Very Unusual Jobs Indeed

NICK BRIGSTOCKE, chairman of CSFB's broking side, has been with the same outfit for 30 years. It may originally have been called Phillips & Drew, and then BZW, but it has retained the same core of people through the years.

RICHMOND YESTERDAY confirmed that they will continue to play at Reading FC's Madejski Stadium next season.

LONDON TOWERS were good enough to finish only fourth in the league this season, but last night they took the Budweiser Championship play- off title 82-71 against a Thames Valley Tigers team who had lost their playmaker Casey Arena with a knee injury in Saturday's semi-final win over Manchester Giants.

THAMES WATER, the country's biggest water company, has stepped up its campaign to be allowed to take over other UK suppliers by lobbying Tony Blair's office directly.

TWO NEAR-MISS rail incidents, including one where a commuter train nearly crashed head-on with another service, were being investigated by Railtrack yesterday.

BRITAIN'S 27 water companies have defied the Government and Ian Byatt, the water regulator, by seeking inflation-busting price rises in the business plans they have submitted for the next five years to Ofwat.

Ink

JUST AS Derby Storm put one of their disciplinary problems behind them, another surfaced for the Budweiser League club yesterday, when their American player Maurice Robinson was banned from the game for one year after failing to supply a complete urine sample during a Sports Council doping control test.

THREE of the UK's biggest water companies yesterday threw down the gauntlet in their battle with the water regulator, Ofwat, over the amount they can charge customers for the next five years. Only one, Thames Water, is proposing a cut in bills.

A TWO-YEAR-OLD boy drowned yesterday after falling from a pleasure boat into the River Thames. Police were called to the river bank at Donnington Bridge in Oxford just before midday after the child disappeared from view.

THE BOAT RACE crews, with little over 24 hours to go, have cut their training to the minimum with the few remaining sessions devoted to precision work and practice race starts. They go from the stake boats moored in the stream with the unfamiliar sensation of the Tide running underneath. This year the Umpire, Mark Evans, an Oxford Blue and 1984 Olympic champion, has decreed that the blades must remain flat on the water until he calls "go".

A PROJECT to tempt otters back to the Thames was launched yesterday by Sir David Attenborough, the wildlife broadcaster, and Michael Meacher, the Environment minister, who posed with two tame otters near Maidenhead in Berkshire.

RISING WATER levels beneath London are to be tackled by drilling a network of boreholes aimed at preventing hundreds of millions of pounds worth of damage to buildings and the Underground system.