Most big companies don’t like you very much, except for hotels, airlines and Microsoft, which don’t like you at all. I was in another hotel, in New York City, when I noticed that the room service menu said: “For your convenience, a charge of 17.5 per cent will be added to all orders.”Curiosity aroused, I called room service and asked in what way it would be convenient to me to have 17.5 per cent added to my room service charge.There was a long silence. “Because it guarantees that you will get your food before next Thursday.” That may not be the precise form of words the man used, but that was clearly the drift of his sentiment.There is a simple explanation for why this happens. One awaits the day when it sacks everyone and stops handling money altogether, at which point its service should be impeccable.)Still, like most things, good and bad, corporate hypocrisy exists in greater measure here than in most other places. Residents of Skipton, North Yorkshire, may recall the morning a couple of years back when an anonymous and unassuming American-born journalist, in a hurry to catch a train, was to be seen hurling himself bodily at the door of the High Street branch of a leading bank and shouting vivid sentiments through the letter slot with regard to a notice in the window that said: “In order to provide a better service, the bank will open 45 minutes later on Mondays for staff training.” (The same bank later made thousands of employees redundant and claimed without evident irony that it was “to provide a better service to our customers”.

If the sign had said something honest like: “What do you want ice for anyway? Your beverage is already chilled,” I would have no problem with the situation.Of course this is not a strictly American phenomenon. It used to be that there was an ice machine on every floor of every hotel in America. I think it was guaranteed in the Constitution, just above the right to bear arms and below the right to shop till we drop But there was nothing on the eighteenth floor of this hotel. Finally, I found an alcove where an ice machine clearly had once stood, and on the wall was a sign that said: “For your convenience, ice machines are now located on floors 2 and 27.” You see my point, of course.
My objection isn’t to the removal of ice machines per se, but to the pretence that it was done with my happiness in mind. For example, I was recently in a big hotel when I went to get ice, and I traipsed around miles of corridors (possibly, I see now, in a large continuous circle) without finding any. You can usually tell this is happening when the phrase “for your convenience” or “in order to provide a better service for our customers” appears somewhere in writing.

OUR TOPIC this week is a feature of modern life that really gets up my nasal passages, namely the way corporations do things to make life easy for themselves and then pretend it’s for your benefit. I do worry.`Embarrassing Illnesses’ will run every Tuesday at 8.30pm on Channel 4, until 21 December. When I go to bed at night it’s the last thought on my mind and my first in the morning, and I worry. I love you but I want to go and live with my dad.”I do understand that I’ve got to I’ve railed against how unfair it is Why my son? But I’m so proud of him He’s begun talking at schools. One school was quite rough and the kids were giving him a hard time. “I’m telling you boys, examine your balls,” he said and he whipped his shirt off and showed his scar.He’s not in remission, he’s still got a tumour, but he’s getting on with his life and doing the normal things.

He said to me, “I keep thinking about what I’d have done if I hadn’t had cancer. My life has changed and I have no control over anything any more, but I can control where I live. We left it for a couple of days then we went out for a drink. I became quite sensitive to his moods.Martin has lived with me since I was divorced But one night he said to me: “I need to tell you something I need to go and live with my dad.” I was very, very hurt.

The amounts of energy and motivation required to make it successful are huge.”Building hydro-electric power plants in Turkey was “too remote” to satisfy. She read about a woman who had set up a company to finance films “I decided I was going to work for her So I wrote to her. “I learnt early on that if work becomes such an integral part of your life, it’s got to be something that you love. There were only four Brits on the course; we were the cynical ones, and always came top. It paid to be questioning.”After five years as a banker, Lancashire remembered an old maxim: that work should be fun.

“You’ve got to be positive all the time; there’s no room for self-doubt. As Britons, we don’t find that easy – even if you’re good, you’re never as optimistic as an American. “We had exams every week for nine months, and if you failed two you were out – the pass rate was 75 per cent.” It also gave her a glimpse into the American mind. A year’s corporate finance training in New York was “very rigorous,” she recalls. My mother was a partner, and our nanny was company secretary. But my sister and I were the only ones who could work the video recorder.”Lancashire fast-tracked through university, leaving with an economics degree to work for Chase Manhattan Bank. “My father taught me the language BASIC because he was convinced that operating systems weren’t going to catch on.

He had his own management consultancy and did everything from the accounts to the IT systems. When Internet companies advertise on television, it starts becoming something that you trust a bit more.”
Lancashire, 29, was an early adopter of technology As a child, she loved playing Space Invaders. Christmas will be a testing time for Becky Lancashire. Will visitors to her giant music website, Clickmusic, and its online store in particular, be willing to pay over the Internet for 1999’s seasonal selection on CD? Will shoppers forego a visit to Santa’s Grotto to sit at a screen?

Lancashire believes that the key to successful e-commerce is to persuade customers that they’ve found a better deal via the Web – a combination of better information, choice, availability and prices “This Christmas will be the important one for e-commerce We’ll see whether people are convinced. I’m not just talking about QVC’s service, I’m talking about the way broadcasters can develop their own interactive response areas behind the programming, not just put something in the standalone interactive area.Remind me exactly what Open does, that others can’t? Perhaps it should lower its tenancy fees and try to lure more competitive retailers to rent space on its service. How else is it going to soon be in a position for a successful floatation on the stock exchange?amyv qpp.co.uk.

