They wear headbands with antlers on at Christmas and coats and wellies

“They wear headbands with antlers on at Christmas, and coats and wellies when it’s wet.”Considerable effort had been made to get the dogs ready “We spent most of yesterday on them. They’ve had their feet, bottoms and faces washed, not in that order, they were dried, groomed and hairs were plucked from their ears It is exhausting. But we’ve got five horses so we’re used to washing bottoms and wiping noses.”Chris Van Beirendonck, 47, a teacher from Belgium, was giving Xchyne of Snowboot Bears, standing on a grooming table, a furious backcomb. The Old English, who looked liked he had been plugged into the mains, was one of 343 foreign dogs to enter the show.

Last year, when the competition first allowed overseas entries, there were 93.While Snowboot is a champion in France, Belgium, Holland, Germany and Poland, his owner was adamant that he would not do well. “It’s difficult for us to compete because the judges like to place their English people.”I can understand it, I’m here for the pleasure,” she said, disappearing with her comb behind a white fuzz.. The artist Antony Gormley, best known for the giant “Angel of the North” sculpture which towers over the A1 near Gateshead, has started work on an eight-tonne “Stone Circle” for the British Library in London. Delays in opening the British Library and difficulties in finding financial sponsors led to the commission being put to one side. But yesterday it was announced that the work is going ahead and will be completed within weeks.Eight glacial granite boulders imported from southern Sweden will be set on the existing stone plinths around the Poet’s Circle in the Piazza.

The one-tonne rocks will be carved with the outline of a variety of human bodies trying to cling on to them – “to celebrate the body and its dependency on matter within the context of this repository for the mind,” according to the artist.Gormley, who won the 1994 Turner Prize, said yesterday: “It is a tribute to independent creative thinking. I hope this work can function in a similar way to that of contemplative stones in a Japanese garden.”Lynne Brindley, the British Library’s chief executive, said: “This piece of public art is an exciting project for the library It signifies our commitment to appeal to a wider audience.”. Female graduates are paid 15 per cent less than their male counterparts at the start of their working lives and more than 30 per cent less by the time they reach their fifties, a survey reveals today. “If an employer cannot show they take equal pay seriously, students might well ask themselves how much they value their staff,” she said.More than 30 years after the Equal Pay Act of 1970, there is still an 18 per cent pay gap between male and female earnings. To tackle the divide, the EOC has urged big employers to carry out pay reviews so disparities over pay scales, promotion prospects and bonuses can be put right.Barbara Roche, the minister for Women, will announce today that the Government is to recognise firms that promote equal pay with a new mark of excellence. The Castle Award is named after Barbara Castle, the former Labour cabinet minister who introduced the Equal Pay Act.. Nightclub owners were urged by the Home Office yesterday to use metal detectors to search customers for firearms amid growing concerns over gun crime.

Dr Ramsey said 4MTA and a second ecstasy-type recipe, downloaded from the internet and called 2C27, were outlawed last month.The toxicologist pointed out that ecstasy deaths were not caused by batches of “killer-pills” as some clubbers believed, but by the body overheating due to the combined effects of ecstasy and the conditions inside a club.The Home Office minister Bob Ainsworth said: “We have to recognise that some clubbers will continue to ignore the risks and carry on taking dangerous drugs. If we cannot stop them from taking drugs then we must be prepared to take steps to reduce the harm that they may cause themselves.”. In 1978, when I was a chubby 16-year-old with a wispy blond moustache that could not be seen from more than 10 feet away, a middle-aged man from Birmingham, who was wearing a quilted anorak and looked vaguely like my uncle, spat at me and called me “scum”. I was a respectable grammar school boy who, give or take a tricky gerund, could translate from the Latin Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe. I had been brought up to offer my seat on a crowded bus to my elders I was not scum The man in the quilted anorak was dead wrong about that. I told him to eff off.A little later that day, I stood in the away supporters’ section of St Andrew’s, Birmingham City’s football ground, and with a couple of thousand others, to the tune made famous by sweet, long-haired Mary Hopkin, bounced up and down singing: “Those were the days my friend/ We took the Stretford End/ We took the Shed/ the North Bank, Highbury/ We took the Geordies too/ We fight for Everton/ We are the Street, of Everton FC/ La, la, la, la, lala, la la la, la, lala…”I had, of course, never taken Manchester United’s Stretford End; in fact I had never even been to Old Trafford.