Much of the time is spent languishing in idle contemplation, doing nothing but wait for something to happen. That is until the train pulls into a station, maybe in some remote outpost in the endless treescape which is Siberia. Then, in the same way that ending a baseball innings provokes a frenzy of consumables purchasing, so the whole train seems to dismount from the carriages to buy food. Not so much popcorn, ice-cream, burgers, fries and Pepsi, but an indigenous fare of a more wholesome variety: potatoes, fried fish, bread patties, milk and forest fruits

The Trans-Siberian Railway is not all trees. Sometimes things happen: maybe the train crosses a river, or speeds through an isolated village. But on the whole your lot is trees, and there are plenty of them.
So what do you do for six days on a train between Vladivostock and Moscow? To begin with options seem endless.

There are the initial joys of train travel: the possibility of an unexpected liaison, the exploration of exotic locations, the mental stimulation from unusual sights, even staring out of the window watching the vast taiga go by has an element of romance. However, after a couple of days, stagnant reality sharpens the soft-focus haze and Trans-Siberian lassitude sweeps through the train. Then, as Peter Fleming recalls in Travels in Tartary, “You sit down and read and read and read. There are no distractions, no interruptions, no temptations to get up and do something else; there is nothing else to do. You read like you’ve never read before.”By the end of the second day a strange thing happens. Your body and your watch tell you that it is time for bed and yet outside the light refuses to give way to night.

The train is travelling west and so gains an hour whenever it crosses one of the seven time zones between Vladivostok and Moscow. With the train maintaining Moscow time, the passengers experiencing local time and your body still working in Vladivostok time you begin to feel a disturbing loss of context as time becomes distorted in the emptiness which is Siberia.You are still time-independent when you wake the next morning. It is hot and you begin to feel the claustrophobia of three days on a train with nowhere to go. With such continued close proximity to personal and cultural strangers you are running out of behavioural tolerance and have to spend the morning staring out of the window watching the taiga, steering clear of people so as not to shout at them.

When you work a muscle you make little tears in the fibre, so you should rest it on the second day. Athletes know that, but no one tells pianists.”With hindsight, and the knowledge he has now acquired, Fleisher believes he could have prevented his condition from developing. “But back then, no one even recognised this as a legitimate medical problem, and everyone felt ashamed or embarrassed.”In Britain, RSI (or Repetitive Strain Injury as it is commonly known, although it has many names) is a syndrome that office workers, journalists and others who spend long hours at keyboards are trying to have recognised as a bona fide occupational health problem. But there is as much debate over it as there is over ME.Dr Ian James, who runs the Performing Arts Clinic at the Royal Free Hospital in London, and sees many cases of the complaint, believes that it is caused by one or more of the following three factors: “Bad technique; bad posture; emotional tension.”But Fleisher, who is considered “a direct artistic heir of Beethoven” – since he studied with Schnabel, who was a student of Leschetizky, who was taught by Czerny, who was a disciple of Beethoven – is known for his brilliant technique and teaching (on the faculties of Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory, New York’s Juilliard School and Manhattan School of Music, and Toronto’s Royal Conservatory). His posture also appears to be fine.What about emotional tension? Does he give any credit to that possibility? “No,” he says firmly. “People have come to realise that this is not a psychological problem, but one of overuse.

It’s a syndrome that Gary Graffman and other well-known pianists have suffered.” (Including, apparently, Robert Schumann, who invented a device to strengthen his fingers which ended up damaging them so badly he had to concentrate exclusively on composing.)The composer William Bolcom is in the process of writing a concerto for two left hands – and two pianos – for Graffman and Fleisher. “It will be a concerto that Gary and I can each play separately and can also combine together,” Fleisher enthuses. “It’s been commissioned by a consortium of four orchestras in the US and will be premiered in April of next year.”But isn’t he impatient to get back to the two-handed classics? “I think people will gradually accept the change, but I want it to be gradual,” Fleisher stresses. He doesn’t want to neglect the left-handed literature, so much of which has been created especially for him (four concertos by major contemporary composers, a number of solo pieces and some chamber works).Oddly enough, he is grateful in many ways for his disability.

