Penulis: Agus S

An Australian win looked inevitable after setting 282 to win, but Aiden Markram and Temba Bavuma defied the odds

Right from the start of the day, there was an inevitability that this match was Australia’s. They started 218 runs in front, in the third innings, walking back onto a Lord’s field where 28 wickets had fallen in the previous two days. They had the four-star bowling attack, their opponents had the shooting-star batting order, one that had flashed and vanished in its first sighting. Soon this would be compounded by Temba Bavuma’s hamstring injury. The lead as it stood looked a chance to be enough, and first would come the chance to increase it a smidgen more.

The sense of inevitability only grew as that smidgen broadened into a big dirty smudge. There is nothing more galling for a cricket team than a long tenth-wicket partnership. Every ball is more annoying than the one before. Things had started right, Kagiso Rabada in his second over of the day trapping Nathan Lyon with only four runs added to the score. On four wickets for the innings, nine for the match, Rabada was ready to complete twin milestones.

Except they didn’t come. Not in his third over, nor his fourth. Not his fifth, not his sixth. Not even his seventh. When he was taken off after drinks, fading with fatigue, it must have been galling to the entire side, their champion deserving that last swipe of icing on the cake. Instead, not content with seeing off the major threat, Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood just kept batting: 135 balls, 59 runs, to the stroke of lunch.

Starc made a few Test fifties early in his career, including a 99, as slap-and-slash affairs. He hadn’t made one in the last six years, but over that time his batting has probably been better. He has made 20s, 30s, 40s, over long periods, in tough situations, when resistance was needed. Look at the previousWorld Test Championshipfinal, the last Ashes in England, some of the most difficult outings against India. Today’s unbeaten 58 was one of his best, by far his slowest score of anywhere near that size, facing 136 balls, more than anyone in the Test to that point.

So a session of frustration, surely a distraction for South Africa as a lead inverted its final numbers from 218 to 281. Then an early wicket for who else but Starc as Ryan Rickelton nicked an outswinger. Starc again, as Wiaan Mulder chipped to cover for 27. Bavuma’s hamstrings have always popped like champagne corks on New Year’s Eve, and the South African captain did another when he was on 9. It was still inevitable, it seemed. Australia were on their way to win.

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But there was one wrinkle. For all that the Starc and Hazlewood stand drove South Africans mad, every run they made was also an example to the same team of how much easier run-making had become. The pitch metrics showed that movement had eased through the air and off the surface. The sun was shining brightly. And while it was the fourth innings of the Test, it was also only the third day.

Those who pay attention to county cricket will know there has been a Lord’s trend, at least recently, of scores growing bigger as matches goes on, with surfaces easing as chases are made. A month ago, Middlesex spinner Zafar Gohar sealed a chase of 366 at eight wickets down. Most followers of the Australian Test team would find themselves short of the required standard on reaching the Zafar Gohar round of their local pub trivia night, but that is a fact with some bearing on Australian fortunes.

Because over the next session and a half, that inevitability shifted. Bavuma batted on despite the injury, riding some luck with a dropped catch, injuring Steve Smith in the process, then growing into an unbeaten 65. At the other end was Aiden Markram, who had looked like a million dollars from the outset, riding the bounce and diverting the pace of Australia’s celebrated quicks, using their gifts to build his score. As the runs went by, South Africa became the team untroubled, Australia the team starting to scramble, and by stumps the pairing remained intact with only 69 more to win. Markramstarted his careerwith a fourth-innings hundred against Australia, and has reached that career’s peak with another here. The first time he still ended up on the losing side; this time, he mustn’t.

Cricket is fond of dishing out the lesson that nothing can truly be known, or in more frank terms, the lesson that you, the one making the assumptions, are an idiot, actually. No matter how many times the lesson is taught, each fresh instance of an opportunity will see some portion of us fail to remember it. Australia were going to win this, it was inevitable, until they weren’t. South Africa will win it from here, that too is an inevitability. Which means it might happen. Or it might not.

We asked a chatbot some common finance questions – and then ran its responses past human experts

Artificial intelligence seems to have touched every part of our lives. But can it help us manage our money? We put some common personal finance questions to the free version of ChatGPT, one of the most well-known AI chatbots, and asked for its help.

Then we gave the answers to some – human – experts and asked them what they thought.

We asked:I am 35 years old and want to ensure I have a comfortable retirement. I earn about £35,000 a year and have a workplace pension, in which I have saved £20,000. My employer contributes 4% of salary. I would like to retire at 60 and want to ensure I have enough in my pension pot to not worry about money later in life. Do I need to save more?

ChatGPTsaid*:A comfortable single-person retirement requires roughly £43,000 a year of spending (in today’s money) while a moderate lifestyle might need £31,000 a year. Covering £43,000 a year over a 20- to 30-year retirement implies a very large pension pot of about £793,000 in addition to the state pension. A moderate £31,000 a year needs £478,000 in savings.

Your state pension will kick in at 67 and is about £12,000 a year, much less than the £43,000 needed for comfort and it does not arrive until seven years after you retire. This “pre-state pension gap” could well exceed £150,000. You must plan to fund all expenses for seven years on your own savings.

Even optimistic growth leaves you well below the £500,000 to £800,000 needed. You’ll need to save more – much higher than 9%. Vanguard [an investment adviser] suggests saving 12% to 15% of your pay a year (including employer contributions). Legal & General offers a rule-of-thumb savings percentage of half your age: at 35, that means 17.5% of your salary. Since your employer already gives 4%, you might target 11%. Don’t forget UK tax relief: your 20% basic-rate relief effectively makes every £80 you save cost you only £60 net.

Consider topping up with a lump sum or contributing to a stocks and shares Isa.

Read ChatGPT’s full answer here

Steve Webb, a partner at the pension consultants LCP, says:Using thePensionsand Lifetime Savings Association (PLSA) standard for a “comfortable” and moderate income seems a reasonable place to start.

For someone aged 35 today, the state pension age by law will be 68 (and could be higher by the time they get there) so the reference to 67 in the reply is incorrect.

The PLSA says you need £43,000 a year after tax, so that implies a pre-tax income of very roughly £50,000; you get £12,000 a year of this from state pension age, but for the first eight years of retirement (before the state pension kicks in) you would need this to come from your pension pot. This means you will need £635,000 on current calculations.

The figure of £793,000, therefore, looks over the odds, though there may be an assumption (not made explicit) that a quarter is always taken in tax-free cash. The person using AI needs to understand what assumption has been made around tax-free cash to clarify what is going on.

It is good the AI explains that in the first years of retirement you are relying solely on your private pension pot, a kind of basic “cashflow modelling” many advisers would do as standard.

The rules of thumb are a decent starting point, although the one about saving at a percentage which is half your age is for people who only start saving at that age.

One omission is that there is no reference to the possibility of an additional employer match. Some firms will pay more if you pay more, and that would make additional workplace saving much more attractive than the suggested alternative of an Isa. Another omission is that if you buy an annuity at 60, you may want to think about things such as inflation protection, and these would increase the size of pot you needed to target.

I don’t think it’s a bad reply aside from the error on state pension age. But you would want to go deeper in terms of understanding the assumptions made.

We asked:We have 20 years left on our mortgage and our current rate is due to run out in a few months. The loan to value is about 50%. What are the best rates on the market? Should we go for a two-year or five-year fix? Or should we stay put and hope that that rates come down?

ChatGPTsaid:The very cheapest two‑year fixes are about 3.7% to 3.8% and five‑year fixes are about 3.8% to 3.9% for borrowers with large deposits. With 50% equity you should qualify for the lowest-rate tier.

For example, Lloyds Bank has a two‑year fix at 3.72%. These often have arrangement fees (typically £999) so factor them into any calculation. For five‑year fixes, Lloyds offers 3.78%.

