Trendsurfing: Travel-hosting networks (The Times)

By David Rowan

It's the new way to see the world, meet lots of interesting people, and then stay on their sofas for free - all in the spirit of broadening global understanding. Thanks to the social-networking power of the internet, tens of thousands of travellers are now offering hospitality to strangers on the understanding that they, too, may one day host guests of their own. It is a cash-free arrangement that relies entirely on trust - yet it is proving so successful that its appeal has spread far beyond backpackers to professionals and even couples with children.

The idea goes back to the 1940s, when a pacifist body called Servas first developed an international network of "hosts" who agreed to share their homes with foreign travellers. Today, with around 14,000 hosts in 130 countries, Servas still insists on interviewing new members in person, and, if they pass muster, sends them a paper directory of other members they can contact. It can be a slow process arranging a home-stay, and you still don't learn much about your hosts in advance.

Thankfully, the internet now offers far more immediate ways to network. Over the past few months, grass-roots accommodation exchanges have enjoyed extraordinary online growth, and all with broadening people's minds, rather than profit, as the goal. Whether you want to offer a bed or simply to borrow one, networks such as globalfreeloaders.com and the Couch Surfing Project (couchsurfing.com) let you search a global database for what's available, and afterwards to assess the experience. And just as feedback on eBay lets a trader decide who to trust, these social networks allow strangers in different continents to vet each other's reputations.

Couch Surfing was launched a year ago by Casey Fenton, a web consultant in Alaska, who needed somewhere to stay after he found a cheap flight to Iceland. Fenton emailed 1,500 students in Reykjavik, receiving several offers of sofas, before realising that a more formalised online exchange could "make the world a smaller place, where people feel they can trust people more often". Today, that exchange has more than 7,700 members in 125 countries, from Afghanistan to former Yugoslavia. They offer visitors anything from a hammock to a penthouse apartment, retaining full control over who visits and for how long.

Earlier this month, Paolo Massa, a doctoral student at the University of Trento in Italy, hosted his first guest, a 24-year-old Russian woman called Anna. He knew from her Couch Surfing profile - with photo attached - that Anna was a fan of Bertolucci and Nabokov, and that another member had vouched for her as "very imaginative, nice". After Anne left, Massa, 30, concluded that she was indeed "a lot of fun", although he did warn future hosts that "her Italian is less than beginners'".

Still, Massa remains convinced that such open-minded exchanges will make for "a better world". "Before hosting Anna, I asked myself questions such as: Why should I host this girl I don't know? Will she steal everything I have?," he says. The answer, he concludes, is the trust that comes through the recommendations of others who have themselves established a reputation within the community. Every user is linked to everyone else they have dealt with, and any comments made about them become visible to all.

It's an intriguing social experiement, which in Britain has already attracted soldiers, architects and lecturers keen to open their homes. And if you are thinking about your holiday plans - well, that low-budget trip to Rio or Rome just became a real possibility.

(The Times, February 26 2005)

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Interview: Susie Forbes, Easy Living (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

Never underestimate Condé Nast. Glamour, its last UK magazine launch, took just three years to become Europe's best-selling women's monthly, confounding the sceptics with a circulation currently above 620,000. Now the publisher of Vogue and Vanity Fair plans an equally radical shake-up in the older women's market with Easy Living, a "revolutionary new magazine concept" that has rival editors holding their breath.

Commentators and media buyers may question whether there is a market for yet another glossy monthly, particularly one aimed so broadly at women aged 30 to 55. But as the editor, Susie Forbes, puts it, "they said the same about Glamour - yet if something's right for its time, the readers are out there".

Until today, little has been known about Easy Living, beyond its vast £17 million launch budget and vague promises to reach this "new generation of 'grownup' women". But now, eight days before the first issue hits the newsstands, its editor is ready to divulge the mysterious formula that has convinced Condé Nast that it is about to "redefine" women's magazines. Forget the celebrities - just portray older readers' "real lives" in the glamorous, relentlessly upbeat and aspirational terms normally reserved for A-list stars.

According to Forbes, the 38-yearold former deputy editor of Vogue, this glitzy take on ordinary women's lives is what is missing from today's titles. "It's a strand that runs through every section of our magazine," she says in her suitably aspirational office overlooking Old Bond Street - from the "emotional intelligence" pages to the extensive food section. "We talked to 12,000 women during our research, and obviously we're entranced by the results or we wouldn't be launching. They want the magazine to be anchored in reality, but with gloss and glamour at the same time. So we're holding a glamorous mirror up to real life."

She admits that she has crafted the magazine partly in her own image. "It's very me," she says, "but I represent a lot of what women feel - their anxieties as they juggle home and work life, their role as a mother, their role as a wife. I'm leading the life." But it is the Easy Living life, rather than the Vogue life she has left behind after a decade. "There's nothing stylish or glamorous about me in my glasses and my pink dressing gown trying to get my children into their school uniforms," she says, "but it is all very lovely."

Forbes is married to the designer Bill Amberg, and they live in Kensal Rise with their children aged four, seven and eight. "It's that big juggle that many of my readers know, with my life depending on fantastic nannies. Yes, the magazine is done on my instinct. But my life is as flawed as the next girl's. It's really difficult to work hard and have three children. I find I have to keep my marriage together while being very busy. It's hard. But it's blissful. And for now, it's working out."

She exactly matches her magazine's target median age of 38 - women, as Forbes explains, who have the spending power that the 22-year-olds lack. That explains why the company is charging advertisers up to £31,720 for a spread. But rather than focus on her readers' ages, Forbes prefers to define them by their "attitude". Condé Nast professes to have discovered a new life stage experienced by women over 30, which it calls "second youth".

"Whatever her age, she has a modern approach to her life, very sure of herself but knowing she's still up for help," Forbes explains. "She doesn't feel a magazine will change her life, but she loves the sensation of reading one and wants to feel she's getting help or advice. The old stereotypes have gone. On my travels, I met everyone from rather conservative 35-year-olds with two children to completely wild 50-year-olds who'd just pierced their belly buttons, got divorced and were ready to get out there and start dating again. Just because she's turned 45 doesn't mean she's checking out of life."

Yet do we really need another women's lifestyle magazine? Forbes insists there is room if, like Real Simple in the US, it makes readers feel "marvellous and inspired". Within six months, she predicts that at least 180,000 of them will be buying her magazine. "And if we hit 200,000, I will be absolutely delighted."

The same size as Vogue, with 150 editorial pages and a similar number of ad pages in the first issue, Easy Living is designed to be calm and easy to navigate, "as functional as it will be fashionable", with the various sections colour-coded to make it easy to locate a dessert recipe or a sofa. The sections, at around 25 pages each, carry equal weight, so that fashion is as dominant as food, beauty as important as the triedandtested consumer pages. Woven through the magazine are its own safely pre-tested columnists, including Lesley Garner, Sally Brampton and Linda Kelsey.

The opening section, labelled "real life", is designed to set the tone - offering, as Forbes puts it, "a nose into other people's lives, and with lovely pictures". In the first issue, this includes a feature about successful businesswomen who have found a way to include their children in their work, thus solving the eternal juggling of kids and careers. There is none of the celebrity coverage to be found in glossies such as Emap's Grazia - a magazine which Forbes thinks "will work, though it won't affect us as we're not doing much celebrity content".

The fashion section follows, with five "real women" testing the catwalk trends. "Nice-looking women, smiling, happy," Forbes adds. Then comes "emotional intelligence" - a "touchy-feely" section inspired by Oprah magazine, which deals with relationships - and "health and beauty", focusing not on radical makeovers but on the new products readers are in practice likely to try. Finally, there are two sections covering food and homes - "lovely features, with beautiful women" - before closing with the "tried and tested" consumer page that offers independent product reviews.

This last service may prompt concern at Good Housekeeping, whose own product-testing institute is well established. Forbes insists that she is "absolutely not attempting to compete with the Good Housekeeping Institute", and that hers is a "very different magazine". Yet Condé Nast's literature clearly positions it alongside Good Housekeeping, whose former publisher Easy Living has poached.

"One of the critical differences between us and Good Housekeeping is that it will be a real indulgence, a treat, to pick up Easy Living," Forbes says. "Being glamorous isn't high on their list."

Other editors in the sector are less reticent about what some see as Easy Living's aggressive targeting of their own readerships. Sue James, editorial director of Woman & Home, says that with her rising circulation of 333,000, she is relaxed - although the March cover price has been cut from £2.90 to £2 "as a sampling exercise" (Easy Living will cost £1.90).

"We identified this huge group of women, which we call the 'treat me' generation, about three years ago," James says, "so it's flattering that someone else has finally discovered them." At Red (down to £2), editor Trish Halpin is taking seriously "any possible threat" to her 30-something readership - although any gap, she believes, has to be in the 40-plus market, and she feels her established title is in a strong position. The challenge for Forbes is to prove that the gap actually exists.

"It's not necessarily that women feel they're missing something at the moment, but Glamour has been the proof that you can grow what seems to be a saturated market," she says. "They're reading all sorts of things. It could be Marie Claire, it could be Good Housekeeping or Vogue. But I hope that when they see Easy Living, it will fulfil their wildest dreams."

Whether it does remains a £17 million gamble. And as Condé Nast knows, its rivals will not give up readers without a fight.

(Evening Standard, February 23 2005)

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Sunday Times Magazine: Inside eBay

It offers everything - including the dream of success and financial independence. More than 10,000 of us make a living from it. Millions more are simply obsessed by it. But is the global phenomenon of eBay spinning out of control? By David Rowan

Fossils are Trevor George's life. His semi-rural 17th-century cottage in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, is packed with them: 2ft-tall local ammonites, Patagonian saltasaurus dinosaur eggs, cretaceous fossilised insects piled up by 365m-year-old Moroccan trilobites. Until a year ago, George, once a soldier with the Royal Engineers, was making a tolerable if undemanding living polishing unrefined fossils in his back-garden workshop, which he would sell on to Britain's remaining beach-front souvenir shops. Then he had an idea that made fellow dealers laugh out loud. Why didn't he photograph and describe some of his older specimens, and try auctioning them on eBay?

