Woman's Hour - 19/01/2010

With Jane Garvey. Stories of Britain's obsession with booze are well known; just this weekend it was revealed that adults in Scotland are drinking the equivalent of 46 bottles of vodka each, in a year. At the same time UK teenagers as a whole come second in a European table of binge drinkers - only Bulgarians drink more. So what to do? As part of the Winning Women's Votes series, Jane asks how, and if, we need to change Britain's drinking culture. With Dr Fiona Measham and Professor Ian Gilmore. When the journalist Simon Carr's wife Susie died of cancer in 1994, he was left to raise his five-year-old son Alexander on his own. Soon after, his eleven-year-old son from a previous marriage came to live them too. His few rules and 'just say yes' approach inspired a bestselling memoir. Ten years on, it's now spawned a major film starring Clive Owen, The Boys Are Back. Simon joins Jane to talk about the film, father-son relationships, and the merits of his parenting approach. Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang made her debut at the age of ten with the Norwegian Radio Orchestra. Since then, she has been a soloist with orchestras in Scandinavia, England, Germany, the US and Singapore. Vilde performs live in the studio and shares some of the secrets of her life in music. Once a place strictly reserved for formal occasions and Mother's best china, it seems that the formal dining room has become a largely unused space. It's certainly the most popular room to 'knock through', with an estimated 500,000 demolished last year. If this trend continues, the traditional dining room could be extinct by 2020. Jane weighs up the benefits of open-plan living versus a separate, dedicated dining room with the journalist Rosie Millard and Barbara Chandler, a design writer.