Dear Virginia,I've had four tries at IVF. I became pregnant with one, but soon miscarried. The other attempts didn't work. Each time, I stopped working, relaxed – and each time it failed. Now I am having my last try, but I'm starting a stressful job, one that I know I'd enjoy and be good at. Should I ask them if I can start a month later, giving myself a chance to relax (at the risk of getting off to a bad start), or should I just go ahead and hope for the best? Yours sincerely, Miriam

Defending champion Venus Williams today won the first set of the Wimbledon final against sister Serena in blustery conditions on Centre Court.

Heikki Kovalainen secured the first pole position of his Formula One career to put McLaren team-mate Lewis Hamilton in the shade.

A 21-year-old man was arrested today in connection with the murders of French students Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez.

A blustery wind kept umpires and steersmen of coxless boats busy at Henley yesterday. Before the wind got up, Leander’s B crew were disqualified from the Visitors’ when they were hit by Martyrs and Christ Church while Leander were being warned for being off their station. The same two crews were involved in a similar incident at Marlow Regatta two weeks ago, with the opposite outcome.

Sporting rivalries are not supposed to be like this. Mike Tyson may have gone to extremes when he bit off Evander Holyfield's ear, but in the world's great sporting arenas you always expect an edge to confrontations between the best of the best. You could never picture Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett sharing a joke before or after an Olympic final or Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost leaving a grand prix to go for a drive together in the country.

A mistral blowing from the north-west sent the TP52 fleet, TP stand for Trans-Pacific, scurrying for cover on the less than oceanic Bay of Cagliari yesterday, reducing the tally of races in the Audi Medcup grand prix to just one and increasing the lead held by the American yacht Quantum to four points.

Boris Johnson's deputy Ray Lewis resigned yesterday over sleaze allegations, plunging London's Mayor into his first serious crisis since taking over from Ken Livingstone.

Between them, they have shrugged off criticism for ramming a 300-year-old chestnut tree, sipping gin and tonics at the wheel of a car and dashing to the North Pole in a gas-guzzling 4x4.

Knife crime has replaced terrorism as the police's highest priority, Scotland Yard said yesterday after six people were stabbed to death in just five days.

The home I grew up in... We moved around a lot, between Oxfordshire and London. I was happiest between the ages of 11 and 16, living in north Oxfordshire. I spent most of my time meeting boys and going to parties.

Wang Kanghua ran down the street to Juyuan Middle School as soon as her house stopped shaking from the earthquake, and dug with her fingers to find her daughter, Zhou Yating.

I got my nose pierced when I was 17. I was young and naïve. I wanted to be different, so I thought I'd put a bit of metal in my face. Originally I wanted my eyebrow pierced, but people at college said I'd look like a fool. Not many men have their nose pierced, so I did that instead. I went alone and had it done in the North Laine in Brighton. It didn't feel like being tickled with a feather, but it didn't hurt either. It's not doing any harm. I don't notice it any more.

Scenario One: You head out for an evening jog, only determination etched on your face. After 40 sweaty minutes, you return with the whites of your eyes bright and cheeks, pink. Scenario Two: You're about to play three sets of world-class tennis on a blistering June day. You're wearing a bespoke tuxedo-playsuit, your hair is ironed flat and on your face are three coats of mascara, concealer, foundation, cream blusher and pink lip gloss. Now, I like make-up, but I'll take the former, any day. It's that time of year again when I gaze at the superwomen of SW19 and wonder, what's more impressive, her serve – or the way she manages to stay, like, totally matte?

What a great time of year it is for vegetables; you really don't have to think too hard about what colourful accompaniments to dish up with your meals. There are loads of native beans and peas in the shops, and I've even been serving bowls of peas in their pods as a snack or starter – they're fresh, simple and get you in seasonal mode for your meal.

If ever a restaurant embodied the Zeitgeist of the Nineties (and isn't Zeitgeist the Ninetiest of words?) it was Quo Vadis. How deliciously ironic that an old Soho haunt, once the home of Karl Marx, should be taken over by the PR maestro and corporate flack Matthew Freud. And what larks when Freud and his partners, the artist Damien Hirst and Marco Pierre White, eventually had a spectacular falling-out, leaving White sulking in sole charge with only his self-painted Hirst knock-offs for company. Truly, each generation gets the bohemians and boulevardiers it deserves.

