travelled with the roof of the boat open, taking in the freshness of new life under those enormous skies.

We visited the fascinating Museum of the Broads in Stalham, where Ken showed me the antiquated kind of boat on which he'd first cruised the Broads many years before. We also visited a restored windmill at Thurne and the Broads Wildlife Centre at Ranworth. From Wroxham, we were able to catch a bus or train into Norwich for a visit

to the cathedral and some retail therapy.

We often ate at riverside pubs—favourites being The Maltsters at Ranworth and The Kings Head at Coltishall, where you can moor just a few yards away—although we sometimes cooked onboard our cruiser (there's a great deli in Ludham village).

One morning, while I was still washing to.

BOATING BONANZA

Richardson's Boating Holidays hassixberth cruisers for hire from £255 for seven days (0844 272 3814; richardsonsboating holidays.co.uk)

Tilting at windmills: sivview from the er Thurne; (inset) ackie and Ken from the Isle of Wight

PHOTOS COURTE SY OF THE H AM BLI NS

4 It's a few years in the future. The economic crisis is finally behind us, and you have just flown from Paris to Heathrow en route to a well-earned holiday in the Virgin Islands. But when you look more closely at your ticket you realise—gadzooks!—your next flight leaves not from Heathrow, but Gatwick. And in 90 minutes!

You might squeak it in a taxi, but it will be touch and go. So instead you do the obvious thing: book yourself a seat on the next FanWing shuttle, leaving in five minutes. Climbing on board with 50 others, it crosses your mind that this odd-looking craft—in appearance a cross between a flying truck and a combine harvester—has quietly become part of everyday life.

No one would call it elegant: in place of the sleek, slim, swept-back wings of the jet, this craft's wings are stubby, fat and perpendicular to the fuselage, and house a line of cylindrical rotors, not unlike the blades of a harvester. And the principle behind it is completely different from both the traditional propeller planes and the jet: this is brought home to you as FanWing trundles down the runway, then, after just a few yards, takes off, at a far steeper angle than a normal plane.

The FanWing is slower than conventional aircraft, but as well as taking off almost vertically, it can carry immense weight, is immune to stalling and very fuel-efficient. It flies as fast as a helicopter, but is very much quieter—and that's the most important reason why it's your only choice for the quick hop down to Gatwick. The shattering racket made by helicopters has always barred them from scheduled use in situations like this. The whispering engine of the FanWing, and its miserly fuel consumption, have brought air commuting, the stock-in-trade of science fiction for more than a century, within daily reach of the public.

The above, of course, is a fantasy, but the airplane it describes is not. The UK's Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) put tens of thousands of pounds into its

"Part of inventing is being bloodyminded an i wanting to do things differently

The FanWing works by sucking air in at the front of the rotors, compressing it as it hits the fan, and then blowing it out at high speed over the wing

up and Ken was sitting on deck fishing, he called out: "Come up here and just listen to nature." There was nothing but birdsong—a blackbird singing in a distant tree; a chaffinch, a mallard's call to his mate, ducks and coots, each with their own distinctive noises; the swish of the water in the reeds; and, in between the movements— silence. These are the sights and sounds I remember of Norfolk, and the tranquillity of the Broads will always stay with me.

Send us a photo of your favourite holiday, tell us briefly what made it so special, and if we include it on this page we'll pay you £70. See address on page 4.

TRAVEL WEBSITE

Nasa is fuelling excitable chat about how spectacular the Northern Lights will be this winter. Allow enough time to see them (a sighting may not arise for days). Sunvil Discovery (020 8758 4722; sunvi!.co.uk) can organise a week's two-centre trip to Stockholm and Lapland's Kiruna, inside the Arctic circle, from £1,480pp, including four nights at Camp Ripan, where you can try dog-sledding, snowmobiling and an excursion to the Aurora Sky Station.

From January 14, RHS Garden Wisley in Surrey has some special guests to brighten wintry days: beautiful butterflies will flutter in the Glasshouse (open daily, 10am-4pm)—expect an array of exotic species feeding on fruit and the nectarrich plants of the Exotic Zone. Or brush up your snapping skills at either of two photography mornings on January 24 and February 8 from £50 (to book, call 0845 612 1253; rhs.org.uk/wisley).

