£172.5m acquisition by British Airways parent company consolidates airline's leading position at Heathrow airport

IAG chief executive Willie Walsh celebrated his airline's purchase of bmi on Friday by deriding his "humiliated" rival Richard Branson and challenging Virgin Atlantic to make good on its promises to provide short-haul services to Scotland.

Speaking after the deal was cleared by European competition authorities, Walsh said the news was great for Heathrow and Britain's economy. The £172.5m acquisition by the British Airways parent company was approved after the airline agreed to relinquish 14 landing slot pairs at Heathrow.

The merger still gives the airline an extra 42 slots and consolidates its leading position at the UK's biggest airport. Virgin, which had also hoped to buy bmi from its parent Lufthansa, had claimed the IAG takeover would inevitably mean less choice and diminished domestic services.

The European competition commissioner, Joaquín Almunia, said: "The commitments package includes an appropriate number of very sought-after slots at London Heathrow as well as far-reaching feeder arrangements as regards connecting passengers. We are therefore satisfied that the competitive dynamics will be maintained so as to ensure choice and quality of air services for passengers."

A delighted Walsh said IAG now had "the opportunity to really fulfil the potential we've always believed existed at Heathrow". He said the extra slots would allow the airline to serve new destinations, make Heathrow a better hub and strengthen the UK economy.

He said the deal would "secure the maximum number of jobs" at bmi, although he conceded many of the 2,000-plus staff would go. But he said: "Lufthansa were seriously considering shutting down the airline with the loss of all jobs. We'll engage now with bmi and their unions as soon as possible but inevitably there will be job losses."

Seven of the relinquished Heathrow slots must be sold to operators providing flights to Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Walsh challenged Virgin, which had warned that domestic services would be lost in a BA-bmi merger, to step in. He said Branson's airline, when still hoping to win bmi for itself, had pledged to Scottish politicians it would operate such flights. "I would expect Virgin to honour the commitments they have made. They have said they would start flights to Scotland. They now have the ideal opportunity."

IAG must also provide competitors with access to seats on its UK and European services, allowing airlines such as Virgin to book journeys for passengers who wish to transfer on to its long-haul flights. Walsh said: "It must be humiliating for Virgin and Branson to have to rely on the BA network to feed their traffic.

"It clearly demonstrates that the Virgin business model is not sustainable … they are reliant on their biggest rival's network."

Walsh said IAG would operate bmi's published schedule in the short-term but soon expand IAG's long-haul network, announcing new destinations in Asia.

On Thursday Branson had made a last-ditch appeal to the EU commission to scrutinise the deal further. However, Walsh said it had been a "very detailed" examination of competition concerns.

Ryanair also condemned the deal for what it called the "discriminatory" application of competition rules, complaining that it contrasted with the treatment of Ryanair's 2006 offer for Aer Lingus. Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary said: "While we have no objection to BA's acquisition of bmi, it will undoubtedly lead to higher fares and higher fuel surcharges … It also exposes again the commission's discrimination against Ryanair in its 2006 prohibition of our offer for Aer Lingus, an airline which accounts for less than 1% of EU air travel."

The baby boomers have been accused of stealing their children's future. Then they were hit with the 'granny tax'. Geraldine Bedell and Ed Howker join the age wars

They had free education, cheap housing and some even have final-salary pensions – and still the baby boomers complain about the "granny tax". Meanwhile, according to Financial Times research, twentysomethings will be the first generation who won't be better off than their parents. Geraldine Bedell, editor of Gransnet, and Ed Howker, co-author of Jilted Generation: How Britain has Bankrupted its Youth, discuss whether a generational war really has broken out.

Ed Howker: One of the dangerous things about this debate is that it's easy to reduce it to an old-versus-young battle. There are two points – why do young people feel they're in such a weak position in British society? I would argue that we've been colossally bad at planning Britain's long-term future. The second point is about if and how we transfer wealth. I don't want to go back to the 80s and before, when pensioner poverty was grotesque, but there are a lot of asset-rich pensioners who argue for the extension of their benefits, and I don't feel that's responsible when big chunks of our society, particularly young people – one million unemployed, a third of under-30s living with their parents – really need help at this point, not pensioners.

Geraldine Bedell: What worries me is the language that is often used, like "burden", "selfish", "greedy". If you scratch the surface, what you uncover is a lot of ageism. In terms of what older people contribute, one in three working mothers relies on grandparents for childcare, and the value of that has been estimated at £3.9bn. It's been estimated that grandparents who bring up their grandchildren, for whatever reason, are contributing £10bn to the economy in saved care costs. What we see on Gransnet is older people not only looking after their grandchildren, but looking after elderly parents as well. If someone in your family has dementia, who is it who pulls everything together? It's usually a woman in mid-life. I would resist the idea that the boomer generation is parasitic.

EH: But the case has been made pretty conclusively that as a cohort they have done very well. The question is to what extent they do well at the expense of younger people. Take housing – the average age of first-time buyers is now 44 and as we all know, house prices are outrageously high. There are all kinds of reasons – the growth of speculation and the buy to let market – but the fundamental reason is planning has been restricted in Britain and that pushed up value. That has been extraordinarily good for the boomer generation, but it's disastrous for their kids. Ageism exists, but it's towards young people, too.

GB: No parent or grandparent feels it's us against them. People are worried about youth unemployment, not least because it affects our kids and grandchildren. Housing is in a terrible state and politicians are unable to do anything about it because it would detrimentally affect everyone who is an owner-occupier. My generation doesn't want to sell its houses because we haven't got proper pensions, we haven't got anywhere else to put the money without its value declining, and we face the possibility of having to pay for care. There are a lot of great stresses that are tied up in the housing market that affect my generation. It's about policy, and also about Britain's national decline. If you are a young person in Brazil or China, things probably look pretty good. Since Thatcher, politicians have found few ways to talk to us other than in terms of "freedom", and what we need to rediscover are more old-fashioned values – care, compassion, fairness.

EH: I agree. There are many reasons why old and young people should find common cause. Why does the government spend time encouraging 19-year-olds to start businesses when the people with assets and experience, who could start and fund new businesses and create employment, are much older?

GB: I would like to see more internships for older people, and ways out of one kind of employment into another. I'd like to see a movement of older people helping younger people and that might take all sorts of forms, like tithing part of your winter fuel allowance if you can afford to, or mentoring. Your argument focuses on jobs and housing, and I think it negates a lot of good things that have happened for your generation – if you are gay it's easier now, women have more opportunities, the opportunities thrown up by the internet mean it's an exciting time to be young. My generation wanted to remake the world as a better place, and what I hear from yours is "we want a proper career and a place on the housing ladder" and it's a slightly bourgeois argument. Which is not to say you shouldn't have a place on the housing ladder and jobs.

EH: How dare you dismiss jobs and housing as bourgeois! [laughs] They're the fundamental underpinning of human, civilised society.

GB: It was a joke.

EH: But it's a line I've heard a lot. Housing and jobs aren't middle-class concerns. Lives don't even get started if instead of having employment, young people have long periods of unpaid internships or they have to spend the first 10 years of their adult lives with their parents. If neoliberalism is a world of freedom, where we are all invested in our economy but find the economy is one that huge chunks of the population can't take part in, then it's failed.

GB: One of the troubling things that has happened in my lifetime is that now a lot of grandparents or parents will fund their grandchildren getting on to the housing ladder, and that entrenches inequality. This isn't about old versus young, it's about rich versus not so rich. I was a child of the welfare state and I was grateful; I can't see my children having the same opportunities if they had come from the same background I did.

