The pressure’s off when we’re not staring at each other, we can relax and have a nice chat
On the day after Boxing Day last year, my dad and I went to buy some cabbage. My aunt and cousins were joining us for dinner that evening and we had a meal to prepare. The local supermarket was closed and the cabbage, sourced from an Italian deli around the corner, was obscenely overpriced. In a bind, we bought some anyway and headed back home to begin cooking. Standing around the kitchen island chopping and peeling vegetables, preparing a rib of beef and assembling a side dish of dauphinoise potatoes, we listened to music and chatted. The meal was a success and the cabbage – lightly browned and decorated with caraway seeds – tasty. But most important was that, for the time we had spent cooking, I felt closer to my dad.
This kind of intimacy almost always occurs for me while I’m cooking with someone. When I was 14, I was paired with a classmate in food technology where we were tasked with making a meal from scratch. We decided on a menu of jerk chicken, rice and peas. For practice, we gathered a group of friends at my house and, after procuring our ingredients, got to work. The results of our efforts were average, but that joint experience of clumsily blitzing fiery scotch bonnet peppers, onions, garlic and various sauces into a clumpy and barely edible mess cemented our friendship.
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© Photograph: Fabio De Paola/The Observer
© Photograph: Fabio De Paola/The Observer
The actor, 49, talks about his royal heritage, earliest memory, hard times in a hostel, four gifted kids and what happened when he met Sidney Poitier
David, you are going to walk among kings.” This was my mum’s prophecy when I was small. My father is from a royal family in Nigeria, so I interpreted it that way. Remarkably, she was right: I went on to play King Pelasgus, Henry VI, Martin Luther King and Seretse Khama.
My earliest memory is sitting on my dad’s shoulders as he walked down Balham High Street in London. I was eating a cream puff, watching the sugar fall into his hair. I can still smell and taste the cream. It felt magical, both the longest and the shortest walk imaginable.
We moved from the UK to Nigeria, where I attended a military-style boarding school for three years. There were lashings and I was made to cut an entire field with a cutlass. Those formative years were character-building and made me value the wisdom of elders, but the idea of subjecting my own children to that is inconceivable.
When we returned to the UK, we lived in a hostel for a time. Mum was coping with a lot of challenges, but she was a joyful person and always made our environment feel like we were kings again.
My wife [actor Jessica Oyelowo] was told her IQ is off the charts during an assessment for ADHD. Now, she’s a member of Mensa. Our four children are neurodiverse, too. They have incredibly special attributes that they wear as superpowers. I’m in awe that I get to be their father.
Any lasting relationship needs non-negotiables. We made the decision early on never to be apart for longer than two weeks: 26 years married and we’ve only broken that rule once, by 11 hours, when my wife was in Sleepy Hollow. If I ever meet [director] Tim Burton, I’ll be having words.
Never let the sun go down on your wrath. We won’t go to bed if a disagreement isn’t resolved – sleep makes it grow like cancer. Before you know it, you don’t remember why you were fighting, ego and pride becomes a factor, and then it starts to fall apart.
God has never let me down. He’s a key factor in guiding my decisions and feeling safe within them. My wife and I suffered three miscarriages, one of them quite late in the pregnancy. Without faith, we would have retreated into our own corners to lick our wounds, but our love increased.
Sidney Poitier, a hero of mine, was full of compliments and respect when we met. I mustered up the courage to say hello and to tell him what he means to me, but instead he started talking about my work. I still doubt myself that it happened, but I have the photograph.
Oprah Winfrey played my mother in The Butler. In one scene, she slaps me across the face, which was nerve-racking, because with each take she was gaining in confidence. Oprah taught me that the intention with which you do something manifests in the thing itself. If your intentions are pure, the chances are that it will be edifying both for you and the people you’re doing it for.
Success is subjective. It can sometimes mean coming away from something that failed, knowing you gave your best. That has been a guiding and guarding principle for me and has stood me in very good stead.
© Photograph: Shayan Asgharnia / AUGUST
© Photograph: Shayan Asgharnia / AUGUST
A Wall Street Journal article offered disturbing details about the billionaire’s behavior. Imagine the backlash if he were a woman
I regret to inform you that, once again, we are all being forced to think about Elon Musk’s gonads. Musk, who has had at least 14 children with four women, hasn’t officially launched a new mini-Musk for a while, but the Wall Street Journal has just dropped some disturbing details about the billionaire’s well-publicized breeding fetish.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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© Photograph: Nathan Howard/Reuters
© Photograph: Nathan Howard/Reuters
Somerset House, London
After 10 fun-packed years, it’s a wrap for the UK’s biggest celebration of indie, communal gameplay. But the folk games at the heart of this year’s edition have now filtered into the mainstream, from Taskmaster to The Traitors
When she was a child growing up in Adelaide, Australia, Holly Gramazio made up a game with her friend Summer. The two girls would lie back on swings with their eyes closed. When someone made too much noise nearby, they’d sit to attention and yell as loudly as they could: “Don’t wake me up!” The game captured a child’s view of grownups and their irksome inconsistencies – the self-defeating idea, or perhaps threat, that an adult could scream themselves awake amid their stated efforts to remain asleep. It was a co-operative game: the two girls “won” if they shouted in unison. If only one yelled, they lost. “This is the first game I remember playing,” records Gramazio in the printed guide (which also doubles as a delicious compendium of folk games) for the final Now Play This festival of experimental game design.
