A fire service could become the first to hire on-call staff - that DON'T fight fires. Oxfordshire's new chief fire officer, Simon Furlong, says fire stations could employ staff who will not respond to blazes. He said the 'community safety advocates' could carry out social care home visits, help with NHS patient transport and promote safety campaigns. He stressed the proposal was at a 'very early' stage but said it could be part of wider changes to broaden the role...

A legendary Brough motorbike which was capable of 125mph almost 90 years ago is set to sell for a world record £585,000. The Brough Superior SS100 is regarded as the most desirable thing on two wheels and the Rolls-Royce of motorcycles. This unique 1928 SS100 model dubbed the 'Moby Dick' and is even quicker than the standard model TE Lawrence was famously killed riding. It was fitted with a 1140cc engine specially tuned by George Brough and JA Prestwick to...

This mesmerising image looks like toy tractors playing on a fabric field - but is actually a team of farmers hard at work. Photographer Chris Taylor, 47, spotted the workers in a field in East Winch, Norfolk, on Tuesday while taking aerial snaps from the sky with his drone. As they planted potatoes, they etched perfectly straight lines in the soil which look flawless from the air. Commenting on the eye-catching effect, Chris said: "Looks like tiny tractors making corduroy!"

By Michael McNulty It’s Forgotten Film Friday, here’s this week’s instalment. Gus Van Sant’s 2003 film Elephant won both the Best Director and Palme d’Or awards at Cannes. It’s a piercingly quiet, stunningly effective, nightmarish film based on the Littleton, Colorado Columbine school shooting of 1999 which left 12 students and 1 teacher dead. Unlike the media storm that surrounded the Columbine shooting, desperate to explain and assign blame, Elephant is unafraid to leave questions unanswered. It doesn’t try to...

A chilly vineyard has become Britain's most Northerly commercial WINE producer for the first time in history. The British wine boom has rarely seen vineyards pop up as far north as Watford as the French try to snap up land for the same desire across the South of England. But no other grape-grower has managed to achieve the longitude co-ordinates of breezy Malton in North Yorkshire. The effects of climate warming and hardier strains of vine have blown away the...

Britain is experiencing a beetroot boom, with supermarket sales of the root vegetable increasing by as much as a third year-on-year on the back of the ‘purple trend’ – people eating purple to consume more antioxidants and nutrients in a bid to stay healthy. Leading researchers Kantar cite the total market spend over the past 12 months on fresh beetroot - beetroot which is ready for eating, pickled in vinegar or infused with various flavours - was more than £34 million,...

It may be a man’s world - but modern mums are twice as likely to want daughters over sons, a new study shows. Two in five mothers said they wished for a girl while pregnant, compared to just 18 per cent who hoped for a son. But for fathers the reverse is true, with men a whopping three times more likely to want boys. A huge 31 per cent of men expressed the preference to have sons, while only one...

Three quarters (76%) of NHS Trusts and Health Boards say there is not enough specialist nursing care for people with incurable secondary breast cancer, reveals charity Breast Cancer Care. Worryingly, close to half (42%) of organisations surveyed do not provide specialist nursing care for people with incurable breast cancer, in stark comparison to the majority (95%) of people with primary breast cancer having a named clinical nurse specialist for support. This is despite half (49%) of NHS Trusts and Health...

It was my first day on the job but that wasn't unusual as it was everybody's first day on the job at MAYOUT, an organisation so new that we hadn't even worked out just what the letters in MAYOUT stood for as an acronym. Jenkins, who had come to us from football after his great success with the Sven Out, Moyes Out, Pardew Out and Wenger Out campaigns (granted that last one is TBA) suggested 'Meeting All Yobs Outside Underwood's...