Classic Watches For Men

In a mocked-up Main Street in the middle of a field in Sussex, several strikingly well-dressed women are queueing impatiently for admission to the catwalk show in the Fashion Pavilion. Some are clad in the khaki uniform of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (the famous Fanys), some are in land-girl slacks with their hair knotted inside red bandannas. Others are squeezed into tight rayon skirts that accentuate their Monroe hips, or floral cotton blouses with embroidered trim that their grandmothers might have considered a little fussy back in 1948.

Run your eye along the line of beauties, and you notice not everyone has gone for a Forties theme. Mad Men-style floral frocks with belted waists from the late 1950s are popular. Hobble skirts and polka-dots are everywhere, as are white gloves and teeny hats, like sequinned skull-caps clamped to the side of marcelled heads. Sixties-chick paisley mini-dresses compete with white PVC coats and Courrèges boots for the title of Most Authentic King's Road Look Circa 1966. There are even some boob tubes and fluorescent leggings from the 1980s, worn by skinny teenagers – to whom, of course, they represent the quaintly old-fashioned style of their parents' generation.

Not everyone is waiting for the catwalk show in this huge field in the grounds of Goodwood House. On the main stage, 500 yards away, the retro-rocker Alvin Stardust is knocking the crowd dead with "My Coo Ca Choo", unheard on the airwaves since 1973. A DJ called Simon the Preacher is manning the ones and twos in the Let It Rock tent, while a sextet of white, urban, soul-jazz-funk exponents called The Filthy Six are conjuring the old 1960s Blue Note sound on the Soul Stage. Devotees of British cinema are catered for with a 2pm screening of the Ealing Studios classic, The Lavender Hill Mob and, in the Tanqueray Torch Club, chaps in ginger moustaches and their petticoated lady friends are jiving to the boogie from the delectable Laura B and the Moonlighters.

Welcome to the world of Vintage, the style revolution that's been sweeping the nation for a few years – a counterblast to the domination of designer labels and high street convention – and, more specifically, welcome to Vintage at Goodwood, the inaugural music-and-clothes festival on the Duke of Richmond's estate near Chichester, West Sussex, managed by his son Charles, Earl of March. It's a massive enterprise, spread over three days and involving music events, fashion shows, art installations, classic English movies, vintage cars, a fun fair, a circus and an astonishing number of visitors unselfconsciously dressed in crêpe frocks and plus-fours.

Goodwood has been a name in the festival diary for some years for its annual Festival of Speed (racing cars) and its Goodwood Revival (vintage cars, 1940s-60s). This is the first time it has embraced rock'n'frocks. "When we started the Revival," says Charles March, "what amazed me was how directly people became involved with it. We wanted to see if we could use it in a different way, to create something a bit edgier, more arty and cultural, to bring music and fashion together. For me, one of the most exciting things is that the people become the show."

He formed a partnership with Wayne Hemingway, the designer behind the Red or Dead label, who, with his wife, Gerardine, masterminded the look of the festival. "There are lots of vintage weekender festivals," explains Hemingway, "which celebrate a single niche – rockabilly, say – and they're usually held in grim seaside resorts. This festival brings everything together. We wanted to celebrate the gamut of British creativity – music, fashion, art and design, film, food – and give people a chance to dress up and be glamorous. The coverage has been fantastic. El Pais [the Spanish newspaper] said we had built 'a city in a field'. Not quite, but we've done a lot more than put some burger vans in a muddy meadow."

Indeed. The festival's centrepiece is the Main Street, down which punters stroll, gazing at the two-storey façades on either side. There's a miniature Fortnum & Mason, a bonsai Veuve Clicquot, a mignon Bonhams auction house (where pop-culture memorabilia is going under the hammer, along with some jewels once owned by Jacqueline Onassis). Mocked-up bars feature trompe l'oeil pictures of knitting-pattern models posing in the windows. An early portrait of the Rolling Stones in about 1962, looking pleased as Punch in their sensible new grey suits with fur collars, dominates the skyline.

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Copyright © Martin Rowson 2010

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Everyone's got their own Something Nasty In The Woodshed, and mine is Madonna's muff. Not in the flesh, you understand – rather, hand-held in black-and-white, glimpsed a whopping EIGHTEEN YEARS ago when some commissioning clown thought it would be a right laugh to give sensitive, sheltered me her book SEX to review. Visions of that greasy muff, which one could easily have fried an egg on without the benefit of oil, haunt me till this very day. However in recent years I've started to come round to the old bird. She hangs out in Israel, and now she's allegedly been seen with booze in one hand and a fag in the other as she celebrated her 52nd birthday.

