Chinese Opportunity

In the beginning, there was a hedgehog called Nigel. I can remember the exact moment we met. It was 1993, and I was doing a research project for the RPSCA in which I was studying the behaviour of hedgehogs in the wild after they had spent time in captivity. I was based in a field on the border of Devon and Somerset, and was monitoring the mammals' movements using radio tagging – attaching miniature transmitters to their spines – and noting their progress. It involved living on my own in a caravan in the middle of nowhere, but it kick-started my love of these tiny insectivores.

In the middle of one night, I had finished work at 4am. My only water source was outside, so I needed to get up to venture into the night to clean my teeth. That was when I first saw Nigel. He was snuffling around outside, and I recognised him immediately. I'd first met him several weeks earlier during the tagging progress, and was immediately struck by his speed, so I decided to name him after the racing driver Nigel Mansell. I watched him for several minutes, and when he wandered off I followed him. After about an hour, he came to a halt, and I laid down opposite him. And then something strange happened. He looked up at me, and seemed to notice me for the first time. I looked into his eyes. It was then that I got a sense of his genuine wildness. It's not something that you experience very often. You never really get close to wild animals normally. And so began my love affair with these enigmatic, beautiful, eccentric creatures. From working with hedgehog preservation charity HogWatch, recording the current number of hedgehogs in the British Isles, to becoming a life member of the British Hedgehog Preservation Society, hedgehogs began to captivate me.

Many people believe hedgehogs are ubiquitous in Britain, but in 2007 they were added to the Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP), a document compiled by more than 500 British wildlife experts and one of the most-respected reference sources on endangered wildlife. Nowadays, their population in this country is estimated to be as low as one million. This is a problem. In many ways I think hedgehogs hold the key to our nation's rediscovery of nature. Unlike wildlife charities' traditional "poster animals" – often called charismatic mega-fauna – like lions and whales, you can actually get close to hedgehogs. They are a gardener's best friend. They love eating slugs, caterpillars and beetles, vacuuming up unwanted invertebrates. The fragmentation of our landscape – through the replacement of hedgerows with fencing in farms and gardens – has destroyed their natural habitat, epitomising man's domination of the landscape, an encumbrance which is reflected in his negative effect on the world through climate change.

And then there are their positive effect on our mental health. "Natural Thinking", a report published in 2007 by the RSPB, presented evidence that suggested contact with nature and green space has a very positive effect on our way of thinking. Richard Louv, an American author, has identified "nature-deficit disorder", a condition which affects our modern selves. That phrase makes utter sense to me. I strongly believe that through caring for hedgehogs we can feel better about ourselves.

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More than half of the UK's beaches have excellent water quality, a report for the Marine Conservation Society has found.

The Good Beach Guide, released yesterday, shows a slight improvement in water quality on last year. The number of sites failing the bathing water tests fell from 66 in the previous guide to 41 this time.

However, the Society added that water quality has deteriorated since its peak four years ago, when it recommended a record 505 beaches, and that about one in seven beaches – including tourist hotspots such as Rock in Cornwall and Robin Hood's Bay in North Yorkshire – are likely to fail tougher new EU standards being introduced in 2015.

"Since 2006, water quality has declined due to high volumes of rain carrying storm pollution from the sewer system, farmland and towns and into the sea," said Rachel Wyatt, of the Good Beach Guide.

The rain washes animal waste, fertilisers and rubbish into rivers and to the sea. According to the Met Office, 2007 and 2008 were the wettest summers on record, and levels of rainfall were 42 per cent above average in summer 2009.

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On a bright summer day in 1986 I married my wife, Kate. I was a young Navy pilot, a veteran of the Falklands War, about to set out for Asia on a new career in finance. The first years of our marriage were full of excitement, fun and new experiences. The business was a success; we travelled widely and had two children.

Anyone looking in from the outside would have seen something close to ideal; a relaxed ex-pat lifestyle, success, wealth and healthy, happy children.

So when, after eight years of marriage, Kate told me how unhappy she was and stated that unless things changed we were heading for divorce, it was a bolt from the blue. When she explained that despite the good aspects of our marriage she felt we were no longer friends, I had no idea what she meant. Because of course, while on the surface our relationship appeared incredibly privileged and stable, inside, thanks to the way I related to my wife, the marriage was a mess.

It took a course of counselling to make me realise how my upbringing, my father's absence from the age of three and my years as a child in boarding school, had left me emotionally shut off. I had to learn from an early age to get by without loved ones around and that it was better not to feel, to be closed. This had carried through to my adult life and consequently, in terms of my relationship with Kate, it had developed into bad habits.

