A father told how he was left fighting for his life after being bitten by an adder during a walk with his family at a country park.

Minutes after being bitten on a finger by the foot-long black snake, Matthew Popov, 36, said his hand swelled to twice its normal size and he was gasping for breath.

Mr Popov, a scaffolder, from Frindsbury, near Strood, had been enjoying a stroll with his wife and two children in the Riverside Country Park at Rainham, Kent, on Sunday when he tried to pick the snake up to move it to the side of the path out of harm’s way. He was given an antidote in hospital.

Favourite sweet

The juicy strawberry has beaten the fizzy cola bottle to be named Britain’s favourite sweet, ac-cording to a survey.

The cola bottle, which has held the top spot for years, was beaten by the berry outsider in a poll of more than 2,000 people by woolworths.co.uk.

The liquorice allsort was voted the UK’s least favourite sweet, attracting just seven per cent of the vote.

Graduate tax

The British government is likely to decide against a “graduate tax” to pay for higher education, it was reported.

Ministers are thought to believe that it would be unfair for high earning graduates to pay back more than the cost of their degree, a senior Tory source told the BBC.

There are also concerns that such a tax will lead to a “brain drain”– with graduates leaving the country to avoid the payment, the broadcaster reported.

Leadership race

Former British climate change secretary Ed Miliband has won the support of a second trade union in a week in his bid to become the next leader of the Labour Party.

Unison’s national political committee gave its support to Mr Miliband following a hustings earlier this month with all five candidates.

The executive of the GMB union made a similar nomination last week. Other candidates include his brother David. The result is due to be announced at the start of Labour’s annual conference in Manchester on September 25.

Tweet home

Aliens may be using a cosmic version of Twitter to contact us – but for decades we have been missing their “tweets”, it has been claimed.

ET is more likely to be sending out short, directed messages than continuous signals beamed in all directions, say experts.

“This approach is more like Twitter and less like War And Peace,” said Californian physicist Dr James Benford, president of Microwave Sciences Inc.

Wolf whistle

A champion wolf whistler has been crowned in Northern Ireland.

The rural town of Irvinestown, Co Fermanagh, witnessed the bid to find the planet’s finest exponent of the traditional builders’ greeting.

Around a dozen hopefuls challenging for the prestigious title clambered on top of specially erected scaffolding on the main street to show their appreciation of a parade of passing beauties. Local butcher Stephen Miller claimed the title.

Mistaken identity

An aquarist called Jamie Oliver believes he was confused with his celebrity namesake after being upgraded to business class on a flight to America.

Mr Oliver, 38, the deputy curator of the Sea Life London Aquarium, thinks British Airways (BA) assumed he was the television chef when the offer was made.

But Mr Oliver, who was on a trip to work at an Arizona aquarium, said airline staff were happy to go ahead with the upgrade when he boarded the flight from London Heathrow to Phoenix. A BA spokeswoman said: “We do not have a policy of upgrading celebrities.”

There goes my everything

Instruments used in Elvis Presley’s post-mortem examina-tion and embalming are going up for auction in Chicago, includ-ing the toe tag used after the original was stolen amid the chaos at the hospital following his death.

All of the items will be available, from rubber gloves and forceps to a comb and eye liner. Even the coffin invoice and the hanger used to hold Presley’s burial suit will be sold.

The items were saved by the senior embalmer at the Memphis Funeral Home, which prepared the singer’s body.

Not a prayer

Vienna’s archdiocese has ruled that a confessional where be-lievers confess their sins cannot be turned into a sauna.

Internet bidding on one described as ideal for conversion into a one-person sauna, a small bar or a children’s playhouse was ended when the archdiocese stepped in.

A spokesman said that auctioning “objects which were used for dispensing the sacraments is not acceptable”.

Extra topping

Ordering a pizza may have saved George Linn’s life.

He had just suffered a heart attack when the delivery man knocked on the door of his Colorado home.

The delivery man happened to be a paramedic recently returned from Iraq and performed CPR on Mr Linn and revived him.