BOOZE AND FAGS! The twins pillars of hedonism, demonised as heartless killers in the press, Booze and Fags are like a pair of fugitives who need each other but don't really like each other. I envision them on the run from the PC Police, each blaming the other for their pariah status.

"It's all your fault for giving people cancer!" yells Booze, fair chucking it back as they run. "You fat ignorant brute," replies Fags, stopping to light up. "If you hadn't got all those kids chugging down alcopops and beating each other up in the town centre of a Saturday night, we'd be laughing. Oh no, but YOU had to go and create an 8.5 per cent-proof low-calorie lager, didn't you?"

"You lowered the nation's sperm count and made my nan's breath stink!" retorts Booze. And on they go... together yet apart.

As a non-smoker who loves to drink and whose friends all smoke, I can see both sides of the story. There's no doubt that Fags gets the worst rap when it comes to shunning. I've just received an e-mail telling me that One Aldwych hotel, for a decade my home-from-home in London – a place where over 10 years I've probably spent enough money to literally buy a house – will get rid of its small number of designated smoking rooms from 1 September.

Meanwhile, down in the Lobby Bar where I've spent so many happy hours, people will continue to pay handsomely to ruin their health, as they will be doing in pubs and clubs all across the country. These drinkers may or may not go on to wreak havoc in cars, or they may take it into their heads to beat up or murder some innocent bystander – yet we still see adverts in which alcohol is portrayed as some magic potion, one sip of which will bid us enter some sexy, sparkly wonderland of fun and games. No one shows you photos of ruined livers on bottles of booze – yet no one ever went and mowed down a pedestrian or urinated on a war memorial because they'd smoked a whole packet of Benson & Hedges in one go.

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Diners are buying a new version of ordinary water for £1 a litre, 1,000 times more than it would cost if it came out of a tap.

Saf, a vegan restaurant in the Whole Foods department store in Kensington, London, uses a machine to turn ordinary mains supply into ionised water, which it serves in re-usable glass bottles. According to one of Saf's founders, Joe McCanta, the result is a highly alkaline water healthier than other waters and acidic drinks such as coffee, tea and alcohol. Saf in Kensington, as well as its forerunner in Shoreditch, London, sells an initial litre of ionised water for £1, although diners can request more bottles for free.

By comparison, 1p buys 10 litres of tap water from Thames Water, 99.9 per cent of whose water meets European and national standards.

Coca-Cola was forced to withdraw its Dasani water in 2004 after derision greeted the news that it was little more than treated mains water from Thames Water in Sidcup. That mishap drew parallels with an episode of the BBC comedy Only Fools and Horses in which the main character, Del Boy played by David Jason, bottled "Peckham Spring Water" from the tap in his high-rise flat.

Despite acknowledging that some people would inevitably be unimpressed with his product, Mr McCanta insisted the fee for his water – which he described as a "service charge" to cover the cost of the ionising machine and carbon filters – was good value.

Costing £1,200, the ionising machine charges the mains water in two chambers, before the more alkaline water is passed through a carbon filter, which removes chlorine and other chemicals, while retaining fluoride and minerals. Diners may also order free tap water, although the benefits of the pH 10 ionised water will be explained to them.

"A number of sustainable restaurants are charging £1 for a bottle of filtered water but it's not really doing anything," Mr McCanta said.

"I can see why people think it is a scam but it's something that's an option, we don't push it and we have a lot of information to back up why it's different to the filtered option."

While restaurants have been selling bottled water for years, the sale of filtered or otherwise treated tap water is part of a trend that is re-inventing ordinary mains or spring water as a life-affirming elixir that, it is usually hinted, bestows extra health benefits. Indeed, far from being on the way out, the bottled market is thriving.

After a couple of years when sales fell due to the recession, bad weather and environmental concerns, the amount of bottled water drunk by Britons rose by 1.4 per cent to just over 2 billion litres last year, according to market researchers Zenith.

Natural mineral waters such as Perrier and Evian take the lion's share of the market, 61 per cent, followed by spring water on 27 per cent.

Flushed by the industry's recovery, Zenith estimates sales will rise by 12 per cent to 2.3 billion litres by 2014.

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The poor bloke trying to flog old cricket books isn’t exactly doing a roaring trade. Then again, it’s rather hard to browse through the titles when his entire stock is draped in an enormous protective tarpaulin.