QVC’s shop window and transactional facilities will sit behind its TV programming in a way not dissimilar to Teletext. Of course, to put all its 12,000 products on to QVC Directory, as it calls the service, it will need to buy additional bandwidth from Sky and whichever other digital operator it manages to sign up with.The service, which works in a similar way to Sky Sports Extra, where data is stored in the set-top box and navigation is through the remote control, has great potential. QVC, long considered a bastion of kitch, naff goods and tanned smarmy presenters, raised a few eyebrows last week when it revealed its plans for interactive TV shopping.Most press reports claimed it was developing a service to rival Open but didn’t really grasp the concept of enhanced TV where the interactivity is built into the broadcast stream. I had to mention this because, for some unfathomable reason, since I heard this, I’ve not been able to get the vision of Tom Cruise screaming “show me the money” out of my head.QVC’s tech savvyHome shopping channel QVC may not instantly convey images of technical savvy, but look beneath the surface and you may be pleasantly surprised by the scope and breadth of its interactive plans. While this may be exclusive, it also means that the core business and skills incubator won’t be diluted by fly-by-night ideas.The company likens itself to a “digital [Hollywood] studio” where it takes scripts, if you follow the analogy, vets them and, if they’re deemed good enough, a movie (website) is made.

After I heard the jury’s decision I’d lost all faith in humanity, but when I heard he’d lost the computer porn case I thought `Well, people will believe me now’.”Mrs Brown also explained why she had chosen to make her allegations to a newspaper rather than going to the police. I’m not the person that Gary knew,” said Mrs Brown, who has two children aged under five “Once you are a victim you stay a victim until you change I’m not a victim any more. Hours later, Glitter admitted 54 charges of making indecent photographs of children, under the age of 16 and was jailed for four months.
Complainants in sex assault cases are legally entitled to anonymity but yesterday, Mrs Brown, flanked by her publicist, Max Clifford, went on Talk Radio to explain herself “I just want to get on with being a mother. Details of payments made to Allison Brown by the News of the World emerged last week during the trial at Bristol Crown Court where Glitter, real name Paul Francis Gadd, was cleared of eight charges of sexual assault against Mrs Brown, which were alleged to have taken place when she was 14. THE WOMAN who re-ignited the row over chequebook journalism by giving evidence in a sex abuse case against the pop singer Gary Glitter in return for pounds 25,000 waived her right to anonymity yesterday to explain why she sold her story. Instead of the twin towers being replaced by four giant masts, they will now be replaced by a steel arch, 140 metres high.. If the council stalls on planning permission and it has not been granted by next July, when Fifa, football’s world governing body, decides on the venue of the 2006 World Cup, England’s bid to stage the tournament might be jeopardised.It was also revealed yesterday that the stadium has changed in shape – just four months after the design was originally unveiled.

Brent Council said in April that it specifically wanted a warm-up track to be part of the new complex, but no such track appears in the plans. UK Athletics and the British Olympic Association, the governing bodies that oversee such events, would not be able to afford the cost, and would have to rely on funding from a future government – something that cannot be guaranteed.The cost and difficulty of converting the new venue for athletics was not the only contentious issue to arise yesterday as the stadium’s architects formally unveiled their latest designs. We have to put our faith in the hands of the independent reports that the new proposals meet our requirements for an Olympic bid.”I’m absolutely determined this will not compromise any future bid for the Olympics in any way. Even the Sports minister is starting to ask whether this new stadium really is a national stadium or whether it’s just a football stadium.”Yesterday’s developments will diminish the chances of an athletics World Championships (perhaps in 2005) or an Olympic Games (in 2012 or beyond) being staged at the new Wembley unless the organisers of such events find the finance for the transformation costs.Even though WNSL has an agreement that allows the stadium to be used for those two events, should they come to England, the cost may prove prohibitive. Questions are also being asked about who would compensate WNSL for up to six months’ lost revenue if the stadium needs to be converted for athletics use.Ms Hoey has asked Sport England (formerly the Sports Council) to commission independent technical reports of WNSL’s proposals for increasing the capacity for an Olympic Games, but the reports are not expected until Friday.Simon Clegg, chief executive of the British Olympic Association, said yesterday: “I’ve heard about [the new proposals] second hand, because we weren’t invited to today’s [Wembley] press conference.