George, a short, quiet man with a mischievous pixie grin, assumed that even serious collectors would hesitate before buying petrified life forms over the internet. He did not expect to find himself running a hugely profitable global business. His personal eBay trading account, in the name of "british-jurassic-fossils", made more than 5,100 sales last year, at prices ranging from a few pounds to £2,200. This year, with 200 trilobites or meteorites listed at any time, George expects to double turnover to around £250,000. "The potential's there to make a million a year through eBay, maybe more," he says with undisguised delight, as he fills the kettle which, like the wall clock and garden tools, he bought second-hand over the site. "It's changed my life. If I get two girls doing the typing, a third photographing and packing, I could become the Argos of British fossils."

A decade after an idealistic French-Iranian computer programmer named Pierre Omidyar built a website and auctioned off his broken laser pen for $14, that website is rewriting the rules of British business. AuctionWeb, launched at Omidyar's ebay.com web address from his spare bedroom in California' s Silicon Valley, was conceived as "a place where people can come together" ? an online exchange for all, which would never actually handle merchandise, but would let its users determine a fair market price. In exchange, Omidyar asked for a small proportion of any sale price to pay his web-hosting bills. Today, eBay continues to earn up to 5.25% commission on each sale, plus the fees it charges for everything from listing items to setting a reserve price. That "perfect marketplace", as Omidyar conceived it, is now the internet era's outstanding commercial success story, handling trades worth $34 billion (£18 billion) a year. It is established in 32 international markets and its 135m registered members buy or sell goods worth $1,050 (£560) every second, from over 34m items listed at any time. Corporations such as IBM and Vodafone use eBay to dispose of excess stock, but 95% of this "community" still comprises individuals and small businesses.

Talk to an eBay employee and you'll soon be showered with eager superlatives: the 4m new listings daily, the diamond rings traded every two minutes. But in the past few months, the most extraordinary numbers reflect the company's phenomenal growth in this country, five years after a dedicated website was launched here. With 10m members, the UK is now eBay's third biggest market after the US and Germany, growing at more than 160% each year. So culturally ingrained has it become that a day barely passes without an eBay story making the news- from students auctioning their foreheads to advertisers, to the more worrying reports of illegal gun trades, hard-core pornography, fraud and fake tsunami fundraisers.

But the negative publicity hasn't stopped more than a third of British internet users visiting eBay each month to buy and sell, or just to check how much their Fendi bag or Ferrari Spider might fetch. Some use its chatrooms to swap stories about "eBay addiction", the thrill of bidding leading them into debt. For the more entrepreneurial, the site is a powerful new way to reach customers. The company estimates that at least 10,000 people in the UK now rely on eBay to make a living, having recast an established "offline" business as an internet-based "shop window", or turned a hobby into a commercial venture. For Trevor George, it was both. "You need a passion for what you're selling," he says, scratching rock away from a 2in trilobite using a pneumatic air chisel. "That one's 450m years old," he points out with paternal pride. "Every fossil is individual."

George, 46, first used eBay to sell some old computer printers in December 2003. "They went very quickly, so then I got rid of my old climbing gear," he recalls. "All my friends said fossils would never go, that you can only sell rubbish on eBay. So I tried it. And it works."

He sources his merchandise in China and Morocco, but some of the richest pickings come from a former iron-ore quarry nearby, whose owner happily lets him take away soil by the skipload. His father-in-law, Glyn, a retired engineer, helps out in the workshop, and Richard, his son, offers a hand when not at college. But mostly, once George has cleaned, photographed and listed his precious finds, it is the computerised shop window that does the work. He starts the bids at 99p, £4.99 or £59.99, or specifies a fixed price that lets a customer "Buy It Now". Then, bar the odd e-mail inquiry, he waits at his computer to learn how much he's earned. "I'm comfortable, and I've got a great lifestyle, jetting around the world to collectors' fairs," he says. "It can only grow. I'm offering 30 lines, but there are a hundred I could do. No wonder jobs around the house aren't getting done."

At 1pm, a Parcelforce van arrives to collect 13 boxes destined for Quebec, California, Florida and Coventry. A pile of Jiffy bags for smaller orders sits on the kitchen table, alongside a few of this morning's cheques: one for £159.92, another for £38.50, a third for £4.99. "My accountant warns me to bank the cheques before sending out the goods," George says with a shrug. "But I think it's fairly safe. I've only ever had one person rip me off, pretending his parcel hadn't arrived. Mostly, eBay teaches you to trust people."

That is exactly how its founder intended it. On February 26, 1996, six months after launching the website as a hobby, Omidyar wrote to the "community" explaining that its growth depended on trust. "Most people are honest, but some people are dishonest. Or deceptive. It's a fact of life... But here, those people can't hide. We'll drive them away... This grand hope depends on your active participation... Use our feedback forum. Give praise where it is due; make complaints where appropriate... By creating an open market that encourages honest dealings, I hope to make it easier to conduct business with strangers over the net."

The "feedback forum" would be the key to Omidyar's "grand experiment". Members would be encouraged to rate everyone they traded with - whether as buyers or sellers. They would be asked to define the experience as positive, negative or neutral, and adding a comment visible to all. For the ponytailed Omidyar, who still held a day job programming codes for a Silicon Valley start-up, General Magic, this self-policing mechanism would save his time and give users an incentive to earn each other's respect. George may have been trading for barely a year, but his 99.9% positive-feedback rating, following reviews from 2,185 eBay members, gives him the credibility that will drive sales.

After graduating in computer science from Tufts University in 1988, Omidyar worked for some of Silicon Valley's hottest tech companies before helping launch some of his own. One, eShop, was bought by Microsoft, making Omidyar a millionaire before he was 30. Then, in summer 1995, he decided to experiment with his "virtual exchange".

A few myths have grown up around eBay's birth. One is that Omidyar launched it to help his fiancée, Pam Wesley, now his wife, find some rare Pez sweet dispensers for her collection. That, Adam Cohen discovered, researching his authorised history of eBay, The Perfect Store, was a publicist's invention designed to give a human face to a tech company. Further confusion surrounds the name. It is not a homage to San Francisco's East Bay area, nor Echo Bay in Nevada.

It was simply a contraction of Echo Bay Technology Group, a name Omidyar used for his web consulting business because "it sounded cool". The echobay.com web address had been taken. A contracted form, ebay.com, was available.

Now 37 and living with Pam and their two young children in Nevada, Omidyar is estimated by Forbes magazine to be worth $10.4 billion. Although Omidyar remains chairman, Meg Whitman, an energetic former Disney executive, has been running the company since March 1998. This has left the publicity-shy Omidyar time to devote to his next goal: to give money to causes that, as he sees it, use the networking power of technology to "make the world a better place".

In the company mantra, eBay is "just a platform", letting the busy mother in Ascot compete on equal terms with the global corporation in Akron. But this, critics say, is what lets fraudsters prosper, their unvetted auctions ensnaring the unwary for as long as eBay leaves them to it. This is not, of course, how Omidyar sees it: eBay's hands-off approach lets its users "become empowered by participating in an open and honest marketplace", discovering "their own power to make good things happen". The ponytail may be long gone, but not, it seems, the multi-billionaire's hippie idealism.

In the spare bedroom of an unassuming semidetached house in Bristol, Helen Southcott, 27, sits answering some of the day's 500 e-mails. Three feet away, tapping heavily on a keyboard on the same cluttered desk, Southcott's fiancé, Matthew Ogborne, monitors the bids rolling in on some of the 2,000 items that he listed yesterday for auction.

Until June 2003, Ogborne, now 26, was making an uncomplicated living as a photocopier engineer, and driving a rusting H-registration Metro. He still drives the Metro - but today, as an eBay trader calling himself "MoggieX", Ogborne has a turnover approaching £1m "any day now". In eBay language, that makes him a "Titanium Powerseller", putting him among its top few earners in Britain.

The venture began two years ago with a £2,000 credit-card debt, after Ogborne chanced upon a supplier of digital cameras. He found he could easily make £50 on each by selling them on eBay. He then found an electronics manufacturer to supply him with DVD players, memory cards and home-theatre systems at prices that would let him undercut the high street. Demand was so great that by summer 2003, he'd quit his job and was working from home. "Quitting the job was the most liberating experience for me," says Ogborne. "The hours, and the pay, are much better here." By last summer, the business was bringing in up to £77,000 a month. "It scared the living daylights out of our accountant," he says, sipping tea from an eBay mug. "We've doubled turnover since May; I intend to do so again by the summer. The volume of feedback is mind-boggling."

Southcott has also given up her job in fashion retail to take care of "customer service". This, Ogborne explains, ensures that feedback remains high, which in turn attracts new business and higher prices. After 12,400 customers, MoggieX claims a 99.7% positive rating. "The feedback works for us too," he says. "If a customer has no feedback and is buying £800 worth of kit, you get suspicious and check them out. Warning bells ring if they've bought lots of 99p items simply to build up feedback. But if they've been buying golf clubs - well, that's a human being, isn't it?"

At eBay's UK headquarters, in a Georgian square by the Thames in Richmond, Surrey, you hear a great deal spoken about the "community". The membership might not be welcome here in person - the building is unmarked, the phone numbers unlisted - but as Whitman sees it, they are the company's "soul" and the reason for its success. They loyally offer suggestions on its voluminous bulletin boards; they report back when they find auction rules being breached. Doug McCallum, the UK managing director, calls them "the biggest Neighbourhood Watch in the universe".

That makes Dan Wilson one of eBay's more important UK employees. As "community manager", the 27-year-old is responsible for monitoring members' concerns. When auction fees are raised, as happened in January, he will bring their worries to his bosses' attention. If he hears horror stories about eBay customer support, he investigates. "We're not a democracy, true, but it makes good business sense for us to work with the community," Wilson says. "They have to make money for us to make money - so I really don't think it's the shareholders who are running the show."

As with all eBay employees, Wilson is obliged to trade there himself: internal competitions reward staff with the most improved feedback scores. His most recent sale was an electric coffee grinder that cost him £12.50 in the Whittard sale, which he sold for £18.50. He also made £400 on a box of old 78rpm records that he bought on the site for £1. "Call me the Terrible Trotter, but I don't think you can look the community in the eye unless you know what they do."