If you think of German wine as cheap, sweet and basic, you're in excellent company. When the go-ahead German wine company Zimmermann-Graeff & Müller commissioned market researchers to find out what UK consumers thought of German wine, "cheap, sweet and basic" came the response. Ten years ago, it looked as if Germany was starting to turn a corner. With unlovely lieb at an average price of £2.75 per bottle and shock-horror hock at £2.19, Germany's big producers created New World-style brands like Devil's Rock and Fire Mountain for the new drier styles. Tesco even thought of stocking them in its New World section but felt uncomfortable at the idea of passing Germany off as Australia. What happened to the Devil's Rocks and Fire Mountains? Well, the Devil didn't Rock and the Fire went out on the Mountain as the brands bombed.

The saga of the English cherry would make a good disaster movie. During the 16th century Kent was already famous for its cherry orchards and by the 17th century, the colonists left for the New World with two dozen different varieties of Kentish cherry in the hold.

Sitting in a picture-perfect spot, surrounded by woodland and overlooking a glorious valley landscape, John Carver and Anna Carloss's home rehabilitates the idea of the English bungalow. While in California and Australia, single-level living is a way of life and bound up with notions of designer sophistication, here the bungalow still carries connotations of a very different kind. But Carver and Carloss's low-slung, larch-clad house in East Sussex suggests we should think again and let our imaginations loose on our bungalow stock.

Brits have been going everywhere for ever. As explorers, then soldiers, colonial administrators, global corporate types and NGO types. And as tourists, poor and rich. The recent rich ones go to those beautifully re-worked princely hotels in India. Just enough Maharaja, but plumbing and broadband and Kensington detailing. The same people have been going to faraway Hispanic places recently too (rather than lovely Spain, because it’s so near). And they’ll have done the smart Old South in the USA too.

A small exhibit at the Chelsea Flower Show this year, tucked quietly up in its north-west corner, was a landmark as far as show gardens are concerned. Entitled "More Questions Than Answers", the outline of a fallen figure in white roses with red petals for blood, questioned our obsession with Health and Safety laws, and the disparity between sending soldiers into conflict unprotected while not letting our children play conkers at school. Emotive, political, conceptual stuff, something the Royal Horticultural Society has been a bit nervous of in the past. The fact that Tony Smith managed to ensconce himself at an event that clearly didn't have a conceptual category suggests that they were beguiled by his triumph at Hampton Court last year where his garden "In Digestion" won Best in Show in the conceptual category. Needless to say it was a breath of fresh air – so Smith's exhibit this year at the Hampton Court Flower Show is eagerly awaited.

I'd like to buy a small pet for my children, but I am daunted by the cost. How can I keep the cost of purchasing and maintaining a pet down? And in this case what pet would you recommend? Alan, Birmingham

If you ask me, Giffords is probably the best circus in Britain. Theatrical, whimsical, exotic, celestial (in places) and even rather glamorous, it shows that there is still a place for the travelling circus in the 21st century. And as they're playing all over the country until the middle of September I urge you to seek them out. It is bonkers, and you will love it. In some respects, Cirque du Soleil has raised the bar in terms of what we expect from a circus these days, and having seen their "Love" show in Las Vegas recently, in which they re-imagine the Beatles' back catalogue in a genuinely original way, I am now a devotee.

For years now pressure groups such as Living Streets and the Ramblers Association have been urging the Government to produce a co-ordinated national walking strategy. With almost geological slowness a "discussion paper" has been circulated, limping from not very interested party to indifferent one; in the meantime local authorities have pushed ahead with their own walking strategies. If you feed these words into Google you'll come up with plans advanced by councils as various as Luton and Cheshire. Reading them is to stroll into a petrified forest of bureaucratic jargon, where a Sits (Sustainable Integrated Transport Strategy) sits on the rotten boughs of verbiage.

