Driver ‘faces off’ with Just Stop Oil on ‘last day of action’ in London
A vehicle appeared to have been driven slowly towards Just Stop Oil (JSO) protesters as hundreds took to London’s streets on Saturday for what the group declared their “last day of action”.
Hundreds of demonstrators, clad in the group’s trademark orange vests, rallied through central London, occasionally blocking roads, including the Trafalgar Square roundabout.
In a march from St James’ Park to Waterloo, it follows JSO’s claimed victory regarding new oil and gas licences, prompting the group to announce they were “hanging up the hi-vis” after this final demonstration.
However, the day’s events were marked by a confrontation captured on video by the PA news agency.
Footage appears to show a white minivan, carrying a child and at least one other passenger, slowly advancing towards a group of JSO protesters.
The protesters, some holding a JSO banner, can be seen with their hands raised, and one individual is heard shouting, “Officer, I’m being pushed back.”
The minivan appeared to edge forwards until the bonnet was pressing against them.
He then exited the vehicle and could be heard shouting, “What are you doing blocking the whole road up?” and saying to police, “What about my right to get home?” as a mass of people including press photographers gathered.
Footage appears to capture the officers reminding the man that the disruption is temporary and that people had a right to protest.
Police seemed to successfully call for the crowd to move away from the vehicle.
Other similar incidents of drivers apparently becoming frustrated with people on the road were caught on camera.
Last month, JSO announced it would stop direct action after it had won its demand to end new oil and gas.
During Saturday’s rally, Keir Lane, 59, from Northamptonshire, told the PA news agency: “You learn the ropes, you learn your business, and you have to identify your strengths and your weaknesses and make changes in what you do.
“This is why JSO are hanging up the hi-vis vest.
“Effectively, what we’re saying is we are stopping one model of operating, which is the disruptive action that we’re known for, and that will then morph into other things… what happens with the Just Stop Oil name, again, I don’t think that’s decided.”
Asked if that action had become a weakness, he said: “No, but you can’t carry on doing the same thing time and time again.”
The group has drawn attention, criticism and jail terms for protests ranging from throwing soup on Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers and spray-painting Charles Darwin’s grave to climbing on gantries over the M25.
In its March statement announcing the end of direct action, it said: “Just Stop Oil’s initial demand to end new oil and gas is now government policy, making us one of the most successful civil resistance campaigns in recent history.
“We’ve kept over 4.4 billion barrels of oil in the ground and the courts have ruled new oil and gas licences unlawful.”
The Labour government has said it will not issue licences for new oil and gas exploration, while a series of recent court cases have halted fossil fuel projects including oil drilling in Surrey, a coal mine in Cumbria and the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields in the North Sea, over climate pollution concerns.
But Labour has distanced itself from Just Stop Oil, with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer criticising its actions and saying protesters must face the full force of the law.
The Metropolitan Police have been approached for comment.
How motherhood changes the way women listen
I mean, the sound that I found really profound was the first time I heard Delphi’s heartbeat,” Natasha Khan tells me. We’re in her kitchen in east London, seated on either side of a small wooden table. Delphi is her daughter.
Natasha is telling me about something that happened five years earlier, when she was early in her pregnancy and went to visit a midwife, Nancy, a “silver-haired, beautiful woman in her sixties who had helped to birth 1,500 babies”. She’d not expected to hear a heartbeat that day, but Nancy had the equipment and asked if she wanted to. “And then suddenly there was just, like, a magical sound.” I ask if it surprised her, what it sounded like. “It was much faster than I imagined. And because you see it all the time in movies and people talk about it so much, it’s supposed to be emotional. But I suppose until you actually hear it . . . It’s different when it’s your baby.”
Natasha is a musician, among other things. As Bat for Lashes, the alias under which she performs, Natasha has earned three Mercury Prize nominations, won two Ivor Novello awards and released top 10 albums. When we speak, she is working on a novel, has recently created a tarot deck and is weeks away from releasing her sixth album, The Dream of Delphi. This was why I was speaking to her. Natasha had published a mission statement when she announced the new album, and in it I found a kind of mirror to the year I’d been living. In the wake of having a child, she wrote, “I returned momentarily to the cycles and seasons, through naps and breastfeeds, writing this music in any spare moment I could, methodically mapping out the experience of having my mind slowly blown by something so seemingly common.”
Becoming a mother, Natasha’s statement continued, made her realise how damaged the human connection with nature was; how the increasingly urban, capitalist and digital nature of human existence had placed us “in the hands of something that’s very lifeless”. It speaks of mother archetypes – of crones and sages and witches and midwives – and how distant they feel; of a need to “heal our society” by “reconnect[ing] with our empathy, compassion, power and love, which to me is a very matriarchal energy”. The album, the statement continues, “is just my tiny way of trying to reconnect people… a small slice of music, about a very personal story, and I made it for Delphi so she can hear it when she’s grown and know how much her mum loved her.”