The real stars, mentioned with reverence by staff at HQ, are those who are turning over six- or seven-figure sums from home. "Some have given up senior management positions; others are mums who have built up their business by listing their goods when the children are asleep," says Elspeth Knight, responsible for Britain's "Powersellers", those conducting the most transactions. They include Julie King, 33, who was reluctant to return to her demanding job as an IT consultant after giving birth to Lewis two years ago. She decided to try selling shoes from her North Tyneside home. The result was killer-heels-com, where you can buy £15 party stilettos or £14 cowboy boots.

"We now list about 400 pairs at any one time. We expect turnover this year to reach about £150,000, up from last year's £98,000," she says, tired having just put Lewis to bed before another evening packing shoes. That "we", by the way, is deceptive: King, a single mother, runs the business entirely by herself, from visiting wholesalers to answering e-mails. "It's 16-hour days. I'm earning less than I was in IT, but this lets me see my littl'un grow up," she says.

Louise Allen, 25, has no such domestic distractions. She was studying accounting at Leeds Metropolitan University when she discovered eBay, selling a South Park script for £130, then a treadmill for £450. From there, a fitness-equipment business quickly grew, with Allen handling orders from university while her father, in Manchester, arranged deliveries. Last year's turnover was £1.3m. With eBay, you can "launch a business in a day", says Allen, now working full time with a staff of six. "But you can't rely on it 100%. If you can find a new product, it will do well for a few weeks, then the demand disappears. And anyone can copy your idea in an instant." So eBay has become just one outlet for her business, exerciseathome.co.uk.

Still, not all traders are just after money. Simon Stevens, in Coventry, makes just a few hundred pounds each month selling swimming aids and waterproof clothing. After four years on eBay, he is proud that he has earned 99.5% positive feedback. What his customers don't know is that Stevens, 30, has cerebral palsy, "as eBay and the internet don't discriminate on appearance", he says, typing his words into a text phone to be more easily understood. "This has given my business, Enable Enterprises, an opportunity to reach a market that would have been impossible before eBay. I'm not ashamed of being disabled," he adds. "But to be able to compete on a level playing field - that's wonderful."

But there is a darker side to the eBay experience. For all its members' unpaid vigilance, eBay's boundary-free community has allowed fraudsters, pornographers, drug dealers and weapons traders to abuse its loosely regulated hospitality. The company says it would be impractical, and doubtless costly, to vet each of the 4m new items listed for sale each day. Yet by pulling unauthorised auctions only when alerted to breaches, eBay's management is letting its "perfect" marketplace become wilfully soiled.

On a random afternoon in January, The Sunday Times Magazine quickly found auctions under way for illegal flick knives, pirated software, obviously fake designer labels, and junk e-mail addresses - all supposedly banned by eBay. A "poor student girl" in Redditch was offering "nude photos - totally naked!" to repay her overdraft. The current bid was £9 for 10 intimate images. For £4, another trader offered "some really hot pics and video of my sexy wife and her mates playing up". A number of sellers were advertising soiled knickers for up to £20, often employing clumsy typographical tricks to evade the site's proscription of dirty underwear. "Do you want to buy my un USED panties?" one seller asked. "I have had many a wild night packaging these special thongs for you naughty boys. I take requests..."

A seller in Rayleigh, Essex, was offering five "big bud cannabis seeds", with bidding at £6.61 - legal, the listing claimed, unless germinated, but in breach of the rules. You could also buy throwing knives (£3.70), a means to "unlock your Sky box" (£1.99), allegedly "genuine" Viagra (starting at £1), and CDs containing 200m e-mail addresses (£8.99).

Garreth Griffith, responsible for what eBay UK calls "trust and safety", accepts that these items should not have been there. "The challenge is the volume," he admits. "We try to catch them. We're trying to improve really quickly. I feel more confident that we're on top of it."

More awkward for eBay have been the guns. The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) has warned of illegal weapons entering Britain through eBay. Last year, the site was forced to end the auction of a semi-automatic CZ75 pistol 24 hours after it went on sale for £650. "It does nothing for eBay's reputation," the Labour MP Steve McCabe told his party conference in September. "A company making the money eBay is making could afford to properly monitor the site." McCabe has since compiled a dossier of guns allegedly on sale. The site was allowing dealers to sell the weapons without checking whether they were active or not, thus contributing directly to street crime, he claimed. "Dealers know that illegal weapons will be removed from the site within 24 hours, so they are using that time to advertise private sales or advertise empty bags or boxes for sale and offering guns as a free gift."

Doug McCallum says the claims are grossly exaggerated. "It's an outrage that people in their own interests have managed to create an impression that guns and weapons are available on eBay," he says. "We've actually gone further than the law states and banned paintball guns and knives. Obviously, we can't keep a marketplace of this scale clean every moment of every day" (an argument repeated by other executives to The Sunday Times), "but we aggressively invest in removing things as soon as we hear about them."

The company says it does far more than simply wait for tip-offs. "We recognise that the whole foundation of eBay is based on trust," Griffith says. "So we look for references to, say, gun-related terms. We also look at the type of people coming onto the site to identify questionable behaviour. If I've just registered and within a few hours am bidding on eight cars, I'm probably not legitimate. We'd catch that." So why not use automated word filters more effectively? "Could we block the word 'gun'? Yes, but as a result we'd block Guns N' Roses and The Guns of Navarone," Griffith says. The site has indeed begun using key-word filters to block terms related to drugs, guns and pornography until these listings can be manually approved. "Thousands of items" await approval at any time. The other problem is fraud.

In December, sentencing a woman who had sold £3,000 of fake Glastonbury tickets on eBay, Judge Richard Bray warned that the system made committing fraud "easy". Just how easy is made clear by  recent reports, from the 17-year-old Gwent boy who made £45,000 selling nonexistent goods, to John Leary, jailed for four years after selling $1m worth of laptops that never arrived. At least those fraudsters were caught: some of the more problematic transactions have involved fraudulent buyers.. Dheeraj Saxena, a 28-year-old IT consultant from Berkshire, has no idea who cheated him out of his laptop. After waiting for the selling price of £870 to reach him via PayPal, he sent the computer to the address in Russia the auction winner had specified. PayPal announced by e-mail 10 days later that the transaction had been unauthorised and it was reclaiming the funds. "It looks like someone's account was hacked, but PayPal has frozen my account, which is now in debt," Saxena says. "PayPal and eBay have washed their hands of it, and I'm getting threatening notes from PayPal demanding the £170 I'm supposedly in debt."

A trading-standards officer told Saxena that eBay was within its rights, as he had agreed to its user agreement. "So just because you sign up to a damned user agreement, you can get ripped off! And eBay doesn't even give out contact numbers. I'm not using eBay any more. And I'm not settling the outstanding fee. I'm up for a class action!"

Saxena is not alone. Bevans, a Bristol law firm, has been contacted by almost 400 fraud victims, or groups representing them, about suing eBay over allegedly unfair contract terms. "Not all cases could be said to be eBay's fault, and some of these people are a little naive," says Tony Hughes, a solicitor handling the complaints. "But there's a case for saying that eBay is not taking sufficient steps to prevent fraud, and not providing sufficient compensation."

The company says that just 0.01% of trades are confirmed as fraudulent, and that it compensates buyers by up to £105, more if they buy through PayPal. "That's fine for a pair of shoes, but it doesn't help with the case of a £900 saxophone," says Hughes. Most recently, that has included fake tsunami appeals. Still, the risks have not dented eBay's rise. Britain's ultimate bring-and-buy sale is now part of our  mainstream culture, the dinner-party conversation piece that has supplanted house prices, and the only club that could unite second-hand car dealers and celebrities such as Cherie Booth and Sir Paul McCartney. There are now even chains of bricks-and-mortar stores, such as Auctioning4U in London, which exist simply to sell busy people's goods on eBay in exchange for a 30% commission.

Yet for all its success, eBay remains at its core the minimally regulated public noticeboard that Pierre Omidyar envisaged - a powerful commercial exchange, certainly, but also a barely policed storefront for the world's con artists and opportunists, where the live auctions we chanced upon included illegal anabolic steroids, pirated DVDs and even a deactivated Soviet rocket launcher. Naturally, eBay removed these listings once they were drawn to its attention. But as the ultimate multi-billion-dollar winner of the online auction business, it may no longer be enough for eBay to remain "just a platform" that relies on its customers to look after themselves.


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EXTRA PANELS:

Planet for sale: ebay moments

* Diane Duyser, from Florida, claimed that a 10-year-old image of the Virgin Mary on a toasted sandwich had brought her luck - including $70,000 in casino winnings. The auction was viewed more than 1.7m times before GoldenPalace.com, an online casino, bought the sandwich last November to take on a world tour. The website paid $28,000. It was not long before another eBay seller offered a sandwich toaster able to produce Virgin Mary images.

* In December 2002, Joe and Elizabeth Lapple sold Bridgeville, an 82-acre town that they owned in northern California. Their 19th-century pile of real estate attracted almost 250 bids, including a last-minute offer of $1,777,877. Alas, the supposed buyer, who was never named, quickly disappeared and the property was offered off eBay a year later for $850,000. The sales agents described using the auction site as "a fiasco".

* Nazi, Ku Klux Klan and murder-related memorabilia are banned.

* In July 2000, eBay hosted an auction of handbags owned by personalities including Cherie Booth, Jerry Hall and Lady Thatcher, to benefit the charity Breast Cancer Care. The Thatcher handbag sold for £100,000 to an unnamed bidder, which eBay says remains the highest-value single trade on the UK site.

* In 1999 the website crashed for 22 hours in what the CEO, Meg Whitman, called a "near-death experience".

* The most expensive item yet sold on eBay was a 12-seater Gulfstream II jet, sold by a Texan company, Tyler Jet, in August 2001. The price - $4.9m - was three times the previous record for an eBay end-of-auction price. It was bought by a charter aircraft company in Africa.

