T his was a really tough test for me, as a wholefood chef who cares deeply about quality. In this instance, animal welfare, provenance and processing were my main concerns, and there’s disappointingly little transparency on display. Some products claim to use British pork, a term that in itself has little, if any, meaning, not least in terms of traceability, sustainability or welfare; others boast of higher welfare standards without any certification. This week’s best bargain and best overall are therefore merely acceptable, rather than exceptional.
Most of the sandwiches feature reformed ham, which is bulked out with phosphates and water, but some higher-quality ones are made with real ham – that is, sliced meat without added water; some of the best are made with shredded ham hock. Every single product contains additives, however. As for flavour, most are good enough only to fill a hole, but a few are genuinely tasty: moist, flavourful and fresh. And please butter your bread, supermarkets! Mayonnaise is not a substitute.
The best supermarket ham and cheese sandwiches
Best overall : M&S honey-roast ham & cheddar cheese
★★★☆☆
Light brown oatmeal and malted barley bread neatly filled with a double layer of ham and cheddar, with one side spread with soft cheese and the other with mayo. The only product in the test with clear welfare standards and the fewest additives (three). Contains palm oil.
Best bargain : Aldi Specially Selected Ayrshire cured ham hock with farmhouse cheddar
★★☆☆☆
A thick, square-cut doorstep made with malted bread filled with shredded ham hock, cheddar, spinach, mayo and sweet chutney. Meaty and relatively good value. No animal welfare data, other than it’s made with British pork, and it contains additives.
And the rest …
Waitrose oak-smoked ham & cheddar cheese
★★★☆☆
A sturdy malted bread sandwich filled with multiple layers of powerfully smoked British formed ham, one slice of mature cheddar and a surfeit of mayo. Seven additives, plus no welfare certification.
Morrisons the Best ham hock & farmhouse cheddar
★★☆☆☆
A thick, malted wheat bread doorstep stuffed with pulled ham hock, cheddar, spinach, mayonnaise and apple and pear chutney. A nice, handmade feel and balanced flavour, but no animal welfare details and five additives.
Tesco smoked ham & mature cheddar
★★☆☆☆
A classic, malted bread sandwich filled with a good amount of formed ham smoked over beechwood, which imparts a mild, sweet and nutty flavour. It’s soft, moist and has a generous slathering of mayonnaise, a thin slice of cheese and a hint of mustard. Contains six additives and palm oil; no animal welfare information.
Asda oak-smoked ham and cheese
★☆☆☆☆
Standard malted brown bread filled with a liberal amount of cheddar, medium oak-smoked formed ham and mayo. A good, firm bite and moist texture, but only subtle smokiness and tiringly dry bread. Contains several additives, and no welfare details.
Morrisons smoked ham & cheese
★☆☆☆☆
A utilitarian, sparsely filled malted bread sandwich with a few layers of subtly oak-smoked formed ham, mature cheddar and a thin smear of mayo. Five additives, and zero welfare information.
Sainsbury’s smoked ham & cheddar
★☆☆☆☆
Malted brown bread filled with a decent amount of wafer-thin formed ham and a good slice of medium mature cheddar, all moistened with mayonnaise. Contains four additives and, again, no animal welfare details.
Co-op ham & cheese sandwich
★☆☆☆☆
Fresh malted bread generously filled with British oak-smoked formed ham, mature cheddar and a thin spread of mayonnaise. Overpriced, underwhelming and six additives.
Unearthed Spanish serrano ham & cheese rosca
☆☆☆☆☆
A doughnut-shaped, cook-at-home pan de cristal “sourdough” containing multiple additives and a scant amount of ham, smoked bacon, cheese and tomato sauce. An elaborately awful and costly product that is all but inedible. No animal welfare data, five additives.
For more, read the best supermarket breakfast teabags
Ocean Vuong’s second novel is a 416‑page tour of the edgeland between aspirational fantasy and self-deception. It opens with a long slow pan over the fictional small town of East Gladness, Connecticut, beginning with ghosts that rise “as mist over the rye across the tracks” and ending on a bridge where the camera finds a young man called Hai –“19, in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light” – preparing to drown himself.
Instead of jumping from the bridge, Hai crosses it, to be adopted on the other side by 82-year-old Grazina, a woman suffering mid‑stage prefrontal lobe dementia. He will become her proxy grandson; they will be each other’s support in a crap world. It will be a disordered but productive relationship.
Grazina, born in Lithuania, “an old country, far away”, lives on a street known locally as the Devil’s Armpit, takes 14 pills a day, and always eats Stouffer’s Salisbury Steak for dinner. She needs a carer; Hai, a pillhead in remission but longing to be back in the arms of opioids, needs a more constructive narrative of himself. Between them they invent a role-playing game to bring her down from the destabilising hallucinations and insomniac panics of her disease. Then, as she sleeps, he quietly ransacks her cupboards for prescription medicines.
This is a huge novel in terms of where it directs our attention: from gay self-discovery to the uses of fiction; from the industrial farming of animals to the drive to write yourself free of the parental experience. It’s heartbreaking, heartwarming yet unsentimental, and savagely comic all at the same time. M John Harrison
£8.49 (RRP £9.99) – purchase at the Guardian bookshop
Fiction
Katabasis
RF Kuang
In Katabasis, hell is not a roiling pit of fire, it’s worse: “Hell is a campus.” Cambridge postgrads Alice Law and Peter Murdoch are here on a quest. They’re searching for their thesis supervisor, the recently deceased Professor Jacob Grimes. The victim of a grisly lab accident, Grimes has exploded, and not just in rage. His body is in bits, and his soul is in the queue for judgment. Without him, Alice and Peter’s academic futures are equally damned. Their plan is simple: sneak into the underworld and haul him back. It worked so well for Orpheus.
This is the 1980s: post-structuralism is eating meaning and theory is eating itself. Our dauntless duo are scholars in “analytic magick”, an archaic and volatile branch of the humanities where philosophy is actually useful (that’s Kuang’s joke, not mine; don’t sic the Nietzscheans on me).
The real dark magic in this book is self-delusion. As Alice and Peter wander the “eight courts of hell”, they come to realise how deeply they’ve internalised the extractive logic of the academy. They’ve been taught to mistake rivalry for strength, exploitation for meritocracy, privilege for prestige, and endurance for resilience. To thank the system that feeds on them. The lie was so simple: you can be the exception, if you’re willing to be exceptional.
The heretical glee of this novel is irrepressible. I escaped from my PhD 14 years ago, and it really did feel like an escape; it still does. This book reminded me why. It also reminded me how it felt to ascend from a hell of my own making and not look back. I read Katabasis in a single sitting and then slept the deep, unburdened sleep of someone who’d never even heard of Foucault. Beejay Silcox
£9.89 (RRP £10.99) – purchase at the Guardian bookshop
Fiction
Dream State
Eric Puchner
American author Eric Puchner’s latest novel is a colossus: a vast, bright behemoth of a book, panoramic as the Montana skyline. Dream State opens in 2004 with the image of a young woman, a month before her wedding, diving into a perfect lake whose “blue expanse of water” reflects the “overlapping peaks of the Salish range”. From this Edenic outset, it traverses decades, barrelling through our present day into a projected future: dipping in and out of the lives of a tight cast of characters as they succeed and fail; love and fall out of love; change and stay the same.
