‘I gulp back feelings of regret’: how I found my long-lost sibling
“My meeting with Dec had raised questions for us both, and made me want to speak to other people who had experienced something similar. How had they found their long-lost siblings? Had they been able to reconcile their different upbringings and move beyond pondering what might have been?”
Apropos of Nothing by Woody Allen review – a life and an accusation
‘While Allen quips that the main theme of Apropos of Nothing – which was controversially binned by its original publisher, Hachette, after staff staged a walkout – is “man’s search for god in a pointless, violent universe”, the 90-odd pages devoted to the Farrow “to-do” would suggest that, after remaining mostly quiet on the subject for 30 years, he has deemed it time to offer his version of events.’
Verona van de Leur: ‘When you have no food you do anything to survive’
“She returned home one day to find the locks had been changed. She later learned her father had spent her money on his own personal leisure. Van de Leur and her boyfriend were homeless for two years, sleeping in a car every night. Survival meant long afternoons collecting a few cents on the beach, eating complimentary food in supermarkets. Sometimes they would shoplift. Before helping with youth camps at gyms, she would douse herself in sample supermarket perfume.”
‘The horrors I saw still wake me at night’: the liberation of Belsen, 75 years on
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing – I couldn’t believe … people could sink to that level, and treat people the way they treated these prisoners. When you see a person who is a living skeleton, as these people were, it’s difficult. It’s astonishing that any human being could survive the terrible torture …Anybody who didn’t see the place as we saw it would find it very difficult to believe what we actually saw.”
Police fear gangland feud from Irish Republic now being fought in Belfast
“It started with taunts about stolen flip-flops, veered into a litany of horrors – abduction, murder, dismemberment, betrayal, vengeance – and ended with a party. The gangland feud propelling such violence and depravity has played out in Ireland and now moved to the UK.”
6. Blind date: ‘I hoped the video wouldn’t freeze while I shoved in pizza’
This column intentionally sidesteps coronavirus. But many things in life have had to change, not least Blind Date. The first remote edition includes the question “any connection issues?”
7. My favourite game: Liverpool v Milan, 2005 Champions League final
The Miracle of Istanbul as seen through the lens of a sports photographer. “Did I stay put and hope that Milan keep turning on the style or did I blag a spot up the other end to witness an improbable Liverpool comeback?”
8. Man accidentally ejects himself from fighter jet during surprise flight
The 64-year-old civilian got the most unwelcome ride of his life after the force of the take-off made him “float” off his seat, causing him to stand up and involuntarily grab the ejection handle to steady himself.
9. Tommy Chong: ‘We were always high. That was the job’
“England itself is probably the most racist country in the world with its royalty and its caste system. You still have the system that colonised the world. Meghan wasn’t white enough. She would never be white enough. I can see why they left.”
10. World Cup questions: Why didn’t the great Dutch teams of the 1990s win it?
“The Dutch didn’t just have better tactics or better players. There was something brittle and individualistic about their style, their way of carrying themselves. This was football of the left bank, the unfiltered cigarette, the gap-year poncho.”
11. ‘I was shattered’ – Paul Weller, Booker T and more on the day the Beatles split
“In hindsight they couldn’t have gone on into the 70s. Bowie took their place, I think. But I also wonder what would have happened if they had continued. Would there have been 50 years of OK or shit records to lessen their meaning and impact? Would they still remain as important as they are now?”
12. Prue Leith: ‘I worried about my daughter finding her birth mother’
‘In one affecting scene, the women meet an American pilot who flew Cambodian babies to their adoptive parents in the west in the 1970s. He tells them that he met the women giving their babies up for adoption and that they did it to save them from a murderous regime. “These mothers were giving up their children for a better life,” Leith says. “It was an act of absolute love.”’
13. What makes a restaurant a classic?
During this grim, hopefully fairly brief time when it’s impossible to go out to eat, Jay Rayner ponders what it is that the really great places have in common.
14. How Scottish football’s voting farce led to open warfare breaking out
“Scottish football does not have a monopoly on toxicity. At times like these it just feels that way. People with involvement spanning decades admit they have not encountered anything quite like the past few days.”
15. Can Denis Villeneuve break the curse of Dune on the big screen?
After Alejandro Jodorowsky’s abortive 15-hour version and David Lynch’s tailspin of an attempt, it is Denis Villeneuve’s turn to ride the sandworm.