This – according to the stadium’s architect, Lord Foster of Thames Bank – would be reduced to 68,000 for athletics meetings, because a temporary track, on a concrete base laid six metres above ground level, would have to be built.It was pointed out almost immediately after the original launch that Olympic stadiums need a capacity of at least 80,000, and that the new Wembley was being touted as the potential centrepiece of any future British bid for the Olympic Games even though it would not be big enough.By yesterday, when Lord Foster unveiled his latest designs and submitted them to Brent Council in north-west London for planning permission, he said it would be possible to convert the new Wembley into an 80,000-seat athletics arena, but the cost would be pounds 20m and the conversion time around six months.Because WNSL will not meet these costs, and because the latest designs have not yet been seen by the British Olympic Association – which would organise an Olympic Games in this country – there is concern about how feasible it will be to use the stadium for other sports. But yesterday’s disclosure is still likely to dismay those people, including the Sports minister, Kate Hoey, who had hoped the stadium might be used more easily as venue for a wide spectrum of activities, including the Olympic Games.When the original plans for the stadium – construction of which is due to start next year and finish in 2003 – were unveiled in July, it was announced that the crowd capacity for football and rugby matches would be 90,000. Although the stadium is being planned by Wembley National Stadium Limited (WNSL) – a wholly owned subsidiary company of the Football Association – and will be used mostly for football, the venture has received pounds 120m of National Lottery money towards the pounds 475m building costs and has been marketed as a venue for a variety of national sporting events.
The Football Association paid pounds 103m to buy Wembley from its previous owners, and WNSL will find the funds to complete the development through City institutions. DOUBT WAS cast on the prospect of staging sporting events, other than football and rugby, at the new Wembley stadium when it was revealed yesterday that it would cost pounds 20m and take six months to make temporary changes to the structure to enable an athletics event to be held there.

George Gill, the leader of Gateshead Council, said: “We have been needing something like this for the last 30 years; now we are going to have a site second to none in the country and possibly in Europe.”This will be one of the finest buildings in the world for all kinds of music as well as a breathtaking new landmark for the North-east. We have worked hard to change the image of Gateshead over the past 10 years … and the council is now looking forward to creating one of the finest centres for music and the arts in Europe.” The centre will include a concert hall designed to seat 1,650 and the project’s backers expect that 500,000 people a year will visit.It is the latest in a number of projects, including the statue The Angel of the North, which towers over the A1, the MetroCentre, a vast shopping precinct, and the Gateshead International Stadium, which have all been designed to transform the image of the town.The council hopes the projects will help Gateshead in its joint bid with Newcastle to be chosen as the European Capital of Culture in 2008.. Liverpool city centre was given pounds 3.7m for a new multimedia centre.Chris Smith, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, said: “There is an enormous amount of evidence that where you have really vibrant arts projects you can get a real sense of self-confidence within a community and this is the starting-point for social and economic regeneration.”The Gateshead Music Centre, which costs a total of pounds 62m, is scheduled to open in 2002.Situated on the south bank of the River Tyne next to the famous bridge, the land has been derelict for several years and the site is part of a redevelopment project. The curved, glass-fronted building in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear, will house a concert hall and a music school and be a base for the Northern Sinfonia Orchestra.
It is the second-biggest award to be handed out since the grants began – the largest so far is pounds 78.5m to the Royal Opera House.The music centre was one of four projects to share the bulk of the money being distributed by the Arts Council yesterday, with the north and south of the country benefiting.Other projects that were awarded grants were the Laban Centre in Deptford, east London, a dance and music centre, which received pounds 12m for a project that will include a 300-seat theatre.Hampstead Theatre in north London was awarded pounds 9.8m to replace the existing theatre, which was built as a temporary structure 37 years ago.

Hiatt Thompson’s only link with Hiatt and Co was as a purchaser of its equipment, he said.
Hiatt and Co received no payment for the use of its name and logo in advertising of products such as leg irons by Hiatt Thompson. In 1986 it formed a distribution partnership in the US with a businessman, Chuck Thompson, forming a new and separate firm, Hiatt Thompson.
Hiatt Thompson’s website boasts that the firm has been “Simply the Best Since 1780″ and bears a company history written by a former director of Hiatt and Co, Terry Fellows. It also uses the logo of the UK company on advertisements for leg irons.
Geoffrey Cross, the chairman of Hiatt and Co, denied his firm exported leg irons or components for them, but said it did make extra-large handcuffs which were exported with a licence. In 1995 Patrick Foster, a British businessman imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for drinking, told a newspaper he was held in Hiatt leg irons.

He saw one man taken away in them to be beheaded, and another hung upside down by them while he was beaten on the feet.
Hiatt is a British company set up in 1780, when it provided leg- irons, gang-chains and “nigger collars” to the slave trade, says an official history. In a glass case beneath a gallery of stuffed wild turkeys, are displayed rows of handcuffs, leg-irons and belly- chains with “Big Brutus” handcuffs for thicker wrists.
If there were any quality problems, the Ray’s staff said, the cuffs were covered by a warranty from Hiatt and Co in the UK.
Leg-irons and gang-chains are legal in the United States, used in some prisons. The goods required export licences before Labour came to power and the rules on their sale and manufacture have not changed.
Thirty miles west of Manhattan, past a polluted wasteland of twisted metal, Ray’s sits among the strip malls on Highway 22, between a Nissan dealership and a Blockbuster video store. They could supply a variety of Hiatt goods, all recent stock, they said. The Independent bought a pair of leg irons with “Made in England” on the cuff and with Hiatts’ address in Birmingham on the box.
Two years ago the Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, announced a ban on such devices. At Ray’s Sport Shop in New Jersey, half a dozen customers were stocking up on law enforcement and hunting equipment last Thursday.

The staff were helpful, friendly and open.

