Ireland sealed the Triple Crown but were made to work hard for the win against an improved Wales
6 mins. A strong first phase attack from Ireland moves the ball left quickly. They are into the Wales 5m zone and the visitors inevitably drift offside as they defend frantically. The ball is put in the corner for a lineout which is won and two phases later Conan drives over the line.
4 mins. The scrum ends with a Wales penalty after WillGriff John forces Porter to the floor. The clearing kick and lineout gives phased possession in the Ireland half, but the ball is not secured and Ringrose puts in a delightful drilled, bobbling kick up the right touchline. It’s a 50:22 and Ireland will have the ball in the Wales 22.
Call for investigation into unfair payment for labourers on seasonal visa scheme
When 26-year-old Ben* boarded a flight in Uzbekistan in June, he was looking forward to more than just a summer job picking fruit and vegetables on a British farm.
“I wanted to see new places, cities I’ve never seen before,” he said. “I wanted to make friends, exchange ideas and make new memories.”
The tech firms’ efforts to change copyright laws and gain free access to intellectual property is patently wrong
There are decades when nothing happens (as Lenin is – wrongly – supposed to have said) and weeks when decades happen. We’ve just lived through a few weeks like that. We’ve known for decades that some American tech companies were problematic for democracy because they were fragmenting the public sphere and fostering polarisation. They were a worrying nuisance, to be sure, but not central to the polity.
And then, suddenly, those corporations were inextricably bound into government, and their narrow sectional interests became the national interest of the US. Which means that any foreign government with ideas about regulating, say, hate speech on X, may have to deal with the intemperate wrath of Donald Trump or the more coherent abuse of JD Vance.
The pianist and composer talks about his passion for chillies, teas and saucepans, and cooking for his dad’s remarkable literary dinner parties
I live in Torino [Turin], a town where I grew up, where I was born. There’s a famous dish from there called bagna cauda. It’s a meeting of the garlic from the area of Piedmont, the mountains, with the anchovies coming from the sea in Liguria. It’s a very simple dish, a bit like a broth, perfect in winter, and you eat it with raw vegetables of the season. But there’s so much garlic in it that, when you eat it, you need a couple of days away from other people.
There is a connection between how you eat and how you make music: the way you blend the elements that you eat, the colours, it’s similar to composing a piece of music. If I take my solo piano repertoire, I would associate it with a very simple food, with few elements and few colours, not overelaborate. If I think of a piece of mine with more instruments, more orchestral, I would associate it with a dish, maybe a soup, that is made of different elements that were cooked for hours, and you can taste the different layers and ingredients in your mouth.
There’s nothing like the crisp sheets and serene stylings of a boutique hotel. So how can you recreate it? Busola Evans speaks to those in the know
Whether it’s the crisp white sheets, plush rugs, luxurious finishes or serene feel, there is always something deliciously inviting about a boutique hotel bedroom. So it is hardly surprising many of us attempt to recreate that same warm and inviting look in our own homes. In fact, according to Pinterest, in the last three months alone, searches for “hotel room aesthetic” have risen 30% from the previous quarter and “modern luxury bedroom” has jumped 25%. And yet we still somehow fall short: the bed never looks quite as plump, furnishing appears less harmonious and clothes are constantly spilling out of wardrobes.
“People can find it difficult to design bedrooms because it is such a sacred and personal space,” says Minnie Kemp, interior designer and design director for Firmdale Hotels, which includes London’s Ham Yard Hotel and New York’s Whitby Hotel. “But it doesn’t have to be difficult and there are lots of things that you can do, like the choices of bedding, furniture and artwork, that will help achieve that boutique hotel look.”
Database, first proposed by Trump in 2020 and created by Biden administration in 2023, is now offline
Donald Trump’s second presidential administration shut down a national database that tracked misconduct by federal police, a resource that policing reform advocates hailed as essential to prevent officers with misconduct records from being able to move undetected between agencies.
The National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD), which stored police records documenting misconduct, is now unavailable, the Washington Post first reported.
Joël Le Scouarnec’s ‘black books’ of handwritten notes in which alleged sexual abuse was recorded are at the heart of case against him
When two gendarmes knocked on her door in 2019, Marie had no idea that she was about to find herself at the dark heart of one of the world’s biggest child abuse cases.
