The Stornoway Way is an entropic tale of energies sparked to life and quenched by landscape, language and culture. “We do not live in the back of beyond, we live in the very heart of beyond,” notes Robert Stornoway, the maniacally amusing, melancholy Hebridean hero of Kevin MacNeil’s novel. And so he is here as he projects the terrible loneliness of a don who belatedly realises that if liking people is half the battle, this was, in his case, “the wrong half”..

Unable to hurt the feelings of a nubile sexpot, he succumbs to her seduction, and I’ll never forget his priceless, slightly flattered, intensely panic-stricken look as she musses his hair into an impromptu Rod Stewart look.Russell Beale is absolutely matchless, though, at portraying characters who kick over all their emotional defences and retain a quiet, matter-of-dignity as they face up to humiliating truths. At least I think I am”), he is hilarious at the farcical aspects of Philip’s plight. Philip’s engagement to the beautiful, preeningly malicious young graduate, Celia (a spot-on performance from Anna Madeley) only starts to feel genuine when it begins to unravel horribly.But Hampton’s insight that Philip’s liking everybody through terror would wind up leave him as isolated as Alceste, who hates everybody from pride, is brilliantly realised by Russell Beale.Playing a dumpy, chronically apologetic and indecisive don (“My trouble is, I’m a man of no conviction. The kind of writer who has been forced to abandon the left wing for tax reasons is lampooned with an almost counter-productive heavy-handedness in the velvet-suited, strenuously “shocking” Braham (Simon Day) whose new novel is about a social worker who sees the light and becomes a merchant banker. In his place, we have Russell Beale’s Philip, a bachelor don who anxiously likes everyone and has to be a philologist because he is incapable of the critical judgements needed to teach literature.Pitch-perfect in terms of period feel, Grindley’s production can’t disguise the fact that the piece operates on different levels of achievement. The insularity of the milieu is satirically underlined by the political backdrop: the assassination of the Prime Minister and the majority of the Cabinet are ludicrously not enough to wrest the attention of the dons and literati from their own self-absorbed concerns.Hampton’s master-stroke is to put at the heart of the play a reverse-image of Moli?’s Alceste, the man who takes scathing hatred to an extreme. For the hypocritical hothouse of Louis XIV’s court, we have the backbiting, bitchy world of modern academe.

Now he’s portraying a philology lecturer in Christopher Hampton’s The Philanthropist, a play from 1970 which is receiving a welcome revival at the Donmar Warehouse in David Grindley’s sharply etched and highly entertaining production.
As the title suggests, this early work is a clever, witty inversion of Moli?’s great comedy The Misanthrope. He was the hapless astrophysicist in Humble Boy and a sublime mix of donnish self-importance and tortuous insecurity as the professor of moral philosophy in Stoppard’s Jumpers. For many in the audience, these observations and the vague menace of violence will seem all too familiar.To 1 October (020-7565 5000). Simon Russell Beale certainly knows how to go to work on an egg-head – and he seems to have cornered the market in bumbling, heart-injured academics. Nevertheless, Rachael Blake, Tanya Moodie, Paul Hickey and Neil Dudgeon give expression and humour to Crimp’s crisp writing.

Simple chandeliers in black or red crystal start at around £40 from Heals ( www.heals.co.uk; 020-7636 1666), while Grand Illusions ( www.grandillusions.co.uk; 020 8607 9446) sells a very pretty painted wire Fantasie Chandelier, £36, with matching wall sconces, £21.50.If budget is no problem, Glory Chandeliers ( www.glory-chandeliers ; 020-7633 0696), a family-run business in SE1, can supply antique, handmade Italian chandeliers from £2,000. Need to spice up a tired love-life? Want to impress a new partner? Then it’s time to introduce a touch of romance into your bedroom interior. Some of the things you need to consider include floral motifs, tactile, sensuous textures and soft, seductive lighting. Think ornate French romantic, sluttish Moulin Rouge or irreproachable English country virgin, and shake your boudoir, baby…
LIGHTINGA chandelier will provide an exciting, twinkly light, while wall-lights and table lights cast a softer glow and create suggestive shadows.

