Fronted by Mark Sandman , the group brought enigmatic, elegant rock to post-grunge America. As lost demos surface, those closest to Sandman remember a man who grabbed on to life’s joys It’s early 1998, and at Fort Apache recording studio in Massachusetts, Mark Sandman, the suave frontman of Morphine, is nearing breaking point. Morphine’s four enigmatic and blackly humorous albums have won critical acclaim and, lately, unexpected commercial success considering their uncompromising creative vision. After the excesses of grunge, Sandman considered their idiosyncratic blend of sophisticated storytelling, prowling slide-bass and Dana Colley’s atmospheric saxophone a kind of “palate cleanser”. In 1997 Morphine had signed to DreamWorks Records, founded by industry bigwigs David Geffen and Mo Ostin. Now, working on Morphine’s first LP for his new paymasters – a batch of songs finally seeing release almost three decades later – Sandman was consumed by doubt over their direction. “For the first time, Morphine were trying to please someone other than just ourselves,” remembers Colley. Continue reading...

Longer battery life, better screen, upgraded Siri and new variable aperture camera in refreshed design from last year’s model Apple’s smaller Pro iPhone gets the best kind of spec bump for 2026: longer battery life, faster chips and a fancy new variable aperture for the main camera. The iPhone 18 Pro is one of a pair of slab phones launched alongside Apple’s first folding phone, the iPhone Duo, and is the cheapest of the new phones, with a regular iPhone 18 yet to be announced. Screen: 6.3in Super Retina XDR (120Hz OLED) (460ppi) Processor: Apple A20 Pro RAM: 12GB Storage: 256GB, 512GB or 1TB Operating system: iOS 27 Camera: 48MP + 48MP UW + 48MP 4x, 18MP front-facing Connectivity: 5G, wifi 7, NFC, Bluetooth 6, Thread, USB-C, Satellite, UWB and GNSS Water resistance: IP68 (6 metres for 30 mins) Dimensions: 150 x 71.9 x 8.75mm Weight: 211g Continue reading...

Thirty-three months after it was announced, the grime legend’s new album is coming out. He explains how skinheads, fatherhood and rap history came to bear on its socially conscious contents ‘I can’t be perfect,” Skepta says, pulling a black Arc’tyrex beanie down over a furrowed brow with both hands. “But I can be conscious.” The self-proclaimed king of grime has always been a serious person, wary of fools and time-wasters. Focus is important to him, perhaps because he’s often multitasking: balancing his music career, his fashion label Mains, film-making and acting (his debut short, Tribal Mark, came out in 2024), his Big Smoke festival and a house music project, Más Tiempo. He coordinates them all from the scruffy but functional studio in London’s West End where we meet. At one point, he picks up a Rubik’s Cube from the cluttered coffee table, and, over the course of five minutes of conversation, solves it. “This album has been winding me up,” he admits, referring to The Fork and Knife, which is out next week, 33 months after it was first announced. “But I think I’ve actually made something here that is what the people want from me.” Continue reading...

Many Muslims saw their places of worship destroyed or abandoned during the sectarian violence of India’s partition in 1947. Now villagers of many faiths are coming together to revive them Gajju Khan is smiling as he sits in an unfinished building in the northern Indian state of Punjab in the late afternoon. The 87-year-old is hopeful that before he dies he will hear the azaan, the Muslim call to prayer, echo across his village once again when the mosque is completed. The last time he heard it here was when he was eight years old, living with his parents in Tira Maloya, a village in Chandigarh, not far from where he lives now. Bibi Rajinder Kaur, a Sikh, donated family land to build a mosque in her village. ‘There is no deed better than giving someone a place to worship,’ she says Continue reading...

Allerton Project attracts abundant wildlife and its success can offers clues to reversing the sharp drop in populations Farmer Alastair Leake is standing in a field of sprouting winter wheat, pointing at his experiment. One side was ploughed before planting, with green shoots breaking through neat rows of upturned soil. On the other, the crop was drilled directly into the earth, emerging through a messy carpet of “trash” – stems, stubble and crop residue from previous harvests. “When we’re watching to see where the birds are landing to feed, none of them are going on to the ploughed side,” says Leake, the director of the Allerton Project farm, standing on the trashy side. “They’re all coming and feeding down here. Continue reading...

