As they await their big break, today's young artists are having to make ends meet with day jobs. How are they coping?How does the average ­artist make a living? If you're Damien Hirst, of course, you need only flog a couple of sharks in formaldehyde; if you're Tracey Emin, an unmade bed will do. If you're an actor, a well-publicised turn as Hamlet and near-omnipresence in the Christmas TV schedules, a la David Tennant, would keep the ­accountant happy.But none of these scenarios will ring true for the average artist – who is more likely to be stacking supermarket shelves, waiting tables or writing ­advertising copy by day, and acting, dancing or sculpting by night.Right now, the economic climate for artists in this country looks particularly bleak. There's the innate...

Glenn Beck is a TV host, bestselling author and the most influential voice on the rightwing Fox channel. Now, even some Republicans worry that the extreme and maverick views of Beck and his supporters will make their party unelectable. Is the TV tail wagging the political dog?On 12 September this year, during the Indian summer of America's discontent, tens of thousands of rightwing protesters marched on Washington. The issues at stake were many – Obama's proposed overhaul of healthcare, high taxes, big spending, feared socialism, abortion – and the venom was extraordinary. Placards featured Obama as the Joker – in whiteface, with his mouth slashed bloodily from ear to ear, and the caption "THE DOCTOR WILL SEE YOU NOW".It was some time around then that the White House launched a war...

Monday:It was the forty-sixth anniversary of Doctor Who first being on the tellybox, so what better way to celebrate the start of a new era than by going back to the first story from the man who'll be at the head of the NEXT start of a new era. We welcome our new Grand Moff with his 2005 Hugo A Go-Go Award Winning "Empty Child". Rose Tyler, wearing a Union Jack tee-shirt no less, hanging from a barrage balloon over London, the classic skyline of St Pauls surrounded by flames but unbowed, as the Luftwaffe bombers scream towards her. The show has done bigger spectacle since then, for which read "more CGI", but no one has managed to top that image for iconic status or sheer summing up of everything that is Doctor Who: the juxtaposition of the history, the terrifying, the slightly-ironic...

A mother claimed £130,000 in benefits for her son by pretending he was disabled in a six-and-a-half year deceit during which she kept him wheelchair bound and convinced doctors he was so unwell they should operate on him. The 35-year-old lived a ''high flying'' life on benefits after telling doctors the boy had diabetes and backed up her claims by providing false urine samples spiked with glucose. She claimed her son - now aged eight - had cerebral palsy, cystic fibrosis, the throat disorder dysphagia, and was allergic to all types of food. She fitted him in extra large clothes to make him look ill and told doctors, friends family - and even the boy's father - that he was unable to eat or swallow food. He was believed to be so ill that he was praised by a leading children's charity and...

Shakira is not your average £26m pop star. She reveals why life is like a soccer field, why she's in therapy, and why she licked the bars of that cage.In the lobby of the studio where Shakira is receiving the British press, there is a television tuned to a non-stop music video channel. For the most part, it appears to be engaged in a lengthy experiment to see how many times viewers can watch Pixie Lott's Mama Do video before suffering permanent damage to their cerebral cortex, but just before I'm called into the presence of the fourth richest woman in music (according to Forbes magazine), it shows the video for her new single, She Wolf.This makes meeting Shakira a slightly disconcerting experience. It's not just that it feels strange politely shaking the hand of a woman you've just...

David Cameron invoked the memory of his late son, Ivan, today as he defended the Tories' commitment to the NHS.Bruised by the transatlantic row over the health service, in which a Tory MEP dismissed the NHS as a "60-year mistake", Cameron described it as a "fantastic and precious fact of British life".During a speech in Bolton, Cameron made clear that the NHS had transformed his family's life after Ivan was born in April 2002 with cerebral palsy and epilepsy.Cameron said: "The moment you're injured or fall ill, the moment something happens to someone you love, you know that whoever you are, wherever you're from, whatever's wrong, however much you've got in the bank, there's a place you can go where people will look after you and do their best to make things right again." The Tory leader...

One of the best Doctor Who stories ever made, and one of the most atypical – unusually long, highly political (even highly liberal), with not even a mention of the TARDIS and refusing to side with the ‘humans’ against the ‘monsters’, I’ve often said this was the story that turned me into a Liberal. For the new producer at the time, though, Doctor Who and the Silurians was even more significant, as a technological breakthrough forty years ago this week demonstrated… “There’s a wealth of scientific knowledge down here, Brigadier – and I can’t wait to get started on it.” There are few Doctor Who stories about which I have such a wealth of feeling and which have had such profound effects on me. This may, on the face of it, seem a little strange – after all, I...