“It may sound Pollyanna-ish to say so, but I’m convinced that, had I continued as a two-handed pianist, I would have wound up a much narrower person. I got into conducting because of my hand; my teaching became far more effective. I don’t think any of these things would have happened otherwise.”n Leon Fleisher plays Foss’s ‘Concerto for Left Hand’ tomorrow night at Newcastle City Hall (box-office: 0191-261 2606). “My chairman keeps telling me: never look back,” remarks Tom, the entrepreneur protagonist of Skylight “In business, he says, the world was created this morning.

Smiling nuns waited patiently in a van giving the thumbs up sign to passers-by. Just hours after the last Serbian shell had ripped through the suburbs of the town, Croatian troops were struggling to remove the mangled remains of burnt out cars and shattered timber.Dazed Croat families wandered around the wreckage of the town centre, looking for their former houses, wondering what life had been like here during their absence Only the stoic Stefica Bocha could have told them “At first when the Serbs arrived we hid But then we came out like mice. All my neighbours left in fear but the Serbs didn’t bother the old people They paid my pension. I used to be an accountant in the municipality,” she said.Yesterday the returnees searched for their old Croatian street signs, which been ripped down and replaced by Serbian names. Stefica’s road – Matija Gubec Street, named after a Croatian peasant leader, had been re- named Karadjordje Street – after a Serbian nationalist leader. “Now we can have our street name back,” she smiled.On one street corner yesterday a young man was re-erecting his sign over what had been his bakery and scouring the rubble inside to salvage his possessions. “I was baking bread here until three days before the Serbs came [in 1991],” he said.

“The Serbs have been living here – just look,” he said pointing to gaping holes in the walls and rubbish strewn around “They have taken everything They even took the light bulbs But I will rebuild it all The government will give me money. “”We went to our village nearby but we couldn’t find our house,” said Sleo Graco, whose arm had been maimed by a mine in the 1991 fighting. He had bought his children to see the town, and to see the park where the Catholic Church of Saint Louvra once stood. It was destroyed by the Serbs along with scores of other churches throughout the occupied zone.

“Little Vukovar” read the scrawled letters on the wall of a tottering block of flats.”We had many Serbs in our village before the war – of course,” said Mr Gaco “We were friends then But now they will never come back here again. It is not possible.” His 11-year-old daughter smiled nervously. “I am happy we are back and that the Serbs have gone.”Already yesterday the soldiers were putting in the telephone lines to re-connect Petrinja to Croatia. A bus drove through from Zagreb for the first time in four years. ‘Advocat Ana Ercejovac’, said the sign above an office door which was flapping open in the breeze.

Inside were strewn piles of Serbian registration documents, and lists of Serbian names, shortly to be swept away by the Croat cleaners to make way for the returning refugees.On a street corner Croatian workmen were starting to rub out the Serbian victory insignia scrawled on the doors of shattered buildings.. Police will deploy special surveillance officers and operate a telephone “hotline” as part of their effort to prevent football hooligans sabotaging the European Championships in England next summer. Intelligence gathering will play a key role, as will a “hooligan hotline” to encourage genuine fans to supply information on thugs. Police forces from countries whose national teams qualify will be invited to send “spotters” who will point out known foreign troublemakers.

And we enlisted the support of local people – playing on rural parish councils who didn’t want to be lumped in with a new town But we were realistic about what the Commission would wear. The strategy was to maximise the number of winnable seats.”Conservative Central Office realised too late what was happening Its officials are trying to be sanguine. “Which candidate represents which seat is a matter for the constituency associations,” said one. But the resulting free market in Tory candidates is not what they would have wanted.Ordinarily constituencies chose from a mixture of young merchant bankers who have in a previous elections safely carried the Tory flag in a Labour seat and former MPs who have lost their seats in previous elections, with ex-ministers like John Maples, Francis Maude or Michael Fallon high on the lists. Now these traditional candidates are being augmented by carpetbaggers. The term carpetbagger was originally a scornful appellation applied, after the American Civil War, to Northerners who went South and sought election by appealing to the Negro vote. Currying favour with Negroes is not always a high priority in a Conservative adoption meeting: the maverick ex-MP Peter Bruinvels is more likely, according to rivals, to “get out a pair of handcuffs and rage about law and order”.This time the carpetbaggers are sitting MPs like James Arbuthnot, whose existing seat of Wanstead and Woodford is being divided in three parts “like Gaul”, as he puts it.