The French mother of three, now 38, was shocked when the officers told her she had been the victim of Joël Le Scouarnec, a surgeon and an alleged serial paedophile accused of raping and sexually abusing hundreds of children.
Want to know the best way to keep your kicks clean? Looking for a comfy pair that aren’t gross? We’ve got all your trainer questions answered
I bet you know very few people who don’t own a single pair of trainers. Even the most cursory glance at people’s feet on the street, in the office or, occasionally, on a red carpet (Spike Lee is never not in his Air Jordans) is proof that they have transcended their original purpose.
But does that mean it’s OK to wear them to work – and if so, which ones? Does wearing black or white ones show your age, as much perhaps as how you wear your socks? What should you actually wear to run in – and, most burning of all, what is the new Adidas Samba in this post-Rishi world (clue: there’s more than one)?
A rousing fightback does not camouflage the extent to which Ruben Amorim and Manchester United were reprieved at Goodison Park. The visitors recovered from two goals down to salvage a point against in-form Everton, but only after a penalty awarded to David Moyes’ team was controversially overturned in the 96th minute.
Bruno Fernandes and Manuel Ugarte, the latter with his first United goal, appeared to have rescued Amorim’s team from a dire first-half performance in which Beto and Abdoulaye Doucouré gave Everton a merited lead. Moyes’ side were comfortable until Fernandes converted a free-kick in the 72nd minute but were given the chance to regain the lead in stoppage time. After André Onana had saved from Idrissa Gueye, Ashley Young appeared to be impeded by both Matthijs de Ligt and Harry Maguire before he could reach the rebound. Referee Andrew Madley immediately awarded a spot-kick but overturned his decision after being sent to the pitchside monitor by VAR. It was a huge and debatable let-off for United.
FBI says Aurora Phelps met men online for dating then drugged them and stole cars and money
A woman used online dating apps to lure at least four older men to meet her in person, drugged them with sedatives and stole hundreds of thousands of dollars in a “sinister” romance scheme, FBI officials in Las Vegas said on Friday.
Three of the men died, authorities said, and she has been charged in one of their deaths.
Trump administration is seeking to oust Hampton Dellinger, head of the office of special counsel
The US supreme court on Friday temporarily kept on the job the head of the federal agency that protects government whistleblowers, in its first word on the many legal fights over the agenda of Donald Trump’s second presidency.
The justices said in an unsigned order that Hampton Dellinger, head of the office of special counsel, could remain in his job at least until Wednesday. That’s when a lower-court order temporarily protecting him expires.
Atalanta manager says: ‘I didn’t want to offend anyone’
Striker called manager’s comments ‘deeply disrespectful’
Atalanta’s manager, Gian Piero Gasperini, said he never intended to offend Ademola Lookman by saying the striker is “one of the worst penalty takers he has ever seen” after their home Champions League defeat by Club Brugge.
Belgian side Club Brugge stunned Atalanta 3-1 in the second leg of their playoff tie to dump the Italian side out with a 5-2 aggregate win and reach the last 16. Lookman, Atalanta’s hero last season when they won the Europa League, pulled back one goal for the Italian side when they were 3-0 down.
The designer, 83, talks about her troubled childhood, love of art, and how she persuaded David Bowie to drop the dodgy brown suits
During World War Two I remember standing in total darkness in a corridor at our home in Versailles, listening to the bombs. I was two years old. The sound scared me so much that my parents sent me to their dear friends’ farm in Normandy, where I stayed for a long time. They called me “Lamb” and I called them “Shepherd’ and ‘Shepherdess”.
Mother was complicated: strict, sometimes very nervous, often furious for no reason. She fought a lot with my father. Inside and outside the house, she was two different people. The life she wanted was with her lover, but back then you didn’t get divorced.
Everyone in the family knew I was my father’s preferred daughter. My sisters accepted it because they could see how alike we were. Bruno Troublé, my funny, interesting brother, was known as “le ravissant” – “the ravishing” – by my mother. He was her favourite.
When I left my first marriage to Christian Bourgois, aged 20, I had no money. He paid my rent; the rest I had to manage. I sold my wedding jewellery and some furniture so I could feed our two children. Christian was an important literary publisher, but not a great husband. I kept the “B” for my surname, though.
Nice girls are always in danger. I broke my leg when I was 12 and had to stay at home for a month. My uncle came to see me every night and abused me. He was a great man, with three children, but he loved me too much. It inspired my film, My Name Is Hmmm, about a girl who was abused by her father.