Dear Grant Schapps, It looks like you’ve got some decent media coverage for your investigation into IVF.  You found that more than 80% of NHS primary care trusts in England fail to offer the recommended three free cycles of IVF to infertile couples, with a ‘postcode lottery’ in operation with regard to rules on age, relationships and other children.  However, you seem to have jumped straight passed the question of whether IVF should even be available on the NHS.  I’ve been doing some digging on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority’s (HFEA) website and uncovered some incredible statistics on this matter.  First of all, there is a perfectly reasonable objection on the grounds of cost.  Out of every 100 couples who try to have a baby, 95 of...

  This does not pretend to be a comprehensive list. It's just I remember what having a block used to be like – I'd wander round like some kind of wee lost soul for weeks – and you don't get the time back. A minute wasted is a minute lost. I turned fifty a few weeks ago and I'm starting to do my sums because that's me about two-thirds done bearing in mind that neither of my parents made it to seventy-five and it depresses the hell out of me how much of that two-thirds I frittered away on daft stuff like bemoaning my lot in life. Also by the age of fifty one would hope that I've gained a bit of wisdom or if not wisdom exactly then at least experience. So here goes. Things to do 1. Read Every writer will agree that reading is vitally important. And...

So, here we are again, another dogsounds reviews: is upon us. Being a part-time gamer (and not sitting on a huge pile of cash Scrooge McDuck-style) I have to pick and choose the games I buy, so it’s not often you’ll get a bad review from me. But, to the chase. I have spent a pleasant few weeks wandering the Capital Wastelands, one man and his dog, and although I am still wandering and nowhere near fully complete I felt that I have experienced enough to offer a fully-fleshed review. In fact, there is so much to this game that there is no way that anyone who has reviewed it has come close to complete, if there is such a thing. So, how does the game stack up? Find out after the jump! Disclaimer – this started as a review, but ended up as long enough to be a game guide....

This is a guest post by Valdemar Squelch.The release of the new Star Trek movie has already prompted a deluge of hyper-nerdy commentary. But Star Trek isn't just about spaceships, ray guns and teleportation machines. It also has something to say about politics. And it's the politics of sci-fi - using Star Trek as a convenient warping-off point - that I'd like to look at today.Star Trek is set in a putative 24th century in which Earth is one of many planets inhabited by various ‘races’ (species would be the more correct term) that together form a United Federation of Planets. The Federation is a major galactic power with impressive hardware - yet it is also, surprisingly, a communist regime. Some people think so, anyway!To be fair, others take a different view. But what's...

• Argentinian joins Kenny Perry in the lead• Jim Furyk poised for a strike on final dayThe tornados Caramba! Welcome to the 2009 Masters, the one that has everything in terms of sub-plots but, as yet, no compelling central narrative. There is, however, hope. Mostly this hope revolves round whether the players at the very top now stumble sufficiently to allow the chasing posse real hope this afternoon.Chad Campbell, Kenny Perry and Angel Cabrera offer an unlikely combination of leaders. Cabrera, Argentinian and a player whose mellow approach to the game offers occasional brilliance as evidenced by his 2007 US Open victory, is the leading character here now. Campbell and Perry are walking strange and uncharted territory even if they are doing so with the air of men who have suddenly...

Sorry, couldn't resist that, all will become clear because we must away to the Book Sale chanced on by accident and not to be confused with the PBFA Book Fair.This was for charity, Help the Aged of the town and we must do our bit for them because perhaps that'll be us one day. As I browsed I found a good selection of new paperbacks that I could re-home easily for 50p each so I gathered them in. Apparently the dealers had all gone tearing in the minute the doors opened so I have no idea what I might have missed, but I was happy enough with these. I already have a good selection of Aharon Appelfeld's and luckily not The Healer,also found a couple of May Sarton's, Plant Dreaming Deep and Recovering, Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal which I still haven't read and finally The Great White......

ToryDiary: Theresa May insists that the recession has made the Conservatives even more committed to welfare reformHoward Flight on Platform: The counter-revolutions needed in Education and BureaucracyLocal Government: Cllr Tim Archer: An alternative vision for Tower Hamlets Tory woman councillor accused of "sexist" email Deselected Tory Devon councillors threaten to stand as independents WATCH:Highlights of Gordon Brown's address to the European Parliament interspersed with less than supportive responses by UKIP leader Nigel Farage and Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan President Obama says he sees "signs of progress" on the economy "My little daughter says Ivan is eating chocolate in heaven""Grieving David Cameron last night talked for the first time about the loss of his disabled son...