Richard Dawkins’ first work has thrilled fans and frustrated critics for five decades. The science has moved on, but any writer looking to supplant its place must learn its lessons Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene was not predicted to be a success. Its initial print run, published this week in 1976, was just 5,000. It went on to sell millions, and is perhaps the most influential work of pop-science ever. For 50 years, it has been the go-to resource for the layperson seeking to understand evolution. What accounts for its enduring power? Prof Dawkins’ central claim, that “we are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes” was provocative, stripping the messy stuff of human and other life down to a simple law. And yet the book is primarily concerned with proving that complex, selfless behaviour such as altruism in animals can emerge from these basic “selfish” drives, satisfyingly resolving an apparent paradox. Prof Dawkins – a zoologist by training – also succeeded in conjuring entertaining, vividly drawn vignettes of the lives of animals, from lions and ants to hawks and honeybees, to make his points. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...

As deadpan spoof documentarian Philomena Cunk returns with a new series on cinema, her creators discuss meeting J-Lo, their worst ever jobs – and why artificial intelligence is like mad cow disease She has tackled Britain, conquered the world and even grappled with life itself. Now Philomena Cunk is back on our screens – looking as miserable and confused as ever – to take on her biggest subject yet: cinema. Cinema, the iconically stupid presenter explains, is not just mankind’s greatest achievement but also a world where “men can be heroes, women can get off with heroes, and nobody ever goes to the toilet – unless you’re watching a specialist film from Japan”. So if you’ve ever wanted to know why “Citizen Ken” always has carrots in his pockets, where the word auteur comes from (“They felt they oughta get all the credit”) or how Benedict Cumberbatch reacts to the hardest-hitting questions of his career (such as “Who are you?”), this is quite literally the only place you’ll ever find the answers. Continue reading...

A giant screen, big battery, rapid chip and top cameras push the great iPhone 18 Pro to the max with a price tag to match Apple’s largest Pro iPhone gets its biggest battery upgrade yet to make it a true two-day phone with new Siri AI and a variable aperture camera. The iPhone 18 Pro Max is the supersized sibling of the regular 18 Pro and, though it is no longer Apple’s most expensive phone thanks to the £2,000 iPhone Duo, it has a similarly large price tag to match costing from £1,299 (€1,599/$1,299/A$2,299). Screen: 6.9in Super Retina XDR (120Hz OLED) (460ppi) Processor: Apple A20 Pro RAM: 12GB Storage: 256, 512GB or 1TB Operating system: iOS 27 Camera: 48MP + 48MP UW + 48MP 4x, 18MP front-facing Connectivity: 5G, wifi 7, NFC, Bluetooth 6, Thread, USB-C, Satellite, UWB and GNSS Water resistance: IP68 (6 metres for 30 mins) Dimensions: 163.4 x 78 x 8.75mm Weight: 249g Continue reading...

Aitana Bonmatí has been voted the best female player on the planet by our panel of 127 experts ahead of Mariona Caldentey and Alessia Russo 2024 list | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 Meet the judges | See how every judge voted Subscribe to Moving the Goalposts, our free newsletter Continue reading...

Every autumn, Corvo Island in the Azores turns off its public lighting for a few key days to help fledgling Cory’s shearwaters as they attempt to fly to the ocean guided by the stars Once a year, Corvo, the smallest and most northerly island of Portugal’s Azores archipelago, goes dark. Since 2019, the island’s 450 or so inhabitants have chosen to switch off the lights every autumn for five nights to tackle the disastrous effects of artificial light on Cory’s shearwaters, a seabird endemic to the Atlantic Ocean. It began in 1991 when the community noticed huge numbers of deaths among young shearwaters. A newborn Cory’s shearwater chick Continue reading...

Sale makes ‘Jodi’, a smaller relative of T rex, the ‘second most valuable dinosaur ever sold at auction’, Sotheby’s says A rare skeleton of a Nanotyrannus, a smaller relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex, sold at auction in New York this week for $47.3m, making it one of the world’s most expensive fossils. The skeleton, named “Jodi” after the person who found the remains in 2019, sold at Sotheby’s on Tuesday for $47.3m, “after a twelve-minute bidding battle that saw six bidders compete online and over the phones, before ultimately selling on the phone”, Sotheby’s said in a statement. Continue reading...

