Best Watches For Sale

Its mass of office blocks and car parks have earned it an unenviable reputation as one the ugliest spots in Britain. It's boring, drab, dull. Call it what you want – nobody likes Croydon. There is universal permission to be as rude as you like about this urban punchbag. No joke too corny. Take Jimmy Carr, who was in town on Tuesday night, and quipped later on Twitter: "I'm having a knife crime in Croydon. Sorry, nice time. It's like 1974." When he played a gig there earlier in the year, he joked: "An audience member proposed – she's not even pregnant. That's a first for Croydon."

The unwritten rule on the comedy circuit is that you don't pass through these concrete woods without adding another line in the Croydon gagbook.

Blame David Bowie – who called Croydon a "complete concrete mess" when he was there briefly as a student. Or the 19th-century writer William Cobbett, who wrote: "From London to Croydon is an ugly a bit of country as any in England." Selling Croydon may just be one of the toughest PR jobs in the country.

Yet Toby Kidd, who has worked with the rock group Franz Ferdinand, still believes he can help add some shine to the much-maligned south London borough. He has been brought in to curate a new arts and entertainment programme in the town hall building, transforming old rooms with disco lights and star performers. The idea is to conjure up some long-awaited Croydon cool.

Mike Fisher, the leader of Croydon Council, has heard all the teasing before. "It's such a shame," he said of Carr's tee-heeing at Croydon's expense. "It's a cheap joke," he sighed to the local paper this week. "Some of his jokes are more akin to the 1970s." The trouble for Fisher and others is that, as far anyone outside of Croydon is concerned, the town is indeed trapped that bygone age.

When ambitious proposals to regenerate the area in the style of Barcelona, with new public squares and more interesting architecture earlier this year, the idea was roundly mocked. There was hardly a newspaper in the country which didn't succumb to the temptation of a teasing compare-and-contrast factbox. Barcelona: Gaudi's cathedral, the Picasso Museum and Barcelona FC. Croydon: A tram and the birthplace of Kate Moss. All the jokes, bruised Croydonites argue, actually mask a cultural heritage. The remind anybody who will listen – sadly for them, not many – that the Davis Theatre, which once stood in the High Street, could lay claim to hosting Buddy Holly, on his only UK tour, and Ella Fitzgerald. The actress Dame Peggy Ashcroft, poet John Ruskin and film director David Lean (there is a David Lean Cinema in Croydon) spent their childhood years there. Another treasured association is with the composer-conductor Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who is buried in Croydon. And as Bowie did briefly, Malcolm McLaren, Roy Hudd and Ray Davies of The Kinks, studied at colleges in the area.

Toby Kidd and his colleague Sam Hunt hope their programme at the Croydon Clocktower Arts Centre, inside the Edwardian town hall building, might finally turn the tide and end the jokes. "The Clocktower has been an open secret," Kidd says. "But there is huge potential in our customer base because there's no other venue that gives the high-quality mix of art forms we can. We have to make the Clocktower represent the immense talent and diversity we know is here, and not behave like a backwater. We'll be producing music, comedy and theatre in-house on a national scale."

drive from www.independent.co.uk

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Friday 13 August 2010

The piece below claimed that a junior health minister, Anne Milton, had recently written to the Scottish Office about free school milk, but that institution disappeared in 1999.

The coalition government was accused of making policy "on the hoof" yesterday after plans to remove free milk for the under-fives were summarily dropped by David Cameron amid fears it would remind voters of the "Thatcher milk snatcher" episode of the 1970s.

Cameron moved so quickly that David Willetts, the higher education minister, was on live television defending the idea of removing free milk when the prime minister announced the U-turn, leaving broadcasters to tell Willetts of the change.

The idea of cutting free milk had been the brainchild of the junior health minister, Anne Milton, who today received the full backing of the prime minister and the health secretary.

A spokesman for the Department of Health saidtoday the proposal was "one of the options" being considered, adding: "We have decided to rule it out.

"The prime minister and the secretary of state for health have full confidence in Anne Milton," he said. "She is a very good minister doing what she was asked to do – come up with ideas to save money. But we are not going ahead with this one."

