Filmgoers are excited to be among first in world to see 25th Bond film, No Time to Die, in Birmingham
For a film spanning 163 minutes – the longest James Bond movie ever made – it takes serious dedication to watch it at a midweek midnight showing.
But the 007 fans outside Birmingham’s Odeon cinema on Wednesday night were excited to be among the first people to see the eagerly anticipated 25th Bond movie, No Time to Die, at a public screening.
Virgin Money has announced it will close 31 branches – almost all in Scotland and the north of England – in the latest stage of the UK banking sector’s retreat from the high street.
The bank said it expected to make 112 people redundant because of the closures after the coronavirus pandemic accelerated the shift to online and mobile app-based banking, a move that has rapidly reduced the profitability of physical bank branches.
“Household saving fell particularly strongly in the latest quarter from the record highs seen during the pandemic, as many people were again able to spend on shopping, eating out and driving their cars,”
Overall, while the upward revisions to GDP are clearly welcome, Q2 was three months ago, and the recovery appears to have stagnated since.
Even so, given that there is now thought to be less spare capacity in the economy that will only encourage the Bank of England to hike rates in the not too distant future.
France has accused Australia of lying shortly before Canberra cancelled a major submarine contract, with the French foreign minister declaring “someone lied”.
With no sign of any imminent easing of tensions between the two countries, Jean-Yves Le Drian told a parliamentary hearing that Australia had never expressed doubts about the €56bn (A$90bn) submarine contract or the strategic Indo-Pacific pact before breaking the contract.
The myth of a silenced English majority betrayed by a liberal metropolitan elite goes back decades
Patrick Wright is the author of The Village That Died for England: Tyneham and the Legend of Churchill’s Pledge
Like some of the emeritus professors who have recently steamed into the Conservative party’s “anti-woke” campaign under the name of History Reclaimed, I grew up in a less fractured country, in which, stately occasions apart, waving union jacks seemed largely left to the National Front.
In English classrooms, we were encouraged to be more moved by the famous list of “characteristic fragments” that George Orwell pulled together in the first months of the second world war, as he searched for a unifying “pattern” in the diversity of English life. He wrote of old maids biking to communion through autumn mists and the clatter of clogs in a Lancashire mill town.
Together, Climate Visuals and TED Countdown are releasing 100 photographs that depict climate solutions alongside the global impact of the climate crisis. The images were selected from more than 5,500 shots taken by professionals and amateurs from more than 150 countries. The images will be freely available to key groups communicating on climate – the editorial media, educators, campaigns and non-profit groups – via the Climate Visuals library.
The chosen images needed to be illustrative and powerful, and to communicate positive climate solutions in five key areas: energy, transport, materials, food and nature.
The collection will be displayed at the TED Countdown Summit in Edinburgh from 12-15 October and will also feature during the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow from 1-12 November.
Exclusive: soprano, who died in 2019, stopped performing after surgery in London in 2015
She had a voice described as a “grand mansion of sound”, won four Grammy awards and thrilled audiences in the world’s opera house – but suddenly stopped performing in 2015.
When Jessye Norman died four years later at the age of 74, her family said she had passed away from septic shock and multi-organ failure secondary to complications of a spinal cord injury she had sustained in 2015. The circumstances surrounding the injury and disappearance from public life were never explained.
Met officer used police ID card and handcuffs to lure Everard into car before strangling her and burning body
The former Metropolitan police officer Wayne Couzens will be sentenced today for the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard, whom he lured off the street by abusing his powers and position as a police officer.
Couzens, 48, used his police warrant card and handcuffs to lure Everard off the street before strangling her with his police belt and burning her body, depriving her family of the chance to say a final goodbye, a court has heard.
Environmental campaigners who worked with UK officials fear for their lives after receiving death threats
The UK government has been accused of ignoring the plight of three environmental activists from Afghanistan who worked with British officials to mitigate the damaging impact of climate change on their country before the Taliban takeover.
The campaigners, who have received credible threats to their lives, do not know the fate of one of their colleagues who was detained by the Taliban.
Merseyside force says officers ‘gutted’ to kill animal after attempts to tranquillise it had failed
Merseyside police have responded to public criticism of their decision to shoot dead a marauding deer by saying officers were “gutted” to have to pull the trigger.
