The original artwork from Rolling Stones album Let It Bleed is to be sold for up to £40,000.
The 1969 sleeve was styled like a stacking record player with a clock face, pizza, film-reel can and a tyre piled beneath the glace cherry-decked cake. It will be sold by auction house Bonhams next month as part of an entertainment memorabilia sale.
Designer Robert Brownjohn was commissioned to create the image by his friend, guitarist Keith Richards. The over-the-top cake on the cover is decorated with cherries, silver balls, trails of pink and green icing and wedding cake-style figures of the band. The cover regularly features in polls of the greatest sleeves of all time and was chosen for a set of Royal Mail stamps depicting classic album covers.
State-of-the-art cemetery
The Lac Hong Vien Cemetery in Hanoi is where Vietnam’s rising middle class is dying to flaunt its bling: a new cemetery at the end of a golden-gated Highway to Eternity.
The cemetery is bringing in tomb buyers by the busload to choose state-of-the-art resting places for themselves and their dearly departed. Relatives can purchase afterlife gifts – from flowers to boiled chickens to expensive cognac – by the click of a mouse. Cemetery staff take the items to the tombs and send videos or photos of the display by email.
The cemetery hopes to cash in by selling upmarket burial plots it claims will give high status beyond the grave. Vietnamese honour their ancestors by burning incense and placing offerings on graves that are thought to provide spiritual sustenance in the afterlife.
Elephants bee-ware!
When it comes to protecting African plantations from elephants, a British biologist has discovered that buzzing bees will keep the beasts at bay.
Lucy King, a researcher at Oxford University, has been honoured by the United Nations Environment Programme for devising a wire fence connected to apiaries that begin to buzz when an elephant trips the wire. Weighing some seven tonnes, the African Savannah elephant may be the biggest land animal on the planet, but it is terrified of bees and makes off at the first hum of the insects which are attracted to the sensitive areas around their eyes and inside their trunks.
Ms King’s discoveries have enabled several Kenyan villages to protect their plantations from herds of elephants which often ruin their fields and deprive the local populations of their livelihood.
Bond auction
The naval jacket of James Bond creator Ian Fleming was sold at auction yesterday for almost double its estimated price.
The coat sold for £13,750 at Bonhams, in London. Mr Fleming wore the coat during the Dieppe Raid of 1942 when he was in the Naval Intelligence Division.
He later presented it to his friend Ivar Bryce who gave it to his niece, Janet, who married David Mountbatten, the third Marquess of Milford Haven. His great nephew, Lord Mountbatten, sold the jacket.