Though better known for honeymoons than gastronomy, it was in the Sicilian cliff-top resort of Taormina that I saw one of the most remarkable foodstuffs of my entire life. It happened when Mrs W and I were holidaying there. (No, not a honeymoon.) We were participating in the evening passeggiata on the main drag Corso Umberto when I caught sight of an extraordinary fruit sitting in the window of a restaurant. Barring the size, you would have said it was a lemon. About 10 inches in length, it might have escaped from Gulliver's Brobdingnag. I was smitten. After 10 minutes peering in the window, Mrs W had to drag me away. Its impact was akin to the pineapple that prompted John Murray, the fourth Lord Dunmore, to erect a 53-foot pineapple-shaped pavilion in the grounds of Dunmore Park, Stirlingshire, in 1761. (It's still there. Indeed you can stay in the Pineapple through Landmark Trust.)

Henry Conway is the older son of the "disgraced" Tory MP Derek Conway, the one who paid his younger son, Freddie, nearly £50,000 from public funds for doing Parliamentary work that he may not actually have done, and now stands accused of doing much the same with Henry. Still, no mind. As Henry is now a brain surgeon as well as our foremost cancer specialist it was, at least, taxpayers' money exceedingly well spent whichever way it pans out. OK, only joshing. Henry, 25, is the one who describes himself as "blond, bouncy and one for the boys" and who, shortly after the scandal broke, arrived at Mahiki, a Mayfair nightclub, in a horse-drawn carriage and dressed as a regency dandy. Actually, thinking this through, do we own that horse-drawn carriage? Did we pay for it? And might we have it back? (Stupid, I know; where would we keep the horses? I can't have them here.)

The search for a perfect murder is the constant quest for crime writers; but for petty villains in South America, it appears that the quest for the perfect scam for relieving travellers of their excess cash has reached a perfect conclusion. It relies upon the large number of forged bank notes in circulation, but is far more subtle than simply handing over fake bills in change.

I sat waiting, focused ahead. The cross-traffic started thinning out. I gave a twist with my right hand, just a touch, till I felt the bite. The lights changed to green. I gave it a bit more. The automatic clutch caught, and I was rolling. More with the wrist, and I was going fast enough to lift my feet and tuck them on board. Sheer bliss! Like the best bits of flying and skiing rolled into one.

Alpine ski resorts that lack the year-round pull of an Eiger or Matterhorn often become ghost towns when the snow thaws, their hotels shuttered and all the ski instructors off to teach at surfing schools. But the threat posed by climate change to the future of low-lying resorts is forcing them to broaden their appeal and think of ways to attract visitors year-round.

Three children swaggered out of the Build-A-Bear Workshop variously hugging a cuddly moose, a pink-skirted teddy bear and a grinning groundhog. They were palpably proud of the creatures they had helped to make. In their wake came their shopping-laden grandparents. Would the kids like to ride the Log Chute rollercoaster? Yes, they chorused. And then, they suggested (while the grandparents wearied visibly), they'd like to visit the aquarium to meet the stingrays. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to the Mall of America.

A familiar scene of velvety highlands and soft moor unfolds as the plane approaches the far north of this island nation, entering a proudly independent province where a resilient people guard their distinctive language, dress and culture. But I'm not touching down in Scotland, as the thousand-metre volcano at the end of the crumbling runway confirms: this is Batanes, the Philippines' last frontier.

Q We are getting married this summer and our first child will be three months old. Before the unexpected arrival we had hoped for an exotic adventure holiday but are now reluctant. We want some privacy and some activity (likely to be walking now) but don't want to go long-haul and want it to still feel special. Usually our holidays are independent and involve climbing mountains or cycling so we are considering a villa somewhere with hills nearby. Do you have any suggestions? We are completely stuck for ideas. J Sinclair-Gieben, via email

First holiday memory?

Guideline No7 on my sheet of gorilla-tracking protocol advises: "Do not beat your chest at the silverback." I wonder what moment of idiocy prompted this warning; Rwanda seems an unlikely destination for a stag weekend.

After more than a decade of phenomenal growth, UK house prices have finally started to slide over the past few months, with some parts of the country already recording double-digit falls since the peaks hit in 2006 and 2007.

The rising costs of food, petrol and heating have pushed inflation up past 4 per cent over the last few weeks, and for some of us – most notably the elderly – the cost of living has been rising at a much faster rate. Although the pressures of rising inflation are being felt firstly in consumers' wallets, another unfortunate side-effect of rising prices is that your savings also need to work much harder to keep pace with the true cost of living.