A few yards along – just past the decidedly incongruous ice cream van – the chaps manning the official Sussex County Cricket Club souvenir store (mobile version) are also twiddling their thumbs. Sun hat, anyone?

Fair enough, it was just a thought . . .

See, the problem is, it’s absolutely pelting down.

Well, actually, no, not pelting; if it were truly pelting, we’d have all packed up and gone home by now. No faffing or dithering required. Nice and simple.

What it’s doing instead is drizzling. Persistently, relentlessly, spirit-sappingly, soul-destroyingly drizzling. And in many ways that’s so much worse. Somehow drizzle still allows for hope, hence the hundreds of bafflingly optimistic spectators – some of them taking shelter in the beer tent (actually, loads of them taking shelter in the beer tent), others prepared simply to get saturated if an impromptu game of bat’n’ball keeps the kids amused – who are stubbornly refusing to call it a day.

It’s all wonderfully, quintessentially English, of course. And today, I’m afraid, it’s getting on my absolute wick.

For heaven’s sake, I’m thinking, just call it off, split the points, or whatever it is you cricketing people do in these situations. Then we can all go home and dry off, put an end to this wretched experience. I may be learning to like your sport, but believe me, I’m not liking it this much. This is just stupid.

We’re at Horsham in Sussex, by the way, where the home side – away from their usual base at Hove, for once – are meant to be playing Somerset in a Sunday afternoon Clydesdale Bank 40 Group A fixture.

But, as I say, the weather isn’t exactly conducive to cricket. Hence the delayed start. And all these soggy people aimlessly milling around. And the forlorn-looking stallholders. And hence the fact that the three of us – myself, my wife Julie and our daughter Emily – are huddled beneath a giant golfing umbrella, bearing the logo of the company that Julie doesn’t actually work for anymore on the grounds that they were gits, staring out rather pointlessly at the semi-covered pitch, where various unidentified bods are standing around, deep in conversation about, I don’t know, probably last night’s X Factor.

Personally, I didn’t even want to come. Not once I’d seen the forecast. Couldn’t see the point. But if you’re thinking to yourself (as I assume you must be by now), ‘Just go home, then, you blithering nincompoop!’ then let me explain the problem here: Julie and Emily don’t want to. Yes, my wife and daughter, don’t ask me why, would rather hold out, despite these laughably atrocious conditions, on the off-chance that this fixture still goes ahead.

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If the British property market resembles a shrivelling party balloon, in Ireland it looks more like the aftermath of the Hindenburg disaster. The bubble that started growing in the 1990s and accelerated out of control after 2002, when Ireland joined the euro, eventually burst spectacularly in 2008, and has yet to show any signs of recovery. Since the crash, those who lost a fortune or who have been left with unsellable property have been looking for someone to blame.

Now a hate figure has emerged in the form of the property journalist. Although a case has yet to be lodged, a number of aggrieved investors are said to be consulting Dublin lawyers about launching a case against certain journalists who, they believe, were responsible for misleading them into investing in developments that failed to deliver promised returns.

"Journalists fear they may be made legally liable for misleading readers who followed their advice and bought properties abroad, suffering major losses," says Richard Compton Miller, a property journalist himself. "There's a lot of anger among investors."

If such a case were brought, it would raise questions about the responsibility of journalists who use supposedly impartial editorial space to promote commercial developments. It may be understood among journalists that the editorials of glossy property supplements follow a less rigorous code of impartiality than conventional journalism – they are essentially vehicles for advertising – but to the consumer such a distinction may not be so clear.

Articles recommending holiday homes abroad are particularly contentious, says Compton Miller. "Journalists would go on trips to places like Bulgaria and recommend it as a place to buy a holiday flat. Now, places like Bulgaria have fared very badly, and people are feeling angry with the journalists who promoted it."

Property journalists have already fallen victim to the crash as newspapers have cut budgets and downpaged – or axed – their property supplements, because of loss of advertising. But many lawyers are sceptical about how strong a case against journalists could be. "The idea that any investor could sue a property journalist is barking mad," says Simon McAleese, a Dublin lawyer. "Though it wouldn't surprise me: people have been getting desperate to find someone to blame."

Even if it would be hard to prove that property journalists had deliberately misled readers, it is easy to see why investors might feel cheated. Property journalism has exploded over the past decade in line with the boom. But it has always been fraught with questions of independence, as developers use offers of lavish trips abroad to entice journalists to write about their projects.

