Surprize For You

Baboons, it seems, prefer pinot noir. They also like a nice chardonnay. Largely undeterred by electric fences, hundreds of wild baboons in South Africa's prized winelands are feasting on ripe, succulent grapes, forcing winemakers to use noisemakers and rubber snakes to try to drive them off during this harvest season.

"The poor baboons are driven to distraction," said Justin O'Riain, who works in the Baboon Research Unit of the University of Cape Town. "As far as baboons are concerned, the combination of starch and sugar is very attractive – and that's your basic grape."

Growers say the picky primates are partial to sweet pinot noir grapes, adding to the winemakers' woe, for pinot noir sells for more than the average merlot or cabernet sauvignon.

"They choose the nicest bunches, and you will see the ones they leave on the ground. If you taste them, they are sour," said Francois van Vuuren, farm manager at La Terra de Luc vineyards, 50 miles east of Cape Town. "They eat the sweetest ones and leave the rest."

Baboons have raided South Africa's vineyards in the past, but farmers say this year is worse than previous ones because the primates have lost their usual foraging areas due to wildfires and ongoing expansion of grape-growing areas. Out of a 12-tonne harvest, about 5 per cent goes to waste at La Terra de Luc because of the baboons. And in the Constantia wine-producing area alone, up to £23,000 worth of the crop has been lost annually in previous years, according to the Baboon Research Unit.

Sometimes the baboons get an alcohol kick – by feasting on discarded grape skins that have fermented in the sun. After gobbling up the skins, the animals stumble around before sleeping it off in a shady spot.

During harvest season from January to March, winemakers put up serious frontline defences. Some try to scare off the baboons by blowing into vuvuzelas, horns that are often used by South Africa's football fans.

Electric fencing often doesn't work because baboons can dig underneath it or swing above it from trees to get to the vineyards. They also test the fence for weak spots. If they're shocked, they'll scream, but they'll probably return the next day, says Mr O'Riain.

Sakkie Lourens, manager of Cabrière farm, has found one ruse that seems to work – rubber snakes. "I put them all over where the vines are, and since then, I haven't seen a single baboon," he said.

The Baboon Research Unit is pioneering a hi-tech approach in which a collar with a sensor is placed on a member of a baboon troop. When the collar passes a particular point, an "incoming baboon" text message is sent to a mobile phone, prompting someone to race to the fence and defend the vineyard.

Mr O'Riain doesn't think the problem will go away because vineyards are expanding into the lower slopes of the mountains, the baboons' traditional foraging grounds. "Where there's a mountain, there's a baboon," he said. "As we take up more and more of their land, the conflict increases."

drive from www.independent.co.uk

There are an estimated 33,000 urban foxes in cities in Britain, with many more – some 225,000 – living in rural areas, according to the University of Bristol's Mammal Research Unit.

Foxes have been fond of living in our cities since the spread of the suburbs in the 1930s. The expansion of low-density housing, often with substantial gardens attached, attracted foxes to move in with us.

In an urban environment, the fox faces no natural predators. Although foxes can live up to 15 years in captivity, in the wild a mere 16 per cent make it past their second birthday. The London Wildlife Trust estimates that 60 per cent of the capital's foxes die every year. About half of these will be killed in road collisions.

In cities where sarcoptic mange, caused by a parasitic mite, is widespread, it may cause even more deaths among foxes than do cars. The chance of a pet dog catching it from a fox is slim, and there have only been 11 known cases of a cat catching mange worldwide since 1973.

The number of foxes living in British cities had been pretty stable since the middle of the last century, but during the Nineties the spread of mange caused a serious decline. In some urban areas, 95 per cent of foxes were killed by the disease.

British foxes are smaller than we might think – only a little larger than a domestic cat. The male will weigh between four and eight kilos; the vixen between four and six. A third of their body length belongs to that distinctive bushy tail.

Foxes are faithful sorts. The dominant male and the vixen form a pair that can last a lifetime. While they are solitary travellers, hunters and feeders, the pair will continue to meet in order to mate, play and groom each other.

Urban foxes may also have an unconventional family set-up: it's common for an adult fox to remain with the breeding pair. This 'helper' is often the grown-up offspring of their previous litter who failed to leave at the usual age and is subordinate to the mating pair.

