Any Jewelery

Who knew Michael Bay was an animal-lover? The director of multiple Meat Loaf videos, lingerie ads and Pearl Harbor offered a hefty reward for the capture of the now-infamous YouTube puppy-drowner. "There is a disturbing video going around the news outlets," Bay's people blogged on MichaelBay.com, "of a blonde young woman in a red sweatshirt casually tossing squealing puppies into the fast-moving river one by one. Michael Bay... is offering a $50,000 [£32,500] reward for information leading to [her] arrest and successful prosecution." Soon after it was posted, however, the blog vanished again. Maybe Bay was told the girl had already been identified by web users, and was being investigated by police in Bosnia, where she's thought to live. Maybe he realised he'd been a tad generous: the maximum punishment for such a crime in Bosnia is a €15,000 (£12,500) fine, so the girl could split his reward for a tidy profit. Or maybe he just decided she had the right stuff for Transformers 4 – a criminal record might damage her visa application.

* I wasn't the only diarist to wonder whether Boris Johnson had really got the hang of austerity when an invitation arrived to Wednesday's lavish Square Mile Masked Ball, at which the Mayor was guest of honour. I think it was the Mail that described the dinner, for which assorted super-rich City types forked out £5,000 per table, as "a display of Bacchanalian excess". But our concerns went unheeded, for in his speech Mr Johnson complained that he'd been accused by meddlesome journalists of "ignoring the recession" by attending. Upon reading this, he told his audience, he'd paused and "thought about it for a millisecond", before deciding to turn up and enjoy the high-class canapes and free-flowing Louis Roederer champagne anyway. Celebrating the event's success, Martin Deeson of Square Mile magazine declared defiantly, "Even when times are hard, bankers like to party hard". And he does indeed sound like a complete and utter banker.

* Culture minister Ed Vaizey demonstrates a disturbingly sure grasp of fashion-speak in his first column for GQ magazine, gushing that he's the UK fashion industry's "biggest fan" and that "British politicians should stop being embarrassed about fashion". No ghastly tucked-in tees or baseball caps in Vaizey's wardrobe, but rather, he claims, a 20-year-old Vivienne Westwood shirt and handmade Timothy Everest suit – both of which unexpectedly impressed the fashion department of this newspaper. In lamenting the fashion ignorance of his parliamentary colleagues, however, I fear Mr Vaizey has been remiss in one respect. "Caroline Flint, a Labour MP, did a fashion shoot... and had to spend weeks playing it down," he writes. "Ken Livingstone has been out and proud about owning an Ozwald Boateng suit. And that's about it." About it? Surely he hasn't forgotten that his own boss, David Cameron, was voted one of the 10 best-dressed men in the land for the past four years running – by GQ magazine?

* Might Sir Stuart Rose, due to step down as chairman of M&S next year, care to join the likes of Alan Sugar and Peter Jones on the small screen? Not in front of the camera, at least. "I would be hopeless," he told me at the launch of Daisy Goodwin's novel My Last Duchess. "I really don't think so." He does, however, seem to suggest that Sugar and the Dragons could learn a thing or two about business programming. "People are very interested in how business works, and there's a lack of understanding about how important it is," he says. "But there is also a danger that, in the last year or two, people have trivialised it." Some people will trivialise anything, Sir Stu.

* Still getting up everyone's noses three decades after their demise, the Sex Pistols have lent their name to a perfume by French perfumiers Etat Libre d'Orange. Sold for £32.50 (more than Britney's "Believe", or Jordan's "Stunning"), in a tartan-topped bottle, it purports to smell like "revolution in a bottle", though in fact it contains such conventional scents such as lemon and pepper. Sweat, spilt beer and urine might have been more appropriate.

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It is the one maternal feeling no mother wants to experience, the ultimate in parenting taboos: admitting (whisper it) that life might have been better before you had children. Now new research purports to show that starting a family doesn't make parents any happier than their childless counterparts.