At Ray’s Sport Shop in New Jersey, half a dozen customers were stocking up on law enforcement and hunting equipment last Thursday. Cannabis was far below alcohol or tobacco on both measures.
The programme shows that when the drugs war began in the 1960s, ignorance was as rife among the police as the general public.
One police officer explains how, when he first caught someone in possession of cannabis, he thought he had merely discovered an Oxo cube.
High profile examples were made of icons like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones when they were caught in possession of soft drugs.
Today, police recognise that arresting pop stars is no effective deterrent to the average user, especially in a culture where magazines run articles about their readers’ favourite drugs, the programme finds.
Panorama is screened by BBC1 tonight at 10pm.. A tough line was also taken with Ecstasy, with nine out of 10 police saying possession of 20 pills was a “serious” offence.
Police officers rated cannabis below coffee on an addiction scale and only slightly higher on a potential harm scale. At present the whole drugs supply business, this whole international industry, is controlled by criminals.
“If we look at the social damage caused by the present regime – and I mean all the violence and abuse that is carried on through the fact that it’s a criminal business – if we can get rid of that, then the fact that we are supplying the drug through more highly regulated mechanisms locally will probably be a good thing.”
The programme features the results of a three-year study tracking the changes in police attitudes towards illicit drugs.
The study, which looked at the reactions of 95 officers in three different forces to various hypothetical cases involving cannabis, heroin and Ecstasy, reveals police are more tolerant of drugs than they were ten years ago.
More than two-thirds of those surveyed said they would probably not prosecute a man for having four cannabis plants, because it was a “run of the mill” case and the suspect was likely to be released with a caution.
However, more than two-thirds said possession of a small amount of heroin was a “serious” drugs case and they would prosecute. A former chief constable tonight reveals that he has become a leading member of a group campaigning for the legalisation of all drugs.

Francis Wilkinson, who retired as Gwent’s top policeman earlier this year and has recently spoken out against the Government’s prohibition policy on drugs, tells BBC1’s Panorama that he has become a patron of campaign group Transform.
The controversial documentary also reveals results of research showing widespread police tolerance of cannabis, which officers of all ranks say they regard as less harmful and addictive than alcohol or tobacco.
Mr Wilkinson joins a former head of Scotland Yard’s Drug Squad, Edward Ellison – already a patron of Transform – to call for drug prohibition to be replaced with an effective system of regulation and control.
Speaking to reporter Peter Marshall, he says: “The British crime survey shows that over the last couple of years cocaine consumption has doubled.
“It will double again in a couple of years unless we do something to manage the supply in a more effective way.
“What I want do is to take the criminal out of the market. A former chief constable tonight reveals that he has become a leading member of a group campaigning for the legalisation of all drugs.

You cannot have a government while illegal weapons and illegal organisations are intertwined in the process.”
Mr Maginnis challenged the British, Irish and American governments and the SDLP to underwrite the disarmament process.
“If two governments, the US president and the SDLP believe the IRA should decommission, let them spell out with clarity and certainty how they would react if they are betrayed by what Sinn Fein says,” he said.
Should he decide to move ahead, Mr Trimble faces an uphill struggle to get the deal accepted, with strong opposition from influential party members, including his deputy, John Taylor.
Mr Taylor said the deal was skewed in favour of republicans and unionists must get a better offer to attract them into an inclusive executive.
Ulster Secretary Peter Mandelson was telling unionists to take a leap in the dark, Mr Taylor said.
The Strangford MP said it was also unfair that unionists as well as republicans would suffer if the executive was rescinded in the event of the IRA not getting rid of its arsenal.. “But I believe there is sufficient support within each of our constituencies to ensure that this will work and we will put behind us forever any prospect of a return to violence.”
SDLP senior negotiator Mark Durkan said the deal offered “an opportunity for everyone” and the chance of “comprehensive implementation” of the Good Friday Agreement.
Senator Mitchell was returning to Stormont this morning for what he hopes will be the final sessions of 10 weeks of tough negotiations in his review of the Belfast peace accord.
Unionists are considering a deal which includes IRA and Sinn Fein statements backing the peace process and disavowing all violence, and the nomination of a shadow cabinet in early December.
It is anticipated that the agreement will also mean a start to a hand-over of IRA weapons by late January – but unionists say this is not explicit enough.
Mr Maginnis said: “We are going to have to get a degree of certainty and clarity in respect of what is already proposed.
“Unless we can have that, to move forward towards something that would break down in a matter of weeks would be foolhardy. It can provide for all of us, whether we are Republican or Unionist the opportunity, to pursue our political ambitions.”
Mr McLaughlin avoided saying whether Sinn Fein would be able to give David Trimble, the UUP’s leader, further clarification on decommissioning.
He insisted that the process had to move forward so that further problems could be dealt with gradually, saying: “We will not unpick, we will not breakdown the hostilities that have existed for nearly three centuries here in a matter of weeks – it will take collaboration between us for some considerable time.”
He believed Mr Trimble had enough within the deal to take the process forward.
“I believe that whilst there will be those who oppose him he must confront those, as we must oppose those within Republicanism who oppose what we are attempting to do. Hopefully the Unionist Party will endorse the position that has been adopted by their negotiators we are seeking the same endorsement from ours.”
“We believe that this process can in fact end all vestiges of political violence in our society. Ulster Unionists and Sinn Fein were still at odds over paramilitary arms as former United States Senator George Mitchell tried to close the deal on Northern Ireland’s future.

