Have you experienced reactions from other people when using your blue badge? We’d like to hear from you Scepticism about people’s right to a blue badge, as well as discussion of Motability, has created an atmosphere where disabled people are facing public questioning about their eligibility for the measures. Some disabled and chronically ill people report that they have been accused of “faking” their impairment while using their blue badges. Others say they have been accused of “scrounging” after using a car believed to be via Motability. Continue reading...

Gerald Fox’s documentary on early film-makers’ fascination with dreams and human consciousness is a fascinating, if rather scholarly endeavour Luis Buñuel wrote that dreams were the first cinema. His short film Un Chien Andalou, co-written with Salvador Dalí and inspired by the pair’s dreams, is nearly 100 years old but its images still have the power to shock and disturb: a razor slicing through an eyeball; two rotting donkeys strapped to grand pianos. Un Chien Andalou is one of dozens of films in this documentary about the influence of dreams in early cinema. It is directed by Gerald Fox, based on an essay by the late Harvard film studies professor Vlada Petrić that expounds a theory that early cinema pioneers used techniques to activate the brain much like dreams. In the nicest possible way, the documentary itself feels like a film-school lecture, erudite and exhaustive. Its expert edit of clips conveys the shock of the new that audiences must have felt in the 1910s and 1920s, watching the double exposure used to create the ghost-like vision of a victim in the tormented mind of his murderer in DW Griffith’s The Avenging Conscience. Or Charlie Chaplin turning into a chicken in the eyes of a man delirious with hunger in The Gold Rush. Continue reading...

Richmond theatre, London Archive footage and fresh commentary shed light on the craft and chaos of interrogating big names such as OJ Simpson and Donald Trump What are these shows, in which veteran entertainers regale us with clips from their glorious careers, if not attempts to grasp one more round of applause – without having to generate any new material? The virtue of Ruby Wax’s contribution to the genre is that she’s disarmingly upfront about this. In a show about fame-hunger and the experience of celebrity, it feels very on point. Co-hosted with her longtime TV producer, Clive Tulloh, Absolutely Famous finds Wax talking us through clips from her BBC show When Ruby Wax Met …, on which she interviewed the 90s’ and early 00s’ most controversial individuals: OJ Simpson, Imelda Marcos and a certain New York businessman whose notoriety was at that stage (oh, innocent times!) still in its infancy. There’s no point pretending we experience the shock of the new: Wax has already reflected on these interview experiences in a retrospective for the BBC. There’s no denying either that the footage, plus Wax’s insights, make for a very entertaining evening. Here she is talking (and acting out) sexual positions with Pamela Anderson, and here she is being read the rulebook by a steely Madonna. Marvel as Simpson mimes stabbing Wax with a knife, and peek through your fingers at her encounters with Donald Trump and Bill Cosby – whose loathing for their assertive female interviewer seethes across the screen. Touring until 7 July Continue reading...

Exclusive: Neville has criticised “those bloody YouTubers” – but The Overlap has now acquired channels with 3.7m subscribers for seven-figure sum Gary Neville’s sports media group has acquired two YouTube channels owned by one of the UK’s most popular but controversial football content creators in a deal understood to be worth a seven-figure sum. Mark Goldbridge’s The United Stand and That’s Football YouTube channels bring a combined 3.7 million subscribers to The Overlap, Neville’s group, which is understood to be seeking to grow its specialist coverage of big clubs across Europe. Continue reading...

Sparks fly in this homoerotic dance of desire and betrayal, from a powerful new voice in Irish literature Toxic masculinity, that repressed and repressive male energy that does so much to fuel brutality and abuse, sometimes finds itself on the brink of a vulnerable homoeroticism. In Djamel White’s debut novel All Them Dogs, a vividly propulsive neo-noir, two violent men discover that murderous desires can lead to love as well as death. This is a fast-paced crime thriller with a psychosexual twist, set in a dangerously Freudian arena of Eros and Thanatos. On the run for five years after killing a man in a gang fight, Tony Ward has returned to the badlands of west Dublin under the protection of a local crime boss. Teamed up with tall and sullen enforcer Darren “Flute” Walsh, Tony is back on his home turf grafting a grim routine of collecting debts and drug dealer’s dues. Propelled through a world of old scores and hard knocks, our protagonist is a shark who has to keep moving simply to survive. But when he and Flute are called upon to kill a failing dealer, their brutal conspiracy becomes a visceral dance of desire and betrayal. Continue reading...