The electronic gambling commission has reported a £750,000 profit.Buyers pay 5.5 per cent stamp duty and 4 per cent conge (a property tax) along with 1 per cent document duty for homes worth over £150,000. The house prices and new industries are extremely modern, but almost everything else on the island stopped in the 1960s.The lowdownCost of living: You pay £200,000 for a two-bedroom flat near the cricket pitch or £450,000 for a four-bedroom house in good condition. A large stone house with an acre of land and coastal views will be £625,000. One-offs such as converted churches or forts will be more than £1m.Attractions: Cricketer Ian Botham, commentator John Arlott and Tory grandee Edward du Cann used to live here but in the absence of celebrities, there are two 1938 London Underground carriages that criss-cross the island on an hourly basis.Downside: Alderney’s eccentric property market is hard to call – some properties find buyers within a month but one large home has been on the market for 13 years.How to get there: There are daily direct flights from Southampton, Bournemouth and Brighton, but other locations need connecting flights, usually from Jersey. Travel to or from London takes five hours.USP: This place is Miss Marple meets The Prisoner. There are no parking meters on the main street, the airport lounge has a box of unfinished knitting that locals toy with while waiting for flights, and the police Land Rover’s number plate is 999..

I did this to show people what I could do, but I also needed to show myself. But most significantly, Heap has proved that you don’t need a multimillion-pound recording or marketing budget to make an impact.”I really didn’t expect to get as far as I did,” she says. “My credit cards are maxed out and I owe all this money to my mortgage, but I’m really glad I put everything on the line for this. Heap has had to learn to rely on herself – both artistically and financially – and to trust her own judgement. Setting out to make a record completely on her own was a risk, but as the album proves, it was worth taking.Response has exceeded expectation: the first pressing of 4,000 copies sold out in under three weeks; a major label is so impressed that it is offering Heap a deal to sign others to Megaphonic; and requests for her to produce other artists are already trickling in. Consequently, from cheeky romantic daydreams (“Goodnight and Go”) to intentionally non-specific heart-stoppers (“Hide And Seek” and the album closer, “The Moment I Said It”), her songs make for intriguing and refreshingly human, personal vignettes.Making Speak for Yourself has been a voyage of self-discovery.

“Without anyone to help, I just couldn’t imagine how I was going to get out of that fix.”But Heap’s determination not to allow anyone else into the studio actually worked well for her – particularly where her songwriting is concerned. Beneath Heap’s in-control, determined shell lies an emotional – and, she admits, at times irrational – core “I have a tendency to get carried away,” she says. “I might think fleetingly that someone I know might die, then the next moment I’m crying like it’s just happened. And that’s exactly how a song might start.”With no one around, Heap felt able to open up.

The nagging debt wasn’t always conducive to creativity, however.”There were times when I really couldn’t finish a song, when all I could think about was that I’d wasted £2,000 in studio rent,” says Heap. “But why should I get anyone else to do something if I can do it myself? I get to have everything done just like I want it.”Such freedom has come at a price. During our interview, a courier delivers a parcel of “Hide and Seek” promotional DVDs which, after our chat, Heap will hand-deliver to Radio 1.”I suppose I am a bit of a control freak,” she admits shyly. It is a hard task, but Heap has succeeded in giving her electro album a human heart.When it came to dealing with record labels, it was a case of twice bitten, thrice shy. Heap signed to Almo for her 1998 debut, I Megaphone, and then with Universal to release Frou Frou’s 2002 debut Details.