If your coffee can be fair trade, now your holiday can be as well, with the world's first fair-trade tour from Ananea, Kuoni's responsible tourism brochure. Its 13-night Fair Trade Garden Route Tour, from Port Elizabeth to Cape Town, is certified by Fair Trade in Tourism South Africa, which ensures that every element of the holiday has been audited against fairtrade tourism standards. From £2,995pp (01306 871 187; kuoni.co.uk/ananea).

villas4kids.co.uk How do you ensure that a self-catering property you rent is child-friendly? Cue Villas4Kids, a company that works with private villa owners in family-friendly resorts to equip the properties—eight in Cyprus and two in France—with everything from stair gates and DVDs to pool fences. Although there's no online booking, this simple website is well set out, so you can assess each villa easily, and simply book over the phone. ■

TReaheders Digest

JANUARY'S FICTION

REVIEWED BY N WILSON

EXTRACTS FROM OUR FAVOURITE NEW RELEASES EXHILARAi ION OF WAR AND THE CALAMITY OF ROMANTIC LOVE BOOKS THAT CHANGED MY LIFE: HARRIET WALTER

development, and aircraft companies from Wales to New Zealand by way of China have been pondering its possibilities and crunching the numbers for several years. It's under consideration not only as an air taxi, but also as a fire fighter, a crop duster, an unmanned surveillance craft and a freight lifter. Its ability to take off from the shortest runway makes it a natural for use in places like the African or Asian outback where conventional airports are scarce.

Yet the FanWing is not the brainchild of aeronautical engineers at Lockheed or British Aerospace. It was dreamed up, built, refined and patented by a man with no university education, whose earlier ideas produced a rotating fork for eating pasta, and a flame-powered amplifier (neither of which went into production).

Pat Peebles, 66, an American born in Washington DC and brought up in Rome, where his father worked for the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, is a compulsive inventor. "I was very hard to teach—I did badly at school," he confesses, "I was in a daydream the whole time." He's a proper inventor of the "Eureka!" school.

"Part of inventing," he says, "is trying to improve things, but it's also being bloody-minded and wanting to do things differently, something that has plagued me my whole life. A lot of ideas I've worked on in the past didn't work out very well. But the FanWing actually worked."

Flying and flight in all its aspects have absorbed Pat for years. "I have a passion for flying, and I've done a fair amount of gliding," he says. "This idea—the principle behind the FanWing—hit me a few years ago as a hunch. Although I'm not really a modeller, I built the first model to prove to myself—and, I hoped, to some other people— that this wing is a viable alternative to the traditional ways of getting off the ground."

Pat first introduced the Idea, and his model, in the pages of Model Airplane News in June 1998, three years after his first experiments. The mower-like rotors on the wing pull in air at the front and blast it out the back. "The genesis of the idea," Pat says, "was to distribute the ►

Following their dream: Pat Peebles, inventor of the Fan Wing, and wife Dikla have dedicated their lives to developing the plane

January fiction

All Is Song

by Samantha Harvey (Cape, £12.99)

This is a highly original novel to which I give a five-star recommendation. It's largely about brotherly love: the conversations between Leonard, an atheist divinity teacher, and William, the batty idealist/religious believer, are really Socratic dialogues—and fascinating with it. But the plot is terrific, too. Leonard has

spent the year looking after their ailing father in Scotland, and when he dies, the supposedly saintly William doesn't even attend the funeral. Meanwhile, William's long-suffering wife knows there's something rum about her husband...

On every page of this beautifully realised and entirely believable story, I felt I was in the presence of a truly wonderful writer.

Dark Eden

by Chris Beckett (Corvus, £17.99)

Eden is dark because it's in outer space, beyond the solar system. A colony of human beings is marooned there, after a space mission from earth got stranded— they reckon about 200 years ago—and, to preserve the species, began mating.

CLASSICS CORNER: CHARLES DICKENS

A N Wilson on the month's best novels

The world of these twilit, unhappy people is brilliantly brought to life by Chris Beckett, a dazzlingly inventive science-fiction writer. As well as being superbly well paced and well written, the book is packed with ideas: about how societies cohere, and the place of memory, religion and ritual in social organisms. Above all, it's haunted by a sense of yearning for where human beings belong: "Eden was all I knew, all my mother knew, all my grandmother

There won't be much escaping Dickens in 2012, the 200th anniversary of his birth. But if, amid the avalanche of adaptations and tributes, you actually want to read one of his books, where should you start? Here at RD we wouldn't argue with the man himself. The year before he died, Dickens explained that he was "a fond parent" to all his novels. , "But," he went on, "like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield."

knew, but sometimes I longed and longed for the bright light that shines on Earth...and for the creatures that lived there, with red blood and four limbs and a single heart like us."