The young woman is Cece. She has stepped out of the lakeshore family home of Charlie Margolis, a cardiac anaesthesiologist to whom she’s engaged. She’s come to Montana early to put the finishing touches to the wedding plans before the guests, or even Charlie, arrive. In his absence, Charlie has deputed his best friend, Garrett, to lend a hand. Garrett appears on the lakeshore as Cece is swimming – and from there, events unfold more or less as we’d expect. Cece and Garrett move rapidly through antagonism into fascination; the wedding looms; and decisions taken in the heat of the moment profoundly shape the lives of all three characters from that point on.
Puchner tells his tale so compellingly, so engagingly, with such warmth and humour, that it’s not until you set the book down that you can appreciate the breadth and brilliance of what he’s done. Sarah Crown
£9.89 (RRP £10.99) – purchase at the Guardian bookshop
Fiction
Ripeness
Sarah Moss
Ripeness is structured in alternating narrative strands, both following an English woman called Edith: one as a septuagenarian living comfortably in the west of Ireland in the post-pandemic present, and another as a bookish, Oxford-bound 17-year-old travelling to Italy in the late 60s. These strands are initially connected by stories of babies given up. In the present, Edith’s best friend Méabh is contacted by an unknown older brother who was adopted and raised in America and now wants to “see where he comes from”. In the historical strand, Edith is travelling to help her older sister, a professional ballerina, pregnant with a child she will almost immediately relinquish. Together, a textured and affecting story about place and identity emerges.
Early on we learn that Edith has four passports – English, Irish, French and Israeli – and that her French-Jewish mother was granted refuge in England in 1941 while her grandparents and aunt were murdered in Nazi concentration camps. While her mother’s migration was driven by genocide and trauma, and her grandparents before had fled Ukraine for France, she and her sister were able to travel freely around Europe. But in the novel’s present, military aggression is again forcing migration. Edith reflects on the cyclical nature of conflict, noting that the “great grandparents of the people now fleeing Russian invasion and taking refuge here in the west of Ireland were the aggressors from whom her great-grandparents fled Ukraine”.
A central tension is established when Edith discovers that while Méabh is sympathetic to their village’s Ukrainian refugees, she is actively protesting at the use of a local hotel as emergency housing for African refugees. Edith is sickened and wonders briefly if she can remain friends with “someone who thinks the problem is refugees”. Quickly she decides she can; despite her personal connection to histories of genocide and displacement, her dismay at Méabh’s position fades.
The anger of Ripeness wanes too. But while its critiques of contemporary attitudes towards migration, and failures in historical thinking, and the ways some refugees are accepted while others are not, do lose some force, it remains a powerful and beautifully written story of family, friendship and identity. Arin Keeble
£8.49 (RRP £9.99) – purchase at the Guardian bookshop
Fiction
The Artist
Lucy Steeds
A love story wrapped in a mystery, Lucy Steeds’s vividly poetic debut novel begins cinematically and with a prophetic hint of myth: the arrival of a stranger on a dusty road, in his pocket a paper bearing the single-word summons, “Venez”. The year is 1920, in a Europe that is still under the pall of the war that should have ended all wars, and Steeds’s stranger is approaching a remote farmhouse in the Provençal village of Saint-Auguste where fabled painter Edouard Tartuffe – Tata, “the Master of Light” – lives with only his niece Ettie for company.
The newcomer is young Englishman Joseph Adelaide. Hoping to begin a new career as a writer on art, Joseph has petitioned Tartuffe for an interview. He asks more in hope than expectation, as Tartuffe is an enigma around whom myths swirl, and has shut himself away from the world for decades. But then the summons comes, and it seems that Joseph may begin his new life.
It soon becomes clear, however, that whoever scrawled that word of invitation, it was not Edouard Tartuffe. Joseph is far from welcome: the old painter, half-blind, monosyllabic and uncooperative, is at best indifferent and at worst violently hostile.
As Joseph makes a place for himself in the claustrophobic menage, he finds his attention turning to the increasingly insistent questions the household poses: not so much on art, but about the most private secrets of its inhabitants. Where does Ettie go at night? Why did Tata withdraw from the world? Coaxing the characters’ many secrets into the light, with each revelation Steeds brings just the right amount of new tension to bear on the narrative. Christobel Kent
£9.89 (RRP £10.99) – purchase at the Guardian bookshop
History
History
Some Men in London
Edited by Peter Parker
In May 1945, the British photographer John S Barrington was celebrating the end of the second world war in his own way. He pushed through “the crush in Piccadilly Circus, kissing every soldier, sailor and airman I could meet”, before rounding things off by deciding to “pick up superb sailor, take him to office and fuck him ‘silly’”.
This is the striking start to the lively first volume of Some Men in London, an anthology of gay men’s experiences in the mid-20th century collated by Peter Parker, whose previous books include biographies of Christopher Isherwood and JR Ackerley.
It comprises diary entries, letters, newspaper reports, extracts from novels and more, on a subject so alien at the time to polite society that many couldn’t even agree on what to call it. Conservative peer Earl Winterton said “homosexualism”, an internal Metropolitan police report applied the dainty tongs of a hyphen (“homo-sexuals”), while others opted for “pansies”. Winterton, a few years later, thought better of his linguistic liberalism: “I prefer the word ‘pervert’ to ‘homosexual’,” he said in the Lords in 1959, “because ‘homosexual’ is too friendly a word for these horrible people.”
Two qualities make an anthology stand out. The first is the quality of the extracts. There is exceptionally good writing here from, among others, Denton Welch, James Lees-Milne and JR Ackerley, lover of rough trade and the only writer who could create beauty from a diary account of his jailbird lover masturbating his beloved alsatian, Queenie.
The other key quality is the editing. Some Men in London is skilfully sequenced, juxtaposing Henry “Chips” Channon ’s casual ledger-card accounting of his conquests with sobering reports on arrests of working-class gay men, or following an extract from William Douglas Home’s 1947 play Now Barabbas … with the Evening Standard ’s hostile review (“the normal section of the audience giggled with embarrassment”). In all, this is one of the best anthologies I have ever read. John Self
£13.49 (RRP £14.99) – purchase at the Guardian bookshop
Food
Food
The Heart-Shaped Tin
Bee Wilson
Two months after her husband left in 2020, Bee Wilson was startled by the clatter of a baking tin falling on to the kitchen floor. In one way this doesn’t seem particularly remarkable: Wilson is an esteemed food writer who presumably has a surplus of kitchen utensils crammed into her bulging cupboards. This tin, though, was different. For one thing it was heart-shaped. For another, Wilson had used it to bake her wedding cake 23 years earlier, taking care to leave out the cherries because her husband-to-be loathed them. (This now strikes her as ominous: “Maybe a man who was so fussy about cherries was not the man for me.”) Lurking at the back of Wilson’s mind had been the thought that she would soon be using the heart-shaped tin to bake a cake for their silver wedding anniversary. But now here it was, lying dejectedly at her feet and, she couldn’t help noticing, spotted with rust.