EH: This is the point. It's about how that inequality gets passed on. If there are lots of jobs and cheap housing, as there were in the 1950s and 60s, it doesn't matter so much who your parents are. I wonder whether a universal winter fuel payment is the best use of limited resources. Wouldn't it be better for the government to build public housing, for example? Are there other chunks of welfare which end up not helping the poorest?

GB: I think older people would buy into that if the argument is properly made. What you saw with the "granny tax" was money taken from older people and given to the richest. You can't expect people not to protest. Similarly with winter fuel payments, if you are on a fixed income and your annuity payments are affected, of course you are going to cling on to every last penny.

Chief executive of British Gas's parent company is also awarded an £848,000 bonus that will vest in three years' time

The boss of Centrica, the parent company of British Gas, was handed a potential £4.3m last year as long-term performance-related deals paid out.

As gas and electricity prices rocketed for cash-strapped Britons, the chief executive, Sam Laidlaw, was paid a salary and benefits of £1.3m in 2011. In the same year, he was able to cash in shares worth £3m, awarded as bonuses dating back to 2008. Centrica argued that figure included investment shares, which have been counted as part of Laidlaw's salary and bonuses in previous years. Discounting those shares, Laidlaw could have cashed in shares to the value of £2.5m in 2011.

A spokesman said: "Although they vested in 2011, those bonuses were based on performance during the previous three years, which was a period of very strong growth for the company."

On top of this multimillion-pound payout, Laidlaw was also awarded a bonus worth £848,000 in shares that will vest in three years' time.

Last August, British Gas raised electricity prices by 16% and gas prices by 18%, although it has since cut electricity prices by 5%, while leaving gas prices unchanged. In February, Centrica faced renewed criticism over household energy prices when it reported pre-tax profits of £2.4bn from revenues of £22.8bn for 2011.

The company is changing its bonus structure.

Lesley Knox, head of Centrica's remuneration committee, said in the annual report that Centrica would shift the focus of targets for bonus payouts away from earnings per share and towards other measures. "The committee felt that the scheme was driven exclusively by financial metrics and did not acknowledge the other key drivers of sustained performance, including customer perceptions and service levels, employee engagement and health and safety," she wrote.

Centrica will also introduce a means of clawing back deferred bonuses, "if it is subsequently discovered that results have been achieved by behaviour which fails to reflect the governance and values of the business", Knox wrote.

At some point an acceptable settlement may be available, but the war which Argentina provoked narrowed everybody's options

There is no more irrational influence on human affairs than numerology. Why the mere passage of a certain number of years should prompt reflection, trigger memories, and even sometimes drive policy is ultimately rather mysterious. So it is with the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands, the 30th anniversary of which falls on Monday. Partly in anticipation of that moment, the Kirchner government in Buenos Aires has been working itself into a lather from late last year, attempting to organise a ban on Falklands-flagged vessels in Latin American ports and releasing a report on Argentinian military mistakes in 1982 in a way that may suggest it wants the idea of force to be bobbing about, albeit distantly, in the background.

Britain added fuel to the fire by dispatching Prince William to the islands in his role as an RAF pilot, as well as by sending a particularly powerful warship to the South Atlantic. Prince William is now home, and the British government says the ship is on normal rotation. But the row sputters on, half serious and half comic, in a manner characteristic of the Falklands from the beginning.

Those who actually fought in the Falklands do indeed have a reason this time to be specially conscious of a conflict which in many cases has profoundly shaped their lives. Men who were in their 20s then are now into middle age, asking with particular urgency why they were spared when others fell, and why their countries sent them to war. Each month a special flight from Argentina lands another group of veterans at Mount Pleasant airport where, before setting off to try to find their old foxholes in the bleak turf, they can take a sideways glance at the military arrangements supposed to prevent any fresh Argentinian descent on the islands. Mount Pleasant is the pivot of a system supposed to funnel reinforcements of men and planes to the islands. Nobody knows whether it would work, and nobody, no doubt including the Argentinians, wants to find out.

This newspaper was opposed to a military solution 30 years ago, arguing for a diplomatic settlement up until the last moment when it was possible to do so, in part because the cost and the risk were deemed too high, and in part because it did not believe the Falklands would be viable even if we won. We wrote of "the bleak, costly and intractable future that faces the people of the Falklands after the Union Jack flutters once more from Port Stanley". That was wrong: the Falklands have in fact enjoyed a rather prosperous time since the war, with a substantial income from fishing and riches ahead in the shape of oil revenues, and with only limited harassment by Argentina. The Falklands are viable, perhaps not for ever, but well into the future. As a result, Britain has to shoulder a defence burden that is less than crippling but more than nominal, suffers some diplomatic disadvantages in Latin America, and retains access – how much is not yet clear – to broader South Atlantic resources.

The charge of colonialism is a red herring. The central colonial acts in the Americas were the dispossession of native peoples and the enslavement of Africans, begun by metropolitan masters and continued by white settlers. What followed in the shape of territorial rows between settlers was akin to a quarrel among thieves and deserves no moral stature.

The Falklands are an anomaly, but far from the only anomaly in the Americas. One has only to mention Puerto Rico, Greenland, or the Carribbean and Canadian islands that are provinces of France or parts of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, to show that the American political map is not a tidy one. At some point a settlement acceptable to all may be available, but the war which Argentina provoked 30 years ago narrowed everybody's options. Its consequences, including the continued existence of a separate Falklands political entity, will be with us for a long time to come.

Man who tore off his trousers and clambered over press photographers towards stage is cleared of any crime

A streaker who gatecrashed the Turner prize award ceremony has been cleared of any crime.

Mark Roberts tore off his trousers and clambered over press photographers to make for the stage, just as celebrity photographer Mario Testino was about to announce Turner winner Martin Boyce's name at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. Testino paused, then said "wow, art is everywhere", as Roberts was bundled out.

Magistrates' chairman Ray Ashley told Roberts: "Although we do not find a criminal offence has been committed, we do not condone your behaviour."

This was the opposition's seat to lose. It should have been looking to increase a majority, which instead disappeared

George Galloway is given to hyperbole, but he did not exaggerate in boasting that the remarkable result he had achieved in Bradford West defied all recent precedent. Byelections are routinely an opportunity for insurgent outsiders, but few shoot from absolutely nowhere to victory. Fewer still claim an outright majority of the poll. Even Shirley Williams didn't quite manage that when she took Crosby with 49% of the ballot in the first flush of excitement which accompanied the 1981 birth of the SDP. You can ridicule Mr Galloway's talk of a "Bradford spring" whose sunlight will spread, but in one city, at least, he has broken the mould.

A cool reading of the numbers reveals that his Respect profited from losses made across the mainstream. Labour were indeed routed, but the Conservatives surrendered a slightly larger slice of the vote, haemorrhaging four votes for every five they had had in 2010. Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats, who – in the half century since their predecessor party's win at Orpington – have been the automatic choice for that insurgent outsider role, instead broke down at the starting line, forgoing their deposit.

Having paid little heed to this contest until it was too late, Westminster's tribes may now simply brush it off. They will reason that Respect is little more than a platform for Mr Galloway's noisy one-man band, a peculiar mix of Marxism and mosque that might thrive in a byelection but would not convince anyone in a wider contest. They will reason, too, that this is an unusual constituency, one of a tiny handful where half the population stem from minorities, where ethnic factors loomed so large that Labour lost votes here in 1997, even as it swept them up nationwide.

There is truth in all this, but it is a complacent analysis – which disrespects Bradford's voters. A failing war in Afghanistan is a special concern for the Muslim community, but it is unpopular more widely too. With the mainstream meekly united behind that lost cause, it is no surprise if voters hunt around for ragbag alternatives. Beyond that, the result indicates the depth of disillusion in one working-class seat at a time of austerity. That is a problem for all parties, of course, but most particularly for Labour.