Rules vary from place to place but usually foreigners require permission from the island government. This is often a formality but is expensive – Grenada, for example, charges up to 10 per cent of the purchase price of a house for issuing the licence to buy it.Buyers also pay stamp duty and transfer tax, up to 5 per cent of the purchase price, plus legal fees of up to 2 per cent. Different matches are going to be played in different Caribbean countries, so I am looking forward to island-hopping. But how much should I expect to pay for a property? Which islands are best for travelling directly to and from the UK? Is it easy to travel between the islands? Can you reassure me that this is a sensible move, and not one induced by the euphoria of England’s winning The Ashes?
The adviceGRAHAM NORWOOD REPLIES: Only you can judge whether this is a logical or emotional purchase, but plenty of Britons have committed to the Caribbean.There is huge choice. Although the Bahamas has many luxurious homes it also has some of the cheapest properties in the region, some in routine resorts lining the coast but also timeshares linked to premium-brand hotels allowing owners to use their facilities.

Unlike other Caribbean islands, most local homes are well maintained. While many coastal chattels were snapped up, knocked down and replaced by developments, those that remain sit side-by-side with large houses invariably owned by Britons or Americans.It is easy to buy on almost all Caribbean islands, although fees can be high. Most good-quality holiday homes are £450,000 to £4m or more, although for each property like that there are a dozen “chattel houses”, small homes for the 270,000 locals. Antigua is also quite cheap, although recent developments have attempted to take it upmarket.At the other end of the scale is Barbados, which lists Cilla Black, Cliff Richard and Gary Lineker among its second-home owners. The problem

STEVE DOYLE OF TRING WRITES: I am a cricket nut and I love the Caribbean, so I am going to pull down equity from my Hertfordshire house and buy a holiday home there in good time for the 2007 Cricket World Cup. Tonight, however, the runarounds of FC Thun line up alongside the Ferraris of European football when they face Arsenal at Highbury in the Champions’ League. No wonder there is such strong demand for houseboats, especially in London where moorings are scarce.

Last year, the Britannia Building Society stopped selling self-build loans.”Self-build is a niche market,” says Mike Sims, the society’s mortgage marketing manager. “Self-build mortgages are complex, both to sell and to process. We found that, despite training our staff to a high standard, it was difficult to maintain that knowledge because staff dealt with self-build cases on an infrequent basis. Also, the onset of mortgage regulation has made the sale of self-build mortgages more complicated. This may explain the more recent decisions of a number of other lenders to withdraw from this lending sector.”There are, though, still several mortgage lenders who remain committed to the market. Unless a self-builder has a substantial amount of cash to hand, or can borrow from friends and family, he will need a mortgage that is tailored to the construction process.

This means finding a mortgage lender prepared to release funds in stages, including for land purchase.But despite the growing interest in self-build, it is an area of mortgage lending that some lenders are finding hard to service. Each year, about 20,000 people build their own homes, according to Government statistics, and the number is rising. The idea of having total control of the design of a new home explains the popularity of self-build. There is also a good chance, if the home is well designed, of making a significant profit when it comes to sell. Financing a self-build project, though, remains a challenge.

The self-builder’s website www.selfbuildit.co.uk estimates that the average self-build project costs £140,000, and that two-thirds of self-builders need a mortgage.
The number of financing options is far more limited than for a conventional home purchase. It can be extremely difficult to borrow the money, and the lack of secure moorings puts your investment in peril.The main problem is the need to haul your investment out of the water every few years for an insurance survey, according to Sarah Blackburn of Lane Fox.She recently let the houseboat Chairman at the famous moorings at the end of Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. The boat was for a while the home of the comedy actor Nigel Planer.”I would never advise anyone to buy a houseboat as in investment,” she says. “The need for dry docking every few years disrupts tenants – you can’t just ask them to leave for a couple of weeks.”You can’t even put them up in a hotel because of the risk that the work might take longer than expected.”It is a different matter when the owner cannot live on their beloved boat for a time, but aims to return at some point.”Young couples buy them, live in them for a while and then have to move out when children arrive, but they can’t bear to sell,” Blackburn says.. High-earning individuals such as lawyers and surgeons use the boats as floating pieds-a-terre, staying overnight once or twice a week.