Don’t be fooled by the A-Z treatment – this thoroughgoing guide asks deep questions about the art of autobiography “I’ve had a life and I’ve also had a life as a life writer”: Blake Morrison opens his tour d’horizon of arguably literature’s most expanding and expansive genre with a flash of his credentials and an implicit call to further inquiry. What constitutes a life, and what can it mean to write about it? Can you write about your own from inside it? Before his bestselling and highly praised account of his father’s life and death, And When Did You Last See Your Father?, was published in 1993, Morrison had a life as a poet, a critic and a literary editor. And perhaps his interest in penetrating the mysteries of another’s interior world was already in evidence: a few years earlier, he had written The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper, in which he had attempted to capture what newspaper reports had missed of serial killer Peter Sutcliffe (“So cops they lobbed im questions / Through breakfast, dinner, tea, / Till e said: ‘All right, you’ve cracked it. / Ripper, aye, it’s me.’”). Continue reading...

US vice-president defends pre-election visit to Hungary with fresh barbs against EU in first comments since Orbán’s loss Hungarian election winner Péter Magyar has been invited to meet with the Hungarian president, Tamás Sulyok, on Wednesday to discuss the government-formation process following the stunning win over Viktor Orbán in Sunday’s election. The meeting could be a bit awkward, given Magyar’s repeated calls for Sulyok, an Orbán loyalist, to resign from the office. “He’s one of the few European leaders we’ve seen who’s been willing to stand up to the bureaucracy in Brussels that has been very, very bad for the United States. So for example, when you see a European bureaucrat go after an American company, sometimes the only vote ‘no,’ the only vote to protect that American interest, has been Viktor Orbán.” “I think that his legacy in Hungary is transformational, 16 years, fundamentally changing that country.” Continue reading...

Independent Office for Police Conduct examines allegations that the race of victim’s’ families influenced conduct of officers The police watchdog is investigating complaints made against 11 officers over their handling of an inquiry into a road crash that killed two schoolgirls. The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) has confirmed that the officers, including a serving commander and a detective inspector, are being investigated over alleged gross misconduct. Continue reading...

Sponsorship income due to rise by more than 40% Champions League clubs to benefit from the growth Uefa is poised to bring in more than €1bn (£870m) a year in commercial revenues from club competitions from next year, with two more global sponsorship deals close to being agreed. Uefa’s commercial arm, UC3, is finalising agreements with an official payments provider and technology partner, which would complete their roster of premium global partners and see sponsorship income rise by more than 40%. Six-year deals with AB InBev as Uefa’s official beer partner and Pepsi as soft drinks provider from 2027 to 2033 have already been agreed, while Nike last week entered exclusive negotiations to replace Adidas as Uefa’s match ball provider. Continue reading...

Liverpool legend talks memories of Istanbul, learning magic and his adventures in Malaysia with Johor Darul Ta’zim Luis García was “super cool”, he says. That, at least, was the plan, but things have a habit of working out differently. When the former Atlético Madrid, Barcelona and Liverpool player retired in 2016, it was the second time: he walked out of the game in 2014 and walked back in again six months later. But this time, he wasn’t going to be affected. All that suffering and satisfaction, the pressure, the emotion: that was no more. “I was always very competitive and once I had left football, I thought I wasn’t going to have those feelings I had before,” he says. “I still enjoy football, still play seven-a-side with my friends – every Saturday at 10am, Los Jareños Club de Futbol – but I thought I had lost that and it wasn’t coming back. In fact, I was trying to avoid it; I didn’t want it. So when it happened, it surprised me. I didn’t expect football to give me that again. But there I was, crying.” Continue reading...

The Grand National, Masters, Paris-Roubaix and Champions League put it ahead of even July’s mighty trifecta The thought struck me on the last rattler back from the Grand National, as Avanti’s wifi faltered somewhere outside Crewe and the Masters stream on my phone froze yet again. I was watching the world’s best golf tournament, on a train journey back from the world’s greatest steeplechase, having seen the best football match of the season – Real Madrid against Bayern Munich – earlier in the week. Is there a better month in the sporting calendar than April? Augusta always delivers. Club football hits peak levels of drama and jeopardy. Then there is Aintree, Paris-Roubaix, the start of the County Championship cricket season and the World Snooker Championship. To round it off, the life-affirming sight of the great and the ordinary doing remarkable things at the London Marathon. “April is the cruellest month,” writes TS Eliot in The Waste Land. But he was not a sporting man and was living in very different times. Continue reading...

The government hails the ‘green revolution’ as a solution to economic decline, but some young jobseekers say the rhetoric does not match their experience On paper, Jake Snell, 19, sounds like the perfect candidate for a role in the UK’s burgeoning green energy sector. He has high grades in maths and physics A-level, a distinction in BTec engineering and another distinction in an extended engineering diploma. He has also done work experience at an engineering company. He is from Lowestoft, a coastal town in Suffolk, outside Great Yarmouth. Both towns contain areas that fall within the most deprived 20% in England and are part of a wider pattern of coastal places with low employment opportunities. Continue reading...

