Last week was ...

A Good Week for studying stress as a survey for a cable television company drew up a stress profile for different regions of the country. Northern Ireland proved to be by far the most stressful place for males, though the north-west of England was worst for females.

The news that Yorkshire is a relatively unstressful place (scoring 93 stress points compared to a national average of 100) must have come as a surprise to Kelvin Pratt from Doncaster, who was so stressed at people ringing him up to ask if he is a Pratt that he has changed his name to Kevin Paul Gascoigne.

Others have had an even more stressful week. A tramdriver in the central Russian town of Tula took it all with admirable calm when a woman gave birth to twins in his tram. Neither he nor the mother, however, would swap their lives for those of the turkeys that have been assisting Harvard researcher Thomas Roberts in his efforts to discover how the tendons in our legs store and release energy. His experiments involved training turkeys to run on treadmills while gauges were attached to the tendons in their legs. Stressful turkeys go to Harvard.