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They call August the silly season because of the lack of news around, what with everyone going on holiday. As a result, newspapers are said to rely on ever sillier stories that would not see the light of day in more newsworthy times. Sometimes, to a seasoned education journalist like myself, it seems that this silliness even extends to the only real news story that can be guaranteed to emerge in August: exam results.

For years now, as A-level results have improved year on year for the past 24 years, we have obsessed about whether the exam is now easier than it was in the days when those spouting forth their opinions took it. We should make it harder, they say, presumably dramatically reducing the pass rate and allowing more youngsters to have spent two fruitless years in the sixth form and ending up with no qualification after it and being virtually unemployable. (The latter is not their argument. That's my interpretation of what would happen.)

The truth, though, according to studies over the years from organisations such as the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (in the days when it was the exams watchdog) is that A-levels are now different. Not necessarily easier or more difficult, but different.

Syllabuses have quite rightly changed over the years, making it difficult to make comparisons. After all, when it was first launched, discoveries such as DNA had not yet been made, so surely the content should change to reflect that and include questions on it.

Priorities have also changed since it was introduced in the 1950s when only a handful of youngsters from each age cohort went on to university – around 6 per cent, as opposed to the mid-forties today. Then it was unashamedly an elitist exam which, to exaggerate a point, decided which public schoolboys (and I mean boys) would go on to university.

Nowadays, it is an exam taken by more than 40 per cent of youngsters. It has, as the Cambridge University admissions officer Geoff Parks told The Independent, had to be made accessible to a wider range of youngsters.

The nature of the questions has therefore changed. Over the years, they became more knowledge-based rather than allowing for the freedom of expression and argument which can aid university admissions tutors in selecting the brightest and most talented youngsters for the most popular courses – law and medicine.

Incidentally, Dr Parks indicated that a by-product of this change – which exam boards would never admit to – has been a kind of "dumbing down" of the markers. As more and more have had to be hired to cope with the massive increase in the amount of scripts to be marked, so subject teachers with less depth of subject knowledge than the few recruited to mark them in the old days have had to be hired.

The question is: should we be worried about this trend, and what should we be doing about this?

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In the annals of photography, depictions of the world of cowboys are dominated by certain attractive clichés. Sprawling vistas, perhaps punctuated by the alien rock formations of Monument Valley. Dusty sunsets. Able men, high atop their steeds, lassoing things. But when the British photographer and filmmaker Jane Hilton was on assignment in the American West, she realized that something was being overlooked back at the ranch. How, she wondered, do twenty-first-century cowboys make their homes? In other words, what’s the cowboy approach to interior decorating? The result was her series of portraits of cowboys at home, “Dead Eagle Trail.”

One thing that struck Hilton about current cowboy quarters was how timeless they felt. Very few of her subjects, for example, had computers, and those that did often weren’t inclined to use them. “A lot of them have never seen a beach,” Hilton told me. “They don’t travel, because they can’t be away from their animals.” Being a cowboy, Hilton learned, is a very focussed life, chosen by men who value simplicity, solitude, and the old ways of doing things. One old thing Hilton’s subjects seemed to appreciate was the antique plate camera she used to take their portraits. “It’s under the old cloth, with film, obviously,” she said. “They loved the fact that I got this old camera out and fiddled about with it for a while. It was a really slow process.”

Hilton, who grew up in the suburbs of London, said she feels a strong westward pull. “As someone from a country that’s so tiny, where we’re all crammed in and there’s no room left, to come to America and see the big, wide open spaces always gives me goosebumps.” She’s been documenting American culture for more than twenty years; for the BBC, she made a ten-part film on Nevada brothels. “I keep thinking that I’m gonna go east and do a new book in Japan or something, but, fortunately, American culture is endless, and the space is so terrific. Just to cover it in a lifetime would be an achievement. So I don’t foresee myself coming out of the States for a while.”

Here’s a selection from “Dead Eagle Trail.” Captions are from the book.

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Police have released sketches of 20 unidentified people found dead on Britain's rail network over the past 35 years in an attempt to trace them.

Here are details of the cases:

* A woman was struck by a train at Victoria Tube station, in London, on January 13 1975. She was white, 25 to 30 years old, about 5ft 5ins, with short dark brown hair and a wart on her left cheek. She was wearing an orange three-quarter-length coat, a green jumper, black trousers and black shoes.

* A man was struck by a train at Mile End Tube station, east London, on May 8 1975. He was white, 45 to 50 years old, about 6ft, with black, receding hair and false teeth. He was wearing a navy blue blazer with yellow metal embossed buttons, a light blue shirt, blue trousers and black leather shoes.