If you did nothing, your mortgage would revert to the lender’s standard variable rate, which are typically much higher – about 7-8%. An SVR can jump if rates rise, and lenders are not required to pass on cuts in full.

If you expect further rate cuts, a two‑year deal lets you refinance again sooner at (hopefully) lower rates. The downside is more frequent remortgaging: after two years, you’ll need another deal.

Five-year deals are likely to be a few tenths higher but give peace of mind for longer and protect you if market rates jump or stay elevated. If stability of repayments is your priority, a five‑year fix is often recommended.

Most analysts expect further modest cuts – economists at Barclays predicted the bank rate could fall to 3.5% by early 2026. That could push mortgage offers down further, but likely not to the ultra-low levels seen pre-2020.

Many experts lean toward taking a fixed rate now (especially to avoid the very high SVR) and revisiting options after a year or two.

Read ChatGPT’s full answer here

David Hollingworthof the broker L&C Mortgagessays:This response is not even close to the level of advice that a qualified adviser would provide. What it does provide is a quick spin around some of the things that have been going on in the market, along with a general overview of elements the borrower may want to think about.

The AI response is a bit of a mishmash and veers from quite specific information, such as specifying the Lloyds rate, to more general observations. Aside from the fact that this deal is now defunct, it also required the borrower to be a current account customer. Criteria will be as much a factor for many borrowers as the deal itself.

It does highlight that there’s an arrangement fee to factor in, but borrowers need to understand there are options that can reduce or remove those costs, which could work much better for someone with a smaller mortgage.

It feels a bit mixed about what may or may not happen with rates – the bottom line is that none of us know and, as far as I know, that includes AI.

Because it was asked about two- and five-year rates, it fails to consider whether another option could fit better. An adviser would take a borrower through that, which could open up something like a three-year deal, fixing for 10-plus years and the existence and pros and cons of variable rate deals, too.

The response may give some food for thought to borrowers and help them consider the questions they want to cover with a human adviser. Most borrowers will have had a browse online of “best buy” deals and coverage of what’s happening in the market before seeking individual advice. ChatGPT may offer another way to drag a very general summary together quickly as part of that research.

We asked:I have two children (12 and 15), both of whom are in secondary school. Both want to go to university when they finish school. What is the best way for me to start saving and how much will I need to put together? They will be going to university in the UK. Can they get student loans? How much will accommodation cost us?

ChatGPTstarted with details of the government loans for tuition and living costs and when they need to be repaid. It says these children would qualify for the minimum maintenance loan of between £3,907 and £6,853 depending on where they work and study.

It then said:It’s wise to start saving now with dedicated education savings. JuniorIsasallow up to £9,000 a year for each child in tax-free savings or investments. Any growth is tax-free, and funds are released when the child turns 18.

Even small regular deposits (eg £50-£100/month) into a Jisa, or a high-interest children’s savings account, can add up. Other options include premium bonds, a stocks and shares Isa (higher risk, higher potential return), or simply a regular savings account in the parents’ name. Consider investments for long-term growth: index funds or diversified portfolios can beat savings rates, though with risk of loss.

It added that you should encourage children to save and to check for bursaries and scholarships.

Read ChatGPT’s full answer here

Charlene Young, a senior pensions and savings expert at AJ Bell, says:It did a decent job of spelling out the facts of how much uni could cost, and the probable level of loan that could be applied for.

It falls short on explaining the differences that would help someone make the right decision for their circumstances. A discussion with a real person would involve questions asking for extra information to give a more comprehensive answer.

When saving or investing for children, we often talk about putting on your own oxygen mask first, such as checking you have a cash buffer or emergency fund for those unexpected costs. I’d want to double check that you don’t have any unsecured, high-interest borrowing outstanding – the AI answer doesn’t really explain that, starting from an assumption your own finances are in good shape.

A pot such as a junior Isa makes sense for a specific goal such as university costs, but that money is locked away until the child turns 18 – and after that, it switches to an account in their own name that they can spend as they wish.

It was good to see the AI suggest involving the child in all financial discussions to help them become a bit self-sufficient and mitigate some of those risks, but the answer did not spell out the important access at age 18 point.

We know that investing gives the best chance of growing money over the long term – above cash and rises in the cost of living. But the short investment window between now and the time the eldest child would go to university was not mentioned at all as a risk.

A specific fund recommendation from AI would be a bit of a red flag, but it’s helpful to give people an idea of what could be considered or where to find more information. For example, what is an index fund, or a diversified portfolio and what are the likely costs.

Here, a real adviser could make a formal recommendation, or an expert could point out how to research different types of funds.

We asked:I have just bought my first home and am expecting a child with my partner. What types of insurance do we need and how much should we spend? We travel on holidays every year and both work full time.

ChatGPTgave a list of insurances and explained what each does, including what policies typically provide and exclude. For example, it said “life insurance pays a tax-free lump sum or regular payout if a policyholder dies during the term… A Which? comparison found a 30-year-old could insure £300,000 (25-year term) for about £113 per year.”

It said the key policies to get in this case were life insurance, income protection, critical illness cover, buildings insurance, contents insurance, and travel insurance.

It said:“To save on premiums, you can bundle cover as insurers often discount multi-policy customers. A joint life policy (pays on first death) is cheaper than two single life policies, but note it ends on first claim. Sometimes buying separate dual life (first-death) and second-death life insurance can be optimal. Rates vary widely so get multiple quotes.”

Read ChatGPT’s full answer here

Graeme Trudgill, chief executive of the BritishInsuranceBrokers’ Association saysthe response is “very generic” and does not take into account the complexities of insurance. Brokers, he says, are able to negotiate with providers on behalf of the consumer and know what the best policies are on the market.

Kathryn Knowles from brokers Cura Insurancesays some of the advice on critical illness cover was confused and did not properly distinguish it from income protection, which advisors have to do.

AndGarry Nelson from AllClear Travel Insurancesays the AI’s response on travel insurance is “very simplistic” and fails to help people in what they need, be it a single trip or annual policy. “This is as far as ChatGPT can go in my opinion for travel insurance enquiries – ie offering a general description as it is not regulated to offer anything more detailed or complex,” he says.

The responses from ChatGPT were largely limited to general summaries about the various topics – and sometimes even contained inaccuracies. They may be a useful introduction and guide, but lack the level of detail needed to make serious decisions that could cost thousands of pounds. It’s a good place to start if you want an idea of some of the things you need to think about before making decisions – but if you want advice, you should be better off with a human.

* The responses from ChatGPT have been edited for this article

You will get better detail in an answer if you provide a lot of information, such as your age, your salary and what debts you have, rather than just asking a general question.

Check your privacy settings to ensure you are comfortable with how ChatGPT processes your data. You may well want to ensure your chats are not being used for training.

Don’t rely on the AI to tell you about the most up-to-date products. Instead do your own research or go to an adviser. The AI is better placed to give plans or broad strategies.

Use it as a jumping-off tool, not for a final plan. While you might get some good general details, don’t make any decisions without doing your own research as well or consulting an expert.

If you don’t understand a term, ask the AI to break it down for you – for example, you might want to know what the difference is between types of loan available when you go to university.

On the free version of ChatGPT, click “Run Deep Research” in the tools section of the query box to get a more extensive report on your query, as we did in collating this article. There are five opportunities to use it in the free version, and you can pay for more.

Small, huge, camp, Star Trek-themed … weddings have changed beyond recognition, but we’re still reading out the same old Shakespeare sonnets. What to read at a modern ceremony? Plus, leading poets pick their favourites

Tell us: what poem would you choose to read at a wedding?

Imarried my wife in October 2022 and, in the lead-up, it was obviously my job to source the wedding poems. I have published seven poetry collections, I read poetry every day, I own more than a thousand poetry books. I should have read through my favourites till I found the perfect fit. But that’s not what I did.