Chair of National Gallery’s First Nations advisory group says the technology is undermining artists’ agency and the authenticity of their work Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast AI is taking First Nations art and turning it into “Temu slop”, the Pitjantjatjara artist Sally Scales has said. Scales, the chair of the National Gallery of Australia’s First Nations advisory group, says the technology is undermining the agency of First Nations artists and the authenticity of their work and represents a “a theft” of cultural knowledge. Continue reading...

The Cali Fund, set up to raise $1bn a year for biodiversity from drug companies, remains near empty Big pharmaceutical companies have been accused of “free-riding on nature”, after a landmark biodiversity fund that invites businesses to put some of their profits back into conservation was left virtually empty. The Cali Fund set out to raise $1bn (£750m) annually, by asking companies that profit from nature’s genetics to contribute towards conservation in low-income countries. But more than 18 months after the fund was launched, it remains far below this target. Continue reading...

The Covid pandemic shed an unforgiving light on health and social care inequalities. The lessons have yet to be absorbed The fear that so many felt as the death toll rose during the Covid pandemic was magnified for Fiona Walker. “I know from experience they wouldn’t have valued my life,” she says, in a new report on the treatment of people with learning disabilities during the crisis. The 1.5 million people in the UK with learning disabilities, and their families, had reason for concern. Death rates in England were four to six times higher than average for people with learning disabilities. As is now well established, the pandemic did not create inequalities; it exposed and intensified them. People with learning disabilities die on average 19.5 years earlier than people without, and deaths are almost twice as likely to be classed as avoidable. Continue reading...

Randomised trials of omega-6s do not show an increase in inflammation caused by the fatty acid Read more in the Antiviral series If you’ve been online lately, you’ve probably been bombarded with the discourse about seed oils. Once a completely innocuous food that no one really talked about, they have become the enemy of the moment. Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of health and human services in the US, has called them “toxic” and vowed to act against them. There are countless activewear-clad influencers online saying that nothing harms your health more than these products. Which is odd, because the Australian dietary guidelines say seed oils are basically fine. You should limit them because they’re high in calories but otherwise there’s no major reason – according to the guidelines and most experts – why you should avoid them. As Prof Lauren Ball, director of the University of Queensland’s Centre for Community Health and Wellbeing, says: “There’s no convincing evidence that eating seed oils like canola or sunflower oil in normal dietary amounts harms our health. In fact, these oils contain unsaturated fats, which are generally beneficial for cardiovascular health.” Dr Jason Wu, a professor at the University of New South Wales, agrees: “The evidence base consistently points to health benefits of eating seed oils.” Continue reading...

Companies have rushed to supply the drug as a wellness treatment, but patients with serious illnesses aren’t able to get NHS prescriptions In 2022, a prodigiously talented young artist named Louis Petit was preparing to return to the UK, having been effectively exiled in the Netherlands as a teenager so he could access the medical cannabis he needed to control his epilepsy. Six years earlier, Louis, then 12, had been diagnosed with a rare form of the neurological disease when medical cannabis was still illegal in the UK. But in Rotterdam, where it was legal, doctors helped him discover that a medical cannabis oil called Bedrolite, in combination with the right mix of anti-epileptic treatment, could slow and eventually stop his seizures. This was something his neurologists in the UK had previously considered impossible. Dr Kojo Koram is professor of law and political economy at Loughborough University and the author of The Next Fix: The Winners and Losers in the Future of Drugs Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...

Ousmane Dembélé becomes our seventh winner as he beats Lamine Yamal into second and Vitinha into third on our list of the best players on the planet Premier League dominates list | How every judge voted | Our methodology | The top 100 female players for 2025 2024 edition | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 Continue reading...

Archaeologists uncover jewellery, cosmetics and coins in cabinet sealed since eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79 Fragments of personal objects, from makeup tools and a perfume bottle to coins and a child’s necklace, have been found tucked away in a wooden wardrobe sealed off for almost 2,000 years in the ruins of Pompeii. The artifacts provide an intimate glimpse of daily life in the ancient Roman city before it was devastated by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79. The wardrobe was discovered in a room of a home on Via dell’Abbondanza, which was one of the most bustling streets in Pompeii. Continue reading...

