SCOTLAND'S KNITWEAR producers are celebrating an extraordinary turnaround in their fortunes after revealing record sales during a year when many expected to go bankrupt in the so-called "banana wars".

Are you naturally bow-legged? Have you always wanted to be a cowboy, or girl? Is your idea of the perfect holiday galloping through Ghana, rodeoing in Rajasthan or saddling up in Spain? If you're horse-crazy, you'll know a riding holiday no longer means a wet weekend in Wales. If you grew up with Thelwell but want more sophisticated horse-play, Lucy Gillmore gives you some ideas

A fantasy wardrobe holds treasures to inspire childlike wonder - couture creations worth their weight in gold

Lawrence Norfolk applauds the globe-trotting, shape-shifting ambitions of an astonishing fictional debut; Ghostwritten by David Mitchell Sceptre, pounds 10, 436pp

THIS IS DAGIRANZ, a retired Mongolian superstar, playing his horse- headed fiddle to a gathering of camels. Dagiranz was discovered in a local talent competition in his early forties, and duly became the country's most celebrated singer - their homegrown Bing Crosby. His career was long and distinguished: he starred in many films and had a large, faithful following, but when he reached the age of 70 he decided to retire. After living for 26 years in Ulan Bataar, the capital of Mongolia, he made the journey back to the region on the edge of the Gobi Desert where his family had lived for generations, and where he had grown up.

IN A country famous for its pubs it should come as no surprise that the British have so many words for getting drunk.

It brings out the worst in all of us, the end of the world. As you read this, there is a chap in Sussex preparing for the final reckoning, getting ready to go up onto the Downs next Saturday night with his Bible to await the end of everything, which comes sometime on Sunday. In rural hideaways in Japan, whole families are conducting last-minute surveys of their bunker's stocks of dehydrated soup, dehydrated milk, dehydrated meat - everything except dehydrated water. The Internet is pulsing with messages from people desperately asking questions such as whether they should move out of New York before the weekend - as if Armageddon is going to be so particular.

Seven years travelling the world in a caravan almost proved the undoing of the Grant family.

THE TABLES were turned on China, which has had so much success in spying on the United States, when pictures of its secret crewed rocket capsule were published yesterday on the Internet.

THEY DON'T eat bananas on the Mongolian grasslands. But as the traditional nomadic herders shelter in isolated ger tents against the long winter, a tit-for-tat American-European trade dispute over the sub- tropical fruit is threatening the subsistence livelihoods of those who provide one-third of the world's cashmere.

BENEDICT ALLEN, the maverick adventurer who gained fame and notoriety for his "one-man-and-his-camels" travels in the outer reaches of Mongolia and Namibia, has retraced the steps of an explorer who disappeared more than 70 years ago.

THE LAST time Howard Wilkinson made a public appearance at Wembley he was booed off the pitch by Leeds United supporters after their team's abject League Cup defeat by Aston Villa in 1996.

1. St Catherine's Hill