Instead, for some bizarre reason, I sat down at my laptop and furtively Googled the words “wedding poem”. Why do we all do this, poets included? Well, I think, even though we want to express something deeply personal, the word “wedding” makes us all panic and reach for stock texts. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s How Do I Love Thee? or The Passionate Shepherd to His Love by Christopher Marlowe (“Come live with me and be my love”) or Ecclesiastes 4 (“Two are better than one”).

Up until very recently, a wedding was no place for reinvention. Now, gay marriage is legal in Britain; heterosexual couples can have civil partnerships; you can get married in a yurt or a cave or on a rollercoaster. But the old traditions die hard, and despite these new freedoms, the word “wedding” still influences our imaginations in ways that can feel alienating or limiting. When it comes to the “wedding poem”, even a Star Trek-themed do will find us translating the same old Shakespeare sonnet into Klingon.

My friend and fellow poet Rachel Long and I decided the time was right for a brand-new wedding anthology, “alternative poems for alternative weddings”, shaking up the genre. When a publisher picked up our idea we felt smug that we would be getting paid to spend months reading love poetry – now all we had to do was pull together 100 wedding poems that fitted our brief of “something new”. We arrived at thePoetryLibrary in London, the largest public collection of modern poetry in the world, armed with a list of our favourite contemporary poets. The hard part, we agreed, would be whittling them down.

In order to sift for suitable poems, we’d given ourselves these criteria:

1) Does not necessarily need to mention weddings, but must believe in the concept of lasting love.

2) The hope must outweigh the sadness.

3) No profoundly grim last lines.

Simple, right? As we quickly discovered, these criteria ruled out nearly every contemporary love poem ever written. Our Poetry Library days looked something like this: two women hunched in silence over poetry books, speed-reading and frowning. Our dialogue consisted mainly of “No”. Occasionally one of us would say, “Maybe?” – and the other would sit up like a meerkat, briefly hopeful – then we’d read on and say: “Oh no, sorry, the last line is about the inevitability of death.” Charles Simic’s Listen begins “Everything about you, my life, is both make-believe and real” – promising, I thought – then ends with “a small child leaping out of a window with its nightclothes on fire”. Fantastic ending, not a wedding poem.

Sometimes one of us was sure – “Yes! This is a beautiful wedding poem!” – then the other would take a closer look and ask “Isn’t this about an affair?”, or “But doesn’t this leave the reader with a deep, pervading loneliness?” or, and this became a frequent question, “Is it a bit too sexy?” Could a wedding poem really proclaim, “I place your ring on my cock where it belongs”? (American Wedding by Essex Hemphill.) As the piles of books dwindled, our list barely grew. Days went by, then weeks, then months. Reading love poems became a slog.

As summer turned to autumn, Rachel and I spent the evenings manically texting each other vast threads of poems from our personal bookshelves. What the hell did we actually mean by a wedding poem, anyway? What were we looking for? Love poems, of course. But what kind? As our reading attested, a huge majority of contemporary love poems are tinged with doom; and this is expected, after all, as often the emotional key to effective poetry is contradiction, an alloy of joy and sadness, anxiety and hope, clashing together to spark the unparaphrasable world of a poem.

However, if a celebrant stood up and said, “Statistically 42% of marriages end in divorce,” they’d be breaking the rules of the day and perhaps get a glass of prosecco thrown in their face. The point of a wedding is to provide you with enough optimism, support, encouragement and affirmation to sustain you through the hard times ahead; therefore, to be a wedding poem, a love poem mustn’t let in too much hard reality, or predict the end of love, or contain so much emotional ambiguity that it pours a gravy boat of sorrow over the vol-au-vents. But what about tone? What tone should a wedding poem have?

We realised this was the wrong question. Every wedding, every couple is different. The dream of the “perfect wedding poem” is something that speaks directly, seemingly specifically, to a particular love. We can all picture that guy standing up to the microphone to awkwardly read a poem, using words (and a wooden poetry voice) that sound nothing like him. Well, I’m a firm believer that if a poem speaks to you, it will speak like you when you read it aloud. So, we didn’t want a “one-size-fits-all” anthology. We needed to be braver. Maybe a wedding poem could be a bit sexy? Or reflect real love in a difficult world? Unrequited, probably not, but funny and irreverent? Yes. These were alternative poems for alternative weddings, after all, be they small, huge, camp as Christmas, hilarious, glamorous, shotgun, a third wedding held in a nursing home, or the low-key but profound culmination of a 40-year love.

Who says a wedding poem should feature stars, skies and rivers? Who limited our imaginations in that way? What about vacuum cleaners, the Tapton Bridge, black Chevrolets, cheese and onion rolls, brass bands, scaffolding and kittiwakes? What about “the ethereal gleam of wet tarmac”? (Michael Pederson.) Or laughter that “fills up the corners of the room with a thousand upside down cartoon bats”? (Hera Lindsay Bird.)

After all, weddings need poems because poetry can express the inexpressible, translate longing into language, throw a can of paint over an abstract feeling. We reach for poems on these days because “love” is too small a syllable to elaborate on the endless uniqueness of the heart. So, rather than creating a safe generic tone across the whole anthology, we decided to include all tones, so that at least one poem would speak to a reader’s wedding specifically. Perhaps the couple are two lighthouses joined by a “beam of alignment” (Two Lighthouses by Julia Darling)? A Mr and Mrs “unveiling each other” (Measuring Light by Theresa Lola)? Masons, building a wall of “sure and solid stone” (Scaffolding by Seamus Heaney)? “Pure flame and song” (Serenade by Terrance Hayes)? “Two fat cats in love” (Cat Worship by Golnoosh Nour)? “Less silk and lace, more heather and thistle” (A Boy Gets Married by Lewis Buxton)? Or flying to the moon “by the speed of queer zest” ( i love you to the moon & by Chen Chen)?

Finally, we had an anthology of one hundred (and one) newly selected poems for the big day, of all sizes, flavours and styles. Some are cheeky, some are weird, some sexy, subtle, domestic, ecstatic and sweet. You won’t find many featured in your frantic Google search, but we can assure you that their hope outweighs their sadness, and they all believe in lasting love.

Something New: Alternative Poems for Alternative Weddings edited by Caroline Bird and Rachel Long is published by Picador. To support the Guardian, order your copy atguardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

I would like us to live like two lighthousesat the mouth of a river, each with her own lamp.

We could see each other across the water,which would be dangerous, and uncrossable.

I could watch your shape, your warm shadow,moving in the upper rooms. We would have jokes.

Jokes that were only ours, signs and secrets,flares on birthdays, a rocket at Christmas.

Clouds would be cities, we would look for omens,and learn the impossible language of birds.

We would meet, of course, in cinemas, cafes,but then, we would return to our towers,

knowing the other was the light on the water,a beam of alignment. It would never be broken.

She pressed her lips to mind.– a typo

How many years I must have yearnedfor someone’s lips against mind.Pheromones, newly born, were floatingbetween us. There was hardly any air.

She kissed me again, reaching that placethat sends messages to toes and fingertips,then all the way to something like home.Some music was playing on its own.

Nothing like a woman who knowsto kiss the right thing at the right time,then kisses the things she’s missed.How had I ever settled for less?

I was thinking this is intelligence,this is the wisest tonguesince the Oracle got into a Greek’s ear,speaking sense. It’s the Good,

defining itself. I was out of my mind.She was in. We married as soon as we could.

Excerpted from Everything Else in the World: Poems. Copyright (c) 2006 by Stephen Dunn. Used with permission of the publisher, WW Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Andrew McMillanThe joy of a wedding is the singular love celebrated within a community; and the party afterwards, of course. The Wickedest, by Caleb Femi, is a collection that captures that vibe perfectly, and a great one to read aloud would be Max Meets Shelley on the Balcony. It begins: “like a planet flung I danced / unroped”. A perfect start or end to any ceremony.