As the discussions reopened after the weekend break Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed optimism that the peace process would move forward.
The current stage in the Mitchell Review gave a “one-off opportunity” to gain peace and mutual respect among the Province’s communities, he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.
“We have not failed at all yet and I hope we never do so – let us hope that in the next few days that the leadership of people like David Trimble, who have shown incredible courage, will continue to exercise that leadership,” he said.
Mr Blair, who was speaking from South Africa, where he has been attending the Commonwealth Heads of State conference, said: “I have learned enough and I think everyone else has to know that it is not sensible to talk of breakthroughs and the rest of it until it really happens – but let us hope that it will happen.
“I am sure that the vast majority of people in Northern Ireland want it to happen, and the one thing I am convinced of – and I think Senator Mitchell has come to the same conclusion – is that the key parties in this process do want it to work.”
Ulster Unionist Party security spokesman Ken Maginnis said he needed “clarity and certainty” on decommissioning before his colleagues could enter a power-sharing government with republicans.
But Sinn Fein chairman Mitchel McLaughlin said he believed both parties could sell the agreement on the table to their respective constituencies.
The parties had reached a point where decisions on setting up the political institutions could be made, he told the Today programme.
“We are awaiting a decision of the Unionist Party and we hope it will be a positive decision this morning,” he said.
“There is a very complex package negotiated out between us.

Boden believed that conversation animated the sitter, helping to reveal the personality.It was a technique that he employed with marked success in his 19 royal portraits. It was the only portrait for which Pius XII granted sittings. There were 14, at Castelgandolfo, the Pope’s summer palace, and in Rome, where the Pope asked for it to be hung in the Vatican. A string of portraits of distinguished men and women in the worlds of industry, commerce, medicine, the armed forces, politics and the arts followed over the next 40 years. They included three Lord Mayors of London – Sir Peter Gadsden, Sir Murray Fox and Sir Ralph Ferring – as well as Field Marshal Lord Slim, Lord Wakefield of Kendal, the Marquess of Linlithgow, Sir George Pinker, Sir James Cameron, Baroness Thatcher and his close friend Donald Sinden.In 1957, Boden had the rare chance to paint a reigning Pope. Leonard was brought up on opera, and, as well as Christoff, numbered among his friends Eva Turner, Sir Geraint Evans and Tito Gobbi.In 1954, Boden’s career as a portrait painter advanced with his first large-scale commission, Field Marshal Lord Milne.

Boden’s father had been a passionately keen promoter of music in Scotland, including appearances by Sir Thomas Beecham and Dame Eva Turner. A larger portrait is in the National Theatre Museum.It was a happy association of twin interests, painting and opera. He also painted his first portrait of the singer Boris Christoff as Boris Godunov in Mussorgsky’s opera. The breakthrough into full-time portraiture came soon after demobilisation, when he established a word-of-mouth reputation for his depictions of notable thespians such as Alastair Sim and Sir Donald Wolfit.

He edged towards portrait painting when called on to sketch the subject of interviews, such as the conductor Sir John Barbirolli.During the Second World WarBoden was an ack-ack gunner, served at a prisoner- of-war camp in Comrie, Perthshire, not far from his home, and in intelligence. To make a living in the 1930s, Boden and his wife did book illustration, book- jackets and advertising. There he met his future wife, Margaret Tulloch, and like her went on to Heatherley’s School of Fine Art in London. After school at Sedbergh, Leonard might have been expected to follow his much older brothers Ernest, who became chairman, and Sydney into the family firm. But, as he had shown a strong aptitude for drawing and painting, his father and mother accepted his wish to be an artist.He joined Glasgow School of Art, his teachers including that notable portraitist William Oliphant Hutchison, Francis Hodge, John D Revel and Frederic Whiting.

Wodehouse and Robert Benchley.Boden was born in Greenock, Renfrewshire, in 1911. His father John had co-founded Rowan & Boden, a company which furnished ships such as the Clyde-built Cunard liners Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth. He was a freeman of the City of London, a liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers, a vice-president of the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution and a gold medallist of the Paris Salon. As chairman of Chelsea Arts Club in the 1960s he was known for his gentle humour, probably honed by a love of reading P.G. In his final years it grieved Boden that, while he was a respected member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, his wife had never been elected.
By his death, Boden was a noted art-world figure. His name was on the pictures, but theirs was a joint operation.

