Victory for anti-whaling campaigners
September 3rd, 2010 by author1
The controversial attempt to scrap the 24-year-old international moratorium on commercial whaling collapsed yesterday, to the delight of anti-whaling campaigners and the frustration of Japan, Norway and Iceland, the three countries which continue to hunt whales in defiance of world opinion.
Delegates from the 88 member states of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), meeting in Agadir, Morocco, were unable to reach agreement, after two days of talks behind closed doors, on the three-year-old proposal to abandon the official whaling ban in exchange for smaller, agreed kills by the whaling states. Britain was part of a European Union group that strongly opposed the plan.
The issue is now off the agenda for at least a year, until the next meeting of the IWC, but the result was greeted as a triumph by some environment groups who feared that the deal would put the future of the great whales in jeopardy once again.
"We have won the battle to keep the ban in place, but we must continue to fight to win the war on all whaling," said the chief executive of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, Chris Butler-Stroud. "Yes, the moratorium still stands but we must not forget that Japan, Iceland and Norway continue to whale outside of the sanction of the IWC, and that is a situation that has to change. Their whaling activities must come to an end once and for all."
The leader of the British delegation at the talks, the Minister for the Marine Environment, Richard Benyon, said last night: "We in the UK have been consistently clear that any new agreement must reduce the numbers of whales that are killed each year with the aim of a complete phase-out of all commercial whaling. We could not support an agreement that did not have conservation at its heart."
However, the Japanese whaling commissioner Yasue Funayama, said her country had offered major concessions to reach a compromise and blamed anti-whaling countries that refused to accept the killing of a single animal. "We must rise above politics and engage in a broader perspective," she said.
The deal which failed yesterday was originally proposed by the United States, which was seeking agreement with Japan to secure whaling permissions for its Inuit native peoples in Alaska, without the Japanese making tit-fot-tat trouble because of American support for the moratorium – something which had happened in 2002.
It would have allowed commercial whaling to be legitimised once again for a period of 10 years, with official IWC "quotas" set for the number of whales which each country would catch.
The sweetener of the deal was that these numbers would supposedly be lower than the number of whales actually being killed by Japan, Norway and Iceland outside the IWC, a figure currently running at about 1,500 a year, so in the end whales as a whole would benefit.
But no quotas had actually been agreed, and many of the anti-whaling countries thought such a deal would be virtually impossible to police, besides opening up commercial whaling to potential new participants, such as South Korea.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
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Online anonymity lets us behave badly
September 2nd, 2010 by author1
Just as the real world has complex rules that define our behaviour towards one another (eg, "Your place in a supermarket queue cannot be maintained with a basket containing a solitary banana") there are rules for online interaction, too.
The most famous is probably Godwin's Law: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving the Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." But another, by web comic artist John Gabriel, is gaining ground; it simply states the following: Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Idiot*. Or in longhand, give the average human the opportunity to express themselves online anonymously and without fear of retribution, and they'll behave rudely, viciously and inappropriately.
This "Greater Internet Idiot Theory" – or something incredibly similar to it – was undoubtedly in the minds of executives at Blizzard, the company behind the insanely addictive game World Of Warcraft, when they decided last week to impose a system in their forums where you'd be obliged to post using your real name. Many people began to rant aggressively at strangers over the imminent loss of the opportunity to rant aggressively at strangers, but there was a more measured but equally deafening reaction from those who simply valued their anonymity – or at least their pseudonymity. If you've played World of Warcraft you'll know it's not the most restrained social arena (particularly if you're trying to annihilate Kaz'rogal in the Battle for Mount Hyjal) and the prospect of online altercations spilling over into the real world scared many people.
Female players were particularly concerned, very aware that revealing their gender could invite unwanted attention from the kind of men who spend long hours sitting indoors seeking the Reins Of The Bronze Drake within the Caverns of Time. Some respondents during the ensuing 2,000-page discussion on this topic dared to suggest that privacy wasn't really an issue, but they were forced to eat their words when a Blizzard employee, after revealing his real name in defence of the system, suddenly found his phone number, address, details of his parents, siblings and spouse, and even pictures of his childhood home posted online by Warcrafters trying to make a point.