There are 10 tracks on The Dream of Delphi. It’s a record that feels both feather-light and plummeting at the same time, and it takes me a while to tune into it. After a few listens ahead of meeting Natasha, I stop; the stream runs out of access time and I neglect to renew it. I stay put in a life without music.
Natasha found out she was pregnant in the toilets backstage ahead of the penultimate show of her 2019 tour (“I was so out of my body; you have this special sort of twinkling secret”). Four months later the world started to lock down in response to Covid. She was living in Los Angeles and had already begun to navigate her pregnancy as a creative project on its own terms. “It was such an interesting moment, to have a baby in the middle of lockdown,” she explains. “Everything just went quiet, yet my body – tuning into internal sounds or feelings or vibrations, or just natural sounds – had the space to heighten, and was already heightening anyway because I was pregnant. The world stopped and got quieter and the animal side of me grew.” Natasha tells me that, in labour, she sounded “like a groaning cow”, a sound that “was coming from the depths of the earth, it felt like”.
Delphi was born at home, and when I ask Natasha about her sonic memories of her daughter’s arrival, it’s not the newborn noises she remembers, but the silence. She paints me a scene in the hours after birth: she’s in bed with tea and toast and tiny, newborn Delphi, looking out at glass doors that lead onto a porch. “I remember looking out and just seeing this weird twilight time. The midwives left, and [my partner] and Delphi fell asleep. I felt like it was this liminal space where everything was silent. It was this silent world between worlds: I wasn’t not a mother, and I wasn’t a mother yet.
“I was in this threshold moment and everyone else had gone and I felt this existential loneliness, like I was in a spotlight standing in the world. It was a moment that was unrepeatable; it was a moment, and I was just lying. I felt like I’d been in a war, but I was also so aware of this peace after so much motion and noise and movement. It was that silent it was almost like this huge tear in the fabric of reality; I was just completely washed clean of everything for a minute. I felt the mirage of existence had fallen away, and this real sense of connection to animals and plants: that every living thing goes through this process of death and rebirth and birth and growing and dying. I was just overwhelmed with the serenity of that feeling.” Natasha says she fell asleep afterwards and awoke to the sun rising, bringing with it a sense of “pure joy: it was over”.
These hours are represented by two songs on The Dream of Delphi: “The Midwives Have Left” and “Her First Morning”. The former is spare and spectral, wordless vocal chords folded atop gently building piano keys like origami. The latter is more euphoric; Natasha’s cooing vocals sound a little more sure, they’re tentatively growing into something, reaching out into a new kind of existence. “It was really interesting trying to make music around that experience,” says Natasha. “Initially I didn’t want to do any lyrics because I couldn’t really put words to the feelings I was having; the just a fraction of my small human ability to put music to the thing.”
Matrescence changed sound for Natasha, a person who has been engaged with making noise as a musician and a vocalist for most of her life. There was “something about pregnancy that made me continuously connected to something beyond myself”. Once Delphi was born Natasha noticed that her “ears just went insane. At the slightest shifting in her cot I would sit up. What I found interesting was I was totally overtaken by this instinct that was beyond my control. Any slightest hiccup or gurgle or breath. It’s not just your ears that are hearing it, it’s your whole body that senses their whole body; there’s an interchange between our vibrational expressions.” I’m reminded, I tell her, of the raw first days after I gave birth, when I would lie awake despite bone-shattering exhaustion and listen to the strange dialogue between my husband’s sleeping breath and the baby’s fluttering exhales.
“Motherhood drags you down into a state that we would all be in if we were living in greater connection with nature and less artificial environments,” she says. “I think that’s why it’s been such a profound spiritual awakening for me, because as a child I was so naturally connected. There’s been this never-ending longing and melancholy towards wanting to keep that thread alive.”
Having been astonished by where motherhood has taken her spiritually, Natasha believes society doesn’t offer people enough space to properly occupy it: “It’s a moment to be quiet and I think that women aren’t allowed that big space around having a baby; it should be, like, a year and a half, to really marinate in that experience. We’re sort of forced back out way too quickly.”
Hours pass. I leave the intimacy of Natasha’s home – kitten playing on the floor, Polaroids on the fridge, little shoes lined up by the door – and head back across London. It feels like a lot of what I’ve been thinking about – the tussle between artificial, digital noise and the sounds of the outside, organic world; the strange metamorphosis my senses have undergone during my matrescence and how the space I occupy has changed since – has been thrown up by our conversation. I feel seen, but I’ve also had my thinking challenged. I admire the way Natasha is able to inhabit, to embrace, her matrescence and her motherhood so fully. Perhaps in three years’ time, when my son is the same age that Delphi is now, I will too.
Right now, it still feels as if I am emerging from something and the outside world is not quite ready for it; that I am not quite ready for it, that I am still made of tissue-paper layers: who I was, who I am, who I will be. That in listening to myself I must also accept who I am, who I am becoming, who I have lost. It is still easier for me to tune into the sounds of what society expects mothers to be, rather than that more vivid and vital song of what kind of mother I am.