Pressure on Martin O’Neill after 2-0 defeat by Falkirk Hibs will face Rangers in Premier Sports Cup final Celtic slumped to a 2-0 defeat at Falkirk on Sunday to ramp up the scrutiny on manager Martin O’Neill after a run of three wins in 10 games. The Scottish champions had the chance to extend their lead at the top of the table to seven points, but never recovered from conceding a third-minute opener to Ethan Ross. Scott Tanser scored a second before half-time and the Bairns even had a third goal ruled out by a video assistant referee review for handball against Jacob Murrell. The majority of Celtic’s struggles this season have come in European competition as they crashed out of the Champions League qualifiers and have lost all three Europa League group matches. Continue reading...

Cop17, focused on protecting nature and restoring ecosystems, concludes on Saturday with critics saying system allows ‘one idiot’ to stall progress Calls are growing for major reforms to UN biodiversity summits as countries fail to deliver on their promises to halt the destruction of the natural world, with governments likely on track to continue their record of never having met a target in the 34-year history of the convention. Two weeks of negotiations at biodiversity Cop17 in Yerevan, Armenia, concluded on Saturday morning with countries vowing to redouble their efforts to meet this decade’s targets, which include commitments to protect 30% of the planet for nature, restore nearly a third of Earth’s degraded ecosystems and reform $500bn (£410bn) of environmentally damaging subsidies. Continue reading...

As glaciers melt and permafrost thaws, Longyearbyen, on the remote Arctic islands of Svalbard, faces climate-induced problems from tap water to housebuilding to landslides • Heavy metals make Norwegian village’s tap water toxic On a rugged mountain plateau of snow-dusted rocks, in the remote archipelago of Svalbard, a glaciologist, Andy Hodson, points out the “ears” of ice, white against the rock, that gave Foxfonna glacier its name, after the arctic fox. The small glacier, on a mountain 8 miles (15km) outside the Norwegian village of Longyearbyen, is a popular summer hike for tourists who come here seeking the Arctic experience. Continue reading...

A mile beneath the Black Hills, scientists are building giant detectors to analyse neutrino particles – and possibly find the answer to existence For more than a century, the mining town of Lead, in the Black Hills of South Dakota, attracted workers with a taste for gold. Now, a flagship experiment being built in the old mine is drawing scientists in search of more intriguing riches: answers to the deepest mysteries of the universe. Construction of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (Dune) in the former Homestake mine is due to start on Monday. Engineers will begin assembling four giant detectors inside caverns blasted from rock a mile underground. Continue reading...

Midfielder praises his side’s grit and determination Szoboszlai says there are fine margins between teams Declan Rice says Arsenal are ready for more grinding wins as he hailed the 1-0 success at Liverpool on Sunday as the performance of champions. The midfielder set up Kai Havertz for the only goal on 16 minutes but his physicality and reading of the game on the defensive side were arguably more impressive. Liverpool were unhappy at the non-award of a penalty for a Jurriën Timber shirt-pull on Alexander Isak in the 21st minute and it was a day when the Kop fumed about Arsenal’s streetwise tactics, especially how they won free-kicks – albeit their own players were also guilty of going down too easily at times. The Arsenal goalkeeper David Raya was booked for time-wasting in the 92nd minute as his team closed out the victory. Continue reading...

New electricity generating capacity would enable north-east to attract investment for large-scale AI infrastructure National Grid has taken a step towards building Britain’s biggest electricity substation on Teesside, which could supply power to a vast neighbouring datacentre as the UK races to expand its AI infrastructure. Last week, the company agreed to purchase 29.5 hectares (73 acres) of land at Dorman Point on a site owned by Teesworks, a local private-public partnership. The deal was first reported by Sky News. Continue reading...

While anglers cannot take endangered sand tiger sharks, a loophole lets private firms catch the fish to sell abroad, profiting from Delaware Bay’s conservation success Shortly after 12.45pm, what remains of a 300-metre line goes taut. Somewhere beneath the murky green surface of Delaware Bay, on the eastern US coast, a sand tiger shark has taken the bait of a mackerel chunk. Marine researchers at the University of Delaware haul the line towards a small boat as the shark’s grey-brown outline emerges. It is a large animal: 225cm (7ft) long with a 90cm girth. Its mouth hangs open, revealing rows of jagged teeth. The researchers work quickly, measuring the shark, recording its sex, and taking blood and muscle samples. A tag is then fastened beneath its dorsal fin, through its thick sandpapery skin. Continue reading...