Blizzard backtracked at the weekend, realising that alienating thousands of customers might not be good for business. But that has left them as the unhappy gatekeepers of a famously brutal online forum where untrammelled anger is endemic. There's no doubt that exposing real identities can raise the level of debate – but it can also dissuade sensible, privacy-conscious contributors from posting. Balancing this encouragement of forum participation with a desire to maintain a respectful tone is something that news organisations are having to address constantly – indeed, our online editor, Martin King , has written a couple of excellent blog posts on the subject. The solution now employed on The Independent's website uses a system called Disqus, and it's a nice halfway house; by linking your comments with your other social media profiles – be it Yahoo, Twitter or Facebook – it doesn't rule out the option of pseudonymity, but does enough to at least make us consider the consequences of rude or threatening behaviour. Ideally, of course, everyone would just conduct themselves in a polite fashion – but that would be ignoring the Greater Internet Idiot Theory, which is never a good idea.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
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A whistle-stop tour of Tokyo's best ramen restaurants
September 1st, 2010 by author1
A cheap lunch has drawn me to Tokyo. It is a long way to travel to save a couple of quid on fast food, granted, but since I started visiting Japan around 10 years ago, I have become obsessed, haunted, by one Japanese lunch staple in particular: the salty-savoury flavours, steamy-meaty aromas and chewy-soft textures that lurk in a proper bowl of serious, seductive ramen.
Japan, too, is in the midst of its own colossal, collective ramen fixation. This is the so-called "ramen boom", which, in Tokyo alone, sees a new shop open every day; where each week countless newspaper articles and magazine features are published about it and TV shows are aired; not to mention the blogs (oh, how many working hours have I burnt browsing those back home?) and guidebooks which contribute to the ceaseless chatter on what you'd think would be the relatively limited subject of noodle soup. Ramen might be Chinese in origin, but the Japanese have made it their own. A new manga has just been launched here; its hero is a cat who runs a ramen shop.
Within minutes of checking in, I leave my hotel, wild-eyed and desperate for ramen, any ramen. The first place I come across is a dingy, greasy, narrow shop with all the charm of a Kwik-Fit waiting-room. Here I buy a token from the machine at the door, hand it to the chef and sit expectantly at the counter. It is a tonkotsu, or "pork bone", ramen, one of the four main categories – along with soy, salt and miso – which together head an almost infinitely diverse ramen family tree. As with many of the most memorable culinary flavours – well-hung game, the funkier French cheeses, offal – a proper tonkotsu should taste faintly of the barnyard, but this one has tipped fatally into the realm of animal bottoms.
My second bowl, an hour or so later, is at Mist, one of the new wave of upscale ramen restaurants targeting women, on the top floor of the chic Omotesando Hills mall. A waitress takes my coat as I enter – not something I have ever experienced at a ramen restaurant. Inside, all is moody lighting and glittery stainless steel. I choose a miso ramen, which, at 1,400 yen (£10), is double the price of my first. It is an improvement, but doesn't make my hair stand on end as some ramen can.
Clearly, with about 4,000 ramen shops in Tokyo alone (and 80,000 in Japan as a whole), I need guidance. As evening arrives, I meet Rickmond Wong at Shin-Daita station in western Tokyo. A Chinese-American from LA, 35-year-old Wong is the author of rameniac.com, one of the handful of English-language ramen blogs I follow avidly. Wong is a self-employed web designer, a job which, he explains as we walk to a nearby ramen joint, allows him to travel as often as possible to Japan to indulge his passion for ramen.
"Really, the best ramen in LA would only get a bronze medal in Tokyo," he sighs. Why doesn't ramen travel, I wonder? "The water is so important," he says, echoing what several of Japan's top kaiseki chefs have told me. "And you can get away with selling lesser ramen in London. There is a lack of education, but that is changing." (For what it's worth, Wong names Brewer Street's Ten Ten Tei as the least worst of London's offerings.)
We are heading for Basanova, a ramen restaurant owned by a chef from Fukuoka who has recently handed over the ' reigns to Keizo Shimamoto, a Japanese-American, also originally from LA. Shimamoto is now "living the dream", as his blog, goramen.com, puts it, of becoming a ramen chef.