Q. Nectar offered me a free treat last year and I chose its offer of a sphereing session. But when I tried to book this with SphereMania, I was informed the voucher was only valid for one person and it was not possible to book a session for one, so I would need to pay an additional £40 to make the booking. JS, Alveston

Mike and Julie Henson, from Hertfordshire, are about to make the biggest move of their lives. In November, along with their sons Isaac and Alex, they'll be emigrating to Australia, where Julie has secured a job as a midwife.

As I write, the UK stock market is approaching the lows it reached back in March. The economic news continues to be poor and, given that the housing market seems set to continue to fall, I can't see the news getting better any time soon. House builders have been slaughtered, despite the fact that they have enjoyed a 10-year bull market.

Mark Watson-Mitchell, a flamboyant veteran whose career has embraced many aspects of City life, has emerged as an enthusiastic fan of Plus, the increasingly important share market I discussed last week.

Just when I thought the worst for the banks was over, the news comes through that Bradford & Bingley has lost another investor. That's twice the rescue rights issue has failed. To borrow from an old Bradford & Bingley advertising campaign and the even more venerable Oscar Wilde, "To lose one rights issue, Mr Bradford and Mr Bingley, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness." I felt a little queasy.

It is the question on every investor's lips: is now the time to start buying cut-price equities, which have taken such a hammering – or is it better to seek refuge from turbulent global stock markets by moving into bonds and cash?

This week, our panel of readers tests Mercedes' three-door CLC. That's a new model name, but the car itself is largely carried over from the Sport Coupé model of the last-generation C-Class. The main change is that Mercedes has grafted what looks like the nose of the new C-Class on to the front of the old car, and a good job it has done too.

My kit kat habit is starting to show. Well, I say "starting", but what I really mean is that I'm at the stage where none of my clothes fit. Several months' fast food got me through a mountain of work, but they are proving rather less helpful when it comes to me getting dressed.

I'm just sitting down with Helga Schmidt when the news breaks that Santiago Calatrava is in the building. The arrival of the great architect generates excitement and apprehension in equal measure. "There are things he is still not happy with," says Mrs Schmidt, the intendant of Calatrava's extraordinary Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía in Valencia.

In summer, it's impossible to park in Deià. Many of the hotels and restaurants are alarmingly expensive. The high street, being part of the coastal highway, is a traffic jam waiting to happen. There's no room for a tree-shaded plaça where you can drink wine and while away an afternoon, people-watching. Clinging to the dizzy slopes of Puig des Teix, it spends much of the day in shadow. The only beach is small and at the end of a precipitous walk. And the people who put it on every tourist map of the island are long gone.

It is known as the wind capital of Europe – and Tarifa, the most southerly point of Spain, makes the most of it. As well as a booming surfing scene, enormous wind turbines march along the cliffs, standing sentry like giant sculptures. But we weren't here for the breeze. The unique geography of the Strait of Gibraltar, where two oceans and two continents meet, also makes the water around Tarifa very special. My children and I were here to see whales.

The sun is hot, the air is fresh, the meadows glow with buttercups. Above the 1,000-year-old church, beech woods climb to rugged peaks. Somewhere cowbells clunk. Just 60km from Girona's busy airport, this is the sylvan paradise that the Catalans cannily keep for themselves.

Ray Lewis was an inspirational black community leader who appeared to have a golden touch when it came to tackling under-valued and under-motivated children from the ethnic minorities.

Detectives investigating the murders of two French students in London fear they were tied up and tortured for computer games and the codes to their bankcards.

Gordon Brown said he was disappointed with 33 of his own ministers, including Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, for voting to continue with the "John Lewis List" of MPs' allowances for furnishing their second homes.

Williams, 27, is a member of the R&B group Destiny's Child. In 2002 her debut solo album was the biggest selling gospel album of the year. Her new album, 'Unexpected', is released next month.

Charles Wheeler, who reported the world for the BBC with a fearlessness and integrity that helped to define the corporation's journalistic reputation, has died at the age of 85.

