The couple behind interior design agency Maison MAVI have turned an old villa into an incredible showroom

When Marine Koprivnjak and Victor Chabaud, founders of interior design agency Maison MAVI , bought their home in the south of France in 2020, they wanted to renovate everything themselves in their spare time. “It was an adventure that lasted longer than expected,” Marine says.

They found the house online. It’s a 1920s villa in the centre of a small town the Luberon with countryside all around and Aix-en-Provence just 20 minutes away by car. It has two floors, covers a total of 130sqm, with a patio in front of the house and a simple room layout. “It’s practically the classic Provençal house with the facade painted in warm earth tones, white-framed windows and sage green shutters. It was irresistible,” says Marine. However, having been abandoned for around 20 years, it was run-down, the roof leaked and the small garden looked like a jungle.

My phone tells me it made a ‘Five Years Since!’ slideshow, a kind of greatest hits of photos from March 2020, soundtracked by cheerful, plinking guitar

Last week my phone pinged an alert to tell me it had made a little slideshow. It’s one of those ‘It’s Good To Remember!’ functions you’re probably familiar with, the kind that collates a dozen photos of, say, weddings you’ve been to, or beach trips you’ve photographed, scored with enough chintzy, heart-tugging music that you don’t pause to consider how much computing power your phone uses to work out what a wedding looks like.

This, however, was a ‘Five Years Since!’ slideshow, tabulating a kind of greatest hits of my photos from March 2020. As such, the pictures soundtracked by cheerful, plinking guitar were not of perfect days building sandcastles or raising glasses to some happy couple, but a dazzlingly bleak carousel of photos from the dire onset of the pandemic and the beginning of the first lockdown: boxes of PPE that had arrived by mail, empty streets under grey skies and an embarrassingly well-documented supermarket trip that featured my first experience of socially distant queueing and eerily loo- roll-denuded shelves.

Uzo Aduba turns Poirot-esque super sleuth in a juicy White House murder mystery; it’s stony faces all round for Bob Mortimer, Daisy May Cooper and co; and where next after a breathless Severance season finale?

The Residence (Netflix)
Last One Laughing (Amazon Prime)
Severance (Apple TV+)

A terrible thing has happened in the White House. This isn’t real life, thank God. This is a delicious, funny fantasy.

The broadcaster on a new documentary about how music helped her recover from a catastrophic haemorrhage, having a tricky name, and why ‘Arsène knows’ would be her dream tattoo

Clemency Burton-Hill, 43, was born in Hammersmith, London, and brought up by her mother, casting director Gillian Hawser, alongside her two older half-brothers. She has performed internationally as a violinist, acted, written five books, worked as an arts journalist, and been a regular BBC classical music presenter and broadcaster since 2008. In January 2020, she suffered a brain haemorrhage caused by an abnormal connection between arteries and veins in the brain. A new BBC Arena film, My Brain: After the Rupture , about the experience and her recovery and aphasia, will be shown this Friday. She lives in Washington DC with her husband, James Roscoe, and sons Tomos and Joe.

My Brain: After the Rupture is an astonishingly honest film about your brain injury. How would you describe it?
The reason it exists isn’t because I suddenly thought I’d like to have a documentary about my absolute fucking nightmare. Sorry! I do swear these days. At no point have I been one of those people who feels as if I hold any interest. But as a journalist and a broadcaster who had lost all my ability to speak and to write, I did realise that I had this unbelievable privilege to tell this story.

In what sense?
Unlike most brain injury survivors, I had a platform, or knew how to get the wheels turning, in terms of telling people how something like this could happen. I also had this very strong sense of wanting to do something useful for the community of people who have had brain injuries, especially as we still don’t know what is going to happen to me ultimately, or anyone else.

This documentary gets incredibly raw and personal at times. Was it important to you to show the toughest moments?
It felt really important that none of this was sugar-coated. Yes, what happened to me was extraordinarily rare and random and weird and wild, and here’s where all the platitudes and cliches come out, but we just don’t know how long we’ve got. We don’t know what is going to happen in five years or five minutes.

But there is hope in your film, too, especially when you start playing your violin again.
Yes, we didn’t make a film to make people depressed. I didn’t want people to think, oh God, I’m going to have a brain injury [too], so I’m going to go away and just watch kittens on the internet instead!

Both the national police and a UN peacekeeping force have failed to staunch the year-long insurgency, with more than a million people displaced

By day, the stressed-out Haitian police officer patrols the streets of his beleaguered city with an Israeli assault rifle to do his bit to resist the onslaught of the gangs. By night, the 28-year-old returns home to his increasingly empty neighbourhood wondering what calamity may unfold as he rests.

“Yesterday afternoon … there was panic, heavy gunfire ... It was tense … there was continuous gunfire throughout the day,” the officer said this week as the battle for control of Port-au-Prince raged on.

Coldplay, Harry Styles and Stormzy also join the Suffolk songwriter in campaigning for music funding in schools

Elton John, Coldplay, Harry Styles, Stormzy and Central Cee are among the artists backing a call from Ed Sheeran for Keir Starmer to commit £250m of funding for music education.

As part of his newly launched Ed Sheeran Foundation, the Suffolk songwriter is campaigning for music funding in schools, training for music teachers, funding for grassroots venues and spaces, apprenticeships in music and a more diverse music curriculum.

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two), Edinburgh
Words and ideas are as one – and at war – in Finlay’s witty, elegant work, from sculptures to screenprints, which are ideally displayed in this intimate centenary show

S tar/Steer is a masterpiece from 1968 by the Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006). What you see can be simply described. The word “star” appears a dozen times, screenprinted in silver on deep grey. They graduate down the page in a swaying column. Right at the bottom is a 13th word, “steer”, as if tethering – or guided by – all these descending stars.

Each star is like an instance of itself, glimmering out of a fog, and the winding pattern irresistibly evokes starlight on rippling water. You look up to the stars, and down to the invisible boat summoned by that noun-verb “steer”. Which star to follow, how to navigate at sea, what the night skies can hold: the work is a visualisation, a poem and a prayer.

In her crucial statement this week, the chancellor would do well to reject the Gradgrind mindset

There are two inconvenient if fundamental truths about Britain’s economic and budgetary stasis. The first: Labour’s ceaseless repetition about its terrible legacy has led its army of critics from left and right almost to dismiss the profundity of our economic plight as political staging. Yet a succession of feckless, intellectually bankrupt Conservative governments really did leave a disastrous mess.

The second: while there must be a determined response, it must be more than regressing to the Gradgrind orthodoxies of the penny-wise, pound-foolish “Treasury brain”. A Labour government must have a credible political vision and some imaginative, progressive ways of finessing the desperate need for more resources for defence, together with repairing our overstretched public services; of boosting growth and raising extra revenue that does not provoke electoral wrath. It’s not just the Labour party and its voters that expect this – so do financial markets , which understand that economic and political credibility are intertwined.

I’m a little embarrassed by how many Easter eggs I’ve tested, but at least you don’t have to

This week, Gabriella Cugno ’s new masterpiece landed on my desk. Cugno (chocolatier to 2023’s Wonka film) makes eggs like no one else. They are heavy – the thickest I’ve ever come across and the opposite of what I wrote of last week (‘Simple milk chocolate eggs’). Her latest work of art is the smoky, caramelised almond and hazelnut praline egg with bits of chilli and salted caramel (other versions are available, but all on similar lines, including vegan). These are my ideal eggs in terms of inclusions. I get excited just looking at them.

Cugno makes every one, so they are limited edition and start at £44 (the eggs are sent out a week before Easter). If they’ve sold out, go on the waiting list for next year. They’re worth it.