* The Beanie Baby craze of 1997 made up 6.6% of total volume of sales for that year.

* In January 2004, Rosie Reid, an 18-year-old student at Bristol University, turned to eBay to auction her virginity and so cut her debts. Within three days she had received 400 offers, including one for £10,000. After eBay cancelled the auction, Reid continued it on her own website, claiming to have accepted a £8,400 bid to sleep with a 44-year-old BT engineer in a London hotel room. The police were investigating but no charges were brought.

* Only 399 Ferrari Enzo sports cars were ever made. So when a "perfect" one came on to eBay's Swiss site last October with just 250 miles on the clock, international bidding was fierce. The winner had to spend £544,000 to secure the car, based in Zurich - just £22 higher than the second-placed bidder. It is the most expensive item that eBay has sold in Europe.

* In February 2001, a University of Washington student named Adam Burtle, 20, offered his soul for sale. Burtle was pictured wearing an "I'm with stupid" T-shirt, and warned: "I make no warranties as to the condition of the soul. As of now, it is near mint condition, with only minor scratches." The bidding reached $400 before eBay learnt about it and cancelled the auction. "I was just bored, and I'm a geek," Burtle said later. "Any time I'm bored, I go back to my internet."

* It was described as "a genuine British £5 note - the face of Queen Elizabeth II on one side and Elizabeth Fry on the reverse", and offered in "crisp" condition with only a few creases. Paul Bradley, based in Gloucestershire, used a fixed-price auction and persuaded an American to pay over the odds: the price reached £6.99. Naturally, Bradley charged the full airmail rate to the US on top.

HOW EBAY PROFITS

Sellers, who are asked for bank-account details and credit- or debit-card information, have to pay eBay to list goods. Current fees range from 15p, for an item starting below £1, to £2 for one over £100. You also pay to upgrade your listing: extra pictures cost 12p, and being featured on the home page is £49.95. Setting a reserve price is a further 2% of your chosen price. Extra fees are payable when an item sells.

Sellers set the length of their auction and postage costs. They can set a reserve price, and a fixed price for a buyer who wants to end an auction early. PayPal, eBay's own electronic system, takes up to 3.4% when you sell.

If an item does not sell, it can be listed again for free. When it sells, you pay eBay a "final value fee" - 5.25% of the first £30, plus 3.25% of goods up to £600, plus 1.75% of the rest.

BID NOW

Amber Rainey, 22, from California, auctioned her "pregnant belly" as ad space on eBay this month. An online casino paid $4,050 (£2,190) to display its logo until her due date in March

eBay officially bans the sale of guns - but British MPs say the rules can be flouted

(Sunday Times magazine, February 20 2005)

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Trendsurfing: Skinvertising (The Times)

By David Rowan

Is there anyone left who's not renting out a body part as advertising space? Suddenly every indebted student or well-endowed young woman seems to be available as a human billboard. At the right price, they agree to have a corporate logo tattooed on to their skin for anywhere between a few days and several years. But what started out as a few opportunistic eBay stunts is now stirring a bizarre new debate in the ad industry: if branding your logo on to someone's head can create buzz, what's to stop mainstream advertisers giving it a try?

Blame Andrew Fischer, the "average American Joe" who last month persuaded a pharmaceutical company to spend £20,000 renting his forehead to promote a snore remedy. The real value, of course, was in the huge global press coverage the auction generated for the client. Since then, hundreds of potential walking ad hoardings have put themselves on the market, through internet auctions or marketing agencies that act as intermediaries.

With all the available foreheads, chests and skulls currently saturating the market, it's only a matter of time before ITV issues a profit warning. Well, perhaps not quite yet: a study of prices being achieved on eBay's body-ad auctions suggests that already supply is far outstripping demand.

That means that sellers are having to be ever more resourceful to stand out. A 27-year-old Scottish woman managed to raise £422 earlier this month by renting a nine by five-inch area of her cleavage to an online casino, but that only raised potential advertisers' expectations. For the £2,100 paid to Amber Ray, the 22-year-old is having to display a commercial message on her pregnant belly until she gives birth (as Ray explained in her sales pitch, "It's much bigger than someone's forehead!").

The winners have been those who arrived early on the scene. One of the first was a US internet hosting firm, which paid Jim Nelson to have its logo tattooed to the back of his head for five years. Within six months, the company says, this brought in 500 new customers. We can't quite expect the same success for the California man who has been using eBay to auction space on his "huge" nose, targeted at companies keen to promote "nasal sprays, cold remedies, deodorants, plastic surgeon endorsements, tissue companies or other as yet un-thought-of applications". It is not entirely clear how serious the man's intentions are, but as we went to press, bidding stood at $103.

This may prove a short-term fad, but the marketing industry does seem to be intrigued by what it's calling skinvertising, tattoovertising, or, according to the context, headvertising or even assvertising. A Vancouver company called TatAD claims to have signed up more than 1,000 people willing to be paid to wear tattooed ads, and has already struck sponsorship deals worth up to $1,000. Even major brands such as Dunlop and Dunkin' Donuts have hired face space and customised hairstyles to promote new products. When Toyota launched the Scion TC Coupe, it paid a group of skinvertisers to walk around Times Square with temporary tattoos on their foreheads.

Just think what this could do for The Times. A glance across the newsroom reveals millions of pounds' worth of prime journalistic face-space going to waste. Now, who's going to start the bidding?

(The Times Magazine, February 19 2005)

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Interview - Lorraine Heggessey (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

WHY has Lorraine Heggessey chosen to quit now? Just six months ago, the self-assured BBC1 boss declared that she planned to stay until at least 2007, thus becoming the longest-ever serving channel controller. But since then, the BBC's new chairman and director-general have been questioning her channel's priorities and slashing budgets in the run-up to charter renewal. Could that explain her sudden announcement on Monday that she was "ready for a new challenge"?

The official line is that Heggessey, 48, was simply enticed by an offer to run Talkback Thames, the production company behind The Bill and Pop Idol. "I had no intention of moving on it's just that this has come up," she explains, matter-of-factly. "Talkback Thames simply made me an offer I couldn't refuse."

That is not quite how they are reading the runes in White City. Heggessey, who has long boasted of holding "the best job in British television", was so clearly a favourite of the Dyke regime, colleagues suggest, that her ambitions would inevitably be frustrated under Mark Thompson. Having waited a year since Dyke's resignation, she could now leave with dignity. Besides, with charter renewal putting "public service" at the top of the corporation's agenda, a natural populist like Heggessey was never going to find the next couple of years easy

So, was she really leaving to avoid implementing Thompson's unpopular budget cuts, as some are suggesting? "Absolutely not," she says firmly. "I would have been completely happy to stay on, but it seemed too good an opportunity to pass up. Besides, one of the reasons for the cuts is so that more money can be put into programming. And BBC1 was going to be the beneficiary."

Why, then, back down on her stated goal of outlasting Sir Paul Fox in the job? "Well, I've been the longest serving controller for over 20 years, so that's not too bad a record," she counters, leaving no room to be challenged. "You have to leave a job like this while you still love it. It was my dream job, but I can't do it together."

She will not talk about her new role, which she takes up in June. But after 20 years at the BBC - starting as a news trainee in 1979 - it cannot have been a decision taken lightly.

Heggessey rose quickly, via Panorama, the science unit, children's programmes and factual and learning. She has also made series for ITV and Channel 4. Colleagues warn against judging her on her diminutive stature: she is a formidable operator, they say, tough and determined, yet enthusiastic and rewarding to work for. The mother of two daughters - she is married to a musician - she also has the human touch, stating in Who's Who that her recreations include "having fun and laughing".

After taking the job, in 2000, Heggessey accused her predecessor, Peter Salmon, of bequeathing a "neglected" channel "in need of some major surgery". Her goal she said, would be "to reach more people than any other channel". With an extra £100 million from Dyke, and the news shifted to 10pm, she set about trumping ITV in the ratings. In these terms she has been successful, overtaking ITV in 2001 and extending BBC1's lead last year to a 24.7 per cent audience share compared with ITV1's 22.8 per cent.

Yet her critics argue that her pursuit of ratings has damaged the channel, particularly by neglecting arts and serious journalism. When she brought in Rolf Harris as the face of art on BBC1, Melvyn Bragg denounced "a total dereliction of [the channel's] public duty". David Attenborough criticised a lack of "serious" documentaries, and a former director general, Alasdair Milne, recently attacked "dumb, dumb, dumb" makeover and cookery shows.

More worryingly, the BBC governors last summer ordered a review of BBC1 after public approval fell to a record low.

Heggessey remains unmoved. "If you didn't get the viewers, you'd be criticised for that as well. It's that balance between making the popular good and the good popular that we've always striven for."

Her schedules, she insists, combine quality with wide appeal. "Whether it's Himalaya with Michael Palin, Natural History of Britain, or fantastic factual landmarks such as Blue Planet, we're never short of terrific programmes in every genre. We have incredible single dramas like England Expects, as well as popular soap dramas like Holby City and Casualty. Then there are our innovative programmes like Spooks."

Clearly with a schedule as broad as BBC1's, it is easy for Heggessey to reel off her successes. The issue for her critics is the extent to which her populist approach has compromised the channel's public-service remit.

Jana Bennett, the BBC's director of television, emailed staff on Monday praising Heggessey as "a true champion of public-service broadcasting". But one senior BBC journalist points to the shelving of Panorama late on Sunday nights as evidence of her "lack of commitment" to traditional corporation values.

"She was a huge admirer of Greg Dyke, who paid lip-service to public-service broadcasting," the journalist says. "For Greg, read Lorraine. She thought that if you had audiences, that would deliver charter renewal. That's been a fundamental weakness - and when Mark Thompson took over, he found that preparations for charter renewal were in disarray."

Heggessey is infuriated at the suggestion that she is "Dyke's woman". "I'm nobody's woman," she snaps. "I'm my own person. Secondly, Mark Thompson appointed me when he was director of television, and has always been extremely supportive. I have a fantastic working relationship with Mark, so there was no issue there. Greg left over a year ago now. I was very sad on that day but I've had my own job to do."

