Newlyweds spend a ridiculous amount of money to have the same conversations over and over. That’s why it is time to embrace the French exit

Turns out it’s not only intricate dances and lip-syncing – there is common sense on TikTok, too. An idea circulating there is that a new wedding rule should be introduced, stipulating that guests must not say goodbye to the happy couple, but should just leave. That way, the newly spliced spouses are allowed to enjoy the most expensive party they will ever throw, rather than being persistently interrupted and pulled off the dancefloor.

While your kneejerk reaction may be that this is rude, ungrateful ghosting on the most special day of their lives, stop for a moment and think about it rationally – and mathematically. A wedding reception can easily have 150 guests, some of whom will be in couples. Even if they’re bored witless, social convention dictates that people usually stay until the last, say, two hours of the night, which means one or two goodbyes a minute. So, in fact, the couple won’t be repeatedly pulled off the dancefloor, because they won’t have enough time to get back on it after the previous guests bid them adieu.

• Updates from around the grounds as first round finishes
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Lovely to sit next to Paul Edwards for the first game of the season. He’s in good form:

In the end, Brian Charles Lara could rest easy, his record first-class score of 501 not out for Warwickshire against Durham in 1994 was not surpassed by Somerset ’s Tom Banton. Resuming on 344 and with his county’s highest score freshly minted in his back pocket, Banton threw the blade at everything Worcestershire sent down on the third morning, a nick behind off the left-arm wrist‑spinner Tom Hinley the final act of an innings of 371.

Concern grows that people will be put off buying electric vehicles because most will also have to pay ‘expensive car supplement’

Tax rules introduced last week mean many drivers – ­especially owners of electric vehicles (EVs) and new high-end cars – face hefty bills to get on the road.

Someone who is buying a new 1-litre Ford Puma , for example, now has to pay £440 tax for the first year – up from £220.

Kings Place, London
A chamber reduction of Das Lied von der Erde formed the centrepiece of this spring-themed concert

Back when Mahler’s symphonies were still rarely played in Britain – and, yes, there really was such a time – Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) was the most familiar of his major orchestral works. Much of that was the legacy of Kathleen Ferrier’s inimitable recording of Das Leid’s final song, Der Abschied (The Farewell) under Bruno Walter before her early death in 1953. But then came the Mahler renaissance of the 1960s and performances of The Song of the Earth – in effect a six-movement song symphony for tenor and alto – became part of the new and much more varied Mahlerian picture.

Renewed interest in chamber reductions of Mahler has been part of this change. Iain Farrington’s version of Das Lied for the Aurora Orchestra is the latest example, and formed the centrepiece of this spring-themed concert under Nicholas Collon. As with Arnold Schoenberg’s 20th-century version, completed by Rainer Riehn, the reduction is abrupt, with just a handful of solo strings and winds in place of a full orchestra. But most of the detail is still there, allowing the winds to be heard with particular clarity, and, under Collon’s fluent and vigorous direction, it still packs a true Mahlerian punch.

Bantams fans feel promotion is overdue, but topsy-turvy season means host of teams could still clinch the title

It was Saturday lunchtime on the outskirts of Bradford and Graham Alexander found himself caught in traffic. He was, in his mind, a good 20 minutes’ drive from the University of Bradford Stadium on a route usually clear of cars. “I thought: ‘this can’t be for our game’,” said the Bantams manager. “As I got closer and closer … it was.”

Bradford City are becoming familiar with bumper crowds these days as the club ride high in League Two. Promotion talk is now rife around the city. The 22,214 fans packed into the ground most still know as Valley Parade certainly got value for their money on Saturday. Just 12 seconds had elapsed, in fact, when their team went ahead against Crewe thanks to Bobby Pointon. The visitors’ first proper touch of the ball was when their goalkeeper Filip Marschall fetched the ball from his net, Pointon having steered home after Calum Kavanagh struck the post.

Firms that were targeted by president after representing his political rivals show ‘absolute cowardice’, says US senator

Law firms that cut deals with Donald Trump ’s administration after the president issued executive orders targeting attorneys who challenge his priorities are demonstrating “absolute cowardice”, the independent US senator Bernie Sanders has said.

“They’re zillion-dollar law firms, and money, money, money” is all that motivates them, the popular Vermont lawmaker who caucuses with Democrats said in a feature interview on the latest CBS News Sunday Morning. “So they’re going to sell out their souls to be able to make money here in Washington.”

We do not have the luxury of rejecting solutions before we have thoroughly investigated their risks, trade-offs and feasibility

As a lifelong scientist, I have always believed that if something is possible, we can find a way to achieve it. And yet, one of the starkest realities we now face is that the world is failing to meet its climate goals. Last year marked a historic and deeply troubling threshold: for the first time, global temperatures exceeded 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. Without drastic and immediate climate action , this breach will not be temporary. The consequences – rising sea levels , extreme weather and devastating loss of biodiversity – are no longer projections for the distant future. They are happening now, affecting millions of lives, and likely to cause trillions in damages in decades to come.

But we must think beyond our immediate horizons. When I read The Iliad, I am reminded that it was written 2,800 years ago. I often wonder: in another 2,800 years, what will people – if humanity as we know it still exists – read about our time? Will they see us as the generation that failed to act or one that made the choices necessary to safeguard the planet for the future?

The next entry in our series of writers highlighting their go-to comfort watches is a look back to the 1961 Tony Hancock comedy

For me, memorable and/or uplifting film experiences tend to be around individual moments – the resurrection scene in The Matrix for example, or Dizzy’s “ I got to have you ” in Starship Troopers. (Do either really hold a candle to Mel Brooks’s A Little Piece of Poland number in the To Be Or Not to Be remake? The jury is still out.) But without wanting to sound like either a retro bore or a they-don’t-make-’em-like-they-used-to fuddy-duddy, I turn to Tony Hancock’s yuk-heavy feature vehicle from 1961 for its unfailing ability to cheer me up.

I think I must have first watched it in the 1980s on TV, after my dad solemnly recited one of the film’s great moments , when Hancock offers a hunk of cheese to a blue-lipsticked beatnik Nanette Newman and says, with a sort of slack-jawed terror: “You do eat food?” Newman, as it happens, is perhaps The Rebel’s most amazing sight: otherwise known as the apparently-prim English star of the first Stepford Wives movie, a middlebrow popular-culture staple in the UK for her washing-up liquid TV commercials , she is tricked out here in a fantastic exi get-up – dead-white face paint, Nefertiti eyeliner, lank copper-coloured hairdo – at almost the exact same moment in time that the Beatles were being talked into ditching their teddy boy quiff.

I was always up for a fierce dinner-table debate – but if differences are aired without ever reaching a resolution, what’s the point?

I hate confrontation. Even a whiff of beef can keep me up at night. As a journalist, I’ve learned to listen and to probe only gently, never raising my voice or outwardly judging. Yet, for a long time – until quite recently – I would occasionally engage in fierce political arguments with certain friends and family members.

The trigger would usually be a passing comment about, say, renewable energy , the character of Boris Johnson or the #MeToo movement . Wine often had a place at the table. It never involved swearing or insults, but there would follow a familiar spiral: a steady increase in volume, a hardening of tone, a grasping for poorly remembered evidence, an admission that “we’re just going round in circles here”, followed by another go around anyway.