It has a little bucket armchair, which I re-covered in French chintz.I try to make peaceful places around the house for us to be together, and on the landing there’s a sofa, suggesting a place where you might sit down and read. Usually, though, there are cats or dogs asleep on it.It often seems that living in Norfolk is crazy, but each time I get out of the car I’m so glad.The new Emma Bridgewater autumn catalogue is out now:tel 020-7371 5489; www.emmabridgewater.co.uk. I hung a 19th-century Proven? quilt on a curtain rail to make it look a bit less basic. At the foot of the bed there is a chaise longue with clothes flung all over it.The main bathroom is tongue-and-groove panelled and has a double-ended bath high under the window, so that you can look out to the garden. Although it was very pretty, it was hugely uncomfortable, and I swapped it, quite to Matthew’s horror until he slept on it, for a new huge king-sized bed from a John Lewis sale. She has littered the walls with magazine cuttings of fashion models or rock stars, as well as faces of her friends taken on photocopiers It is very messy in a wildly creative way.

They started off with sweet Victorian prints and lots of books and now are terrible teenage dens with fairy lights, pictures of Kurt Cobain and dartboards on the walls. I like the children doing what they want, but Elizabeth has really let rip. She has colonised the old playroom downstairs as her bedroom and has a four-poster bed that she bullied Matthew to drag in for her from the barn. The coat-lined stone-flagged passage is wallpapered with huge-scale ordnance survey maps that we plan routes with.

I don’t really have a style, but the house is full of furniture and pictures belonging to my mother and grandmother, along with stuff that we have bought more recently in markets or junk shops. What really matters to me is that it feels like a family home. The house is very much about having friends and family to stay Hospitality is important. This is why I make everyday china because it symbolises those and moments in the day when you stop fussing and sit down together.The landing upstairs is painted a surprising pale violet – the same colour as my office downstairs, where I have a painting by Julian Trevelyan of a rhinoceros against a purple sky – chosen because the violet colour on the walls suited it very well. There’s no electricity, just a cranky chandelier, and it’s too far away from the house to hear the telephone.

The first, as Chancellor at Oxford, is to help make universities in Britain world-class The second is to help the Tories see sense on Europe. To achieve the former, he will have to take on more than a century of vested-interest bureaucracy and the huge middle-class perk of getting the poor to pay, via taxes, for old Etonians to enjoy low-cost education at Christ Church and Trinity. To achieve the latter, he will have to pray that the Tories keep losing elections until they realise that Europhobia wins headlines in the Rothermere press but turns off voters.If he achieves either, he will deserve the nation’s thanks. And this elegant, warm, clever and readable book shows that, even if he cannot do everything, Patten has done much that is good. British and European politics is the richer for his presence in our public life.Denis MacShane is Labour MP for Rotherham and was Minister for Europe 2002-2005 He now represents Britain on the Council of Europe. You will not find a better book on Shakespeare. Peter Ackroyd, one of the wonders of the scholarly world, has done it again.

Our greatest biographer has once more put the academics to shame. You might have thought it impossible to write a book on Shakespeare that did more than repeat what we already knew. Ackroyd does not have any rabbits to produce from the hat – Shakespeare does not turn out to be a woman or an Arab – but this is the first really plausible account that situates our greatest writer in his time and place. Were this the product of a lifetime of scholarship one would still be astonished by the reach of its historical knowledge and the depth of its literary understanding.