As we arrive, Shimamoto, 32, with a dinky goatee and back-to-front baseball cap, is busy studying the viscosity of his pork broth, holding a sample of the soup up to the light in a refractor, a common tool of the modern ramen chef. "I'm looking for a rating of between five and 10," he explains. "Beyond 10 and it gets too thick, it's more of a sauce." Last year, Shimamoto travelled the length of Japan eating 55 bowls in 21 cities in 28 days. "I probably eat at least two bowls a day," he reveals.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
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It's a greener shade of green: Britain's first organic golf course
August 31st, 2010 by author1
With their diamond-patterned jumpers, neatly pressed slacks and expensive club memberships, most golfers seem to have little in common with the unwashed eco-warrior brigade. The divide between the two groups is not just sartorial, but stems from the fact that many golf clubs use huge amounts of water, disfigure the landscape and use fertilisers and pesticides to keep their greens lush. However, this gulf may soon be bridged, as a Cambridgeshire club which boasts a full-time ecologist, not to mention a resident stoat at the eighth hole, is poised to become the UK's first organic golf club.
The owners of New Malton Golf Club, an 18-hole course, claim it has been chemical-free for a year, and they plan to apply to the Soil Association for organic certification. The course's out-of bounds areas are home to birds, including woodpeckers, kestrels, owls and pheasants, as well as hares. The owners plan to graze animals on the land, while also growing fruit and lavender.
"We don't use any pesticides and have been 100 per cent chemical-free for a year," said the golf course's co-owner Paul Stevenson. "We get water from the River Cam to water the greens... there will be traces of chemicals in it, but we are hoping to find a bore hole to get around that."
While Mr Stevenson claims the quality of the green is unaffected by his unorthodox approach, which involves using citric acid and sugar in lieu of chemicals, experts have questioned whether it is possible to create a quality golf course without the use of some weedkillers. Courses are often afflicted by various species of Fusarium fungus, which produce white rings on the grass, and are a prime breeding ground for anthracnose, a general term for a wide range of plant diseases especially common on turf that is under repeated stress. Golf professionals point out that the trend for chemical-free golf courses is also being undermined by an opposing trend for ever more luxuriant greens.
"We are fighting a marketing drive trend towards lusher, greener and more manicured courses – stimulating golfers to want to play on what they see on TV," said Jonathan Smith, chief executive of the Golf Environment Organisation. "New Malton is showing important leadership in a sector that already understands the need to minimise pesticide use."
Mr Smith points out that some small clubs in rural areas may already be chemical-free, but are simply not advertising the fact.
New Malton's owners believe that forsaking chemicals has economic as well as ecological benefits, saving tens of thousands of pounds a year. And encouraging stoats keeps the rabbit population down. Rabbits can be a blight on golf courses, as they dig up greens.
Environmentalists also object to the vast tracts of land courses take up, as well as the amount of water needed to keep them properly irrigated. A Unesco World Water Development report found that an 18-hole golf course can use as much as 2.3 million litres of water every day. The protests against Donald Trump's plans to build a £750m luxury golf course on the Aberdeenshire coast are testament to the strength of public feeling.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
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'If Burt Bacharach says you're good, it's time to start believing in yourself'
August 30th, 2010 by author1
Rumer: 'I want to weave a spell where we can all fall into a beautiful musical dream' Photograph: Suki Dhanda for the Observer
If dedication can be measured by the number of odd-jobs a musician is willing to undertake to keep his or her career dreams alive, Rumer must be one of the most dedicated musicians on the planet. "I've done everything you could possibly imagine," she tells me when we meet for coffee in King's Cross in London. "I've worked in hotels. I've done loads of washing dishes. I fixed iPods in the Apple Store on Regent Street. I sold advertising space. I was a teacher. I was with the Arts Council for a while. I did admin. I sold laptops. I was a cleaner, a waitress, a barmaid. I worked in a hairdresser's washing hair and making tea. I worked behind the popcorn desk at a cinema…"
All this while labouring over songs, gigging in innumerable small venues around London and searching for the right producer to guide her towards that elusive record deal. "Did I ever feel like giving up? Every day! I'd tell myself: 'I should train to become a teacher instead.' But every time the application form came in, I just couldn't do it. I've always believed I had something to offer and I knew my music was good."
It's a good job she stuck at it, because now, after 10 years of toil, Rumer is in the process of making it very big indeed. But not for her any tabloid-baiting antics: in person, she is no-nonsense and quite intense, with the steeliness of one who has seen too many opportunities slip away. She presents herself unassumingly: for our interview she is dressed in jeans and a plain grey dress. Her music, which harks back to classic American singer-songwriters of the 70s such as Carole King and Laura Nyro, is powerful without having to raise its voice. If you've been near a radio recently, you'll have probably heard her debut single, "Slow". At first listen, it feels pleasantly lulling, with a hint of Norah Jones about it, but closer inspection reveals a sharp edge honed by unrequited love.