In this delightful book, part memoir, part anthropological investigation, food writer Wilson explores the way that kitchen objects have the power to move, soothe and even reproach us. There’s the plate you feel compelled to eat off because it makes everything taste nicer, or that bowl you keep but can’t bear to use because it reminds you too much of the person who gave it to you.
It turns out that Wilson need not have worried that she was, in her words, going “mad” by ascribing personalities and human meaning to bits of wood and stainless steel. Magical thinking, the textbooks reassure her, is a universal aspect of human cultures. It also provides the propulsion for this engaging collection of 30-odd short essays organised around ordinary people’s complicated feelings for egg whisks and apple corers. Kathryn Hughes
£9.89 (RRP £10.99) – purchase at the Guardian bookshop
Music
Music
Bless Me Father
Kevin Rowland
In the summer of 1979, Dexys Midnight Runners were a band you would have been hard-pushed to describe as anything other than unique. Their sound was a pugilistic update of classic 60s soul, topped with frontman Kevin Rowland’s extraordinary vocals, impassioned to the point that he permanently sounded on the verge of tears.
Yet Rowland really doesn’t appear to have enjoyed being the mastermind of Dexys Midnight Runners at all during their 80s heyday. There were some standard problems: poor management, terrible contracts and intra-band turbulence. But there’s also the sense that Rowland was hellbent on snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The success of the 1982 single Come on Eileen – a transatlantic No 1 – is marred by his belief that he’s stolen its soul-meets-Irish-folk sound from a former Dexys member’s new band. When their ambitious next album, Don’t Stand Me Down, fails commercially, Rowland seems utterly crushed. He descends into a ruinous cocaine addiction, which is recounted in harrowing detail. By the early 90s, he’s effectively squatting in a bedsit: unable to pay his rent, his landlord has turned off the electricity and gas.
If anything, the reader could do with hearing more about what Rowland got right: the actual music Dexys released is almost uniformly magnificent, but here it often feels a little overshadowed, drowned out by the ructions surrounding its making, or by the author’s nagging sense of “what if?” But Bless Me Father is still powerful and oddly persuasive. Even as he seems to despair of himself, you wind up rooting for Rowland, never more so than when he conquers his addictions and releases his 1999 comeback album, My Beauty. A collection of cover versions, he promotes it while exploring his “feminine side”, in makeup, dresses and heels. The incredulity and hostility this provokes makes for sobering reading: a useful corrective to the current wave of rosy-hued 90s nostalgia. The album itself was reissued in 2020 to widespread acclaim, part of a fresh, if intermittent, wave of Dexys activity that sober and reflective Rowland seems less minded to find fault with: he ends Bless Me Father as content as you expect he’s ever going to be. Alexis Petridis
£11.04 (RRP £12.99) – purchase at the Guardian bookshop
Technology
Technology
How to Save the Internet
Nick Clegg
Clegg served as Meta’s vice-president and then president of global affairs from 2018 until January 2025, where he was responsible for bridging the very different worlds of Silicon Valley and Washington DC (as well as other governments). How to Save the Internet is his report on how he handled that Herculean task, along with his ideas for how to make the relationships between tech companies and regulators more cooperative and effective in the future.
The main threat that Clegg addresses in the book is not one caused by the internet; it is the threat to the internet from those who would regulate it. As he puts it: “The real purpose of this book is not to defend myself or Meta or big tech. It is to raise the alarm about what I believe are the truly profound stakes for the future of the internet and for who gets to benefit from these revolutionary new technologies.”
But in fact, a great deal of the book is devoted to a defence of Meta and big tech. In the first chapter he addresses the twin charges that social media has damaged global democracy and teen mental health. He acknowledges that both declined in the 2010s, but he claims that the declines merely correlate with the rise to dominance of social media, and are not caused by it.
Turning to his proposals for how to save the internet, Clegg lays out two pillars: “radical transparency” and collaboration. Transparency is great in theory, but I fear that it may be too late to apply these principles to the powerful companies that now control much of the internet. As for collaboration, it’s hard to imagine companies like Meta giving up their data or their sovereignty.
The great biologist and ant expert EO Wilson once said about Marxism: “Good ideology. Wrong species.” After reading this, plus several of the many books about Meta’s unethical, careless, “break things” culture, I suggest we might say something similar about Clegg’s proposals: “Good plan. Wrong industry.” Jonathan Haidt
£11.04 (RRP £12.99) – purchase at the Guardian bookshop
Linguistics
Linguistics
Proto
Laura Spinney
How did the language you’re reading this in come to exist? The Indo-European family of languages covers most of Europe, the Iranian plateau, northern India and parts of Asia. Its members are spoken by almost half of all living people, and they all stem from a common source. English, Hindustani, Spanish, Russian, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Norse and many others (more than 400 still exist) can all be traced back to this starting point: Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Laura Spinney’s new book tells the story of how a language that may initially have been spoken as a kind of lingua franca by only a few dozen people evolved into the mother tongues of billions.
Spinney draws on a wealth of recent evidence to tell this story, combining linguistics, archaeology and genetic research to trace the movement of people and their language. Making these links is not straightforward. PIE was not written down; it has been reconstructed by comparing the languages that evolved from it.
There are between 1,000 and 2,000 PIE words, and Spinney’s book is at its most interesting when dealing with them. The word * h 2 ster has become “star”. *kerd is the root of “cardio” and “heart”. The phrase *kerd dheh meant “to put your heart”, which became śraddhā in Sanskrit (believe) and crēdo in Latin; * ghostis is “guest-friendship”, a mutual obligation of guest and host. As humans travelled and traded, *ghostis was probably the concept that gave them safe passage. It echoes another word *ghes , “to eat”. Safe passage meant good eating.
As we face the dominance of global English, the potential erosion of languages around the world, and linguistic nationalism, PIE is in some ways a mirror of humanity. The language you’re reading this in will change. It will change as it has always done. When PIE came back to Europe around 2000BC there were about 7 million people living there. That it took over is extraordinary. Spinney says it is as if Italian had taken over New York in the early 20th century. However scary we might find such a future, one in which languages rise and fall, cultures come and go, our past suggests it is inevitable. Henry Oliver
£9.34 (£10.99) – purchase at the Guardian bookshop
T o watch Dear England (Sunday, 9pm, BBC One) – the BBC’s stellar adaptation of James Graham’s Olivier award-winning play – you must first understand the incomparable damage to the national psyche that arose from Gareth Southgate missing a penalty in the Euro 96 semi-final. For those born outside England or too young to remember, imagine the apocalypse mixed with the death of your childhood pet and you’re just about halfway there. I was 11 at the time and almost three decades later still remember going to bed crying as my dad explained over my tear-strewn pillow: “This is what it is to be an England fan.”
