The TGWU said the company’s business was growing, especially at Heathrow, and Go-Ahead’s profits meant a bigger pay rise was affordable.A deal worth 4.2 per cent was agreed last year when the aviation industry was being hit by a downturn, the union said.Members of the GMB union, which has 800 members at the airports, are also being balloted for industrial action in the same dispute, as are hundreds of workers at Gatwick and Belfast airports in the Amicus union. The union will be joining the talks planned for tomorrow.Richard Hunt, the chief executive of Aviance, said employees had a 6.7 per cent pay rise since January 2003. Although more people were flying, he said, that did not necessarily mean higher profits because there were intense pressures on costs.He indicated that the company was prepared to discuss increased wage offers at local level dependent on concessions leading to higher productivity.Mr Hunt said the impact of walkouts would differ from airport to airport Some had no TGWU members.. Environmental campaigners have accused the Government of bowing to the roads lobby as plans to build a second toll motorway are due to be announced in the Commons today. The support of John Reid, the Health Secretary, for the “middle way” over child chastisement may have been influenced by the debate on child smacking north of the border. A European database containing intelligence on terror suspects has been proposed by David Blunkett. The Home Secretary suggests it should include DNA, fingerprint and other forensic material on convicted and suspected terrorists.

A bunch of hippies paid us £250 for a formation in a field of thistles for their friend’s birthday.”With all marketing trends, particularly those that exploit a cultural phenomenon, there is a risk of burning out the original medium. Sam Conniff, director of Livity, a creative-communications agency, assesses the risk: “If a company like Circlemakers is to survive, they will need to diversify – the less cool the brands commissioning them become, the more they’ll need to offer It’s about turning your fad into an industry. “If they’d been put in by an alien and I hadn’t been paid, I’d have been hopping mad.”Rob Irving, 47, also an artist and a satellite member of Circlemakers was one of the first fakers to see the commercial potential in crop circles. “Well before Circlemakers existed,” he explains, “a friend and I called ourselves Circumcereal Ltd and put an ad in the paper announcing that we were available for weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. One farmer in the Stonehenge area is said to have made around £30,000 in four weeks after charging a couple of quid to tourists to visit circles that appeared on his farm.But how does it feel to have a huge corporate logo slapped in the middle of your land? Very good, says a farmer paid £500 apiece for two fields to be used for Circlemakers’ jobs. “We did a formation for the Daily Mail in a wheat field in Avebury,” recalls Dickinson, “and the paper paid the farmer £6,000 for the equivalent of around £100 worth of crops”.

Unsurprisingly, circlemaker-landowner relations are improving Even illicit circles can prove lucrative for the landowner. “Around 85 to 90 per cent of our custom during the summer months is connected to crop circles,” says Jo Smith, an information assistant at Avebury Tourist Centre, where there are maps, calendars, tours, books and other circle merchandise on offer.Farmers are also well remunerated by the commercial turn the phenomenon has taken. Crop-circle researchers and believers are still doing a roaring trade in tours, talks and books – fakers like Circlemakers, they insist, are responsible for only a percentage of formations. In particular, the summer tourist trade in Wiltshire, particularly Avebury, which has the highest proliferation of formations, also benefits. Interesting territory for an artist.” Hence, he and fellow artist Lundberg, 35, a documentary-maker, collaboratively explored what was possible.It’s not just Circlemakers who are cashing in. Then, a few days later, he picked up a newspaper to discover that a crop-circle researcher was claiming that his clumsy creation was some kind of supernatural miracle. “After reading that,” he explains, “I realised there was another dimension to crop circles, that they could be a catalyst for people’s already established beliefs, beliefs they were projecting on to the fields.