Likewise, "Aretha" seems triumphantly uplifting until you realise it's about an isolated child walking to school with only the music in her headphones for comfort. "Mama she'd notice but she's always cryin'/I've got no one to confide in/No one, Aretha, but you." At its own unhurried pace, Rumer's music opens up to disclose a lifetime of hard-won experience.
She was born Sarah Joyce (Rumer comes from author Rumer Godden) 31 years ago to British parents living in Pakistan, the youngest of seven children. Her father was an engineer on the huge Tarbela Dam project near Islamabad and the family lived in a self-contained expat community, a "bubble" where, in the absence of TV, children created their own entertainment. "My brothers and sisters were always making up songs and playing guitars, so I grew up with music," she says. "It was a normal part of communication."
When the family moved back to England, the idyllic bubble of her early childhood burst. She found it hard to adapt to school and the British way of life, and took solace in television, where she cultivated a love of Judy Garland and movie musicals. Then her parents split up.
She was 11 when she came to understand the circumstances. Back in Pakistan, her mother had had an affair with the family's Pakistani cook. This man, it turned out, was her real father.
According to Rumer: "My mother was this well-educated and beautiful, fair-haired English woman. And this quite old man was working to support his own family in a mountain village. But they had a connection. My dad was very noble about it. He didn't treat me any differently, though, yes, it has been very painful for everyone."
drive from www.guardian.co.uk
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Government review to examine threat of world resources shortage
August 28th, 2010 by author1
Ministers have ordered a review of looming global shortages of resources, from fish and timber to water and precious metals, amid mounting concern that the problem could hit every sector of the economy.
The study has been commissioned following sharp rises in many commodity prices on the world markets and recent riots in some countries over food shortages.
There is also evidence that some nations are stockpiling important materials, buying up key producers and land and restricting exports in an attempt to protect their own businesses from increasingly fierce global competition.
Several research projects have also warned of a pending crisis in natural resources, such as water and wildlife, which have suffered dramatic losses due to over-use, pollution, habitat loss, and, increasingly, changes caused by global warming.
Professor Bob Watson, the chief scientist for the Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs, the leading department in the initiative, said every sector of the British economy was directly or indirectly vulnerable to future shortages.
These could be caused either by resources running out or becoming harder to access because of geopolitical factors from war to tighter environmental regulation on resources such as timber and palm oil – the latter being found in an estimated one in 10 products, from chocolate to cosmetics, sold in Britain.
"One of the roles of government is to provide information ... come up with a shared vision of moving forward and working with the private sector so we have competitiveness, a viable economy moving forward," Watson said.
AEA, the consultancy commissioned to carry out the study, said resources at risk included timber, water, fish, precious metals and minerals such as phosphorus, which is widely used in fertiliser.
One area of particular concern is "rare earth elements", important for defence and many green technologies from low-energy lightbulbs to wind turbines, as well as industries as varied as electronics and lasers, film and lighting, aircraft engines, nuclear reactors, and pain-relieving drugs, Phil Dolley, AEA's resource efficiency director, said.
Elsewhere, the US, the EU and Mexico have announced that they want to bring a World Trade Organisation case against Chinese restrictions on exports of nine key raw materials, including coke, bauxite, magnesium and fluorspar, all important for producing steel, aluminium and other chemicals.
Resources under scrutiny by the UK government do not include the already heavily studied oil industry, nor ecosystem services such as flood defences, but the range was still "vast", Dolley, said.
"It's a hot topic because other countries are also thinking of this [and] doing a lot of work," he added.
drive from www.guardian.co.uk
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In a glass of its own
August 26th, 2010 by author1
It was Sir Winston Churchill who famously declared the only way to make the perfect gin martini was to pour a liberal amount of the chilled spirit into an equally frigid and correctly-shaped glass, pop in a couple of olives and show the glass to the vermouth bottle on the mantelpiece. So it is, perhaps, only fitting the nation's first dedicated gin bar should open just a juniper berry's throw from Blenheim Palace, the place of his birth.
Here, one can sample "The Ultimate G&T", which uses Blackwood's 60 per cent, which claims to be the world's only vintage gin, and Q tonic, featuring hand-picked cinchona bark (quinine) from the Peruvian Andes and organic agave - albeit at a wallet-busting £16.75-a-pop.
