They are riddled with caterpillars

They are riddled with caterpillars."At London's Kew Gardens, one of the world's premier botanical gardens, the schizophrenic season has deterred visitors In June, attendance was down by 25 per cent. The marketing manager, Roger Joiner, said: "It bucketed down in June and was pretty dismal July was so-so and August not a lot better. But our shops and catering facilities did well." For the National Gardens Scheme Charitable Trust, which opens 3,500 mainly private gardens to the public to raise money for charity, the unpredictable weather has produced mixed results. In Nottinghamshire, organiser Gillian Hill said: "If it's wet in June then it's a disaster for us. Takings here can be as high as pounds 30,000 but we fear this year they may have fallen to pounds 24,000."But her colleague in Barnstaple, Devon, raved about the downpours. Mervyn Feesey, who specialises in growing ornamental grasses, said: "Our gardens have never looked so lush and full of colour. We've had lovely rain and warm spells too, it's been fantastic In our area we've made about pounds 50,000.".

The idle rich who used to spend their summers on Capri in the 1950s and 1960s might remember it as a fairy-tale island of dizzyingly beautiful landscapes, secluded villas and charming aristocratic parties strewn with bright summer flowers. Anyone who has had the misfortune to spend their holidays there in the past summer, though, would probably characterise it as an upmarket vision of hell on earth. Where to begin with the litany of horrors? With the ferry delays and cancellations that have forced more than one would-be jet-setter to idle away the hours sitting on the dock of Naples harbour? With the invasion of unemployed Neapolitans, who chose the main square in Capri town for an Assumption Day demonstration on August 15? Perhaps one should mention the condemnation of Capri's waters as some of the dirtiest in Italy, a PR disaster that struck at almost the same time as a sewage tank burst near the Faraglioni, the island's natural rock "lighthouses". And the water shortages, caused by a leak in the main pipe linking Capri to the mainland, that left half the villa owners high and dry for days on end. Even the Bar Tiberio in Capri's piazzetta was forced to serve its drinks in paper cups for lack of dishwater.Times have been rough indeed for the Capri regulars, who yearn so much to get away from the riff-raff but constantly run up against hordes of day-tripping tourists who flock to the island, dump their rubbish and then leave again before they have even had the courtesy to spend any significant part of their holiday budget."I don't want to come over all pitiful, but my wife has serious physical problems," complained Giuseppe Liverino, a Florentine who has been coming to Capri for 25 years, in an interview with a local paper.

"The toilets are in a state that I will leave to your imagination We can't use the washing machine and we can't do the dishes. And this is what they call going on holiday."The man at the eye of the storm is Capri's capricious mayor, Costantino Federico, a rather tragicomic figure who has tried for years to raise the social tone of his paradise island but invariably fails at every turn. In the past he suggested turning Capri into a mini-principality with Princess Stephanie of Monaco as monarch. He has tried to ban bare torsos and talks incessantly, but in vain, of imposing a daily quota on the number of back- packers besmirching his gilded kingdom.. The television industry's watchdog has rejected complaints about an advertisement starring a man with an erection, but outlawed the use of the words "fat slags" in another.

The Independent Television Commission ruled that an advert for Impulse body spray, which uses a clock hand rising by a minute and a feather rising on hot air above a radiator to imply that the male model in a life drawing class is getting an erection, was acceptable innuendo that did not go beyond the bounds of good taste. The advertisement was only aired after the 9.00pm watershed but 40 viewers complained that it was indecent and in bad taste to portray an erection in an advertisement. The ITC also rejected a several complaints from viewers who believed that the film was sexist because it would encourage people to laugh at men getting erections.In the past when men couldn't help acting on Impulse they tended to buy flowers. In this advertisement the life model can't help himself when an art student wearing Impulse walks past him.In the same complaints review published this week the ITC accepted the large number of complaints from people offended by Lucozade's television advertisement starring the cartoon Viz characters The Fat Slags. The advertisement provoked more than 300 people to complain to the ITC about the use of the words "O mercy it's the fat slags" in an advert and the negative way overweight women were portrayed.Sandra and Tracey, the two scantily dressed large Geordies, who in Viz eat chips while having sex in alleyways, were seen in the commercial reacting with horror when they found a bottle of low calorie Lucozade in the refrigerator.Many of the 309 complaints said that the advertisement had caused children to start using the phrase "fat slag" as an insult.The worry about its adoption by children and the fact that the advertisement had received the largest number of complaints so far this year meant that broadcasters had already stopped it going out before 7.30pm and the advertiser had changed "fat slags" to "Sandra and Tracey".The ITC ruled that the word "slag" was too strong to be used, but decided that the cartoon characters were unlikely to be offensive to most people.. The investigation into a rash of deaths in Kent from "new variant" Creutzfeldt- Jakob Disease (v-CJD) has led to allegations that the domestic water supply could have been contaminated. A former building contractor who worked at Canterbury Mills, which rendered potentially BSE-infected cattle carcasses, said last night that liquid waste was poured down a well that supplies a public aquifer. The company strongly denied the claim. Gary Skillet, the contractor, said workers at the mills had used a well to get rid of waste from cattle carcasses from the Government's culling programme, introduced last year.

Speaking on Meridian TV's Meridian Focus, he said effluent was regularly pumped into the 15-metre well. This is linked to an aquifer that supplies domestic water to a large area of east Kent.Mr Skillet, of Shadox, Kent, said: "Basically they put down the well whatever they could get down it," and added: "The well was at the lowest point on the site and anything in liquid form, be that rain or material from decomposing animals, would make its way into the well."David Richardson, of Canterbury Mills, said: "We have never put anything down the well other than rainwater."Of 25 v-CJD cases identified since 1994, five have occurred in Kent, most within about 25 miles of the plant. A flat? Nowhere to bury a daffodil or parsnip? It gets worse. Such people don't want their flats in beautiful old houses, tastefully converted, but, he goes on, they want them modern, and purpose- built.And, he adds, he's got just the ticket - a one-bedder, within the city walls, a short walk from the cathedral, and yours for a snip at pounds 60,000."The attraction of Canterbury is historical," he says, "and that being near to the Channel Tunnel and only 20 minutes drive from Dover, it is, as it always was, a good staging post." As a result French and Belgians buy there and again they prefer purpose-built flats to use en vacances and let on six-month assured short-holds.It begins to seem as though, in his 1960s song "Get Away" which did so much to shape our perceptions about second homes not far from town, Georgie Fame may have been a bit wide of the mark. What Peter Fox has to say therefore comes as a bit of a surprise, the more so because he is not only manager of the sales department of the Hillreed estate agency in Canterbury, but treasurer of the East Kent branch of the National Association of Estate Agents, and would seem to speak with more than usual authority. "When they're down from London looking for weekend retreats, a lot of people want low maintenance, which means a one or two bedroom flat without a garden," he says.