But Ackroyd has not spent his life as a Shakespearean scholar, this biography is one of a series that started just over 20 years ago with a magnificent life of T S Eliot and which includes the best accounts of Charles Dickens, Thomas More and William Blake.
If that were not enough, Ackroyd is also a major novelist and in his youth produced memorable lyric poetry The paradox may not, however, be so great. The fruits of Shakespearean scholarship are abundant; our knowledge of the Elizabethan theatre and Tudor social history is now very extensive; perhaps it needed someone from outside this world of specialists to make it live.The exact secret of how Ackroyd manages to inhale vast quantities ofscholarship, inhabit the writing of another until it becomes his own and then to inscribe a measured account in what cannot, to judge from the bibliography, be much over two years will no doubt remain a mystery.But if the process perplexes, the product illuminates. Ackroyd’s Shakespeare is a man of two places: his native Stratford, birthplace and grave, where he takes his place among the burghers; and his adopted London, where he finds in the new theatre a living which becomes a fortune, and a form which becomes a national treasure. Ackroyd has written nothing finer than the opening 100 pages, where 16th-century Stratford is summoned into life. All the resources of his knowledge and his saturation in Shakespeare’s language combine to make it clear how much Shakespeare’s vocabulary and imagination were formed in the world of a Renaissance town, where new forms of exchange and new forms of classical learning lived side by side.Ackroyd is superb at making the connections which show how small a society Tudor England was – not least in the astonishing web that he traces, which links Shakespeare time and time again to the “recusants” who, at risk to their life and living, continued to practise the Catholic faith.

No 2 Friedrich-Ebert Place was built more than a century ago as a palace for the president of Germany’s parliament. It still has an underground tunnel linking it with Lord Foster’s now-revamped Reichstag assembly only a stone’s throw away. It survived the Allied bombing and the Soviet army’s capture of the capital.But for decades during the Cold War, the soot-blackened building was stranded in the Communist eastern half of the city, next to the Berlin Wall. The East Germans used its turn-of-the-century chambers as the headquarters of a state-run recording company.But today the building is an oasis of calm refinement, an escape from the television cameras and the maelstrom of everyday politics.

Lavishly restored as Berlin’s Parliamentary Club, its lawns sweep down to the River Spree, uniformed waiters in dining rooms attend tables decked with crisp, white cloths.Chancellor Gerhard Schr? has blamed the media for talking down his chances of success in last Sunday’s inconclusive general election, but he need not fear inquisitive journalists here. The press is banned and entry is by invitation only.In its tranquil garden Mr Schr? met Angela Merkel, his conservative rival, for the first time since the election. They will meet again in the club next Wednesday for a second round of possible coalition talks.Bullet holes aside, No 2 Friedrich-Ebert Place may provide just the right ambience for a solution to Germany’s latest political crisis.. More than 100,000 British citizens living along America’s Gulf coast were urged by the Foreign Office yesterday to evacuate their homes ahead of Hurricane Rita. British nationals along the Texas coast were told to “take very seriously” the advice given by authorities and to join the nearly three-million-strong exodus of people fleeing the storm and its 165mph winds.

But some were adamant that they would stay put. Wendy Fraser, 43, had decided to avoid the traffic jams and was staying at her home on the outskirts of Houston with her husband and three young children, according to her mother, Irene Scott .Mrs Scott, 68, from Turriff in Aberdeenshire, said: “They have boarded up their house and have stored as much water as possible.

“They have a large walk-in cupboard and two walk-in wardrobes where they can take shelter if need be, although I am hoping it will not come to that.”People in Britain with relatives or friends living along the coast were also advised to telephone them immediately, before phone networks went down, to find out what their plans were.Following criticisms of the inadequate help it gave Britons trapped by Hurricane Katrina, a Foreign Office team has flown out from London to help the evacuation and deal with the aftermath.Staff from the British embassy in Washington, the British consulate general in Houston and other offices across the US were also being sent to the region to help.* Anyone in Britain with concerns about family or friends in the US can contact the Foreign Office on 020 7008 0000.. When Thomas and Rose Marie Uva were shot dead Christmas shopping in New York in 1992, their story could have been the stuff of an Elmore Leonard crime novel. For months, they had been sauntering into the social clubs of the city’s Mafia dons and, brandishing Uzi sub-machineguns, fleecing them of their cash. There was little surprise at the time that the brazen couple had met so bloody a demise.