The catalyst for the crisis point in our marriage was the birth of our first children. Prior to this the relationship had been about excitement and fun, and that had covered up the underlying problems.

The seeds of our difficulties had always been there and as soon as we became parents they were given the freedom to grow as we dropped into the classic mother and father roles. Kate was the primary carer and I became preoccupied with being the breadwinner. I lost the ability to empathise with her. I did my thing and she did hers. Although I got involved with the children, I was never really able to step into Kate's shoes and see things from her perspective. We would end up having what to my mind were inexplicable arguments. I could not understand what caused them. It left Kate frustrated and left me confused. We were drifting apart.

Of course children do not always herald these kinds of problems; in fact in most cases they strengthen relationships, particularly marriages. But when parents are exhausted and preoccupied with work or childcare, vulnerabilities are often exposed.

In my case I made a fundamental decision to change the way I was as a husband and partner, to shift my attitude. I realised it was not enough to want to make the marriage work for the children; I needed to want it to work for Kate and for us. Consequently we went on a marriage course and it revolutionised our relationship. We learnt practical skills that helped us both and it made me realise that it is possible to learn methods that allow you to have a great marriage.

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The British government machine owes a lot to Andrew McIntosh. In the period from 1997 to 2003, as deputy chief whip in the first two Blair governments, he moved apparently effortlessly and always intelligently, through multiple briefs, cajoling or convincing his colleagues, judging where to negotiate, where to stand firm, in order to pilot government bills successfully through the Lords. He did this on behalf of the Treasury and four other departments when there was no minister in the Lords (Trade and Industry; Culture, Media and Sport; Scotland and Transport). His work at the despatch box, rarely noted by a media more interested in personality politics, earned him huge respect and admiration from his colleagues. He was promoted to Privy Counsellor in 1992 and for 18 months before the 2005 election served as the minister for media and heritage.

He had positioned himself for this essential and politically exacting role when he entered the House of Lords in 1983 at the request of Michael Foot, then leader of the opposition. He was quickly on Labour's front bench. During the Thatcher and Major years he spoke variously on education and science (among his causes the abolition of corporal punishment in schools), industry and the environment. From 1992, with the rise of Tony Blair, his main concern was with home office issues, working with the future home secretary, Jack Straw.

He was expected to become a Home Office minister in the Lords with Labour's win in 1997. But he had had his differences with Straw and became deputy government chief whip, known as the Captain of the Yeoman of the Guard, a job which brought with it inspections from, and dinners with, the Queen. When he went on to ministerial office in 2003 as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Media and Heritage, he handled with characteristic aplomb the contested briefs of digital switchover, the BBC licence fee and the publicly unpopular Gambling Bill – of which he was proud since it introduced regulation in some previously free-for-all areas.

The fact that he went to the Lords in 1983 was a consequence of a politically packed 16 hours in 1981 which might have ended the political career of a lesser figure. As the leader of the GLC opposition from 1980 it was he who took the Labour party to victory in the GLC elections. And it was he who was ignominiously toppled by his own party less than 24 hours later, in a move that enabled the hard-left Ken Livingstone to become leader of the GLC. But since Livingstone infuriated the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, the coup was also a factor in the abolition of the GLC and other metropolitan councils by the Local Government Act, 1985.

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Gordon Brown returns to front-line politics today, making an appeal for Britain to fund food aid to the landlocked African state of Niger where more than half the population face starvation.

In an article for The Independent, the former prime minister expresses frustration that the UK, US and other states have failed to contribute enough money to a United Nations appeal, leaving it $80m (£51m) short of target – and delivering little more than half the food needed.

While dramatic TV footage of the flooding in Pakistan has prompted governments to commit hundreds of millions to the aid effort there, the slowly worsening humanitarian crisis in Niger has been largely ignored by donors and the media. After a drought ruined much of last year's harvest, extending the annual "hunger season" from four to eight months, the rains have now come excessively, sweeping away homes, grain stores and livestock.

One in six children are malnourished. In coming months the UN World Food Programme estimates 7.9 million of Niger's 15.3 million population will require emergency food. Josette Sheeran, its executive director, said: "The drought in Niger is an unfolding catastrophe for millions of people and we are struggling against time to scale up quickly enough to reach the escalating number of hungry."

Since his departure from Downing Street on 11 May – when he admitted learning some "frailties" in government – Mr Brown has kept a low profile. He has devoted himself to his Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath constituency in Fife and to writing a book on the near-collapse of global banking, to be called The Financial Crisis.