In any other year, this could be seen as merely another gimmicky splash in the glass from the spirits and leisure industries ever eager to find new ways to persuade us to part with our booze dollar. But the fact that The Feathers, in the charming Cotswold village of Woodstock, Oxfordshire, has managed to gather no fewer than 50 gins from eight different countries and has installed a "Gin Ambassador" in residence to guide the less sophisticated gin drinker through their menu, is as good a sign as any that the intensely aromatic spirit has come a long way since it was 18th Century London's crack cocaine of its day. back then, it was drunk not only like water, but instead of it due to the potentially lethal qualities of Adam's Ale at that time.
Others are following suit. London's Harvey Nichols has opened a martini terrace on its fifth floor until the end of July. The truth is the days of your only choice being whether you want your gin in a green, blue or clear bottle are long gone. The rise and rise of vodka as the fashionable drink has at last seen gin distillers responding in a remarkable and highly profitable manner.
Just as vodka enticed consumers with increasingly varied and expensive offerings – think Grey Goose at upwards of £45 a bottle – so gin has gown up, in a bid to restore the place it once occupied in the sophisticated art deco era of cocktails and cruise ships.
The main weapon in its delicious arsenal is the creation of super-premium gins, infused with ever-more exotic botanicals, sometimes in small batches and made in such unlikely locations as The Shetlands. Paying more than £20 for a bottle of gin was unthinkable in the Nineties, but now super-premium brands such as Oxley, distilled at minus 5C, are pushing well in to the £40-plus region and producing sales figures that are causing the collective jaws of more established gin distillers to hit the floor with a mighty thud. And while the gin market in general is declining by 7 per cent a year, many super-premium offerings are reporting annual sales increases of up to 48 per cent.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
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My life in beer: Neil Morrissey
August 25th, 2010 by author1
Have you always been a real ale drinker? If not how and when were you converted?
My first ever pint was in Stoke and it was a Marston's Pedigree, so I've always drunk real ale. There are quality lagers though, like Pilsner Urquell and Budvar. I'm often tempted to have one of these on a hot day.
How did you and Richard meet?
We met via Hugo Speer at Virgin Radio's first birthday party and we quickly realised we shared a passion for real ale and gastronomy. We haven't looked back – it's been over a decade now.
Why did you decide to get yourself involved in brewing?
Love of beer and English gastronomy. It started with a recipe idea for what we think of as the perfect beer that we previously had trouble finding.
Did you originally decide just to do some homebrew – or did you aim big from the start?
We always aimed big. But we decided to do our testing and flavour profiling in the safety of our own kitchen with a home brew.
Were any people surprised in light of your lager drinking alter ego in Men Behaving Badly?
Hopefully, your average Independent reader can discern between a television character and a real person.
How many ales do you produce?
Our flagship ale is the Blonde ale and we do several seasonal beers – Aussie IPA, Spooky for Halloween, Mulled Ale for Christmas – and the Brunette – which is a traditional English bitter.
What's your favourite Morrissey Fox ale – and why?
It depends on what I'm eating, where I am and the mood I'm in. In sum, all of them, at different times – otherwise I wouldn't put my name behind them.
What lessons about brewing have you learned along the way?
The importance of accurate sparging! This is the process of sprinkling water over the mash. Also, cleanliness – it takes more water to clean down than it takes to brew. Brewing is a very complex process and there are lots of pernickety things to master.
A lot of chefs are pairing food and ale – any suggestions on the perfect accompaniment to your beers?
The normal rules of food and drink matching apply to our beers. For example, our blonde ale – which is a fragrant, citrusy, light coloured ale – would be great with light fresh fish dishes and summery salads as well as fish and chips. As opposed to the Aussie IPA – which is a hoppy, more complex beer, but still with the signature Morrissey Fox citrus notes. Its subtle effervescence cuts through meats such as pork and duck – from burgers to boar.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
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We've gone into the ecological red
August 24th, 2010 by author1
Climate scientists believe extreme weather events like the recent flooding in Pakistan will become more frequent. Photograph: Mohammad Sajjad/AP
At the weekend, Saturday 21 August to be precise, the world as a whole went into "ecological debt".
That means in effect that from now until the end of the year, humanity will be consuming more natural resources and producing more waste than the forests, fields and fisheries of the world can replace and absorb. By doing so, the life -support systems that we all depend on are worn ever thinner. Farms become less productive, fish populations crash and climate regulating forests decline. All become less resilient in the face of extreme weather events.