Indeed, who could have imagined a more ill-advised, foolhardy and mortally rash means of raising extra money? If you crash a Mafia party and take their money you can expect to attract a little heat.
But 13 years later, this crime caper that really could have happened only in New York (or perhaps Las Vegas) has delivered an unexpected sequel. Yesterday, prosecutors in Manhattan were celebrating the arrest of one of two men they say murdered the Uvas.In custody and awaiting trial on charges of racketeering and murder is a certain Dominick Pizzonia, known in underworld mobster circles as “Skinny Dom”. Mr Pizzonia, prosecutors say, was a captain of the Gambino clan at the time of the murders and a close friend of the one-time head of the family, John “Dapper Don” Gotti, who was imprisoned the same year and died in 2002.Actually, two Mafia families competed with each other to claim credit for killing the Uvas. The Bonannos insisted to whoever would listen (except the police) that the hit had been theirs.

The reason is simple: the Uvas had become a source of severe grief and embarrassment to everyone in the New York Cosa Nostra. All the families wanted them punished.Over several months in 1992, it seems the husband-and-wife team identified at least four places they knew were favoured by Mafia chiefs as discreet spots to eat, sip wine and hatch schemes of murder, coercion and blackmail. The couple, with little care for the consequences, would stroll in with their guns and strip everyone’s pockets. They robbed the Mafia in caf?and social clubs in Little Italy, Brooklyn and Queens.The Cosa Nostra was shattered. As one turncoat mobster admitted at a racketeering trial years later: “It’s embarrassing if wise guys get held up.”The filing of charges against Mr Pizzonia could spell new legal trouble for the son of the late Dapper Don. Only last week, 41-year-old John Gotti Jr escaped prison when complex racketeering charges against him collapsed because of a deadlocked jury. Court papers in the Pizzonia case suggest Mr Gotti may have been involved in ordering the Uva killings.”These are old allegations,” Mr Gotti’s lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman, said.

My abiding memory of the New Signum Design, though, will be how surprisingly comfortable it is. Other badges, notably the French marques, have garnered a reputation over the years for producing supremely smooth, soft-riding cars. Yet here is a Vauxhall that can match them for long-journey comfort; in the New Signum you’ll find very well-sized, supportive seats mated to a wellsorted UK suspension set up and that means a pretty soothing time at the wheel So, the New Signum is a very rewarding driving machine. Even the sat nav worked efficiently, never a forgone conclusion on even the most expensive cars. Judge it objectively, and you too may find yourself surprised.. The Wolseley has become such a fixture on the London restaurant scene, it’s hard to believe it’s only been around since 2003.

Surely celebs have been flocking there since the 1980s, checking out Michael Winner’s latest arm candy and wondering just what happened to Anne Robinson’s face?

Back when Jeremy King and Chris Corbin were preparing to launch their grand brasserie on Piccadilly, rumours about The Wolseley ran riot, including the one about The Ivy doorman being poached for a salary of £70k a year. There was much speculation in industry circles about who was going to take charge of the kitchens; the eventual announcement that Chris Galvin would be executive chef was widely approved. Here was a chef who had been doing great things at Conran’s Orrery for some time, and deserved a larger stage.
Excitement about his appointment faded to a muted sustenato of disappointment that the food there didn’t quite live up to expectations. Certainly there weren’t many fireworks, but then it’s hard to get airborne when you’re building your menu around the essentially stodgy cuisine of central Europe. After two years at The Wolseley’s monolithic ranges, Galvin has moved on, setting up his own venture in partnership with younger brother Jeff, himself a veteran of several distinguished kitchens, including Soho’s L’Escargot.That these brothers have been dreaming of something more homespun than their former workplaces is signalled by the choice of name – Galvin – Bistrot De Luxe. That apparent oxymoron tells you all you need to know about the balance between intimacy and aspiration the Galvins are trying to achieve in their new Marylebone premises.