Whatever the detail of the figures, this was the opposition's seat to lose. It should have been looking to increase a majority, which instead disappeared. Just before the budget, polls were suggesting Labour had the edge – until adjustment was made for its supporters' reluctance to turn out, at which point the Conservatives took the lead. After a fortnight of blunders, the Tories' own standing has tanked. But the lesson of Bradford is that the Labour alternative is still dogged by the opposite of enthusiasm.

Sunscreen, sunhats, barbecues and iced drinks: can it really be March? Scotland broke its highest March temperature record three times over three days, peaking at 23.6C in Aboyne in Aberdeenshire on Tuesday 27 March, making it hotter than Athens, Bermuda, Cairo, Lisbon and Rome. During a more average March Scotland would expect temperatures of around 10C.

Meanwhile in the US over 14,000 warm temperature records have been broken. "It has been an extraordinary month, with some of the most surprising records being when night-time low temperatures were warmer than the previous record for warm daytime temperatures," said Jake Crouch, a climate scientist at the National Climatic Data Center in the US. For example the night-time minimum temperature in Rochester, Minnesota on 18 March was 16.1C, beating the previous day-time high of 15.6C.

So what's behind this "summer" in March? The answer is a very strong ridge of high pressure, which sat over the US first, and then moved across the Atlantic to hover over the UK. In each case the high pressure ridge drew warm air from the south, while barring entry to other weather systems. For Aberdeenshire, temperatures were pushed up further by the Föhn effect – winds that have been warmed by losing their moisture as they pass over the mountains.

However the US is experiencing a hard freeze now, and that chilly weather system is reaching the UK.

Design a new highway code, bin the rules that most infuriate you. Invent ones that would smooth journeys, save fuel and lives

Here's a game to pass the time while you inch forward in the petrol queue this weekend. Design a new highway code. Bin the rules that most infuriate you. Invent ones that would smooth journeys, save fuel and even lives. Undertaking, for example. If only it was allowed, it would end all that aggressive tailgating, defuse the frustration of being stuck behind the only driver who thinks 55mph is the appropriate dual carriageway maximum, and keep drivers alert. Boris Johnson wants cyclists to be allowed to turn left through red lights, as French cyclists can when turning right. Plenty of campaigners would like a blanket 30mph limit on rural lanes, or 20mph in urban streets. The fear is always the chaos of changes. But last week, New Zealand – which has the third highest car ownership in the world – abandoned its mystifying give way to the right rule. Although prior surveys suggested that hardly anyone understood what was happening, in the event the most exciting report it provoked was "mild confusion" in Tarankai. But changing the give way rule – so often urged on France, where technically it is still in force – is nothing compared with changing which side of the road you drive on. Back in the 60s, a north European rush to the right occurred almost without incident. In 2009, Samoans, instructed to make the opposite change, feared catastrophe. But the move went without a hitch. Maybe there's a lesson here about shared space and common responsibility that could be applied more widely?

We called ourselves a co-operative. We all had equal say, pay and power. But no idea how to foster co-operative working

I love the idea of workers' co-operatives, I really love it. But one tiny, nagging matter tarnishes my ardour: I used to work for one, and actually, it was a bit of a nightmare. The offices of City Limits magazine, a London listings title set up in 1981 in opposition to Time Out, seethed with victimhood, resentment, factionalism, incompetence and silliness.

I have a gut-wrenching memory of one nominally important meeting to discuss ways of improving the magazine's saleability. Someone came up with the brainwave of "better writing" and within no time it was put to the vote. The editorial team – three of us – and the publisher, argued that "better writing" wasn't something that could be achieved by ballot. Nevertheless, the co-op voted in favour, with the four of us folding our arms in furious abstention. No one voted against "better writing".

More annoying was the fact that, considering our slender resources, the magazine had excellent writing. Contributors at the time included the Guardian's Suzanne Moore, Jenny Turner of the London Review of Books, Sean O'Neill, now crime editor of the Times, education campaigner Melissa Benn, plus other successful journalists, critics, editors and authors too numerous to mention. The publisher was Tony Ageh, who went on to launch the Guardian's Guide, inspire the Guardian's website and co-invent the iPlayer. He's now a controller at the BBC.

I knocked out a feature myself most weeks, in my "spare time", but from that moment on started wondering why the hell I bothered. The real problem with the magazine was unreliable and incomplete listings – which was a fairly fundamental difficulty. Unfortunately, "better listings compilation" could be voted for no more than "better writing" could. Oddly enough, the co-op did not stagger on for too long after that ludicrous, comedy gathering.

Only now, 25 years on, have I recognised with any clarity the simple thing that was so wrong. We called ourselves a workers' co-operative. We all had equal pay, equal power and an equal say. But we had no idea how to promote co-operative working relationships. In his new book, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Co-operation, the sociologist Richard Sennett offers some of the pointers we needed so desperately then. "The most important fact about hard co-operation," writes Sennett, "is that it requires skill." We did nothing to identify, let alone nurture skill, and therefore had no concept of what embedding it in our precious organisation might entail. Because, despite the frustrations, it was truly precious, that co-op, a wonderful failure to have been part of.

Sennett pinpoints three essential elements: listening skills, subjective expression and empathetic skills. None of this was much in evidence at the co-op: on the contrary, people wanted to be listened to, not listen; voting really just gave subjective expression the appearance of being objective; and saw no need for empathy since, well, everyone was constitutionally equal and therefore in exactly the same boat.

The poor co-op then was quite anti-co-operative. No wonder tensions developed. But the good thing is that I have seen groups in action that employ the skills Sennett advises. These are Alcoholics Anonymous groups, which above all require that people listen, and listen carefully, in order that they can hear things they can identify with, not contradict, and find the courage to say: "Yes. That's what it's like for me, too." The most self-destructive thing a person in an AA meeting can do, is listen for things that don't chime with her experience, things that arm her to say to herself: "These people aren't like me at all. I'm completely different to them. I have nothing in common with these losers."

Now, AA is not everyone's cup of tea. But that aspect of its practice – having a speaker who honestly describes their own experience and emotions, to whom everyone listens quietly, and with whom everyone has an opportunity afterwards to express any feelings of recognition and solidarity – is fantastically powerful and soothing, not least because in our competitive and adversarial world, such spaces are rarely available. A lot of people could help a lot of other people, not just addicts, by organising themselves into self-help forums that offered a structure for listening and being properly, respectfully listened to.

In fact, as Sennett points out so eloquently, political spaces are usually the opposite. Politicians will sometimes refer to their own experience, but to illustrate a belief or a policy, not as a catalyst for pure empathy. Politicians will conduct listening exercises, which inevitably consist of waiting until their interlocutor has finished talking, then offering "reassurance" of the "But, silly you, this thing you dislike will be for the best in the end, vote for me" sort. Politicians, however, hardly ever adopt subjective expression in which direct contradiction is studiously avoided in favour of wording that suggests a multiplicity of interpretations are valid, because the whole idea of politicians is that they can and should be nominated to represent huge, diverse swaths of the population single-handedly.

Because of this, Sennett is critical of the political left and right, both broad groups, he argues, that are obsessed with top-down policy. He wants to see bottom-up change, from the grassroots. The perennial problem is that professorial authors, even accessible ones like Sennett, are no more "of the grassroots" than the Guardian columnists who lark about with his ideas. Even the profession of a belief in society being organised from the bottom-up, can, in certain mouths, seem very top-down.

Still, I can't help feeling that this top-bottom, up-down, rich-poor, black-white, left-right dynamic is part of the problem. It's easy to sneer at those Tory slogans – "we're all in this together" and "the big society". But they're only vague truisms, uttered by people widely considered too privileged to have the right even to utter vague truisms. Maybe, above all, what humans need is to make an effort to start doing that standard AA exercise. Perhaps it would be good to stop listening out for, and holding fast to, the things that make us individual and different. Perhaps we need to focus on the things that we all have in common, that bind us and make us human; the things that make co-operation both crucial and sensible, beneficial to all involved. Probably best not to call it socialism again, though. That seems to put a lot of people off.