Or like the former roads minister and now free-thinking backbencher Peter Bottomley, who has told his Eltham constituency – majority 1,666 – to find a younger man and has cast himself upon the waters. It is, he acknowledges, “an exercise in ritual humiliation” but asks: “Why is politics the only profession where you have to lose before you can move? Does a consultant have to get sacked before he can move to another hospital? To exclude from the selection for a safe seat those who are currently doing a competent job in Parliament seems pretty perverse.”It is an exercise that has been performed in the past by MPs as distinguished as Michael Heseltine, Kenneth Baker and Sir Leon Brittan. David at first followed in his path as a classical scholar, but transferred to medieval Hebrew and Arabic, and again Addi basked in the glory of his son’s publications. His daughter Celia turned to the Law as a career, holding an appointment in the Hebrew University; but she too bolstered the family’s classical studies by marrying a lecturer in ancient Semitic languages..

Later this month, providing Nasa can repair faults that forced a launch postponement last Saturday, two American astronauts will don their bulky pressure suits, enter the airlock and float out into the cargo bay of the space shuttle Endeavor But they will have little time to admire the view. One of their tasks will be to evaluate modifications to the life-protecting suits as part of the preparations for assembling the international Alpha space station later this decade. “But I only spilt a drop of coffee on it!” A terrible cry, and one that has heralded more angst for computer users – and profit for the repair industry – than almost any other. Orange juice is the stickiest assassin of all, but any liquid can find its way into the delicate electronic interstices of a computer and kill it dead. For desktop users this is irritating but rarely disastrous: the keyboard may short-circuit, but can be cleaned out of house for pounds 25 or so. For laptop users, the story is different – below the keypad sits the system board (the machine’s heart) and the hard disk, and liquid can short-circuit all three.

The weather was perfect and I’d asked my glamorous girlfriend Susanna, a shapely blonde actress, to join our outing and picnic. As the day wore on we relaxed as we watched Keith play one large tench after another. The signs were all there.
On our first date Keith invited me to one of his favourite spots for a quiet day’s fishing. Keith Elliott’s holiday in India continues. His wife has taken a second opportunity to tell the other side of a fisherman’s tale.

THIS is a warning to all women who may be thinking of marrying a keen fisherman I did it 10 years ago And I should have realised what I was letting myself in for. Modern cricket seems to stagger from one ugly controversy to another. Was there ever a dispute similar to ball-tampering in, say, the last century? – Miss K Brown, London W10Q. Who is the oldest living footballer to have won a World Cup winners’ medal – Phil Burt, Stoke on TrentQ.

As the National Lottery approaches its first birthday, bookmakers claim that unless the Government takes rapid action they will be forced out of business.
On Friday, the independent bookmakers Stanley Leisure announced that half-year profits were “significantly below” that achieved for the comparable half year in 1994-95. Three days earlier, Vernons Pools had announced 150 redundancies. Both companies blamed the National Lottery.The bookmakers want the Government to reduce betting tax by 2 per cent, allow bookmakers to bet on lottery numbers and accelerate the deregulation process which will permit jackpot and fruit machines in the shops.Last month a report from the Henley Centre estimated that 2,400 of England’s 9,300 betting shops would have to close, unless the Government cut betting tax by 2 per cent.

The “big three” – Ladbrokes, Coral and William Hill – own about 5,000 shops between them; the rest are owned by small independents, who are suffering most.Don Bruce’s father and grandfather both worked as bookmakers and he entered the business in 1948. He got his first shop in 1963 (cash betting only became legal in 1960) and now owns 12 shops around London, which are currently losing him pounds 50,000 a year.He would like to sell his shops, but fears trading conditions are so bad at the moment that no one would buy.”It’s never been worse,” he said “We’ve got some good and some marginal shops. The marginal shops are just hanging on while we wait for legislation to come in.”Mr Bruce’s greatest loss has been from what he calls the “roulette wheel” customers – who have been lured away by scratchcards.”There is always an element that use racing but are not interested in the form – the sort that always put a 10p treble on Traps 1 and 2 at Hackney,” he said “They bid on a small scale on famous names. One way or another, scratchcards have attracted this sort of punter. And that’s made marginal shops more desperate.”He says that actual turnover has not fallen: “But it has effectively fallen because we’ve been doing much more hours with the introduction of evening racing and Sunday racing. So we’re making less per meeting.”If a shop does not open on a Sunday, the punter will take his bet – and return to claim his winnings – elsewhere.