A book out next month will cause controversy by suggesting that parents exaggerate how much better off emotionally they are with children around. Nick Powdthavee's The Happiness Equation paints a bleaker picture of parenthood than most parents would own up to recognising.

His findings will unsettle those parents convinced their children enrich their lives. But Dr Powdthavee's views may actually chime with more mothers and fathers than a quick glance around your local park would suggest, according to the magazine Psychologies.
Far from turning their lives into one long treat, say mothers in an article for the monthly, having children left emotional scars and endless worries that turned their lives upside down. Marsha, 50, described being "locked in a daily battle" with her son, who left home at the earliest opportunity, while another, Laura, 40, said she "missed the creative output" of her former life.

Descriptions of constant struggles with children suggest that parenting has more downsides than permanent fatigue and loss of social life. "No group of parents, whether married, single, step or empty-nesters, reported significantly greater emotional wellbeing than non-parents," found Robin Simon, professor of sociology at North Carolina's Wake Forest University. "Of the three major components of adult life – employment, friendship and parenthood – raising children is the only one that doesn't promote wellbeing."

Although most parents would claim that children enhance their lives, Dr Powdthavee, a behavioural economist at the University of York, believes this is only because "there is a discrepancy between what we think makes us happy and what happiness data shows actually makes us happy". He added: "When you measure how happy parents are on a happiness index, they report either an insignificant difference in happiness or lower levels of happiness compared with non-parents."

His findings mirror a wealth of sociological and psychological research conducted over the past four decades. "What's surprising is that everybody finds these findings surprising," he said. Yet mothers – and fathers – will often go to great lengths to hide the fact, even from themselves, that they find their children difficult. No parent we approached would say on the record that their offspring had made them unhappy.

Of the 1,400 or so mums and dads in Britain who blog about their lives as parents, few dwell solely on the negative. Chances are they want to avoid the fate of Ayelet Waldman, the American writer who last year admitted she loved her husband more than her children in Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes. Her confessions prompted scorn, cyber-abuse and harsh public censure, from which she has yet to recover . Some readers told her they were reporting her to the authorities, because she should have her children "taken away".

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It started with The Angel of the North, Antony Gormley's iconic steel sculpture which looms over the A1 and put Gateshead on the map for the right reason. But a decade – and several more landmark sculptures – later, there are murmurings in the art world that the vogue for sky-filling public artworks may have gone too far.

The latest large-scale sculptures soon to be unveiled are Anish Kapoor's four mirrored works in Kensington Gardens, in London. The immense pieces – the largest of which has a width of 35ft – will be placed among nature, by the bank of the lake and in the centre of the Round Pond near Kensington Palace, where the public will stumble across them, from September until March 2011.

Constructed from reflective stainless steel, the giant mirrored surfaces will be visible across large distances. They will be installed as part of a six-month exhibition, entitled Turning the World Upside Down, organised by the Serpentine Gallery and the Royal Parks.
Will Hunter, the deputy editor of The Architectural Review magazine, says such sculptures represent the growing distance between the sculptor and his or her workmanship in producing these works.

"The idea of the artist who understands craft, and the link between authorship and the hand, has been completely broken," he says.

"Artists are more like architects, leading a team of people. They are the ones who will build these large sculptures. These sculptures, once they get to a certain scale, can't be made by your own hand."

Hunter believes that the trend towards large sculptures is a product of Tony Blair's Britain, and that we might now see a reversal of the trend, given these recessionary times. "Maybe it's got something to do with the culture of the Blair years, they spent a lot of money on... things that were not all that relevant. Having just come back from the Architecture Biennale in Venice, there was an art flash architecture group that had researched [this area] and at the end of 12 months, they found that people wanted pedestrian crossings and cleaner streets, not big sculptures," he says.