This week's podcast is even more eclectic than usual, taking in armageddon, vampires, the mafia and an off-screen baby, too.With Jason Solomons away on paternity leave, Xan Brooks contemplates the end of the world with the eco-drama-documentary The Age of Stupid. Director Franny Armstrong tells Xan how she was inspired by Steven Soderbergh's Traffic for the structure of her film, and how she persuaded Pete Postlethwaite to appear in it. Just before he went, Jason caught up with Gavin and Stacey's James Corden and Mathew Horne to discuss their buddy-movie-horror-caper Lesbian Vampire Killers and camping it up in the best British tradition.And finally, Peter Bradshaw joins Xan to cast their critical eyes over the latest releases. Up for scrutiny are Duplicity, the slick, cerebral,...

Technology has enabled globalization. Technology, imagined as an object, is a malleable and versatile thing. We can fashion and mould technology into almost any shape or size. In recent times, we have used technology to build systems on scales that are incomprehensible to any one person — at this point, technology goes beyond the human scale… Thinking back to times past, such as the Dark Ages, law makers created legislation that was at the edge of a layman’s comprehension, mostly because people were illiterate. However, since we can speak, laws could be conveyed by word, so that they could understand the laws they were subject to. At around the same time, farmers markets were (and still are) thriving agrarian hubs of commerce for many nations around the world, where farmers...

I don't seek, I find – Pablo PicassoThere are far too many words, don't you think, that we use without really being able to define or at the very least without being able to define easily? Love is one. Inspiration is another. It's easy enough to provide dictionary definitions of these words – a kid of five can tell you what 'to be in love' means – but not until they have been in love themselves will that mean anything to them.In the past I have been very flippant when answering the question 'What is inspiration?' Inspiration is nothing more than a good idea is usually my pat answer; you don't have to wait for a good idea to start writing, any old idea will do and maybe you can turn it into a good idea or at least a workable idea. I'm not the only one to think this. This is what the...

When I meet Debra Winger, I have not yet seen Rachel Getting Married, a new film in which she has a small part. But I have seen a trailer for it, which appeared before me suddenly and unexpectedly in a New York cinema on the Upper East Side while I was numbly waiting for a Woody Allen picture to come on. And even in this trailer, in which Winger is on screen for approximately five seconds, there is something electrifying about her presence. I mean this very seriously. "Is that Debra Winger?" you think. And then: "It is. It's Debra Winger." In the scenes that follow - the action takes place at a wedding party - you scan every crowd for another glimpse of her: the woman who, as the great critic Pauline Kael once put it, was "a major reason to go on seeing movies in the 1980s". But no,...

I was having a poke around Google, as you do, perusing the current world’s favourites for the search term "graffiti" and was rather miffed to see that for one, I’m nowhere to be seen, and secondly, and far more importantly, the top listing is still being hogged by GraffitiCreator.net. Perhaps you’re a fan of the old school, the old old school, lost in an urban ghetto dream of block parties and tagging till there’s nothing left to tag but the back of your hand, but for me graffiti art never deserved closer scrutiny until it entered the fold of the intellectual, the avant-garde, even the futurist to some extent. The truth is, no matter how much you might have a penchant for toons and typography, it isn’t art as we know it. The graffiti movement,...

There is nothing quite so potent as cheap Christmas cards. I don't mean charity cards, the sort that offer tasteful woodcuts, sharp contemporary graphics or well-done reproductions of old masters in return for your contribution to cerebral palsy or clean water. What I'm talking about are those cards that annually reshuffle a tiny repertoire of wayside inns, robins and snow-banked cottages, and then brazenly keep all the profits for themselves. The kind of cards, mostly found in large assortment boxes, that remain blithely confident that nothing says Christmas quite as instantly as the steeple of a country church smeared with some dandruffy glitter.What's striking is how all these favoured images hail from Britain's pre-industrial past. So you'll see cottages rather than suburban villas,...

In some previous posts, I suggested that the likely effect of the economic downturn might include some significant cultural changes. After the age of excess, I suggested, there might come an age of restraint, and that not of of this would be negative.To a certain extent the suspension of Jonathon Ross and Russell Brand for making obscene telephone calls on a radio programme is the kind of thing that I meant. I do not particularly like Ross or Brand whose style of humour is pretty coarse at the best of times, but the spectacle of two middle aged men behaving like teenagers seems to have been pretty unedifying to a whole lot of people. Although some sources close to the BBC have suggested that the root of the complaint was "salary envy" at Ross's £18 million package, in many ways the whole...

      14th October - 2nd November 2008….Who is going to be the winner?? The battle for the highest Chess Title!  On this link of Chessgames you can play through Kramnik and Anand’s games where they played one another. A new window will open when you click on the link! Where: Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn   Overall Prize fund: 1,5 Million Euro The match will consist of twelve games, played under classical time controls, in the period from October 14 to October 30, 2008. If there is a tie at the end of these games a tiebreak will be played on November 02, 2008. The prize fund, which will be split equally between the players, is 1,5 million Euro (approximately 2,1 million US Dollars) including taxes and FIDE licensee fees. V. Kramnik...