The rare white stag was killed by police on Sunday evening after it spent nine hours running through Bootle town centre, despite animal welfare experts urging officers to let it find its way home.
Reports suggest a decision on whether to deploy military tanker drivers has yet to be taken but 150 will get ready
AstraZeneca has just overtaken Next as the FTSE’s top riser, up 3.1%, after announcing that its newly acquired Alexion division would take full control of the rare diseases specialist Caelum Biosciences in a deal that could be worth up to $500m.
Caelum is developing a monoclonal antibody treatment for AL amyloidosis, a a rare disease in which misfolded amyloid proteins build up in organs throughout the body, including the heart and kidneys, causing significant organ damage and failure that could ultimately be fatal. The drug is in late-stage clinical studies.
Next is the top riser on London’s FTSE 100 index, after the UK fashion chain raised its full-year outlook again on the back of soaring sales, although it also warned over rising prices and staff shortages in the run-up to Christmas.
Its shares went up as much as 4% in early trading to hit a fresh record of £84.08, after the company reported pre-tax profits of £346.7 million for the six months 31 July. Full-price brand sales jumped 62% year-on-year and were 8.8% higher compared with pre-pandemic levels.
Government removes costs and red tape in go-ahead for more trials of gene edited crops
The prospect of genetically modified foods being grown and sold in the UK has come a step closer after changes to farming regulations that will allow field trials of gene edited crops in England.
Companies or research organisations wishing to conduct field trials will still have to notify the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the government announced on Wednesday, but existing costs and red tape will be removed so more trials are likely to go ahead.
Seven years after fleeing army clashes with militants, 100 families eking out an existence on a hillside near the Afghan border are unable to return home
“Don’t talk to me about the government. They don’t help.”
Ninety-year-old Shah Mast is angry. He has been living in the cave he calls home for seven years, ever since an offensive by the Pakistan army against the Islamist militant group Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) destroyed his home.
Earlier this month, proceedings opened in Austria in a civil suit brought against the authorities by the widow and son of a man who died of Covid-19 after staying in Ischgl, the ski resort widely regarded as having hosted a super-spreader event early in the pandemic. The week before, former French health minister Agnès Buzyn was ordered by a court to answer, essentially, for the government’s lack of anticipation of the pandemic.
In the UK, meanwhile, the government has promised a public inquiry into the handling of the crisis. It’s due to start next spring. Those pushing for it to begin sooner argue that the lessons learned could still save lives, but apportioning blame is another function of a public inquiry. The finger of blame has hovered over this pandemic since the beginning, and now it is tapping on actual shoulders.
The results for my art exam came in and I felt talentless, a dunce. For decades I was too scared to pick up a paintbrush, until a powerful woman entered my dreams
Having hands, I drew with them. That’s what hands were for: grasping crayons, freely and joyously making marks. I scribbled on the walls at home, on the pavements outside, as most children love to do.
At primary school, we learned to write using slates and chalks, with wetted sponges to hand. Writing seemed another form of drawing, scrawling loops and curves. We shaped individual letters into repeating lines. They were abstract forms, delightful but meaningless patterns. I had trouble learning to read clumps of letters as words, but I could draw them.
This simmering 70s-set domestic drama is warm, expansive and funny – a pure pleasure to read
The times are a-changing in solid, respectable New Prospect, Illinois, where Christmas 1971 arrives in a whirl of sex, drugs and folk music, while the Vietnam war grinds on off stage. Inside the First Reformed church, the worshippers are attempting to ride out the storm, casting about for something rock solid and true. This might be God or family or a fresh myth to believe in, a 20th-century pursuit-of-happiness tale, self-authored if need be.
New Prospect is in a state of flux but Jonathan Franzen remains reliably, defiantly Franzen-esque, tending to his faltering flock in fair weather or foul, and whatever the ructions in the country at large. Crossroads, his splendid sixth novel, comes billed as the first part of a proposed trilogy, A Key to All Mythologies, named after Edward Casaubon’s absurd, unfinished tract in Middlemarch. But, in the best possible way, it feels less like a beginning than like the latest yield of a familiar crop, or a newly discovered branch of a big midwestern family.
Covid-19 can infect insulin-producing cells in the pancreas and change their function, potentially explaining why some previously healthy people develop diabetes after catching the virus.