40 Days for Life activists outside British Pregnancy Advisory Service clinic in London challenged by demonstrators

It made a strange chorus: on the one side, a small crowd of Catholics, intoning the rosary and singing Ave Maria, while, a few metres away, a noisy gathering of campaigners banged drums, blew whistles and chanted slogans. The venue – a genteel Georgian square in the shadow of the British Museum, central London – was also perhaps unexpected.

But if the noisy standoff between hundreds of rival anti-abortion and pro-choice protesters on Friday night was peaceful and largely good-natured, it represented the latest salvo in an increasingly fraught battle over the issue, in what Britain's largest abortion provider has called "a new era" of challenges to abortion rights.

Activists from a group called 40 Days for Life have been holding daily prayer vigils in the square, outside a discreet clinic run by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS). The campaign group is part of a US-based anti-abortion network established in 2004, which has co-ordinated protests in at least 14 countries.

The group claims its protests, usually attended by only a handful of activists, are "legal, peaceful and prayerful". But BPAS was forced to call the police earlier this month after women complained of being filmed entering the clinic, and a man from the West Midlands has pleaded guilty to hacking into the BPAS website. Vigils have been held elsewhere outside clinics; 170 people from another US-affiliated group called Helpers of God's Precious Infants held a protest outside an east London clinic earlier this month.

40 Days for Life says it does not encourage filming members of the public, but has tweeted about a number of successful "turnarounds" – women who have been persuaded not to enter the clinic thanks to their protests, which often feature signs, candles and plastic model foetuses.

The vigil has attracted counter-demonstrations on Sundays, when the clinic is closed, by pro-choice campaigners, and last night's larger rally, attended by about 300 Catholics including Alan Hopes, the auxiliary bishop of Westminster, provoked a similar response from pro-choice activists, who outnumbered the praying protesters perhaps two to one. Hopes said he intended to make a "principled and peaceful statement of opposition to our society's 'culture of death".

Katy Ladbrook, who works in publishing, said: "I've been in the pro-choice movement for 10 years and I'm really worried about these people. Although they look really benign, sitting here praying, in the US they have closed down clinics with their activities."

Maureen Cooper said she had attended "to defend the most important piece of legislation that's been passed in my lifetime. I'm old enough to know what it was like in the days before choice and what happened to women then. I campaigned for the Steel bill [which legalised abortion in 1967] and I'm horrified that it's having to happen again."

A few metres away, Francisco-Javier Muñoz, a lawyer originally from Spain, was praying. "We are here to pray for the human lives that are being killed, and also for the mothers." What of the argument that their protest might intimidate or cause distress to vulnerable women? "I think that is their personal conscience causing them distress."

Michael D'Arcy said he had attended "just to stand in solidarity with unborn children, really". His partner Laura Crowley said: "I don't think it's proper to characterise this as a woman's issue. A lot of unborn babies are unborn women."

While a rowdy, at times almost carnivalesque protest took place alongside them, the anti-abortion protesters stood or kneeled and prayed quietly, some clutching rosary beads. A pregnant woman kneeled in prayer next to a barrier, clutching her belly.

Hopes left at 8pm, surrounded by a tight circle of protective supporters. He refused to answer questions but released a statement, saying that where women had been persuaded not to have abortions, it was "a demonstration of God's grace – an outcome to be welcomed".

Darinka Aleksic of Abortion Rights, one of the organisers of the counter-rally, said: "There's certainly been a change of climate. , one of the organisers of the counter-rally. "There's a lot of concern about an alliance of interest between the government, which is seeking to restrict the right to choice possibly by an act on the time limit, but certainly in restricting advice to women and, on the ground, anti-choice protests like this one. It was really important that we marked our opposition to what's going on."

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Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 31 March 1932

A newly born baby zebra, neglected by its mother, is being brought up on the bottle and seems likely to flourish. At first it was very weak and, according to its keeper, did the splits when it tried to stand, but after a drink or two more power crept into its legs. Zebras are very suspicious and wild. They must be sure that everything is all right before they venture into a new place, and when they are lassoed and roped they have been known to fight to the death.

In the reptile-house two young bearded lizards from Australia may be seen. If you tickle their heads they swell out the membrane under their chins. This gives them the appearance of having a dark round beard like a Rabbi, hence their name "Jew lizard". They are provided with prickles to discourage larger creatures from taking them in their mouths.

It was with the greatest difficulty that the Zoo authorities could discover the proper food for mastigures, but after a series of trials and errors marigolds and dandelions werefound to be the solution, so now the two new specimens from India are well provided for. Two mastigures in the old reptile-house refused food with great determination, until one day they saw a child peeling an orange, whereupon they went mad. It was supposed that they liked the colour, for although they would not eat the orange, they condescended to lick some persimmons, and eventually fell for marigolds. They need terrific heat, and lie on sand with the thermometer at 90deg. They are never seen to drink; apparently they are used to heavy dews, for they absorb water through their backs when the keeper sprinkles them.

Sumbawa, the Komodo Dragon, who was bitten by Sumba, has now discarded his bandage. As these giant lizards go for anything white, thinking it may be a white rat, the bandage had to be stained with friar's balsam to prevent Sumba nosing round it.

Twelve dingo puppies are on view, also an Anoa calf. It is only recently that the society has been successful in breeding these dwarf cattle. In the sanatorium are two newly arrived opossums, so rare that the Natural History Museum authorities have had to be consulted. Two beautiful young Goliath herons have arrived from Africa in perfect condition. The coloration now is inky purple, rusty reddish purple, and cream colour, but it will darken into a uniform inky colour as the birds grow older. A flock of flamingoes is destined for Whipsnade. They look brilliantly pink and white at present, but in time their rosy legs and dazzling plumage will become bleached and dimmed by this horrible climate.

His cooking is a famously multi-sensory experience. But Heston Blumenthal says he is no longer a temperature-obsessed workaholic, and hopes his Olympic-themed airline meals prove it

With his oversized glasses, closely cropped cranium and faintly mechanical gait, there is something of the Brains from Thunderbirds about Heston Blumenthal. And like Gerry Anderson's puppet, the celebrated proprietor of the Michelin-starred restaurant the Fat Duck radiates an obsession with scientific discovery.

"A counsellor friend of mine did say that I might be ADD," admits the 45-year-old. "I said, 'If I'm ADD then how can I have spent so much time and effort day in day out for so many years?' He replied, 'That's classic ADD. You have no patience for most things and then you find something you like and you go the other way.'"

Obsessive or not, Blumenthal's famously technical cooking appears to have survived a testing three years. In 2009, the restaurant was forced to close for six weeks after a vomiting bug, thought to be caused by the norovirus and linked to shellfish, affected 500 customers. Three years on, and despite the £180-per-person price tag, the waiting list for the tasting menu is back up to two months.

Last year he opened his first London restaurant, Dinner, at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, and has been employed for the past year by British Airways as part of their Great Britons programme to promote British talent in the year of the London Games. He is mentoring the Torquay-based, Michelin-starred chef Simon Hulstone to create four Olympic-themed menus that will be served to three million passengers on long-haul BA flights during the summer.

Handing responsibility for inflight menus to someone famous for difficult cooking might seem like a risky proposition, but Blumenthal – who also revamped roadside diner chain Little Chef's menus in 2009 – says he is enjoying it.

