Indeed, the huge sums of money needed to buy the finest vintage violins are being blamed for depriving talented young musicians of the means to perform at the peak of their abilities.
“If you’re looking at pounds 100,000 you’re talking about a successful professional or a rich amateur. But only a real somebody will be in the running for the star attraction: a fine Stradivari, expected to change hands for up to pounds 700,000 on Wednesday. “At the moment the law condemns a lot of people to a lot of suffering.”n The Independent on Sunday has won the National Newspaper award from the Institute for the Study of Drug Dependence for its high standard of reporting on drugs issues throughout the year. The chairman of the judges, Lord Deedes, who presented the award at a lunch last week, singled out the series of pieces by Philip Knightley for special praise..

ANYBODY who is anybody in the international violin community is coming to Britain this week, when London’s four biggest auction houses are offering 1,500 rare instruments for sale. Last Wednesday, the Lords’ Science and Technology Committee recommended the legalisation of cannabis for medicinal use. It applauded Dr Guy’s work and urged the Government to consider allowing doctors to prescribe the drug to named patients.Many in Britain who suffer the symptoms of multiple sclerosis already take the drug to relieve pain, risking prosecution. (The Multiple Sclerosis Society estimates that at least 1,000 of the 85,000 sufferers in Britain currently use cannabis.) The Lords’ report highlights the urgency of tackling this problem and of taking a compassionate attitude which does not bring the law into disrepute.Lord Perry of Walton, the former GP and professor of pharmacology who chaired the committee, has stressed that a situation in which the police, the courts, doctors and otherwise law-abiding citizens are all increasingly bending the rules is ultimately untenable.”If doctors were able to prescribe to named patients, then those patients could simply show their prescription to the police whenever necessary,” Lord Perry said. Dr Guy, however, will also look into the possibility of delivering cannabis by inhaler or injection.Next month’s historic harvest will come hard on the heels of the long- awaited House of Lords report into cannabis use. The research will confirm Britain’s place as a world leader in the race to understand and exploit the therapeutic properties of the illicit drug.Dr Guy, who was in Washington last week to speak at a conference on scientific research into cannabis, told the IoS: “Six months ago there were still a lot of people who thought that my company was a little oddball.

Now it is acknowledged that cannabis and its extracts are going to be extremely important drugs.”GW Pharmaceuticals will be co-ordinating its research with the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, whose scientists are hoping to concentrate on perfecting a pill or other form of oral delivery for the drug. THE FIRST licensed cannabis crop to be farmed in Britain for medical research will be harvested early next month. Plants grown in secret greenhouses somewhere in southern England, from seeds developed in Holland, will be analysed by Dr Geoffrey Guy and his team during the run-up to Christmas.
Then in the spring, the doctor’s company, GW Pharmaceuticals, plans to begin testing the produce on a number of specially recruited patients. The best places still to find genuinely native trees and to gather their seeds is, he says, in ancient woodland, particularly in Britain’s uplands.n A mystery disease is killing oak trees in Sherwood Forest country park near Mansfield, Nottinghamshire. About three-quarters of the forest’s “middle-aged” oaks, dating back to the Napoleonic wars 174 years ago, have been affected.But 900 veteran trees, some more than 400 years old, including the famous Major Oak, have escaped the bug.Council forestry officer, Gareth Broome, said: “We don’t know what is causing the problem The oaks lose their leaves and die back They don’t recover It is a serious situation but not a crisis.”. “It is not good for the genetic make- up of British trees to have these relatively maladapted genes floating around,” he says.He is trying to revive the art of British seed collection – last week he gathered one third of a ton of acorns from native oaks – but says that there is “no foolproof way” of making sure that seeds have genuinely come from British trees rather than from ones imported years ago.Small fragmented woodlands pose another problem because their trees may have pollinated themselves, again weakening their genetic inheritance.

Making non-smokers spend their working day in smoke-filled rooms is completely unfair,” said Clive Bates, Director of Action on Smoking and Health, which has been lobbying for change for 25 years. “If it’s true that the Government plans to stop smoking in the workplace, it’s great news.”As well as clamping down on passive smoking, the White Paper will lay out plans for advertising and sponsorship bans, ways of preventing young people from starting smoking and helping addicts to stop.Publication of the White Paper has been delayed until the beginning of December because of the sensitivity of its contents.. Similarly, birch imported from Finland is twice as likely to die as native trees.The result, says Dr Worrell, is that a great deal of money is wasted as new plantings die or fail to grow properly.Worse, the imports can threaten native British trees over the long term by inter-pollinating with them. So trees imported from northern Europe to south east England do relatively well, but those that travel longer distances fall behind badly.He has found that Scots pine, for example, grows less well if it is imported from Germany or Poland, on much the same latitude as Britain, than if it originated locally: but pines brought from Scandinavia or southern Europe grow at only half the rate of home-grown ones. Trees, he says, evolve to suit the climate and conditions of the areas where they originate: the further they are moved from them the less well they do. But in the meantime, the skills of seed collection had almost been lost and it was cheaper and easier to import them, or young trees, from Europe.Initially they were imported from German, Dutch and Belgian nurseries but these, in turn, have increasingly been importing their own seed from Eastern European countries.One result, say experts, can be seen around the country each spring where trees of the same species burst into leaf at different times, depending on when they were genetically programmed to do so where they or their ancestors originated.Further research, by Dr Richard Worrell of Edinburgh University, shows that the imported trees do not grow as well as native ones, and die more easily.