You’d better get your therapist on speed dial: the four-part fictionalised account of Southgate’s revolutionary reign as England manager begins with a real-life clip of his penalty miss. Fast forward to 2016 and England is in crisis, with the men’s squad crashing out of the Euros to Iceland while Brexit looms large. Meanwhile, Southgate (Joseph Fiennes, reprising his critically acclaimed West End role) – now middle-aged and managing the under-21 men’s team – is watching football on the TV and looking pensive.
The first 10 minutes is essentially exposition for anyone unfamiliar with the minutiae of mid-2010s English football. There’s a scene in which manager Sam Allardyce is asked to resign by the FA while explaining helpfully for the viewer that he’s only lasted one game and has just been caught giving illegal player transfer advice “over a pint of wine”. An irate Allardyce insists this is what people want from an England manager: a pint of wine (but presumably while winning games). Cue Southgate – the gent who buys croissants for staff and remembers the cleaner’s name – waiting in the corridor to be asked to be caretaker coach.
Wait, there’s more exposition! It’s the World Cup in two years, the FA bosses tell Southgate/viewers, and the press and fans are foaming at the mouth. No caretaker manager has ever gone on to be the long-term manager, Southgate explains back to two men who presumably know that.
Once the script gets past this, it’s a joyous, rousing ride. We begin with Southgate finding his new young players as their names are flashed on screen as if in Ocean’s Eleven – which is useful because some of the actors look nothing like their real-life counterparts (Wayne Rooney will be very pleased, is all I can say). Next, Southgate recruits psychologist Dr Pippa Grange (Jodie Whittaker) to help tackle the men’s mental blocks. Or as he puts it, “Come help fix England with me.”
If you don’t buy the link between football and the wider country, these winks to the camera may seem a bit much. At one point, Southgate actually wonders out loud if there is an alternative universe where he didn’t miss that penalty and we would all be living in a happier, more confident England as a result.
But that apparent weakness is arguably the drama’s strength. This, of course, is not just a show about kicking a ball into a net. Named after the open letter Southgate wrote to fans in 2021 after backlash over the team “ taking the knee ”, the script is meaningful precisely because it weaves in multiple wider themes: from the concept of English values and changing ideas of masculinity to racism among football fans. The scene in which Black England players endure monkey chants from the stands is deeply affecting.
Fiennes has a wonderful vulnerability as Southgate, picking up the key mannerisms without ever falling into caricature. As the team psychologist, Whittaker has some poignant exchanges with the players that moved me almost as much as seeing the inflatable unicorn s again. I’m not saying I got emotionally engaged but after 45 minutes I did find myself shouting: “Come on, boy!” at an actor playing Jordan Pickford about a game I saw the result of a decade ago.
By the time a waistcoat-clad Southgate is on the pitch cheering England’s first ever penalty shootout success at a World Cup, I had to remind myself they never actually won anything in the end. Unless this is an alternative universe? It’s hard to keep track through the tears.
T he shadow of Joseph McCarthy’s “red scare” loomed over the storied steps of this year’s Cannes film festival. Echoing the mid-20th-century blacklist, which shut out about 300 suspected communists from Hollywood, the French media group Canal+ announced an effective ban on twice that many French cinema professionals, including actors such as Juliette Binoche and film directors such as Jean-Pascal Zadi and Arthur Harari . Their crime? An open letter denouncing the growing influence on French media and cinema of conservative tycoon Vincent Bolloré, Canal+’s main shareholder.
The Canal+ chief executive, Maxime Saada, justified punishing the signatories on the basis that their claim was an “injustice” against the staff of Canal+ – who were, he said, committed to the organisation’s independence.
Bolloré has consolidated control over a significant portion of France’s news and entertainment media over the past decade, from the Fox News-like CNews to the Journal du Dimanche , Europe 1 radio , and the publisher Fayard . He is accused of having often shifted the editorial line of his acquisitions towards a rightwing ideological project à la Rupert Murdoch. Recently, his firing of the CEO of the literary publisher Grasset caused a walkout by more than 100 authors – from a political spectrum wide enough to include high-society philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy and the feminist novelist Virginie Despentes.
In their petition, which has since garnered the backing of international celebrites such as Javier Bardem and Mark Ruffalo, the film professionals wrote: “By leaving French cinema in the hands of a far-right owner, we risk not only the standardisation of films but a fascist takeover of the collective imagination.”
The impact of Canal+ scything its connections with actors, writers, directors and technicians could also have stark consequences for the industry: Canal+ represents more than 40% of all private funding that flows into French broadcasting, streaming and cinema. And given the propensity of French productions to be co-financed by some combination of public and private funds, that number probably undersells the critical importance of Canal+. From Mulholland Drive to Paddington in Peru , few other European producers and distributors have the group’s international reach.
Should one person, or a handful of people, be able to meaningfully impact a nation’s cultural output based on their desire to control the political speech of artists? And should the nation’s government intervene?
In the case of Canal+, the temptation might be towards intervention. After all, there was more public regulatory involvement in its creation than being a “private enterprise” might suggest. Launched in 1984 as France’s first subscription channel, Canal+ has been legally obliged to devote a certain percentage of its budget to French and European cinema.
But trying to legislate against this apparent blacklist is also perilous. The French far right is closer than ever to political power. In countries led by illiberal, far-right parties, the government has become just as dangerous a source of media censorship as a billionaire owner might be.
Public funding for journalism and the arts is certainly part of the answer. Democracy is healthier where public media funding is high. In 2025, Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF), which underlines the importance of “predictability and sustainability” of public media financing, found strong levels of confidence in public service media across Europe – including in France, where 69% of people think public media functions well, even as 61% think public services as a whole do not. But the how of public funding also matters. RSF also notes that confidence levels fall in places where the far right is, or has recently been, in power, and where it has often used public media’s dependence on discretionary funding to exert editorial influence on it.
Bolloré has long denied political or ideological interventionism, insisting that his interests are financial, and to promote French soft power.
Yet his power is a reminder that nowhere in Europe is immune to the same dynamics of ideologically driven media consolidation that has unfolded in the US, or the pure and simple shift of public service media into far-right state media that took place in Hungary. The warning light is now flashing in a frenetic way, begging us to strengthen the finances and independence of public media organisations that already exist.
Emmanuel Macron, it is speculated , is attempting to “future-proof” various French institutions against a government led by National Rally. Similarly, there is a way that the EU as a whole, with its long history of funding public service media and the arts, could make that funding an independent counterweight to both billionaires with agendas and censorious governments: moving from annual, discretionary budgets, or even earmarked taxes (like a TV licence), to public media endowment funds answerable only to their governing boards, and nominations to which should stretch across multiple electoral cycles.