Joelle TaylorLawless and adventurous, XIII from Adrienne Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems in The Dream of a Common Language is a poem to launch a lesbian marriage.

The rules break like a thermometer,quicksilver spills across the charted systems,we’re out in a country that has no languageno laws, we’re chasing the raven and the wrenthrough gorges unexplored since dawnwhatever we do together is pure inventionthe maps they gave us were out of dateby years …

It is a sonnet to another way of life, another kind of love, its unmapped territory being the thrill of it. It ends with a moving sense of ancestry, of wrong-walking women connected across time.

Wendy CopeAt our wedding a friend read the Apache Wedding Blessing. My favourite lines are “Now there is no more loneliness / For each of you will be companion to the other”. It ends: “May your days be good and long upon the earth.” I later learned that it is “fake folklore”, written in 1947. I’m glad I didn’t know that at the time. I still like it.

Michael RosenWhen I got married we read pieces about things we liked that were personal to us, so they don’t really translate – but here’s a new poem:

When you get marriedthey ask you to write an inscriptionThink of it as beinglike taking out a subscription.You should sign itwith a feeling of elationand hope it won’t endwith a cancellation.

Mary Jean Chan“At twenty, yes: we thought we’d live forever. /At forty-five, I want to know even our limits.” I love Adrienne Rich’sTwenty-One Love Poems, which speaks about love as a political act, one that arrives like a revelation and endures against all odds in a patriarchal and violent world. Elsewhere, Rich writes, “I choose to love this time for once / with all my intelligence”.

Len PennieWe tend to think of love as a completed action, a noun trapped in amber, a red rose. I wrote a poem called The Vow, which will be published in my new collection, Poyums Annaw, to acknowledge love as a verb, a choice, an action and commitment that’s continually taken every single day. It’s a visceral, embodied action unique to every person and relationship. It celebrates what it is “To be loved through each compromise, question or qualm / To be sheltered from storm and enshrined in the calm / To be held, not like glass, but the end of a deal”. And ends: “I am yours for as long as you’d like to be mine / If you ask me, I’m certain, forever is fine.”

Harry Josephine GilesLove is overburdened with old images, so we need poems to help us see it clearly again. In Gràdh (Love) Aonghas Pàdraig Caimbeul compares it to a bird hanging upside down, eating nuts from a feeder:

Cho daingeann’s a tha gràdh,a’ crochadh an sinsna speuran.

(How solid / love is / hanging there / in the air.)

Marriage is one of those heavy stories that wants lightening up if it’s to sing: this simple lyric, in ordinary Gaelic worn smooth by good use, could bring breath into the ceremony so that people can see love hanging there in the air above them.

Rishi DastidarA friend once commissioned a poem from me for his wedding. I wrote something I thought was plangently romantic. I was summoned to a crisis meeting, where the bride-to-be said: “Can you make it funny?” Now if asked for a wedding poem I’d suggest Victoria Kennefick’sDeposition, with its ardent evocation of the marriage between waves and cliffs: “silt and foam, my wedding dress; spray and salt, my veil”.

Pompidou Centre, ParisAs the gallery prepares to close its doors for five years, Tillmans is let loose across all 6,000 sq metres of its public library. The results are stunning – and chilling

In September the Pompidou Centre in Pariscloses for five yearsfor renovation. The building is nearly 50 years old and needs to be cleared of asbestos, and to reconnect with Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’ original design after years of architectural accumulations. Many of the departments are already moving into temporary new homes, including the huge Bibliothèque publique d’information, the public library usually based on the second floor. Nearly all of its contents have been emptied out, but before it’s stripped back altogether, Wolfgang Tillmans has been invited to deconstruct it another way. His show,Rien ne nous y préparait – Tout nous y préparait(Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us) covers all 6,000 sq metres of the space.

It’s an inspired setting because Tillmans’ work circles around questions of information. He makes documentary photographs but questions the parameters of photographic vision. In his ongoing Truth Study Center he collates newspaper cuttings, photographs, photocopies, drawings and objects on trestle tables, encouraging viewers to consider these elements and their claims to veracity; his installations are always site-specific, and take a nuanced approach to display. Situated in the Bpi, Rien ne nous y préparait – Tout nous y préparait is a meditation on knowledge, how it is organised, and where its limitations lie. “I do trust my eyes, I want to trust observation, study, but for that it is very important that I sharpen my eyes to how I see, how we record, what we capture,” says Tillmans.

The artist had been invited to show work from throughout his 40-year career, but this isn’t a retrospective and it isn’t arranged chronologically. Instead it’s a response to the space, and it’s a space with a big personality. The Pompidou’s distinctive blue pipes snake across the ceiling and a bold carpet covers the floor, mostly grey, with some lime green stripes and squares, and the occasional stain. The carpet also features purple patches in seemingly abstract designs; this is an even older carpet, already there when the grey one was added in 2000. The fitters cut around bookshelves and partitions to lay the grey and so, when those fixtures were removed, a ghostly imprint of the library was revealed. For Tillmans the resulting palimpsest suggests a photographic negative, and it’s something he was keen to keep; elsewhere he’s retained shelving, library books, magazines, the photocopying room, tables, individual study booths and signage.

The vacated BPI requires an exceptionally talented – and prolific artist – but Tillmans makes it look easy. Celebrated images such as Moon in Earthlight (2015) share wall space with the fire extinguishers; a long, thin corridor suggesting a rat run is home to a mid-1990s series on a street rodent. Some of the images are displayed at very large size, such as The State We’re In, A (2015), a documentary shot of a paradoxically ever-changing sea, or Panorama, right (2006), and Panorama, left (2024), which each measure six metres long. These huge works are cheek-by-jowl with much smaller images, even postcard dimensions, creating a physical experience worlds away from same-size online viewing. Some prints are framed, some clipped up, some stuck to the wall, each suggesting questions about how photography isolates what it shows.

Not that Tillmans is sniffy about mass-reproduction. Vinyl-printed versions of the Panorama images are also installed in Berlin’s Berghain nightclub, the exhibition booklet informs, while tables towards the end of the space gather his work with magazines, including Arena Homme+ and Butt. There are also tables devoted to his photobooks, one displaying every spread of 1997 publication Concorde, a testament to 1960s techno-utopianism and cross-channel co-operation. At the end of the exhibition there’s a BPI reading table, complete with reading lights, and his monographs free to flip through. In the Autoformation [“Self-education”] booths there are videos on demand, allowing visitors to explore as they choose. Elsewhere are reproductions of image and text pieces Tillmans circulated online and as posters, exhorting readers to vote Remain, or against Marine Le Pen or Donald Trump. Some of these images and texts made it on to T-shirts, and there are photographs of people wearing them. “What is lost is lost forever,” reads a rallying cry about Brexit, a message the march of time has made forlorn. Nothing could have prepared us, though on the other hand Tillmans did try.

Tillmans isn’t anti-technology at all, speaking excitedly at the press view of the new possibilities afforded in the 2000s by ever-faster digital cameras. One of the intriguing aspects of this show is seeing how consistent his interest in technology has been, with very early works such as distorted black-and-white photocopies from 1988 sitting happily alongside contemporary prints.

A final room is a sound installation, 2018’s I want to make a film, in which Tillmans narrates a potential project looking at digital technologies, while another installation, Travelling Camera (2025), hovers across the back of a digital 4k screen, a usually hidden infrastructure he has dotted with found fragments such as seashells and postage stamps. It’s not kit for the geeky sake of it, as evidenced by a large photograph of Russian troops in Moscow, shot in 2005. Tillmans is asking what we know, and how; what we notice, or are shown, and what remains obscure.