Doctors are increasingly concerned about the growing number of patients who have developed diabetes either while infected with coronavirus, or shortly after recovering from it.
Stunning Bacca is a 2 year old female Cross-Breed. She is now ready for a new and very experienced home. She came to the UK last year (2020) but did not settle in her home showing severe anxiety and stress with strangers etc and guarding. We took Bacca back into our care and after spending some time in kennels we sent her to the excellent rehab centre Birkett- Smith with Joy Keys in Dorset.
Bacca has progressed extremely well and is much more relaxed with life in general. Bacca needs an experienced adopter maybe a single person or a couple who will give her the space and time she needs and not expect her to accept lots of new situations. A quiet home without a lot of visitors or a home where Bacca can retreat to her own space when visitors come would be ideal.
A rural setting with a secure garden would be perfect. Potential adopters will be expected to visit her here more than once. She will have full back up from us as her Rescue and Joy Keys as the behaviour expert.
Any potential adopter will be expected to follow all advice given by the rehab centre to continue with the excellent rehab work she has had for the last 8 months and to ensure that Bacca is not put in situations where she feels intimidated or fearful.
She walks well on her lead and has no issues with other dogs who are introduced calmly to her. She is affectionate and will become attached to her chosen human.
Currently in South Yorkshire where visits can be arranged.
from Dogs for Adoption – dogsblog.com https://ift.tt/3mcNVYB
Writer, actor and activist explains how he fell in love with this England football team and his respect for players making a stand
“I went to an England game at the start of the Euros,” Benjamin Zephaniah says while explaining how he has come to love the national team for the first time in his 63 years. Zephaniah is a warm and amusing man who refers to himself, wryly, as “a dub revolutionary poet”. He is also a writer, an actor (most recently when playing the role of a preacher in Peaky Blinders) and an activist who has fought against racism most of his life.
Zephaniah has loved football since he was a boy supporting Aston Villa in the late 1960s. But his relationship with England has always been a tangled affair – at least until Gareth Southgate built a team full of players Zephaniah identified with, admired and even loved. He reels off some of the names in the squad that prepared for England’s first game of the European Championship – Raheem Sterling, Marcus Rashford, Harry Kane, Jack Grealish, Tyrone Mings, Bukaya Saka and the others who have so impressed him on and off the field.
Every inch of Margot’s body hurt from the unrelenting work. Her hands bled from blisters that burst as she repeatedly hauled carcasses, but she would wait until she got home to sterilise her wounds with ammonia. “If you didn’t do your job well, you’d be pushed – they didn’t care if your hands were full of blood,” she says.
This wasn’t the life Margot* imagined when she left her job in a clothes factory near her home village in Romania in search of better prospects for her young family in western Europe. She thought labour conditions in the Netherlands – where she worked for three years in a meat factory – would be much more favourable than in her home country. “I didn’t expect it to be so awful.”
Life as a meat worker can be brutally hard. But Margot soon realised there were two types of workers: employees, who she says were mainly Dutch; and precarious workers, mostly migrants like herself, who had to work harder and faster but earned less. “The ones hired directly by the company have more rights, get more relaxed work, stability and hours,” she says.
My sexual desire comes in peaks and valleys, but these days the peaks are fewer and further between. Do I need medical help?
I’m a 35-year-old gay man.I’ve always feltas though my sexual cyclesmay be different to everyone else’s. Sexual desire comes inpeaks and valleys; I have periods of high sexual activity and then it plummets to almost zero. In my20s, I shrugged it off by notstaying in sexualor romantic relationships for long, having more casual partners in the highs and just enjoyingtime alone in the lows. However, as Iget older, I notice these peaks are fewer andfurther between and much less pronounced.I worry that, nowI’m longing for more stablerelationships, I may not be able to offer a fulfilling sexlife to a potential partner. Is thisa medical condition I should fix? Or is this something I should learn to negotiate withany potential partner?
Men and women have cycles of libido – largely driven by hormonal activity – and everyone has to learn to adapt to them. These cycles and their intensity naturally change as we age or undergo life changes. They are also affected by elements such as stress, fatigue, anxiety and illness.
Japan will lift emergency coronavirus measures across the board at the end of this week, amid a dramatic fall in cases and rapid progress in its vaccination rollout.
The prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, said restrictions in place in 27 of Japan’s 47 prefectures would end on Thursday.
Victims can find it almost impossible – as I did – to deal with their pain. We need access to proper mental health support
Last month I thought about taking my life and wrote a note. I hadn’t made up my mind about dying, but I thought it was best to be prepared. I used the most legible form of my handwriting I could, I kept it succinct and without blame. I hoped the core message would come through: “I have tried so, so hard, but the pain is too much.”
I didn’t realise the irony. I didn’t realise yet that it was the “trying” that was killing me. I was trying much, much too hard to be OK and to be happy. And because I wasn’t (and am not) happy – or, a lot of the time, OK – I felt like a failure. This feeling of failure was the thing making me want to die. I hope that in detailing the depths of pain I felt that night, this article might help someone.
Deep sea mining firms claim their rare metals are necessary to power clean tech – but with even major electric car firms now backing a moratorium, critics say there is an alternative
At the Goodwood festival of speed near Chichester, the crowds gathered at the hill-climb circuit to watch the world’s fastest cars roar past, as they do every year. But not far from the high-octane action, there was a new, and quieter, attraction: a display of the latest electric vehicles, from the £28,000 Mini Electric to the £2m Lotus Evija hypercar. Even here, at one of the biggest events in Britain’s petrolhead calendar, it’s clear the days of the internal combustion engine are numbered.
As countries strive to meet stringent carbon-emission targets, and vehicle-makers phase out combustion engines, 145m electric vehicles are predicted to be on the roads within a decade, up from 11m last year. The car batteries they require, along with storage batteries for solar and wind power, have sent demand for metals soaring, taking mining firms to the bottom of the sea in the hunt for those metals.
The coronavirus pandemic has made people in the UK more likely to support the use of technology such as artificial intelligence and data analytics in enhancing public safety a new report argues.
A study by Goldsmiths University and Motorola found that three-quarters of people surveyed believed technology should be used to help emergency services predict risk, while a similar number said all forms of technology including video surveillance, needed to be more widely used to address the challenges of the modern world.
A major study of vaccine hesitancy among schoolchildren has found that younger children and those who are from more deprived communities were the most hesitant to get the jab. Those who were less willing to be vaccinated also felt less connected to their school community.
Researchers say the study shows the need to focus information more on social media than in traditional news outlets so that it can reach a younger audience.
Pickled cows and unmade beds: the art award has always challenged convention. But in 2021 it is going further, by abolishing individual artists altogether
The Turner prize has given us some great characters. Grayson Perry was a little-known alternative potter before this annual competition for avant garde British art launched him as a commentator and media personality. Tracey Emin became a national sensation when she showed her unmade bed in 1999, though she lost out to Steve McQueen – yet another talent for whom it was the beginning of great things.
But it’s a fair bet that no individual will become rich or famous as a result of this year’s Turner exhibition at Coventry’s Herbert Art Gallery. This is no slight on the 80 or so people I count behind the five collectives on this year’s shortlist. It’s just that you have to scan the small print to even find these folks’ names. The Turner has turned on itself.
Major figures privately admit summit will fail to result in pledges that could limit global heating to 1.5C
Vital United Nations climate talks, billed as one of the last chances to stave off climate breakdown, will not produce the breakthrough needed to fulfil the aspiration of the Paris agreement, key players in the talks have conceded.
The UN, the UK hosts and other major figures involved in the talks have privately admitted that the original aim of the Cop26 summit will be missed, as the pledges on greenhouse gas emissions cuts from major economies will fall short of the halving of global emissions this decade needed to limit global heating to 1.5C.
Ahead of Cop26, the UK could take the lead in diverting investments away from carbon emitters
Richard Curtis is a filmmaker and activist
Someone said something so simple yet so shocking to me recently: that weather used to be the last thing on the news, now it’s the first. Fire, floods, drought; it’s impossible to ignore. Well, I can’t help but feel that we should treat our pensions the same. They used to be the last thing on our minds – the worst possible thing to bring up at a party – but in order to tackle the climate crisis, they must now be the first.
With delegates from across the globe descending upon Glasgow in November for Cop26 – the most important climate negotiations for a generation – a new movement now has the power to deliver on the world’s most urgent agenda.