The government expected opposition to the measure from the media, parents, nurseries, childminders and the dairy sector. In a letter to the Scottish Office, Milton said: "Abolition of the scheme is likely to be highly controversial, particularly as this will affect some children in low-income families." She added: "This should not prevent us from ending an ineffective universal measure … given the state of public finances and the need to make savings."

Milton said that the cost of running the scheme in England this year was nearly £50m and would rise to £59m in 2011-12. She said the programme did not "provide value for money in difficult times" and had "become increasingly outdated".

Health was one department that had been due to have its budget protected in the autumn spending review.

The plan had not been relayed to Cameron personally, and the swiftness of his response appears to show the resonance Thatcher's decision still has within Downing Street.

Thatcher's plan to halt free school milk for the over-sevens as education secretary in 1971 remains one of the most remembered aspects of her political career.

Asked about Milton's plans on BBC1's Andrew Marr Show this morning, Willetts said: "We're having a comprehensive spending review, so we are looking at a whole range of options. This is one of the options that is being looked at.

drive from www.guardian.co.uk

When it comes to the countryside, despite all I've learned. I still rank as an idiot, a novice. I've only just discovered the difference between a swallow and a swift. (Swallows have red throats) However, I can and always have been able to spot a puffball at half a mile because they are delicious. It's about the right time of year for them and as there has been some rain I thought it would be worth extending my runaround to come back through the field where they grow.

The Daylesford steers, the castrated male cows, were in that field.

It's not always easy to tell the difference between cows and bulls until it's too late but I know these fellas: each one two tonnes of pure organic Daylesford with attitude. Handsome beasts: black, bold and beautiful. It's lovely talking to them over a fence. We often do it. They gather quietly in a crowd of eyes and a cloud of steam.

Even entering a field full of them, you're all right as long as you square up to them. It takes a bit of bottle to do it. You just have to be bold, raise your arms as you walk gently towards them saying tough stuff like, "You want some?" "Yeah? Yeah?? Yeah, really?" and "Who are ya? Who are ya?" It's quite good fun. You don't want to startle them but they will back off if you keep your nerve.

The trouble starts when you walk away from them. Once they've got inquisitive they start to follow. So if you run, they run. This was apparent by the time I was halfway along the copse when one of them did a little dance, a crazy skip and a skitter and then launched into a full-on, full-speed ahead charge.

There was a sort of feedback effect on the others and soon they all were stampeding and having a great time. I only just managed to scissor kick over the fence at the end of the garden with a nine-inch scratch on my backside, completely exhilarated. I won't be doing it again but I don't know who had the most fun, them or me.

Life gets better in a gentleman's club

"Some days," they say, "you eat the bear, and some days the bear eats you." Well, yesterday morning it was all about the bear, and I didn't see him coming at all. I'd hoped I might be telling you about that first, that most satisfying biff of autumn, today, but no. Oh, no. The prevailing atmospheric conditions, just a big cloud of bad news.

From daybreak it was raining toxic sludge. The first snippet, enough to ruin my wife's day, arrived by text message before my head had left the pillow and I woke up to the sound of her swearing.

Then, lurking in with the newspaper, there was a hand-delivered note full of quite the most pointed, infuriating nonsense I have read for a long time. Even before I'd set out for town, I was hopping up and down but somehow, inexplicably when the emails started to whirr it was more of the same only different. Soon I wanted to throw the phone out of the window. It was all looking a lot like a bear's birthday when really it should have been all about that first biff of autumn that can be so exhilarating.

By 11am I was sitting in a magnificent gentleman's club. Apart from me and the porter and two people changing lightbulbs it was all quite deserted. I was lounging back in a Chesterfield trying to feel grandiose but drawn into black and pointless speculations. How could so many interrelated things have gone quite so spectacularly wrong in such completely different ways on the same morning? I was looking so broken that the porter evidently thought I was some kind of loser masquerading as a gentleman.

"You can't have your bag in here", he said. "Lose it. Are you a member? Did you sign in?"

There he was, the bear. A rubbish bear at that and he knew I was weak and he was having his fun and there I was, beaten.

drive from www.independent.co.uk

Egon Ronay, the Hungarian food critic who transformed British eating habits, died yesterday at the age of 94. Launched in 1957, the Egon Ronay Guide to British Eateries rapidly became the food-lovers' bible, helping to improve the range and quality of British restaurant food, which, by international consensus at the time, was pretty ordinary.