Dr Marta Shahbazi was travelling to a conference to receive award for scientific excellence in developmental biology An “inspiring” Cambridge scientist died in the Spanish train collision on Wednesday that killed at least 69 people. Dr Marta Shahbazi, 41, an affiliate associate professor at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute and a group leader at the city’s Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), was travelling on one of the trains involved in the crash near Urda in Toledo province. Continue reading...

More than 100,000 species are traded globally, whether illegally smuggled, sold as ornaments or in fisheries, timber and fashion industries, study finds The number of plant and animal species in use or sold in the wildlife trade is more than twice as high as previously thought, researchers have discovered. A study, published in Science Advances, warns that there are huge gaps in global assessments of how wildlife is traded, and that past estimates have failed to keep up with changes such as the boom in the online exotic pet trade, where sellers offering to post spider eggs across the world or sneak reptiles on to planes are just a click away. Continue reading...

Russia plans to build own version of US billionaire’s satellite communications to help attack Ukraine Vladimir Putin praised Elon Musk’s genius and said he was in touch with Starlink’s controlling shareholder as Russia develops its own satellite communications for its military to use against Ukraine. The Russian president, speaking at a summit with African leaders in Moscow, was comparing the Earth-orbiting network built by Musk’s SpaceX with Russia’s gradual efforts to build its own Rassvet constellation. Continue reading...

Judges hail Sofia Demetriades’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto as full of insights, poetry and maturity A teenage violinist has won the BBC Young Musician competition 2026, in the first all-female final in the competition’s 48-year history. The judges, Joanna MacGregor, Ben Gernon and Errollyn Wallen, hailed Sofia Demetriades’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto as full of insights, poetry and maturity. Continue reading...

Warning for other Arctic communities as residents told not to use water in Longyearbyen in Svalbard, one of the world’s fastest-warming places Residents of a remote village in Norway that is in one of the fastest-warming places in the world have been told they must no longer drink tap water due to heavy metal contamination that scientists have linked to the thawing permafrost. Longyearbyen, in the archipelago of Svalbard, gets its main drinking water supply from a 1.5 mile-long (2.5km) dammed lake called Isdammen, or “ice pond”. Higher temperatures as a result of the climate crisis have thawed permafrost, leading to newly exposed bedrock leaching metals into the pond. Continue reading...

Prada's new advertising feels like a direct response to those still indulging in a tech that is threatening human creativity and livelihoods. Their ‘Drawing Prada: Animated By Hand’ campaign shows that the "not-made-by-AI" approach has become a major selling point.

The presenter recalls being a ‘weird little nerd’, almost becoming a scientist – and the most revealing costume she’s worn for work Born in Reading in 1973, Lucy Worsley is a historian and TV presenter. She ­graduated with a first in history from Oxford, before completing a PhD in art history at the University of Sussex. Worsley spent 21 years as chief curator of Historic Royal Palaces, overseeing the Tower of London, Hampton Court and Kensington Palace, among others. She has p­resented numerous documentary series, including Six Wives, Royal History’s Biggest Fibs and most recently Victorian Murder Club. She lives in London with her husband. Her latest book, Queens and Kings: An Unusually Personal History, is out now. This is me at the age of four. It was my career ambition to become a witch. My back-up options were spy and nun. Continue reading...

It is billing £32.99 a month but I have had no functioning phone line since it switched me to Digital Voice I’ve had no landline since May 2025 when BT switched it to Digital Voice. Weeks passed, and each call to BT involved at least an hour waiting on hold and answering security questions before being passed between departments. Eventually, last December, two engineers were sent and discovered that a wire had been severed during the upgrade. They said they needed a cherry picker to reconnect it to its original location and would return. They did not. Continue reading...

Deployments of surveillance vans over five months resulted in nine false alerts and led officers to engage with 146 registered sex offenders Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast More than a million people have had their faces scanned in a trial of real-time facial recognition technology in Western Australia, resulting in 122 arrests and nine incorrect alerts. WA police said under the five-month trial, which concluded on Saturday, the technology scanned 1,380,882 faces after 100 deployments across 43 regional and metropolitan locations. Continue reading...

