After Adele’s tearful reunion with a former teacher, four readers recall their own school memories
“So bloody cool, so engaging.” That’s how Adele described her English teacher at Chestnut Grove school in Balham, south-west London, Ms McDonald, when asked who had inspired her.
Answering a question from the actor Emma Thompson during ITV’s An Audience With Adele on Sunday, Adele said: “She really made us care, and we knew that she cared about us and stuff like that.”
Continue reading...With fellow Europeans leaving the UK, and no British workers taking their place, Eleanor Popa’s job harvesting strawberries has gone from tough to tough and lonely. Will the farm survive another year?
Eleanor Popa used to sleep in a six-berth caravan on the site of Sharrington Strawberries, a 16-hectare (40-acre) strawberry farm in Melton Constable, Norfolk. Now, there are only four people in her caravan: everyone else has left to work in EU countries. “My friends,” she says, “they went home, or to work in Spain and Germany. A lot of them did not come back to work this year.”
Popa, who is from Bulgaria, has been a fruit picker for two years. “It’s hard work,” she says. “We have to get up early and pick. It’s 6am in the summer. Now we get up at 7.30am. And we work in tunnels. Sometimes it’s cold, sometimes it’s hot. Sometimes it’s windy. It can be boring.” Picking strawberries is skilled work. “It took me a month to learn how to pick the fruit,” she says.
Continue reading...Analysis: scientists say high transmission rates mean caution is critical if people are to stay safe
As Christmas approached in 2020, it was not a Dickensian spirit but the spectre of Covid that haunted households up and down the UK.
With cases soaring, government-approved plans to allow three households to mix for five days in England were scrapped within weeks of being made, while scientists urged families to connect over Zoom or host drinks on the pavement rather than meeting for a hug.
Continue reading...Latest updates: tens of thousands of people march in Belgian capital against Covid measure; UK health secretary says vaccination must be voluntary
From Monday, people aged 40-49 in England will be able to book a Covid jab, the Department of Health and Social Care has confirmed. Sixteen and 17-year-olds will also be able to book in for their second jab.
Taking up the offer of a second or third dose will help protect the progress of the vaccine rollout in the face of waning immunity, and mean people can “enjoy Christmas safely”, the Department of Health and Social Care said.
We simply don’t know how many people who didn’t come forward during Covid-19, during the pandemic, will actually come forward, and therefore we are in a bit of a guessing game about exactly how many.
But the bit I can assure you is that NHS staff and NHS leaders are working incredibly hard at the moment to create that plan to ensure that we can get through that backlog as quickly as possible.
Continue reading...Critics call for planned rule change on outside work to include restricting use of personal companies to avoid tax
Critics have urged Boris Johnson to restrict MPs using personal companies to skirt tax bills under the planned new rules on second jobs, as the Conservative sleaze row continues to dominate Westminster.
Using a personal company to accept payments for consultancy work can provide benefits such as avoiding income tax of up to 45% at source on the earnings, with an investigation by the Times finding multiple MPs were paid in total about £1m via the arrangements.
Continue reading...Volunteer passengers will be aboard central TfL section of Elizabeth line as part of final testing phase
Hopes that Crossrail will open in central London in early 2022 – this time on schedule – have been boosted as the troubled £19bn scheme moved into its final phase of testing at the weekend.
The start of months of trial operations, which will involve thousands of volunteer passengers to test how the system will function, including in emergencies, was described as a “significant milestone” by Transport for London and the mayor.
Continue reading...The health secretary says the UK 'won't ever look at' mandatory vaccinations for the general public, after Austria announced it would become the first country in Europe to make coronavirus jabs compulsory. This comes as several countries, including Belgium, Germany and Norway, revealed last week they were preparing to beef up measures to tackle low uptake of Covid-19 vaccines
Continue reading...Police treating the deaths of a man and a woman found at a house in Higher Walton as suspicious
Police have arrested a man on suspicion of murder after two people were found dead at a house near Preston.
Lancashire constabulary said officers found the bodies of a man and a woman at the property on Cann Bridge Street in the village of Higher Walton on Saturday afternoon.
Continue reading...Activist Joel Keys says unionism would benefit from confronting, not avoiding, the things it finds most difficult
He was the teenage supermarket worker who shocked MPs examining loyalist anger in Northern Ireland by claiming that sometimes violence “was the only tool you have left”. Joel Keys left the committee chair, Tory MP Simon Hoare, “chilled and appalled” and he faced a media backlash.
Six months on Keys, now 20, has not disappeared into oblivion after his 15 minutes of fame. Nor has he abandoned his position on violence. He has ambitions to become a local politician representing young loyalist communities that he describes as “goldmines” left behind by unionist parties and education leaders.
Continue reading...Diversity report alleges that the FA’s referee system is obstructing black and Asian people from reaching elite levels of the game
English football has been rocked by a fresh racism scandal after black and Asian referees revealed the scale of abuse and prejudice that, they say, is holding them back.
A dossier compiled by match officials, and seen by the Observer, alleges that racism in the Football Association’s refereeing system is undermining efforts by black and Asian people to reach the highest levels of the game.
Continue reading...Memorial to novelist would be by Thames, which would evoke her suicide by drowning
Concerns have been raised about a planned statue of Virginia Woolf overlooking the Thames, which has been called insensitive because of the way she killed herself.