The Buddha

In the Attic

by Julie Otsuka

(Fig Tree, £12.99)

The first sentence of this remarkable, if deeply bleak, book sets the shocking tone for what follows—not just in the material, but also in the spare way it's presented. "On the boat we were mostly virgins," writes Otsuka.

The passengers in question, some as young as 14, are mail-order brides, shipped to San Francisco from Japan in the early 20th century to marry Japanese men they've never met. Although examples of individual horror multiply, from marital rape to slave labour, this is a collective experience for the poor women—which is why the book uses the secondperson plural, "we". And after Pearl Harbor, life becomes even grislier.

I'm not even sure this is a novel, exactly. It reads more like richly imaginative journalism, written with concision, passion and an anger that's all the more explosive for being so controlled. You must read it!

The Art of Fielding

by Chad Harbach (Fourth Estate, £16.99)

Henry Skrimshander arrives at Westish College on the shores of Lake Michigan with a book called The Art of Fielding in his pocket. Against all the odds, he becomes a champion baseball player in a campus novel that bristles with allusions to Moby-Dick. In some ways, in fact, it's the Moby-Dick of baseball: a novel that seems obsessed by a single theme, but that's actually about far more—in this case, life, love and growing up.

But if you now think the book sounds too American for you, think again. Believe me, I'm no baseball fan, but I found this rich, mellow, wise—and thoroughly enjoyable.

QUICK QUIZ QUIZ Who's this, talking in a new paperback about the Labour government in 2001? (The initials should speak for themselves.) "TB said we had to understand that GB was far and away the most talented politician of his generation and probably would be a good prime minister. I said he was obsessive and lost focus because of it. TB said he believed his three key people, GB, Peter M and me, all had touches of genius and touches of madness about them. Of all of us, he said, he was the most normal."

Answer on page 144

RD RECOMMENDED READ: 1

Apocalypse then and now

A Vietnam veteran on how his experiences of fighting—and killing— continue to haunt him. But not in the ways you might expect...

You may think that by now we don't really need to read something called What It Is Like to Go to War. After all, don't we already know—bombarded as we are with war films, games and TV programmes? Yet you don't have to read much of Karl Marlantes' fierce and brilliant book before realising just how necessary it is. Marlantes writes unforgettably about soldiers not as they should be, or as we'd like to think of them being, but as they are.

And this is someone who certainly knows what he's talking about. A Yale graduate and former Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Marlantes served as a marine in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star, two Navy Commendation Medals for valour, two Purple Hearts and ten air medals. The book draws heavily on his Vietnam experiences—but also on the fact that he's thought carefully about them ever since.

As a result, Marlantes writes like a man on a mission. Soldiers, he argues passionately, must be given proper psychological support—especially before they're sent back home. On his own return, the unpopularity of the Vietnam War meant that he was jeered in the streets and spat at by pretty women on trains. Over the years, he's watched many of his old comrades fall apart, taking to drink, drugs and sometimes suicide.

For Marlantes, the solution is a paradoxical one. Only by separating the worlds of conflict and home can ex-soldiers hope to bring those two halves of their lives together. And to do that, they need the chance to be entirely honest about their feelings of what war was like, either by discussing them with each other, or by talking to people who won't offer glib and ignorant judgements. Even so, the best that veterans can hope for might be sadness and grief, to replace disabling guilt.

In this extract, many of Marlantes' key themes come together...

SIX OTHER GREAT BOOKS ABOUT THE VIETNAM WAR

The Quiet American by Graham Greene How it would all soon begin. Writing in the 1950s, when the Vietnamese were fighting the French, Greene foreshadows US involvement through a title character who proves how dangerous idealism can be.

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien Award-winning collection of short stories about one American platoon, based

t‘ I'm occasionally asked, 'What's it feel like to kill someone?'

111 Sometimes I'm not asked; I'm told. 'It must feel horrible to kill someone.' And infrequently, but enough to sting, I've been judged. 'How could you ever kill a fellow human?'