The first Agnès Bstore in Paris was full of birds. We had two in a cage, then opened the door once they had babies. They added stray threads from the clothes to their nests and were very happy. In the end we had 35 birds, flying around to the sounds of Bob Marley and Roxy Music on the stereo.
David Bowie wore an awful brown pleated suit when I saw him in concert. I sent him a pair of black leather jeans with a note in the pocket that said “You should stick to a rock ’n’ roll style.” He bought more pieces from me, then I dressed him for 25 years including his 50th birthday at Madison Square Garden.
Islington Assembly Hall, London The twentysomething singer-songwriter brings classic Motown rhythms with a touch of hip-hop to a resounding set of anti-anxiety anthems
Joy Crookes is only 26, but the south Londoner’s music already feels omnipresent. One song in particular, at least: Feet Don’t Fail Me Now seems to be absolutely everywhere. I hear it in cafes and bars, trendy boutiques and grimy off-licences and, when I forget to turn it off, the autoplay function on my streaming app of choice. The song only came out in 2021, as a single from Crookes’s acclaimed debut album, Skin, and even if it doesn’t yet feel canonical, it has at least thoroughly saturated certain pockets of the city.
Which makes it all the more remarkable that, when Crookes plays it at Islington Assembly Hall this evening – an “intimate”, or intimate for her, show at only 890 people – one of the Brits Week for War Child charity shows, it doesn’t even garner the biggest singalong of the evening. That honour might go to the understated funk earworm Trouble, about a tumultuous, toxically appealing relationship; or Don’t Let Me Down (Demo), an early song performed by Crookes solo with an electric guitar, preserving all the warm minimalism of the original track. The enthralled crowd roars in appreciation during these moments, which belie the fact that Crookes is still a relatively early-career artist: she’s only released one album, with, she assures fans this evening, another set for release later this year.
Gathering data used to be a fringe pursuit of Silicon Valley nerds. Now we’re all at it, recording everything from menstrual cycles and mobility to toothbrushing and time spent in daylight. Is this just narcissism redesigned for the big tech age?
I first heard about my friend Adam’s curious new habit in a busy pub. He said he’d been doing it for over a year, but had never spoken to anyone about it before. He had a furtive look around, then took out his phone and showed me the product of his burning obsession: a spreadsheet.
This was not a record of his annual tax return or numbers he was crunching for work (Adam is a data scientist). Instead, it was a spreadsheet recording the minutiae of his life, with dozens of columns tracking every element of his daily routine. It all started, he told me, because of a recurring argument with his boyfriend. His partner didn’t think they spent enough time together, but Adam thought that they did. There was only one way to settle this, he decided: cold, hard data. So he began keeping a note of the days they saw each other and the days they didn’t.
There are three tried-and-tested strategies for getting into Donald Trump’s inner circle, from adoration to misogyny
There are three tried-and-tested strategies for getting into Donald Trump’s inner circle. No 1: be young, blond and so obsessed with the president that even the Secret Service think it’s kinda weird. That strategy certainly seems to have worked out well for Natalie Harp, a former far-right cable host who is now an official aide to Trump.
Spanning deep soul, disco and beyond, McCrae – who has died aged 81 – didn’t get the recognition she deserved for a discography charged with pain and wonder
Rockin’ Chair, 90% of Me Is You, All This Love That I’m Givin’, Keep the Fire Burning, Funky Sensation – Gwen McCrae, who has died after a long illness aged 81, sang all these soul-funk anthems and more. Songs that refreshed radio, songs that lit up discos and clubs, songs that saw her called “The Queen of Rare Groove”, songs that were covered and sampled and sound as fresh today as when she originally recorded them in Miami in the 1970s and early 80s.
Gwen Mosley was born in Pensacola, Florida, and grew up singing in church before marrying a sailor she met the week before when he was on shore leave. Her new husband, once free from the navy, insisted they form the duo George & Gwen McCrae in 1963, with Gwen out front. Betty Wright, then a 14-year-old vocal prodigy, brought the couple to soul singer and label owner Steve Alaimo in 1967, who signed them to Alston Records. After the duo’s singles sold only moderately, Gwen signed to Columbia to perform deep southern soul but, when sales flagged again, she returned to Alston and began recording the lighter, more dance-oriented “Miami sound” then fermenting in the city’s TK Studios.