Asked before the general election what he wanted to do after his premiership, he indicated he would not take business directorships, but would focus on charity and international development. Earlier this month he was reported to be considering making speeches for $100,000 a time.

Although less well-known than neighbouring Nigeria, Niger is one of the world's largest countries with a landmass five times bigger than the UK. An arid land whose people eke out a living from subsistence farming, it is desperately poor. GDP per capita is the fifth lowest of 227 nations, ahead of Somalia, Liberia, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The floods are its worst for 80 years.

The BBC's Mike Thomson, who visited the south-east of the country for a report for the Today programme, found 9,000 people waiting for grain from aid agencies near the town of Maradi. Some of them had been surviving on leaves and near-toxic berries edible after being soaked in water for a week. He was told these were now running out.

Mr Brown, 59, supports the development of irrigation and water schemes to increase cultivable land. There are no easy answers," he writes.

"But, today, where there is suffering without hope, we can prevent children dying painful, avoidable deaths."

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North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-il, prompted speculation that he will soon anoint a successor by making an unexpected trip today to the country's main ally, China.

The ailing dictator, who reportedly suffered a stroke two years ago, crossed the border in his armoured train and visited the Chinese school where his father, the former president Kim Il-sung, began taking an interest in communism.

The second trip to China in less than three months is unusual for Kim, who rarely leaves his home. Coming before a rare meeting of the North Korean Workers' party in Pyongyang, analysts said the visit might be aimed at laying the groundwork for a transfer of power to his third son, Kim Jong-un.

After recent floods in North Korea, Kim may be seeking more aid from his country's main benefactor, and discussing steps to resume six-party nuclear talks.

As with previous trips, neither government has commented on reports that Kim has crossed the border, but teachers at Yuwen middle school in Jilin province confirmed they had received a 20-minute visit. "He definitely came over," a physical education teacher who would give only his surname, Zhao, told the Associated Press. "But I'm not sure if his son was with him or what time he came."

According to South Korean media, Kim may be travelling with his son to consult with Chinese officials on plans to extend the world's only communist dynasty.

Analysts said Kim's reported trip to Beijing was probably connected to next month's party assembly, the first of its kind for more than 30 years. At the last such meeting, in 1980, the party confirmed Kim Jong-il's status as heir apparent to his father, Kim Il-sung, although he did not become leader until his father's death in 1994.

"There is so much circumstantial evidence pointing to the succession issue," said Daniel Pinkston, a North Korea expert with the International Crisis Group in Seoul. He said there were also signs that the North Koreans were looking for "cash aid and assistance".

"If the succession is being accelerated, then of course Kim has an incentive to address the economic problems and other issues which will be helpful for his son in the transition to taking power," he added.

The visit comes a day after the former US president Jimmy Carter arrived in Pyongyang to seek the release of an American who has been sentenced to eight years in prison for entering North Korea illegally.

There was no word today on the progress of Carter's mission, although reports suggested he would return to the US with Aijalon Gomes, a 31-year-old English teacher and Christian missionary.

Carter, who arrived yesterday on a private jet, accompanied by his wife, Rosalynn, is also expected to use the visit to engage in unofficial diplomacy with the regime, although the Obama administration has been quick to stress that he is on a private humanitarian visit.

"It's a mission to secure the release of Mr Gomes," said a US state department spokesman, Mark Toner. "But we don't want to jeopardise the prospects for Mr Gomes to be returned home by discussing any of the details."

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Europeans are eating more fish while stocks in their own seas continue to deplete, according to a new analysis that highlights the unsustainable nature of the industry. A report from the New Economics Foundation (NEF) names today as the point at which Europe has nominally consumed all its own fish, and needs to bring in stocks from elsewhere. The thinktank says this "fish dependence day" comes earlier than in previous years, which it says shows that policy changes are needed.

The report, Fish Dependence: The Increasing Reliance of the EU on Fish From Elsewhere, maps marine resources onto a calendar year, and finds the day when the EU effectively starts to live off the rest of the world. This point now arrives a month earlier than when the group performed a similar analysis in 2000.

Aniol Esteban, head of environmental economics at NEF, said: "Safeguarding the marine environment is vital if we want to make use of EU resources and protect livelihoods and economies."

Esteban added: "The EU has some of the largest and richest fishing grounds in the world but at the moment we're not managing them properly. The upcoming reform of the EU's common fisheries policy presents a unique opportunity to ensure that these ecosystems are protected for future generations."

The group is calling for reduced fishing capacity and stronger conservation controls. It also wants wider campaigns to promote responsible consumption of fish, as well as greater government investment in ways to enforce quotas and sustainable practices.