When people say, 'You must have felt horrible,' I have a hard time giving the simplistic answer they'd like. When I was fighting, and by 'fighting' I mean a situation where my life and the lives of those for whom I was responsible were at stake, I either felt nothing at all or I felt exhilaration akin to scoring a touchdown.

I used to hesitate to say this, worried it would only fuel the accusation that we Vietnam veterans were sick baby-killers. I'm also sure some of the people telling me they'd feel horrible could well feel that way if they ever had to do it. But they didn't have to. I did. And it makes me angry when people lay on me what I ought to have felt. More importantly, it obscures the truth.

There was one NVA [North Vietnamese Army] soldier whose desperate fearful eyes I still recall, standing out like black pools in an exploding landscape of mud. I can still see him rising from his hole to throw a grenade at me. The wild desperation of the animal cornered. He was a teenager, like my radio operator Cleveland.

As the grenade left his hand, I jerked the trigger instead of squeezing it. The bullet struck the lip of the hole spraying dirt right into the kid's face.

"It makes angry when people lay on me what I ought to have felt": Vietnam in 1967

What It Is Like to Go to War

by Karl Marlantes

is published by Corvus on January 1 at £16.99

My feeling? I felt embarrassed that I'd bucked my shot. I fired off two or three hasty follow-up shots as I was rolling and moving. I'll never know if they killed him, because Cleveland came tearing across and sprayed the soldier with half a magazine.

My feelings then? It felt pleasurable and satisfying. I was alive! Another obstacle was out of the way of achieving our mission. But it also felt just plain pleasurable to blast him. Take that you (choose a name that describes anything but a fellow human). In combat you are in a fierce state where there is a primitive and savage joy in doing in "your enemy".

My feeling, now? Ohh, the sadness. The sadness.

What is different between then and now is simply empathy. I can take the time, and have the motivation, to actually feel what I did to another human being who was in many ways just like my own son.

My problem was that for years I was unaware of the need to heal the split that occurred then. That kid's dark eyes would stare at me at the oddest times. I'd be talking at work and that face would suddenly overwhelm me. I only began to re-integrate that split-off part of my experience after I began to imagine the kid as a real kid, my kid perhaps. Then, out came this overwhelming sadness—and healing.

...AND THE

HCKLE35WTERANS

COVER STAR RICHARD QUICK QUIZ?

E GRANT'S favourite book? Lewis Carroll's That was Alastair Campbell— Alice In Wonderland from Diaries Volume Three: Power and Responsibility, covering the years 1999 to 2001, back when Tony Blair seemed to rate Gordon Brown quite highly. The book is published in paperback this month by Arrow at £9.99.

4 on O'Brien's own experiences.

Dispatches by Michael Herr

A crunching piece of journalism and, in 1977, one of the first books to reveal what US soldiers had being going through.

In Pharaoh's Army by Tobias Wolff

One of America's most respected writers on his time as an adviser to a South Vietnamese unit—a job that might have been easier if he'd ever known what to advise.

American Pastoral by Philip Roth Masterly novel about 1960s America—and how the Vietnam War tore it apart.

Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes

Thirty years in the writing, Marlantes' devastating first novel came out in 2010 to great critical acclaim— and became an international best-seller.

The myth of the soulmate

But, argues a new book, our belief in romantic love is not just misguided—it's a cultural calamity

The Wonderbox begins with the biggest question of them all: "How should we live?" It's not, as Roman Krznaric admits, a new question. But with the world changing so fast around us, it's perhaps never been more urgent—or more difficult to answer. In his own quest for a solution, Krznaric turns not to philosophy or religion, but to history. After all, people have been trying to live well for thousands of years. So which methods worked best, and which could work again today?

Taking one hefty theme per chapter—such as love, work or home—Krznaric serves up a fascinating series of accounts of how we got where we are now. (The original wonderbox was a Renaissance cabinet packed with interesting curiosities.) He then sifts the valuable from the worthless with an impressive indifference to current fashions.

Many myths are overthrown along the way. The idea that until recently people lived in extended families is apparently false. As for the meal where parents and children sat down together—this seems to be something that people have always lamented the passing of, rather than actually done.