UN-backed report finds even temporary rises above Paris agreement target could cause harm to glaciers and polar ice sheets Earth’s icy regions face such dangerous melting that global heating should be brought back below 1C after an inevitable period of overshooting global temperature targets, a UN report has found. Permanent and widespread losses of snow and ice expose a “persistent myth” that overshooting the 1.5C target of the Paris climate agreement – to 2C or 3C – could be manageable or even preferable to urgent cuts to emissions, the report found. Continue reading...

She was scared of him but soon loosened the Shakespearean up – then watched him give Star Trek depth, even insisting scenes be rewritten for her. Captain Picard’s right-hand woman salutes her fabulous friend I’d been warned about Patrick by friends who’d worked with him at the Royal Shakespeare Company. They said: “Marina, you can’t be you around Patrick Stewart. He’s all about the work. He takes it very seriously and he won’t abide you mucking about and trying to make people corpse.” We had been cast together on Star Trek: The Next Generation and, because of what I’d heard, I was a bit scared, a bit intimidated. And let’s be honest – Patrick was very serious about the work. But there was a concerted effort by the rest of us to beat it out of him. We were from a younger generation and we wanted to shake up this Englishman who was so typical of his generation – stiff upper lip and a Yorkshireman to boot. You know, the kind of person who was not exactly renowned for showing their emotions. Early on Patrick told us all that we weren’t there to have fun, and you should have seen the looks he got. I’m a cockney: I’ve got a Spurs tattoo and we all looked at him in the same way I look at an Arsenal fan. But we did loosen him up. And – he’s said this himself – I think we actually freed him. We gave him a freedom that he said he’d never really felt before. Continue reading...

While Halloween is traditionally a family-oriented holiday and an occasion for children to dress up and go trick-or-treating, a unique spin on spooky season is taking off in Japan. ‘Jimi Halloween’ or ‘Mundane Halloween’ sees adult participants dress up as ordinary people in everyday life. They do highly specific tasks, embracing and celebrating unremarkable situations for the event, hosted by online magazine Daily Portal Z in Tokyo’s Shibuya district. Continue reading...

For skiers looking to reduce their carbon footprint, rail travel from the UK to the Alps has never been quicker or easier. Here’s how to get there Speeding effortlessly towards the slopes by train, you might wonder why you ever flew to a ski resort. On paper, it seems a short hop by plane; in reality, airport queues, cramped flights and long transfers can mean the journey eats up a whole day. Measured door-to-door, daytime rail travel from London can be as fast as flying, while taking a sleeper train gets you extra time on the slopes. And with Alpine glaciers suffering significant loss of snow cover as global temperatures rise, rail travel constitutes the biggest emissions saving a skier can make. Continue reading...

The late actor’s co-stars in Logan and Anthony and Cleopatra remember dog impressions, marching band-conducting and a fervent belief in fun I had the unbelievable privilege of working with Patrick when I was 11 [in Logan]. He was a man of extraordinary warmth, wit and generosity. He possessed that increasingly rare ability to make everyone around him feel as though they were being let in on something wonderful. To work alongside him was to be reminded, every day, of what it means to love what you do, and to share that love with others. He imparted lessons in a way that was so wise, you didn’t even realise you were being taught. Continue reading...

A low-budget building by the Olympic site that was never meant to last has been given a £4m revamp full of Italian pizzazz. Now The Yard is putting bums on (heated) seats – and Ian McKellen is soon to star Since the 2012 Olympics, the skyline of Hackney Wick in east London has bristled with cranes. The athletes may be long gone but the legacy of the sporting spectacle rolls on, as developers continue to extract profits from rising land values around the Olympic park. Across the canal, in this former industrial edgeland, there are more cranes than ever, busily hoisting prefabricated brick cladding panels into place, wrapping the latest loft-living concepts with a veneer of industrial chic. Where factories once stood, replicas of factories have risen, complete with sawtooth roofs and Crittall-esque windows, offering concierge-serviced views of the surrounding regeneration-scape. But among all the crane towers, one is different from the rest. It stands still, now relieved of its duties, and encased in a silvery sheath of polycarbonate. Big red letters cling to the shimmering shaft, spelling out the new home of the Yard theatre. Once used to haul bits of buildings, the steel crane tower now serves as a beacon-cum-ventilation shaft, glowing by night while exhausting stale air from the theatre below. Continue reading...