‘Hark: How Women Listen’ will be published by Canongate in the UK on 1 May 2025
At least 14 killed, 750 injured following massive explosion at port
Iran has raised the death toll to 14 after a massive explosion and fire rocked a port in the south of the country. More than 750 people were also reported injured.
The blast occurred on Saturday at the Rajaei port, located near Bandar Abbas in southern Iran. This key shipping hub handles a vast volume of cargo, estimated at 80 million tons annually.
Saturday’s blast was reportedly linked to a shipment of a chemical ingredient used to make missile propellant.
Helicopters dumped water from the air on the fire hours after the initial explosion, which happened at the Shahid Rajaei port just as Iran and the United States met on Saturday in Oman for the third round of negotiations over Tehran’s rapidly advancing nuclear programme.
No one in Iran outright suggested the explosion came from an attack but even Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, who led the talks, on Wednesday acknowledged that “our security services are on high alert given past instances of attempted sabotage and assassination operations designed to provoke a legitimate response”.
Iranian interior minister Eskandar Momeni gave the casualty figure to state media.
Social media footage captured the aftermath of the blast, revealing thick black smoke billowing from the port area. Other videos showed the force of the explosion, with windows shattered in buildings several kilometres away.
There were few details on what sparked the blaze just outside of Bandar Abbas, which burned into Saturday night, causing other containers to explode.
The port took in a shipment of “sodium perchlorate rocket fuel” in March, the private security firm Ambrey said.
The fuel is part of a shipment from China by two vessels to Iran, first reported in January by The Financial Times.
The fuel was going to be used to replenish Iran’s missile stocks, which had been depleted by its direct attacks on Israel during the war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
“The fire was reportedly the result of improper handling of a shipment of solid fuel intended for use in Iranian ballistic missiles,” Ambrey said.
Ship-tracking data put one of the vessels believed to be carrying the chemical in the vicinity in March, as Ambrey said.
Iran has not acknowledged taking the shipment and the Iranian mission to the United Nations did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday.
It is unclear why Iran would not have moved the chemicals from the port, particularly after the Beirut port blast in 2020.
That explosion, caused by the ignition of hundreds of tons of highly explosive ammonium nitrate, killed more than 200 people and injured more than 6,000 others.
Israel did target Iranian missile sites where Tehran uses industrial mixers to create solid fuel.
Social media footage of the explosion at Shahid Rajaei showed reddish-hued smoke rising from the fire just before the detonation.
That suggests a chemical compound being involved in the blast, as in the Beirut explosion.
“Get back, get back! Tell the gas (truck) to go!” a man in one video shouted just before the blast.
“Tell him to go, it’s going to blow up! Oh God, this is blowing up! Everybody evacuate! Get back! Get back!”
On Saturday night, the state-run IRNA news agency said that the Customs Administration of Iran blamed a “stockpile of hazardous goods and chemical materials stored in the port area” for the blast, without elaborating.
An aerial shot released by Iranian media after the blast showed fires burning at multiple locations in the port, with authorities later warning about air pollution from chemicals such as ammonia, sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide in the air. Schools in Bandar Abbas were closed on Sunday.
Iran has a history of industrial accidents, often linked to ageing facilities, particularly within its oil sector, which faces challenges accessing necessary parts due to international sanctions.
Rajaei port is some 1,050 kilometres (652 miles) southeast of Iran’s capital, Tehran, on the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf through which 20 per cent of all oil traded passes.
The blast happened as Iran and the United States met Saturday in Oman for the third round of negotiations over Tehran’s rapidly advancing nuclear programme.
Crystal Palace set up shot at FA Cup history and show others the way
This is what the FA Cup is supposed to be about. Crystal Palace are now one game away from history, after Eberechi Eze emphasised how he is the present, and maybe the future. You could say the same about Adam Wharton. The first won this semi-final against Aston Villa, the other ran it. Ismaila Sarr then offered the flourishes. All three players crucially elevated a supreme team performance, on an epic day for the club.
Villa meanwhile couldn’t get to that level, as if recent efforts have finally caught up with them. For Palace, this was everything, and you could tell. Eze and Wharton stood out but the collective effort was utterly immense.
There were so many blocks and ultra-committed challenges, of the type that only come when something greater is on the line; when players go deep into themselves. This would be of profound value, after all. Palace are the only club left in this FA Cup that have never won a major trophy.
Villa are now out, after a 3-0 defeat where they didn’t give the best of themselves. It was the one pity about an otherwise vibrant occasion at Wembley, where you could feel how much it meant to both clubs.
Villa just couldn’t transfer that desire in the way they wanted. They are almost vintage victims of their own success in that sense. They’ve had so much on the line of late, and the chance to end a trophy drought that this represented has almost been too much amid a push for Champions League qualification, as well as a Champions League quarter-final itself.