Particularly eye-opening are those sections showing how things we now think of simply as part of human nature were, in fact, the result of specific historic developments, often deliberately engineered for commercial purposes. After reading The Wonderbox, for example, endlessly shopping for stuff you already have will seem distinctly strange. So will that unthinking tourists' compulsion to see every church and museum.

Here, though, Krznaric takes on the one myth we all appear to believe in:

or, The idea of passionate, romantic love that has emerged in the West over the past millennium is one of our most destructive cultural inheritances. This is because its main 2-

Roman Krznaric is a cultural historian who has taught at Cambridge and at City University, London. He is an adviser to Oxfam, the Red Cross and the United Nations.

aspiration—the discovery of a soulmate—is virtually impossible to achieve in practice. We can spend years searching for that elusive person who will satisfy all our emotional needs and sexual desires, who will provide us with friendship and self-confidence, comfort and laughter, stimulate our minds and share our dreams. We imagine somebody out there in the amorous ether who is our missing other half, and who will make us feel complete if only we can fuse our being with theirs in the sublime union of romantic love. One of Britain's most popular online dating sites is called, unsurprisingly, Soulmates, and in a survey of single Americans in their twenties, 94 per cent agreed that 'when you marry you want your spouse to be your soulmate'.

We take the possibility of romantic love for granted. But to understand why we have become so obsessed with it, and with the idea of a soulmate—a term that only emerged in the 19th century—we need to unveil how the concept of love has developed in the West over the past thousand years. The unfortunate truth is that the myth of romantic love has gradually captured the varieties of love that existed in the past, absorbing them into a monolithic vision.

We imagine somebody out there in the amorous ether who is our missing other half

True to his historical approach, Krznaric now examines at length how this happened. The Ancient Greeks identified many different types of love, each of which would be found with different people. Yet, starting with the medieval Persians, these types gradually came together until they were all focused on one person. It needn't have happened—and, as you can probably tell, Krznaric wishes it never had:

This cultural calamity has not only left millions harbouring fantasies that reality has failed to fulfil, but has also played a major role in causing the epidemic of divorce that has struck the Western world in the past half century, and the inexorable jpjo rise of unsatisfactory short-term relationships.

Let's just hope they've read their Ancient Greeks: another couple fall for the myth of romantic love

Books that Changed my Life

Hart :=2: Walter's distinguished acting career, both on stage and screen, spans over 30 years, and she was made a dame in the 2011 New Year Honours for services to drama. She plays DI Natalie Chandler in ITV1's Law and Order: UK. The new series airs from January 6.

The Female Eunuch

by Germaine Greer

Following the sort of socially acceptable life that was expected of me by my parents—and finding myself thinking it was all rather dull—I couldn't believe how exciting it was to find a book that turned everything upside down. Although I was never a natural rebel, it showed me that there were different ways of thinking about a woman's place in society. It gave me the licence to pursue my career—rather than a husband. In 1970, when this was published, women were looking for a shift in their lives. The old "rules" were cultural rather than natural, and we realised we had the ability to change things. This book empowered me, and many others, in a way that's hard to imagine now.

The Empty Space

by Peter Brook

When I was at drama school, this famous director's book defined the profession. The opening lines include, "A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this

Crime and Punishment

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

My love of words, both written and spoken, came late in life. As a rather deep teenager somewhat in turmoil myself, the plight of Raskolnikov intrigued me. I'd been a religious child, and so to find myself questioning how much one could get away with before God pointed His finger through the thunderclouds helped define my own moral compass. We're all interested in right and wrong and what we'd do in different circumstances —that's why there are so many crime dramas on TV today. Do we all have a conscience? What does it mean to be human?

is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged." Brook

2* showed acting can be profound, and not just about the pay cheque and basking in applause. It's one of the reasons I've stayed in drama so long; I'm always digging to find deeper reasons why I spend my life pretending to be someone else. •

GERMAINE GREER THE FEMALE EUNUCH

upright vacuums

Genuine 4-Carat Sapphire Eternal Diamond Pendant

... available to every reader who solves the puzzle — entry takes less than 3 minutes! rro promote Spencer and Mayfair 1 Jewellery to readers of this publication we are delighted to have sourced one of our most prized items to date: a genuine 4-Carat Sapphire Eternal Diamond Pendant. This special piece of jewellery contains two precious gemstones — genuine Sapphire and a genuine Diamond — set in a silver-tone diamond shaped Pendant with gold-tone chain.