The memorial the author, designed by Laury Dizengremel, would be positioned on a park bench overlooking the river on Richmond riverside in south-west London, where she lived for about a decade from 1914.
Continue reading...Prof John Edmunds says millions still unvaccinated and warns that surge on continent ‘shows how quickly things can go wrong’
The surge in coronavirus infections across Europe shows the “critical” need for people in the UK to get vaccinated, a government scientific adviser has said.
Prof John Edmunds, of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, told Sky News that the rise in cases on the continent underlined “how quickly things can go wrong”. He pointed out that there were still “many millions” across the UK who were still not fully vaccinated, while some have not had any Covid shots at all.
Continue reading...The late diagnosis of Melanie Sykes and Christine McGuinness came as no surprise to those who, like Sara Gibbs, have trodden the same path
The news of Melanie Sykes and Christine McGuinness’s late autism diagnoses may have come as a surprise to many. After all, they are glamorous career women. They look nothing like the stereotype of autism we as a culture are used to. I, however, was not shocked, knowing only too well that you can’t tell anything about someone’s private reality from their public image.
As I read their stories, I couldn’t help but imagine what they might be feeling. Were they elated? Confused? Excited? Terrified? Angry? Relieved? All of the above?
Continue reading...With queues for petrol, inflation and Abba on the radio, it’s easy to compare the two decades. But you wouldn’t if you were there, says Polly Toynbee, as she revisits the styles of her youth
Queueing for petrol, I turn on the radio and there are Abba, singing their latest hit. Shortages on shop shelves are headline news, with warnings of a panic-buying Christmas. And national debt is sky high. But this isn’t the 1970s; it’s 2021. People who weren’t born then have been calling this a return to that decade. There are similarities, of course: this retro-thought was sparked by the recent petrol queues, people as frantic to fill up to get to work as I remember back then. Elsewhere, flowing floral midi dresses are back, just like the ones I wore; Aldi is selling rattan hanging egg chairs; and, as well as Abba, the charts have been topped by Elton John. But is this really a 1970s reprise?
No, nothing like it; not history repeated, not even as farce – just a stylist’s pastiche, as bold as the wallpaper I’m posing in front of here. Folk memory preserves only the 1974 three-day week; the miners’ strike blackouts, with no street lights and candle shortages; the embargo that quadrupled the price of oil. True, I did queue at the coal merchant’s to fire up an ancient stove for lack of any other heat or light. But the decade shouldn’t be defined by this, or by 1978-79’s “winter of discontent” strikes, a brief but pungent time of rubbish uncollected and (a very few) bodies unburied by council gravediggers.
Continue reading...Ministers launch public consultation and will also investigate limiting wet wipes, tobacco filters and sachets
Single-use plastic items such as plates, cutlery and polystyrene cups could be banned in England as the government seeks to eliminate plastic waste.
Under proposals in a 12-week public consultation, businesses and consumers will need to move towards more sustainable alternatives.
Continue reading...After the pandemic more women are choosing to work from home but that choice could damage career prospects
Employees want it, employers know they have to offer it; flexible working has transformed almost every office during the pandemic and it’s here to stay.
It is a change that has been demanded for decades by groups including women, those with caring responsibilities and disabled people. But economists and employment experts are warning it could lead to more inequality at the office, particularly for working mothers.
Continue reading...Nevres Kemal demands Miles Scott quits as chief executive of Maidstone and Tunbridge NHS trust
The mother of one of the victims of the morgue rapist, David Fuller, is campaigning for the boss of the hospital where Fuller serially abused corpses undetected for 12 years to resign.
The body of Azra Kemal was raped three times in July 2020 in the morgue of Tunbridge Wells hospital by Fuller, a hospital electrician, who is known to have violated at least 100 corpses between 2008 and 2010.
Continue reading...Okehampton welcomes revamp of service connecting Dartmoor town to Exeter and beyond
In 1972, the people of Okehampton turned out in force to wish a fond farewell to the Devon moorland town’s regular passenger rail service.
The mayor, Walter John Passmore, carried a funeral wreath and his wife, Daisy, waved the green flag to signal the final train’s departure, just about managing a sad smile for the cameras.
Continue reading...Morale low as scandals and doubts on policy delivery add to worries about PM’s competence
A shame-faced Boris Johnson told his own MPs this week that he had “crashed the car into the ditch” by misjudging the Owen Paterson scandal. As he heads to his country retreat of Chequers this weekend, some at Westminster have begun to wonder if he has what it takes to get the show back on the road.
As well as exposing Johnson’s lax approach to probity in public life, the Paterson debacle highlighted what those who have worked with him say is one of his most maddening characteristics – the impetuous style of decision-making and tendency to sudden reversals cruelly caricatured by Dominic Cummings as “like a shopping trolley”.
Continue reading...Campaigners say removal of blue badge parking to make way for new defences is in breach of Equality Act
Disability rights campaigners are planning a legal challenge against York council after it voted to ban blue badge parking on key streets in the city centre.
York Accessibility Action (YAA), an organisation founded by disabled York residents and carers, said the city has become a “no go zone” for many disabled people and there was now no suitable parking within 150 metres of the city centre.
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