Considered from the perspective of Germany's domestic priorities, the proposed composition of the new government could have been much worse The nominations have a consensual feel. Germany's chancellor-to-be, Angela Merkel, opened formal coalition negotiations with the Social Democrats yesterday, embarking on a marathon that is not expected to end until mid-November She had earlier made public her nominees for the cabinet. "Giraffe Manor" became a fixture for wealthy tourists seeking giraffe-related experiences, among them Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall, Marlon Brando and Brooke Shields. The Giraffe Centre, which has a special walkway and thatched tower where giraffes can be hand-fed, is now run by Betty's son Rick Anderson.Though she often visited the Giraffe Centre, Betty returned to the US in the 1980s, when she married Vice-Admiral George Steele, whom she had met on safari Summing up her life, she remarked: "I have one philosophy.

You are only sorry for what you don't do, so try everything on for size and wear what fits."Peter Marren. In 1974 the couple purchased the manor at Langati, a stone house built in 1932 by a toffee magnate, Sir David Duncan, as the centrepiece of a farm for breeding horses. The manor stands in 150 acres of private forest and natural grassland only eight miles from the centre of Nairobi.After Jock's death Betty Leslie-Melville turned their home into a "grande r?dence" where paying guests would often find an inquisitive giraffe poking its head through a second-floor window.

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As a profile in her home-town Baltimore Sun put it, she had "scampered across two continents like the heroine of a picaresque novel, leaving a glittering wake of crazy and glamorous stories".Born Betty McDonnell in Baltimore, in 1927, she attended Johns Hopkins University, then became a model, appearing in a beer advertisement, before setting up and running a nursery school with her sister.

She first visited Africa in 1958 with her second husband, Dancy Bruce. The couple divorced after Betty met Jock Leslie-Melville, a Kenyan citizen and grandson of a Scottish earl, who ran a tour company. She fell in love with the "Technicolor world" of Kenya and the two settled there, Dancy setting up a non-hunting safari business. More animal stories followed: Elephant Have Right of Way (1973), There's a Rhino in the Rose Bed, Mother (1973), That Nairobi Affair (1975) and Walter Warthog (1989), a children's story about the tame warthog they named after their friend Walter Cronkite, the CBS news anchorman. The books helped to raise more funds for the Giraffe Centre they set up at Langata in 1983.After Jock's death from brain cancer the following year, Betty wrote A Falling Star (1986), her account of the "twenty magical, scintillating, exuberant years full of mutual joy and adventure and accomplishment" she had spent with her "Jockieduk". There are now some 500 animals, four times as many as 30 years ago, and their future is reasonably secure.As part of their fund-raising efforts, Betty and Jock Leslie-Melville collaborated on a series of books about animals, most of them characterised by Betty's rather breathless style.