In Gloucester, a 16m artwork set to be built at the site of an old chapel has caused friction between town planners and the city's Civic Trust, a heritage group, who told the local newspaper that the tower, which will stand alongside a newly created 30m "art wall", was too large for the site. Hugh Worsnip, the chair of the Civil Trust's planning-appraisal panel, says: "We believe that the monument is too big and impacts on the views of the cathedral. It is also built in a way that would be excellent for drunks to climb up and for seagulls to perch on. It is unrelated to the area and fails to interpret the site's history..."

Meanwhile, a vast galvanised-steel statue built in the Scottish town of Cumbernauld in the hope of reviving its fortunes, at a cost of £250,000 of public money, has reignited discussion on whether that money might have been better spent on housing.

But Hans Ulrich Obrist, the co-director of the Serpentine Gallery, says the trend to design large sculptures may not be such a new phenomenon: "In the past, I noticed just as many ideas for these larger sculptures were out there, but a lot more of these were unrealised projects that were not being built. Now, the artist has the possibility of their work being built," he says.

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France has come under increasing pressure to stop its mass expulsions of Roma when a United Nations human rights panel added its voice to the chorus of condemnation.

In recent weeks, French officials have dismantled more than 100 illegal camps and sent hundreds of Roma back to their homes in eastern Europe.

A report released yesterday by a UN anti-racism panel urged France to avoid its "collective repatriations" and expressed concern that members of the Roma community weren't receiving full voting, education and housing rights in France.

In its report, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) said it was "worried about the rise in violence of a racist nature against Roma" in France. It recommended that the country "avoid collective repatriations in particular and work toward lasting solutions to challenges with the Roma based on the complete respect of their human rights".

Francois Zimeray, France's ambassador for human rights, lashed out at the findings, saying "it's very easy to give lessons". "France doesn't pretend to give lessons to the world, even if we're often seen as the country of human rights ... We also don't pretend to listen to lessons from countries that don't make a tenth of the efforts that we've accomplished," he said, in an apparent reference to the members of the UN panel, which is made up of independent experts from countries such as Russia, China, Algeria, Pakistan and Romania.

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Almost one in five A-levels taken by pupils at private schools were awarded the top A* grade, compared with a national average of fewer than one in 10, figures released today suggest.

More than half of independent school entries for the exams got at least an A, and 6% of candidates gained three or more of the new A* grades, according to the Independent Schools Council (ISC).

The proportion of state school pupils who got an A or above was 27%.

The ISC, which represents 1,260 of the 2,600 independent schools in the UK, said 18% of entries from the sector were awarded an A*, compared with a national average of 8%. The figures do not include the results of about 86 schools that are ISC members, including the prime minister David Cameron's alma mater, Eton College, and St Paul's, which decided to boycott the tables again this year.

The headteacher of Wycombe Abbey girls' boarding school in Buckinghamshire, which topped the league table for A and AS level scores combined, said the exams no longer offered pupils the chance to show originality and creativity.

Cynthia Hall said that helping students prepare by giving them model answers online, marking schemes and details on the kinds of questions likely to be asked had taken the "mystique" out of what examiners were looking for.

She said that although A-levels were good qualifications and proved the work done by a student, there was so much information available on what was necessary to score marks that capable students with well-qualified teachers had little excuse for not getting good grades.

"There's nothing wrong with demonstrating that a student has studied and done a good job of work. The problem is that we need to have ways of demonstrating originality and creativity," said Hall. "I don't think that's something that's available."

More than half of Wycombe Abbey's exam entries got an A* grade, and pupils got 247 A* and A grades between them.

This year's A-level results have heightened concern that the most privileged students will continue to dominate university entry. As grades have kept rising in recent years, elite institutions have faced a struggle to differentiate between the increasing number of pupils getting three As at A level.

A number of universities, including four from the Russell Group – Cambridge, Imperial, UCL and Warwick – adopted the A* as part of some of their offers this year. LSE and Bristol plan to do so next year.

Pupils at 23 schools took the new Cambridge Pre-U qualifications, and those at 43 schools took the International Baccalaureate. These qualifications were taken either alone, or alongside A-levels.

