minute, leadership challenge at the minute, tory mp5 would leadership challenge at the minute, tory mps would end up bachinger theresa may. but again, let's see where we are. you theresa may. but again, let's see where we are. you are a theresa may. but again, let's see where we are. you are a brave man to make such statement —— backing theresa may. and finally back to the daily telegraph. we need somebody with a technical mind to step in and help us with this story. hackers huack help us with this story. hackers hijack thousands of government websites to mine bitcoin. you're looking at me! it is to do with the internet! that's all i've got. what i know is that it takes a lot of processing power to mine crypto currencies. and it seems that different government websites are being harnessed to bring that processing power. you can use the metaphor. it is the equivalent, we know that sometimes your broadband gets nicked by your neighbour. these

are very thorough neighbours with a million password at their disposal, this is them effectively borrowing the broadband from an attire neighbourhood, city, town, whatever, to create the processing power needed. more insidiously, there may be some kind of virus infection. there are questions for government to answer, not least that the information commissioner's office is one of the websites... they must survive a laugh when they that. one of the websites... they must survive a laugh when they thatm is also pointing out that there are easy steps that the government can ta ke easy steps that the government can take to stop it happening. we will do that later, i am so relieved that story is over! that's it for the papers this hour. don't forget you can see the front pages of the papers online on the bbc news website. it's all there for you, seven days a week, at bbc.co.uk/papers, and if you miss the programme any evening you can watch it

later on bbc iplayer. but tony and caroline will be back at 11:30pm with a view more stories, maybe not from telegraph! now it's time for meet the author. two children are inseparable. theyire tom apart by an accident; late in life they meet again. then we're taken into a parallel world, where they meet in middle—age and have a passionate affair. then another, in which they marry young but confront unhappiness. they are ivy and abe, and in elizabeth enfield's novel, each of these stories reveals a part of their character as if all of us aren'tjust who we are here and now, but are always carrying with us the weight of the oldest question of all — what if? welcome. in this book, we are reminded that life and your fate can change

in the blink of an eye. do you think of that as being reassuring or alarming? i think it's both but i think it's one of those tantalising thoughts that people have a lot, that sort of "what if i'd done this" and "what if i'd done that," and i think the thought is very alarming, especially if you've based your whole life or you've lived your whole life dependent on one route you've gone down. but i actually think the exploration of it, which i've tried to do in the book, is less alarming because i think that life... there are a lot of themes to the book, notjust the issue of the relationship between the two people, but i think life has a habit of turning out as it's going to turn out, and those paths not taken have a sort of way of rejoining almost, so that you can look back and think, "if i hadn't done, that my life might have been very

different," but very often it's not. it's similar. that is the reassuring answer, but what's interesting about ivy and abe of course — the couple we follow and then go backwards with in this book — is that it's not so much what they have done, decisions they've made, it's about things that have happened that are beyond their control, an accident for example when they are children, that throws them apart. a lot of it is accidental, so they're not to blame, or it is not something they have done that's produced good or bad, it's just stuff that happened. i've tried to work in... there's something else in that, that there are two things in the book that abe's life... so the two people have different things going on in their lives and abe's life, as you said, is there's an accident which happens in each of his parallel lives and it always has a different effect. so it's a completely random accident. whenever it happens, the effect of that accident plays out differently. and against that, i wanted

something that was more sort of set in the stars, if you like. so ivy has something which is — when i was writing it, i was thinking what can she have that's just almost immutable, that's not going to suffer the same random effects, so she has something in her genes which also plays out, which i don't want to give too much away, but that was my thing of what can you have in your life that is absolutely set that you can't affect, and that seemed to me like it's something you're born with, your cards are marked, your genetic card is marked, and that's going to play out no matter what happens really in the rest of the world, the way that it will. we don't want to give too much away but we can say that we see them operating in parallel worlds. i mean they're children, then they meet when they are much, much older, elderly really. then there are two other episodes when they're in midlife, and we see these things almost acting simultaneously. it is inevitable when this book

is reviewed that people will look back to that film sliding doors and say, "oh, that's the kind of thing we are talking about here." people will remember that movie. as you say, ivy and abe meet again and again, and it's like sliding doors but not in that it's not that same time that might have gone differently, it is at different times of their lives. they are children, they're in their 70s, in their 60s, in their 50s, 40s, 30s. we go right through, and within those chapters we have a little bit of background and a bit of information so we know what that particular life to date, how it's been slightly different than it was to another version. you are writing a fascinating story because it's absorbing, you know, what will happen in this circumstance and how does it compare with what's happened before or what's to come. were you conscious at all, when you were writing the story and as the novel developed, that you wanted to say something about the nature of life