The report says: "In a context of finite resources and growing populations, the current EU model is unsustainable. The EU's increasing fish dependence has implications for the fish stocks in other countries, which are also overfished, and for the communities that depend upon them."

It adds: "The main message of this report is that rising fish consumption in a context of declining stocks is a model that is environmentally unviable and socially unfair. The EU has highly productive waters that have the potential to sustain a long-term and stable supply of fish, jobs and related social and economic benefits, but only if its fish resources are managed responsibly."

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In 1948, an entrepreneur called Harry Snyder decided to open a new kind of fast-food outlet. It would cater to motorists who were too busy, or too lazy, to leave their car. Customers would drive to a speaker-phone outside a building, place their order and then proceed to a service hatch, where dinner would be handed to them in a paper bag. He called this revolutionary means for selling burgers, shakes and fries the "drive-thru" restaurant.

Six decades, and tens of thousands of drive-thrus later, Snyder's big idea has been shamelessly copied by McDonald's, Burger King, and almost every modern fast-food company, changing eating habits around the world. The small restaurant he opened in Baldwin Park, a blue-collar city just east of Los Angeles, became In-N-Out, one of the most popular burger chains in the American West.

But progress comes at a price. While residents of Baldwin Park have long celebrated their hometown's claim to fame as the semi-official birthplace of a culinary revolution, fast food has exacted a terrible toll on their waistbands. So terrible that the city's council has now taken the headline-grabbing decision to ban any new drive-thru restaurants from opening there.

In a bid to combat rampant obesity levels – almost half the town's 90,000 inhabitants are overweight and a third are classed as clinically obese – and decrease the traffic congestion and dangerous pollution being caused by long queues of cars idling outside burger and fried-chicken restaurants, the city's law-makers voted last month to impose a moratorium on new fast-food outlets. The ban, which took affect at the weekend, will initially last for nine months.

"We here in Baldwin Park have taken strides to create a healthy community, and allowing one more drive-thru is not going to meet that goal," said Baldwin Park city planner Salvador Lopez, who was inspired by a small number of Canadian cities which have imposed similar bans in recent years. He estimates that the city's off-licences and fast-food outlets outnumber its old-fashioned grocery stores and sit-down restaurants by a factor of six to one.

You interfere with the all-American freedom to scoff cheap junk food at your peril, though. And while Baldwin Park's totemic ban has delighted healthy-eating campaigners, it is already meeting with stiff resistance from customers of the city's existing drive-thrus. They complain that it will merely lead to longer queues outside existing venues.

"They ought to put in more drive-thrus, not stop them," Isaac Colin, a regular customer of the city's current In-N-Out, a stone's throw from the original venue, told the Associated Press. "It's a waste of time getting out of your car, finding a parking spot, going in, ordering your food." While conceding that cities in other US states ought to impose a ban, he added: "Not here, this is California!"

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I first met Rose Gray 13 years ago, when she and Ruth Rogers were celebrating 10 years of the River Café's existence. Rose was lean-faced and wore rimless glasses like a Nazi camp commandant, but her conversation was warm and her eyes sparkled. Alternately friendly and firm, she reminded me of a sexy convent headmistress. I liked the way she joshingly ordered the waiters around ("Out of the way, you lot. I saw you trying to sneak into the photograph...") and I discovered, inside half an hour, that she was the most knowledgeable, most discriminating and perfectionist chef I'd ever met. Thirteen years later, I'd say the same. Rose Gray, who died on Sunday, was the foodie's foodie.

Today, every restaurant from Penzance to Perth makes a song and dance of how it "sources" its "produce" – how it gets its meat, fish and vegetables from respectable, organic farms a few miles from the kitchen, rather than in plastic bags from the local Tesco Metro. In the late Nineties, nobody was more scrupulous about ingredients than Rose and Ruth. The point of their restaurant was "to cook Italian food to a sublime degree" and boy, did they take it seriously. Not only did they travel to Italy all the time in search of menu ideas, they went right back to basics. They looked around the markets, then went to the shops that sold the seeds that produced the vegetables that appeared in the market, bearing them home in triumph, to be planted and coaxed into growth by English suppliers. Rose selected an army of growers from all over: a chap in Southampton for the herbs, and a Sicilian farmer called Mario ("just off the M25" she'd say vaguely, as if unwilling to share him) who grew piles of rocket and trevisano, broad beans and winter leaves, just for her.