These special pendants, dispatched in a luxurious black satin pouch, are guaranteed to be received by all callers who register correct answers to the puzzle shown here, by Midnight Thursday 12th of January. There is no more to it than that. And remember calls last less than 3 minutes!

It seemed fitting that we awarded our Genuine 4-Carat Sapphire Eternal Diamond Pendants to those with an ability to solve our Jewellery wordsearch. But strictly one entry per person please.

Should you solve the puzzle then call the number shown straight away. We will tell you whether you have the correct answers and are successful!

This genuine 4-Carat Sapphire Eternal Diamond Pendant may not be offered again in this publication, so call today to ensure you don't miss out on receiving yours. Good luck!

• Hurry: opportunity ends Midnight, Thursday 12th of January!

• We apologise to any readers who were unable to respond before the promotion deadline.

Should you manage to solve the puzzle, please do not communicate the answers to any third party. Thank you. "Calls last under 3 minutes and cost a maximum of £4.60. Calls cost £1.53 a minute from a BT landline. Calls from other networks may vary. Calls from a mobile or public payphone cost considerably more. This is a skill competition open to UK residents aged over 18. Correct entries will be acknowledged on the phone line. You may also receive other exciting offers from us and other selected reputable companies. If you do not wish to receive these offers please write to inform us at Dept 0, 6 Castleham Road, St. Leonards on Sea, TN38 9NR or call free phone 08081263083. For Customer service queries please call 01424797534. Image of Pendant shown is not to actual size. Pendant diameter: 30mm or very close thereto. Each pendant has been set with four 1-Carat Sapphires and one tiny diamond. Chain length 18 inches. At the end of the call you will be asked if you wish to be transferred to another phone line to receive matching earrings. If you do choose to do so the second call will last 2 minutes and 55 seconds at a cost of £1.53 per minute. Phone line closes Midnight Thursday 12th of January. We aim to deliver within 14 days but please allow 28. Churchcastle Ltd. T/A Spencer & Mayfair 2011. Registered in England no 4301808.

the Puzzleman a mere 20 minutes to answer 4

A new year, a new challenge! But if it takes e5-: ( these five questions, how will you fare?

3 What number should

1 Use the clues to replace the question mark? complete the similes. The initials of the words are given—for example, the answer to as P as a P would be as pretty as a picture. What are the similes?

As R as R—Going well

As P as D—Obvious

As P as the D S—Untainted

2 In the box provided, place a four-letter word that can be attached to the start of the given words to form six longer words. What's the word?

BOOK STICK LET MAN LAIN PIE

4 Which of the following numbers is the odd one out?

5 In each of the following, what number should replace the question mark?

So how raid scr,ro? A point for every correct answer. Here's the Puzzleman's verdict:

0-2 A case of the winter blues, we suspect.

3-4 The fog's beginning to clear at last.

5 Bravo! Let sunshine rule the day!

The first correct answer we pick on January 6 wins £50!* Email excerpts@readers digest.co.uk.

Rearrange the letters of VIOLENCE RUN FORTH to give a period in history

7 A8 MAKI ONV 100V-9 (8) 'S'E

El A man walks into a bar and says, "Two single whiskies, please."

"Sure. Do you want both now, or one at a time?" asks the barman.

"Oh, both now. One's for me and one's for my little friend," he says, pulling out a six-inch-tall man from his shirt pocket.

The barman is amazed. "Can he drink?"

"Sure." With that, the tiny man, using a tiny straw, sips his whisky.

"What else can he do?"

The man flips a penny along the bar and asks his friend to get it. The little man runs along the bar to retrieve the coin, picks it up and jogs back.

"Incredible!" replies the bartender. "Can he talk?"

"Of course. Hey, Jim, tell him about that time we were in the jungle and you called that witch doctor a stupid fake!"

Grahame Jones. London

1 "Why are you in the crash position, sir?"

"I'm not!"

Stephen Merchant on being a very tall man on a plane

I I saw a collision between a red lorry and a yellow lorry. The police asked me who was to blame. I said it was hard to say. Maggie Cobbett, North Yorkshire

11 I work on the 17th floor and the lifts are broken.

I'm pretty sure I'm the first person ever to use the phone in reception to call in sick. Seen on the Internet

I A POLICEMAN IN A SMALL TOWN STOPPED A speeding driver. "Officer," said the man, "I can explain!"