So although most shops will only get 40 per cent of customers they would on a weekday, they are too scared of losing further custom not to open.But it would be wrong to blame all retail ills on the lottery, according to Ray Stone, assistant director of the Henley Centre. In March, the centre brought out a report, Lottery Fallout, which looked at the effect of lottery spending last December and January.At that time, some of the 10,000 shops and garages with lottery terminals had seen sales rise by as much as 20 per cent since November 1994. Food stores had doubled sales at their tobacco counters.The report also warned that pubs and restaurants were likely to see trade fall, or at least shift around, as so many people were staying home later to watch the draw. It suggested that cinemas might have to reschedule Saturday evening shows, or even announce the draw themselves.However, Mr Stone said that these findings were preliminary and some were out of date six months on. Lottery Fallout 2, a report which looks at the first full year, will be published at the end of November.”People should be asking different questions,” he said “It is not all the National Lottery We should look at what else has made a difference. For instance, the hot weather this summer made people spend a lot more on drinks.”Mr Bruce disagrees.

His sudden death has left us a double legacy, a hugely varied output of exceptionally refined music whose popularity shows no sign of diminishing; and through his energetically altruistic work as festival director and concert organiser and sometime impresario, an irreplaceable contribution to the cultural life of Japan.Julian AndersonWith the death of Toru Takemitsu, writes Oliver Knussen, we have lost a great musician with an uncannily precise aural imagination and a command of orchestral colour and harmonic nuance second to none. Another thing he liked about gardens was that “they never spurn those who enter them” and he tried to ensure his own music had a similarly welcoming, unaggressive exterior, once remarking to a colleague that “the worst thing you can do with sounds is to drive them around like a car”.Many later works, including the orchestral piece A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden (1978), the piano concerto Riverrun (1984) and Tree Line (1988) for ensemble have long acquired the status of contemporary classics, and thanks to the persistent advocacy of such leading musicians as Oliver Knussen, Sir Simon Rattle, Paul Crossley and the London Sinfonietta, Takemitsu’s music has found a wide international audience, becoming a particular favourite at the BBC Proms. He imbued all these influences with a uniquely personal aura due to his liking for generally unhurried, calm rates of musical utterance (he once joked that “the Japanese have no sense of allegro”).To explain the unpredictable, often seemingly random forms of his music, he would cite as inspiration the Japanese formal garden, remarking that he placed musical objects (chords, fragments of melody or instrumental textures) next to each other much in the way stones, plants, rock and trees are carefully juxtaposed in a garden. One of the finest works from this period is the attractive orchestral song-cycle Coral Island (1962); its colourful preponderance of tuned percussion instruments and massed swathes of strings were found in many other composers at the time, but few could match the extraordinary fluency and aural exactitude with which Takemitsu handled these things, or imprint upon them such an individual harmonic style.Although he retained a profound dislike of conservative Japanese nationalism, Takemitsu did gradually develop a lasting interest in his own country’s traditional music, incorporating two Japanese instruments (the biwa, a short-necked lute, and shakuhachi, a bamboo flute) into his 1967 New York Philharmonic commission, November Steps, and composing a piece for the traditional court Gagaku orchestra, In an Autumn Garden (1974).As his music travelled, he found increasingly strong links with colleagues in the West, and a particular kinship in the directionless, Zen-influenced music of American composers John Cage and Morton Feldman; he collaborated with Cage in 1964 on a multi-media event entitled “Blue Aurora”, and one of his most haunting later orchestral pieces, Twill by Twilight (1987), was a memorial for Feldman.Takemitsu also developed a burgeoning reputation as one of the most inventive film composers in the history of the art, writing music for over 100 features and collaborating with some of the most famous Japanese directors of his day – amongst them Masaki Kobayashi (Kwaidan, 1964) and Akira Kurosawa (the award-winning Ran, 1986) as well as composing for the Hollywood film The Rising Sun (1993).Latterly, Takemitsu’s musical language broadened to incorporate increasingly frank elements of tonal harmony, returning to his early loves of Debussy, Gershwin and Messiaen without abandoning some of the more spiky, brittle elements and sense of volatility he had absorbed from the serialists. Around this time, too, his lush, hyper-Romantic Requiem for Strings (1957) was attracting international attention.In the Sixties, Takemitsu evolved a more fractured, discontinuous style in keeping with the then newest trends from the West, but unlike many followers of serialism or aleatoric music, he showed a singular ability to keep his personal compositional voice intact.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not study with any of the leading European composers of the day (several of his colleagues studied with Messiaen), but despite this, at scarcely past 20, he had already started composing with the characteristically rich, chromatic harmonic vocabulary inspired by Ravel, Debussy and Messiaen which was to remain a hallmark of his style, as his early piano piece Two Lentos (1951) shows.To these influences were soon added the totally serial music of more radical composers such as Luigi Nono and Pierre Boulez, whilst simultaneously Takemitsu developed a lasting interest in electronics and musique concrete, producing a number of the most accomplished and atmospheric tape pieces of the era such as Vocalism AI (1956), a hypnotic study on the Japanese word for “love”. His family moved back to Japan at the outbreak of the war; later on he was drafted into the army and, like many Japanese intellectuals of his generation, the complex emotions generated by his country’s behaviour both before and during the war caused him to feel increasingly alienated from Japanese traditions and culture so that by the early Fifties, as he later recalled, “I passionately hated all things Japanese.”
His interest in Western music meanwhile grew apace to the extent that he had begun studying privately with the leading Japanese composer of the preceding generation, Yasuji Kiyose, who wrote in a late-Romantic style – the only formal instruction in music Takemitsu ever received. His rise to this status was all the more surprising in that he was largely self-taught as a composer and did not come from an especially musical background. Although born in Tokyo, he was brought up in China, where his businessman father’s 78 recordings of American jazz were the first music he remembered.