The average litter is of four or five cubs, born blind, deaf and with black fur. They weigh about 100g and are 10cm long. The female remains in the den at the beginning, while the male brings food. The cubs do not leave the warmth of the den for the first few weeks.

At about 12 weeks, cubs start to forage for their own food, and many die at this age. If they make it, at 16 -18 weeks they can find their own meals without the help of the adults.

From the 1940s to 1970s, the Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and the London boroughs attempted to control fox numbers through culls. But when a fox dies its territory comes up for grabs; within days a dead fox may have been replaced by a new one. Lethal control is also expensive, so not usually seen as an effective approach.

In the 1800s, however, the fox population was successfully reduced around East Anglia and east Scotland through poisoning and leg-hold traps – practices which are now illegal.

Contrary to popular opinion, foxes are not big scavengers. One survey of 5,480 urban households found that more than 80 per cent believed they had never had their dustbins rifled by foxes; 16.4 per cent of households said they had occasionally, and 2.7 per cent frequently.

drive from www.independent.co.uk

It's talked about in the US as the "iPod of the book world", as deeply associated with reading as horses are with riding. And yet in Britain we've not been able to experience Amazon's Kindle without paying through the nose for shipping and customs charges from the States, and then buying ebooks in US dollars. So while the American reviews of what they call the Kindle 3 focus on comparisons with the Kindle 2 and the original, for us it's our first proper look. It's like being shown Return Of The Jedi without having any prior Star Wars knowledge.

Fortunately it's better than Return Of The Jedi, at which point I'll stop attempting to compare an e-reading gadget with a science-fiction film. Its e-ink display is a thing of great beauty; it isn't backlit, so it just looks like a printed sheet of paper covered by a thin plastic sheet. In a good way. One blogger this week subjected the screens of various devices and print formats to microscopic examination, and the similarity between the Kindle and a newspaper was extraordinary. The upshot of all this is that it's easy on the eye, and easy on the battery – one month between recharges if you keep wi-fi switched off. Sure, you'll have trouble seeing the screen in the dark, but your copies of Catch 22 or Delia Smith's Book Of Cakes aren't backlit either, so stop complaining and switch a light on.

Once you have a book opened up, the Kindle does its job beautifully. You flip backward and forward through the pages speedily, add bookmarks, read unencumbered by electronic distractions, and can store around 3,500 books. The only downside is the limited functionality when doing stuff other than reading – like, for example, buying a book. We've become so used to stabbing small screens with our fingers to make things happen, and on many occasions I wanted to swipe or tap the Kindle's screen, but instead had to laboriously manoeuvre a cursor around with fiddly keys, rather like playing a primitive maze-based game on a ZX81. This makes using some of the Kindle's features rather tiresome compared to, say, the iPad – but then again, for a little more than £100, who's complaining?

The Kindle's low price will be a key factor in our attitude towards it. The iPad is unquestionably a beautiful object, but it's pricy. Pricy enough and chi-chi enough for you to think twice about getting it out on public transport, lest you be thought of as a swaggering hipster or compulsive show-off. The Kindle isn't flashy; it's sober, demure, the colour of a civil servant's suit. But the act of solitary reading isn't one that you generally want interrupted by curious gazes or, worse, people saying: "Ooh, what have you got there?" (This is why one doesn't go for an afternoon in the park with a book and a boa constrictor.) Whether, as one American professor claimed this week, e-reading will make "buying literature cool again" is open to debate; Amazon's offering of popular blogs on the Kindle for £1.99 per month when they're already free to read on the web isn't so much "cool" as "confusing". But there's no doubt that its arrival in the UK will prove to be an e-reading tipping point.

drive from www.independent.co.uk

This fine summer's evening we are travelling downriver to Greenwich, to partake of a whitebait dinner and a glass of Hospital Porter. How delightfully mid-19th century. In Dickens' time, Greenwich was famous for its whitebait – the small fry of various fish which bred abundantly in this polluted stretch of the Thames – and visitors would journey from far and wide for an infanticidal fry-up. The fish may come from Billingsgate Market these days, but the traditional Greenwich whitebait dinner is enjoying a revival, thanks to an appealing new venture from local brewers Meantime.