At the Pompidou Centre, Paris, until 22 September

No they don’t cook from scratch, sometimes forget the sunscreen and often miss work deadlines, but at least their kids are wearing secondhand clothes … Meet the new gen of radically normal mums

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Most mornings, I’m woken at 6am by my alarm (the baby crawling on to my head). I stretch, go downstairs, fill a bowl with iced water and, the theme of Transformers playing in the background, write my journal (a list of emails-I-forgot-to-reply-to). I drink hot water with cider vinegar to regulate my blood sugar levels, followed by tea using the baby’s leftover milk. Dragging a chilled jade gua sha spoon across my face in an attempt to reverse the ageing process, I then make my young sons’ porridge. While they eat, I plunge my face into the iced water until I can’t breathe, and begin my three-step routine (two La Roche-Posay serums followed by SPF). Some mornings, I run. Others, I cry into a coffee, albeit one made with organic milk, before taking amushroom gummyto take the edge off the day. My partner and I divide childcare dropoffs – we’re late for both and broadly OK with that – and each have one day a week with the youngest.

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This is my routine. You might think it’s elaborate and weirdly specific, and you’d be right. Yet we live in an age of routines shared online, often in pursuit of some sort of personal optimisation – I’m aiming for somewhere between writing 2,500 words before breakfast (Anthony Trollope) and 5am cold plunge (fitness guru Ashton Hall). And however elaborate my morning seems to you, to me, it isnothingcompared with the pernicious routine of the tradwife.

For the uninitiated:the tradwifeis a married woman, usually conservative and/or Christian, usually white (though not always), of the belief that her place is in the home. She is feminine, usually kempt, often dressed likeBetty Draper, but increasingly workout gear in neutral tones too. Though at home, she is not a stay-at-home mother, rather someone who performs as if she is, documenting her life in dizzying, up-close fashion for us to wonder: who’s doing the potty training?

The tradwife is not new: in 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft described these sorts of women as birds “confined to their cages [with] nothing to do but plume themselves and stalk with mock majesty”. But in recent years she has rebranded, growing from traditional role to niche subculture, to full-blown digital movement (her current incarnation is theMaha – Make America Healthy Again – mom, who wangs on about her distrust of vaccines and suncream to camera in head-to-toe florals). Historically, tradwives earned nothing. These days some out-earn their husband through shilling products, presumably to pay for a small team of helpers to do the actual childcare.

Last week, I watched Nara Smith, a 25-year-old, South African-German mother-of-threemakepannacotta from scratch in a Ferragamo dress. It would be impressive were she and her peers not so clearly sidestepping a traditional career for one that involved packaging their cookie-baking for the algorithm.

I am not the first wrung-out mother to take umbrage with this sort of performance. Yet as the cost of living crisis squeezes us ever tighter, the fantasy of escaping into being a wife and mother becomes more vivid. I am, after all, a hard worker, a mediocre baker and a realistic mother whose life is a delicate balance between task and failure, app-reliance and guilt. One colleague describes me as “frazzled but focused”. So I prefer the term radwife.

To be a radwife, you don’t need to be married. I’m not. Perhaps you saw children as a choice, not a mandate, or came to them slightly late (mid to late 30s), like me. You’re not afraid of giving them plain pasta four nights in a row provided they brush their teeth. You batch cook where possible, bribe your children when possible, and buy fish locally (though largely to offset the amount of parcels coming through the door). You miss deadlines for work, lose sleep overultra-processed food (UPF),and are overly familiar with the unsung heroics involved in “leaving the office early” to get the kids. But you can also use a drill, a lawnmower and always finish the veg box. Of course, this is often in tandem with a rad dad or partner, who shares the same tensions, childcare and anxieties.

What else? The radwife is aware of trends, would never wear an elasticated waist (unless it’s her Adidas Firebird tracksuit – she burned her Lucy & Yak dungarees once the youngest started nursery), but always, always chooses comfort. Her heels are a bridge to her former life, and though she rarely wears them now, she’ll never get rid. Other radwife-ish things: baseball caps, a fringe (it’s that or botox), one wildly unsensible coat on principle. To unwind, she reads cookbooks like novels,Graziaat the doctor’s andthe LRBon the loo. She reads the Booker shortlist, though she’s a sucker for covers with interesting typefaces. For her holiday, she has packedOcean Vuong, but will quietly leaf through self-help book of the momentThe Let Them Theorywhen no one is looking. It’s with some discomfort that she watched a version of herself in Amandaland (Amanda) and The White Lotus 3 (Laurie)–it’s not uncommon for the radwife to be divorced.

The tradwife caused a major stir globally; not surprising, perhaps, given that it is largely a fantasy role which hinges on personal wealth, and is almost totally removed from the maternal ideal it promotes (it’s also, in part, why Meghan Markle’sWith Love Netflix series, with its unnecessary pretzel decanting, feels so ill-timed). I’m not bothered by the perfectionism this movement peddles – wake up, it’s Instagram! – but I am by the way it impinges on normal life. When did making fish pie from scratch once a week become trad-coded? The difference is, tradwives idealise this stuff – the radwife strives to go beyond it.

It’s precisely this tension that makes the radwife a perfectly imperfect parent, what developmental psychologist Donald Winnicott called a “good enough mother”. So you might forget to put sunscreen on your children sometimes – at least they’re wearing secondhand clothes fromVinted. You make socially conscious non-judgmental parenting decisions which prioritise your sanity over their sugar intake. We need conflicts “in order to survive painful choices”, says Ora Dresner, president of the British Psychoanalytic Association. There will not be a perfect decision and parenthood is defined – just like life – by ambivalence. We will see, inevitably, the good and the bad in every choice we make, “but we should not see conflict as a negative concept; that unless you are absolutely certain about your choice, you are failing”.

“On the contrary,” Dresner says, “the ability to be aware of these often painful feelings is essential if the mother is to find the way that works best for her.” The reality is, it’s OK to feel bored by your children, but utterly lost without them. It’s OK to want to go to work, to drinks – but also OK to want to rush home to do phonics. “We as partners, friends and society must be aware of this and support mothers to feel validated as they try to find their way,” adds Dresner.

Rad is short for radical. But maybe it’s about being radically normal. Most mothers I know suffer from what I call “churnout”: burnout from trying to shift back and forth at speed between modes (partner, worker, mother). Writer Frankie Graddon of the Mumish substack talks about the ambient threat of “The Call” at work (a sick child) and the guilt of “beige dinners”. This might sound a little obvious. But we live in delicate times. Only the bravest among us are off social media, despite the fact that we know, on some level, that it is full of “false messages that others are doing far better”, says Dresner. “I don’t think it’s possible to find the perfect balance or perfect choice. But to be able to observe our conflicts, and to some extent tolerate them, might offer a degree of freedom from internal and societal pressures, and what social media drives in us,” she says.

Ideally, we wouldn’t shapeshift so much. Ideally, we would live in a world in which there were time and resources to allow for parents to work less, or more flexibly, without barely scraping together the nursery fees. Four-day weeks. Cheaper, subsidised childcare. Instead, capitalism has taken the notion of empowerment and turned it into a world in which all hands must be on deck for the profit motive.

Forsomewomen, it’s a form of feminism that means that if you’re not a high-flying earner, then who are you really? As Rosanna, a 35-year-old film producer and mother of two, tells me: “As much as I value the role of mother, I would feel ‘less than’ if I didn’t work – and I’ve certainly struggled with that feeling when out of work or looking for work.”

Certainly, many tradwives are more interested in marketing than mothering. But if big business is responsible for the idea of putting a career first (see Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In and “girl bossing”, a mid-2010s movement that became a byword for pseudo-woke corporate feminism) and trad-wifing feels like a cop-out, something in the middle seems like a reasonable reaction. Rosanna loves parenting and loves working, but still feels that “capitalism sucks and rams this idea that unless you’re earning a living and acquiring status, you are not quite valued”.

