His first great United side, in the early 1990s, was constructed around the simultaneous blossoming of some exceptional home-grown talents, among them David Beckham, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes and Gary Neville. There are no comparable prodigies waiting to burst on the scene. This time, revitalising the squad will cost money, yet Ferguson has been warned that a transfer kitty depleted by the £27m capture of Wayne Rooney will stretch only to a goalkeeper. That would be a good place to start.Better keepers than Roy Carroll would have struggled to stop the twister from Tiago that brought Chelsea their equaliser to Ruud van Nistelrooy’s opener. But when viewed in the context of his other lapses, the failure to move for a ball struck from 33 yards must count against him. It is hard to imagine Petr Cech conceding in such fashion, and that is the standard to which United must aspire, five long years after Peter Schmeichel left.Carroll was not helped by the inability of his central defenders to close down Tiago. Rio Ferdinand and Wes Brown played with the distracted air of players lacking concentration.

Ferdinand’s display was untimely given his recent “accidental” meeting with the Chelsea and former United chief executive, Peter Kenyon, and his reported demands for £120,000 a week.Centre-backs often do not peak until their thirties, and it could be United need an older, more dominant figure at the heart of their back line Someone like John Terry or, dare one say it, Jaap Stam. There has long been talk of Roy Keane dropping back to perform that role. Against Chelsea, rather as Ferdinand found Eidur Gudjohnsen too hot to handle, Keane struggled to keep pace with Frank Lampard. Think back to 1999 and the year of United’s treble; Keane, then so inspirational, looks half-paced by comparison today.There were signs on Tuesday that time is also catching up with Scholes. Darren Fletcher, who twanged the bar at 1-1, showed in last season’s FA Cup semi-final defeat of Arsenal that he can impose himself on a game, but he needs to show such authority over a sustained period.In attack, Ferguson has been unlucky with injuries to Van Nistelrooy, Alan Smith and Louis Saha.

Van Nistelrooy scored a trademark goal against Chelsea but is patently still short of fitness.The players deputed to break from midfield rarely came close enough to the Dutchman, while Rooney, for all his flashes of skill and explosive shooting, was often divorced from the action in Giggs’ left-sided role.With all his forwards fit, Ferguson would surely be reflecting on a better goal tally than 56, around 20 adrift of Arsenal and Chelsea. He trained as an engineer, but began to have epic dreams and followed their injunction to study throat-singing in Tuva. Okna’s story is fascinating: his name means “White Road”, and the road in question was the long hike back from exile in Siberia to his parents’ homeland in Kalmukia: it was during that hike that he was born in 1957. No wonder Bj?is rushing to collaborate with her.Next up was the Mongolian throat-singer Okna Tsahan Zam, whose superb CD took us by surprise last year. This wasn’t a solo singer: it was a pullulating group of the most ill-assorted spirits you could imagine, all contained within the same small body.This was Inuit throat-singing, normally practised by women in pairs to while away the long Arctic nights, but here performed in the unique style this young Canadian has patented.

Shamans are cool this year, but would Contemporary Music Network’s latest wheeze be anything more than stylish window-dressing? When Tanya Tagaq Gillis skipped on stage, squeaked a girlish “Hi!” and launched into a breathy song in infant tones, one feared the worst.
But then she began to sway and, without warning, a new voice joined in, grunting as though from the bottom of a deep cavern. Then another, jostling for space between the first two, heaving and groaning. And while the young bass Charbel Mattar lacked the truly cavernous bottom pitches, he more than made up for this with the vibrant generosity of his middle and upper range.Meanwhile Aci, cast in true Baroque high camp fashion as a soprano ranging far above his lady love, fell to Carolyn Sampson, who made something especially radiant of her lilting aria, contrasting her own melancholy with the happiness of the birds.Granted, the work lacks the formal and dramatic neatness of the later Acis and Galatea as it also lacks the textural variety of added choruses. But what invention, ardour, unexpectedness! Naples can have heard nothing like it before Festival runs to 28 May (020-7222 1061). Indeed, his darkly scored aria after Galatea has escaped his clutches and thrown herself into the sea evokes his despair in a series of colossal leaps over a range of nearly three octaves. But although the story, out of Ovid, is broadly the same, the music is entirely different – and even more remarkable.
Or so it seemed in this rare performance, launching the 21st Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music in St John’s, Smith Square.

The introductory music, contrasting pastoral sonorities with dashing solo string passage work, already amounts to a concerto grosso in itself – with the strings of The English Concert directed from the first violin with characteristic fire by Andrew Manze.Yet scarcely have we been introduced to the lovers than Galatea plunges into an anguished aria of apprehension, with keening oboe and bassoon obligati, sounding like a number out of a Bach passion, especially as delivered here by the contralto Hilary Summers.The cyclops Polifemo is a far more menacing character than in Acis and Galatea. Is there no end to the dazzling achievements of Handel’s three and a half years in Italy in his mid-twenties?

Is there no end to the dazzling achievements of Handel’s three and a half years in Italy in his mid-twenties? One might have imagined that the so-called Serenata Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, composed for a grand Neapolitan wedding in 1708, was a preliminary version of his much-loved later English pastoral drama Acis and Galatea, of 1718. To our shame, the UK has one of the highest rates of ‘excess’ winter deaths in the European Union and we do not want the same needless suffering to happen throughout our hotter summers too.”How to stay cool* If you can, stay out of the sun and avoid going out in the hottest part of the day (11am -3pm).* If you must go out, wear a hat and loose clothes, preferably cotton.* If you are going to be outside for some time, take plenty of water with you.* Take cool showers or baths and splash yourself several times a day with cold water.* Try to eat more cold food, particularly salads and fruit, which contain water.* Look after older people who are more prone to the effects of heat Check regularly on ageing relatives and neighbours.. While Britain is ahead in its thinking and planning for a heatwave, we would like the Government to invest in the much-needed vital research to ensure these plans would actually work in such an emergency. Increasing numbers of older people in the UK and their vulnerability to hot weather means they are at particular risk in the event of a heatwave. The plan would help ensure that the organisations involved in providing health and social care services knew what actions to take if a heatwave arrived.The plan includes close monitoring of heat-related illnesses reported to GPs and NHS Direct, which would trigger different levels of alert so the NHS and other public bodies can react as temperatures rise.Paul Cann, director of policy at Help the Aged, said: “Lack of preparedness in the 2003 heatwave across Europe caused a major social, medical and political crisis. In continental Europe an estimated 27,000 died because of the heat.