Already responsible for several local gastro-pubs, as well as some fine beers, Meantime have gone one step further and created a gastro-brewery, behind the porticoed façade of Sir Christopher Wren's Royal Naval College. Once home to a brewery that supplied the Royal Hospital's Pensioners with their three-pints-a-day ration, the space has been reinvented as a café, bar and restaurant. By day it serves visitors to the neighbouring Discover Greenwich exhibition, and by night the lights dim, the white tablecloths come out, and the place transforms into a dramatic dining room, serving a modern British menu with a distinctively beery bias.

To get the full experience, you really have to arrive at the Old Brewery by boat. The Thames Clipper service speeds there in just 30 minutes from the London Eye, past the wharves of Limehouse and the skyscape of Canary Wharf. From Greenwich Pier, it's a one-minute stroll to the Naval College, where the Old Brewery occupies an impressive chunk of riverfront real estate.

There's a small terrace and attractive bar, but the restaurant space is altogether on a different scale, with a swagger to match the epic surroundings. One wall is dominated by gleaming copper beer vats – this is an operational micro-brewery – and the ceiling is so high you expect to see small clouds floating beneath it. Only the Wapping Project, housed in a converted power station a couple of miles upriver, can rival the room for sheer wow factor. Huge industrial lamps create pools of light and shade, and a sculptural wave of beer bottles is suspended unnervingly overhead.

Disappointingly, for a riverfront restaurant, there's no view of the river, and if one were being picky, the tables do seem rather small, given the available space. Painted over one wall runs a brewing time-line of London. Meantime has revived the historic Hospital Porter, brewing it on the premises, and the friendly manager encourages us to sample it, and any of the other draft beers that we fancy. "I've tried them all," he tells us. "Not today, obviously." We start with the lager-like house beer – Keller Bier – and work our way through to the Hospital Porter, matured in whisky casks to leave a distinctive whiff of Germolene.

Though there's a conventional wine list on offer, beer matches are suggested for each item on head chef Daniel Doherty's menu, which also finds interesting uses for ales in dishes such as chicken liver parfait with cherry beer jelly, or neck of Herdwick mutton braised in Meantime pale ale. (The name is a tribute to the area's most famous export – Greenwich Meantime – and not that Mike Leigh film set among East End tower blocks.)

We start with the echt Greenwich experience – a plate of devilled whitebait, and a glass of Hospital Porter. No longer are the tiny fish rolled in flour and plunged live into boiling lard. But they were pretty damned fresh, dusted in paprika and served with a caper mayonnaise. Oysters – half a dozen rocks for £8.50 – get the full production, raised on a platter over cracked ice, with shallot vinaigrette, Tabasco and a jug of stout to pour over them.

drive from www.independent.co.uk

Madonna fans keen to secure a seat at the singer's increasingly rare live performances can expect to book months in advance and part with a sizeable chunk of cash for the privilege of an hour or two in the same room (well, stadium) as the Queen of Pop.

Naturally, Ms Ciccone's nearest and dearest – her four children – don't have to pay but, according to reports last week, they too have to book ahead if they want to enjoy their mother's company. And they only get 15 minutes at a time.

Rather fittingly for the woman who redefined notions of fame, we're told that mother-of-four Madonna ruthlessly divides her days into 15-minute segments, each accounted for in her diary by her personal assistant. So, supposedly jotted alongside her business commitments and all those Kabbalah meetings and gruelling workouts are homework sessions, bedtime stories and cuddles.

On one hand, the story offers rich pickings for unreconstructed males – and indeed females – who'd prefer modern families to resemble the images of 1950s advertising. Cue much predictable spluttering over the selfishness of a woman, a 52-year-old single mother no less, shamelessly prioritising fame and fortune over her children.

On the other, it also seems like a terribly old-fashioned, unsentimental approach to parenting. We all know Madonna enthusiastically embraced a number of English cultural traditions during her marriage to public schoolboy turned Cockney geezer film-director Guy Ritchie, but surely Victorian parenting wasn't on her citizenship curriculum alongside riding horses and accessorising every outfit with a flat cap? Are unscheduled hugs really a no-no?

If there is a kernel of truth in this story – which is, admittedly, deliciously credible evidence of the Material Girl's joyless, control-freak reputation – I expect it's that Madonna is a very busy woman who organises her time more efficiently than the rest of us can, or indeed would want to.