She was, she admitted, terribly selective: only this pumpkin would do, or that cabbage. She was doctrinaire to an obsessive degree. No EU food commissar, laying down the law about straight bananas, was as strict as Rose. "Of course there's such a thing as a perfect zucchini," she'd say. "It has to be organically grown and hand-picked when it tastes best – which is when it's slightly longer than your first finger and before the seeds have developed inside. After that, the flesh gets softer and watery and you don't get the intense flavour." This tone informed the River Café Cook Book, where aspirant cooks would read that beetroots must be "the size of golf balls," and the only salt you should use was Maldon sea crystals.

Her fascination with food, and the lovely predictability of growing things, derived from her childhood. Her father was a designer of hot-air balloons who was killed just before Rose was born (she was christened Clemency Anne Rose Swann) in 1939. It was a freak accident in the house beside the balloon shed. When she and I first met, in 1997, Rose had only just learned about the accident. She had visited her father's grave for the first time three weeks earlier. "Nobody spoke about it," she told me. "My mother used to pretend he died in the war. Perhaps because of having a secretive mother, I've always been very enquiring about my origins, about food and gardening."

She grew up in Surrey, where life was frugal but her mother was a good cook and everything was home-made. Her early memories weren't of tastes and smells, however, but of "being sent out to pick Brussels sprouts in the garden" at Christmas. "They would be frozen, and I still remember that wintry feeling in my fingers".

She studied fine art at Guildford, taught art at Shoreditch Comprehensive, then raised four children and learned cooking at home. For a while she made French crêpes in Portobello Road and at rock concerts at Birmingham's Rainbow music venue, before leaving for the US where a friend asked her to be head chef in a new restaurant.

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"Actually, the first idea I had was something called 101 Uses For Your Murdered Sister," reflects Rebecca Peyton. "I sat on the bus and wrote down all the things that I'd had the chance to do because of the fact that Kate had been murdered."

We are sitting in a vaulted, panelled space – part attic, part theatre – above the dining room of west London's Frontline Club. Downstairs, in an artlessly arranged display case, a single black-and-white photograph of Rebecca's sister Kate is perched, surrounded by a clutter of unmarked mementos.
Kate Peyton, a successful journalist and senior producer at the BBC's Johannesburg bureau, was shot dead five years ago in Mogadishu, Somalia. A renowned voice of reason in the field, she had, it subsequently emerged, accepted the posting against her better judgement. Emails to her fiancé, with whom she was poised to embark on a quieter life away from the cut-and-thrust of foreign postings, betray a distressing distrust for the job at hand. "I am drowning," she wrote in one. Shortly before her deployment, she had been called into a meeting with the bureau chief, Milton Nkosi, who criticised her for her "lack of focus".

Within hours of the event, Kate's death was being reported around the world. Inevitably, friends and acquaintances who could not be warned in time learned of the killing via the impersonal medium of the television screen – something that was both a blessing and a curse for her family. "There is this very strange nature of it seeing it on the news and having people phone you," recalls Rebecca. "It gives it a kind of affirmation: this event is huge for me and it has an appropriate size. But then there was no chance to fulfil that desire for it not to be true. There was never any place for it not to be happening. And as a result, I still don't quite engage with the news media like I did."

What followed was a very public inquest. Why, it was asked, was Kate put at risk? Why was she feeling under pressure at the time? It's the sort of self-exorcism that the BBC does so well, though this one was without that characteristic knuckle-gnawing of the post-Sachsgate corporation. Instead, Kate's bosses remained defiant. The horror of it – of losing a sister to a murderous bullet, of having the news, sensational as it was, being reported on the television, on the radio, in the papers and then of having the whole thing dragged out in a courtroom – is almost impossible to imagine. How do you cope with something like that?

To their immense credit, Kate's family threw themselves into campaigning for more rigorous checks on journalistic risk – the sort of constructive activity that frequently follows such public grievance, but which cannot account for the entire emotional response. For her part, Rebecca, the youngest of three children, experienced a sudden and profound burst of creative exuberance. "I wanted to go out dancing every weekend. I drank a lot more than before. I wanted to talk about things that mattered. And within days I was thinking, 'There's something for me to do here.'"

There was, and the result is Sometimes I Laugh Like My Sister, a one-woman play which Rebecca is currently staging at the Edinburgh Festival. Part memoir, part observational comedy, it reflects on the torrent of events unleashed on the Peyton family in the wake of Kate's death.

Our response to grief is a curious thing, so conditioned is it by social norms. Rebecca's reaction – the drinking, the dancing, the desire to express herself – is not really so very unusual. Still, it seems it wasn't quite what everyone around her was expecting.

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