Research group says discovery could lead to new type of environmentally friendly farming
A biological mechanism that makes plant roots more attractive to soil microbes has been discovered by scientists in the UK. The breakthrough – by researchers at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, Norfolk – opens the door to the creation of crops requiring reduced amounts of nitrate and phosphate fertilisers, they say.
“We can now think of developing a new type of environmentally friendly farming with crops that require less artificial fertiliser,” said Dr Myriam Charpentier, whose group carried out the research.
As the invasion enters its fourth year, analysts are examining the health of Ukraine and Russia, and who will be the better prospect for investors once the conflict ends. The answers are not as predictable as one might think
As Ukrainians prepare to enter their fourth year dealing with the harsh daily realities of life during conflict with Russia, few will be musing on the comparative economic health of the warring nations. However, inflation figures released either side of the border showed the continued toll the conflict has had on citizens of both countries – with price rises running at 9.5% in Russia and 12% in Ukraine.
Three years on since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, economists are examining the relative health of each country.
Experts say current US outbreak is unlikely to end without intervention with further mutation of virus likely
A newer variant of H5N1 bird flu has spilled over into dairy cows separately in Nevada and Arizona, prompting new theories about how the virus is spread and leading to questions about containing the ongoing outbreaks.
The news comes amid a purge of experts at federal agencies, including employees who were responding to the highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreak at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the US Department of Agriculture.
An explosive succession trial and an astonishing interview with one of Rupert’s sons have exposed the paranoia and hatred at the heart of global media’s most powerful family. This could get messy…
When some of the mind games and manoeuvres that turned a Murdoch family “retreat” into an ordeal appeared in Succession, the TV drama about squabbling family members of a right-wing media company, members of the real-life family started to suspect each other of leaking details to the writers. The truth was more straightforward. Succession’s creator, Jesse Armstrong, said that his team hadn’t needed inside sources – they had simply read press reports.
Future screenwriters have been gifted a whole load of new Murdoch material in the past few days, after two astonishing stories in the New York Times and the Atlantic lifted the lid on the dysfunction, paranoia and despair at the heart of the most powerful family in global media.
Ukraine’s lithium deposits are among biggest in Europe and the US is looking for ‘payback’ for previous military assistance
Drawing in the snow with his finger, Mykola Hrechukha sketched out how Ukraine’s new lithium mine might look. It would have a deep central shaft, with a series of side tunnels, he said. “The lithium is good everywhere. The biggest concentration is at a depth of 200-500 metres,” he said. “We should be able to extract 4,300 tonnes a day. The potential is terrific.”
For now, though, there is little sign of activity. The deposit is buried under a large sloping field, used in communist times to grow beetroot and wheat. The mine’s proposed entrance is in an abandoned former-Soviet village, Liodiane, today a scruffy grove of acacia and maple trees. The only inhabitant is a security guard, who lives on the 150-hectare site in an ancient Gaz-53 truck. Wild boar and even a wolf sometimes wander past.
Arne Slot’s side have spurned chances and need to restore scoring touch in time for Manchester City on Sunday
The path to Munich suddenly looks more complicated for Liverpool, with Paris Saint-Germain and potentially Real Madrid standing in the way of a Champions League final appearance. Scant reward for finishing top of the 36-team group stage. Sunday is an opportunity to make the road to a record-equalling 20th league title run smooth in comparison, as perhaps it already should be.
Liverpool encounters with Manchester City have been often decisive in Premier League title races and the latest could be no different, although only where Arne Slot’s team are concerned. There is an end-of-an-era feel to Pep Guardiola’s side, wounded by an early exit from the Champions League on Wednesday and desperate to react against adversaries intent on taking their Premier League crown. Deepening City’s malaise, however, would be secondary to rediscovering title-winning form for Slot and deflating Arsenal’s hopes of bridging the gap in the process.
The classical singer on scrimping and saving for his first guitar, being diagnosed with two brain tumours and getting back to music
Born in Salford in 1966, Russell Watson is the UK’s bestselling classical crossover artist. The tenor started on the north-west’s working men’s club circuit, before getting a record deal and releasing The Voice, an album that held the No 1 spot for 52 weeks. He has had seven Top 10 albums, more than 7m album sales, and has performed for Queen Elizabeth II, King Charles and the late Pope John Paul II. He is celebrating 25 years of The Voice with a UK tour.