This does not take away from Palace’s victory, though. They were good value and this was a 3-0 that really could have been a 4-0 or 5-0 on chances. There was even a missed penalty from Jean-Philippe Mateta.
Whatever the figures on the scoreboard, though, the reality was that Palace did a number on Villa.
It is credit to their manager, Oliver Glasner. You can see why Palace quoted Bayern Munich so high a figure when they came for him in the summer. It is said to be well over £20m. If he wins the FA Cup, to follow Eintracht Frankfurt’s 2022 Europa League, it will be priceless.
He has already given this club just a third major final in their history and it stems from maximising the burgeoning quality of this fine team.
Glasner had been privately confident before the game, given that he hadn’t lost any of four games to Unai Emery’s Villa. The feeling was that Palace are set up well to play them and the Austrian had been working on a plan to work around Villa’s superior midfield.
Wharton had been central to that, literally. It was one of those great defensive midfield displays. He seemed to constantly be in the right place to win the ball, before then doing something productive with it. Repeat this over the course of a game and you gradually shift emotional momentum as much as the momentum of a match.
Villa just couldn’t get a proper foothold, even after moments that felt game-changing, like Tyrick Mitchell’s early mis-kick or Mateta’s missed penalty. Palace always had more to give. There was always that man there.
Any time someone like Marco Asensio worked their way into the box, Maxence Lacroix or Chris Richards appeared. There were so many of those sudden blocks or interceptions, delivered with utter conviction.
There was then the showpiece moment, that essentially put Palace in English football’s showcase event.
On 31 minutes, Sarr drove the ball across the Villa box, with the sort of delivery that just demanded to be hammered. Eze responded. He ran on and whipped the most emphatic and swerving strike into the net. It was as powerful as it was aesthetically pleasing. The ball did end up going down the centre of the goal but, in real time, it looked like Emi Martinez had no chance.
You maybe couldn’t quite say the same for the game-clinching second. After Martinez’s movement had made Mateta’s penalty more difficult, to the point he hit it wide after a foul on Eze, it seemed to catch the goalkeeper himself out. The footwork wasn’t quite right and Sarr evidently spotted the opening, driving the ball into the corner.
Sarr’s breakaway second, to make it 3-0 in stoppage time, was just a final touch; an opportunity for Palace to properly celebrate this win.
The truth was that they never looked nervous in any way. They were too on it. While some of that is the sort of thing that happens when players lift themselves for a day of this magnitude, a collective display like this is only possible out of something greater.
Glasner has fashioned a fine team, that has grown with the season. To think there were doubts at the start of the campaign, when Palace initially struggled after the loss of Michael Olise.
No one at Selhurst Park was ever worried. They had full confidence in their fine manager, and the talents of this team.
Palace now look like they are brimming with vibrant quality. While the usual response to this is to survey the number of players that wealthier clubs would look to buy – and we are now talking Eze, Wharton, Mateta and Marc Guehi at the very least – there is something worthier to discuss.
Palace are what a lot of upper-level English teams should be. They have built on and honed the abundant talent in their south London area, to create a feisty and sophisticated team.
There is real identity and now, there is a real chance to create a moment that the club’s history can be wrapped around.
Meanwhile, Villa fans could barely look, with many having left before the final whistle. That is entirely understandable.
A danger grows that this previously promising season peters out into little. All that is left is now the push for the Champions League, which is one of the very reasons they were cost this chance in the first place.
It is one of the problems of modern football that qualification for the premier continental competition is worth so much more, in pure financial terms, than getting to the FA Cup final. Those at Villa will be consoling themselves with that, although some within the club were even remarking how that shouldn’t be the case.
You only have to look at Palace. They have also become a team to watch. They now have a day to look forward to.
After two previous lost FA Cup finals, both against Manchester United, they have this third opportunity. They certainly look like they know what this is all about.
The world has become addicted to rage – and 2016 might be to blame
I am trying to imagine your mental state as you read this. Perhaps your children are screaming. Perhaps the milk you used to make your coffee was dubiously sour. Did you wake up and look at your phone, which promptly delivered you some of the worst news possible, from indiscriminate locations across the world, instantly from the palm of your hand to your retinas? Perhaps you clicked off news websites and looked at emails that you shouldn’t read until Monday morning. Perhaps you quickly opened Instagram, to look at the stories of people you don’t like, purely to scratch an itch. And then X (Twitter), where you read apoplectic or sarcastic takes about the news stories you just heard about five minutes ago. How are you feeling? Yes, bad.