"I was fascinated," he says . "It's weird with aeroplane food. We kind of expect it to be bad. In the context of eating in the sky, if you paid six quid for most of that food in the pub, you'd send it back. But we happily sit on the plane, open these little containers, and still expect it to be – or at least hope it will be – a highlight of the trip. Hopefully, with the menus Simon and I have created, it will be the highlight of the trip." Curious diners can sample the menus from next week at a pop-up restaurant in Shoreditch.

Last year was also a time of personal upheaval for Blumenthal, who separated  from his wife Zanna, with whom he has three teenage children. His new partner is American actor-turned-cookery-writer Suzanne Pirret. He also lost his father. "My father passed away and that was really, really hard, and it was all happening at the same time that the Mandarin was opening. Things like that, you have to deal with deep. Really deep. It's much easier now, but of course, anything like that is going to affect focus."

"But I still have the drive. I still have the excitement. I still love doing what I do, and I'm really lucky to get up in the morning and want to go to work. And with the TV, the books, the restaurants and Waitrose, at any one point we have 600 dishes in development and many of those feed back into the restaurants, and that's where I get most excited."

As if to illustrate the point, he embarks on a rapid and astonishingly detailed explanation of the painstaking lengths he'll go to perfect every single dish, that culminates in the assertion that 72C (161F) is the only temperature at which to cook a lemon tart.

It's this level of molecular exactitude that Blumenthal is known for: not for him the more casual, homely approach to cooking promoted by some other celebrity chefs. Last year Marco Pierre White called Blumenthal's kitchen "a well-oiled production line, technically flawless" but lacking romance. Blumenthal turns pink when I bring this up and says: "I like to think my food is really emotional." He then recounts a story about one of his signature dishes, where diners listen to the sounds of breaking waves on an iPod while tucking into razor clams, shrimps and oysters.

Blumenthal's famously elaborate contrivance has won him admirers. Just three years after opening the Fat Duck in 1995 in a dilapidated 450-year-old former pub in Bray, Berkshire, came his first Michelin star. It received its third in 2004, and the best restaurant in the world prize in 2005 was followed by an OBE in 2006. Then came the UK Good Food Guide's top restaurant honour in 2007 and 2009, and the 2010 Bafta nomination for his Channel 4 show Heston's Feasts.

Success has brought the luxury of an extensive support network of talented chefs, experimental psychologists, cognitive scientists, neurologists, musicians and scriptwriters, collectively tasked with generating a superlative mutli-sensory experience. All of which is a million miles away from his early days.

"When we started I was working stupid hours," remembers Blumenthal, whose first paid work as a chef was at the Fat Duck.

"I worked 120 hours a week for eight years. That's 20 to 22 hours a day every day and one week I only got 15 hours sleep."

Surely such extreme sleep deprivation provoked an urge to attack strangers with a kitchen knife?

"I kind of did. Not literally attack someone with a knife but in the early years, I wasn't very calm," he says with admirable understatement.

"I used to do ridiculous things. I remember once portioning a piece of cod and there was this triangle here and a jagged bit there. I'd actually been asleep and just carried on doing it. Sleep filleting, you could call it. I'm lucky I didn't cut my fingers off.

"Another time, I tried to light a blowtorch with a hot tap. And the bizarre thing was that the thought process was: 'You can't possibly light a blowtorch with a cold tap' – it was quite Lewis Carroll – 'it has to be a hot tap.' So I turned the gas on and turned the tap on. And then I realised what I was doing."

For a time, Blumenthal's anger threatened to spiral out of control. "I became obsessed with measuring temperature: fish, meat, everything. And my first notion was always about ways of doing things in the kitchen that created consistency and limited the possibility of errors. And my drive for doing that was more about my temper."

He says a spell of therapy, as well as some faith healing and a course in cranial osteopathy, helped improve his mental health. "The moment I took responsibility for everything, that's when my stress levels went right down, and it's been 10 years since any of those outbursts."

"Before, if somebody did something wrong, I was having a go at them and blaming them, but I realised that if I took total responsibility for everything, then it would always be my fault; I'd either employed the wrong person for the job, I'd expected too much from them, or I'd not trained them properly."

So is the stereotype of the cleaver-clutching chef, reducing his commis chef to a collapsing blancmange, a thing of the past?

"There are still customers who'll book the chef's table where they can get a view of the kitchen. They're a bit like drivers on a motorway rubbernecking at an accident on the other carriageway – but people wanting to see that at Dinner will be disappointed.

"No one shouts. Even if a pan drops. And I think that sort of quieter kitchen atmosphere is happening more and more now. There are still top-end kitchens where chefs scream and shout – and I wouldn't say that those kitchens are the exceptions to the rule – but they're in a minority."

Blumenthal was 16 when his parents, who ran their own business, took him to the two-Michelin starred L'Oustau in Provence – "it was like falling down a rabbit hole into Wonderland," he says. Convinced he wanted to learn cooking, Blumenthal spent a week under the tutelage of Raymond Blanc at Le Manoir in his late teens, and worked for a short spell with Marco Pierre White as well. But he quickly decided that apprenticeship to a master was not for him.

"It sounds arrogant, but it wasn't," says Blumenthal. "I just thought, 'I want to carry on down the teaching-myself route, experimenting. I'll go and get a job and earn money and that'll get me more money quicker so I can open my own restaurant up.'"

Financing his culinary education through various jobs, including photocopier salesman and debt collector, Blumenthal spent the next decade immersing himself in French cookbooks and science manuals, fantasising about the moment when he could recreate that multi-sensory Provençal high.

"When we [Blumenthal went into business with his wife] bought the Fat Duck, we realised that it wasn't possible to recreate the noise of the crickets and the water, the crunch of the gravel and the smell of the lavender as it's just a tiny building on a main road, so the multi-sensory idea really began to take hold."

"Development is where my heart is focused because eating is the only thing that we do that involves all the senses. We eat with our eyes and our ears and our noses. You think about some of the most memorable meals you've ever had; the food will be good but it will often be about locating a mental memory and taste is inexorably linked to all the other senses and memory, so ultimately it is all about taste.

"I find myself at this lucky junction between some guy working on sound, some guy working on memory, some guy working on smell, and then there's me, a cook, bringing those things together. The Duck is my labour of love and it's better now than it's ever been. I'd say it's 50% better than it was when we got the first Michelin star.

"I don't have a specific kind of timeline for the future, but I do have one ambition and I don't know if this will ever happen. Maybe I'll just keep it as one of those things that is really enjoyable to think it might happen.

"I've always loved shiny things, things that go flash, loads of buttons to press, purple lights and stuff like that. So I'd love to have a James Bond-style development kitchen with a door that goes swishhhhh. Like M. Maybe hidden under Buckingham Palace."

Heston Blumenthal has mentored Simon Hulstone to create an Olympic menu for BA's Great Britons programme. The menu will be served on BA flights between July and September and can be sampled at a pop-up restaurant in Shoreditch, east London, 4-17 April. For bookings visit www.facebook.com/britishairways

People, presumably, would not dream of climbing a drainpipe to gawp at the bedroom secrets of their neighbours

I would like to think that the Soho shops flogging DVDs of "Tulisa's sex tape" for £3.90 are finding their stock hard to move. Yet it's apparent that people see nothing at all wrong in grossly invading a person's privacy, as long as a third party has actually done the foul and nasty groundwork for them. Despite all the evidence after the phone-hacking scandal broke, that invading the privacy of other humans – even famous ones – causes great and needless distress, many people still seem to think that such activity is just a bit of fun, something that people have a "right" to enjoy, snigger about or discuss.

There can be no doubt at all that the person responsible for placing sexual material involving Tulisa Contostavlos, below, the former singer with rap group N-Dubz, more widely famous as an X-Factor judge, is doing this awful thing out of malice, and out of a wish to exploit Contostavlos's embarrassment and hurt for money. The poor woman has taken every legal move she can to stifle distribution of this short piece of camera-phone film. It's plain that she doesn't want people to look at it.