I was 15 when this photo was taken. My childhood bedroom was the size of a postage stamp, but I still filled it with posters – Marilyn Monroe, Madonna and Paul Weller. I was obsessed with music, but even more with football. I wasn’t particularly interested in girls; my life revolved around hanging out with my pals.
Flurry of directives relaxes regulations and drop lawsuit – and billionaires who donated to Trump are ready to benefit
The millions that US tech companies invested in currying favor with Donald Trump seemed to pay off this week as the new administration issued a flurry of directives that relaxed regulations and dropped lawsuits previously aimed at holding the industry to account. Crypto, AI and social media companies, many of which made donations to Trump, are all expecting to benefit.
At the center of the administration’s moves is Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. Over the past week, federal agencies under the president’s authority dropped legal fights against his rocket company and the US’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange. The White House also issued a “deregulatory initiative” aimed at loosening tech-sector regulation by empowering Musk’s Doge.
Dubbed ‘eHarmony for babies’, bill would create connected databases for pregnant women and those looking to adopt
A Republican lawmaker in Missouri has introduced legislation to create a registry of pregnant women who are “at risk” of having an abortion – a proposal the bill’s author characterized as an “eHarmony for babies” that could alsohelpmatch adoptive parents with babies.
If passed, the bill would create two registries: one for people “at risk” of abortions and one for people looking to adopt. Members of each registry could access the other, while Missouri government officials would be tasked with helping members meet each other and facilitating adoptions. The bill’s goal is to “reduce the number of preventable abortions in Missouri”.
Comfort food par excellence, and ideal for making ahead, all ready to reheat and impress
Today’s meal is all about earthy winter comfort food at its best. A lot of the ingredients may well be in your cupboard already, so possibly just a trip to the butcher will be required a few days before you want to make it and ask them to order some pig cheeks for you. This indulgent plateful is a real favourite in our house, and will both please the family and impress guests.
Joan always suspected she had been handed someone else’s baby by the hospital when she gave birth more than 70 years ago. Then an Ancestry DNA test seemed to prove her right. Now in her 90s, she is in a race against time. Can she find her missing child?
When Sue bought her mother and younger brother Ancestry kits for Christmas in 2018, she knew that they were never going to be fun gifts. A lingering doubt had always cast a shadow over their family, a question that had gnawed at them for decades. Sue hoped that, if she, Joan and Doug took DNA tests together, they might finally have the answer they craved.
Their results came in a few weeks later. Ancestry listed Sue and Doug as full siblings, with Joan as their mother. Their father, Tom, had died in 2016. Sue felt certain that William – her parents’ first child, the older brother she and Doug had grown up with, a man they hadn’t seen for years – had already taken a DNA test with Ancestry. But he didn’t appear anywhere on their genetic family tree.
How do you follow up an Oscar winner like Parasite? If you’re the South Korean auteur, you make a sci-fi satire where Robert Pattinson dies over and over again. The director discusses the inspirational Loach and Mike Leigh and why it’s hard being a ‘middle-aged film-maker’
We are in the run-up to the release of Bong Joon Ho’s latest, Mickey 17, and Warner Bros has got the Oscar-winning Korean director stashed away in what appears to be some kind of basement storage room, with grey-painted brickwork and exposed wiring. In fact, this room could pass for one of the “gritty and kind of nasty” cargo-container-packed cabins of his film’s spaceship setting.
Not that anyone is complaining. Bong, who speaks good English but prefers to conduct interviews via his longtime interpreter Sharon Choi, appears cheerful throughout our conversation, taking occasional sips from a takeaway coffee cup, while dressed in his usual arthouse auteur uniform of a slate-grey blazer over a black T-shirt. He is, for example, completely sanguine about the fact that this follow-up to 2019’s Parasite is only now reaching our screens, 12 months after its slated release date. Mickey 17wasn’t the only production delayed by 2023’s Screen Actors Guild strikes, he points out, and besides: “My films are quite complicated in terms of distributing and marketing. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how to package and when to release, because it’s a mix of so many different genres.”