“I want to get away from telling jokes – I see them as a springboard – and do something more interesting.” His main interest is interacting with an audience to create an improvised, one-off performance. “I don’t like comedians who ignore their audience – they’re just as imaginative as you are.”THE POLICE: Constable Mark Williams, 26PC Mark Williams joined the Lothian and Borders Police three years ago under the accelerated promotion scheme and won the Scottish Probationer of the Year award. “He has these freewheeling flights of fantasy and takes advantage of whatever falls into his lap. He’s got the balls to seize a situation and run with it.”Commended: Kevin Eldon, 36, is another leading talent, described by Cassidy as a “brilliant character comic”. He threw out his entire set to do a rehearsal for the wedding.

He’s extremely talented.” Jenny Eclair also enthused about his stand-up approach “When his act takes off, it really flies,” she said. How do you connect Billy Connolly, Victoria Wood, Jo Brand and Eddie Izzard? Basically they have to be funny.”WHAT THE PANEL SAIDPhil Kay, from Glasgow, was the outright winner “He’s brilliant,” said Mark Wareham “His improvisation can be spellbinding. I’ve seen him go off at a tangent; he takes mind-blowing chances.” Seamus Cassidy thinks that, in general, comedy has become too safe: “Things need to get more dangerous again – like the moments where Vic and Bob made everyone stop and think about what was funny.” But he, too, admires Kay: “One night I saw him and he had a hen party in the audience. As Mark Wareham says: “You need the ability to react to situations as they happen and to inject freshness into the same old routine, night after night.” Seamus Cassidy believes the winning formula is difficult to pin down: “There are a million things. She says that, “In the long term I’d like to work for the Labour Party as a policy analyst – that’s where I think the most exciting work is going to be.”COMEDY: Phil Kay, 26, stand-up comicPhil Kay was voted Live Stand-up Comedian of the Year at the British Comedy Awards in 1994 and is writing a comedy show for Channel 4.THE PANEL Seamus Cassidy, commissioning editor for entertainment, Channel 4 Jenny Eclair, Perrier Award winner, 1995 Mark Wareham, comedy critic, The IndependentTHE CRITERIAOur panel was looking for young comedians with stage presence and an incredibly quick mind. I see this as a means of getting good training.” Over Easter she provided policy advice to the Ministry of Agriculture over the BSE crisis.