But people want to look anyway, and other people want to facilitate their want. People, presumably, who would not dream of climbing a drainpipe to gawp at the bedroom secrets of their neighbours, and would be incandescent with anger and humiliation if their neighbours targeted them in such a fashion, see nothing wrong in lapping up salacious private details, as long as somebody else is supplying the material.

Newspapers and magazines insist that they ply such dubious material because it's what the public wants. Amazingly, in some sections of the press, there is a real sense of grievance over phone-hacking, a genuine – if counter-intuitive – belief that it's all the public's fault for wanting to know gossip about the stars, and thereby forcing others to supply it to them. The consumer is king. The market decides.

In truth, it's sellers who create markets, not buyers. The person who is torturing Contostavlos in this way is an unspeakably vile and pathetic little individual. All those who are splashing the singer's name and photograph on the covers of their own publications are colluding in his cruelty, facilitating his merciless, destructive bullying. They are disgusting.

Average price for a city home in the UK of £173,202 is 5.5 times gross annual earnings for full time employees, the lowest ratio since 2003

Anyone about to buy an urban property has picked the right time to do it, with housing affordability for city dwellers supposedly at its most favourable in nearly a decade, according to a report.

The average price for a city home in the UK of £173,202 is 5.5 times gross annual average earnings for full time employees, the lowest ratio since 2003, according to the Lloyds TSB Affordable Cities Review.

Disgruntled BBC staff who have recently had to relocate to Salford in line with the corporation's move may be partially appeased by the news that the city is now the most affordable in the UK, according to the Lloyds' data. There, the average property price is £102,391, less than four times (3.8) gross average annual earnings. This partly reflects a 32% fall in house prices in this part of Greater Manchester since 2008.

The next most affordable cities are Derry and Bradford, where house prices are just under four times average salaries, followed by Lancaster, Stirling, Belfast and Durham.

However, homebuyers looking in Hull, where residents are used to being the targets of disparaging data, are being given another reason to look elsewhere. The city, which 10 years ago was the second most affordable place to buy in the country, no longer even makes it into the top 10, according to Lloyds TSB. Instead it now ranks 16th. House prices have fallen in the city by 18% in the last five years, just over half the drop in Salford.

"In general with northern cities there has not been the same supply and demand balance that there has in the south," said Suren Thiru, housing economist at Lloyds TSB. "In the south the number of people looking for properties frequently exceeds supply and this has kept house prices high."

He added: "Looking forward, the marked improvement in city affordability is likely to help support demand for those able to enter the housing market. Much of this benefit, however, maybe offset by the continuing difficulties many households face in raising a deposit and uncertainty over the outlook for the UK economy."

Ten years ago, Bradford was the most affordable UK city (with house prices 2.73 times average salary), followed by Hull (2.86) and Durham (3.02). In contrast, Oxford was the least affordable UK city (8.61).

The least affordable cities in the UK, according to Lloyds TSB's analysis are Truro, Oxford and Winchester. In Truro, the average wage would need to be multipled nearly 10 times to match the average house price of £250,489, where the cost of homes has been ramped up by high earners buying holiday homes.

Commenting on the findings, Sarah Newton, Conservative MP for Truro and Falmouth said: "I have met with hundreds of constituents, forced to live in inappropriate and often overcrowded accommodation, who are at the sharp end of Cornwall's affordable housing crisis. There is only one long term solution to this issue - to be build more affordable housing."

Perhaps surprisingly, London does not make it into the top 10 least affordable places - partly because salaries are higher in the capital. The City of London (home to bankers and fund managers) is not ranked at all because of an insufficient amount of available data while the City of Westminister makes it into the 14th slot.

"The least affordable cities tend to be in the commuter belt or places where people have second homes," said Thiru. "Here, house prices can be many times higher than the average local salary."

Commenting on the Lloyds TSB report, Howard Archer, chief UK and European economist at Global Insight said: "The North-South divide in the affordability of City prices is of little surprise and largely reflects the general story in house prices. The decline in house price affordability is clearly good news for people trying to break into the housing market, but it is clearly still very difficult for many first time buyers to get into the housing market in cities given that prices there are still appreciably above the national average."

Earlier this week the Nationwide building society reported a house price fall of 1% in March, compared with the month before. This was the biggest fall in two years. However, the picture was a mixed one across the country. Of towns and cities, Cambridge rose the most in value on an annual basis, going up by 13% to an average of £319,884, followed by Liverpool (10%, £158,500) and London (9%, £340,439). Belfast recorded the biggest annual fall in house prices, dropping by 15% to £150,738, while Edinburgh properties fell by 6% to an average of £234,091.

Parenting is all the rage, with poor discipline blamed for last year's riots. But as the government rolls out free courses, is there any evidence to back up the idea you can teach people how to be parents?

Because the notion of teaching people how to be good parents is relatively new in this country, much of the teaching material currently being used is imported from America, which can make participants squirm.

The parenting programme taught by Save the Children in high-poverty areas of the UK is the Fast (Families and Schools Together) scheme, which was conceived in the US and involves, according to Peter Bryson, who runs the programme, "a lot of yahooing and clapping". "There is a cultural resistance for the first few weeks; you're aware that it's a bit embarrassing, but you begin to have fun anyway. By the end of the course, parents are yahooing at each other when they meet in the supermarket," he says.

This is a sight we may begin to witness more frequently over the next couple of years. The Save the Children scheme is one of a number of programmes that the government announced this week it would be rolling out in three areas of the country, as part of a two-year trial of free parenting classes for anyone with a child under five who wants them.

At face value, it's hard to find much to dislike about the concept of parenting classes. Given that most parents sit through hours of antenatal lessons, it seems crazy that the classes stop at birth, and that there's nothing to help with the much bigger task of bringing the child up.

Except that beneath the cheerful prospect of supervised play sessions and coffee mornings, simmers the politics of the parenting debate, which is surprisingly highly charged.

The announcement of parenting classes came the day after headlines in the Daily Mail and elsewhere announced that "Poor parenting gets the blame for riots", which selectively quoted from the independent inquiry into the riots, to pinpoint parenting, over the other riot triggers: lack of opportunity, failures of the police and the justice system, growing materialism. "We heard from many communities who felt that rioter behaviour could ultimately be ascribed to poor parenting. We need to consider what can be done to ensure that all children get the right support, control and guidance from parents and guardians," the report said.

The government's focus on parenting as the cause and possible solution to many of society's problems predates the riots. A number of government-commissioned reports have highlighted the need to improve parenting, and have often carried an uncomfortable subtext of blaming parents for children's failures, and sometimes a peculiar conflation of being poor with being a poor parent.

Over the past couple of years, the government has commissioned and endorsed two research papers, both written by Labour MPs, on the theme of parenting and early intervention. Frank Field called for all children to be given parenting classes at school, commenting: "Being a parent, apart from running the army in Afghanistan, is the most important thing we will ask anyone to do and we assume people get the knowledge by osmosis – and they don't"; Graham Allen, who last year called for the launch of a national parenting campaign, remarking that "babies don't come with a handbook", made an explicit link between poverty and poor parenting, adding: "Parents have a strong desire to do the best for their children but many, especially in low-income groups, are ill-informed or poorly motivated on how to achieve this."

For a while, Iain Duncan Smith liked to produce images of the cross-sections of unloved children's brains, rather like shrivelled walnuts, in a dramatic (but controversial) attempt to show the effect neglectful parenting has on brain development. The new parenting classes will be available to everyone, the government said – neatly defusing any debate about whether the government's attachment to parenting as a core element in its family policy implicitly blames poorer parents for their circumstances.