Creating such a “meta-endowment” at an EU level, and charging it with being a supplementary source of funding for national, regional and local public service media, journalism, publishing and cinema across Europe – from cross-border Arte , to independent magazines, to France Médias Monde , to a reconstituted Hungarian public broadcaster – would add an extra level of independence and resilience in between journalists, artists and writers, and whatever political and private pressures they might face.
Of course, I can already hear the critical voices, saying how substantial the price tag on such an initiative would be – eye-popping, some will surely say. Except, such an endowment fund wouldn’t necessarily represent additional spending, but merely front-loading part of the billions that EU member states spend annually on public service media – €35bn across all member states in 2023. By following the 4% spend rule that pension funds and university endowments adhere to, a public media fund like this could make inflation-adjusted grants to European media in perpetuity, regardless of shifting political will or priorities.
At any rate, even “eye-popping” fizzles when put in the context of defence budgets, which increased by €495bn in Europe and Canada from 2024 to 2025, and then by tens of billions more in 2026, particularly in Germany . Democracy runs on information; what is the point of spending money to defend the territorial integrity of a democracy, but not its cultural and intellectual integrity?
Alexander Hurst writes for Guardian Europe from Paris. His memoir Generation Desperation is out now
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Britain needs a “national consensus” about rejoining the European Union, David Miliband has said, in response to revelations that the UK government pitched the creation of a single market for goods with the EU to the bloc.
The former foreign secretary, who is now president of the International Rescue Committee, said he thought the UK needed a reset of its relations with the EU at “a much higher dosage” than the government was planning.
Asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme about the report by the Guardian , he said he was “absolutely convinced” the security and prosperity of the UK depended on an “institutionalised, deep and strong relationship with the rest of Europe”.
“When the government says we want a reset of our relations with Europe , I think that’s a good thing, but then when I look at the reset so far, [which] is only worth £9bn by 2040 and I remember that Britain is a £3tn economy, I’m left saying no, we need a much higher dosage in our reset.”
When pressed on whether he would advocate for rejoining the union, he said: “What we have to do is build a national consensus about our position with the European Union . I’m very happy with it as a long-term goal … I want this strong institutional relationship with the European Union, but then I know the deal we had until 2016 is not available now; we’re not going to be able to get that deal again.”
The European Union was changing profoundly, he said, with Ukraine an increasingly important factor. “The big issue for Brussels today is not Britain joining; it’s Ukraine joining,” Miliband continued. “They’re talking about associate membership for Ukraine; they’re talking about different tiers of membership.”
On Friday, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, wrote to EU leaders, describing a German proposal to grant Ukraine “associate” membership of the European Union as “unfair” because it would leave Kyiv without a voice inside the bloc.
The proposal, put forward by the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, this week, would allow Ukraine to participate in EU meetings and institutions without a vote, as an interim step toward full membership.
Regarding the Labour leadership challenge, in which his brother, Ed Miliband, could play an influential role, he said he was more concerned with government action than leadership.
“Britain is in the eye of a global storm. The global order is being ripped up. Our economy is being transformed by new technology. Our welfare system needs to shift from a focus on older people to an investment in younger people – a million people between the age of 16 and 24 [are] not in education or training,” he said. “We have got a massive debate to have in this country about how we spur wealth creation, distribute it fairly [and] reinvent the way in which a government works … If we spend all our time talking about who, not what, we’re going to miss the point. The ‘what’ questions are absolutely key.”
Asked whether he thought the Labour party needed a new leader and the country needed a new prime minister, he said: “When the world changes, we have to change. And in the two years since the general election, the world has changed fundamentally.”
Mike Galsworthy, the chair of European Movement UK, said the government needed to have more open conversations with businesses and members of the public about the UK’s relationship with Europe and the rest of the world.
He said he believed joining the single market would be “economically helpful”, but would not solve the question, for the British public, about where the UK is headed as a nation.
“We want to be full team players,” he said. “[The conversation] needs to feel democratic and open and constructive. If you’re not doing that, then the public are going to continue feeling that they don’t have much agency in the whole deal.”
T he diving tragedy in the Maldives – which claimed the lives of four Italian divers inside an underwater cave, followed by the death of a Maldivian navy diver – has renewed warnings from experts about the risks of cave diving without proper training, planning and specialised equipment.
On Thursday, the Divers Alert Network (DAN), which coordinated the complex search and recovery operation at the Dhekunu Kandu dive site in Vaavu atoll, announced all the divers’ dead bodies had been recovered.
The victims were identified as Monica Montefalcone, an ecology professor; her daughter Giorgia Sommacal; marine biologist Federico Gualtieri; researcher Muriel Oddenino; and diving instructor Gianluca Benedetti. The body of Bendetti was recovered earlier outside the cave.
Mohamed Mahudhee, a member of the Maldivian national defence force, also died in the tragedy, as a result of decompression sickness after taking part in a recovery mission.
After initial attempts by the Maldives National Defence Force, DAN deployed a specialised rescue team to the site. It included Finnish cave diving experts Sami Paakkarinen, Jenni Westerlund and Patrik Grönqvist.
Working with Maldivian authorities, the team recovered all the bodies during multiple long dives over several days, using closed-circuit rebreathers, underwater scooters and extensive backup equipment.
Investigations into the circumstances of the fatal dive by Maldivian and Italian authorities are still still ongoing. But diving experts are already calling for stricter adherence to established cave-diving safety protocols.
Experts have also stressed the need for greater awareness of the many factors involved, including proper training, equipment configuration and even diver mindset.
Speaking to the Guardian, Jonathan Volanthen – one of the British cave divers who helped rescue 12 schoolboys from a flooded cave in Thailand in 2018 – says cave diving carries risks fundamentally different from open-water diving.
The vastly experienced Volanthen says cave divers cannot make a direct ascent in an emergency.
“If something goes wrong, you can’t simply head to the surface because there’s usually something that’s preventing that … Quite often in caves as well, it’s very easy to swim in somewhere and then find you stirred some silt up,” Volanthen says.
The combination of not being able to ascend to the surface and a poor-visibility exit makes it “much more difficult to get out” if a diver hits trouble, he says.
Adding depth to the equation, he says, exacerbates the dangers.
“The deeper you are, the more air you use, or the more gas, depending on what you’re breathing … Depth generally equals an increase in danger,” Volanthen says. Divers must carefully manage gas supplies to ensure a slow ascent, to reduce the risk of decompression sickness.
“Pressure [as a result of depth] creates a situation where gas dissolves into the bloodstream, and that means you have to ascend slowly,” he says.
Edd Sorenson, an American cave diving expert who has led more successful cave diving rescues than anyone else in the world , explains a common misconception about caves.
“Caves are not dark. Everybody thinks they’re dark … They’re devoid of light. Your house at night is dark … When your light goes out [in a cave], there’s nothing,” Sorenson says. “You don’t see a reflection, your eyes don’t get used to it.”
As a result, divers can lose track of all spatial awareness: “That’s why we learn to always have a continuous guide line to the surface.”
Sorenson also emphasises a philosophy known as “redundancy” in cave diving – multiple independent backups for all critical systems.