"Just be quiet," snapped the cop, "I'm going to let you cool your heels in jail until the chief gets back."

"But, officer, I just wanted to say..."

"And I said be quiet! You're going to jail."

A few hours later, the officer looked in on his prisoner and said, "Lucky for you, the chief's at his daughter's wedding—he'll be in a good mood when he gets back."

"Don't count on it," said the chap in the cell. "I'm the groom." Gloria Wilding, Prescot, Merseyside

1 Facebook should have a limit on the number of times people can change their relationship status. After five, it ought to default to "Unstable". Seen on the internet

1 I'm Jewish Anglican, which means I was personally chosen by God, but I don't like to make a fuss about it.

Comedian Chris Addison ►

My computer beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick-boxing

Comedian Emo Philips

LITTLE EPIPHANIES

# 9:

Young people: respect your elders! They made it through school without Google or Wikipedia

Seen on the internet

Comedian Alun Cochrane inhabits a daydreamy world of surreal realisations and whimsy. This is his monthly moment of revelation

My wife and son wanted to go skiing. So I had a choice—stick to my usual routine of telling jokes or go with them and learn this new skill. When offers like that come along, I fantasise about a post-apocalyptic world in which I'm practically useless, yet my basic juggling tricks and humorous anecdotes are traded for mead and three chicken heads.

But, I went skiing...and I didn't like it. I should've known— I've never really loved slipping. There was never a point before skiing where I slipped on ice or water and thought, I'm buzzing off this. I enjoy this feeling so much that I'm prepared to spend over an hour limping up a mountain in the least comfortable footwear mankind has ever invented, and then try to keep my knees together—against the laws of gravity—and risk hurting my already-riddled-with-football-and-martial-artsinjuries legs. That's how much I'm loving this slipping.

I'm not skiing again. My wife and son are already rebooked. Let's see how their jokes go when the Apocalypse comes.

OVERHEARD ON KULULA AIRLINES

Famous as the South African airline that refuses to take itself too seriously, here are a few of their top in-flight announcements.

"Weather at our destination is 50°F with some broken clouds, but we'll try to have them fixed before we arrive."

"As you exit the plane, make sure to gather all of your belongings. Anything left behind will be distributed evenly among the flight attendants. Please do not leave children or spouses."

"Kulula Airlines is pleased to announce that we have some of the best flight attendants in the industry. Sadly, none of them are on this flight."

GOOGLE SAID WHAT?

+ "Ladies and gentlemen, please remain in your seats until Captain Crash and the crew have brought the aircraft to a screeching halt against the gate. And, once the tyre smoke has cleared

and the warning bells are silenced, we'll open the door and you can pick your way through the wreckage to the terminal."

Helpful suggestions from the world's most powerful search engine. It's like it knows what we're thinking...not.

Google

Everything

Images

obama is obama is an idiot

obama is a muslim

obama is a cactus

obama is the antichrist

Videos obama is a republican what would happen

+ "Thanks for flying Kulula. We hope you enjoyed giving us the business as much as we enjoyed taking you for a ride."

"Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to smoke, the smoking section on this plane is outside on the wing. If you can light 'ern, you can smoke 'em."

"To operate your seat belt, insert the metal tab into the buckle. It works like every other seat belt —and, if you don't know how to operate one, you probably shouldn't be out in public unsupervised."

urethra

urethra function

urethra pain

urethral prolapse

urethra histology

urethra bums

l 1. ,,,nt extinct 0. O w

what would happen if the earth stopped spinning what would happen if yellowstone erupted what would happen if the sun wont out what would happen if there was no moon what would happen if the sun exploded what would happen if meiosis did not occur what would happen If i hired two private investigators to follow each other what would happen if a girl took viagra

urethral cancer

urethra infection

urethra Franklin

dinosaurs yk, ,:rinosaurs websites for kids dinosaurs we're back :dinosaurs webcomic dinosaurs were made up by the cis to discourage time travel

;inosaurs website

9 eBay is for people too proud to rummage through skips. Comedi&; Alan Carr

11 My aunty is a bit mental. Once, in a breakfast bar, she was asked, "How do you like your eggs?" to which she replied, "In a cake!"

Comedian lain Stirling

Q: What do you call a dead hippopotamus?