Or not just bad. Pissed off, perhaps, or filled with rage. We are in the midst of a rage epidemic, after all. It doesn’t just feel like everyone is angrier than they used to be: they are. The world is a rage-fuelled and rage-filled place. Last year, polling company Gallup published the Global Emotions Report to take the temperature on the positive and negative emotional and mental health of people around the world. The picture they painted was sobering: anger around the world has been on the rise, they found, since 2016. In fact nearly a quarter of their respondents (23 per cent) reported feeling angry every day. Although anger was understandably highest in areas of war, genocide, extreme poverty and civil unrest, even in supposedly peaceful and prosperous countries, levels of rage were simmering. In the UK, 17 per cent of people reported daily anger. In the US, 18 per cent said the same.
It’s not just us normies stoking the fires of fury. Last month on the Call Her Daddy podcast, mercurial and divisive pop star Chappell Roan played up to her persona of being mercurial and divisive by complaining baldly about aspects of her own life (“How can these girls tour, write, perform, interview, sleep, eat, and f***ing work out? How can they do it all and lead a team and be a boss and pay people?”), her past (“I still hate those bitches from high school”), her friends who have children (“I literally have not met anyone [with young kids] who’s happy – anyone who has like light in their eyes, anyone who has slept”) and the expectation for famous people to be political. “Why the f*** are you looking to me for some political answer?” she said. “You think I have the f***ing answer? Like, I’m a pop star. I wish I had the answers. I wish the president was a pop star, but she’s not.” Unsurprisingly, her annoyance made everyone else annoyed at her even more so. In comment sections across the internet, her fans fought it out with posters who argued she was entitled, and nobody won except perhaps Alex Cooper, who hosts the podcast in question.
But why do we let ourselves get so caught up in these kinds of arguments, which are essentially arguments over nothing? Why are we so annoyed? What are we angry about? Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s different for different demographics. And perhaps more unsurprisingly, it’s young men who are leading the charge on our rage epidemic. Ryan Martin, a researcher and author of Why We Get Mad and How to Deal with Angry People, has been charting rising male rage on his Substack and website The Anger Project for the past four years. This January, he revealed some of his findings – that men get angry much more often than women. Over half of all of the men he surveyed (60 per cent) reported getting angry at least once a day – and 40 per cent of those men said it happened multiple times over the same day – compared to just 38 per cent of women. When he delved into the reasons for it, he found it came down to three main areas: I get angry when I experience or witness injustice, I get angry when I am treated poorly, and I get angry when I can’t get something I want. It’s worth noting, by the way, that men polled higher than women in only the latter two of those provocations.
Usually the main arena where we see rage spill out and spill over is the online world. Poisonous figures in the so-called manosphere, like Andrew Tate, have made their own army, fuelled by misogyny, out of alienated and frustrated young men. Alongside the manosphere, “rage-baiting” has become a dominant feature of online life. A genre of content has emerged inspired by and defined by rage – videos and posts intended to rile up the reader or the viewer, to invoke outrage purely for traffic, engagement, revenue, and attention. Rage-baiting is increasingly a calling card of the online right, who use it to inject irony into statements that would otherwise be blatantly racist, homophobic, transphobic or classist. “You can’t get angry,” this mentality says. “I was only joking. If you get angry, you lose.” The result is that we’re all more guarded and more adversarial, online and off.
Gallup’s revelation that rage has been growing since 2016 is telling – it’s tempting to point to that particular year as the one in which we became more politically divided than ever, thanks to Trump and Brexit, and the one which saw us retreat into our own echo chambers on social media, free to speculate and fume to people who agreed with us and attack those who didn’t. Four years later the pandemic saw us further isolated. Shut inside our homes, frustrated and scared, we retreated further into our phones, feeding the algorithms with those fears and frustrations and gobbling up the explanations for our ennui that it spat back out at us.
Sometimes, the rage-baiting algorithmic machine is more bizarre and silly than flat-out violent and poisonous. The morning routine video of fitness influencer Ashton Hall – which saw him rise at around 4am, his mouth taped shut, and repeatedly dunk his face in ice water before faffing around for the next six hours – is the most recent example of viral rage-baiting, and yet most of the backlash to his video was pointing out how silly he was. The rage-bait was so obvious it made us laugh rather than descend into fury, but that’s not often the case. Often, we’re already too pissed off to find the funny in even the most obvious, ridiculous attempts at rage-bait. As one viral post puts it, it works on us because we were already angry, even before we encountered it.
Ashton Hall is the exception rather than the rule, however. Most rage-baiters want us to descend into fury, not chuckle indulgently. And occasionally the rage that’s stoked by populist rage-baiters, and those who seek to divide and incite us, spills over into real life. Anger doesn’t just stay within the confines of the internet. More and more often, videos of people having rage-fuelled meltdowns in public go viral online, from road-rage incidents to one particularly bad example of a man screaming in the face of a young woman on the London Underground for several minutes, while fellow passengers ignore them rather than intervening. And even though these kinds of videos might be posted with the intention of shaming the person having a rage meltdown, seeing them happen again and again only adds to a general sense of growing, rage-fuelled ennui, online and IRL.