“We have a minimum of two tanks for your two regulators, we have a three-light minimum rule … If we’re going to go a long way, we’re going to have more. We have to have two computers,” he says, referring to the devices that track depth, time and ascent rate. “We have to have two writing devices, we have to have dual, redundant everything.”
He also highlights anti-silting techniques that cave divers should use, because common open-water flutter kicks in caves can quickly reduce visibility.
“If you get close to the bottom, that’s going to disrupt the sediment on the bottom … so on a flutter kick, you can instantly go from crystal clear water to zero visibility in the blink of an eye,” Sorenson explains.
Instead, cave divers use a frog kick. “Our propulsion goes horizontal or up from horizontal,” Sorenson says.
With decades of technical experience, Volanthen and Sorenson both stress the importance of training and personal limits.
“If you are trained properly by a reputable instructor and a training agency, you’ll understand the limits,” Volanthen says. “Hopefully you can make good decisions, whether that’s going into a cave or not going into a cave.”
Sorenson warns that experience can also create false confidence. Often, he says, when people reach the status of a divemaster or an instructor, “they think they know it all … However, a bad idea is a bad idea”.
“If they’re exceeding their training limit, exceeding their experience and exceeding their knowledge limits, they’re playing Russian roulette … Cave diving is a very, very safe sport with good training. It’s a very unforgiving sport without.”
Beyond technical skill and proper gear, experts say human factors and mindset are critical elements in diving decisions.
Cristina Zenato, a Bahamas-based cave diving instructor with more than 4,500 cave dives and over 80km of guide lines laid across different cave systems, cautioned against vilifying cave diving as a discipline, despite its technical complexity.
She says the underwater environment – “an alien place for us” – demands a level of respect.
“Is cave diving potentially dangerous? Absolutely. So is being two metres below the surface because we’re not aquatic animals.”
In addition to proper training, human factors and mindset are critical, Zenato says.
“You can be super hyper-trained, but I’ve sat on that water’s edge when I said ‘not today’, and then you’re in a car driving back, [wondering] did I call it right? And usually when you question yourself … you know it’s the right answer,” she says.
Jonas Vingegaard took the Giro d’Italia leader’s pink jersey for the first time after completing a hat-trick of stage wins, the race favourite soloed to the summit to take stage 14, proving too strong for his rivals in the Alps.
The Visma-Lease a Bike rider, already successful on the summit finishes on stages seven and nine and, aiming to become the eighth rider to win all three Grand Tours, attacked with less than 5km left of the gruelling 133km ride from Aosta to Pila. The Dane looks set to win the Giro at his first attempt.
Felix Gall (Decathlon CMA CGM) was second, 49 seconds behind, with the former winner Jai Hindley taking third.
The Dane’s Visma-Lease a Bike teammates did all the work to set him up for the win on the final climb to Pila consisting of 20 hairpins, where the race leader Afonso Eulálio and many others struggled.
“Today we made a plan from the start with the team, and we wanted to control the race, and that’s what my teammates did,” Vingegaard said. “It was really impressive how they rode, and I’m so proud of my teammates, and I’m proud that I can pay them back, it’s a super nice win.”
Vingegaard, already successful on the summit finishes on stages seven and nine, attacked with less than 5km left and looks set to win the Giro at his first attempt.
Felix Gall (Decathlon CMA CGM) was second, 49 seconds behind, with the former winner Jai Hindley (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) taking third. Portugal’s Eulálio (Bahrain Victorious), who had hung on to the pink jersey since taking the overall lead on stage five, trailed in almost three minutes behind Vingegaard, and dropped to second place, 2min 26secoff the leader.
The riders were climbing from the off and a large breakaway group formed on the ascent of Saint-Barthelemy, while Visma controlled the peloton. Visma’s Tim Rex put in a stellar shift to drag the bunch along, grimacing in pain as they neared the top of Lin Noir, with Victor Campenaerts pouring water over his teammate’s head as the sun blazed on the mountains.
There was little respite, with the Verrogne climb beginning after a brief descent, and Rex swung off the front, his work done for the day. Vingegaard still had four Visma men to lead the way, with Eulálio tucked in behind.
Giulio Ciccone, still seeking a stage win in this year’s race, pushed the breakaway group, but a lead of just over two minutes as they began the final 16.6km climb to the finish was never going to be enough.
The vastly reduced peloton containing the overall race contenders reeled in the leaders one by one, with Eulalio trying in vain to hang on at the back, and his time in the pink jersey ended as expected on the winding road to Pila. Eulálio battled bravely to the top, and has a 24-second gap over Gall, in third place overall.
Sunday’s stage 15 takes the riders 157 km from Voghera to Milan.
H aving lived through the “ matcha revolution ”, I’ve become used to giving unfamiliar drinks a go. From bubble tea to pumpkin-spiced lattes, coffee tonic to ube frappes , I’ll try anything twice and – compared to those beverages – horchata feels like a more palatable prospect. The refreshing yet creamy cold drink from Spain and Mexico is often compared to cereal milk, which has also gained popularity as a flavour in its own right and is increasingly cropping up on menus elsewhere.
Last month, Starbucks announced that, in the US, an iced horchata shaken espresso would be returning to its summer menu (this year joined by a new horchata frappuccino), having outperformed all previous seasonal iced shaken espresso beverages by an impressive 44%. In the UK, where horchata is less commonplace, I started spotting “dirty” versions, with added espresso, on coffee shop menus, alongside “dirty chai”.
It wasn’t long before the algorithm took over and my Instagram/TikTok feeds filled with recipes for how to make my own – usually Mexican-style, which blends rice and cinnamon soaked in water with vanilla and sugar. Traditionally, it’s part of the dairy- and alcohol-free “aguas frescas” family, but many modern recipes add milk. Spanish horchata is typically made from soaked, ground and sweetened tiger nuts – which are not nuts at all, but tubers – and is often served alongside “ fartons ”, cigar-shaped Valencian pastries.
Keen to try it, I head to Mestizo Mexican market in Camden, London, in search of what I hope is authentic horchata. For £6.50, I pick up a bottle of Mexquisita horchata concentrate – enough to make 5.6 litres, which seems like a lot. Confident in my ability to get it wrong, I also purchase a freshly prepared version. Adriana, who whips up my beverage, tells me it’s a popular drink with her and her friends – they like to add evaporated milk and top it with crushed walnuts. It’s cool and sweet and smooth – easy to gulp down on a hot day and reminiscent of chai, especially the cinnamon dregs, but without the black-tea caffeine kick.
Over the last three months up to publication, UK Google searches for “what is horchata” have risen 30%, while searches for “mexican horchata” are up 20%. Worryingly, “horchata BuzzBallz” (yes, it exists) has been deemed a “breakout” term, meaning searches are up by more than 5,000%.