INTERVIEWERS tend to describe Heggessey as "feisty", and she certainly wastes no time hitting back at the accusation that she has "dumbed down" BBC1. "I'd say we have innovated, particularly in specialist factual programmes, using computer graphics to take the viewer into new worlds, and investing in Child of Our Time, a landmark science project that's going on for 20 years. But part of running BBC1 is to make it popular."

She bites back again at the suggestion that she hired Graham Norton - for a reported £5 million - without having worked out how to use him. "How do you know whether I have a strategy for him or not? How does anybody know? Of course I have a strategy for him, and it is that he will be a prime-time BBC1 entertainer. But shows take time to develop. It's about building artists for the future, and that takes time."

What about her reliance on soaps, piling on a fourth weekly EastEnders slot that seems to have contributed to its audience slump? "These things are always cyclical," she replies. "EastEnders became the show to beat. ITV has worked hard to raise Coronation Street's game, and used all sorts of scheduling tricks. I'm not complaining about that, it's absolutely fair game. But EastEnders is well on track now. For every up you have a down, and I assure you it's back on the way up."

Still, Mark Thompson knows that ratings alone will not guarantee a new charter. As if to signal a new mood, last night the corporation announced fresh investment in serious journalism on BBC1 and more peak-hour Panorama specials. Publicly Thompson might be proclaiming that Heggessey's shoes "will be hard to fill". Still, it cannot hurt his case to have lost the Dyke era's most visible ratings-chaser.

(Evening Standard, February 16 2005)

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Trendsurfing: Hotel-room ownership (The Times)

By David Rowan

Love your hotel room? Now you can own it. As the hotel industry looks for new ways to make money, the idea of selling off individual rooms is suddenly hot. Your check-out bill might set you back a few hundred thousand pounds, but you earn cash back each time the room is rented out. And, of course, you get a five-star holiday-home as part of the deal.

They are known as "condo hotels", or "cotels", and they are springing up from Exeter to the Everglades. Developers love the concept, as it provides money up-front from investors tempted by potential capital as well as rental returns. There are no guarantees that they will necessarily make their money back, but that hasn't stopped them signing up by the hundred. In Florida alone, demand is reported to be strong enough to support around 30 current projects from Miami to Key Biscayne.

Here's how it works. Once you have bought your room, you typically join an owner's club giving you access to all the hotel's facilities, from fitness suite to maid service. You can of course stay there yourself, but whenever your room is unoccupied the hotel will make it available in its general rental pool. When a paying guest checks out, the revenue is split roughly equally between you and the hotel management. The front desk takes care of everything from laundering sheets to updating furnishings.

At Intrawest's Mont Tremblant resort in eastern Canada, £270,000 will buy a two-bedroom suite at the elegant Ermitage du Lac hotel that will rent out for £330 a night. "You choose when you stay, which on average amounts to about 14 nights a year," explains Michel Naud, a local real-estate broker. "The revenue from the rest of the year will cover your expenses and a good proportion of your mortgage payment." The 69-room hotel is managed by a specialist company, Boutique Hotels, which takes 50 per cent of the revenue. Whenever you want to use your room, you simply call in advance.

The catch, it seems, lies in the high "maintenance" fees, which for the Ermitage du Lac suite add up to almost £8,000 a year. That would comfortably buy you 14 nights in some of the world's most luxurious hotels. Still, the developers are betting on capital appreciation to lure prospective buyers. When the British developer GuestInvest offered 20 fairly small rooms in its Notting Hill hotel two years ago, it claims to have sold out within eight weeks at prices starting at £140,000. The company is now marketing 153 further rooms in hotels in Cheltenham, Exeter and Manchester, all on 99-year leases.

Does it stack up as an investment? GuestInvest likes to quote rental returns "in excess of six per cent", but some in the industry worry that the glamour of being an amateur hotelier may blind owners to the considerable risks. What if a hotel proves to be so badly run that owners' income suffers? No problem, says Michel Naud in Tremblant: the residents' association can simply re-award the management contract. But further questions remain. What if re-sale values prove less optimistic than the forecasts? What if the monthly maintenance bills shoot up? What if condo hotels prove to be the next time-share bubble?

For now, that's not too much of a concern for Donald Trump, currently building 200 condo hotel units into his latest Chicago tower. Just don't expect him to throw in the mini-bar.

(The Times, London, February 12 2005)

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The Times: Singleton Britain

Britain is undergoing a dramatic shift towards solitary living, reports David Rowan

If you want to understand today's most profound lifestyle trend, dive into the crowds streaming out of High Street Kensington Tube station in West London. As you head left past packed cappuccino bars, caught between pretty twentysomethings busily picture-messaging friends and guerrilla-marketing teams pitching free fashion makeovers, look closely at every passing Vuitton-toting, Nokia wielding hand and count how many are displaying wedding rings. If your unscientific survey is anything like ours, you will struggle to find more than a quarter of working-age women here signalling that they are married.

Welcome to the capital of Singleton Britain. According to official statistics, the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea has proportionately more single-person households than anywhere else in the country, with 48 per cent of homes now occupied by one person, typically somebody still of working age. Of course, as one of London's more expensive neighbourhoods and a particular magnet for young careerists, it makes sense for much of the housing stock to comprise small apartments unsuitable for a family. Yet as Britain undergoes a dramatic shift towards more solitary living, the single-person flat is fast becoming the most common type of household.

"I can't see what all the fuss is about," says Sue Rose, a designer in her mid-30s, sipping a latte in Caffe Nero. "Most of my girlfriends have lived alone for years and it's not as if there's anything weird about it. That old fashioned idea that if you're unmarried by your thirties you've somehow failed; well, it might have bothered my parents' generation but you can hardly take it seriously nowadays."

Just around the corner, in Adam and Eve Mews, Mary Balfour has been watching these social priorities change over the past two decades. In 1986 she took over a two-year-old dating agency called Drawing Down the Moon. Since then, she says, any stigma attached to single life has gradually evaporated, while the educated professionals she specialises in have become far more relaxed about meeting their potential partners.

"I'm noticing a greater confidence in people happy to see being single as just another stage in life," she says. "Back in the Eighties it was still unusual to admit to membership of a dating club but today it's as much a badge of singledom as gym membership. Our members are anything but desperate, but in the Eighties the single person was a little like Bridget Jones. Now Bridget Jones is really old hat."

Her women clients, in particular, enjoy being single, she says; their challenging jobs are more important to them than settling down. "It's probably the first time in history that women have been able to buy property and to live alone without needing to bring up a family," Balfour says. "We don't need to rush into relationships for economic survival. I'm finding that older people in particular don't want to cohabit any more. They want love and fidelity in their relationships, but they're happy in their own home. They love the single life and they want someone around for two, maybe three days a week. It's nothing to do with unhappiness or loneliness; they simply want the icing on the cake."

These radical social changes are far more than a matchmaker's impressions. Government statistics point to an extraordinary shift in Britain's household structure over the past generation. The proportion of one-person households almost doubled between 1971 and 2001, rising from 17 per cent of our homes to 31 per cent. By 2010, according to official forecasts, that proportion will increase to 40 per cent, making the single-person home the most common household unit; more common, for example, than two-parents-plus-family menages or single-parent-and-child abodes.

The causes range from later first marriage to easier divorce and the "increased affluence" that the Henley Centre, the futures consultancy, says allows singles, especially women, the historically novel privilege of choosing to live alone.

Partly, of course, it is because we are living for longer, although that fails to explain why the under-65s make up 70 per cent of Kensington's single-person households. What is clear is that the traditional advertising image of the 2.2 children family is increasingly unrepresentative of people's experiences.

To understand how the rise of Singleton Britain will change our lives, Body&Soul consulted some of our most eminent demographers, sociologists, economists and trend forecasters. Their overall message is stark: policymakers, housebuilders, marketers, even the restaurant industry, are going to have to adjust. The "power of one" is here to stay. "The happy, married family as the norm is a myth," says Malcolm Williams, a sociologist at the University of Plymouth who has just led a detailed study into the changing make-up of our households. "It might actually be that diversity is now becoming the norm. And that's going to have huge economic implications."

Advertising will have to change. "The picture of the happily married nuclear family will matter less and less," he says. "You'll also buy different kinds of food if you live alone, so the decisions about what supermarkets sell will no longer be based on the consensus of family groups." This demographic revolution will also affect health policy and social care. "If you've got people living alone, they haven't got somebody to look after them for relatively minor illnesses. That will be costly for the NHS." Williams's study found a growing tendency for those living alone to report long-term health problems.

The main pressure, though, will be on housing, particularly on the urban areas where single people tend to congregate. "But there's a paradox," he says. "The Government sees building more houses as a solution but that doesn't necessarily resolve the issue if you've got such a huge mortgage gap . The solution would be to provide more housing for rent, or for us to rethink what housing is for: consumption or gain?"

What surprised Williams most in his research was the discovery that people who live alone in early adulthood were far more likely to do so again. "We didn't expect that," he says. "But if you've already lived alone in your twenties, maybe it makes you more self-sufficient, more prepared emotionally and practically to do so again. Living alone becomes a lifestyle choice. That's a positive thing, giving you considerable resources to draw on in old age."

Sarah Harper, who runs the Oxford Institute of Ageing, is equally optimistic. "People are choosing to remain single," she says. "Women especially are surviving much more successfully living alone, whereas before at 35 they'd be expected to be married with children. If there's a problem group, it's lone men aged 50-plus, who are more likely to suffer health problems such as alcoholism and depression. Increasingly it's women who are instigating divorce and choosing not to remarry or necessarily to cohabit and, for the men left behind, who find fewer natural opportunities for making new relationships, that can mean less social interaction."

There is more bad news for men in the Government's forecast for Britain in 2010. The report's author, Richard Scase, concluded that single women in their thirties and forties had the well-developed social networks and confidence that men lacked. Men defined themselves more by their work, and relaxed with too much unhealthy food and drink, a recipe for isolation and loneliness, Scase suggested. Single women, by contrast, were more likely to see friends, explore their spiritual side and relax with yoga.