Sometimes rage goes even further. Without all the answers but filled with righteous, impotent anger, people spill out into the streets to burn and attack and destroy. They target women, immigrants, anyone they believe is the enemy, the source of their rage. The police move in to subdue and arrest, politicians give statements in which they toe a careful line between condemning violence or understanding frustration, and eventually the boiling eye of the rage storm passes. Those angry people simmer down and stew and rage into their phones and laptops once again, waiting for the next time they can explode.
Perhaps the best way to look at rage is not as an epidemic but as a cultural addiction. And like all addictions, unless we find a way to manage it, it will eat away at us, leaving less and less of ourselves behind a growing societal red mist. The only problem with the “boil over to simmer” cycle is that it leaves us with nowhere to go. If everyone is already angry, all the time, every day, forever, then what comes after the rage? “Gentle outrage” is one potential answer. That’s marketing speak for a move away from outright rage-baiting. Instead it’s all about creating enough annoyance for a click, a reaction, a response, but not enough for an explosion, or getting you cancelled. If that’s not enough to replace your latent feelings of rage with overwhelming feelings of ennui, I don’t know what is.
How online schools can help children form friendships as they learn
When thinking about the best education for your child, it’s naturally not just academic success that comes to mind. A good quality school experience is made up of many parts and one key element is the socialising opportunities that school can provide. Socialisation is crucial for building social skills, growing emotional intelligence and helping children form their own individual identity, as well as giving them an additional incentive to attend a place where they have fun and feel part of a community.
While it might be assumed that the social options are reduced when children attend online school, this is not the case. In fact, there are a number of advantages in terms of the structures, support and diverse social opportunities offered to children who join online schools.
Online schools give students the opportunity to form connections with a much more diverse community of students. The online model allows schools to welcome young people from around the world and this gives pupils a chance to make friends with students from differing backgrounds and cultures. Furthermore, this means they can meet more like-minded individuals and form stronger bonds and more meaningful friendships. This access to such a big and vibrant community also ensures that students can really find ‘their people’ and avoids situations where students are stuck in small circles or forced to engage with classmates that don’t share the same interests or passions.
This is something that Grace, who is now in year 13, has experienced since moving to online school. At her previous school, she was struggling with socialisation and felt that she didn’t really have a self-identity. At an online school, she has found she can be more herself. “A lot of people think that online school is about being alone, but I’ve found that without the physical element, I can express myself better,” Grace explains. Subsequently, the majority of her closest friends are from her online school and many she has met offline too. “I feel like I’ve met my people,” she says.
Isabella, who is in year 10, has also found that her experience of socialising at an online school has suited her much more than previous bricks and mortar schools. With her father’s job meaning the family moves country every three years, she has always previously struggled forming new friendships at the schools she joins. “I’m always the ‘new’ student, and it’s tough,” she says. After experiences with bullying, she found that online school is an environment she can thrive in. “You don’t have to turn on your camera or use your microphones if you’re not feeling comfortable. I’m not really a ‘social’ person, but I have made some friends here because we have these breakout rooms where we can talk to each other,” she adds.
While young people might not be meeting their fellow students physically every day, online schools put in place extensive measures to ensure that socialising is available for those who want to. This can be seen clearly at King’s InterHigh, the UK’s leading global online school which welcomes children aged 7 to 19 from across the world. Here, students join a warm and welcoming community with a huge range of opportunities for socialising. There’s dozens of clubs and societies for students across all year groups, representing a vast range of interests from chess to technology, sculpture to debate. Throughout the yearly student calendar, there are a number of events, showcases, and competitions of all kinds that provide a chance to socialise in different settings. Some happen internally, like the King’s InterHigh Arts Festival, while others allow students to interact with peers from outside their school when attending events like the International Robotics Competition.
Assemblies bring students together on a weekly basis and give them the chance to celebrate each other’s achievements, hear from their Student Council representatives, and find out what’s coming up at school. Each student is also assigned to one of the school’s eight houses and these smaller, tight-knit communities bring students a sense of belonging and camaraderie. Additionally, inter-house competitions are a fun and friendly way for students to engage and bond.
Although much socialising can come as a result of activities organised by the school, students at King’s InterHigh who are aged over 13 can continue building these relationships in a more informal setting thanks to the in-house, monitored, social media platform. Restricted solely to school students, the platform is safe, secure, and monitored to ensure a positive socialising environment for all those who choose to use it.
Online schools don’t just offer opportunities to socialise online but also offer ample opportunities to cement these connections in offline settings. At King’s InterHigh, there are global meet-ups throughout the year which bring together families allowing both children and parents and guardians to connect in real life. Regular educational school trips, from Geography excursions to science practical exams at other Inspired schools (the group of premium schools of which King’s InterHigh is part of) also allow children to socialise and have fun together in different settings.