As they drowned their sorrows about the political scene on the Commons terrace on Tuesday, two gloomy Labour MPs announced they had reached the same conclusion. They were certain to lose their normally winnable constituencies at the next election, so they would tell their local party not to waste money on a lost cause and to save it for the attempt to regain the seat at the following election.

In the days after the 7 July bombing three years ago, Londoners responded by declaring, in all sorts of ways, that they were "Not Scared". It doesn't look like that any more. A poll conducted to mark the anniversary of the bombings finds that Muslims have experienced a marked increase in hostility since the attacks. People feel threatened by Islam, and the more savage and cowardly among the population express their own corrupting fear in acts of sometimes very serious criminal bullying.

Boris Johnson, London's Mayor, says the streets are now so dangerous that he has told his children never to intervene in trouble. Is he right?

Farmers have threatened legal action if the Government decides not to allow a cull of badgers to tackle tuberculosis in cattle.

Britain's most senior intelligence officer is said to be showing no sign of recovery after being in a coma for five days with a mysterious illness which doctors have so far failed to diagnose.

It's one of the great music events of the year – and you could be there if you can answer these 15 questions. Email your entry to competitions@independent.co.uk by Wednesday night – the winners will be chosen at random from the best responses.

The scandal of trafficking young boys from Africa to Europe with the lure of fame and fortune as a football star is to be targeted in a new clampdown, The Independent has learnt. The move will throw a spotlight on the recruitment practices of clubs in England and on the continent.

Uh-oh. We really must be in trouble. "Sub-prime" and "credit crunch" have just entered the Oxford English Dictionary. They're Americanisms, and they're a bit weaselly ("sub-prime" means "sub-standard," not just "less than the best") but they're here to stay. Also granted full OED status is "fascinator" meaning the feathery frou-frou clamped to some ladies' heads at Ascot, "freegan" (a person who lives off discarded food) and "sleb," a contemptuous reference to celebrity. The term "bling-bling," meaning ostentatiously worn fashion jewellery, joins "jiggy," "phat" and "breakbeat" in the hip-hop lexicon. It was coined in the 1990s by the rap team Cash Money Millionaires, one of whom, BG, released a single called "Bling Bling." "I just wish I'd trademarked it" said a rueful Mr G.

Big words are being thrown around in the Church of England these days; words such as schism, with echoes from 1,000 years ago when the world divided between Rome and the Orthodox; words such as Reformation, with echoes of the split between Catholic and Protestant, which spilt a deal of English blood in the 16th century.

Iran has handed over its long-awaited response to the West's offer of incentives to halt its suspected nuclear weapons programme, after a warning by one of its top military leaders that any strike against it would trigger war.

The former US Senator Jesse Helms, a legendary isolationist and defender of “Southern values” who spent much of his life goading liberals, died yesterday.

Iraq will be plunged into a new war if Israel or the US launches an attack on Iran, Iraqi leaders have warned. Iranian retaliation would take place in Iraq, said Dr Mahmoud Othman, the influential Iraqi MP.

The main news tonight: a television reporter is making front-page headlines across America, after being entangled in a scandalous love triangle during a posting to Baghdad.

Nearly 60 years after Chiang Kai-shek and his battered troops fled the Chinese mainland to Taiwan, scores of Taiwanese packed the first direct tourist flight from Taipei to Beijing, clutching their special edition stamps and souvenir retractable chopsticks.

It started as an argument between a husband and wife political team and staff at Iguanas Waterfront Bar, a restaurant north of Sydney. Now it's Iguanagate – a scandal that could claim the scalp of one of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's new intake of Labor MPs.

Since the day Las Vegas was created in the shimmering Nevada desert, visitors have been drawn by one simple promise: "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas". The motto adorns the city's road signs, and has inspired everything from its souvenir T-shirts to the local tourist board's seductive advertising campaigns.

Once a week, my mail package arrives from The Independent foreign desk in London. It contains anything up to 250 letters and parcels, and wherever I am – in the hot smog of Cairo, amid the Atlantis towers of Dubai or on my own flower-smothered balcony in Beirut – I never cease to be amazed. Some letters are just plain asinine. Others are packed with the kind of psychobabble that makes me writhe with fury. Most are eloquent to the point of literature, analysing human folly, family history and war with a grace and philosophical wisdom that leave me breathless. Why oh why, I find myself asking when I read them, can't we journalists write like this?