Friendships become closer as you get older argues the novelist, because by middle age everyone has faced dramatic challenges, disappointments and sorrows – and being honest about them is a powerful point of bonding
My ninth book is published this week, and in recent years I’ve described my writing like this: I take care with my sentences, but exquisite prose isn’t my goal. My goal is to give the reader the feeling that you – and by you, I mean me – have when you’re going for a long walk with a close friend, and the friend says: “The craziest thing just happened to me.” What?! You think and possibly say. Tell me immediately! And then what happened, and then what happened? As a writer, this is the urgency I’m chasing, this is the investment, the richness of emotion, the confiding and closeness and caring.
A line in Miranda July’s 2024 novel All Fours, a book I’ve discussed with many friends, perfectly captures for me this sense of participating in a bottomless conversation: “I was often two or three hours late because I had trouble admitting that I was planning to talk to Jordi for five hours.”
From adding the president’s face to Mount Rushmore to pushing for him to serve a third term, party members are getting inventive in their brown-nosing
If proof were needed that Donald Trump’s cult of personality has never been stronger, it comes in the inventive ways Republican members of Congress have spent his first month in office trying to lionise him. Welcome to the sycophancy stakes.
On 23 January the congressman Addison McDowell of North Carolina introduced legislation to rename Washington Dulles international airport as Donald J Trump international airport.
This weekend, a symphony of Singers (not that kind) will lead an experimental performance that stitches together feminism and fashion – and offers the audience free repairs
Stepping into the studio of the Brazilian-born artist and performer Lisa Simpson – no relation to the cartoon character – feels like entering a crossover between the Mad Hatter’s workshop and a postindustrial steampunk landscape with a colourful girl-power twist. The ground floor space in Berlin’s southern district of Neukölln is filled with shelves laden with old sewing machines and coat racks brimming with hats, bags and fabric scraps. Even more sewing machines propped on two tables might suggest that this is a tailor’s workshop, were it not for the tangle of cables and synthesisers connected to them. Toy sewing machines in candy colours have a purple phone receiver attached; colourful cables with knitted covers sneak out of household sewing machines and seam overlockers; pins and needles are connected to microphones.
Some of Simpson’s sewing machines really are used for sewing, but most of them are living a second life as musical instruments. Having spent years teaching herself basic engineering, she is converting them to synthesiser-like devices for live performance. “It started with toy sewing machines,” she says. “I always thought they were so pretty – but they were impractical for actual sewing. So I started putting oscillators and sensors inside them to use them for sound-making. Then a few years ago, I started putting electronics into a household sewing machine and it has become a sort of synthesiser.”
Moscow and Washington held their first talks on ending the nearly three-year war in Ukraine on Tuesday
Donald Trump’s shocking and mendacious attack this week on the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as a “dictator” while cozying up to the Russian president and indicating that traditional US security support for Europe is waning may have alarmed US allies abroad but has prompted a more starkly divided response among Americans at home.
Reflecting the country’s deeply partisan attitude to the new president and his “America first” foreign policy doctrine, polling suggests that Republicans are much more likely to oppose additional help for war-torn Ukraine. A Pew Research Center survey earlier this month found that 47% of Republicans but just 14% of Democrats thought the US was providing too much support to Ukraine – views that have changed dramatically since the war began three years ago, when just 7% of all American adults (9% of Republicans and 5% of Democrats) said the US was providing too much support to Ukraine.
After 35 US caps, three World Cups and hall of fame recognition, the former flanker is still a fighter – but now it’s in the octagon, for money
Phaidra Knight is already a pioneer, the only African American woman in the World Rugby Hall of Fame. In 2017, when she retired after three World Cups and 35 US caps, she was 43. Now she’s 50 but on Saturday night in Patchogue, New York, she will claim another first: the oldest woman ever to make her pro MMA debut.
“All roads lead to where I am,” Knight says, by phone from New York, on her way to training, with a sort of fierce zen sentiment familiar from conversations about rugby, the game she found at law school, through which she found herself, and which she came to see as a prop and a flanker as “violent yet controlled, kind of a form of art”.
The London photographer always saw odd things going on while cycling at weekends, but nothing quite like this …
You’d be forgiven for thinking this shot was taken during the pandemic; an inventive, impromptu attempt at masking up, perhaps. Instead, Richard Chambury took it in the spring of 2013, in London’s Victoria Park.
“My daughter was 11 and to get her out and about on the weekends we used to go cycling,” Chambury says. “We eventually discovered this was not her favourite pastime; she’s a reader, and likes the warmth. But we always saw odd things going on, people doing the morning walk of shame dolled up from the night before, or wild birds and swans knocking about.”
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