Possibly it’s an allegory about the European lipstick mountain, or something.If the secret of good comedy is timing, everything you need to know about the mirthfulness of Spy Hard (PG) is that it’s a snappy come-back made more than three decades too late. The plot? Jeanne (Mlle Beart) marries Louis (Daniel Auteuil) on the brink of the Second World War; he promptly gets taken prisoner, she has affairs, and husband and wife spend the next 20 years respectively going off to war and being an old slapper. It’s doubtful many Brits will take long to work out at least one of the twists that’s in store, but perhaps our godless nation just tells more smutty jokes about clergymen than they do in the States. Granted such handicaps, the result are diverting enough: the trial scenes are swiftly paced, and Gere proves yet again that you don’t have to be believable to be watchable.Regis Wargnier’s last film of note was the nostalgic colonialist epic Indochine; his latest, the dismal Une Femme Francaise (18), treads similar ground. As the years pass into decades, the unageing Emmanuelle Beart – her remarkable lips given even more prominence than usual by vivid maquillage – wears a demure powder-blue frock with white gloves, a blazing white silk wedding dress, a dark blue satin party gown, a severe black suit, a lightweight oatmeal linen number (ideal for the tropics) with matching hat, a low-cut scarlet cocktail dress slashed to the thigh, and many, many other striking outfits. It’s not much of a movie, but it would make a charming spread in Vogue. This doesn’t matter unduly, since the film is so much a plot- driven courtroom drama that it can afford to jettison psychological ballast, though a little more plausibility might have been a polite gesture, Richard Gere, greying nicely, plays Martin Vail – the name, you will note, is a single consonant removed from “vain” – a grandstanding defence attorney who decides to take on the case of Aaron Stampler (played by a newcomer, Edward Norton, who is not half bad), a stammering redneck charged with the gory murder of an archbishop.

Could that be why all the characters have French-sounding names?Compared to Leigh’s creations – indeed, compared to the Muppets (see below) – most of the characters in Gregory Hoblit’s meaninglessly titled Primal Fear (18) are ciphers, points on a script diagram rather than breathing entities. Hence, perhaps, the paradox rewarded at Cannes: the closest artistic kindred of this intensely British film come from other nations. In terms of spirit, it means an attitude to quotidian life which borders on the kind of humility you can find in Ozu or Olmi – two of the directors Leigh has said he most admires – but not so often in the work of other British directors. In terms of style, this means plenty of close-ups, static camera positions and audaciously long takes. (The montages of Maurice at work are the film’s comic high-spot.)What Secrets & Lies does, and which so few entertainments manage, is to attend, patiently and scrupulously, to the lives of its characters. While everyone is ultimately redeemed, two in particular – Maurice and Hortense – border on the saintly, and while one would not want to accuse Leigh too directly of dabbling in symbolism, it does seem more than coincidental that, as an optometrist and a photographer, they are both concerned with looking and seeing clearly.

You’re no longer tempted to feel, as, say, in Abigail’s Party, that you can judge someone’s soul by the shade and texture of their upholstery, and anyone who sniggers at Monica when she stencils her walls with a Laura Ashley kit will have ashes in their mouth by the final reel.Among the film’s many accomplishments is its extraordinary lightness of touch on the nervous issue of race. Beyond a couple of inescapable but-you-can’t-be-my-daughter! gags, the topic is hardly mentioned at all, though Monica’s brittle solicitousness to Hortense and Hortense’s awkward fielding of her twitterings capture truths that less delicate treatments would miss.More striking still is Leigh’s ability to create beings whose uncompromising decency, for all their burdens of grief, is entirely convincing. Sparks fly, though not quite in the directions you would expect.What distinguishes Secrets & Lies from a good deal of Mike Leigh’s earlier work is its generosity and concern with redemption. After Cynthia’s initial surprise and dismay, however, the two begin to get on famously, to the point where Cynthia gathers the nerve to introduce her to the rest of her half-family at a barbecue her affluent younger brother Maurice (Spall) and his wife, Monica, are holding for Roxanne’s 21st birthday. Prompted to wonder about her biological mother, Hortense eventually tracks down Cynthia, who is not only one of life’s more conspicuous casualties – a bone-weary factory worker and unmarried mother of another daughter, subsisting in a terraced house which is sliding inexorably into slumhood – but, to her shock, white. By the end of the film, they’re beyond excellent: they’ve become people you know with uncomfortable, even irritating intimacy.
More melancholic than some of Leigh’s earlier family comedies, Secrets & Lies begins with a funeral – the burial of the woman who was the adoptive mother of Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a self-possessed young black woman who works as an optometrist.

