Oppoice

Funny how some animals exert a powerful fascination over us, even though their impact upon our lives may be incidental or even non-existent. Such is clearly the case with the mole, which has featured strongly in the media in the past week, after reports that mole numbers are soaring as a result of the ban on strychnine as a mole poison.

It's as if all we needed was an excuse to talk about the little fellow, and we couldn't stop; and reading the various accounts it struck me that there was something primally absorbing about this small insectivore, which most people never set eyes on.

Partly, of course, it was the references to mole-catchers, now increasingly in demand as expanding numbers of moles seem to be throwing up their unkempt molehills across ever more pristine lawns. The fact that mole-catchers still exist (and indeed, are organised in the British Traditonal Molecatchers' Register (call-outs to whose members have trebled in the past two years) leaves us at once delighted and incredulous, as if a curtain is being lifted on a corner of life which seems far too comical to have a real existence. There cannot be many modern occupations which seem more like a satirical invention, a throwback to a music-hall vision of a countryside full of yokels wearing moleskin trousers making corn dollies, or even a Mozart opera vision of what rural life is like – "Enter Popo the Mole-catcher, carrying a spade."
Yet there is something more basic, it seems to me, about our fascination with Talpa europea. I first got a feel for it many years ago when I read, and was much taken with, a short poem by Andrew Young, the Scottish-born clergyman who was one of the "Georgian" nature poets at the start of the 20th century, but went on to develop a more independent style (and also to become a captivating prose writer on the natural world – next time you're in a second-hand bookshop, scour the shelves for his A Prospect of Flowers, 1944).

The poem is called simply: "To A Dead Mole". Coming across a diminutive mole corpse, Young addresses himself to it, realising what a full and vivid life the animal had led beneath the ground, not only digging, but fighting and loving, hunting and feeding, and makes the point that for the mole to make the mound of a molehill, was the mole equivalent of a human digging a hole. And then he says:

What wonder now that being dead

Your body lies here stout and square

Buried within the blue vault of the air?

I sat up with a start when I first read that. It was like suddenly seeing part of the world in a completely different way, and shows what's at the heart of our mole-fascination: in living out their lives underground, they invert the natural order of things. "Underground" has long been a place of nightmares, in our imagination the domain of beasts that will emerge from the depths and drag us back down with them; but as moles are not threatening, or at worst, a bit of a pest, instead of dread they trigger our wonder with their upside-down lives, lived out almost entirely in the dark.

drive from www.independent.co.uk

Homeowners who bought at the height of the housing market face another four years of negative equity, according to a forecast published today.

People who bought a property in England in 2007 will have to wait until 2014 before emerging from negative equity, according to the National Housing Federation.

Independent forecasts in the study Home Truths 2010 have indicated that people who bought at the height of the boom paid on average £216,800, and this will have risen to £226,900 by 2014. The report predicted a 22 per cent rise in house prices over a five-year period to 2014, fuelled by an under-supply of new housing.

In 2009-10, it said, work started on just 87,360 new homes in England, producing only enough homes for a third of the new households forming each year.

The federation fears that an "entire generation" of people would be locked out of the housing market as a result of high house prices.

It adds that the shortage of social housing will leave those shut out of the home ownership market with "little realistic chance" of obtaining a social home. More than 1.76 million households, the equivalent of 4.5 million people, were on social housing waiting lists in 2009, a 23 per cent increase in the last five years, according to its figures.

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The health benefits of eating extra fruits and vegetables are well established: for years, children have been told that an apple a day will keep the doctor away.

But now, scientists have identified a diet promoting a much wider range of foods, including fish, poultry and nuts, that they say is much more effective at cutting the risk of heart attacks.

The Dash (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) dieting plan reduces the chances of suffering from heart disease by 18 per cent over 10 years, compared with an average American diet. People who simply up their consumption of fruits and vegetables see an 11 per cent decreased risk, a study shows.

The plan, also recommended by the American Heart Association, emphasises consumption of low-fat dairy products, whole grains, poultry, fish and nuts as well as fruits and vegetables. It also calls for a reduction in fats, red meat, sweets, and sugary drinks.