A former engineer who was disabled and living on benefits has turned his life around - after a stroke rewired his brain and turned him into an artist. Ken Walters suffered multiple spine fractures and massive internal injuries when he was crushed against a wall by a fork lift truck when a driver lost control. The horrific accident left him wheelchair-bound and jobless and triggered a 19-year depression. Two life-threatening heart attacks deepened his gloom. And when things looked like they couldn't get any worse, Mr Walters suffered a stroke at his home in 2005. But incredibly the cerebral haemorrhage turned out to be an astonishing piece of good fortune. For it 'rewired' part of his brain and spawned an artistic flair he never previously possessed.Now, after his early doodles developed...

Preliminary note: When I set out to write this article, my plan was to frame it in the same way as a chapter in Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela in which a character thinks to himself whilst reading a book. In the layout of the chapter the lines from the book are alternated with the character’s thoughts. I thought I might do the same thing: alternating lines from a ‘straight’ article on Cortázar with lines from a more personal and excitable appreciation. About half way into the writing I found that this approach was not only too clever by half, but also that I was not half clever enough to achieve it. What remains of my ‘personal appreciation’ has been inserted into rather clumsy parentheses, and to those who find this thoroughly annoying I apologize. It’s a favourite if...

This mordant, ticklish and addictive novel tracks, over twenty-six stories, the Canadian rock phenomenon okay (italics, lower-case) from its garage-band beginnings to global stadium-filling behemoth. The adventures of Crab the drummer (and articulate narrator), Syph the singer, Mono the bassist and Clap the guitarist take in both mainstream and indie chapters in the life-cycle of many a U2-sized band – the deranged groupie, the loneliness of the long-distance tour, the Spinal Tap follies – but this is a sober spoof, truer than most samples of the bespoofed. Unexpected themes creep up – marriage and paternity, spiritual thirst in a secular age, the costs of experience. More so than other fictions set in the shark-pool of the music business, such as Salman Rushdie’s The Ground...

Rosy Thornton is a lecturer in Law at the University of Cambridge. She is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, having formerly been a Fellow of New Hall for 16 years. She teaches property law, landlord and tenant law and Women and the Law, and has published in these fields. Rosy's first novel, More Than Love Letters, came out in 2006. Her second novel, Hearts and Minds (a tale of the internal politics of a fictional Cambridge college), was published in hardback in 2007; the paperback is due out in June 2008. Here Rosy writes about Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South. Rosy Thornton on North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell There is something about the moral certainties of the Victorian novel which makes it perfectly suited to appeal to the teenage ideologue. Her distinctive blending of the...

According to the 'Brain Challenge' game I just got for my iPod Nano, I have the cerebral age of 71....

What do you want to do when you grow up...March 2008 (3)The sad news that Terry Pratchett has, at the relatively young age of 59, been diagnosed as suffering from an unusual form of Alzehimer’s has understandably caused yet more concern about this wretched disease. Terry has coined a delightful neologism. He calls it an “embuggerance”.It seems only yesterday that we were all worried about BSE and frantically trying to avoid hamburgers and British meat. That fad is now long forgotten. Is British meat now any safer than it was before? I haven’t a clue. They never had BSE in the USA. American meat was always safe. Of course it was. They would have told us if it had not been. You can believe that if you want to.Yesterday, I saw a 77 year old lady. We will call her Enid. She is a...

I've come across a dreadful series of self-congratulatory assertions on a couple of the less cerebral right-wing blogs. It ties into the fairly widespread idea of a golden age in the past, when you didn't have to lock your doors, and kids could play out all day with no supervision. But the divergence from reality is such I'm willing to bet it never rained in this world, and, never mind qualifying for them, England always won football tournaments. It starts like this:First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us.Now, it should immediately be obvious what is wrong with that as an opening, but if not, I refer you to Unity's suggestion how to address the British Crime Survey's omission of murder as a crime:1. Have you been a victim of murder in the...

Imagine facing a situation where your darling child has been born and very soon was been diagnosed with an exceedingly rare illness (only sixty patients in the world are known to have it). You are faced with a situation that there is no known cure, not much research being done and consequently treatments and medical care are very expensive. And the disease is progressive but not that fast, so you have to watch your child slowly suffering. You literally see your little bundle of joy diminishing right in front of your eyes. I cannot imagine this, but my friend is currently going through this and he needs help. And I resolved to help out by whatever little I can do. I was introduced to Colin last year on a work related matter, but after the work matter was finished, we spent quite a long...