The other day, I was chatting to my friend Jo, who is a parent of two. She said that, initially, “motherhood shook me apart, identity wise, and I clung on to work as something to define me. But now I work to provide – and fulfil myself. I don’tneedthe workplace in the same way I once did.”

Taking this metaphorical step away from work – from the churn of the machine – is not a betrayal of the 1970s feminist fantasy. That dream was co-opted, used to sell a life that only meant something if it was dedicated to corporations. When I’m scraping porridge off the pan, and I’m late for work, I think about the tradwife and wonder if she too burnt the porridge. Probably. But at least I’m OK with it.

Lighting assistant: Declan Slattery. Styling assistant: Sam Deaman. Hair and makeup: Natalie Stokes at Carol Hayes Management using Tatcha

Main photoRed gingham dress: £200,Anthropologie. Sandals, £109,Dune London. Necklace, £118,Astley Clarke. Bow earrings, £38,Anthropologie. Trug, £37.95,The Worm That Turned. Aprons and gloves, stylist’s own

Above photosPink floral dress: £49.99,New Look. Aprons and gloves: stylist’s own.Green quilted jacket: £155,Whistles. All other clothes writer’s own. Cycle helmet loan:cyclespirit.com

Unpredictable questions from neurodivergent audience have created perfect interview format for social media age

It is an interview like no other. One which has seen Emmanuel Macron confronted over whether it was right to marry his former teacher and Danny Dyer probed about whether he has ajoint bank account with his wife. Celebrities have been caught off guard, or left sobbing and laughing in equal measure.

The Assembly, in which an audience of autistic, neurodivergent and learning disabled people ask unpredictable, probing and often remarkably direct questions of a celebrity, has won plaudits and rave reviews since launching in 2022. It has now become an international phenomenon.

The show, which originated in France, had more international commissions than the all-conquering reality hit The Traitors last year. The format has already been commissioned across 19 countries, according to an industry report by K7 Media. Ten new versions have already been confirmed.

Unusually for a new European format, The Assembly is already making its mark in Asia: it will launch in Singapore in January. It is heading into its fourth series in France and has been a hit in Norway, Australia and Denmark – succeeding on public and private broadcasters.

Its producers say the authenticity of the show has created its universal appeal – while the clippable content is perfect for a social media age in which broadcasters are desperate to reach younger audiences glued to their feeds.

Stu Richards, creative director of the programme’s UK producers Rockerdale Studios, said it was crucial the show was billed as having broad appeal, rather than as a programme highlighting neurodiversity. “It’s not just representation for the sake of it – it’s not tokenistic,” he said. “We see this as mainstream entertainment.”

The stripped-back look of the show – shot over three hours in natural light with the camera crew in full view – adds to the sense that viewers are getting an unfiltered experience. “There’s an honesty that you just don’t get in other TV shows,” said Richards.

“It has non-culturally specific values like honesty and by extension, empathy. In shows with disabled people, you as a viewer are almost always asked to be sympathetic towards the people you’re seeing. You’re rarely asked to empathise. In this show, our cast have the authorship, they have the agency.”

Richards said he was sold on the idea immediately after seeing Macron asked bluntly about the propriety of his marital relationship. “When I saw that question, I thought: this is something unlike any interview format I’ve seen,” he said. “We’ve had interview formats in the past, like Ali G, where people have tried to ask comedically funny questions. But the president of France asked about the age gap with his older wife? Boom, yes. I’m completely in.”

For broadcasters desperate to reach new audiences to be found on social media, the format also lends itself to short clips, as an unsuspecting celebrity responds to a left-field question. Several of such clips, featuring Macron,Michael Sheenand the Game of Thrones actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau in the Danish edition, have gone viral.

“That’s the mother load for so many commissioners and broadcasters at the moment,” said Michelle Singer, Rockerdale’s director of production.

Coster-Waldau broke down when talking about the death of his alcoholic father. In the Australian edition, the Jurassic Park actor Sam Neill was similarly floored when asked about the best lesson he had learned from his parents.

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The team distributing the show had a queue of potential takers after it aired in France. They said the dynamic between the cast and the interviewee meant it was unlike other chatshows or political programmes. “It’s the authenticity,” said Arnaud Renard, co-founder of Can’t Stop Media, the programme’s distributor. “Everybody gets it. Everybody understands it’s a show where we have people that are going to ask unexpected questions – but without bad feelings. We’re not trying to trick people.”

Despite the show’s international success, it has had an unusual journey in the UK. A pilot featuring Sheen was made for the BBC, but the corporation is said to have concluded it did not have the funds to make a series. It has since found success on ITV, where the first series featured David Tennant, Jade Thirlwall, Gary Lineker and Dyer – who, among other things, was asked how much he was paid for presenting the Saturday night gameshow The Wall (about £100,000).

Bigger names have been booked for follow-up series overseas, though producers are sworn to secrecy. To take it to the next level in the UK, fans are hoping a British politician might be brave enough to enter The Assembly should a second series materialise.

“It’s interesting that the idea for this programme grew from the grilling ofEmmanuel Macron.” said Tim Nicholls, assistant director of policy, research and strategy at the National Autistic Society. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could see British politicians subjected to the same scrutiny by autistic interviewers?”

Northern Ireland faces stark questions over the racism, xenophobia and intolerance that has forced families from abroad to flee

First came the shouts as the crowd worked its way through narrow terraced streets, proclaiming its mission to rid the town of “scum”. Then came the shattered glass as rocks exploded through windows. Then the flames, licking up curtains and spreading to sofas, carpets, books and framed pictures until smoke billowed into the summer night.

They might have been scenes from another century, another country, but they played out inNorthern Irelandthis week in the glare of rolling news and social media, which recorded a soundtrack of glee and hate. “Where are the foreigners?” the mob shouted.

The targets werefamilies that were different– different nationality, different ethnicity, different skin tone, different language. The goal was expulsion – or immolation. “There’s someone in that room inside,” said a voice caught on video. “Aye, but are they local?” responded a comrade. “If they’re local, they need out. If they’re not local, let them stay there.”

No one died in Ballymena, the County Antrim town that erupted on Monday andflared for the rest of the week, or in other towns with smaller, copycat mayhem, but families fled, dozens of police were injured and Northern Ireland faced stark questions about racism, xenophobia and intolerance.

Three decades ago, the Good Friday agreement drew a line under the Troubles. Republican paramilitaries that wanted a united Ireland, and loyalist paramilitaries that wanted the region to remain in the UK, wound down the killing.

Peace brought the novelty of immigration and diversity. In the 2001 census just 14,300 people, or 0.8% of the overall population, belonged to a minority ethnic group. By 2021 it was 65,600 people, or 3.4%. Compared with England (18%), or Scotland (11%), Northern Ireland remains very white.

Despite this, many residents in Ballymena, a mainly working-class, Protestant town 25 miles north of Belfast, believe foreigners have “invaded”, “infested” and “ruined” their community.

It was not only the hundreds of young men in hoods and masks who hurled missiles: older residents, during lulls in violence, endorsed the disturbances. “We want our voices to be heard. If this is the only way, so be it,” said one woman in her 30s, who declined to be named.

The Police Federation of Northern Ireland said its members, by drawing the wrath of mobs, had averted a pogrom.

The spark was an alleged sexual assault on a teenage girl by two 14-year-old boys, who appeared in court with a Romanian interpreter and were charged with attempted rape. Loyalist groups in other areas took that as their cue to protest. “It’s time to take a stand and stop welcoming these illegal migrant gangs flocking into our town, paedophiles, drug pushers, human traffickers, prostitutes,” said a group in Portadown, exhorting people to march on a hostel.