Dr Marilyn Glenville, a nutritionist, explained that the high intake of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, poultry, fish and nuts, combined with relatively low-fat dairy products and less sugar and red meats, would help to decrease the levels of cholesterol in the body. In turn, that would reduce the chances of heart disease, she said.

"Cholesterol causes a problem when it oxidises in the body and the antioxidants in fruits and vegetables prevent that from happening," she said. "People should try to eat as many different colours as possible: they need to eat a rainbow." She said that eating low-fat dairy products would "limit the damage" caused by cholesterol.

Dr Glenville also explained that the whole grains recommended would provide fibre, "which mixes with cholesterol in the intestine, helping to push it out of the body". She added that the relatively slow breakdown of whole grains "maximise their cholesterol- and blood glucose-reducing effects".

She added: "Poultry, fish and nuts do not have as much saturated fat as red meats do, they also contain more Omega-3, which controls inflammation of the arteries and, in some cases, of the heart itself. That inflammation, along with cholesterol, is often the cause of heart disease. Sugary drinks and sweets have the opposite effect."

Nisa Maruthur, who co-authored the study, said: "The research would seem to suggest that eating a more balanced diet is important to reducing the risk of heart disease, but don't underestimate the value of fruits and vegetables."

drive from www.independent.co.uk

A French daredevil climber who has scaled skyscrapers around the world was arrested in Sydney yesterday after climbing a 57-storey building and into the arms of waiting police.

Alain Robert, 48, who is also known as the French Spider-Man, was taken into police custody when he reached the top of the 57-storey Lumiere Building in central Sydney yesterday morning. He took 20 minutes to scale the 495ft-tall building using just his bare hands and without safety equipment, cheered on by a crowd of about 100 onlookers.

"It's a wonderful achievement," his agent, Max Markson, told reporters. "He's the best at what he does. I'm sad he's been arrested, but hopefully he'll get out soon and we can have some champagne."

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The Wei Li Gong Hui methodist church in Jinfeng town, Fujian province, China. Photograph: Dan Chung for the Guardian

Ever since Deng Xiaoping's relaxation of the Chinese Communist party's (CCP) suppression of religious practice in the late 1970s, Christianity has flourished in China. This has been an unexpected phenomenon, as it has been a story largely unheralded by the western media. While figures are patchy, it is estimated that the Christian missionaries (of whom the first were the Nestorians as far back as the Tang dynasty in the seventh century) that were expelled from the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 left behind about half a million people baptised – the majority of whom were Catholics. Today, estimates of Christians range between 40 million and 100 million.

Mao Zedong's cultural revolution banned all forms of religious expression, driving Christians underground into "house churches". After the cultural revolution, realising the potential dangers of such uncontrolled practices, the CCP reinstated the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) and formed the China Christian Council as the formal registered organisations of Chinese Protestants, as well as the Catholic equivalent – the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association. The latter, critically, has no formal links with the Vatican, in large part due to CCP fears of western meddling.

During this period, house churches boomed in popularity. As the New York Times correspondent Nicholas Kristof noted, initially popular among the peasantry, Christianity's reach has extended towards the cities and the wealthy and intellectual Chinese over the last decade.

The reasons for this boom are twofold. The first is that the Chinese have found Christianity to be a stabilising belief system amid a dramatically changing socioeconomic landscape, which had its previous religious traditions crushed by Maoism and its values questioned after Tiananmen Square. And, secondly, with its obvious western heritage, the rise of Christianity may be linked to a subconscious attack on the norms and values espoused by the PRC – rather like South Korea in the 1980s.

However what is most surprising is the CCP's recent policy of actively funding and supporting state-sponsored Christian belief in China, as reported by the BBC earlier this week. According to the director general for the state administration for religious affairs, Wang Zuo An, this is due to the CCP's belief "that it should respect and protect religious belief".