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Stretch, whirlpool, surf. I repeat the mantra while preparing my first flat white, at a top-notch La Marzocco espresso machine that an hour ago was as alien to me as the cockpit of a Formula One racing car.

I am on the barista training course at Allpress Espresso, one of Auckland's premier roasters, to learn how to make the antipodean take on white coffee, the flat white. Perfected in New Zealand – which bickers with Australia over who actually invented it back in the 80s – the flat white is a single shot of espresso blended with steamed velvety milk; strong, creamy, not too frothy.

In the last couple of years, the flat white coffee has become the in drink in London's hipster neighbourhoods; spreading from Soho cafes such as Flat White, and Dose Espresso in Smithfield, which first catered to homesick Kiwis, to the new spate of cool coffee shops that have opened recently in East London – Tina We Salute You, Mouse & De Lotz, Wilton's, Taste of Bitter Love, and Prufrock where 2009 World Barista Champion Gwilym Davies works.

And the brew is gearing up to become as widely known in the UK as the country's last great export, Flight Of The Conchords, as at the beginning of the year, the nationwide chains joined in. Peter Andre launched Costa Coffee's maiden flat white in January, around the same time that Starbucks got in on the act. Next month, Allpress is due to open a roastery/cafe in Shoreditch,

I went back to the Auckland original, to see if the city really does make the best coffee in the world, and to learn how to make a flat white myself.

After stretching (gradually warming the milk) and the whirlpool (steaming the liquid to make a latte froth), I surf – swirling the metal jug to mix the bubbles back into the milk. Under the careful eye of my tutor, Monica, I have already made a half-decent espresso. Now I gently pour the velvety liquid over a spoon to blend it with the shot. As the cup fills, I move the spoon away so a nice slug of cream falls on top. Perfect. New Zealand's biggest city boasts one of the strongest claims to have devised the flat white as we know it, thanks to an explosion of espresso-drinking in the mid-80s. No one is quite sure where it all began, but the boho DKD was generally considered the first Auckland venue, though Sydneysiders reckon they beat the Kiwis to it. In one hangout, I speak to Jackson, who roasts beans in his own garage, and speaks fondly of those times. "I was a student and I remember drinking flat whites back then," he says. "We used to watch subtitled films at the Civic Theatre and have coffee and cake after."

DKD is long gone, but its legacy and that of other pioneers remains in a thriving cafe society. Aucklanders use coffee shops as social venues, as we might pubs, for business meetings, to catch up with mates or simply read the paper. And they take coffee seriously, with 140 roasters in New Zealand, many based in this city. Even if most Kiwis do not roast beans themselves, many buy them freshly ground to supply their own gleaming Italian machines.

Back in the 80s, cafe owners aped continental mores, a practice continued by Auckland's finest city centre institution, Reslau (39 Elliott Street). Its narrow space barely provides room for a handful of tiny tables and just one banquette. The coffee is perfect (I am an expert now) and the individual salmon quiches from the tea trolley exquisite – the owners' mum does the baking. Reslau offers a rare slice of chic in Auckland's drab central business district, an area that many locals avoid.

The city's industrial waterfront lacks charisma – there's a motorway running through it – and many of the suburbs are livelier, with quirky, original cafes. I found the best flat white at Espresso Workshop (2 Owens Road, espressoworkshop.co.nz), a perfect name for this bustling Epsom joint that acts as a caffeine laboratory. Despite coming only as a single shot, its version offers bags of punchy flavour without bitterness. Suddenly I realise I have halted a lifelong habit, adding sugar to my coffee.