Ever since the Northern Rock crisis struck, seemingly out of nowhere, last autumn, there has been a sense that this was just a warning clap of thunder and that the real storm still loomed some way ahead. This week, that storm suddenly came a great deal closer, with a host of indicators showing just how justified were the qualms of British voters and consumers.

There can be little doubt that the American media giant Viacom, which is suing YouTube for breach of copyright, has a strong case. Anyone who has even briefly visited the popular video-sharing website will know that there is a mass of legally protected television content there, all of it freely available at the click of mouse.

Belinda Neal certainly sounds like a handful. The Australian MP has been ordered by her leader, Kevin Rudd, to attend anger management counselling after she allegedly abused staff in a restaurant.

The concept of parallel justice systems, different for various communities based on their religious beliefs, is in effect a denial of the principles of gender equality and inclusion and shared citizenship ("Sharia law 'coming to Britain' ", 4 July).

Today I write in praise of slowness, longevity of attention, what used to be called – when we had schools – concentration. This in response to an article my fellow Independent columnist John Walsh wrote last week about that artist of the now-you-see-it, now-you-don't, Martin Creed. I won't be discussing Creed's work itself. It passes me by – which is perhaps, given Creed's commitment to evanescence, the highest compliment I can pay it. "Why do we have to look at paintings for a long time?" he asks. "Why not just look for a second?" So that's his second. What interests me more is John Walsh's high-spirited gloss on Creed's philosophy of instantaneousness. "Our response to the spectacle," he writes, meaning the spectacle of athletes dashing through the Duveen Galleries at Creed's artistic behest, "is a joyful blink, rather than a solemn, chin-stroking inspection of brushwork."

"Cultures," said an academic called Professor Ellis Cashmore on Radio 4 this week, "are no better or worse than each other." Indeed. Cultures, for example, which offer a tasty smorgasbord of rabbits, beans and humans to whet the appetites of angry gods; cultures in which children who emerge from birth looking a little puny are left on hillsides to die; cultures which mark the emergence of a human infant with batteries of benefits; cultures in which politicians fawn over Wags. All much of a muchness. And who, after all, are we to judge?

Anyone with experience of the Church of England will know how difficult it is to get rid of a rogue vicar. When I looked into the matter some time ago, the principle seemed to be that he had either to preach heresy or be drunk in the pulpit to merit expulsion.

This was a significant week for British theatre, and for that much-used phrase "colour-blind casting." On Wednesday a revival of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger opened at the Jermyn Street Theatre with black actor Jimmy Akingbola as Osborne's rebellious and angry young character Jimmy Porter. On the same night, just down the road at the Palace Theatre, a casting change in the Monty Python show Spamalot saw British-Asian actor Sanjeev Bhaskar take over as King Arthur.

For almost 30 years, Clive Hornby played Emmerdale's longest-running character, Jack Sugden, the flat cap-wearing elder son of the matriarchal Annie Sugden, who was facing widowhood after the death of her farmer husband Jacob when the serial began – as Emmerdale Farm – in 1972.

In the comparatively brief history of broadcasting, only a handful of news correspondents have become household names. Charles Wheeler, knighted in 2006, was incontestably one of them. In a career with the BBC that lasted more than 60 years, he reported from the most troubled and significant parts of the world with measured judgement and sometimes laconic aplomb that listeners and viewers found reassuring, however dire the story he was obliged to tell.

It was Independence Day in the US, which always translates into quieter markets in London, and beyond Bradford & Bingley, the City was pretty independent of decent stories or bid chat. There was some interest in J Sainsbury, as the Qatari sovereign wealth fund that failed in its bid to buy it last year upped its stake to 26 per cent. The move brought some vague chat of a renewed bid, but nobody's heart was really in it.

The only people who will not mind this weekend's soggy weather are the 100,000 petrol-heads camped out around Silverstone for tomorrow's British Grand Prix. They love the plumes of spray and 360 degree spins. And while race-goers at Sandown for today's Group 1 Coral Eclipse Stakes will grin and bear it, they will be reviewing the form if softer ground prevails.