Discount supermarket chain to open further 100 stores as it reports 10% rise in UK and Ireland sales
Aldi will create 2,000 jobs and open another 100 stores across the UK as part of a £1.3bn plan to take a larger share of the British grocery market.
Aldi said it would also use the cash to expand its distribution centres, including a new 1.3m sq ft warehouse in Leicestershire, and trial a new checkout-free store in Greenwich in London, where it will use cameras, sensors and artificial intelligence to scan items and charge shoppers.
The voting figures published by Labour show that Sir Keir Starmer only won the vote on the party leadership election rule changes with union backing. In some respects that is a reversion to Labour’s past, when the leadership regularly used to rely on rightwing unions to outvote leftwing activists, although that is not a description of how the party is generally operating at the moment.
In the card vote on this rule change, the constituency Labour parties (CLPs) were 52.86% against and 47.14% in favour. But the affiliates (mostly the unions) were 60.2% in favour, and 39.8% against.
Good morning. Sir Keir Starmer won the vote last night on the internal Labour reforms that will require leadership candidates to have the backing of 20% of MPs, not 10%, stop registered supporters voting in leadership elections and make it harder for activists to trigger a reselection ballot in their local Labour MP. The changes were passed by 53.67% to 46.33%, which was closer than some expected, but it does go some way to compensating for Starmer’s failure to get the unions to back his plan to change the leadership election system more fundamentally (he wanted to return to the electoral college) and his allies are treating this as a significant victory.
In an interview for the Today programme this morning, Lord Mandelson, one of the main architects of New Labour and a Starmer supporter, was much more explict about that this might mean than Starmer himself, and his shadow ministers, have been. He said this was all about locking out another leader like Jeremy Corbyn. He said:
Jeremy Corbyn built on the rules that Ed Miliband introduced, which allowed hundreds of thousands of people to apply to vote for our future leader without actually caring about the Labour party, knowing about the Labour party and in many cases not even becoming a member of the Labour party.
That avalanche of people who were allowed in the Labour party to back one far left candidates who they wanted to see elected leader will now no longer be allowed to happen …
Albert Potrony’s exhibition turns Gatehead’s Baltic into a giant creche, inspired by a radical Dutch playground architect and the forgotten feminist men’s movement of the early 70s
For most parents, the ritual of pushing your child on a swing or kicking a ball with them in the park is the diametric opposite of high culture and radical politics. But artist Albert Potrony doesn’t see it that way. “Play is an amazing vehicle to explore absolutely everything,” he says. “Play is a fundamental tool for self-discovery, for knowing how to be in the world. It’s basically the artists’ process. We play – but it’s serious play.”
In his past work (if “work” is the right word), Potrony has given children the freedom to devise their own toys and encouraged students and refugees to make sculptures together. In his latest exhibition, Equal Play at Gateshead’s Baltic, Potrony uses the realm of the children’s playground to smuggle in ideas about urban theory, imagination and masculine roles. A key reference point, he explains, is Aldo van Eyck, the pioneering Dutch architect who opposed the soulless, abstract, top-down tendencies of modernism.
Germany is set for weeks or even months of protracted coalition talks after the race to succeed Angela Merkel after 16 years in power failed to produce a clear winner, with the centre-left Social Democrats just ahead of the centre-right conservative alliance according to official returns.
Low vaccine rates may be the predictable outcome subject to entrenched social forces that have diminished American health and life expectancy since the 1980s, health researchers say
Dr Claudia Fegan’s patient was a congenial, articulate and unvaccinated 27-year-old deli worker who contracted Covid-19 and became so ill he required at-home oxygen treatments.
Now recuperating, he told his doctor his 64-year-old boss had been vaccinated, and she too was sickened with a “breakthrough” case. However, she only had mild symptoms.
I am clamped into a razor-thin perineum-mashing machine with no brakes. What could possibly go wrong?
This is hardly the place to admit it, but I hate cyclists. I never know if they are going to stop at traffic lights or plough through; they’re often very shouty due to always being in danger; and the worst thing is, they’re right. We should all be cyclists as it’s good for the planet. I hate being around people who are right but, to my credit, I am always willing to have my rabid road prejudices punctured, so I have agreed to give track cycling a go.