Children's minister Sarah Teather said: "We want parents to be able to seek help and advice in the earliest years of their child's life and for this to be a normal part of family life." For the moment, though, they are being piloted in areas of "medium to high deprivation".

The announcement left some key figures in the field wary.

Katherine Rake, chief executive of the Family and Parenting Institute, said she didn't think there was clear evidence that good parenting was in decline and wondered whether the debate about parenting was a distraction from other problems that have a profound impact on children's lives – unemployment and stretched family finances, for example. "You can give someone good driving classes, but if you send them out on an icy road they are going to find it very, very difficult. The road is very, very icy at the moment," she says.

She also wondered how much could be delivered for £100, which the vouchers are worth, and how classes for 0-five-year-olds would help parents struggling with difficult teenagers.

Naomi Eisenstadt, one of the founders of Sure Start and now an academic at Oxford, is critical of the drift towards promoting good parenting as a key theme in the government's child poverty strategy. Despite her own career-long commitment to championing parenting classes as a key element of Sure Start, she feels there has been too radical a shift in this direction, arguing that in the context of rising prices, frozen benefits and soaring unemployment, parenting classes do not feel as high a priority as helping people to find work. "I also think it is insulting to poor people to suggest that poor parents are bad parents," she says.

But can good parenting be taught, or is it a bit like trying to teach someone to be a good person? I have very hazy memories of the three-hour, free, evening parenting session I sat through 18 months ago, which promised to make me a calmer, happier parent, but which turned out to be a protracted sales pitch for a set of 10 CDs. I can dimly remember one thing: if you want a child to do something, you need to stand close to them and patiently wait for them to do it, rather than shrieking at them madly from a distance, which is probably sensible advice if you're ever calm enough to remember to take it.

What's interesting about the government's pilot schemes is the different approaches offered by different providers; it's clear there is no established formula for creating good parents yet.

Octavius Black, founder of Parent Gym, one of the few home-grown courses in the government's pilot, is convinced that skills can be taught. While he stresses there is no robust evidence, he believes parenting classes could ultimately contribute to preventing future eruptions of antisocial behaviour of the kind we saw last summer. Children who have benefited from good parenting "have a greater chance of succeeding at school, of getting a job, reducing the chance of criminal behaviour, and that would suggest that better parenting would lead to less social unrest", he says. (Black, who is a school and university contemporary of the prime minister's, says he has played no part in shaping government policy, but is "delighted" parenting has been given this high profile.)

The most difficult part of the programme is getting people to sign up; people are resistant because "challenging someone's parenting skills is one of the strongest challenges to their identity", Black says. Providers have to avoid any suggestion that the courses are created to help bad parents; instead they need to persuade people it's about "building on their good points".

Bryson, of Save the Children, says the Fast programme is less about practical parenting tips, more about improving relationships within the family, and between the family, the school and wider community. He is wary of talking about poverty, because the charity knows any overt linking of the courses and poverty prevents people signing up, but the programme's literature is explicit: "Parents can support children to overcome the effects of deprivation."

Angela Edwards, 39, from Manchester, says her time on the Fast course taught her the importance of spending time with her daughter without allowing distractions to interfere. Like many of the messages, it's a simple and obvious point, but somehow the classes made her take the lesson on board and apply it to everyday life.

"I didn't realise how much time you don't spend with the children. I'd be at home cleaning, doing the washing and she'd be playing or watching a film. I was thinking I was spending enough time with her, but I wasn't," she says.

Before, there was a lot of shouting – mainly from her five-year-old daughter in her direction. "If I didn't listen to her, she'd shout. It's not very nice being shouted at by a five-year-old. We've got a much better relationship now. She actually listens to me."

Edwards has found time to do extra spelling, reading, writing and maths with her daughter, and the course has simultaneously given her the confidence to become a school governor. "I know from the teachers that they have seen a change in her. The extra time I'm spending is bringing her on with her reading and writing. I've learned that it doesn't cost anything to spend time with the children; it doesn't matter if you have money or not. I wasn't a bad parent before, but I wouldn't have spent the time."

Mostly she enjoyed meeting other parents from the neighbourhood, which chimes with Rake's analysis that it's not really what you learn in parenting classes that matters, but the friendships you make during them.

"We are living in increasingly fractured communities so there is an enormous value in parents coming together as a community," Rake says. "When you're put in touch with other people facing different challenges, you learn that you are not alone. We know those connections continue for years and years."

How to be a better parent Tips from the experts

"Children have eyes and ears, hearts and minds – they see and hear more than we think they do, feel things deeply and have their own thoughts. Find time to talk and to play. Don't be afraid to answer their questions honestly."

Becky Hall, child psychotherapist

"Have clear, simple rules and limits, and be consistent in expecting them to be met. But praise good behaviour and give your children attention when they are being good – it will increase."

Chris Cloke, head of child protection awareness and promotion, NSPCC

"Look at the ways in which you do the bad things to your children that your parents did to you, and look for the ways you re-enact with your partner the bad stuff that happened between your parents as your children watch you." Oliver James, clinical psychologist and author

"Listen to your child and try to see things from their point of view. Don't mistake childish exploration for defiance. Love unconditionally. Relax and enjoy." Annalisa Barbieri, agony aunt

"Put away your mobile, turn off your laptop and don't even think about a BlackBerry or an iPhone."

Justine Roberts, Mumsnet

Amelia Gentleman, Paul Lewis, Zoe Williams and Polly Curtis nominated for political writing award

Four Guardian journalists have been nominated for the Orwell prize for political writing. Amelia Gentleman, Paul Lewis and Zoe Williams have made the long-list in the journalism category and Polly Curtis has been nominated for her Reality Check blog in the blogging category. Prizes are awarded for entries that come closest to George Orwell's ambition 'to make political writing into an art'.

The Guardian has also been nominated in the Sony Radio Academy Awards for two audio podcasts. Days in the Life was a programme made to celebrate the 2011 Manchester festival, in which producers Francesca Panetta and Tim Hinman made four historic editions of the Guardian into sound sculptures. Beginning with the Peterloo massacre, they re-created the history of the Guardian with archive voices, eyewitness reportage and music. The Science Weekly podcast was also nominated in Sony's internet category for Sounds of the Space Shuttle - an acoustic tribute to the retiring Nasa shuttle.

Once the media decide that this government is comically inept, the perception will be almost impossible to shift

✒I thought David Davis coped manfully on The World at One this week when he talked about the government's problems. Davis, who failed to beat Cameron for the Tory leadership, was raised by a single mother on a council estate. Eton and the Bullingdon Club never featured in his career plans, and he is not the prime minister's greatest admirer.

But, dancing between the landmines of loyalty, he made a good hit, which is that once the media decide on the "narrative" about a government, it is as easy to shift as it is to turn an oil tanker through 180 degrees on a stormy sea. Journalists and broadcasters decided that the Major government was sleazy, then that Blair told terrible porkies, and are in the process of deciding that this lot are comically inept in every field, from kitchen suppers and emergency petrol storage to Cornish pasties. And once that happens, once the press decides that it's dealing with the gang that couldn't shoot straight, the perception is almost impossible to shift.

✒I see that exports of scotch whisky last year rose to £4.2bn, a record. Some 90% of scotch goes overseas, with the US and France the main customers, but the far east is catching up fast. I love scotch, and when the Scots decide to become independent, thanks to Alex Salmond's cunning, I shall miss the warm glow of feeling that it's our great national drink.

One thing that hasn't been discussed properly – at least I haven't seen it – is who exactly gets to vote. Will it be everyone on the Scottish electoral roll? But that includes loads of "foreigners" from the rest of the UK, and indeed overseas. And what about expat Scots? Don't they have any say? Millions of people are, you might say, of mixed race; how do you define them? We can be sure that Mr Salmond will decide on the option he thinks is most likely to produce the result he wants, which he will then argue is the only one that is morally and historically acceptable.