The son of a prominent restaurateur from Budapest, Ronay emigrated to England in 1946 after first the Nazis and then the Russians left the family business in tatters.

He started off managing three restaurants in London owned by a friend of his father's, before borrowing £4,000 to set up his own, the Marquee, near Harrods in 1952. Described as "London's most food-perfect small restaurant" by Fanny Craddock in her Daily Telegraph column, on the menu were classic French dishes unheard of in Fifties Britain. He went on to write his own column for the paper for six years.

But it was the launch of the Egon Ronay Guides that made him the most famous and respected food critic in the UK. Inspired by the French Michelin Guide, the first edition sold 30,000 copies and over the next three decades it became synonymous with good food. Lauded for his integrity, Ronay and his team of anonymous inspectors never accepted a free meal or drink, and restaurants proudly displayed blue plaques in their window for each year they were listed.

With taste buds for talent, Ronay was an early champion of Marco Pierre White and Raymond Blanc, though in recent years he saved his highest praise for Gordon Ramsay. But he was just as passionate about food for the masses after a horrifying early experience at the Victoria Station buffet when he was forced to use a shared teaspoon – hung on a piece of string – to stir his tea.

This led him to cross swords on several occasions with Charles Forte about the quality of food served at the peer's Welcome Break and Little Chef outlets. The quality of airline catering became another bugbear and for four years in the 1990s he worked with the air authority BAA on improving standards.

As a food consultant for the pub chain J D Wetherspoon, he would famously turn up unannounced in a chauffeur-driven limousine to check the crispiness of the onion rings and fluffiness of the baked potatoes.

drive from www.independent.co.uk

Stuart Broad insists the challenge of taking wickets in Australia holds no fear for the England attack.

Broad has so far contributed 11 Pakistan wickets to the sackful taken against the at-times-hapless tourists, in conditions made for exponents of traditional English seam and swing this summer.

James Anderson has been still more prolific, with 20 wickets in three Tests.

It was a little harder work for England's bowlers at The Oval last week - and after Pakistan had battled to a four-wicket win to trail only 2-1 with one to play at Lord's, their captain Salman Butt offered the view that Broad and co may be in for much more of a struggle as they bid to retain the Ashes down under next winter.

Yet Broad believes he and his colleagues have the talent and adaptability to prove Butt wrong.

"We have no fear going to Australia, and we certainly have the skills necessary to go and win the Ashes over there," he predicted.

"We are very confident in our attack. We have bowled fantastically well this summer, in the conditions we've had.

"We have bowled Pakistan out very cheaply in all but one innings."

Butt's warning follows an unexpected claim from Australia captain Ricky Ponting that another 5-0 whitewash may be in the offing for England, following their Ashes drubbing on Australian soil in 2006/07.

Broad sees things very differently.

"We are all very confident in what we do," he said.

"We have the best spinner in the world in Graeme Swann, and some very skilful seamers too.

"Everyone will have an opinion on the Ashes, because it is such a huge series. But what opposition players and opposition captains say has no impact on us and what we are going to do.

"We have great confidence in our ability - just look at our record over the last 18 months."

England will have the added presence of Tim Bresnan for company as they prepare for the resumption of hostilities with Pakistan at HQ on Thursday.

Bresnan was nominated as stand-by only for a team who knew, barring injury, they were going to play at The Oval. The Yorkshire seamer is a fully-fledged member of a 12-man squad this time, but Broad reports the extra edge of competition for the final place will not alter preparations.

"Tim has been with us throughout the whole series, pushing for a place," he said.

"It does not change the mindset for any of us. It doesn't add any more pressure - because you always put yourself under pressure as an international player.

"That is what you do to try to come up with good performances."

drive from www.independent.co.uk

Vanessa Perroncel, the model who shot to fame after being accused of having had an affair with the former England captain John Terry, has made a surprise attack on the use of injunctions by footballers, after two England players last week succeeded in keeping their sex lives out of the press.

In an interview with this newspaper, the 33-year-old former girlfriend of Manchester City left-back Wayne Bridge, said she had suffered because of an unnecessary injunction, as in her case "a simple denial would have done". She added that footballers who cash in on their profiles by selling wedding pictures to magazines should not be allowed to "cherry pick" what is then written about them by using the courts.