Staying single can certainly have a downside. A current University of Edinburgh study on "solo living", run by the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships, has found that singles drink more, worry more, work longer hours and skip too many meals. The study also puts to rest the notion of a Bridget Jones generation. Between 25 and 44, men are twice as likely as women to be living alone. Fran Wasoff, the centre's director, says it would be more representative to talk about "Brad Jones". But being single does not necessarily mean isolation.

"People would often tell us that they had a partner but were living separately," Wasoff says. "These are the LATs; people Living Alone Together. And let's not forget that people living alone do have regular links with family, friends and wider kin networks."

Life can certainly be more expensive outside a couple. The London Magazine calculated the extra lifetime cost of living alone to be £266,000, taking into account mortgage payments that would not be split, utility bills, even single holiday supplements. Other studies have shown that singles are expected to work for longer hours for less pay and that they face discrimination in everything from credit applications to car insurance.

Still, the spending power of Singleton Britain also creates new economic opportunities. Appliance manufacturers, food producers, restaurants - they will all have to appeal more directly to the single customer, says the business strategist Tamar Kasriel, the head of "knowledge venturing" at the Henley Centre.

"You'll see a big rise in 'third spaces' like Starbucks where people can hang out, more single-serving packages and a huge increase in disposable single-use products such as cleaning wipes. People want a sense that nobody else has touched that product."

Businesses that adapt may prosper. The travel company Solo's Holidays enjoyed 15 per cent growth last year by serving 16,000 singles not necessarily looking for partners. "It's about having someone to share the moment with," says Emma Reynolds, its marketing manager.

Kasriel is advising clients to "speak positively" to this growing demographic, rather than falling back on outdated stereotypes. Marketers have still to grasp the change, she says. "When advertisers try to portray non-traditional households, it often falls a bit flat. What works are those ads which don't necessarily force you to think about yourself as single but show someone enjoying 'me time'."

The big challenge remains finding homes for all these new households. Sabina Kalyan, an economist with Capital Economics, has predicted in a report for Charcol, the mortgage broker, that singletons will comprise 44 per cent of the new mortgage market by 2007, making them the fastest-growing type of borrower and a significant spur to house-price inflation.

In the meantime, as singles become a more powerful force in society, they are likely to find their own political voice. There is not yet a prominent British equivalent of the American Association of Single People, which lobbies Congress against the "singlism" that rewards couples with tax breaks, but it can be only a matter of time. After all, the feisty bulletin board of Britain's Single Living website (singleagain.co.uk) suggests that the anger is certainly there.

"I'm fed up being surrounded by smoochy couples everywhere I go," moans a Newcastle woman sick of the "smug couples thing". "I don't need a man to feel complete as a woman and I will go out with someone only if they are right for me."

What do you say, Mr Blair? You've got a Minister for Women - how about one for singles?

(The Times, February 12 2005)

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Interview: Jeremy Vine, BBC Radio 2/BBC1 (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

JEREMY Vine thinks interviewers are far too hostile towards politicians. It is a curious admission, given that the Radio 2 presenter also fronts BBC1's Politics Show, and one certain to prompt the customary Jeremy Paxman scowl. But the Paxman-Humphrys school of questioning, Vine believes, has only produced "gridlock" in political debate, and brought the media into disrepute. What's needed now is "a different tempo, a different style of interviewing".

He does not name names - Vine is too smooth an operator for that.

But two years after he left Newsnight - where Paxman witheringly dismissed him as "mini-me" - it is not hard to jump to conclusions.

"We've thrown them all around the room, slapped them in the face, yet we've realised it doesn't get them to say things that are truer than they were saying before," Vine says, eyebrows raised. "It's turned out to be counterproductive, because we've ended up treating them as if we hold them in contempt. The result is that the viewers and listeners have decided that they hold us in contempt, too."

What began as an interview to promote Vine's latest project, a new BBC1 books series, is starting to look like a pitch to replace David Frost as the corporation's soft-touch political question-master.

"I have quite a high opinion of politicians," he says, easing into his chair in a hotel by Broadcasting House. "Maybe that's a grotesque human failing.

But these guys have gone into something that's fairly thankless. They probably could earn better money elsewhere, they have their lives opened to scrutiny, then in the studio they're treated like something the cat brought in.

We need to start from the basis that they come into the studio in good faith, to try to explain what they're doing. There's no point in us trying to throttle them."

So what about the rumours that he will succeed David Frost when he retires?

"Frost would be a fantastic show, but I can promise you nobody has rung me about that," he says. "I find the speculation rather perplexing." He laughs.

"Do I sound really shifty now?"

Still, he firmly challenges the view, famously attributed to Paxman, that an interviewer's correct response is to keep asking himself, "Why is this lying bastard lying to me?". "No, I don't share that view," Vine says firmly. "If we honestly believe that all they ever do is lie, then what is the point?"

Vine's argument conveniently echoes the view of Michael Grade, the BBC chairman, who recently warned its journalists against "the knee-jerk cynicism that dismisses every statement from every politician as, by definition, a lie".

BUT then Vine, 39, has always managed to play the loyal corporation man.

Whereas Paxman used a recent interview to question why "the boss class" saw it necessary to propose 15 per cent budget cuts, all Vine will say is: "I understand the rationale ... There needs to be some money shaved off so it can be used for other purposes. If that's the case, that's the case."

His loyalty has been rewarded with near ubiquity. As well as Radio 2, the Politics Show and an upcoming BBC1 series interviewing actors, he is about to take on Richard and Judy's book club with Page Turners. "It's an oldfashioned, low-tech programme about content, not whizzy gimmickry," he says. The fact that Channel 4 got there first is irrelevant. Where Richard and Judy succeeded - "and good luck to them for being there first" - is by creating a communal reading experience in an atomised culture.

Vine, a committed Christian, has published two novels on religious themes.

Yet growing up in Surrey, he was also an unlikely punk rocker, in bands such as the Flared Generation. His pop career stumbled after their debut vinyl single emerged from the presses as oval rather than round.

He went on to read English literature at Durham University where, displaying the relentless ambition later to prompt ribbing from Newsnight colleagues, he persuaded Metro Radio in Newcastle to give him a graveyard slot. A traineeship with the Coventry Evening Telegraph led to a BBC traineeship.

He soon earned a reputation as a work-obsessed, focused reporter who would never turn down a job as he rose through Today, BBC Westminster, Five Live and a post in Johannesburg.

The pressure of work and travel, he has admitted, contributed to the end of his seven-year marriage to an American banker. He wooed his second wife, Rachel Schofield, a Radio 4 reporter, while covering the last general election for Newsnight in a VW camper van. They have an 11-month-old daughter, Martha.

Despite the reported tensions with Paxman, he looks back fondly on his Newsnight years. "I joined very young, presenting fulltime at 34," he reflects. "At that stage it was never going to be my show, and it took me a while to realise.

The upside was that it gave me a unique training experience in the political interview."

But he was never one of those "back of the envelope BBC people", as he sees them, who precisely plot their careers. "They're the ones who are usually not flexible enough to see the big opportunity when it arises. For me, that was Radio 2. It's the best job."

He was apprehensive, he admits, taking over from Jimmy Young, aware that Young's hard-line loyalists - "the militia", as he calls them - were initially hostile.

"I honestly thought we'd drop a million listeners in an afternoon," he says.

"I went in with what I now think was a defensive and negative mindset, not appreciating that the audience was ready for change. As it happens, the audience has stayed and even grown." Has he heard from Young? "No, I haven't," he says with a smile. "I think I probably won't go there, actually."

THE Politics Show has also gained viewers over On the Record, which it replaced, although it has failed in the BBC's professed mission to increase the proportion of younger viewers. "I was never told to go and get a young audience," he explains. "We've laboured under this misunderstanding that we were somehow part of delivering this young people's remit and we didn't make it. In fact, it was never the case. We can't repackage politics in a zingy way to make it more interesting to young people if they're not interested."

Does that mean the BBC has given up on bringing a younger audience to politics? "I honestly don't know," he reflects. "It may be that that goal isn't being professed quite as loudly."

But, he adds, the programme does have "the distinction of having been attacked by Jonathan Dimbleby". Dimbleby, his ITV rival, complained that Vine's shorter interviews were evidence of dumbing-down. "It's a preposterous proposition that the only way to do a serious interview is long," Vine responds. "Having seen my programme three or four weeks ago get double his audience, I'm happy with the 10-minute interview."

Meanwhile, "there's a real job of work to be done" on Radio 2. "The last guy had 29 years," he says. "I've had two." Besides, he is rather enjoying nesting. "Being in harm's way as a foreign correspondent is one thing. Being in the way of dirty nappies is far more life-changing."

Although should the next opportunity arise, you can bet that Vine will be only too willing to make himself available.

(Evening Standard, February 9 2005)

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Sunday Times Magazine: Jewish intermarriage

Britain's Jewish population is in decline because young singles are marrying out. But will they ever return to the faith? David Rowan meets the matchmakers who are desperate to bring them back to the fold

As Devorah Simon sees it, it is pure chance that she happens to be marrying a fellow Jew tonight. Black-hatted rabbis are streaming into Finchley synagogue in north London; a kosher caterer unloads challah bread. Tall plants are manoeuvred to separate the men's dance area from the women's. While Deborah - as she was then known - was growing up in a secular Jewish home in Putney, southwest London, this is certainly not how she imagined her wedding day. Dating a series of eligible non-Jews, she assumed she would assimilate as thoroughly as had most of her cousins - one had married a Hindu, another had moved to a Scottish Buddhist retreat, and a third had a girlfriend who was black.

"The family philosophy was that if we made ourselves like non-Jews, we'd be accepted more," Devorah said, a few days before the traditional Orthodox ceremony. "We'd moved so far away, my father didn't even know what gefilte fish was."

Devorah, formerly a headhunter in the City, knew how easy it would have been to marry out of a faith she barely acknowledged. Instead, she has chosen a strictly Orthodox religious life, emigrating to Israel with a rabbinical scholar she met through a modern-day matchmaker. To the hardline Jewish groups battling against assimilation, Devorah's "return" marks a proud victory against the forces of modernity. In truth, it is a rare exception to a trend that is giving Britain's Jewish leaders serious reason to kvetch.