Other cafes provide more leisurely vibes. Not far from the city centre in Freeman's Bay, down a side street of warehouses converted into architects' studios, lies Queenie's Lunchroom (24a Spring Street, queenieslunchroom.co.nz), last year's top dog from a shortlist of 50 in local magazine Metro's annual survey of Auckland cafes. Queenie's has only been open a year or so, and reflects a move away from minimalism to kitscher decor, with its painting-by-numbers mural of a Maori rural scene and a chandelier made from antlers. Its food was as good as the place looked: I went for huevos rancheros, a classic Mexican breakfast of eggs with tangy salsa. My partner went for scrambled eggs with fresh spinach on toast.

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They gave the world decent roads, indoor plumbing and some of the goriest spectator sports known to man, but now it appears that the Romans made a hitherto secret contribution to global civilisation by pioneering the wearing of socks with sandals.

It is a look which in recent years has become popularised – if that is the right word – by off-duty geography teachers and embarrassing dads, yet new archaeological evidence suggests that the Romans' famous Italian stylishness may have been ditched to help the colonists cope with the chilly British climate.

Excavations carried out as part of the upgrading of the A1 between Dishforth and Leeming in North Yorkshire have found that rust on the nail in a Roman shoe appeared to bear the impressions of fibres, enough to convince archaeologists that the invaders sported sock-like garments.

The discovery was made at what is believed to have been an ancient industrial estate, including a water-powered mill used to grind flour and grain, close to the site of a forgotten fort at Healam Bridge, which formed part of the Roman frontier 2,000 years ago.

It is believed that the area would have supplied the garrison with provisions before becoming a fully established settlement in its own right.

The Roman road of Dere Street follows much of the route of the modern A1. Cultural heritage team leader Blaise Vyner said the discovery of the fort was likely to tell us more about everyday Roman life in Britain.

"We know a lot about Roman forts, which have been extensively studied, but to excavate an industrial area with a mill is really exciting. We hope it can tell us more about how such military outposts catered for their needs, as self-sufficiency would have been important," he said.

The invaders first landed in Britain in 55BC and again the following year, led by Julius Caesar, the general who had been fighting the Gauls in France.

However, his attempts were thwarted, and it fell to the Emperor Claudius in 43AD to finally deliver on the Romans' long-held ambition of pacifying the problematic Iron Age tribes of Britannia. He ordered 40,000 troops to cross the Channel, bringing much of the country under central control for the first time. The Romans remained in Britain for the best part of the next four centuries.

During this period many of the Romans, who were often from the sunny parts of modern day France and Italy, struggled to cope with the harsh realities of the British climate, especially those billeted in the North.

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Edoardo Molinari believes his form and desire are more deserving of a wildcard than the four European heavyweights who have chosen to play in America this week rather than the Ryder Cup's final qualifying event here.

However, the Italian also believes that Colin Montgomerie will only name him as one of his three captain's picks on Sunday evening if he wins the Johnnie Walker Championship. "He would have to then," said Molinari yesterday.

Well, the pressure would certainly be enormous, not least because not so very long ago Montgomerie declared that he "expected" every wildcard contender to tee it up in tomorrow's first round here. Paul Casey, Padraig Harrington, Luke Donald and Justin Rose will instead be playing in the first event of the $70m FedEx play-off series.

Their decision has inevitably dominated the talk on the range. When asked to sum up the general feeling on the European Tour about the stay-away quartet Peter Hanson was commendably frank. "If you really want to make the team and you're close to qualifying then you should be playing here," said the Swede who made all but sure of his debut with Sunday's victory in the Czech Open. "I think the people we're talking about are Casey and Harrington."

That pair would very likely have only required a top-five placing to secure one of the nine automatic spots, while Donald would have needed the win. Rose, like Molinari, would have only been in Auchterarder to catch the eye of his captain, although the latter can get within a few points of the last qualifying berth. If Molinari does, then Montgomerie will surely find it impossible to overlook him.

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England's world cup 2018 bid team yesterday promised the best and most financially successful staging of the tournament ever if they are named as host country in exactly 100 days' time. The deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, received a Fifa delegation at 10 Downing Street, assuring them that the coalition government was "100 per cent" supportive of the bid and claiming that England already had the infrastructure and facilities in place to stage the competition for the first time since 1966.