oi’ oui’ own experiences, or how we look at our emotional lives, or were you just saying i want to tell a good story? both. ithink... you know, one of the premises of this novel was i gathered a lot of stories of, a, people who'd had relationships that they had thought maybe if i'd met someone at another time it might have played out differently. so the circumstances of their life at that particular time had affected a particular relationship. and, b, that almost everyone i suppose, especially as they reach the end of their lives, and the stance at the end of ivy and abe's lives has a sort of slight... not really a yearning but a wistfulness. and i don't mean a deep sad wistfulness but a slight nostalgic "i wonder what might have happened..." a natural curiosity. yes, a natural curiosity. "what if i hadn't done that?" i think generally people think, "i'm glad that i didn't because my life

has turned out fine." i'm interested in the names, ivy and abe. both very simple and almost very intimate. you know, my friends, ivy and abe. you can think of them. there's nothing artificial about them. it's the kind of question readers always want to know. how did you come to ivy and abe? well, i started actually, and there are traces of this this still in the book, i started with robert and eleanor because i wanted names that i could change and give a variation of. and then when i finished the book, i decided it was too confusing and ijust wanted names that were easily recognisable, not unusual, not "how do you spell that," but also unusual so that each time you met them it was obvious it was them. it wasn't another tom, dick or harry, or sarah or kate. it was like, "oh, it's ivy." then actually on the page, they look... they look nice together. they look sort of right. i like the way that

words look on a page. i love the way they look on the cover of the book. you talk about the cover, it's interesting because you've got the names on scrabble tiles and a heart on another tile. it's a lovely idea because we all know how infuriating and how wonderful that game is according to how the tiles fall. exactly. it's a lovely analogy for the story really. exactly and you can, you know, if you were playing scrabble, they might land anywhere on the board, they might repeat themselves on the board so it is a great sort of metaphor for what the book is about. i come back to the idea of alternative lives, which were always waiting out there for us and we could have taken. how did the idea come to you? it came... i mean, i'd love to say there was a eureka moment but there wasn't. it came... i sort of am constantly collecting people's stories so from reading the paper, from listening to the radio, listening to television,

talking to people, and i sort of ended up with this collection of stories which was the sort of theme running through them all was, you know, is there a right person or a right time. you've written a lot of short stories so your mind, in a way, you know, for some years, has been used to that idea of taking a lovely little episode and constructing a beautifully chiselled story, and this book, it seems to me, has a lot of that skill in it. you've put a lot of these things together and say, hang on a minute, there's a big mosaic here which hangs together. it was lovely to write from that point of view because it did feel much more like initially i'm writing a series of short stories but there is a thread of a lifetime and of similar circumstances which runs through them all. but i was almost able to let the characters live their life at a particular moment without worrying about the before or after, and then thinking about that afterwards.

elisabeth enfield, author of ivy & abe, thanks very much. thank you. hello there. sunday was a better day than saturday for most with more sunshine despite it being colder and blustery. this evening, wintry showers will continue in western areas but it will turn frosty and clear skies in the east. you can see the wintry showers coming down from the northwest in the cold maritime air stream so it will be cold tonight. tomorrow as well. plenty of snow in the west, particularly western scotland and northern ireland where the accumulations will mount up. the odd one travelling through the cheshire gap into the midlands but generally central and southern and eastern

parts and scotland should be dry but cold. watch out for the ice on monday morning. monday is not too bad, a ridge of high pressure come in from the south—west ahead of this system which will arrive on monday evening and overnight. monday itself, cold but a good amount of sunshine around. a few wintry showers in the western hills, a bit drier in northern ireland by the end of the day but the wind will pick up ahead of this front is sweeping in the evening to bring a mixture of rain, sleet and snow. some disruptive snow likely as it moves eastwards over the high ground of northern england, the pennines and central and southern scotland. it will be windy as well with gales of up to 60 mph particular over the hills and in exposure. tuesday morning could have some disruption from the snow

and ice in the north, central and southern scotland. keep tuned to the weather forecast on tuesday morning before heading out. the east will stay quite damp at the front clears, but the west it will brighten up with sunshine and wintry showers. we do it all again into wednesday, the next system coming in from the south—west bringing windy weather with gales and some rain, sleet and snow. the sleet and snow will be confined to the hills of the far north of england and scotland with a bit less cold air associated with the system but a lot of rain, something slightly milder in the south but still cold in the north. this is bbc news. the headlines at 11: the international development secretary threatens to cut off state funding to oxfam over its handling of the prostitution scandal involving aid workers. if the moral leadership at the top

of the organisation isn't there then we of the organisation isn't there then we cannot have you as a partner. a russian passenger plane has crashed shortly after taking off from moscow, killing all 71 people on board. three britons have been killed in a helicopter crash in the grand canyon in the united states. theresa may and senior ministers are to give speeches setting out the future relationship the uk wants with the eu after brexit. also in the next hour: great britain's andrew musgrave makes history at the winter olympics in pyeongchang. scotland fight back to earn a first win in this year's six nations