Her current projects include directing her first feature film (the Wallis Simpson biopic, entitled W.E.), launching her own clothing line and fronting the autumn campaign for the Italian fashion label Dolce & Gabbana. Ironically enough, in these ads, Madge plays a house wife in a variety of domestic, if improbably glamorous, tableaux.

It sounds as if Madonna, like many of the busy people and especially mothers with whom I'm acquainted, may well have resorted to the deeply unsexy practices of the uber-organised. Of course, none of them has the luxury of a personal assistant to seamlessly co-ordinate their daily routine with that of their kids, but they certainly use similar military-seeming techniques to keep family life from spiralling into chaos.

Online calendars, which update the entire family about where they should be and what they should be doing on a given day via email, meal planners, text message reminders that dinner will be at 8pm – all of these things can seem like disturbing reminders of how complicated modern life has become. But they can also be viewed as a pragmatic way of dealing with the demands of our situation.

Of course, most of us have those demands thrust upon us to a certain extent; unlike multi-multi-millionaire Madonna, we don't have the option of staying at home and just going with the flow a bit more. And it does make one wonder why a woman who has never really paused to draw breath felt the need to add to her family once more by adopting – and not without difficulty – her youngest child, Malawi-born Mercy, last year. Perhaps Madonna ought to have worked a little more on managing her expectations, as well as her time.

drive from www.independent.co.uk

North Sea reserves are being targeted by the Korea National Oil Corporation amid fears that crude prices will start to rise sharply. Photograph: George Steinmetz/Corbis

The scramble by emerging economies to secure future energy reserves has injected new heat into London's mergers and acquisitions market, with an Asian group launching the first hostile bid by a state-owned oil company – this time for a North Sea explorer.

Korea National Oil Corporation (KNOC) announced a £1.87bn takeover bid today for Dana Petroleum. The approach was immediately rejected by the Dana board, even though it could net its chief executive, Tom Cross, an estimated £60m.

KNOC has already completed a string of successful friendly acquisitions over the past two years. It said tonight that it had obtained support for its cash offer of £18 a share from just under half of Dana's shareholders.

Seong-Hoon Kim, senior executive vice-president of KNOC, said the company was offering a "full and fair price" but regretted having to make a hostile bid.

"It has always been our desire to agree a recommended transaction with the board of Dana and we are very disappointed that the board of Dana does not agree that £18 per share represents a full and fair value for the company," he said.

"We believe that we have no alternative other than to put our attractive proposal directly to shareholders. We hope that Dana shareholders will recognise the merits of our offer."

But Cross and his fellow directors, who have repeatedly shunned previous friendly approaches from the South Koreans, told shareholders to ignore the latest bid, which is at a premium of nearly 60% to Dana's share price on 30 June, the last business day before the approach was announced.

In a statement to the London Stock Exchange, Dana advised shareholders and convertible bond holders "to take no action in respect of the offers" and said that it would give an update on its production, development and exploration activities with its half-year results next Friday.

But the tide seems to be turning against Dana, whose shares jumped nearly 6% to £17.93. The City fund manager Schroders, Dana's largest investor with a 13% stake, has already publicly called for the British company's board to meet KNOC.

Talks between the two companies broke down this month after they failed to agree on terms that would give KNOC access to Dana's books. A week ago, the Korean company refused to raise its offer again, having previously increased it from its initial level of £17 a share.

Cross, who founded Dana, retains a 2% stake, which would give him about £30m in the event of a sale, but some observers have estimated that he could earn double this if all share options and bonuses were taken into account.

Seoul gave KNOC a $6.5bn (£4.2bn) war chest this year to boost the country's oil reserves as the battle between Asian state-owned oil companies for overseas reserves heats up. Heavy oil-consuming countries fear that crude prices can only rise from their present level of $73 a barrel as new output becomes harder and more expensive to find and produce.

drive from www.guardian.co.uk

Financial speculators have come under renewed fire from anti-poverty campaigners for their bets on food prices, blamed for raising the costs of goods such as coffee and chocolate and threatening the livelihoods of farmers in developing countries.

The World Development Movement (WDM) will issue a damning report today on the growing role of hedge funds and banks in the commodities markets in recent years, during which time cocoa prices have more than doubled, energy prices have soared and coffee has fluctuated dramatically.