This state-sponsored investment includes building Protestant and Catholic seminaries, funding academic studies into the role of religion in China, and donating land and part-financing the construction of the largest state-sanctioned church in China (for an expected 5,000 worshippers). According to Wang, there are now around 23m official Protestants in China (members of the TSPM), and that "Christianity is enjoying its best period of growth in China".

Yet this all sits rather uneasily with a state that does not allow Christians to be members of the Communist party and whose police, the Public Security Bureau, still frequently break up house church meetings (though with considerable inconsistency from province to province). According to the US group, China Aid Association, from 2005 to 2006, 1,958 Chinese Christians were arrested by the state.

The likelihood is that this policy of "accommodation" is a result of the CCP's past experiences with underground religious organisations and its acknowledgement of the potential economic prosperity that Christianity can bring. In the first instance, it would appear that conscious of the disastrously counterproductive suppression of the "spiritual movement" Falun Gong in the 1990s, the CCP believes that the threat caused by unregistered house churches is best neutralised by bringing Christianity under the auspices of the state.

drive from www.guardian.co.uk

We all like to think we have the power to make our own ethical choices when we shop; that our personal decision to buy Fairtrade or free-range will make a difference. But what if we don't have that choice? What if, regardless of our best intentions, we are not given the option to choose sustainably?

Enter palm oil. It's ubiquitous. It's in the margarine we spread on our toast, the shampoo we washed our hair with and in the tyres of the transport that brought us to work.

Palm oil is perhaps the ultimate miracle product. It's high-yielding, versatile, good for our health and cholesterol-free. It is also powering many of the emerging economies of south-east Asia – in Indonesia alone it employs 2 million people.

But if it's a miracle, it's one with devastating side effects. Palm oil plantations are destroying forests and peat lands and playing havoc with ecosystems and biodiversity. Deforestation costs anything between $2-5tn dollars a year and causes 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

So while palm oil feeds economies, it's also irrevocably damaging them. As demand for it grows, in Europe and in the burgeoning economies of India, China and the rest of the world, we will all start paying the unaffordable environmental costs.

We need to find a way to reap the benefits of palm oil while managing the costs.

Environmental and development charities have been arguing the case for sustainable palm oil for years. Many businesses now have targets for when all of the palm oil they use will be sustainable – many, but by no means all. In this, the first ever International Year of Biodiversity, it's time to do something about it.

So today, in front of an international business audience, I'm announcing that, starting next month, we will begin the process of mapping the palm oil supply chain to the UK. Working with businesses and the public sector we aim to find out what we're using palm oil for, where we are getting it from and if it's sustainable.

What we find will help us work with industry and NGOs alike to produce a plan to help shift Britain's sourcing of palm oil to a sustainable footing. This is a milestone step in the right direction but commitments from other major international markets are still lacking – less than 4% of the global supply of palm oil is certified from sustainable sources.

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The loaves of bread lining the shelves might be warm and soft to the touch. But despite appearances, many supermarkets use their "in-store bakeries" merely to warm up bread made in industrial units hundreds of miles away.

Just how much bread is made elsewhere is revealed today in a ruling by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) against Tesco. It judged that Britain's biggest supermarket was wrong to suggest its bread was baked from scratch, when most of its stores had done little more than pop near-finished loaves into the oven.

Only 504 of Tesco's 2,362 UK stores baked their bread from scratch – while the overwhelming number of its "in-store bakeries", 1,288, engaged in re-heating, the ASA discovered.

Tesco's discomfort will have been heightened by the fact that the complaint was made by a new campaign demanding "real bread." Part of the Sustain food and farming pressure group, the Real Bread Campaign says most shop-bought loaves are a mix of hidden additives, cheap fats and short fermentation.

They have attacked the performance of "in-store" bakeries which, along with butchery and fishmongery counters, are a way for supermarkets to demonstrate their stores offer all the benefits of a traditional high street under one roof.

Critics claim these areas do not always match the high standards of specialist independent traders.

Supermarket fishmongers slabs, for instance, often sell thawed frozen food that may have been caught 10 days previously, rather than bought that morning at the docks. Meat counters sell foreign beef and pork and produce is often butchered elsewhere, although Morrisons claims it is unique among the "big four" stores in processing 90 per cent of its meat "in-house".