Meanwhile, the annual summer camps, themed around a variety of interests and passions, including adventure sports, fashion, football, and tennis, are open to students across all Inspired schools and are held at spectacular Inspired campuses worldwide. Furthermore, the Inspired Global Exchange Programme offers a range of school exchange opportunities, lasting from one week to a full academic year.
Choosing where to educate your children is a big decision for any parent or guardian that involves many factors. However, when it comes to the social benefits, for the right child, online schools offer something truly transformative. To find out more about King’s InterHigh and whether it might be the right learning choice for your family, visit King’s InterHigh
From fry-ups to Michelin stars – Tenerife is now a foodie paradise
Tenerife now boasts more Michelin-starred restaurants than the whole of Wales. This is no mean feat for an island with a reputation built on package holidays, fry-ups and pubs owned by retired British footballers. To someone who hasn’t visited for a couple of decades, this dramatic change may seem like a scarcely believable metamorphosis. And yet the accolades keep coming.
“Tenerife has become a top gastronomic destination, driven by a shift in mindset among chefs, producers, and investors,” beams Erlantz Gorostiza, executive chef of Tenerife’s two Michelin-starred M.B restaurant, which has become a microcosm for the island’s dramatic change.
Today, this Macaronesian isle boasts a whopping 10 Michelin stars, with one hotel alone boasting more Michelin stars than any other in Spain.
“When I arrived on the island 16 years ago, the first signs of transformation were visible,” Gorostiza continues. “[Businesses have been] supported by both public and private investment. The Ritz-Carlton Tenerife, Abama, has long championed local produce and the island’s circular economy. Thanks to this and similar projects, haute cuisine has advanced rapidly, turning Tenerife into a culinary hotspot.”
Having visited Tenerife as a journalist every year since 1998, the Michelin mushrooming hasn’t taken me totally by surprise. I’ve long extolled the delights of boat-fresh local fish like cherne and vieja, and the bountiful fruit and vegetables the eternal spring climate serves up. There is delicious palm honey too, remarkable cheese and the lip-smacking mojo sauces. I’ve witnessed the wine industry refine itself into small producers focused on quality over quantity.
“At the heart of this gastronomic evolution is a deep commitment to local products,” says Gorostiza. “The recognition and elevation of exceptional ingredients – many of them endemic – have played a crucial role in establishing Tenerife’s unique position.”
Tenerife has always had fantastic traditional restaurants beyond the resort towns. Take Restaurante Los Abrigos, where I’ve returned on most of my visits to Tenerife. The fresh seafood heaves from a display alive with shellfish and white fish plucked from the waters just outside the doors.
Order bocinegro if they have it (a fish so delicious it doesn’t need garlic), spice those wrinkly potatoes (the dinky black ones) with that irresistible mojo rojo sauce and wash it down with a glass of bone-dry bodegas tajinaste blanco seco – now you have a sublime, thoroughly local, life-affirming treat.
The raw materials have always been there, but has the appetite been lacking? Literally. It is only over the last couple of decades that Tenerife has started to move away from focusing on a mass market that is content with two-star hotels with dodgy buffets rather than foodie accolades.
Most startling has been the expansion of luxury hotels from Costa Adeje spreading through La Caleta. Today, there is demand from discerning diners who know chorizo should never be anywhere near paella (sorry, Jamie Oliver) and that the best bit is found at the bottom of the pan – what the uninitiated sometimes complain is burnt to exasperated waiters – the caramelised socarrat.
As tourist tastes have expanded beyond simple and traditional, or the blandness of international comfort food, so has the dining. The pace of change has been impressive: it was only 15 years ago that M.B put the island on the foodie map by snaring the first Michelin star.
To see just how far the island has come, we travel along the cobalt ocean to another luxury oasis, the Royal Hideaway, Corales. A decade ago, the island had just three Michelin-starred restaurants, yet this hotel alone sports a trio of its own. In 2015, Il Bocconcino joined the hotel’s one-star San Ho and two-star El Rincon de Juan Carlos to take the hotel’s total star count to four. No single hotel in Spain boasts more.
Read more: Why the Canary Islands should be your next holiday destination
Dining on the sun-dappled terrace at Il Bocconcino is an utter joy, with the Atlantic gently rumbling in the background. Chef Niki Pavanelli’s tasting menu features local tuna and creamy salmorejo, a gazpacho-style tomato and bread soup. There’s a nod to Italian tradition by way of a perfectly al dente carbonara, and aged balsamic swirled into melted parmigiano. The wine pairing kicks off with an excellent Italian champagne doppelganger and soars with a sublime 2018 Amarone Riserva. Two stars here would not be a surprise.
“Our style of cooking at Il Bocconcino is focused on blending Italian cuisine, where I’m from, with locally sourced ingredients,” Pavanelli tells me. “Tenerife is rich in local produce thanks to the volcanic soil, warm temperatures, and the incredible variety of seafood. [The island’s] food scene is really transforming, and we are excited to be part of this evolution, creating dishes that celebrate innovation and rich culinary traditions.”