For three years, ceasefires have been ignored and we have descended back into chaos. Now there is a credible plan for peace on the table Freedom, peace and justice. Three words that united the Sudanese people and became the banner under which 30 years of dictatorship was brought to an end. An era of corruption, religious extremism, repression and conflict was over. I did not think that seven years on from the glorious December revolution, our nation would be on the edge of irreversible collapse. Three years of senseless violence have pushed Sudan to the brink. The country is engulfed in the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced. And for what? Continue reading...

Vance accuses Iran of ‘economic terrorism’; Hezbollah says it will not abide by agreements that result from the Lebanon-Israel talks in the US US starts naval blockade of Iranian ports after deadline passes South Korean president Lee Jae Myung has said rising tensions around the strait of Hormuz make it hard to be optimistic about the fallout from the Iran war, warning that high oil prices and supply-chain strains are likely to persist for some time. Lee told a cabinet meeting on Tuesday the government should treat prolonged disruption in global energy and raw materials markets as a given and reinforce its emergency response system. For the time being, difficulties in global energy and raw materials supply chains and high oil prices will continue … I ask that we pursue the development of alternative supply chains, medium- to long-term industrial restructuring, and the transition to a post-plastic economy as top-priority national strategic projects.” Lebanon and Israel have been at war in some form since the early 1980s. You’re not allowed to enter Lebanon if you have an Israeli stamp in your passport. The two don’t have diplomatic relations. So the fact that these talks are happening directly between the two governments is something that’s really astonishing. Continue reading...

Biography mingles with fiction as Levy explores the avant-garde writer through the story of three female friends in Paris The narrator of Deborah Levy’s witty scherzo of a “fiction” – “novel” isn’t the word for this uncategorisable book – thinks that Gertrude Stein would have liked Sigmund Freud. She imagines them enjoying a cigar together while their wives make small talk. Would Frau Freud “have exchanged her recipe for boiled beef with Alice B [Toklas]’s recipe for hashish fudge”? The two never met (though with her interest in the “bottom character” and his in the “unconscious”, Stein and Freud would have had plenty to talk about), but that barely matters. This book is full of things that don’t actually happen, of relationships that are not what the people involved suppose them to be, of digressions and fantasies and encounters that are imagined but never take place. It all starts with a lost cat. The cat is called “it”: lower-case “i” followed by lower-case “t”. This causes all sorts of linguistic confusion, highlighting the way we use the word “it” to mean something indeterminate (as in the first sentence of this paragraph), or something trivial, or something tremendous. The phrase “lost it” recurs, the “it” meaning – variously – one’s mind, sympathy with Ernest Hemingway, daring to be as unconventional as Gertrude Stein, the stream of consciousness “flowing under the mowed and manicured golf courses on which men swung their clubs in the 21st century”, the temptation to smile while being undermined by a patronising man, the drudgery of housekeeping, the thing – which might be obedience or shame – that holds an artist back from becoming a modernist … or love, or one’s mother, or a black-and-white cat with one deformed ear. Continue reading...

The artist and film-maker spent a summer on the island making poetic images of the local flora – and exploring their connections to Grenada’s historical trauma Continue reading...

Now I’m being threatened with debt collectors because I don’t have a tenancy agreement or a mortgage British Gas opened an account in my name for an address that I have never occupied, and sent me a £571 bill. It declined to open a complaint because I “refused” to provide a tenancy agreement or mortgage statement which, since I’ve long since paid off my mortgage, I don’t have. It is now threatening me with a debt collection agency. IW, Northampton Continue reading...

Rena Effendi attempts to find the species named after her wayward, womanising father – and a connection to the man she never knew – in this moving documentary Photojournalist Rena Effendi’s father was famous in the world of butterflies; he was a lepidopterist who spent seven years hunting one species. Effendi remarks drily that seven years was longer than Rustam Effendi lasted in any of his four – possibly more – marriages. (When asked for a precise headcount of wives, his old friend answers: “God knows!”) Effendi was 14 when her father died; he had been a mostly absent presence during her childhood, and had another family while being married to her mother. At his funeral, she remembers only women around his coffin. Years later, she discovered from his Wikipedia page that he had a butterfly named after him, the rare and endangered Satyrus effendi. This gentle, perceptive documentary follows Effendi as she searches for the elusive butterfly, which flies for just two weeks a year high in the Caucasus mountains – and chases her father’s ghost. Her mother is evasive, saying only that she would have forgiven Rustam almost anything. Effendi’s first hurdle on her mission to catch the butterfly is obtaining permission to travel to its habitat, on the border between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Effendi is Azerbaijani; her father died just as the Soviet Union teetered on the brink of collapse, after which tensions exploded between Armenia and Azerbaijan and war broke out. There is now a fragile peace. Continue reading...