You must be prepared for your name and picture to appear in the article. I expect the Newton fund to perform well, generating capital growth and a growing income over the years.
In summary, Anne can afford to give up work and purchase a cottage in Dorset. She needs to check out the small print on the car loan carefully and have a serious think about paying off the mortgage.
If she decided she did not want to pay off the mortgage then the £36,000 can be invested for income, which should generate sufficient to meet any income shortfall through giving up work.
Alternatively, the mortgage could be paid off and Anne would still be able buy her cottage and give up work.
If you would like a free copy of The Independent guide to high-risk, high-reward investments, sponsored by Whitechurch Securities, call freephone 0800 374413.
If you would like to appear in the Financial Makeover please write to Tim Cockerill, c/o ‘The Independent’, 1 Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London, E14 5DL. It would also leave her with £5,000 spare which could be invested for growth.
But this money could be put into a high-quality equity income unit trust, such as Newton Higher income.

Her salary is £400 a month which means she would have a shortfall (£400 minus £290) of £110, which is roughly £1,300 per annum.
If she takes an income from the Sun Life Distribution bond of 5 per cent and the income from the M&G PEP this will generate an income of approximately £1,500. This is the equivalent of making an investment for £25,000 paying out 6.24 per cent net for 12 years.
Crucial to this exercise is to ensure that the endowment policy payments are maintained, because in 12 years this will produce around £25,000, which can then be invested for income.
If Anne repays her car loan and mortgage she saves herself £290 per month. And she could consider repaying the mortgage.
The outstanding £25,000 is costing £1,500 a year. The Allied Dunbar bond is a more recent investment and should be left it to grow until a 5 per cent income if needed.
Anne also has a PEP with M&G in their Extra Income unit trust. Anne should take the tax-free income.George also has a PEP with INVESCO in their UK Income & Growth trust. Unfortunately this investment hasn’t been good and I would recommend switching to the INVESCO Income unit trust which has been considerably better.
Anne’s car loan is costing her £158 per month, and it would make sense to repay this, which means her investments need to produce less income.

[They] will contain devices and sensors which will record all your anatomical measurements, what’s going on inside you, and relay them to a black box that you wear on your belt. “We will have thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of embedded chips around us, all intercommunicating,” he predicted.Professor Negroponte, author of the book Being Digital, espouses the view that anything that can be expressed as computer “bits” – including words, images and sound – will eventually be transmitted in that form across the world, speeding deals and cutting costs.As computers shrink and become pervasive over the next decade, the sort of information they can access will grow, he forecast. But if you think about it, an intelligent doorknob would be a really useful thing.”You would not need keys: it could identify you by your fingerprints, and perhaps confirm your identity by asking a question, `What’s your mother’s maiden name?’ for example.”The smart doorknob could also accept parcel deliveries – and perhaps sign digitally for them; “and maybe it could let the dog out, and then let it back in while keeping out the other nine dogs following it”, he said.The technology required to do that is already sufficiently miniaturised, he said, and could pervade our world. Professor Nicholas Negroponte, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory, made his predictions when addressing an audience in London yesterday.
He said: “You may wonder about how computing could possibly affect something like a doorknob. Mr Justice Parker made an order for pounds 70,000 legal costs against Stock and Aitken.. TALKING DOORKNOBS, ingestible computers and telephones that do not ring if there is nobody to answer them are the shape of new technology in the next 10 years, according to an Internet guru. He said they had turned down the chance to be co-owners of PAL Productions.

He insisted they were entitled only to payments for production work and songwriting and that these payments were made. The dispute centred on their in-house record label, PAL Productions, owned by Mr Waterman and set up in 1986.Mr Stock and Mr Aitken said Mr Waterman had no right unilaterally to assign to others the copyrights of songs by Minogue, Donovan and Rick Astley.Mr Waterman denied there was any agreement giving Mr Stock and Mr Aitken a continuing interest in the recordings. On the fifth day of a High Court hearing in London, songwriters and musicians Michael Stock and Matthew Aitken dropped their claim for hundreds of thousands of pounds against Peter Waterman.
The three men, responsible for a string of hits including Kylie Minogue’s number one “I Should Be So Lucky”, separated in the early 1990s.Mr Stock and Mr Aitken had claimed that Mr Waterman parted with ownership or control of the rights in recordings without their consent, in breach of a 1985 oral agreement that the three would share the profits in all their work together. A DISPUTE over copyright between the former members of Stock, Aitken and Waterman, who created hits for Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan in the 1980s, was settled yesterday. But it’s too little, too late to ever turn this into a success story.Dominic Cavendish. Mirren hits notes of dark comedy in Ruth’s seen-it-all-before put-downs, suggesting the age-old cycle of envy, pride and regret that attend the spectacle of a star pupil rising.

And Duff’s Lisa matures, sharpening her character’s conflicted sense of enthusiasm and suffocation. For most of the first half, Mirren has little to do but put her hands on her hips and roll her eyes.There are moments when it comes together, and the two performances seem to fire off each other. And, it feels as though you could write a book in the time it takes for Duff’s Lisa to shed her irritatingly gauche, easily impressionable manner, get into print, and grow addicted to the authority that following in her teacher’s footsteps brings.Ruth seems improbably patient with this process, given that Margulies casts her as a catty, imperious type. There’s plenty of time to admire Ruth’s book-lined, boho Greenwich Village apartment during an inauspicious beginning, when the author struggles to open a window. And, to be fair, the last 15 minutes, in which recriminatory questions about the point at which influence ends and plagiarism begins are openly bandied about, have a palpable heat.
But, oh, the wait. Reconfiguring the story as the bitter culmination of an intellectual friendship between two women, Ruth (Mirren), an ageing, childless author, and Lisa (Anne-Marie Duff), her ambitious protege, who pilfers the former’s youthful experience for her first novel, could have made for an absorbing drama. Margulies was apparently inspired by the 1993 controversy that surrounded the American novelist David Leavitt’s appropriation of a chapter from Stephen Spender’s autobiography.