A. A hippoposthumous.

D r

Salford

I "Andrew, when are you going to take some of your crap away with you?"

"I'm not, Dad. It's crap. That's why I left it here." Comedian Andrew Lawrence on storing items at his parents' place

I I once dated a sixfoot-three girl. I'm only five foot five. It had to end, on account of how many "aaah"s we got when we walked around together. Comedian Tiernan Douieb

60-Second Stand-Up

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Stephen Carlin

FAVOURITE ONE-LINER?

"I bought some batteries the other day, but they weren't included"—Steven Wright

BEST JOKE YOU'VE EVER WRITTEN?

As a kid, I played Cops and Robbers. I was always a cop, but I'd make it as realistic as possible. So my friend Gavin would come round, knock on the door and say, "Are you coming out to play Cops and Robbers?" And I'd say, "Are you kidding? With this amount of paperwork to do?"

BEST HECKLE YOU'VE RECEIVED?

Stepheh has shows in Sussex and London this month. Visit thestephen carlin.com

Most heckles aren't that good. For example, at a gig I did in Edinburgh recently, this guy shouted, "You look like your mother!" He'd clearly realised a lot of people make jokes that insult other people's mums, but he didn't quite get it right. I thought, Well, obviously I do look like my mother, yeah! I then had to teach him how to heckle properly, with a live audience.

FAVOURITE TV SHOW?

The Thick of It, because it's so on the money, and makes the scandalous goings-on in a fictitious government department seem believable. In one episode, 011ie (Chris Addison) is talking about his efforts to obtain some secret info, and Jamie (Paul Higgins) says to him, "You're the s****est James Bond ever. You're David Niven."

FINALLY, WHO'S YOUR COMEDY INSPIRATION?

Eddie Izzard. I was a teen when he came onto the scene, and he was doing something completely new. He has a bit where he talks about the Queen having big glasses, and says she must start a lot of fires with them. That on its own seems ridiculous, but the joke builds up over ten minutes and it's fantastic. •

Beat the Cartoonist!

WIN £100 AND A SIGNED ILLUSTRATION

Think of a witty caption for this picture and you could beat the experts at their own game. The three best suggestions will be posted on our website in mid-January alongside an anonymous caption from our professional cartoonist. Visitors can choose their favourite—and if your entry gets the most votes, you'll receive £100 and a framed copy of the drawing. Submit to captions@readersdigest.co.uk or the address on page 4 by January 10. Enter and vote online at readersdigest.co.uk/caption. We'll announce the winner in our March issue. ■

IN NEXT MONTH'S ISSUE...

Boost that feel-good factor!

• make a date with your emotional calendar—for a year-round difference

• change your life with a new way of thinking

NOVEMBER'S WINNER

It's another reader triumph! Neil McGregor's caption, "When you said you wanted a stag do, isn't this what you had in mind?"pushed cartoonist Simon Meyrick Jones into a distant third with "Trust me, Mr Roberts, with fertility treatment the traditional ways are the best."When will the humiliation end?

SCOREBOARD READERS 23 CARTOONISTS 11

PLUS

• Britain's best modern buildings

• Five foods that will change the world

• Robbie Savage

• Tony Robinson

Support your immune system where it counts.

60% of your immune system is now thought to be based in your so shouldn't this be where you support your immune health

uniq ented formulation is specially developed to work in harmony I with your body's own natural defences - the 'good bacteria that live in your gut.

Scientific studies* have shown that some prebiotic Galacto-oligosaccharides, like those provided by , can help encourage and sustain a healthy level of your gut's 'good' immune-supporting bacteria, helping you to keep your immune system fit and healthy. Bimuno also

Try Bimuno IMMUNAID soft chewy pastilles and support your natural defences where it counts.

IMMUNE HEALTH

Now available from M and Elimuno.com

*Studies on file. Bimuno IMMUNAID is the result of nine years of intensive scientific research with the University of Reading. Bimuno is a food supplement. Food supplements are intended to supplement your diet and should not be regarded as a substitute for a varied diet and a healthy lifestyle. Bimune is a registered trademark which is the property of Clasado Inc for a Prebiotic Transgalactooligosaccharide.

AGE PERFECT

INTENSIVE RE-NOURISH NIGHT BALM

Intensely nourishes with moisture. For skin that looks smoother, plumper and radiant. L'OREAL