Intermarriage is on the rise. Unless that changes, community leaders fear, Anglo-Jewry could be imperilling its future. It is now 11 years since the chief rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, warned that "the Jewish people, having survived for thousands of years in the most adverse circumstances, including the Holocaust, is today threatened by intermarriage and assimilation". Sacks's warning prompted a range of cultural and educational initiatives designed to instil Jewish pride in young singles. Yet the intermarriage graph kept climbing, with around half of British Jews marrying "out".

There is an entire seam of Jewish humour feeding off the anxiety that surrounds intermarriage. In one old joke, a father of three sons becomes increasingly distraught after the first declares he is marrying a Catholic, then the second says he plans to marry a Hindu. Finally, it is the third son's turn. "Dad, I'm in love with this fantastic woman called Goldberg," the young man says. "Goldberg?" the father answers, a relieved grin spreading across his face. "Yes," says the son proudly. "I'd love you to meet Whoopi..."

Lately, the subject has prompted little humour within Anglo-Jewry's representative bodies. According to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, only a third of Jews of marriageable age are getting married in synagogues. Partly, of course, this reflects the general decline in religious ceremonial. But Professor Barry Kosmin, the director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, estimates from his studies that today's intermarriage rate has risen to about 50%. The impact is already being felt on the next generation. Between 1990 and 1999, the Board of Deputies reported, births notified to Jewish institutions fell by a quarter, from 3,300 to 2,500. An even starker warning has come from the demographer Sergio Della Pergola of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Fifty years ago, around 450,000 people in Britain identified as Jews. The figure is now nearer 300,000. The fall is not just related to intermarriage: emigration and a wider lack of faith have played their part. Yet if these trends continue, Della Pergola has written, "the UK's Jewish population will decline to 240,000 in 2020, 180,000 in 2050, and 140,000 in 2080".

"It's a crisis," says Rabbi Shaul Rosenblatt, the joint UK executive director of Aish HaTorah, one of the Orthodox groups most aggressively campaigning against assimilation. "For every Jew that comes back, I expect 50 are moving away. The strictly Orthodox will remain - those couples I know have an average of seven or eight kids. But the rest - the more liberal and secular branches of Judaism - they will die out."

Once Rosenblatt starts to point fingers, it becomes clear how far Anglo-Jewry's branches are divided over a response to assimilation. At his home in north London (his nearby office was destroyed last summer in a suspected anti-semitic arson attack; nobody has been caught), the rabbi blames rising intermarriage squarely on the Reform and Liberal synagogues, which have reinterpreted traditional Orthodox values for the modern world. "Up to 150, 200 years ago, you had no secular Jews," he says. "I don't know when the rot started, but the Enlightenment brought in this concept of humanism, telling Jews they could live secular lives. The floodgates opened. And all these hitherto-Orthodox kids just ran."

Today, Rosenblatt sees it as his mission to bring them back home. Aish HaTorah (literally "Fire of the Torah") targets secular 18- to 30-year-old Jewish singles who might otherwise be lost to the faith. Through heavily subsidised holidays to Israel or South Africa, and "cool" social events such as speed-dating nights, it presents a friendly, often sexy face designed to attract Jews who might not meet other Jews. Once the ice is broken, its approachable, usually clean-shaven rabbis will invite newcomers to Friday-night sabbath dinners or lectures on Jewish thought. Ultimately, Aish wants them to lead Orthodox religious lives and find an equally religiously committed spouse. You would not know it from its posters, which are big on images of celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, but Aish is at war with secular life. Those it rescues are known as baalei tshuva ("masters of return" but also, tellingly, "repentant sinners").

Aish has its critics. At the Coffee Cup cafe in Hampstead on a Saturday night, a favourite hangout of the north London "becks" - the secular, fashion-aware young Jews more at home clubbing than in synagogues - it stands accused of pulling families apart. "Aish has got a really bad name," says 17-year-old Flo Stein, an A-level student from Finchley. "Everyone knows them as brainwashers. One friend who got involved with them was always having arguments with his parents. His mum felt they were making him go against the family." "We're constantly being accused of brainwashing," Shaul Rosenblatt responds. "All we're doing is presenting information and letting people make a decision."

Aish played its part in Devorah Simon's "return" journey, which is why Rabbi Rosenblatt and some of his colleagues are in Finchley synagogue tonight to celebrate her marriage to Jake Greenberg, an American whose own journey took him similarly from secular life to full-time rabbinical study. As Devorah tells it, she was barely aware of her Jewish heritage and could easily have gone the other way. "We had the Christmas tree and stockings with our names on," she says. "I never had Jewish boyfriends or girlfriends." Her great-great-grandfather had helped found the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St John's Wood, but Devorah's only remaining link was a visit during the annual high holy days.

It was a young rabbi at Edinburgh University, where she was studying history of art, who encouraged Devorah to revisit her faith. She went on to spend two years at an Aish-run seminary in Jerusalem. Becoming Orthodox has brought a new set of daily rules for Devorah, from rejecting her parents' non-kosher food to refusing to drive there on the sabbath. "My family has made a difficult journey, but when they see you as a happy, confident member of society, they take it with dignity," she says. Her mother, Doreen, accepts that the rigid rules can cause tensions: "The kosher thing can push you apart, but Devorah's always been good when she visits and she brings her own meals in tubs."

At the wedding, a few guests also seem bemused at the couple's new rule book. Wry jokes are whispered; remarks are made about the wigs (called sheitels) that the married Orthodox women wear to avoid the "immodesty" of displaying their real hair. Some guests nudge and point when, between courses, 30 black-hatted and bearded men leave their seats to sway by the doors in prayer. The North Circular Road might be rumbling impatiently outside, but here we could be in 18th-century Warsaw.

Devorah can still laugh at the logical somersaults the rabbis sometimes turn when interpreting the religious laws. "There's this joke about a new rule being announced forbidding Jews to smoke," she says. "One day the Liberal, Reform and United [Orthodox] rabbis are outside their shuls [synagogues] enjoying a cigarette. The press get very excited, and ask the rabbis why, despite the rule, they are still smoking. 'Oh, that law's irrelevant,' the Liberal rabbi replies. 'In the modern world, it's important to be seen joining in.' The Reform rabbi answers, 'Well, ideally we believe that you shouldn't be smoking, but we're looking for a way to integrate the rule into our everyday lives.' Then it's the Orthodox rabbi's turn. 'Yes, I was smoking,' he shrugs. 'But it's okay, I sold my lungs to a goy...'"

At the devout end of Golders Green Road, it soon becomes clear who carries the blame in this polarised community. "The Reform Jews just see this as a numbers game," says Menachem in Tasti Pizza, as he wraps another falafel sandwich. "The Reform would love to wave a magic wand and get everyone in China to become Jewish, so they could claim an extra billion. But that's not how we see it. If you're not keeping Shabbat, not keeping kosher, how are you still being Jewish?"

A few doors away, the Jewish Learning Exchange (JLE) is trying to resolve Menachem's concerns. If groups such as Aish are spiking secular Jews' curiosity about their faith, the JLE is there to provide the religious context intended to keep them in. It takes the message out to City law firms, medical schools, St John's Wood mansions - anywhere it might reach those lapsed Jews who shun the shuls. "Knowledge is the greatest armoury we have to stop intermarriage," explains its director, Rabbi Danny Kirsch. "We're on our last chance with the post-Thatcher generation who work long hours. If you're in the office until 9pm, probably not a Jewish environment, that's where you're likely to meet your partner."

But it is not just religious knowledge that returning Jews gain from the JLE. Thanks to an extraordinary network of voluntary matchmakers affiliated to it, they may also come away with a pre-screened wedding partner. Joanne Dove, an effervescent 42-year-old mother of seven, is a shadchan, one of the matchmakers who devote hours each day to arranging matrimonial blind dates, or shidduchs. Officially, Dove works at the JLE organising its women's classes. But she spends a lot of time e-mailing and texting to pair up Jewish singles like Devorah and Jake. In fact, this being a global business, it was a South African shadchan who arranged Devorah and Jake's blind date.

But Dove is as well connected as any, and counts Devorah among her confidantes. At their wedding, Dove indicates which couples around the room have benefited from her personal touch. "She's a barrister, who we got together with a South African chap we'd been trying to marry for nine years," she says. "That boy is something big in the City, and I've found someone for him. And this one over here, he's a very nice doctor I've set up on a shidduch later this week."

Like the dozens of other women she liaises with, Joanne Dove gives her time freely out of hesed, the commandment to act out of loving kindness. Still, it can be expensive setting up dates via text message and cold-calling singles on their mobiles. So when Dove does make a marriage - two or three times a year - she encourages the couple to donate at least £250 to help with the phone bills.

These volunteer matchmakers need no special qualifications beyond infinite patience and a spare 20 or 30 hours a week. "We're working as much to stop people marrying out as to help Orthodox kids get married," Dove says. "So we listen, set up meetings, then serve as a go-between. We might send them to meet at the Landmark hotel in Marylebone, the Grove in Watford, or to the zoo if the sun's shining."

The zoo might seem a bizarrely unromantic venue, but these "get to know you" meetings are not about romance - and certainly not about physical contact.

A successful match, she says, comes down not to physical attraction (although that can help) but to "whether you can see that person as the parent of your children". Dove, who refuses to shake my hand because I am male, insists that a couple meet three times before saying no, as she thinks initial visual impressions can stand in the way. Because in today's world, singles, especially the men, are just too demanding. "I've got so many single girls," Dove sighs. "Girls with personality who are intelligent, have got degrees. But the Jewish man wants the perfect everything - he wants her looking like Claudia Schiffer, going out working, making him chocolate mousse and potato kugel. No wonder they say finding your partner is as difficult as splitting the Red Sea."

Typical of those Dove has helped are two vivacious sisters from Stanmore, northwest London. Caroline Cohen, 24, is a successful singer and actress who understudied the lead role in the West End production of My Fair Lady; her sister, Louise Leach, 27, had a promising pop career and sang on ITV's Popstars. Both have now been helped back in to Orthodox Judaism by Aish and the JLE. As Dove sees it, at one stage they could have easily "gone the other way" with non-Jewish partners.