AFTER THE fiasco of Antony and Cleopatra at the National last year, it would be a pleasure to report that Helen Mirren had found a sturdier vehicle upon which to parade stage talents often put in the shade by her television success. But alas, New York author Donald Margulies’ two-hander about the perils of writing fiction based on real life is so creaky that it is upstaged by a fine performance it never earns. Many of the biggest names in British art have contributed and it will be a unique event.” The exhibition is at the Lincoln Centre, 18 Lincoln’s Inn Fields on 28 and 29 November.. On the underside of one shoe is written “Just do it”, a slogan used for Nike trainers – while the artist’s name is written on the other The piece was completed this year. Other works have been provided by Matthew Radford and Peter Howson, the war artist.Andrew Hollingsworth, at the charity headquarters, says the night shelter will cost pounds 3.5m in total, but only pounds 680,000 more needs to be raised.Emma Underhill, an artist and one of the organisers, said: “We have been delighted with the response and never imagined when we began this that we’d have 70 pieces. Prince Charles followed with a lithograph of some cypress trees entitled Greek Landscape in Summer. Emin’s work, My Beautiful Legs, is a 1995 silk screen which, to the relief of the auction managers, “has no bits attached, or fluids”.

Much of the technology needed for multimedia phones is still being developed. “We are dabbling with the technology, but it is going to be 12 months before it’s ready,” he said.An InTouch team will soon move into Independent’s Canary Wharf headquarters in London’s Docklands and the service is due to be launched early in the New Year.How much will WAP phones cost?Siemens claims to be the first to launch a WAP phone in Britain – the S25 – which sells for around pounds 80. SMS will continue to be developed by us but will also provide a platform of users who will be ready to migrate to WAP.Wayne Pitout, the joint managing director of InTouch, said it should be possible to personalise short message alert services so that a subscriber would receive tailored information alerts. Our investment in Short Messaging Systems through our relationship with InTouch (the predecessor to I- Touch) in South Africa alongside Vodacom showed the power of these systems. A large proportion of these will be WAP enabled, and therefore their users will be able to access the Web wherever they are.How is Independent News and Media involved?Through our partnership with Vodafone and our investment in I-Touch, we can provide the three elements needed for a successful service: the mobile network, the middleware needed to make it work well, and the global content and services. In some countries, mobile phones outnumber landlines, and some predict over 1 billion mobile devices in use by 2004. The BBC and Reuters have also been active as content providers (and we will be too, of course).

Services will include news, results, betting, shopping, banking and business-to-business services.Why is everyone so excited?The number of mobile devices in the market already exceeds PCs worldwide by some margin, and growth is higher. Mobile manufacturers are working on phones with improved screens and display capabilities.Who is moving into this market?All the mobile network services are very involved and, as well as working closely with the device manufacturers, are busy signing up content providers. They are also working with retailers and e-commerce providers, such as banks, to put useful services on to the device. The display capability is much reduced, and the download speeds to mobiles are slower. But the second and third generation of WAP devices will be much better in both respects. In the next couple of years, the rollout of the General Packet Radio System (GPRS) will increase bandwidth by combining multiple voice channels together, and the third generation mobile should receive data at up to 2Mb per second: enough for video and graphical applications. WAP does this by employing Wireless Markup Language (WML), a simplified version of HTML, and any Web page written in HTML can be translated, in a reduced version, to a WAP device.
Will WAP be as good as a PC?Not initially.

What is WAP?

WAP stands for Wireless Application Protocol, a new language enabling Web access The first WAP mobile phones are just reaching the market. The Internet content is presented on a mobile’s screen without the need for a built-in browser like Netscape or Explorer. But, on this issue at least, the Government seems to have made a bold, unsentimental start to tackling a difficult social problem.. As we predicted, it has had disappointingly little impact on public policy. We should be working towards a society in which everyone is confident that no one else needs to beg or sleep rough.Too much of Mr Blair’s rhetoric of social morality seemed fresh and appealing before he became Prime Minister.

They would all rather go mad, or explode, or apply for a government grant to help with things, than change to 2000.Right. We now come to the machine on which I am writing this article It is called an Apple PowerBook 150. People who say “if you ask me” are people nobody is ever going to ask, whose opinion nobody ever wants to hear, just as people who are about to utter a lie first say, “If you really want to know…”)The one thing we have established is that computers can’t handle the turnaround to 2000. It is a glitch in-built by the people who first started doing computer programming, because they could not conceive that the present century would ever end, and therefore failed to incorporate any facilities for the date turning to the next century.After 31 December 1999 (as I understand it) the machines will all say to themselves, “Hey, we’ve come to the end of time as we know it! We aren’t programmed to do anything about this! This, in our terms, is the end of the world! Let’s explode! No – hold on, why don’t we just go back to 1900 and start all over again? At least that will give the human beings another hundred years to sort it all out…”That is it, as I understand it.(Have you noticed that I keep using the phrase “as I understand it”? I realise that’s a dead giveaway Only people who don’t understand things ever use it It’s just the same with people who say “if you ask me”. It is a Century bug, because it is a problem that is going to arise every hundred years.In fact, it’s not even a bug.