Track cycling is like cycling squared, but in an oval. You’ve seen it at the Olympics: supercharged, smooth, oddly soothing – until a collision takes out half the cyclists because they’re riding mere millimetres apart. I am surprised anyone is able to have a go at whipping around the London 2012 velodrome on a two-dimensional bike that looks like it weighs less than a toaster. The Lee Valley VeloPark, in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, east London, is huge and engulfing. On the main floor, other people trying today’s taster session sit in three-sided metal pens, spaced apart like we’re at a sheep auction. I feel as if I’m in the hive where they make cyclists. I scan around for a giant alien ovipositor. Where is the Queen?
Joint TalkTalk and government scheme to tackle digital exclusion gives no-contract uncapped usage
People looking for work can now apply for six months of free broadband to help them search for jobs.
A national programme has been launched by the telecoms company TalkTalk and the Department for Work and Pensions that aims to tackling digital exclusion and remove barriers to employment.
The equalities minister says she doesn’t care about Britain’s imperial impact. It’s a sign of how deep-rooted the legacy is
In every single country that was ever under British rule, you will find a significant number of people who praise colonialism or claim they would willingly welcome back the British. It’s a sort of meme – half joke, half genuine frustration over political or economic instability.
Sometimes these laments are wistful longings for things that never really happened, such as the trains running on time, or lost status from a period when “people knew their place”. But they are almost always issued by those who have internalised the logic of empire itself – which is that it was, overall, an improving mission, albeit with a small number of unsavoury excesses.
In June 1940, a Dutch salesman, acting as a consul in Lithuania, issued Jewish refugees with pseudo visas to escape Europe. His remarkable story is only now being told
He helped save more Jewish lives than Oskar Schindler, but while the brave deeds of the German industrialist were known around the world because of an Oscar-winning film, few know the name Jan Zwartendijk, a Dutch radio salesman who helped thousands of Jews flee Nazi-occupied Europe.
Now a book by the celebrated Dutch writer Jan Brokken seeks to rescue Zwartendijk from obscurity, as well as other courageous officials who bent the rules to help several thousand Jews trapped between Nazi Europe and the Soviet Union.
After 10 years of bloodshed, foreign allies are seeking to rehabilitate the Syrian leader
For almost a decade he was a pariah who struggled to get a meeting abroad or even to assert himself on his visitors. Largely alone in his palace, save for trusted aides, Bashar al-Assad presided over a broken state whose few friends demanded a humiliating price for their protection, and weren’t afraid to show it.
During regular trips to Syria, Vladimir Putin arranged meetings at Russian bases, forcing Assad to trail behind him at functions. Iran too readily imposed its will, often dictating military terms, or sidelining the Syrian leader on decisions that shaped the course of his country.
Can the fastest man on the planet become a chart-topping reggae star?
Hang on,” I can’t help thinking as I wait for Usain Bolt – the Usain Bolt, Fastest Man In The World Usain Bolt – to magically appear on the laptop screen in my kitchen. Bolt has released a reggae album with his childhood friend and manager Nugent “NJ” Walker, and I’ve been granted an interview. Except… has there been some terrible mix-up? Am I interviewing some other Usain Bolt, some lesser-known reggae artist who just happens to share his name? Why on earth would a man widely considered to be the greatest sprinter of all time, a three-time world record holder, be releasing a reggae record?
But, nope, there he is, beaming at me from a nondescript kitchen somewhere in the world. (He’s actually in the UK, ready to play for the World XI against an England XI at Soccer Aid at Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium; days later, a clip will circulate of the long-retired Liverpool and England footballer Jamie Carragher beating him in a foot-race for a through ball.) He’s got the Bolt brand logo – a black bolt of lightning inside a yellow B – on the left breast of his black T-Shirt. There’s no mistaking it.
After the success of the chancellors’s £70bn programme, there is uncertainty about the future direction of the economy
The biggest state intervention in the UK’s labour market in peacetime comes to an end this week when the government finally winds up its furlough support.
Barring an unlikely last-minute change of heart, a wage subsidy that has been in place for 18 months and has cost £70bn will no longer be open to struggling firms.
The pastor’s family at the heart of Franzen’s sixth novel – a bravura examination of the mores of liberal America in 1971 – are his most sympathetic creation to date
The characters in Jonathan Franzen’s sixth novel exist in that much-disputed no man’s land between hip and square, in the culture wars of 1971. Since The Corrections, 20 years ago, Franzen has made himself the modern master of that fundamental driver of the 19th-century novel, the understanding that all happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Here, his never less than acute attention falls on the interior lives of the Hildebrandt family in small-town Illinois in the run-up to Christmas.