✒For older readers: some of us still translate, in our heads, new prices into old money, so the news that a first-class stamp is to cost 60p means that it will cost 12 shillings to post a letter. (Not that anyone will post anything if they can avoid it; in today's weird world, you prepare a business for sale by pricing it out of the market.)

Isn't that new stamp price horrifying, older readers? And a pee in a London terminal station costs 6/-, the Guardian – sixpence when I first joined – is now 24/-, and at our local butcher's a large free-range egg costs eight bob. Tuppence-worth of chips costs around 30/- in your average fish fryer's.

Mind you, some things are amazing value these days. Ballpoint pens, once prized items, are literally given away. Good wine costs a much smaller fraction of the average wage. And the days when every family had a single television, often a stately object made of polished wood, possibly with doors like a French escritoire, have long gone and we scatter TVs around our houses like cushions.

✒Another nostalgic moment came at lunch this week – not in an Indian restaurant – when one of our number chose the curry and reported that it "tastes like Vesta". Ah, Vesta chicken curries, with that great taste of slimy chemicals! It set us off remembering other unmourned foodstuffs. There were Surprise peas, little dehydrated green pellets which you boiled to destruction. Cadbury's Smash, a sort of frothy wallpaper paste, was best known for its "Martian" TV ads in which funny humanoids apparently made from saucepans giggled at us Earthlings for bothering to peel real potatoes. Fray Bentos canned pies still exist, and I believe you can find Babycham, though I haven't seen it for years; sophisticates could buy the dry version which had a yellow foil cap. (The first alcoholic drink I ever had was a Mackeson sweet stout; can you still buy that?) Spam never went away and nor did Bisto. Lucozade reinvented itself as a high-energy drink and you see it everywhere. But what happened to the Mivvi, a vanilla ice cream wrapped in a lolly? Some of these comestibles were almost quite nice, but not very many.

✒One or two readers have said that it's all very well for me to be snotty about MasterChef, but what would I produce for a proper dinner party – as opposed to David Cameron's much scoffed-at "kitchen supper"? (Actually, a kitchen supper is a perfectly good idea. It's an informal meal eaten in the kitchen, as opposed to three or four elaborate courses in the dining room, spag bol rather than coq au vin.) One dish I do is a favourite of posh restaurants that charge a fortune. You can make it in five minutes. Freeze small berries, blue or rasp. Melt in a double pan over hot water white chocolate and an equal weight of double cream. (100 grams of each will do for four.) Stir till it's all melted. Put iced berries on plates, pour sauce on top. Incredibly good.

✒Labels and signs: Godfrey Eland's wife bought a packet of Tesco sleep aid tablets, marked "may cause drowsiness". Nigel West acquired a Hewlett-Packard laptop computer: "to reduce the possibility of heat-related injuries … do not place the computer directly on your laptop". It's 'elf an' safety gorn mad!

Tony Currer was in Lidl, where he saw a large sign: "Permanent discounts! Hurry!" Ross Workman was in Gaborone, Botswana, where a supermarket had mounted a placard declaring: "Food: an important part of any balanced diet." Possibly there was another sign at the other end of the store marked: "Drink: an equally important part."

And Stephen Green splashed out £2.99 on a plastic strainer for baths. You put it over the plug hole and it keeps out hairs. The Homebase label says: "Easy to fit. If in doubt, contact a competent plumber."

Author of The Company of Wolves explored myth and legend in work published in south London school magazine in 1950s

There is a minotaur crying with a dreary voice, a ship with death-black sails, chanting priests of Amon-Ra and a nativity tale with a quietly sceptical twist.

Unpublished work by Angela Carter, the celebrated feminist novelist who died 20 years ago, has been discovered in old copies of her school magazine.

The cache of poetry shows how even as an adolescent she was reshaping myths for her own purposes.

Carter, famous for The Company of Wolves – her retelling of Little Red Riding Hood – attended Streatham and Clapham high school in south London, where the works were found in a search of the archive. The novelist died in her literary prime, in 1992, aged 51, leaving fans craving more of her work.

A search made at the request of her biographer has uncovered three poems and two pieces of prose published in the school magazine when she was a teenager in the 1950s.

Earlier this term, the school's librarian, Sue Nichols, found a poem inspired by ancient Egypt written by Carter when she was 12. The Valley of Kings appeared in an issue of the magazine dated July 1952, along with a piece of prose, a Hot Day by the River.

Another poem, The Inn-Keeper's Child, was dated July 1953. Nichols also discovered Sacrifice to the Minotaur from July 1954 and a piece of writing in French, Chez Monsieur Noë, dated July 1955. All of the writing is signed Angela Stalker, Carter's maiden name.

In July 1957, when she was in the school's sixth form, there is an acknowledgment of a piece entitled Fable, but this does not appear to have been published. Carter attended the private girls' school before going to Bristol University to study English.

Nichols, who works as the school's archivist in her spare time, said Carter's authorised biographer, Edmund Gordon, had originally asked about a prize-winning essay.

"That must have been in junior school," the librarian said. "I didn't find any trace of that. I started with our magazine – we've got all the bound copies. That's the only place really to look as we wouldn't have kept classwork.

"I went through the whole lot, in a couple of days. It was great finding them. It was really exciting to see someone's original work like that, and see the themes beginning to come through of her later work. It's nice to know one of our girls did that."

The earliest poem, The Valley of Kings, has a note indicating that the author is in Upper IIIa. With echoes of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandias, it ends with the lines:

Thebes is dead, its temples dead

No more do beggars crave

A little food, or money maybe

All is silent in the grave

In the tombs so far away

Ancient kings long vigil keep

'Til the last bright day is ended

And all the Earth shall sleep

The last of the poems, the Inn-Keeper's Child, has a Christmas theme, with references to a "heavenly hand" and the three kings' gifts of the gold, frankincense and myrrh. It ends on a note of doubt:

The wise men say the Lord sent Him

That he is nursed by seraphim

That though he sleeps among the kine

He will save your life and mine –

I think I see

Gordon said that while the poetry and prose "don't really cut it" as works of literature, they offered a valuable insight into Carter's development.

Gordon, whose book is due to be published in 2015, said: "They are written by a very young girl. There are elements of her later work that can be discerned in them. That's obviously looking at them with hindsight. What is fascinating is what it shows about her interests and ambition at that age – it suggests she already hoped to become a writer."

Gordon added that the work showed an interest in ancient history and in non-realist narrative, "which is precisely what she went on to do".

He said: "They're less interesting from a literary critical than from a biographical point of view. The myths and mythical landscape that they deal in are different to those she later dealt in. They're myths of the classical world rather than fairytale."

Susannah Clapp, Carter's friend and the author of the memoir A Card from Angela Carter, said she was pleased that the discovery had been made.

"I'm surprised, too. I didn't know Angela had written for the school magazine. The only early story she ever mentioned to me was Tom Cat Goes to Market, written when she was six, and eventually thrown away by her mother.

"After her death, I realised she had also written poems – some were published in little magazines, others are in her journals – and these do strikingly prefigure her later work.

"The correspondences between these school pieces, which are clearly juvenilia, and her published books are less evident – but of course that has its own interest. I'll leave it to Edmund Gordon to weigh their significance in his biography."

A verse from Sacrifice to the Minotaur

Darker than death, the swan-like galley plying

To the tune of wavelets, slapping her side and sighing

She hastens to the island, far away

Where towers and mountain-tops are stained with day

And the voice of the Minotaur is drearily crying

Credited to Angela Stalker, Upper IVa