The charity's demands for the British financial watchdog to follow the US in cracking down on such speculation comes against a backdrop of cocoa prices jumping to a 33-year high as it emerged that a London hedge fund had snapped up a large part of the world's stock of beans. On Friday, traders say, Armajaro took delivery of 240,100 tonnes of cocoa – the biggest from London's Liffe exchange in 14 years and equal to about 7% of annual global production, according to the Financial Times.

A 150% rise in cocoa prices over the past 18 months has forced many chocolate-makers to raise their prices and often to use less cocoa.

The WDM's Great Hunger Lottery report says "risky and secretive" financial bets on food prices have exacerbated the effect of poor harvests in recent years. It argues that volatility in food prices has made it harder for producers to plan what to grow, pushed up prices for British consumers and in poorer countries risks sparking civil unrest, like the food riots seen in Mexico and Haiti in 2008.

Deborah Doane, WDM director, said: "Investment banks, like Goldman Sachs, are making huge profits by gambling on the price of everyday foods. But this is leaving people in the UK out of pocket, and risks the poorest people in the world starving.

"Nobody benefits from this kind of reckless gambling except a few City wheeler-dealers. British consumers suffer because it pushes up inflation, because of unpredictable oil and raw material prices, and the world's poorest people suffer because basic foods become unaffordable."

The group used figures in Goldman Sachs' annual report to estimate that the bank made a profit of $1bn (£650m) through speculating on food last year. The bank, however, says the "overwhelming majority" of its activities in commodity markets are on behalf of clients and that the WDM's profit estimates are "ludicrously overstated".

The charity is urging the UK government to take the lead within the European Union in demanding more transparency and tighter controls in commodities markets. It says 800 people have pledged to call the Financial Services Authority watchdog this week to complain about speculators' growing influence on food prices and demand changes similar to those in the US.

drive from guardian.co.uk

On Saturday 20 March, The Independent innocently reported on the launch of a new restaurant in London. A modestly-sized establishment tucked into a side-street just off Chelsea's King's Road, L'Art Du Fromage bills itself as the country's first speciality cheese restaurant. It is run by Julien Ledogar and Jean-Charles Madenspacher, two fresh-faced 24-year-olds from a small village outside Strasbourg, and it serves French and Swiss cheese under many guises, including fondues, raclettes and three intriguing varieties of ice cream: white cheese, blue cheese and goat's cheese. The news of its opening might not have inflamed great passions among our readers, were it not for the headline: "Cheese-only restaurant opens in London (just don't expect cheddar)."

One of the first threads on our comments board beneath the article had a title typed in angry capitals: "CHEESE THOUGHT POLICE". The user rick400 had foolishly described cheddar as "awful", leading another, sidsnat, to make derogatory allusions to rick400's personal hygiene. "British cheeses cannot compete with French cheese on any level," asserted starlingnl. "If you haven't tried unpasteurised cheddar you haven't lived," shot back media_myths, before dismissing Dutch cheese as "plastic and bland".

The online debate raged all weekend, with one dismissive contributor even inviting the unassuming young Frenchmen to "take [their] acne-speckled cheese imperialism and flush it down the toilet", using the classic French volume of food reference, Repertoire de la Cuisine, as loo roll.

Evidently, cheese is one of those subjects that sets the web alight, like Apple products, Justin Bieber, or Israel. Of all the world's foodstuffs, it is the most divisive and perhaps the most beloved; in common with wine, it has genres, histories, trends. One can hardly imagine a serious argument of any length over the relative merits of the brioche and the croissant, but the cheese enthusiasts who take part in these online flame wars back their favourite varieties with the fervour of football supporters.

"Behind every cheese there's a farm, a farmer, animals, a region and a history," says Juliet Harbutt, self-confessed cheese obsessive and the author of a number of comprehensive books about cheese, including Cheese: A Complete Guide to Over 300 Cheeses of Distinction; The World Encyclopaedia of Cheese and A Cook's Guide to Cheese. "Most farmers don't make sausages or pies; they leave it to a pie-maker or a butcher. But they do make their own cheese. Other foodstuffs are not so distinctive, and don't come from the producer to your plate so directly."

drive from www.independent.co.uk

This week I'm writing about a recent break that I took to a wonderful rum distillery in Guyana. What with my tequila mission to Mexico last year, as well as quite a few wine trips abroad, it's true that many of my excursions are based around alcohol, but I justify them by telling myself that having a full understanding of all the types of alcohol in the world is an integral part of my job – at least that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

I was very lucky to be travelling with James Shelbourne and Stuart Ekins from Inspirit, who import fine spirits from around the world and who are fantastically knowledgeable about all sorts of drinks.