The patriarch, Russ Hildebrandt, is the minister at the First Reformed church in New Prospect, beset by temptation in the sweater-dressed form of his recently widowed congregant, Frances Cottrell, and usurped in his spiritual mission by a new young youth minister, Rick Ambrose, who offers the town’s teenagers a heady mix of gospel platitudes and rock music (you are reminded that Jesus Christ Superstar had opened on Broadway that autumn). Ambrose has created Crossroads, a cultish youth group for midwestern adolescents, which renounces sex and drugs in favour of “honest interactions” and “personal growth”. Fringed denim, earnest eye contact and cross-legged confessions are mandatory. Partly as an act of rebellion, Hildebrandt’s three eldest children have neglected their father’s Sunday sermons and joined Ambrose’s after hours’ mission. Perry, 16, with an IQ of 160, sees the group in part as a useful market for his pot dealing. His sister, Becky, has sensed the godhead in the 12-string guitar and sensitive fingers of Tanner Evans, Ambrose’s most charismatic young disciple. Nights at Crossroads, in the falling snow, are James Taylor songs come to life.
How does Sunday start? At 7.30am, with this small person who lives with us waking me up gleefully. I’d like to say a special thanks to the creators of Paddington2: we watch it week-in-week-out, and I enjoy it as much as my toddler.
What’s cooking? Not much for breakfast; I save myself for lunch. I’ve got a Big Green Egg – a charcoal-fired barbecue and oven. I pop in a chicken with wine, garlic, butter and herbs and it steams through the meat.
Travel agents report Australians’ interest in cruising increasing 40% each month since June, with one analyst describing it as ‘the Teflon market for travel’
On 16 September, Miami-based Oceania Cruises, a luxury culinary-focused cruise company that is a division of Norwegian Cruise Lines, set an all-time, single-day booking record. It was driven by the introduction of its newest ship, Vista, due to take its first passengers in April 2023. Nearly half the available inventory of Vista’s inaugural season was sold in one day. These were new cash bookings, 30% of which came from people booking with the company for the first time.
It’s hard to know what this means for Australia. According to Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA), 1.34 million Australians took a cruise in 2018, one of the highest rates in the world by population, yet international travel is currently off limits.
Striker faces depleted Man City after hitting 100-goal milestone
Miedema training harder after ‘reality check’ during lockdown
Vivianne Miedema believes she is only going to get better after passing 100 goals for Arsenal. As she gears up to face a depleted Manchester City defence on Sunday, Miedema said she has been working even harder on her game since being struck by a realisation during lockdown.
The striker has 102 goals in 110 games for Arsenal – without having scored a single penalty – but conceded that to a certain extent she has been coasting. “So far I’ve been able to do a lot just with my talent,” she said.
Hearts beat Livingston 3-0 as Michael Smith leads way
Jon McLaughlin’s penalty save helps Rangers win 1-0 at Dundee
Jon McLaughlin’s second-half penalty save helped Rangers secure a 1-0 win at Dundee to remain top of the cinch Premiership. It meant Joe Aribo’s early goal was enough for Steven Gerrard’s champions to get back on track in the division having been held to a draw by Motherwell last weekend, but Hearts are on their coattails thanks in part to Michael Smith, who opened the scoring in their latest win.
Aribo’s fine finish following good work by Alfredo Morelos with 16 minutes played gave Rangers the upper hand at Dens Park but the basement club made life far from straightforward after.
Southern Vipers, 187-7, bt Northern Diamonds, 183, by 3 wkts
Emily Windsor (47*) and Tara Norris (40*) pull off victory
Southern Vipers triumphed in a thriller at Northampton to retain their Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy title, beating Northern Diamonds by three wickets with just two balls to spare.
Vipers had looked down and out at 109 for seven but the batting depth that had seen them secure victory in six out of seven group-stage matches and gain automatic passage to the final came good once again – Emily Windsor (47 not out) and Tara Norris (40 not out) adding 78 runs to see their side over the line. For Diamonds, it was third time unlucky: they have now appeared in and lost all three finals since the new women’s regional setup was put in place last year.
