Halifax Building Society is so embarrassed about the 30,000-odd trees that had to be cut down to provide the paper for its record-breaking conversion mailshot that it is paying for 30,000 saplings to be planted in the UK. The Halifax Woodland Initiatives kicks off today and involves members of two UK environmental charities, the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers (BTCV) and Groundwork.
The Halifax mailshot is Royal Mail’s largest single job and will use more than 32 million items in 8 million envelopes, requiring 329,000 mailbags and more than 70,000 staff.Gren Folwell, Halifax deputy chief executive, says: “I am acutely aware of the amount of paper that will be used during the conversion process and that is why I am thrilled to be involved in the first of a series of Halifax woodland initiatives.”Allied Domecq is helping to get the Vietnamese wine industry back on its feet and has just sold 3,000 cases of the first wine made in the country since the French colonial days.The British company was granted a licence for a joint venture with a winery in Ninh Thuan province two years ago and brought in British and Australian wine experts to advise on making the new plonk.The province is at the heart of the country’s grape-growing area, which already produces around 35,000 tons of grapes a year. A London-based spokesman for Allied Domecq says they have used the Cardinal grape to produce three new wines, all light and semi-sweet and designed to appeal to the Vietnamese palate.”The first is a sparkling wine, the second a white fruity still wine, rather like Chablis, and the third is a red, which tastes a bit like Beaujolais Nouveau,” says the spokesman.Sadly, he does not think the wines will be available in the UK and he does not know what the wines are called. If they ever do market the stuff over here, one of my colleagues has suggested a possible name: Ho Chi Vin.John Magill, the partner from accountants Deloitte & Touche who has been investigating the “homes for votes” scandal at Dame Shirley Porter’s Westminster City Council, has been promoted.Deloitte has made him head of its forensic department. For those of you fortunate enough not to have come into contact with such a thing, forensic accountants are used by audit firms to burrow into companies where naughtiness has been discovered.

They are widely used to investigate company crashes and corporate fraud and their evidence is often used in court.Mr Magill will continue his work at Westminster, where he was appointed Auditor to the Council in order to investigate the sale of three cemeteries for 15p and allegations of gerrymandering.The Westminster probe, it looks at the moment, will run and run.Sheila Masters, a partner with KPMG who makes Nicola Horlick look shy and retiring, is determined to win the election for vice-president of the Institute of Chartered Accountants this year.La Masters, who is also a member of the Court of the Bank of England, has tried and failed to be elected to this post a number of times before. She is often described by colleagues as “the woman who runs the country” because of her many high-powered roles.The only obstacle she faces this year is fellow candidate Graham Ward, the affable, rugby-playing former boxing blue and partner of Price Waterhouse. Mr Ward has also racked up an impressive number of titles, including head of the London Society of Chartered Accountants. In his manifesto Mr Ward sums his philosophy up with the slogan “Team”, or “Together Every chartered accountant Achieves More”.Votes from the 89 council members of the ICA have to be in by 3 February, with the result announced two days later.

Personally I’m backing Ms Masters, if only to pep up what is otherwise a notoriously dull organisation.An ICA insider tells me: “The boys are absolutely terrified of her.”. When Elvis Presley met Colonel Tom Parker in a Memphis restaurant in 1955, it was the start of a relationship that would transform their lives and see the creation of a 20th- century cultural phenomenon. Parker, the one-time carnival huckster and country music promoter, would become almost as famous and revered as his protege, the teenage hillbilly who became the King of Rock’ n’Roll. For good or ill he would oversee the creation of the Presley legend and guide the singer and actor’s career through its many stages of birth, renewal and decline, until Elvis’s death in 1977.
It was Parker who groomed the teenage rebel for a new role as the acceptable face of American showbiz. He oversaw the transformation from “Elvis the Pelvis” to the Hollywood star of countless lightweight movies. Gradually it came to be perceived that perhaps the Colonel was too protective and was the root cause of the erosion of Presley’s talents and stature.But this was only in the eyes of critics and those fans – like John Lennon – who saw Elvis as crucial to the development of le vrai rock’n'roll. Millions of less demanding Elvis fans around the world queued up to see the movies like GI Blues (1960) and Viva Las Vegas (1964) and continued to swoon at his feet, white spangled jumpsuit and all.But Col Thomas Andrew Parker – the all-American father figure – wasn’t the first to discover Elvis He wasn’t a colonel and he wasn’t even born in America.

His origins were steeped in mystery.He always said he was born in West Virginia, but it was revealed in the Sixties (by a Dutch researcher and later explored in Elvis, 1981, Albert Goldman’s hard-hitting biography) that he was born Andreas Cornelius Van Kuijk in Breda, Holland in 1909, the fifth of a family of nine children. His somewhat tyrannical father Adam ran a livery stable, and as a child Andreas loved looking after the horses. Fascinated by the circus, he’d drive around town on a cart promoting the local show and tried to see every performance.His father died when Andreas was 16 and he went to live with an uncle who was a ship’s captain. Under his auspices he sailed for New York and returned to Holland in 1927, bringing gifts for his mother but refusing to reveal what he’d been doing in the States. He returned to America for good in May 1929 and his family in Holland never heard from him again until they saw his photograph in a magazine in 1961.Andreas had learned to speak English as he explored the States, hitching rides on railroad cars. After a stint as a salesman he joined the US army in 1930 and served with the coastal artillery at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. It has been suggested he assumed his new name from a Captain Thomas Parker he met in the service.Given his love of the circus it was natural he gravitated to the American version, and he began working for the Royal American Shows, a touring carnival which included everything from roller-coaster rides to animal acts and freak shows.

He stayed for some ten years, learning everything there was to know about showbusiness bunkum and the art of publicity and promotion.Tales of his stunts and exploits have been gleefully recounted – like that of Col Parker and His Amazing Dancing Chickens. Live animals were regarded as tax exempt as they needed feeding. A pair of chickens were kept idle at the side of the stage, until Parker decided one night to recruit them into an act. He concealed a hot plate under their feet and set them to work – dancing animatedly to the tune of “Turkey in the Straw”.In 1932, while working with the carnival in Tampa, Florida, he met and married Marie Ross who became his wife and bookkeeper. During the Second World War he was deferred military service and in 1940 took a temporary job as Tampa’s town dog catcher, after the failure of a projected Pony Circus.