In February, Terry was awarded a super-injunction against the News of the World, which stopped the paper printing allegations he had had an affair with Perroncel, but it was later lifted. Perroncel has repeatedly denied the claim. She says she is angry that Terry took an injunction out, as she felt it was disproportionate. "There was no need: a simple denial would have done," she says. "People said I had been gagged but that wasn't true." She is angry at the damage the allegations did to her reputation, and at the red-top intrusion she suffered. But she believes newspapers should be free to report genuine cases of infidelity.
"Each case has its own answer," she said. "I don't think you can make a rule for everyone. There are some people who enjoy the limelight, and they let the press have really intimate information, like weddings, baptisms and so on. So why should these people then be allowed to cherry pick what the newspapers write about them? I know how expensive it is to take out an injunction, and it's not fair that footballers should be allowed to protect themselves because of their money. "

Perroncel says some footballers are not interested in media coverage, and have a right to a private life. "Wayne [Bridge] hated the publicity. We were just happy being happy and being in love. Of course it's flattering when magazines say they'd love to work with you. Footballers get idolised, and people enjoy reading about them. But Wayne and I didn't want any of that, so we should be allowed to be left in peace."

Last week Lord McNally, a justice minister, announced the Government may create Britain's first privacy law, which would put on statute decisions that are currently made by individual judges. Yesterday Lord Lester of Herne Hill condemned High Court judges for granting injunctions "too readily".

Perroncel says freedom of speech brings with it responsibility. "The press should think about whether a story is in the public interest. If so then they should print it. In my case I had nothing to hide, but what they wrote was untrue and very damaging, which is why I am now trying to clear my name."

French-born Perroncel says the British press is responsible for distorting the public's interest in footballers. "Why do we idolise them so much?," she laughs. "They only kick a ball, right?"

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It is the second-lightest element in the Universe, has the lowest boiling-point of any gas and is commonly used through the world to inflate party balloons. But helium is also a non-renewable resource and the world's reserves of the precious gas are about to run out, a shortage that is likely to have far-reaching repercussions.

Scientists have warned that the world's most commonly used inert gas is being depleted at an astonishing rate because of a law passed in the United States in 1996 which has effectively made helium too cheap to recycle.

The law stipulates that the US National Helium Reserve, which is kept in a disused underground gas field near Amarillo, Texas – by far the biggest store of helium in the world – must all be sold off by 2015, irrespective of the market price.

The experts warn that the world could run out of helium within 25 to 30 years, potentially spelling disaster for hospitals, whose MRI scanners are cooled by the gas in liquid form, and anti-terrorist authorities who rely on helium for their radiation monitors, as well as the millions of children who love to watch their helium-filled balloons float into the sky.

Helium is made either by the nuclear fusion process of the Sun, or by the slow and steady radioactive decay of terrestrial rock, which accounts for all of the Earth's store of the gas. There is no way of manufacturing it artificially, and practically all of the world's reserves have been derived as a by-product from the extraction of natural gas, mostly in the giant oil- and gasfields of the American South-west, which historically have had the highest helium concentrations.

Liquid helium is critical for cooling cooling infrared detectors, nuclear reactors and the machinery of wind tunnels. The space industry uses it in sensitive satellite equipment and spacecraft, and Nasa uses helium in huge quantities to purge the potentially explosive fuel from its rockets.

In the form of its isotope helium-3, helium is also crucial for research into the next generation of clean, waste-free nuclear reactors powered by nuclear fusion, the nuclear reaction that powers the Sun.

Despite the critical role that the gas plays in the modern world, it is being depleted as an unprecedented rate and reserves could dwindle to virtually nothing within a generation, warns Nobel laureate Robert Richardson, professor of physics at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

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As World Cup 2010 draws to a close this week in South Africa, we look closely at “Soweto,” a new book by the South African photographer Jodi Bieber. Over lunch at 4 Times Square in May, Bieber told me that the project came about when a friend pointed out that there are virtually no contemporary photographic books on Soweto, a black township of Johannesburg in the apartheid era, and the site of the first and final matches of this year’s tournament. “I knew that the references to Soweto in the mind of the outsider would be of Hector Pieterson, who was killed in June 1976,” writes Bieber in the introduction. “Or perhaps poverty, HIV/AIDS, or even the dusty crime-ridden streets, which I found to be not all true.” So she went to work, covering seven thousand kilometers in three months and challenging preconceptions along the way: a fashion shoot in Mofolo Village, a rock band in Pimville, and a wedding party in Rockville.