Sykes Holiday Cottages showed no empathy and insisted on paperwork we didn’t have so soon after my husband’s death We booked a break with Sykes Holiday Cottages for 11 of us to celebrate my mum’s 80th birthday last February. The cost was £2,400, paid for by my 87-year-old dad, but it was my husband who made the booking. In January, my husband was diagnosed with aggressive lymphoma, and he died 10 days before the trip. My parents and some other members of the party still planned to take the holiday, and my dad informed Sykes of the death, since my husband was their point of contact. Continue reading...

Green tea can be a mixed bag – we sipped our way through the supermarket shelves to find the ones worth boiling the kettle for • The best (and worst) supermarket teabags My mother-in-law has a mug that reads: “By replacing your morning coffee with green tea, you can lose up to 87% of what little joy you still have left in your life.” Some people will never like green tea, while others will probably have tried only poor-quality, over-brewed bags filled with the dust and fannings left over from the production of whole leaf tea. Only one of today’s teas contains whole leaves, and the difference is hugely noticeable, though that’s not to say the more economical bags are undrinkable. Some are single-origin or organic, and are certainly satisfactory, so long as you brew them properly. Due to the large surface area of these tiny broken leaves, you need to be careful not to over-brew them. To stand the best chance of making a half-decent cup, use water at 80C – you can achieve that temperature by quarter-filling a cup with cold water, topping it up with just-boiled water and leaving it to brew for about 90 seconds. You’ll end up with a much sweeter cup, with nuanced kelp, edamame and toasted-straw flavours (all of which are, admittedly, acquired tastes). Continue reading...

A Derren Brown-style experiment? A Ghostwatch stunt? Wild rumours have swirled around Bradley Walsh’s Million Pound Shot all week. The hoax has finally been revealed – and its message is terrifying In late October, some canny viewers began to wonder whether there was something strange about Channel 4’s latest gameshow. Bradley Walsh’s Million Pound Shot had been billed as a new big-money contest with a twist, but information about its pilot episode was strangely minimal. Television and radio producer Chuck Thomas wondered on X whether it could be a Derren Brown-style psychological experiment; a Ghostwatch-esque stunt; or even a dark TV comedy in the vein of the genre-bending series Inside No 9. Indeed, the timing – one day after Halloween – also seemed to point viewers towards some kind of parody or one-off drama. As more information was revealed about the show – including that its players would stake their own money, in a UK television first – Thomas considered whether this was in fact “an elaborate anti-gambling stunt”. It was an opinion shared by journalist Alistair Ryder, who posted that it was “more likely to be a stealth anti-gambling drama disguised as a gameshow than a modern Ghostwatch”, adding that the programme “could make for uncomfortable viewing in a completely different way”. Continue reading...

When 17-year-0ld Danny Donelly got a bank loan to open a record shop and sell dancefloor-filling electronic music, he little knew how he would help revolutionise his town and dance music at large In the early 1990s, the suburban town of Romford was known for three things. It was the home of the world’s best snooker player, Steve Davis. It was where people placed bets at Romford dog track, over a dinner of chicken in a basket. And for those in the know, it was where the UK’s best underground dance music was bought and sold. That pedigree was immortalised by Romford’s most famous musical act, Underworld, with frontman Karl Hyde shouting the words “mega mega mega, going back to Romford” at the climax of 1995’s Born Slippy. Those words now form the title of a new exhibition in the town, Mega Mega: Romford’s Suburban Sound Revolution, which charts how this unglamorous but party-spirited backwater became an upstart rival to great dance music cities such as Manchester or Detroit. Continue reading...

New post-Brexit rules mean that dual nationals cannot enter the UK unless they have a British passport My teenage daughter is unable to see her grandparents because of the UK’s new requirement for dual nationals to hold a UK passport. I’m a UK citizen, married to a French national, and we live in France. Our two older children have both French and UK passports. Our third child was born while we were living in Zimbabwe and only has a French passport. Continue reading...