Such hostility has a blunt, facile explanation: some communities do not like outsiders – a broad, evolving category known occasionally in Northern Ireland as “them ’uns”. Protestant loyalist mobs in Belfast burned Catholics from their homes at the outset of the Troubles in 1969. Ballymena earned notoriety in the 1990s and mid-2000s with sectarian attacks on Catholic schools and churches.

Loyalists in nearby towns have been blamed for a sporadic campaign of paint bombs, smashed windows, graffiti and threatening posters targeting non-white residents. Last year at leasteight African families– half of them including nurses – were forced toflee an estate in Antrim town.

“There is fundamental racism in some places that, to put it nicely, have a proud sense of social and cultural cohesion,” said Malachi O’Doherty, a commentator and author of How to Fix Northern Ireland. Communities that are accustomed to living on the same estate can bristle when outsiders take houses that might otherwise have gone to friends or relatives, he said. “Whether it’s Catholics or Roma, it’s seen as a dilution of that community.”

Just 4.9% of Ballymena’s population is non-white, according to the 2021 census, and very few of the new arrivals are asylum seekers, yet there is widespread belief in proliferating “scrounging refugees”, and scepticism about official statistics. “What we’re reading is completely different from what the government is telling us,” said one resident in his 50s. The riots were welcome and overdue, although, he said, the noise was disturbing his sleep.

The current strife has a seasonal aspect: summer is when loyalists – and to a lesser extent republicans – assert their identity by parading with drums and flutes and lighting bonfires, traditions that fuel tension and confrontation.

Catholics have joined Protestants in anti-immigrant actions and staged their own protests in Catholic areas, but those eruptions tend to be smaller and less frequent. “Catholics almost take a sectarian pride in not being racist. ‘Oh, we’re not like them,’” said O’Doherty.

Despite a gritty reputation, Northern Irelandscores betterfor housing, unemployment and poverty than many parts of England, Wales and Scotland. However, it has some of the worst education attainment rates in the UK and the highest rate of economically inactive people, metrics that hint at the alienation and hopelessness felt in some Catholic and Protestant working-class areas.

An education system that largely segregates the two main blocs also tends to silo minority ethnic pupils, said Rebecca Loader, a social science researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. “You have schools that have no diversity and schools with high levels, perhaps just separated by a few miles. Certain classes of people are never meeting. It’s not conducive to meeting and learning about the other.” Also, very little in Northern Ireland’s curriculum addresses racism, unlike curriculums in Britain, especially Wales, she said.

Two factors, neither unique to Northern Ireland, have aggravated the tension. One is politics. Leaders from across the political spectrum have condemned the violence and appealed for calm, as they did last August during asimilar flare-up. However, critics say some unionist parties – which represent loyalism – give mixed signals by defending “legitimate protest” and amplifying immigration myths.

Political unityfractured on Thursdayafter Gordon Lyons, the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) communities minister, complained on social media that he had not been consulted about a leisure centre in Larne hosting families evacuated from Ballymena. A short time later, a mob set the centre on fire. Hilary Benn, the Northern Ireland secretary, called on Lyons to reflect on his comments. Michelle O’Neill, the Sinn Féin first minister, suggested he should resign.

Paul Sceeny, an interim manager at the North West Migrants Forum in Derry, said growing internationalantipathy to immigrantswas affecting Northern Ireland. “People are becoming emboldened to use racist tropes. It’s part of a wider pattern,” he said.

The other factor is social media. Protest organisers use Facebook, TikTok and other platforms to rally support and broadcast the results. In Ballymena, rioters reportedly requested likes, follows and gifts from viewers while livestreaming the destruction of a house.

During the daytime calm this week, while authorities cleared debris from streets and foreign families packed up and left, youths huddled over phones and analysed clips, like actors reviewing a performance, seeking ways to improve before the next show.

Trump claims they signify a ‘foreign invasion’ but experts say they are flown by US citizens proud of their heritage

At the White House on Wednesday, the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt,told reportersDonald Trump’s decision to dispatch the military to Los Angeles had been triggered by something he had seen: “images of foreign flags being waved” during protests over federal immigration raids.

Leavitt did not specify which images the president had been so disturbed by, but the fact that some protesters denouncing his immigration crackdown have waved Mexican, Guatemalan and Salvadorian flags, orhybrid flagsthat combine those banners with the American flag, has been taken as an affront by supporters of his mass deportation campaign.

The architect of that policy, Stephen Miller, has complained bitterly about flag-waving protesters on the streets of his Los Angeles home town, andsharedvideo of demonstrators on social media with the comment: “Look at all the foreign flags. Los Angeles is occupied territory.”

Trump himself even claimed, during his deeply partisan speech to soldiers at Fort Bragg on Tuesday, that his deployment of active-duty marines to the city was justified because of the protesters he called “rioters bearing foreign flags with the aim of continuing a foreign invasion”.

But observers with a more nuanced understanding of theLos Angelescommunities being targeted in these raids, and of the nation’s history as a refuge for immigrants, suggest that the flags are not intended to signal allegiance to any foreign government but rather to signal solidarity with immigrants from those places and, for Americans with roots in those countries, to express pride in their heritage.

Lalo Alcaraz, a Mexican American satirist and editorial cartoonist, who coined the term “self-deportation” in the 1990sas part of an elaborate prankin response to the anti-immigrant policies of the then California governor, Pete Wilson, said that the protesters carrying those flags in LA were not immigrants themselves, but “the younger generation that are American citizens and that have pride in their immigrant parents”. Their parents, he said, “are hard-working good people who come from other countries – Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador. This is why they proudly wave those flags.”

“Of course they’re proud of their roots, and honestly, what has the American flag done for them but persecute their families?” Alcaraz added. “They are promised that there is a right way to immigrate, that there will be a pathway to citizenship, but this promise has been ignored because corporations make profits off the low wages and hard work of these immigrants, and want to keep them in limbo because it’s easier to control them.”

That sentiment was echoed by a protester named Jesus, whotold NPRduring a protest this week that he waved the Mexican flag because “I’m proud of my Mexican heritage, you know? Even though it was several generations ago, my family members were immigrants.”

As NPR’s Adrian Florido pointed out, the large number of flags from other parts of the Americas at these protests contrasted sharply with what was seen in the same place two decades ago.

In 2006, when huge marches brought hundreds of thousands of people to the streets of LA to protest against Republicans in Congress introducing a restrictive immigration bill that would close off paths to citizenship and build fences along the border, organizers urged the demonstrators to wave American flags.

“Apparently taking stock of complaints about the number of Mexican flags in previous demonstrations, organizers made sure that the vast majority of marchers Monday carried American flags,” the Los Angeles Timesreported in 2006on the massive May Day march that year. Images from that rally showed that Mexican flags were vastly outnumbered in a sea of American flags.

Others have pointed out that, for Americans with European roots, waving the flags of their ancestors, from Ireland or Italy, for example, is considered uncontroversial.

“The reason Mexicans and Mexican Americans wave the Mexican flag is the same reason the Irish wave the Irish flag,” David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute,wroteon Friday. “Not because they want to go back there, but because they are proud of their Heritage and want to stand up for people with their ancestry.”

“When you persecute a minority, it makes them more aware of their identity and differences from the majority, slowing assimilation,” he added. “In other words, the Trump agenda is bad for the very thing Trumpists claim to want.”

In that light, it is worth recalling that charges of dual loyalty were once hurled at Irish and Italian immigrants, too. Less than a century ago, in fact, American citizens from Irish and Italian families were viewed with hatred and suspicion by native-born, white Protestants.

To take one example, when 1,000 robed members of the Ku Klux Klanriotedat the 1927 Memorial Day parade in Queens, and seven men were arrested, one of their chief targets was New York’s Irish American-led police force, which tried to prevent them from marching. One of those menwas the current president’s father, Fred Trump. (A report from the time in a Brooklyn newspaper said that “a charge of refusing to disperse from a parade when ordered to do so” against Trump was quickly dismissed.)