(But here’s a mean thought, anyway: Timothy Spall is outstanding.) The faint whiff of caricature that hangs around each part in the beginning seems to act like an artistic inoculation, in the service of greater reality. Though it was Brenda Blethyn who took the Best Actress award at Cannes, the whole cast works at such a pitch that to single out any particular role seems mean-spirited. Do audiences in Nancy yelp with laughter, as we do, when Paul (Lee Ross) grunts “Can be, mate” to someone who asks if his work is hard? Will cinema-goers in Helsinki squirm, as we do, when Monica (Phyllis Logan) says of her WC “I think the peach tones make it quite tranquil”? Are Bostonians likely to wince in recognition, as we do, at the shrill maternal whine with which Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn) catechises her daughter Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook) about contraceptive devices?

Maybe not; but if international viewers might fumble for some of the precise social nuances, they can hardly fail to catch the denseness and emotional force of just about every performance here, no matter how fleeting. That Golden Palm which now casts its dappled shade over Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies (15) might come as something of an agreeable surprise, for all that it is well deserved; his wanly comic drama about families has many of the qualities of a national family joke, so replete with this country’s shared disappointments, half-forgotten grudges and rueful acceptances that you might not think it fully intelligible in Cannes, or anywhere outside these shores.

Nothing has changed at Southampton. Managers arrive, managers depart but the struggle for survival goes on forever. Graeme Souness may be a big name with a big reputation but he is merely the latest in a long line which has failed to alter history.
His lament had a familiar ring to it as well “There are no easy games in the Premiership,” Souness said. “And if you gift goals to teams it is extremely hard for you. For the last three weeks we have done nothing but work on our defence. For 45 minutes I think we’ve cracked it and for 45 minutes I think: have they grasped anything?”Southampton’s traditionally desperate plight is enshrined in the statistics.

They have now conceded 44 league goals and are in second bottom position. Only Middlesbrough have let in more, 45, and they are bottom.The lapses were merely heightened on Saturday because they came after Southampton not only went two goals in front but had apparently dismantled Sheffield Wednesday’s composure. Perhaps they should have put it beyond Wednesday’s reach then.True, they were twice denied by splendid saves from Kevin Pressman but other opportunities, both before and after a routine close-range shot from Egil Ostenstad which gave them the lead and a penalty by Matthew Le Tissier which increased it, ought to have been converted.Still, it was impossible to anticipate Wednesday’s revival. Wimpish was the word used by their manager, David Pleat, to describe their first- half efforts and he was probably being polite.

Des Walker, missing his first game of the season with a throat infection, will have no trouble in regaining his place. But after two adroit interval substitutions they were level within 11 minutes of the resumption, thanks to two impressive surges by David Hirst, and by the time Andy Booth secured the winner with nine minutes left had reversed the balance of confident, assertive attacking. Where Eyal Berkovitch and Le Tissier were deftly predominant in the first half, now they were nowhere to be seen.If Souness rightly identified casual defending as the chief cause of the transformation, tribute should also be paid to Hirst for taking advantage of it. His finishes, the first with the left foot, the second with the right, both illustrated his power and prompted the belief that at 29, even with his injury record, he can pose difficulties for smarter defences.Souness can only trust that he follows history in another important respect. Come May, Southampton traditionally survive.Goals: Ostenstad (29) 1-0; Le Tissier pen (33) 2-0; Hirst (50) 2-1; Hirst (56) 2-2; Booth (81) 2-3.Southampton (4-3-1-2): Taylor; Van Gobbel (Slater, 66), Monkou, Maddison, Charlton (Robinson, 83); Dodd, Neilson, Magilton; Berkovitch; Le Tissier, Ostenstad.