It’s a bistro, so expect something smaller and less fancy than a high-end restaurant. But that “De Luxe” promises the kind of attention to detail you’d associate with the brothers’ Michelin-starred backgrounds.The site, halfway up Baker Street opposite the former headquarters of M&S, has recently been home to a couple of disastrously short-lived restaurants. First, it was a groovy Italian called Innecto, then Alan Yau took it over as Anda, after a refurbishment that seemed to last longer than the subsequent restaurant.The Galvins’ designers have reconceived the space as a sophisticated, upscale brasserie, the Marais by way of Manhattan. The L-shaped dining room, with its black leather banquettes, classic bentwood chairs and dark wood walls, feels intimate, clubbable, timeless yet modern.The shortish menu combines brasserie classics such as confit of duck and charcuterie maison with slightly more directional offerings, like grilled cod with coco beans. A working knowledge of restaurant French comes in handy in navigating around the pithiviers and parmentiers, though on the evidence of our meal, you might as well throw away the dictionary and dive in regardless. Between four of us, we sampled half the dishes on the menu, and not one was disappointing.From the simplest – a half dozen briny fines de claire oysters – to the most complex – a shimmering, loosely heaped pile of pasta leaves, layered with Dorset crab and the most delicately flavoured velout?f girolles, starters were wonderfully prepared and presented. A pithivier, or puff pastry parcel, of pigeon breast served with caramelised chestnuts was particularly gorgeous to the eye, like a Cornish pasty prepared by an ambitious food stylist.Mains, too, provoked gasps of pleasure, even before the first bite had been taken.

“The show isn’t selected yet, but we’ll be able to have a selection from all six parts so we might be showing things that haven’t been seen [in London] yet.”He expected it would attract audiences from across the North to the Leeds gallery which usually receives around 250,000 visitors a year. It would have been very difficult for the gallery to raise the funds to mount such shows, he said, adding that it would be exciting to see the purchases of a major collector.Charles Saatchi has admitted that he never thought the show would be a success. “It’s good that the public are responding to painting so keenly,” he said.. Three-year-old Lucy Wilkinson watched the images of soldiers in flames jumping out of an armoured vehicle in Basra this week, well aware that her father is off to what she calls “Waq” in 10 days’ time.

She turned to her mother, Joanne, 32, and said confidently: “I think Fireman Sam will come and put him out.”

For Joanne, it is less easy to be sanguine about her husband’s return to a country that remains a war zone: “I started crying,” she said: “because I was imagining my husband on fire jumping out of the vehicle. If someone took Sky News off for the next six months I would be really grateful. ”

Sergeant Andrew Wilkinson, 32, of the Royal Horse Artillery, is among 6,000 men of the 7th Armoured Brigade about to take over in Iraq. In 10 days’ time the first of the famous Desert Rats will return to the city and surrounding area they liberated or invaded, depending on your point of view. Behind them they will leave, in the words of one officer, 3,000 mothers, not to mention other wives, husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends and families. In the next few weeks the coaches will pull up at their base in Germany and the wives, they insist, will not cry as they watch them drive away. They will return to the privacy of their cars and sob for 10 minutes before ” pulling themselves together”.

Many believe the Desert Rats’ turn has come around again too soon. But these women know that, when you are an army wife, the army comes first. “I don’t think soldiers should be out there but they have a job to do and I support him,” said one of the wives yesterday. Aware that after weeks of intense training most of their husbands are already a world away, they opt not to air their own fears.

Some have had “surreal and slightly hysterical” conversations about death; some have ignored the topic “What good will it do if I cry and scream and threaten It is not going to make any difference. He still needs to go,” said Claudia Percival, 38, wife of a major in the Royal Signals, and mother of Tara, aged six, and Ben, two. “Tara will say I don’t want daddy to go and she will start crying That is the most difficult thing,” she explained. Aware that many of the women can be lonely and overwhelmed by coping 24 hours a day on their own, an extensive welfare package has been put together. Under the orders of Brigadier Patrick Marriott, who learnt how tough it was for families as a young officer in charge of welfare, a 100-page Op Home Rat advice guide has been published, which they hope will be adopted across the Army.