“I predicted exactly this for horchata,” says Sabina Palermo, founder of Hi Cacti in Brighton, which started out as a Tex-Mex-inspired cactus shop. “In Mexico, it’s very popular for children, so it’s usually quite a nostalgic flavour.” After 10 years, she recently “pivoted the business” and started serving coffee and other drinks, including horchata lattes (hot and iced; £4), horchata matcha, horchata chai and coconut horchata. The list, she says, keeps growing: “Today, we played around with adding rose syrup to the horchata latte.”
It’s not just coffee; horchata has been getting the cocktail treatment, too. In west London, Latin American-inspired cocktail bar Viajante87 offers a “horchata colada”, blending the milky mix with rum, while Edinburgh’s Tapas3 offers a “horchata martini” using the Spanish variation of the drink. At Motley , Manchester, the Millionaire Shortbread 12 cocktail blends Disaronno, Licor 43 Horchata, biscuit and cream to create “dessert in a glass”.
Restaurant group Wahaca has long featured horchata on its soft drinks menu, and last year included a “tipsy horchata” with rum on the cocktail list, which outsold its more traditional sparkling wine-based cocktail. “It is also delicious with a dash of tequila added to it,” says Wahaca co-founder Thomasina Miers. “It is incredibly refreshing, particularly in hot weather, and goes beautifully with spicy food.”
Tacos Padre , a Mexican taqueria in London’s Borough Market, started doing a series of horchatas at the start of this year: a new horchata every month for £2.50 each. “People really love it, big time,” says owner and head chef Nicholas Fitzgerald. So far, they’ve had a plain horchata, a roasted version, chocolate horchata and black sesame horchata. They are about to launch a melon-seed one, which he says has more of a comforting, rice pudding-esque flavour. “People went nuts for the black sesame one,” he says. “It’s kind of a niche thing but people who have had it before are absolutely delighted to see it on the menu.”
Elsewhere, horchata is being used in desserts outright. At Condesa Tapas in Covent Garden, London, a pan de elote (Mexican cornbread) comes with a horchata foam, while Glasgow’s Topolabamba offers horchata ice-cream, supplied by Dundee gelateria Crolla’s. “I sometimes describe it as tasting like an old-school Caramac bar, or vanilla with burnt caramel and a little bit of cinnamon in there,” general manager Hannah tells me as I tuck in. It’s super creamy and unrelentingly sweet, with less of the spiced flavour of the drink. It’s delicious, but I struggle to finish the two hefty scoops.
Back home, I set about recreating the drink: 240ml of concentrate mixed with 1.6l water, as per the bottle’s instructions. I give it a stir, then pour over ice. The resulting drink is noticeably thinner than the version made for me by Adriana. It’s a real sugar rush. I’d just hit a 4pm slump; now I feel as if I’ve downed an energy drink.
In the UK, Spain’s tiger-nut horchata appears less prevalent – but dairy alternative brand Rude Health launched a tiger-nut drink in 2017, which is available in supermarkets. Interestingly, it also uses rice, but blends it with organic tiger-nut butter (plus water and sea salt). Its recommended “twist on traditional horchata” recipe doesn’t require added sugar, and the result is creamy – a little like almond milk – slightly spiced and far less sweet. Maybe not sweet enough? I add a shot of rum, for balance. Perfecto.
“I moved to England 20 years ago and since then the rise in interest in Mexican culture, Mexican tourism, has massively increased,” says Palermo, who is originally from Austin, Texas. It’s true that Mexico welcomed 16.5 million international visitors by air between January and October 2025 – including more than 370,000 from the UK, a 3.2% increase over the same period the previous year. “People are travelling there, experiencing all the colours and the flavours, and you can’t help but get sucked into it,” she says.
Which reminds me: I’ve still got more than half a litre of horchata syrup to get through. So I set about making a horchata-based dessert using Food52’s spicy horchata flan recipe , one of the only recipes I found to incorporate the concentrate, rather than horchata made from scratch. It looks – and indeed tastes – like a giant creme brulee: silky smooth, caramelly, the horchata syrup standing in for caster sugar in the egg mix, with far less sickly results than some of the other concoctions I’ve tried.
I serve it to guests who compare it to Basque cheesecake and it quickly disappears; a horchata hit! And just under half the bottle still to use. Black-sesame horchata margarita, anyone?
S tephen Miller, Donald Trump’s immigration czar and the architect of some of the government’s cruelest policies, doesn’t care what you think about him. He doesn’t care if you call him “ Pee-wee German ” or “ Weird Stephen ” or “ Voldemort ”, or any of the other nicknames he has inspired; his self-esteem is excellent.
“I have a very, very secure, intact ego,” Miller told Fox News’s Jesse Watters this week after being asked how he felt about his wife, Katie Miller, potentially landing a big distribution deal with Paramount for her terrible Maga podcast . “I’ve never had a larger fan following,” Miller continued. “[A]ny man who works for President Trump is a man that is very, very strong and self-assured in his role.”
Well, yes, I suppose you’ve got to be a very, very strong man to separate babies from their parents – which is what Miller will forever be famous for. Back in Trump 1.0, Miller played a key role in implementing a “zero tolerance” border policy that systematically removed more than 5,000 immigrant children, some just a few months old, from their parents at the US-Mexico border. A Human Rights Watch report released in December 2024 found that as many as 1,360 children had never been reunited with their parents.
Swayed by all the outrage, Trump eventually signed an executive order ending the family separation policy in 2018 . But the practice continues, albeit in a different form. A report released on Monday from the Brookings Institution estimates that more than 145,000 US citizen children have had at least one parent detained since the start of Trump’s second administration, amid a mass deportation campaign heavily influenced by Miller .
To be clear: there are no official figures about how many children have been affected by Trump’s mass deportations. But Brookings, which is a highly reputable nonpartisan thinktank, conducted a statistical analysis that looked at the demographic characteristics of the roughly 60,000 people currently in detention, and the 400,000 people who have been put into Ice detention from an interior arrest since the start of Trump’s second term. The report estimates that out of the more than 145,000 children believed to be affected, more than 22,000 experienced the detention of all their co-resident parents. More than 53,000 citizen children with a detained parent were estimated to be under the age of six.
Trump is not the first president to detain or deport the parents of US citizen minors. However, he’s doing it at a much faster rate, and in a much crueler way, than his predecessor. A data analysis by ProPublica published in March found “ICE arrests of parents doubled in the first seven months of Trump’s second term compared with the Biden administration”. It also found mothers were being more aggressively targeted: “Trump is deporting about four times as many moms of US citizen children per day as Biden did.” A Guardian investigation from May uncovered similar statistics.
Another change from Biden administration norms are the guidelines on how immigration officers should exercise their discretion when it comes to families. “A document once known as the Parental Interests Directive has been given a new name under Trump – the Detained Parents Directive ,” writes ProPublica. “And its preamble, which once instructed agents to handle immigrant parents in a way that was ‘humane,’ has been stripped of the word.”
Again: Trump is not the first president to separate US citizen children from their immigrant parents. But no other administration has been so callous about the welfare of the children affected. “The bottom line is that there is no systematic approach to protecting the children of those detained by ICE,” the Brookings report states. There is “no government entity … responsible for their wellbeing”. There also isn’t adequate record-keeping, meaning we have little idea what is happening to all these children.