The deep vein of hatred Italian immigrants faced was even a motivating factor in the the first Columbus Day proclamation,issued byBenjamin Harrison in 1892. The then US president hoped to gain support from new Italian American voters, but he was also trying to absolve the country of the stain from a deadly anti-Italian riot the year before in New Orleans, in which 11 Italian immigrants had been falsely accused of murder and were lynched by a mob.

One of Trump’s first acts on returning to office this year was to issue a proclamation that Columbus Day would be celebrated during his administration without any acknowledgment of the Indigenous people who suffered so much in the centuries after his voyage to this hemisphere.

Exclusive: Pass to be presented to playwright’s grandson after original cancelled over conviction for gross indecency

TheBritish Libraryis to symbolically reinstate Oscar Wilde’s reader pass, 130 years after its trustees cancelled it following his conviction for gross indecency.

A contemporary pass bearing the name of the Irish author and playwright will be officially presented to his grandson, Merlin Holland, at an event in October, it will be announced on Sunday.

Rupert Everett, who wrote, directed and starred as Wilde in The Happy Prince – the acclaimed 2018 film about the writer’s tragic final years in exile – will play a part in the ceremony.

Holland is an expert on Wilde whose publications include The Complete Letters ofOscar Wilde. Asked how his grandfather might have reacted to the pass being reinstated, he said: “He’d probably say ‘about time too’.”

The decision to revoke the pass is recorded in board minutes in 1895, when homosexuality was illegal: “The Trustees directed that Mr Oscar Wilde, admitted as a reader in 1879 and sentenced at the Central Criminal Court on 25th May to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour, be excluded from future use of the Museum’s Reading Room.”

Wilde’s downfall followed his decision to sue Lord Queensberry, who had accused him of being a “sodomite” after discovering that his son, Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, was Wilde’s lover. It led to Wilde being sentenced to two years of hard labour.

Having been the toast of London society, Wilde died in abject poverty in Paris in 1900, aged 46. After his disgrace and imprisonment, his wife, Constance, fled to Europe with their two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, and changed their surname to Holland, an ancestral family name.

Holland said: “Oscar had been in Pentonville prison for three weeks when his [pass] to theBritish MuseumReading Room [now the British Library] was cancelled, so he wouldn’t have known about it, which was probably as well … It would have just added to his misery to feel that one of the world’s great libraries had banned him from books just as the law had banned him from daily life. But the restitution of his ticket is a lovely gesture of forgiveness and I’m sure his spirit will be touched.”

In 2017, Wilde was assumed to be among more than 50,000 gay and bisexual men who were posthumously pardoned, although the Ministry of Justice said no individuals would be named.

Holland said: “Oscar didn’t think there was anything wrong in same-sex love … I’m not absolutely certain he has been pardoned … If I had to ask for a pardon, I wouldn’t, because all it would do is make the British establishment feel better about itself … History’s history, and you can’t start rewriting it.”

The British Library boasts arguably the world’s most significant collection of Wilde manuscripts, including drafts of his major plays, Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest.

Laura Walker, the British Library’s lead curator of modern archives and manuscripts, said this extraordinary collection makes Wilde’s pass all the more meaningful: “We really want to honour Wilde now and acknowledge what happened to him. Section 11 of the law, which related to the criminalisation of homosexuality, was unjust.”

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In 1973, the British Library officially separated from the British Museum, although it continued to be housed in the Reading Room until 1997, when the new British Library building opened in St Pancras.

Wilde’s long relationship with the British Museum started while he was still a student and, after moving to London in 1879, he applied for a reader pass. But he was not afraid to criticise the institution. When he published his long poem The Sphinx, he was asked why he had printed only a few copies. He replied: “My first idea was to print only three copies: one for myself, one for the British Museum, and one for Heaven. I had some doubt about the British Museum.”

Holland joked that Wilde was “setting heaven and himself above the British Museum in a teasingly arrogant way” – a “slightly naughty throwaway remark about a very august institute, exactly the sort of thing that he would have regarded as being slightly stuffy and conventional”.

He added: “He probably would [be] obliged now to make an apology … on … his rude remark … once they’d given him his pass back.”

The British Library event – on 16 October, Wilde’s birthday – will include a public talk by Everett and Holland, launching the latter’s new book,After Oscar: The Legacy of a Scandal, an account of Wilde’s posthumous life.

Accord comes as Mark Carney seeks shift in Ottawa’s relationship with New Delhi after long diplomatic spat

CanadaandIndiaplan to share intelligence in an effort to combat the rising threat of international crime and extremism, according to a new report from Bloomberg, days before a meeting between the two countries’ leaders.

Canadian officials declined to comment on the report, which, if confirmed, would represent a dramatic shift in relations between the two countries which for nearly two years have been locked in a bitter diplomatic spat after Canada’s federal police agency concluded that Indiaplanned and ordered the murder a prominent Sikh activist on Canadian soil.

Under the intelligence-sharing deal, which is expected to be announced during the G7 summit inCanadalater this week, police from both countries will increase cooperation on transnational crime, terrorism and extremist activities. Canada has reportedly pushed for more work on investigations into extrajudicial killings.

Earlier this month, Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, was forced to defend his decision to invite the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, to the G7 summit in Alberta after Canada’s federal police said the shooting death of Hardeep Singh Nijjar wasorchestrated by the “highest levels” of the Indian government.

Carney said there was a “legal process that is literally under way and quite advanced inCanada”, following questions over his decision to invite Modi. Four Indian nationals living in Canada have been charged with Nijjar’s murder.

Carney also cited India’s status as the “fifth largest economy in the world, the most populous country in the world and central to supply chains”. But the decision did not sit well with lawmakers from British Columbia. A member of Carney’s Liberal caucus, Sukh Dhaliwal, met with the prime minister earlier this the week to express concern over the invitation.

“We as Canadians take pride to be a champion on human rights. We are the country of law and justice,” Dhaliwal, who represents the electoral district where Nijjar was killed, told the Canadian Press. “When it comes to protecting fundamental rights and serving justice for the victim, it is non-negotiable.”

Dhaliwal said that the prime minister was “alarmed about the issue” and would be “very strong in dealing” with the issue when speaking to his Indian counterpart.

Ever since former prime minister Justin Trudeau accused India of orchestrating the high-profile assassination of Nijjar, Ottawa and New Delhi have been locked in a worsening feud over the issue.

India temporarily stopped issuing in visas in Canada and, soon after, Canada expelled six senior diplomats, including the high commissioner, Sanjay Verma. India retaliated by ordering the expulsion of six high-ranking Canadian diplomats, including the acting high commissioner.

“The Indian government made a horrific mistake in thinking that they could interfere as aggressively as they did in the safety and sovereignty of Canada,” Trudeau told a public inquiry into foreign interference, adding that Canada had not wanted to “blow up” its valuable relationship with India. But he said afterNijjarwas killed, “we had clear and certainly now ever clearer indications that India had violated Canada’s sovereignty”.

The Bloomberg report, which underscores Carney’s attempts to mend relations with powerful nations, follows revelations that a suspected Indian government agent was surveilling former New Democratic party leader Jagmeet Singh as part of its network of coercion and intimidation.

According to Global News, the person, with suspected ties to both the Indian government andthe Lawrence Bishnoi gang implicated in Nijjar’s death, knew Singh’s daily routines, travel plans and family. When the RCMP realized there was a credible thread to this life, they placed the federal party leader under police protection.

“India targeted a Canadian politician on Canadian soil. That’s absolutely unprecedented. As far as we’re concerned, that’s an act of war,” Balpreet Singh, a spokesperson for the World Sikh Organization, said after of the Global News report. “If Jagmeet Singh isn’t safe … what does it mean for the rest of us?”