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In the red corner, Cassandro the transvestite ...

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

In a wrestling ring under a set of train tracks in London’s Bethnal Green, a transvestite has a midget wearing a wolverine mask in a painful looking headlock. Pressed into the corner of the ring, the midget struggles his way up to the third rope in an unsuccessful bid to escape. Instead he is slammed into the floor below with a sickening crunch.

In the red corner, Cassandra the transvestite ...

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Binman faces £10,000 jigsaw puzzle

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 14:09:19 GMT

It is a jigsaw that would drive even the most patient of puzzle fans to distraction.

Condoleezza plays piano for the Queen

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 11:39:23 GMT

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave a piano recital for Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace.

WI fights back over 'fat ankle' jibe

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

"Antiques Roadshow" does not usually generate protest. But that changed in September, when the BBC show's art critic, Rupert Maas, quipped that a lady in a portrait had a "Shropshire ankle". Now he is being forced to face the women whose lower legs he dismissed.

The world's last bastion of free speech? Enter the Cheeky Girls ...

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

The Oxford Debating Union, once described by Harold Macmillan as "the last bastion of free speech in the Western world", is struggling to restore its reputation after a week when its president barely clung on to his job, and a quarter of the audience walked out rather than staying to listen to the union's "celebrity" speakers.

Minor British Institutions: Last of the Summer Wine

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

The world's longest- running sit-com has been going so long we've almost forgotten about it. Peter Sallis – perhaps better known nowadays as the voice of Wallace, as in Wallace and Gromit – is the only survivor of the first trio of crazed pensioners that turned up in a "Comedy Playhouse" pilot in 1973. Sallis was then a mere 52 years of age. His character of Norman Clegg joined Bill Owen as scruffy old Compo Simmonite and the magnificent Michael Bates as Cyril Blamire.

Flip-flops to help drunk women stagger home

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 12:54:57 GMT

Flip-flops are to be given to drunk women in Devon to prevent them injuring themselves when wearing high heels.

Vibrant Yorkshire Dales town has best high street in Britain

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

It is not the kind of place you will rub shoulders with the designer-clad wives of Russian oligarchs or battle over Bulgari with brand-obsessed "trustafarians" – but anyone looking to indulge in retail therapy should forget London and head for the tranquillity of the Yorskhire Dales.

Chain store massacre: Tim Walker bids a bittersweet farewell to Woolworths

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

On a lonely shelf at the back of an understocked store in a south-east London shopping centre, a big, blonde, half-price teddy bear sits staring glumly at his paws. "Is this what it's come to?," he seems to be asking himself. Just shy of its centenary year, in the last month before Christmas – when business ought to be booming –Woolworths, the poor bear's employer, is going out of business altogether.

Leeds weathers storm as cuts fail to impress

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Almost at the exact moment that Alistair Darling sat down in the overheated chamber of the House of Commons, shoppers in Briggate in Leeds were hurriedly putting up their umbrellas to shelter against another freezing shower of sleet sweeping in off the Pennines. Of all the cities that reinvented themselves in the 1990s, few could claim to have been quite as successful as here. Under New Labour, the skyline has transformed itself with glass and steel apartment blocks for the legions of young professionals enticed to work in the thriving financial sector. The city centre is now able to boast some of the most famous names in retail.

Odds slashed on a white Christmas

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Arctic weather swept across the country yesterday, with snow, sleet and freezing rain causing treacherous conditions on the roads.

Ethiopia demands stolen crown back

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Ethiopia is demanding that Britain's museums return some of its most significant religious treasures. President Girma Wolde-Giorgis has personally intervened in a dispute to get the artefacts, including the Ethiopian royal crown, returned home 140 years after they were "looted" by marauding British troops.

Conservationists plan to reintroduce sea eagles to England

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 07:41:35 GMT

The long-vanished sea eagle could soon be soaring in the skies above England again under plans drawn up by conservationists.

Young, black and British: The young men who refuse to bow to the stereotypes

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Lewis Hamilton recently became the world motor-racing champ and the nation rejoiced. What an inspiration they said, the youngest man to win Formula 1. And a black man at that. (In truth he is "mixed race", like Barack Obama. But for many it's a specious distinction. Black pride holds the two men aloft, it lays claim to them.) It is a rare moment of affirmation for men and boys who racially identify with these heroes. They are momentarily free to breathe and imagine. How weary they are, bearing the burdens of collective blame, struggling against low societal expectations, and having daily to tear off the wounding tags stuck on to young males whose features reveal an African ancestry.

Minor British Institutions: The allotment

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Just as common land was being "enclosed" in the 18th and 19th centuries, the allotment sprung up as a link to a happier, more bucolic past. The Small Holdings and Allotment Act of 1908 required local authorities to provide land for cultivation, and the restrictions on development were stricter than now.

It was our national pastime – but now shopping is just so over

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

For a time it seemed that walking the shopping malls was more popular than walking the dog, but in a dramatic change for a nation of credit card junkies, the Bank of England has declared that Britons are going off shopping as a "leisure activity".

Scrabble scores sales surge on 60th anniversary

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 10:37:01 GMT

Scrabble has become Britain's best-selling boardgame 60 years after its launch, sales figures show.

Auction reveals the secret life of Spike Milligan

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

It sounds like one of the jokey stories he would tell in a poem or novel. When a wrecking ball sliced a nearby Victorian block of flats in two, Spike Milligan spotted a grand piano left in a disused apartment. Approaching the foreman of the building site, he bribed him with a fiver to hand over the instrument.

'On The Buses' star Reg Varney dies, aged 92

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Reg Varney, who starred in On The Buses, died yesterday following a short illness. He was 92. His daughter, Jeanne Marley, 59, said he died "peacefully" just before 2pm, at a nursing home in Budleigh Salterton, Devon.

Game beware: it's the return of the poacher

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Once, the poacher was a man with big pockets in his raincoat sneaking on to an aristocrat's land to steal game for his family pot. Now he is likely to be part of a gang from town, in it for hard cash, rampaging through the countryside with guns, crossbows or snares.

The Canine credit crunch starts to bite

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

They are the forgotten victims of the credit crunch. As money becomes tight in millions of homes throughout the country, it is the four-legged members of the household that are most likely to feel the chill wind of recession.

Understanding the English

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

I spent Thursday evening at Birkbeck College listening to the novelist Andrew O'Hagan deliver this year's George Orwell memorial lecture on "The English". It was – to say the least – an intriguing combination of speaker and subject.

Ooh, Vicar! Our appetite for randy rectors

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT

Our reading today is taken from the Book of Errant Ecclesiasticals, chapter 458, verses 19-26: "And, lo, it came to pass that the Rev Teresa Davies was cast into the wilderness of the West Midlands and stripped of her priestly raiment when it was discovered she was a husband-swapper, and liked a nip or three of strong stuff before evensong. And then, verily, came tidings of ex-minister Roderick Sangster who, if he met women of certain age and comely means, could not pass by on the other side. Instead, he married them, often all at once. Hence, to the sounding of judicial trumpets, he was found guilty on charges of bigamy. Here endeth the lesson."

The Canine crunch

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 00:00:01 GMT