I only hope that this article will be read by such an expert, who knows what I am talking about even if I don’t.Now, the Millennium bug, as I understand it, is not a Millennium bug at all. And, Kevin, you’ll find out how unhappiness feels on Wednesday When Scotland come back from the dead Oh yes!. I DON’T want to boast, but I think I may have something to contribute to the Great Millennium Bug Debate. A solution, perhaps.
Perhaps not.But I do have a startling revelation to make, which an expert will be more capable of evaluating than I am. By love I mean a happy marriage, a happy family, good friends, being loved in some sort of happy relationship.

All the soppy stuff.These three things won’t guarantee happiness The personality you are lumbered with will see to that And you’ll always have periods of unhappiness. Which is how it should be.”A lifetime of happiness, no man could bear it,” said GB Shaw. For many, they are filling their time, and their life, as a form of escape, to avoid other things – which would suggest unhappiness, rather than happiness.Third, and probably number one – wait for it – is love. I don’t have to be actually doing it – I may be putting it off, moaning about it – but I love having work I’m supposed to do. I feel awfully happy when I get to the end of a day having done a bit of work, however small, however crap I may decide it is.

Then there was the outcry after some breathtakingly ignorant remarks about homosexuality in an interview with the music pressTonight’s show is a live Internet broadcast to promote Brown’s second solo album, the excellently titled Golden Greats. His career has suffered some rather unusual disruptions such as being handed out one of the first prison sentences for “air rage” (he served 60 days in Strangeways at the end of last year). Columns inside are like bamboo bundles topped with fake fronds; outside, savannah has been turned into jungle so effectively that a Tarzan film was shot in the grounds.Even as it reaches for the stars, WAT&G’s latest hotel design opens in the lowest place on Earth, the shores of the Dead Sea in Jordan. In space, where there are no boundaries, these architects will be able to give you the Moon and the stars.. IAN BROWN CONWAY HALL LONDON

HE MAY have started the decade with the world at his feet, but the Nineties had become an increasingly unfriendly period for Ian Brown, the former singer of the band Stone Roses, themselves the great might- have-beens of the past 20 years.
Since the Roses’ gradual demise, which climaxed in the worst performance by a headline band in the history of the Reading Festival (a display largely put down to Brown’s wavering vocals), he has sought to re-invent himself as a solo performer.However, Brown’s image as a pot-smoking, faintly mystical man of peace has been looking somewhat threadbare of late.

It stands on the lawn outside the Science and Space Center in Houston, Texas.That rocket and its triumphal splashdown in 1969 fired Howard Wolff’s imagination to plan a resort in space that is not just a flight of fancy. Most of the hotel and theme-park work that WAT&G designs is rather fanciful – Legoland in Windsor, the Hyatt in Bali, the Four Seasons in Tokyo, Disney’s Orlando beach resort, and the pounds 300m Palace of the Lost City in South Africa. Inside a dead volcano there, WAT&G built a hotel from fake-aged, pre-fabricated cast concrete columns that look like balancing rocks. There’s no doubt the race to fly into space was slowed down by the death of the first space tourist, Christa McAuliffe, in the space shuttle fire in 1986.”In 1969 the astronaut John Glenn strapped himself into his one-man rocket, which was as tightly fitting as an aluminium coffin, lit the fuse and flew off like a firework. If you’re in a floating hotel and it hits an iceberg – or, in space, a meteorite – and you need to escape, you don’t jump out and survive,” he says “So we have planned safety chambers.

Here the best thing is the view of the blue planet called Earth, way below. To help them plan the “life-transforming” viewing-platforms, the architects asked the moon-walker Buzz Aldrin to describe the experience of seeing the Earth from space for the first time It was “like having a globe on your desk”, he told them Clearly, the Earth didn’t move for Buzz. Computer-aided images will identify which parts of the Earth are flashing past but, unlike desktop globes, the screened world will have no lines of territorial demarcation.Health and safety are big issues but Howard Wolff is at pains to explain that cruise liners already have stringent safety measures in place “I’ve seen Titanic. “There are lots of fun things to do in zero gravity,” Wolff says, “including having sex”; Cupola-land, as he calls it, will have honeymoon suites set among the stars.Astroturf provides pitches for weightless games in which the force of throwing a ball sends the player accelerating backwards.

And no jet lag, either.The weightless zone under the clear cupola is the heart of the hub. Made of cockpit Plexiglas specially toughened to withstand meteorites (plus the debris of those emptied Nasa fuel tanks that have been floating round since the Sixties) the clear cupola is shaped like Madame Tussaud’s Planetarium in London, with a lot more things going on under its roof. This will be the first hotel to boast of no rooms with a view. But “it still won’t feel like being back on Earth,” Wolff says.