Nowadays, Caroline mainly performs for all-women audiences, such as a recent ladies-only party at Dove's house. And whereas once Caroline would have dated non-Jews, Dove is now working to find her a suitably religious husband. "I'd happily go on a blind date if Joanne screened them first," Caroline says. "She's very good at knowing who'll be compatible on your journey through life. Joanne's really intuitive."

Dove has also been a mentor to Caroline's sister, Louise, who abandoned her pop career three years ago. The following year she married a Jewish primary-school teacher who had also been brought back to the faith. They are raising their 11-month-old daughter in a strictly Orthodox home. "Louise has married in by some miracle, considering how secular she was," Dove says with pride. Louise does seem to appreciate how close she came: "I see a lot of people marrying out, and the parents are broken-hearted. But it's harder when you're brought up in a non-Orthodox home."

The traditional Jewish home, with family life at its heart, remains the Orthodox community's best hope in the battle against assimilation. That explains why Dove, when interviewing marriageable singles, always tries to discover how far they are prepared to assume the traditional family roles. Jewish comedians might enjoy mocking the domineering family matriarch who wields the ultimate domestic power: the mother who, when told her son is to play the husband in the junior-school play, orders him to "go back and demand a speaking part!"; the grandmother who begs God to save her drowning grandson at the beach, only to look heavenwards on the boy's safe return and scream "He had a hat!" But for all the send-ups, the strong mother figure remains a key figure in ensuring Jewish continuity.

Beside Joanne Dove marches an army of equally dedicated marriage brokers. In a spotless semidetached house off Golders Green Road, a kitchen telephone rings through to an answering machine for the second time in 15 minutes. "Oh, I do apologise," says Tova Shapiro, a small, fresh-faced young woman wearing a flawless wig. "That's just the 24-hour shidduch line."

Inquiries are arriving from all over the world, and Shapiro is meeting so many new singles - around 10 a week - that she has designed a questionnaire to save time. Do you have any converts in your family? Would you want a TV in your home (something many Orthodox frown upon)? Is it important that your partner has studied in a yeshiva (religious seminary)?

Shapiro has yet to make her first successful marriage. But the many other local shadchanim, to whom she chats regularly, continue to inspire her. There are even a few men - such as the businessman Desmond Hertzberg, 55, who, specialising in older singles, claims a success rate of eight marriages "and no divorces, which is what matters". "I'll bring together someone Liberal and someone Orthodox if it feels right," he says, adding that when he does make a good match, he finds it helpful to lend the newly married couple some of his 2,000 Jewish cookery books. "It's the satisfaction of seeing someone happy. I've just met this gorgeous Moroccan girl - 24, unbelievable blue eyes. I'll be speaking about her later to a dentist I know. I'll tell him," he adds with a grin, "that if he doesn't meet her by the end of the week, he'll get his legs broken."

But mostly the shadchanim are women like Linda Sireling, a 51-year-old mother of five in the process of transferring her 400 active prospects from index cards to a Palm hand-held computer. "I've got tall girls, short boys, intellectual girls, boys who work in the dry cleaners..." Sireling says. "I've just texted a girl in Tesco to see if she was available. Look, she's just replied: 'Why, who have you got for me?'

"There is something of Fiddler on the Roof about it: 'Have I got a boy for you!'" Sireling says, smiling, "but we package it better: 'He's gone to a nice yeshiva,' or 'The family's very involved in the synagogue.' And if a girl isn't nice-looking, you help her. I told one I didn't want her going out without make-up. Yentl, that's what we're doing."

There are also practical requirements. Many of the matchmakers want their singles to be pre-screened for genetic disorders through a religious organisation called Dor Yesharim. The results are kept secret, but prospective partners may check whether any genetic incompatibility would make a marriage unwise.

After 15 years as a shadchan, Linda Sireling is specialising in the more religious end of the market, and says it's the baalei tshuva who are the hardest to satisfy. "The modern boys who watch TV want a girl out of Friends, and the girls want Brad Pitt. That's what we're fighting against."

Not all sectors of the community share Aish HaTorah's view that intermarriage is a "crisis". Edgar Bronfman, the president of the World Jewish Congress, condemns the fight against intermarriage as racist and doomed. "The whole concept of Jewish peoplehood, and the lines being pure, begins to sound a little like Nazism, meaning racism," he told the Jewish Chronicle last autumn. "We have a choice. We can make an attempt to double the amount of Jews [by welcoming mixed marriages and encouraging children to be raised Jewish] or we can irritate everybody who's intermarried, and lose them all."

For Jonathan Romain, the Reform rabbi of Maidenhead synagogue, it's a question to be grappled with daily. Rabbi Romain has reached out to his congregants' non-Jewish partners, welcoming them to services, and converting around 250 each year. This inclusive approach, which has made Romain something of a spokesman for a tolerant, multi-faith society, has brought him hate mail and accusations that he is "destroying Judaism single-handedly".

"The Orthodox say that I'm encouraging intermarriage, but I can't legislate for whom people fall in love with," he says after a convivial Friday-night service, much of it (unlike the Orthodox equivalent) in English.

After tonight's service, Romain has an appointment with one such couple. The man, a marketing executive, is 28 and comes from an Orthodox Jewish family; his 24-year-old girlfriend, in PR, has a Catholic mother and Protestant father. Until this relationship, born out of student politics, she had never met a Jew. "So how can I help?" Romain asks in his private office. "I've just started considering conversion," the woman says, "and hope you could tell me a little more." (Both partners declined to be named.)

"Well, as you may know, Judaism is not a missionary faith out to grab numbers," Romain begins. "But you're welcome to attend our fortnightly conversion class together, then see how you feel. In a couple of months you may say it isn't for you. Or you might say, yes, this is great. It doesn't matter two hoots what you decide. But while the Orthodox are hostile if you're a convert, we try to be helpful." The Orthodox, he says, will not recognise a Reform conversion.

If she does wish to convert, he says, the young woman will have to learn some Hebrew, then attend a simple interview, "which everybody passes". After the couple leaves, Romain confides that, yes, he thinks this marriage will result in another Jewish home. "She clearly had an empathy, and liked what she saw," he says. "A few years ago it would have been, 'It's her or us.' But the parents' attitudes have changed, as have the rabbis'. Not too long ago, I'd have been encouraged to put the phone down on them."

Still, isn't Romain ignoring Menachem's worry, at the Golders Green takeaway, that diluting the community is a flawed survival strategy for Anglo-Jewry? "If I didn't get involved, they'd get married anyway in a register office," the rabbi replies patiently. "This way, they will have Jewish children and his parents will have Jewish grandchildren. These people in Golders Green just have to understand. I have so many people come to me and say, 'Rabbi, we're in love, and it's the best thing that's ever happened to me.' Who am I to say, 'No, it's not'?"

But Devorah Simon, now Greenberg, remains unconvinced. "Yes, falling in love might be the best thing for them emotionally," she says from her new home near Jerusalem. "But spiritually it's a tragedy. It's all about keeping our Jewish lineage, bringing up Jewish children. And you just can't do that by marrying out."

(Sunday Times Magazine, London, February 6 2005)

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Trendsurfing: Hot retail trends (The Times)

By David Rowan

If you were a corporate client, we'd have to charge you tens of thousands of pounds to read this privileged information. As a Times Magazine reader, however, you are far more important - so here it is for free. Trendspotters, cool-hunters and professional futurists make a living identifying the hot new ideas that will eventually touch the rest of us. So we asked a few of them for half a dozen innovations in retail that are getting them excited.


Mass customisation: It's the retail buzzword that we kept hearing. To keep your customers loyal, treat them as individuals, even if you are a multinational brand. That means finding ways to let them customise your products at not much more than the standard price. It's not a new idea, but the web now makes it far easier to personalise your purchases - so Nike's website will let you design your own trainers, and Mars will let you write the slogan that appears on your M&Ms. And even if it costs a company money, it gets people talking. Not least here.

Experience stores: They might look like conventional shops, but they are not there simply to shift product. Instead, tech firms such as Samsung and Sony see their new "experience" stores as a way of selling the digital lifestyle. You might not yet be able to buy the latest Blu-ray DVD player or 50-inch TV - but by inviting you into a showroom to play with them before release, the manufacturers hope to fire your brand loyalty when you do take the plunge. Samsung even has a name for its 10,000-square-foot New York retail showroom: it's calling it an "un-store".

Ethical fashion: Do your clothes have a clear conscience? If not, you are about to have another reason to feel guilty. "Fair trade" fashion is moving from the green fringes to the British high street, with chains such as American Apparel trading on their progressive factory conditions, and Traid re-tailoring second-hand clothes as style statements. Watch out too for new organic, sweatshop-free labels hitting the department stores.

Customised shop aromas: It's known as "sensory branding", and its backers claim it drives sales. The marketing industry is sniffing a new opportunity in tailor-made artificial scents that put customers into the mood for spending. Second-hand car-dealers are using "new car" aromas, travel agents are infusing the smell of coconut and sun-tan lotion. Let's just hope you don't have a perfume allergy.

Cereal take-aways: We've had soup bars and juice joints - now prepare for the restaurant specialising entirely in breakfast cereals. A new American chain, the Cereality Cereal Bar & Cafe, offers an all-day menu of 33 types of cereal and 34 toppings, which you can mix to your taste for around £2 a bowl. The servers even wear pyjamas. A dinner of Cheerios and Coco Pops might infuriate your dentist - but past experience suggests that those crazy American concepts do tend to end up over here.

Predictive technology: How can a McDonald's know when to throw extra burgers onto the grill? By using rooftop cameras that monitor traffic entering the car park. An American firm, HyperActive Technologies, has developed software that analyses these traffic patterns to predict demand, and bigger fast-food restaurants are testing it out to cut waiting times. Still, it can't yet predict whether you'll want ketchup on your fries, so we don't guarantee that this is the future.

(The Times, London, February 5 2005)

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