Fifa's president, Sepp Blatter, had earlier implied that Russia were England's greatest rivals. As the delegation currently touring all bidding countries had warned the Russians last week that they needed to make a start on building their new stadia, the English bid team took the opportunity to emphasise how much was already in place.

Before the six-man Fifa team set off for Wembley on the London Underground, the bid's chief executive Andy Anson told them in Downing Street: "We will help Fifa to serve the needs of football across the world by staging the most spectacular and the most successful World Cup ever. Over the next four days, we'll show you a nation that is in terms of football one of the most passionate and diverse in the world. We will show that a Fifa World Cup in England is not just about what it can do for England, but about what [it] can do for the rest of the world."
The six visitors, who include Danny Jordaan, chief executive of the local organising committee for this year's World Cup in South Africa, do not have a vote on the final decision but the report they submit on each country is supposed to carry significant weight with the 24-man Fifa executive committee who vote in Zurich on 2 December.

Blatter, speaking in Singapore, said that England would be the easiest place to host the World Cup in 2018. "The easiest way to organise the World Cup is to go to England," he said. "Everything is there – fans, stadiums, infrastructure – it's easy."

Speaking about Russia, he said: "You cannot deny Russia if they bid for something. They are more than a country. They are a big continent, a big power."

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On the eve of the third Test, Andrew Strauss might have been acting as a prophet. As captain of England, it comes with the job.

"We all have to deliver all the time," he said. "It just seems that there's always one batsman under the microscope, that's the way it is and it's a good test of character to have to go through it." He must have known as he spoke where the lens was preparing to move.

Strauss scored 15 and four at The Oval in a match England eventually lost by four wickets on Saturday – although only after Pakistan, panicked by the sight of the finishing straight, stumbled to the line. Since Alastair Cook, the previous resident of the slide, made a defiantly brave hundred in the second innings, it is the captain who now finds himself the object of rigorous scrutiny.

He has been short of runs and fluency for most of the summer and it has now reached a point where Strauss must score heavily in the fourth Test, starting at Lord's on Thursday, or travel to play in the Ashes in late October with Australians lining up to take a pop at a lame duck captain.

It would not be true, but the home supporters would hardly turn down the opportunity to let the Poms know exactly what they thought of their leader. It is their best-loved national sport after cricket and a distraction the leader could do without. England have named an unchanged squad for Lord's – Tim Bresnan on top of the starting XI. There is not only no inclination for anything else, there is no time.

If Strauss is the member of England's batting order most obviously out of form – it is 22 innings since his last hundred and he averages 33 in 16 innings since the triumphant Ashes campaign of last summer – he does not have exclusive squatting rights under the microscope. The harsh truth is that England have been lacking cohesion as a batting unit for most of this year.

This is partly because they have too often lost early wickets, putting the middle order under immediate pressure. Strauss and Cook are a mere 54 runs away from breaking the most cherished of all England Test records, the 3,249 runs shared for the first wicket by Jack Hobbs and Herbert Sutcliffe between 1924 and 1930.

But since their scintillating 196-run stand against Australia at Lord's last July – when Strauss compiled that glorious 161 to seize the initiative from the first morning – they have opened together 22 times, only to be separated on 10 of those occasions before the total reached double figures. This happens against the new ball but it would be more acceptable if, on the other 12 occasions, they had accrued something substantial. They have not, as one century stand and only four others above 50 confirm.

It is true that the sporting pitches in England this summer have not helped openers and nor did the change in rules governing the use of the heavy roller benefit them in finding form in the County Championship. But the plain truth is that Strauss and Cook have lately not functioned as they should have. They are 2-1 on to overtake, though not surpass, Hobbs and Sutcliffe at Lord's. While it is a formidable effort, it took the holders of the record 38 innings to score their runs, whereas Strauss and Cook have already opened together 79 times.

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