Rum is usually associated with Jamaica, Barbados and Cuba; so Guyana wasn't the first place that came to mind. We visited the Demerara Distillers in Georgetown, where I tried the finest rum I have ever tasted.
They have been distilling the stuff there for three and a half centuries for the local community as well as imports to England. Demerara Distillers is the only rum distillers using wooden pot stills, which not only look beautiful but also give its El Dorado rum its unique flavour.

Mr Robinson's liming punch

Nick Strangeway knocked this up in Guyana and named it after master distiller George Robinson. We visited the local market for provisions a couple of days before so that Nick could get his pineapple and three-year-old rum infusing nicely.

For the infusion

1 small pineapple, peeled, quartered and thinly sliced
1ltr preferably El Dorado 3-year-plus rum

For the lime and bitter orange sherbet

5 limes zested and juice reserved
4 Seville or ordinary oranges, zested and juice reserved
1 tbsp caster sugar

For the Demerara syrup

500ml Demerara sugar
500ml water

Put the sliced pineapple in a non-reactive bowl and pour over the rum. Cover with clingfilm and leave to infuse for at least 48 hours. If you are leaving the pineapple to infuse for longer you can keep it in an airtight preserving or kilner jar.

To make the sherbet, mix the zest, juice and sugar together until dissolved, and leave to stand for an hour, stirring every so often.

Make the Demerara syrup by heating the sugar and water, stirring every so often until infused; then remove from the heat and leave to cool.

To serve, mix all of the ingredients together, adding more or less of the rum and pineapple infusion to taste, and serve in a punch bowl with lots of ice.

drive from www.independent.co.uk

Manchester City did far more than take their first Premier League victory of this campaign. They claimed the win by the sort of margin associated with sides who are viewed as credible candidates for the major prizes.

Luck also went against Liverpool here on occasion, but the home crowd had its glimpse of the spectacle that is now demanded here. In patches at least, the flow and danger were obvious. Time, too, is in the side that is clearly taking shape.

Before a watching Sheikh Mansour, City's benefactor even more than its owner, there was an opulent opening goal as early as the 13th minute. Visitors known for their rigour were still left powerless by the fluency of a move that also showed surprising understanding in a line-up that remains under development.

Adam Johnson, in his first start of the campaign, slid a pass between Milan Jovanovic and Daniel Agger, with James Milner, on his debut, slipped into space on the right before pulling the cross back for Gareth Barry to side-foot the ball into the net.

The breakthrough appeared to augur well, but City showed little further interest in laying on a spectacle before the interval. That was not so very great a surprise. Roberto Mancini has tried to look methodical and even downbeat in his management, as if he could personally offset the bemusement and disbelief that swirls around a club of unequalled means.

The prosaic streak was its broadest when he opened the Premier League campaign with a cautious approach at White Hart Lane.

Even if he was wilfully refusing to play to the gallery, a goalless draw must have been entirely satisfactory against Tottenham Hotspur, who beat City to the spot in the Champions League qualifiers.

A first home fixture of the campaign, against Liverpool, seemed to demand that Mancini reveal more of his intentions. Circumspection could not be the order of the day when Milner, signed from Aston Villa in a deal valued at £26m, was making his debut on the left wing.

Nonsensical as it sounds after all the outlay, City, however, can be as rueful as any other club when a player is missing. Mario Balotelli, a £24m acquisition from Internazionale, might have been of use, but a striker who, on his debut, scored the only goal of the away match with Timisoara in the Europa League was ruled out with a knee problem.

Momentum and credibility for City can only have their origin in victories and those results, above all, must come in a steady flow at this stadium, yet they hardly reduced the visitors to panic in the first half. Liverpool were a good test of City's means.

They were bound to be obstinate under the management of that formidable organiser Roy Hodgson, even if the manager did not have Javier Mascherano in his squad as conjecture swelled of an imminent move to Barcelona.

drive from www.independent.co.uk