Read more: Best budget-friendly hotels in Tenerife for families, solo travellers and couples
The upward trajectory looks set to continue. Donaire was awarded its first star in 2025, joining existing one-star Haydee, Taste 1973 and Nub. Others wait in the wings. The Ritz-Carlton, Abama, may have closed its other star eatery, Kabuki, but new Japanese fusion restaurant Akira Back is reaching for a star with its sublime tasting menu that weaves an expertly curated list of Canarian wines around delightful Japanese fusion dishes. A highlight is cod-like local cherne fish served with a beurre blanc spiked with soy. An unlikely yet brilliant combination. A dish of Canarian potatoes served with palm honey has a similarly thrilling effect on the tastebuds.
In Madrid, Gofio restaurant is gloriously symbolic of how Tenerife has changed. Chefs Safe Cruz and partner Aida Gonzalez are proud Tinerfeños and have wowed locals in Madrid with their Michelin-star menu, showcasing traditional Canarian dishes and flavours. Today, Tenerife boasts more Michelin stars per capita than Madrid and is bucking the trend of parachuting in mainland chefs to run its restaurants.
Read more: Best luxury hotels in Tenerife for sophisticated retreats and adults-only spa escapes
The last word goes to the restaurant that started it all, M.B. Gorostiza, reclining in the Macaronesian sun, looks back at his two-Michelin-star gastronomic temple and smiles broadly. “Tenerife has made remarkable progress in recent years, and the best is yet to come.”
How to do it
The Ritz-Carlton, Abama, remains Tenerife’s finest hotel, enjoying its own barranco (gorge) among the banana plantations; its own stretch of beach too. Doubles from £214, including breakfast.
EasyJet flies to Tenerife from a number of UK airports, with flights from London Gatwick starting at £65.98 return.
Robin McKelvie was hosted by Ritz-Carlton, Abama
A protest vote is a democratic safety valve: but use it with care
If you live in one of the parts of England that is voting on Thursday, we encourage you, above all, to vote. The Independent does not tell its readers how to vote but, like a benign constitutional monarch, it sometimes encourages and warns. Turnout is usually low for local elections, but voting is important and however you intend to cast your vote we urge you to take part in the democratic process.
The opinion polls suggest that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK will do well. It is poised to win the Runcorn and Helmsby parliamentary by-election, which is also being held on Thursday, and to win the mayoralties of Lincolnshire, Hull and East Yorkshire, and Doncaster. The party is likely to win hundreds of local council seats and may end up in control of some authorities, either by itself or in power-sharing arrangements with others.
Reform’s success will be dismissed by the Labour and Conservative parties as “a protest vote”. Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, was dismissive before a single vote had been cast, saying: “Protest is in the air; protest parties are doing well at the moment.”
Unfortunately for her, if a governing party is unpopular, and the Labour Party undoubtedly is, you would normally expect the official opposition to give voice to that discontent and to benefit accordingly in mid-term elections.
What is unusual is that both the two main traditional parties are unpopular at the same time. The Conservatives have only just been rejected by the voters in the most emphatic terms, and it will take some time before they will be allowed a hearing. What was more surprising, perhaps, was the speed and extent of the disillusionment with the Labour government. Never before has a “landslide” general election victory been obtained on such a low share of the vote; and never before has such a triumph turned so quickly into disappointment.
It is no wonder therefore that Reform will do well, and well enough possibly to eclipse the success of other “protest parties”. The Liberal Democrats, well established in local government and long experienced in harvesting defectors from other parties, are also likely to do well on Thursday. The Green Party and pro-Palestinian independents may also pick up support from disillusioned Labour voters.
None of these should be dismissed as mere “protest” votes, as if they were a temporary, misguided and unserious diversion. Purists will say that it is a mistake to use a vote for a local councillor or regional mayor to express dissatisfaction with government policy on immigration, the cost of living or the NHS. This is to overlook the right of voters to use the system in whatever way they see fit. A so-called protest vote is an important democratic safety valve, a way for citizens to use the electoral machinery to send a message.
But – and this is where The Independent issues a warning – elections are about who holds power. Protest is democratic and necessary, but if it gives you a council run by incompetents, ideologues and conspiracy theorists, you are unlikely to benefit as a resident. Mr Farage’s party ought to be given the chance to prove that its representatives are none of these things, but the record of his previous political vehicles is not promising.
These local elections are about who can be trusted to empty the bins – and it is fortunate indeed for the Labour Party that there are no elections in Birmingham this year – but they are also part of the national political story. Two stories in particular. One is whether Labour can recover from the mess it has made of its first nine months in government. The other is the struggle for the leadership of the opposition, not just the one between Ms Badenoch and Mr Farage, but that between Ms Badenoch and Robert Jenrick, the rival she defeated last year.
Whether you disparage them as protest votes or not, they are votes, and they will help determine our future, locally and nationally. Use them carefully.