FEW of us would imagine that any of the men in our lives could be capable of psychotic behaviour, but chances are at least one or two of them quite possibly are. This would have seemed unlikely to me had I not decided to ask many of my female friends whether they had ever been the victim of male stalking or obsession.

TO my surprise, around a third of the women I asked had been. One friend recently had her mobile phone stolen by her ex-husband, who then texted abuse to the hundred people in her address book. Another came home to find her phone smashed by the boyfriend enraged by her refusal to answer his 10th call of the evening, ...

Humans have used statues for millennia as material manifestations of our love of ideals and other people. We build them and tear them down according to the love/hate switch of public opinion. They all decay over time due to the elements and neglect, but also from losing meaning, purpose, in the public’s mind.

We have statues that are attended once per year in fading memory of The Fallen, so statues to entire groups are not novel. I propose a plethora of statues to a single group, to be placed all through Europe to act as a reminder to future generations of the incredible work achieved by this group. Enduring expressions of artistic applause that show our eternal gratitude to one single generation: The War Baby Generation.

Browsing the websites of Finland’s finest companies, one gets the impression that they all respect the environment, care deeply about human rights and generally spend a lot of time helping old ladies cross roads and assisting kittens out of trees. What surprises me about these clean, green images is not that companies are adapting themselves to a changing and more aware trading environment, but that they put so little effort into even pretending that the claims are true.

One of the two major supermarket chains claims to be committed to Fair Trade products. And yet my local outlet stocks 40 different kinds of juice – not one of which is Fair Trade. The competing chain stocks 80 different kinds of juice – of which a single one is Fair Trade. If that is commitment, I can’t imagine what indifference looks like.