* A man was struck by a train at Arsenal Tube station, north London, on April 20 1976. He was white, 40 to 45 years old, about 5ft 7ins, with light brown receding hair. Apart from his lower front teeth, his teeth were false and he was wearing a green check Harris tweed-type jacket.

* A man was struck by a train at Upton Park Tube station, east London, on March 20 1979. He was black, 30 to 40 years old, about 5ft 8ins with black greying hair. He was wearing a brown leather bomber jacket and a blue jumper with a "Rolls Royce" motif.

* A woman was struck by a train at Enfield Lock station, north London, on May 1 1981. She was white, around 50 years old, about 5ft 4ins, with grey shoulder-length hair. She was wearing a brown overcoat, red jumper, black dress, brown ankle length boots and a black headscarf with light blue flowers.

* A man was struck by a train at Embankment Tube station, central London, on August 21 1982. He was 45 to 50 years old, about 5ft 9ins with brown receding hair and false upper teeth. He was wearing a brown jacket and light brown trousers.

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Ramadan, and its obligation to fast from dawn until dusk, can be a testing time for all Muslims, but for professional sports people the holy month can be especially fraught.

While some Western coaches baulk at the idea that their well-paid stars may be under-fuelled during matches, others demand that their players observe the fast.

Yesterday, Ali Karimi, an Iranian footballer known as the "Maradona of Asia", was fired by his club for failing to fast. Tehran-based Steel Azin FC, which announced the dismissal on its website, claims Karimi, who was named the Asian Player of the Year in 2004, and played in the German Bundesliga for two years with Bayern Munich, "insulted officials of the [Iranian] football federation and the Tehran team's supervisor who confronted him on the issue".

Karimi is the second most capped player and the third highest scorer for the Iranian national team.

Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, is the religion's month of fasting in which participating Muslims refrain from eating, drinking and sexual activities from dawn until sunset. Fasting is intended to teach Muslims about patience and spirituality. It is also a time for Muslims to offer more prayer than usual.

The fasting dilemma is particularly acute for Muslim cricketers who, if a match falls during Ramadan, might have to exert themselves batting or bowling for seven hours with nothing to eat or drink. England's third Test against Pakistan begins on Wednesday, a week into the fast.

Muslim cricketers will often not fast during matches and make up the days missed after Eid ul-Fitr, the day of celebration at the end of Ramadan.

To prepare for the fasting, Muslims wake up before dawn and the Fajr prayer to eat a meal. Muslims break their fast at Maghrib (sunset) prayer time with a meal called Iftar. Muslims may continue to eat and drink after the sun has set until the next morning's prayer call. Ramadan is a time of reflecting , believing and worshiping God. Muslims are expected to put more effort into following the teachings of Islam and to avoid obscene and irreligious sights and sounds. The act of fasting is said to redirect the heart away from worldly activities, its purpose being to cleanse the inner soul and free it from harm. It also teaches Muslims self-discipline, self-control, sacrifice, and empathy for those who are less fortunate; thus encouraging actions of generosity and charity.

"A player's decision to fast is between himself and God," the Pakistan cricket team manager Yawar Saeed said. "We don't get involved in this matter. We don't mix sport and religion. It is up to the individual concerned."

The challenges of playing sport during Ramadan are expected to surface at the 2012 London Olympics, which falls in the middle of the holy month. As many as 3,000 athletes at the Olympics will be Muslim and the coincidence was seen as an embarrassment for Lord Coe, who sold the Games as an opportunity to unite Britain's ethnic communities.

In Germany the football authorities and Muslim groups agreed that failing to eat would affect performance and therefore income. It is a precedent that won't help Karimi, who has now lost his principal source of income.

The discussions between Germany's Central Council of Muslims and the football authorities in Berlin last month followed a dispute between the Bundesliga club FSV Frankfurt, who formally warned three of their players for fasting last year.

Jose Mourinho, manager of Real Madrid, was criticised while manager of Inter Milan, after he claimed a Muslim player in his team should not have been fasting during Ramadan. He substituted Sulley Muntari half an hour into a match and later claimed that his lack of energy was down to his fasting.

Fasting sportsmen:

Freddie Kanouté

The former Tottenham striker plays for Sevilla, and his coaches are trying to formulate a hydration and nutrition plan to help him withstand the Spanish heat. "I try to respect my faith and follow it as best I can," says Kanouté, who also gives to charity during the Holy Month. He says there is "no conflict because people who know about Islam, they know fasting empowers and does not weaken the Muslim".

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