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| Saturday, 22 January 2005 |
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London Calling Radio Aid Tony Blair took part in a special day of broadcasting as the UK's local radio network joined forces to help the victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami.
Blair has offered a guided tour of Number 10 and a book on the Building signed by all the living Prime Ministers. The winner of the auction will also be treated to a cup of tea and a chat with the PM, if he was at home. An estimated audience of up to 30 million listeners across 250 stations
are expected to tune in, making it the biggest ever UK radio audience. For better or for worse Britain is a nation of quarrellers - experts claim that British couples now argue more frequently than ever before. The marriage counselling group Relate is to launch an extensive survey into the 'modern row', have found, in their initial soundings, that long working hours, stiff mortgages and other financial worries as the main causes of conflict. Confused gender roles and unrealistic expectations about sex have also been blamed. According to clinical psychologist and author of Britain on the Couch Oliver James, rows between couples have grown because the once separate roles of men and women have become increasingly blurred. On the other hand, Dr Elizabeth Map stone, an associate fellow of the
British Psychological Society and author of War on Words claims
"argument is a really area in a relationship - if you aren't allowed
to express your views, one person effectively ends up held as a
psychological prisoner. Argument can actually make a relationship richer
because you learn to appreciate each other as individual human
beings." Tagging mothers Ministers have bowed to pressure from the campaign group Fathers 4 Justice by including a plan for electronic tagging in a draft Bill on measures to enforce access to children. The law, as it stands, has empowered judges to send a parent who breaks a court order to prison or to fine them but they are often reluctant to jail mothers who flout access orders because it would ultimately penalize the children. Other measures under consideration include community service and curfews that will reflect the displeasure of the court. While the changes would apply to both genders, the bulk of the 4,000 a year who defy access orders are mothers. Gary Burch, a spokesman for Fathers 4 Justice said: "I haven't
seen my two daughters for four years. The courts won't enforce the access
orders... there is a growing number of people who aren't prepared to walk
away from their children. I don't understand why we won't condemn the man
who walks away from his kids but we will condemn a man who tries to have a
say in their lives..." Marriage bans Foreign nationals can no longer register their marriages in the London Borough of Richmond. The Home Office has removed a number of register offices from its official list in a bid to wipe out sham marriages. Although non-British nationals will still be able to register births and deaths, they will have to travel further a field to tie the knot. Richmond's Superintendent Registrar, Win Whiting said that they have enough procedures in place to weed out bogus applicants and this new eligibility criterion would lose at least 28% of her business. "A lot of our couples are from America, South Africa and Australia" she said, "we are welcoming them to the Borough but then saying 'sorry, you can't get married here' we are extremely disappointed and have lost our appeal to get the decision overturned." The news has sparked outcries from Richmond's political leaders: who
believe the Register Office should be open to all constituents. Memories of a lost homeland George Szirtes, who mastered English after being brought to Britain as a refugee when Soviet-led troops crushed the uprising in his homeland Hungary in 1956, has won the TS Eliot award for Poetry, this week. He beat nine other contenders to take the coveted award with a collection which has echoes of regret for his lost homeland, it includes the lines: the lost fireflies of a state/in its dotage or birth pangs. The judges praised his work as a "brilliantly virtuosic collection of deeply felt poems concerned with the personal impact of the dislocations and betrayals of history." "I have never actually tried to be a foreign writer, I wanted to be an English one - the success might lie in the failure" he said "... my first great literary experience was in fact Eliot, I had read many other poets before him but in The Waste Land, I found a landscape that corresponded to a certain element of my own life..." Poetry Book Society |
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Commercial stations across the country have created Radio Aid, with
celebrity DJs hosting programmes that will include auctions, pledges and
competitions.