While market stalls generally source regional British vegetables from local wholesale markets, supermarkets truck fresh produce hundreds of miles around the country to central depots, then out to branches.

drive from www.independent.co.uk

It is the first month of spring and – theoretically – the cold weather should now be subsiding. A larger choice of produce is becoming available and food no longer needs to be quite so heavy to sustain us through the day. Salad is often thought of as dull, one-dimensional and inconsequential, but this needn't be the case. Put together with thought, salads comprising several ingredients and combining seasonal produce are a course in themselves. Think balance: sweet, salty, sharp and always with a crunch. There are no rules, just use your imagination...

Salads should not be served cold from the fridge; room temperature is a perfect way to experience purer, subtler tastes. And it is essential that salad should be dressed just before serving, so that both its flavour and texture are experienced at their very best.

Celeriac rémoulade with Parma ham

Celeriac is nutty and sweet, and the depth and richness of this dressing beautifully balances the smokiness of the ham. A scattering of walnuts strewn over at the last minute completes the dish. Serve as a starter, or as a light lunch accompanied by some crusty, peasant-style bread.

Serves 6

For the dressing

1 tbsp Dijon mustard
4 tbsp crème fraîche
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 celeriac
24 very fine slices of prosciutto
A handful of walnuts, roughly chopped
A few sprigs of parsley

Put the mustard in a bowl and stir in the crème fraîche. Add a small pinch of salt and a couple of grindings of black pepper. Set aside while you prepare the rest of the salad.

Using a sharp knife, cut away the outer layer of the celeriac, cut the remainder into eighth-inch rounds and then into fine batons. Spoon over the dressing and toss together lightly but thoroughly – your fingers are the best tools. Place a little dressed celeriac on to each plate, followed by a slice of prosciutto, and continue to layer. Scatter over the walnuts, a little very finely chopped parsley and serve.

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Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan were old, half-forgotten names for a new generation of theatre-goers and practitioners, yet recent revivals of their best early work – written when both men were in their late twenties – have been acclaimed as period master works with a biting, contemporary appeal.

Coward's Private Lives (1930), starring Kim Cattrall and Matthew Macfadyen, brushed up as a very modern, high-octane bout of marital bickering among the society hedonists; while Rattigan's After the Dance (1939), starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Nancy Carroll, and still playing at the National Theatre, anatomised a similar social milieu of Bright Young Things as the drink dries up, the money runs out, and the war looms.

The best and brightest of our new young playwrights emerging at the Royal Court hark back, unconsciously no doubt, much more to Coward and Rattigan than to, say, their immediate predecessors Mark (Shopping and Fucking) Ravenhill and Sarah (Blasted) Kane or even, beyond them, to David Hare and John Osborne. The question is: will these new plays be revived in 50 years' time? And if not, does it matter?

One thinks of Polly Stenham, whose That Face (2007) caused a very Noël Coward-type of sensation in its portrait of a dysfunctional family. The quasi-incestuous relationship at its centre was a drink-and-drug-addled retread of the mother-and-son meltdown in Coward's The Vortex (1924), a play whose frankly outrageous dialogue Kenneth Tynan once described as not so much stilted as high-heeled.

That Face didn't become a commercial smash when it transferred to the West End, as The Vortex, Coward's first scandalous success, certainly did. But times have changed, and Stenham, who followed up last year with a terrific second play, Tusk Tusk, about three middle-class children abandoned to their own devices by an unreliable mother, could certainly become a "name" dramatist when she gets out in the world a bit more.

The point is she can write, and she can also write good roles, which is always one guarantee of longevity: the Lilian Braithwaite maternal role in The Vortex is easily matched by the Lindsay Duncan one in That Face. Osborne's Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger (1956) remains as essential a hoop to go through for a leading young actor as Hamlet, while David Hare's Plenty (1978), for instance, was reignited 11 years ago by Cate Blanchett as Susan Traherne, the British war-time espionage agent who cannot learn to inhabit the peacetime she helped to secure.

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