Here’s a selection from the book, including the portrait of Nomthandazo and Kgomotso Letsebe which appears in the magazine this week.

drive from www.newyorker.com

The evocatively named Ace of Spades roundabout is a bleak confluence of asphalt and road signs, but for the authorities who enforce the variable speed limits on this stretch of the A3 in Surrey, the streets may as well be paved with gold.

Joe Cole yesterday joined a growing list of sportsmen and celebrities to run out of luck as they're caught zipping along a road that boasts a remarkable record in snaring the rich and famous.

The England and Liverpool midfielder was found guilty of driving his Audi A4 at 105mph in a 70mph zone on the A3 in November last year. He faces a driving ban and must pay £600 in costs.

The same stretch, which bypasses Esher to its left as it winds from junction 10 of the M25 for around 18 miles into London, from Wisley to Wandsworth, has been the scene of several notable speeding cases in the past decade.

At the most notorious stretch, the Ace of Spades junction in Hook, where three lanes narrow down to two, the speed limit drops from 70mph to 50mph, and a speed camera lurks to catch the unwary driver. It has issued almost 13,000 tickets in three years, which works out at nearly 12 a day.

The final straight approaching the bottleneck offers a sneak peak of the giant arch at the Wembley Stadium, which looms over the horizon for several seconds. The arch is a relatively recent addition to the skyline, as are the scores of footballers' cars that cruise up and down the A3 since Chelsea moved their training ground four years ago to its current home just off the A3 in Stoke D'Abernon near Cobham in Surrey.

Most of the current Chelsea squad, including John Terry and Didier Drogba, live in Oxshott, near the training ground, and so drive up the road for trips into London. Others, such as Frank Lampard, and Joe Cole at the time of his offence, have chosen to stay in the city and drive down to Surrey for training.

Cole's England team-mate Ashley Cole was convicted in January of speeding on a nearby section of the A3, where the speed limit is 50mph. He was banned for four months and had to pay £950 in costs after he was caught driving his black Lamborghini Gallardo at 104mph. The Chelsea left-back had told police who arrested him that he had been trying to get away from chasing photographers. Ashley Cole denied speeding and claimed the officers' speed gun was not working properly, but the argument was rejected.

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Foreign donors were urged by the UN chief to quicken their aid to flood-hit Pakistan as experts warned there was an urgent threat of cholera and other water-borne diseases spreading further.

The UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, who visited some of the stricken areas yesterday, said he had never seen a disaster as bad as the flooding in Pakistan. It was essential that more funding was dispatched quickly he warned. Only a quarter of the $459m (£294m) of aid estimated to be needed for initial relief in the country has so far arrived.

"I am here to share my sympathy and the solidarity of the United Nations together with the people and government of Pakistan at this time of trial," said Mr Ban, before heading off for meetings with President Asif Ali Zardari and Pakistan's Prime Minister, Yousuf Gilani. "I am here also to urge the world community to speed up [its] assistance to Pakistan."

The floods have killed 1,600 people and affected 20 million others. Around 2 million are homeless and up to 6 million are in need of food, water and medicine. Over the weekend, the UN reported the first case of cholera and fears have been expressed such outbreaks could spread.

The country's main crops of wheat, cotton and sugar have all suffered massive damage in a nation where agriculture is a mainstay of the economy. The International Monetary Fund has warned of dire economic consequences. Meanwhile, there are sporadic reports of fights among survivors as they battle for food. Around 500,000 tonnes of wheat have been destroyed.

"We are here like beggars," said Mukhtar Ali, a 45-year-old accountant living on the side of a road in Sukkur, in Sindh province, told the Associated Press news agency. "The last food we received was a small packet of rice yesterday and 15 of us shared that."

Given the scale of the disaster, aid groups say donor nations have lacked leadership and been slow to respond adequately, compared to other crises. They have expressed hope that the secretary-general's visit will lead to a dramatic shift of pace. Various reports have suggested doubts about the transparency of the Pakistani authorities has held back some donations.

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