It is now worth double that amount.He says many ATS members are amateur astronomers or scientists. Scientific instruments are becoming increasingly collectable as our obsession grows with all things outer space. Not only are they beautiful and fascinating to look at, they are , on the whole, practical and usable. Newport is the nearest [...]

I would have thought even a footballer’s ex-wife would struggle to spend that much.Now she’s got more than £8,000 a week to play with. The Court of Appeal says she is obliged to invest anything left over from her weekly expenditure to build up a lump sum for the future. But as the level [...]

I was unsurprised to hear there was an eco-park and an interior with lakes that are a joy for twitchers. And there are dense forests and mangrove swamps that offer a tropical wilderness relatively intact compared with the environmental apocalypse going on across much of Borneo. He gestured for me to enter the main [...]

So the idea of a workshop dedicated to creating one’s own signature perfume sounded ideal.Outside the Ecole des Parfums, a converted room off the Ch?au de Berne’s old chapel, an unseasonal mistral lashed the cypresses and sent a delicate wrought iron chair skittering across the gravel. Sonia, a young oenologist, sounded as if she [...]

Needless to say, these discoveries are “breathtaking”.As it happened, the robber and the robbed both died in 1994 – Sir Alfred Beit quietly in a nursing home, Martin Cahill less quietly with a bullet in him – and Lady Beit rehung the recovered paintings. After yet another attempt to steal them failed, the entire [...]

At £257 per night it’s a good place to view the dockside where Passepartout gets drugged and put on a separate boat from his master.Running total: plus £452.60 + £275 = £3,634.3Days 8 & 9: Hong Kong-BeijingIn the new film, Fogg and Passepartout stop over in China, so I copied Michael Palin and arranged [...]