He entered the Glasgow veterinary school in 1933 without a single science qualification. He struggled for years to make ends meet and money worries brought on a bout of profound depression in the 1960s.”I thought for a time he was going to be one of the suicide men,” said his son “Part of the problem was that he kept things bottled up. Until his dying day [10 years ago] there was a part of him we didn’t really know.”Austin Kirwan, a vet from Ormskirk, Lancashire, who co-ordinates a helpline for British Veterinary Association members, believes the transition from a university faculty with 500 highly motivated people to a remote practice with two or three vets takes a profound mental toll.By midday, Mr Norton has his callipers around a decidedly unco-operative 20-month-old cow which is clamped in a narrow pen at Woolpots, a farm where previous vets have included Alf White’s partner Donald Sinclair (Siegfried, in the Herriot books).”These beef cattle don’t care much for being handled, but this chap really knows what he’s doing,” said the farmer, Richard Dennis, nodding at Mr Norton. Were his mind not already set on his next assignment, he might have enjoyed the compliment.. The net curtain may be on its last twitch. Despite its essential flimsiness, it has represented a barrier between our private lives and the world outside.

It became a symbol of suburbia, the badge of office of the nosy neighbour and a surprisingly effective deterrent to criminality. But alongside blind manufacturers, the chief beneficiaries of changing fashions are the nation’s burglars, who can now not only ascertain whether a home is occupied but are also tempted by the array of domestic goods such as televisions and stereo systems on show.
A survey has revealed that only 39 per cent of us have net curtains covering ground-floor windows, while 40 per cent of homes have no covering at all. Almost 60 per cent of home owners do not bother to close their curtains when leaving home for a lengthy period, such as a holiday.Two thirds of those surveyed said they did not have net curtains “because they did not like them”, while nearly half – 47 per cent – considered them terminally unfashionable.The trend is troubling the police, whose crime prevention officers have spent many years advising people to keep curtains drawn as much as possible, and insurance companies, who have to fork out for burglary claims.Adrian Harris, director of NIG, the insurance company which commissioned the survey, said: ‘It’s common sense that leaving valuable goods on display is asking for trouble, but more and more of us seem to be doing that unconsciously. Taking down net curtains may be in keeping with the latest fashions but it does create a shop window for burglars deciding whether or not to break into a property.

The more they can see into your front room, the more likely it is that they will try to gain entry.”Annabelle Campbell, of the Geffrye Museum of Domestic Interiors in London, said net curtains were “about separating the private nature of the Victorian family from the outside world,” and were reinforced by the need for privacy in urban areas with houses being built close together. Now people are restoring original shutters, finding more sympathetic fabrics such as muslin, choosing cotton or wooden blinds, or avoiding window coverings altogether.. They came in their thousands to offer their bodies for decoration to some of the best artists in the world. And judging by the size of the queue outside the inaugural London Tattoo Convention yesterday, the 130 top body colourists from around the world had plenty of flesh to press.
Zele from Croatia, Horikoi from Japan and BorneoHeadHunter from Indonesia joined other tattoo artists in transforming an old brewery building in the East End into the biggest tattoo parlour in the world.Many of the 4,000 or so visitors were seeking a tattoo and had already booked sessions up to seven hours long.Derek Marks-Baker, a “huge body art and tattooing fan”, had woken at dawn for the six-hour drive from Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, to watch his steady-handed heroes.As he queued outside the hall with his wife, Steph, Mr Marks-Baker, 41, said: “I’m quite excited. This convention is bringing together about 100 of the world’s top artists. It’s going to be absolutely awesome seeing them at work.”He was hoping to get a large “horror” tattoo from one of his favourite tattooists, Paul Booth of Last Rites in New York, but feared the price could pass £1,000.British tattooists, like Bugs and George Bone, were busy working alongside famous foreigners leaving their mark on visitors.Tattooing equipment was cleaned in a special sterile room, and after use every needle was stowed away for disposal.For those seeking enlightenment about the history of tattooing, a temporary museum told the story of body art through the ages.Modern Western tattoos were developed in Britain following the discovery by Captain Cook in 1769 of Tahiti and its tattooed inhabitants.

The seafarer reputedly coined the term tattoo from the “tac-tac” sound made by the hammer that hit the needle into the skin.Miki Vialetto, who runs two international tattooing magazines, decided to bring the international show to Britain after staging it for four years in Milan.”There are representatives of all the techniques, from Japanese to Borneo to gothic,” Mr Vialetto, 34, said.The Italian, whose body is covered 80 per cent by tattoos, believed tattooed celebrities such as Ben Affleck, Jennifer Aniston and Eminem were responsible for the surge of interest in body art in the past decade.”It’s become a cultural phenomenon. Many museums have started to get interested in tattooing,” he said.Between 15,000 and 20,000 people are expected to visit the three-day convention before it closes at 7pm tomorrow.. One of Russia’s leading modern art galleries has been forced to remove a stylised icon of the Virgin Mary fashioned from black caviar after the Russian Orthodox Church complained it incited religious hatred. The work of art, Icon-caviar, was created by a Russian ?gr?rtist called Alexander Kosolapov who specialises in unlikely juxtaposition and draws much of his inspiration from the late Andy Warhol.

It depicts an outline figure of the Virgin Mary and a baby Jesus hewn entirely from caviar within a gold icon frame and was displayed in Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery as part of an exhibition called Russian Pop Art. The museum’s director, Valentin Rodionov, decided it was safer to take it down after he received a warning letter from a group of Orthodox believers.
The letter bore the signatures of at least 50 churchgoers and priests, who argued that the artwork violated their constitutional rights. They demanded the museum take “appropriate measures” and vowed to “take their own measures” if they did not get their way.Mr Rodionov said he had complied so as not to escalate the dispute since Orthodox believers have, in recent years,vandalised artwork they deem offensive.Mr Kosolapov’s work seems to be particularly offensive to them. Earlier this year, another of his creations, a canvas which incorporated Jesus’ head into a Coca-Cola advert with the slogan ‘This is my blood’ was vandalised in Moscow.Mr Kosolapov says that Icon-caviar was not religious but inspired by Andy Warhol’s Coca-Cola paintings and aimed at showing Russia as an authoritarian country that divides people into rich and poor. He told Mr Rodionov that his decision to remove the canvas was a personal insult.. A new law going through Italy’s parliament will result in nearly half the 3,000 cases before the country’s highest court of appeal being struck down before the sentences can be confirmed, judges warned this week. Hundreds of serious crimes will go unpunished and many whose sentences have already been confirmed by a lower appeals court will walk free.
Many other cases that are in an earlier phase will also be affected, including the brutal attack by riot police on activists and journalists sleeping in the Diaz school in Genoa during the G8 meeting of 2001, in which dozens were seriously injured.