The Guardian | UK Note

The Guardian | UK

The Guardian is a daily newspaper published in London that provides opinion, debate and interviews from critical thinkers and progressive voices. It has a large global readership and a sister publication called The Observer, a British Sunday newspaper. They often feature in-depth articles on UK, International, Politics, Technology, Education, Culture, Travel, Science, Society, and Environment. News articles can provide in-depth analysis and commentary on public affairs. Interviews help readers to understand more about their favourite writers, politicians, or artists. Overall, it's a good source of serious news and current affairs.

Thread Of Notes

Some of Brian McDermott’s players will arrive home a week after their early exit from the tournament By No Helmets Required England players would have been well advised to ignore the advert outside their North Bay hotel in Wollongong over the weekend: “Everything that truly matters is possible,” it read. Not quite everything, it turns out. While England women packed their cases and headed out of Australia the morning after their World Cup campaign was ended by slick Samoa, England men are still stuck outside a party they’ve been told to leave. Having watched their fate sealed during the Tonga v Samoa game on Sunday, England have moved to Sydney but some players will not arrive home until Friday, a week after their World Cup ended. It could have been worse. They have been staying overlooking Wollongong’s wonderful beaches, where the distinctly salty smell of seaweed drifts in with the mist off the bay. The surfers among the squad could take a hundred steps from their bedroom and be in the water, and the players whose families are in town have been able to start their end-of-season holidays early. When Wigan teammates Junior Nsemba and Zach Eckersley reminisce about their trip to the World Cup, they may well talk about spending the afternoon riding e-scooters up and down Cliff Road or strolling along North Beach rather than playing against Tonga, France and Papua New Guinea. With the beaches, cafes and stunning lilac jacaranda trees on every street, there are worse places for dreams to end. But most England players and staff are just desperate to get home.
A cast including Richard E Grant, Celia Imrie, Kiell Smith-Bynoe and Nigel Planer warm up a formulaic narrative about a imperilled retirement community The annual drive to expand the festive film canon begins unseasonably early with a modest, sentimentally inclined Britpic that opens like a penny-pinching John Lewis ad; thankfully, it improves from there. The titular Mr Flint (John Bradley) is a Napoleonic history buff whose animus towards late December dates from seeing his (French) mother drop dead amid the Christmas decorations; now he spends the holidays cavilling at carollers and insisting that the icy pavements of his native York come with health-and-safety warnings. This very much not being the kind of film to confirm a fellow in such beliefs, Aubrey is instead nudged towards a developer-targeted retirement community planning one last theatre production; and when the residents choose A Christmas Carol, it all but closes the book on where this film is heading. The real hero here is casting director Lucy Amos; she gathers familiar faces who deserve a Christmas bonus for making the formulaic narrative seem far livelier than it is. Atop a mince-pie frosting of sugar, we get a welcome sprinkling of comic stardust; sure, you may struggle to identify Richard E Grant beneath the frizzy wig-and-’tache combo that transforms his toy shop owner Mr Hopkins into a modern Geppetto, but the care home alone gifts us Dave Johns as a former manager, Kiell Smith-Bynoe gardening under Karl Pilkington’s ever-irascible eye, and other eminent residents including Celia Imrie, Brian Bovell and Nigel Planer, whose Ghost of Christmas Present forms a funny little coda to the Nicholas Craig story.