The date is arrived at by comparing our annual environmental resource budget with our ecological footprint – the rate at which we spend it.
The more we overshoot the available budget, the earlier in the year we start to go into the ecological red. Collectively we started to live beyond our means in the 1980s. Since then the date has crept earlier and earlier in the year. Improved measurement and data bring the latest date forward by a whole month in comparison with last year's date. It now takes about 18 months for the planet to generate what we consume in just 12.
The worse news is that this also assumes that the whole of nature is there for human exploitation. Any farmer or ecologist will tell you that for ecosystems to function healthily fallow portions and periods are essential.
In a worst case economic scenario, like the banking crisis, governments can, and did, intervene to ensure that money still comes out of the cash machines. But if ecosystems crash, they cant print more planet.
The same data used to produce the date above also reveal a creeping vulnerability for the UK. We have become more dependent on both food and fuel imports. Worsening self-sufficiency carries a high economic cost as the price of both essentials is rising. But it also undermines national security in other ways.
It was only two years ago that we lived through another food and fuel crisis when prices for both rose suddenly and dramatically. At the time, the severity of the bank failures distracted many from the long-term signals. Increased competition for declining oil reserves and a global agricultural system increasingly vulnerable to climatic upheaval, mean that such events are likely to become much more common.
The price of oil is now again on an upward curve (and events in the Gulf of Mexico lay bare the difficulties of extracting the remaining, more marginal oil fields). Significant crop failures this year have triggered a rise in "food nationalism".
Following serious droughts, Russia, one of the world's major grain baskets, banned grain exports in order to guarantee their domestic food security. Ukraine, one of the world's other major producers, is likely to follow.
Every week seems to bring news of new "land grabbing" initiatives in which wealthy nations or corporations buy or take long-term leaseholds on productive farmland in poorer countries, motivated either by concerns over feeding their own people, or with a speculative eye sharply focused on the money to be made from a combination of demand and scarcity rising hand in hand.
By coincidence the day we overshoot the world's biocapacity happens to fall in a month, August, that seems to have become synonymous with spectacular "natural" disasters. No self-respecting climate scientist will claim a direct cause and effect link between a single weather event and the warming climate. But there is a very high level of confidence in saying that we will face more and more extreme events of the kind that have caused massive upheaval this month, from the vast floods in Pakistan to the mudslides in China.
drive from www.guardian.co.uk
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Battling Murray stays on course in Cincinnati
August 23rd, 2010 by author1
Andy Murray's stunning Toronto triumph over Roger Federer last weekend seemed like a distant memory as the Scot struggled to book his place in the third round of the Cincinnati Masters last night.
Often looking woefully out of sorts, Murray needed two hours and nine minutes to defeat the French world number 58 Jeremy Chardy and move into the next round where he will face Latvia's Ernests Gulbis.
Murray described his day's work as "frustrating" and admitted: "Up to 6-3 and 4-3 I was feeling fine, I wasn't making any mistakes and he was just going for everything and making lots of errors. I didn't serve particularly well but it was more the way I was hitting the ball from the back of the court. I was hitting the ball short, I wasn't moving my legs at all and he got into a bit of rhythm."
Even by Murray's own inconsistent standards his second set lapse was dramatic as he lost three service games in a row before rallying in the decisive set to finally chisel out a 6-3 6-7 6-2 success.
Murray had looked set to ease into the third round with the minimum of fuss after rifling through a dominant first set in which he conceded just three points on his serve. The Scot grabbed the crucial break in the sixth game when a sliced return forced Chardy to net and at that point the error-strewn Frenchman seemed likely to capitulate quickly.
After missing two set points on the Chardy serve at 3-5, Murray duly fired a pair of aces to hold to love and take the first set with little sign of the problems that would soon afflict him.
The second set was an entirely different matter for Murray who would lose his serve three times in succession and ultimately gift-wrap a way back into the match for his opponent.
Despite drawing first blood with a superb backhand cross-court winner to break for a 3-2 lead, it was the first of an extraordinary sequence of six consecutive breaks as both players struggled. Murray served for the match at 5-4 and held a single match point only to be broken back and pushed into the tie-break, where the Scot lost six points in a row to allow Chardy to take the breaker 7-3.
Murray recovered for the third set, starting it by holding to love before Chardy called a time-out for treatment to a right foot problem. Murray broke for 3-1 and managed to step up to finally see off his tiring opponent.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
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