Taking a leaf out of Kenneth Grahame’s book, our writer spends a few days getting lost among the woods and riverside villages of Oxfordshire and Berkshire Strolling through a deep tangle of beech trees to get some fresh air after a long drive, I think of the scene in Kenneth Grahame’s wistful story The Wind in the Willows, where Mole gets lost in the Wild Wood. “There seemed to be no end to this wood, and no beginning, and no difference in it, and, worst of all, no way out.” I’ve come to South Oxfordshire to explore what was once Grahame’s old stomping ground. Although I don’t share his character’s fear of the woods, I do share his own wonder for this part of the country, close to suburbia yet wrinkled with pockets of wildness. It’s one of those spring days when the light feels elastic and daffodils brighten the verges of muddy lanes. The moon is rising, however, and smoke drifts from the chimney of a cottage just beyond the woods. Nocturnal creatures may be rousing but I’m feeling the pull of a cosy burrow. I leave the trees and head back to my accommodation, Bonni B&B, in Hill Bottom. Continue reading...

Crowd turns out to welcome duke and duchess, who are combining public visits to worthy causes with private money-making appearances When Prince Harry and Meghan walked through the doors of Melbourne’s Royal children’s hospital just after midday on Tuesday, a hush came over the crowd of staff and patients gathered to greet them. It was followed by a soft, collective “hiii” – as though the crowd felt that speaking too loudly might scare the duke and duchess away. The couple walked in almost without ceremony on this first stop on their four-day Australian tour, greeting hospital management in the foyer before making their way around the arc of people gathered to see them, paying particular attention to children. Continue reading...

The chef uses surveillance to find out which restaurants desperately need his help. Plus: the search for the truth in The Copenhagen Test. Here’s what to watch this evening 10pm, Channel 4 In a series first shown in the US last year, chef Ramsay is back with his brand of brutal home truths on how to save struggling restaurants. This time, he is using surveillance to secretly gather intel on what’s going wrong before bulldozing in. He starts at a family-run Greek place in Washington DC, where the hygiene standards are said to be seriously lacking. Hollie Richardson Continue reading...

Consumer spending on travel is down for the first time in five years while card spending edges up in March UK consumers have cut back on travel spending for the first time in five years, as they worry about the rising cost of living amid the Iran war. Overall consumer card spending increased 0.9% year on year in March, down from February’s 1%, according to data from Barclays. Continue reading...

Data from 22 police forces shows spending has more than tripled since the ban came into force in 2024 Police spending on kennels and veterinary bills in England and Wales has more than tripled since the XL bully ban came into force, with some forces recording an almost 500% spending increase since the new law was enacted in 2024. Data from 22 police forces obtained via freedom of information requests showed police spending had soared from an average of £137,400 per force in 2022-23 to £423,136 in 2024-25. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Ministers accused of trying to keep investment firm’s withdrawal from partnership with NatureScot under wraps A funding deal to raise £100m from private investors for urgently needed nature restoration in Scotland has fallen through without the Scottish parliament being told. The Guardian has learned that Aberdeen, the investment firm, decided to withdraw from a partnership with the agency NatureScot to raise at least £100m for conservation projects from commercial and private investors late last year. Continue reading...

Wagnerites rejoice! Parsifal and the climax of Barrie Kosky’s acclaimed Ring cycle are in the pipeline. The director of opera talks about scoring a bullseye, the storms that rocked last season – and how to avoid sending audiences to sleep The morning I meet Oliver Mears, the director of opera at Covent Garden, I’m still walking on air. The day before I’d seen Wagner’s epic Siegfried, the third part of the Ring cycle. Nearly six hours long, it is an immersion into a world of gods and giants, heroes and warrior women – but also profound and poignant human relationships. With the remarkable Andreas Schager in the title role among a superb ensemble cast, it is the Royal Opera at its best. On the way to his office, Mears walks through the backstage labyrinth. Singers are warming up; wardrobe people are discussing a costume’s last-minute fix; and a couple of mice scurrying across the canteen lend a bohemian atmosphere. Heaven (give or take the rodents). Mears tells me about next season: course after course of operatic banquet. There will be a new Parsifal, conducted by music director Jakub Hrůša and directed, in his house debut, by the “brilliantly charismatic and interesting” Kazakhstan-born Evgeny Titov. There’s a new Un Ballo in Maschera by Verdi, with another director fresh to the house, the “stylish and rigorous” German Philipp Stölzl. There’s a return for Richard Jones’s brilliant production of Janáček’s Kát’a Kabanová with Hrůša conducting – whose interpretation of Janáček’s Jenůfa last season was one of the musical experiences of my life. Continue reading...