What we do know, of course, is that many of these children are going to be immensely traumatized. Kelly Kribs, an attorney at the Young Center, told the Guardian in May that the separation crisis unfolding now is even more insidious than the family separation policy from Trump 1.0. “It’s leading to all the same forms of trauma that we saw unfold back in 2018,” said Kribs . “But the speed and the scale of the separations now is at a level we’ve never seen before.”
One suspects that the Millers, who have three kids of their own, are not particularly perturbed by these 145,000 traumatized children. Stephen met his wife, Katie, when they both worked for Trump during his first term, and she is just as hawkish on immigration as he is. “DHS sent me to the border to see the separations for myself – to try to make me more compassionate – but it didn’t work,” Katie boasted to Jacob Soboroff in 2018 , according to his book, Separated. She added that colleagues told her she’d think about family separation differently when she had her own kids: “But I don’t think so.” Perhaps she’ll share some more of her charming views with us on The Katie Miller Podcast.
Gaza flotilla activists allege sexual assault in Israeli detention
“We were stripped, thrown to the ground, kicked,” Luca Poggi, an Italian economist who was among those detained from the flotilla, told Reuters . “Many of us were Tasered, some were sexually assaulted, and some were denied access to a lawyer.” Israel has denied these particular sexual assault allegations. Meanwhile, the far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has been proudly showing off a video where the Israeli military is shown abusing the international activists who were trying to reach Gaza with aid.
The Taliban appears to be legitimizing child marriage
According to the AP, a new divorce decree “says that the silence of a girl reaching puberty can be interpreted as consent to marriage”. While the Taliban insists Afghanistan has banned the forced marriage of girls, experts and activists disagree. “After issuing hundreds of anti-women decrees, the Taliban are now attempting to institutionalise child marriage within the formal legal structure,” one activist told the Guardian .
The rise and fall of the only (known) female yakuza
Mako Nishimura has certainly had a more eventful life – and clubbed more male gangsters – than most. This Guardian long read by Sean Williams is well worth your time.
‘Lower-value human capital’ is a delightful new phrase CEOs are using
The chief executive of Standard Chartered, a very high-value man, has now apologized for describing the almost 8,000 staff members who are going to lose their jobs as “ lower-value human capital ”.
Tennessee school board member who called teen ‘hot’ is charged with assault
Back in April, Keith Ervin put his arm around a female student seated next to him during a public board meeting that was being filmed and said: “God – you’re hot. Did you know that? Damn.” His fellow board members eventually censured him but he refused to step down. Now he’s been served with a criminal summons .
Why did Trump invest millions in a conveyor-belt sushi chain?
It’s very fishy, but one theory floating around is that either Trump or his son, Don Jr, who runs the president’s trust, mixed up the sushi brand Kura Sushi with Tokyo firm Fujikura, a wire maker that has been making a ton of money from the AI datacenter boom. Either Trump really loves his salmon rolls or we are governed by idiots.
The week in pawtriarchy
Australian farmer Rhys Smoker was making a nice salad to go with his steak dinner when he found a live frog in his sealed bag of supermarket lettuce. His roommates called the little fella Greg and released him in a nearby pond. Lettuce be glad that Smoker didn’t get a frog in his throat.
I remember the first time it happened, in the band’s earliest days. We were playing a small festival in Yorkshire, before a seated audience in an arts centre. At the end of the first song there was an unfamiliar sound, like bacon sizzling, but amplified. It took me a moment to realise it was applause.
Up until that point we had mostly played in pubs, where everything we did was met with the same level of high-spirited indifference – the persistent, lively hum of people determined not to let a bit of music spoil their night out. Applause was new.
The clapping tailed off and was replaced by a terrifying, respectful silence, broken only by the sound of the guitarist tuning his E string. I thought: “Oh my God, they’re paying attention.” From then on we knew that whenever we weren’t playing, we had to have something to say.
The depth of that between-song quiet still varies from show to show. Some nights a rowdy give-and-take with the crowd prevails. Other nights it’s like being in a touring production of The Seagull. It can be down to the acoustics of the room or the part of the country you’re in. You have to adapt to the moment.
Halfway through our spring tour I come off the stage having related an anecdote about a woman from the previous night telling me a cute story about a cat and me telling her to shut up. It’s based on a true story, except in real life I was polite and charming. The rest of the band are trying to dissuade me from ever repeating it.
“It was completely out of character,” says the piano player back in the dressing room.
“That’s the point,” I say. “It’s unexpected – that’s what makes it funny.”
“But they didn’t laugh,” he says. “There was just this sharp, collective intake of breath.”
“Yeah, well,” I say. “I’m still workshopping it.”
“People love cats,” he says.
I cannot rely solely on anecdotes that have survived the difficult workshopping process. While some members of each audience will have never seen us before, others may turn up to every show in a run of four. In October I got told off by a fan for telling a story about a woman named Angela who drove all the way from Scotland to a gig in Cambridge just to buy one of our souvenir mugs. She claimed to have heard it upwards of 30 times. The tale of Angela and the Mug was completely nailed on, and I retired it with extreme reluctance.
On the drive back from a gig in Hailsham in East Sussex, the guitar player and I rehash the evening.
“They were a good crowd,” he says. “Receptive, engaged, up for it.”
“They would have loved the cat thing,” I say.
“Why didn’t you do it?” he says.
“The rest of the band put me off,” I say. “I’ve lost my nerve.”
“Don’t lose your nerve,” he says.
“It’s supposed to be out of character!” I say.
A week later we’re in Gateshead. We have played here before and know roughly what to expect, but tonight the audience seems particularly tuned in and ready for anything. Just over halfway through the show I swap my banjo for a guitar, and an expectant hush falls. In a conspiratorial voice, I begin a long story about a cute black cat with a white bib.
“I told you it would work,” I say in the Travelodge afterwards.
“It was better,” says the piano player, reluctantly. “Or maybe they just hate cats here.”
But success doesn’t always stiffen one’s resolve, and the next night in Edinburgh I find I have no appetite for risk. In the first half I scan the audience to see if the fan who warned me off the mug story is in. As far as I can determine, she is not. I decide to wheel it out one last time. It has a Scottish connection, after all. For the last line, I lean into the microphone a little.
“And then she said: otherwise it’s a long way to come for a fucking cup .” Reliably, the crowd goes wild.
Afterwards, out by our merchandise stall, a man stops me.
“You told that story tonight about someone called Angela and a souvenir mug,” he says.
“Yes,” I say. “You may possibly have heard it once or …”
“This,” he says, stepping to one side to reveal a woman standing behind him, “is Angela.”
“Oh, hi Angela,” I say. “How are you?”
“I can’t believe you’re still telling that story,” she says.
“Actually I’ve stopped,” I say. “It was just for tonight.”
As we’re speaking it occurs to me that this is not the second time I’ve met Angela after a gig, but the third.