It’s wrapping up “for the same reasons a lot of festivals wrap up”, she writes in a blog post marking its closure. “Sooner or later you need to find a way to make it more sustainable… Or if you can’t do that, you have to go: well, we had a fun time but that’s enough.”
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© Composite: Ben Peter Catchpole
© Composite: Ben Peter Catchpole
After months of mounting pressure on the university to defend itself, Harvard rejected a series of Trump administration demands – here’s what happened
It took Harvard University less than 72 hours to reject a series of demands put forth by the Trump administration, setting up a high-stakes showdown between the US’s wealthiest and oldest university and the White House.
The swift rebuke on Monday came after weeks of mounting pressure from Harvard faculty, students, alumni, and the city of Cambridge, all urging the university to defend itself, and higher education as a whole, against what they saw as an unprecedented attack from Washington.
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© Photograph: Sophie Park/Getty Images
© Photograph: Sophie Park/Getty Images
Duke of York’s, London
A triumphant staging by Rebecca Lucy Taylor of her new album, A Complicated Woman, is part artistic statement, part power pop club night
Hard-edged digital club music throbs from the theatre stage – a place mostly in darkness, its shadows hiding a drummer and a multi-instrumentalist. Standing in a row, glaring at the theatre audience, are Self Esteem and 10 dancers. They are not dancing. It’s a tense, delicious contradiction. The company stand stock-still for what feels like ages, clad in bonnets, collars and black gowns – half convent, half Gilead.
When they do move, it’s just their heads at first, glaring accusatively at one spotlit audience member. Gradually, these halting and jerky gestures become spasms, which become seizures, until finally the tension is released into something akin to dancing.
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© Photograph: Aaron Parsons Photography
© Photograph: Aaron Parsons Photography
67 min: Hearts 1-1 Aberdeen
“Still all square,” writes Simon McMahon. “A Celtic v Aberdeen Scottish Cup final would result in fifth place in Scotland getting a European spot, which means that it would be likely that Dundee United finish their first season back in the top flight with a European ‘adventure’, if that’s what you can call a Conference qualifying round defeat in some European outpost in July. I’ll take it though. Oh, and ‘Big’ Sam Dalby has made the PFA Scotland Team of the Year, one of only two non Old Firm players to do so.”
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© Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters
© Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters
Graeme Winn, 65, and Elaine Winn, 58, were among four people who died in incident on Thursday
The UK Foreign Office has said it is supporting the family of a couple who were killed in a cable car crash in Naples.
Graeme Winn, 65, and Elaine Winn, 58, were among four people who died on Thursday at Monte Faito in the town of Castellammare di Stabia, near Naples in southern Italy.
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© Photograph: Facebook
© Photograph: Facebook
The International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) has come under fire after it issued a reminder about anti-doping rules, saying players chosen to give samples must remain in full view of chaperones if they choose to take a shower first.
In a note sent to players via the tours that has found its way on to social media, the ITIA said although it had worked hard to ensure that showers after matches can amount to permissible delays to doping control it was not an “entitlement”. It requested players opting to freshen up first to strictly adhere to the requirement to stay in full view of the chaperone observing them at all times, and that failure to do so would be taken extremely seriously by the ITIA.
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© Photograph: GoodLifeStudio/Getty Images
© Photograph: GoodLifeStudio/Getty Images
Aaron Ramsey has been given the task of trying to save Cardiff City from relegation after manager Omer Riza was sacked on Saturday.
The Bluebirds parted company with Riza after a 2-0 defeat at Sheffield United on Good Friday left them 23rd in the Championship, one point from safety.
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© Photograph: Magi Haroun/Huw Evans/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Magi Haroun/Huw Evans/Shutterstock
Non-league club garners attention after overseas trip to St Ives match arranged for subscribers to YouTube channel
Football tourism is usually seen at Premier League stadiums like Old Trafford, Anfield and the Emirates, so fans of Harborough Town, who compete in the seventh tier of the football pyramid, were stunned when 100 Spaniards arrived at Bowden Park to watch them take on St Ives Town.
The Spanish fans, who turned up last Saturday, were subscribers to a Spanish YouTube channel, La Media Inglesa (LMI), focused on English football, which has now started arranging overseas trips for its followers.
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© Photograph: Fabio De Paola/The Guardian
© Photograph: Fabio De Paola/The Guardian
Revulsion at deadly Oklahoma City explosion in 1995 has faded. But echoes of the blast, and its perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh, are heard today as far-right ideas storm the US
The world’s first reaction to the young military veteran and far-right radical who blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City 30 years ago this month was near-universal revulsion at the carnage he created and at the ideology that inspired it.
A crowd yelled “baby killer” – and worse – as 26-year-old Timothy McVeigh was led away in chains from a courthouse in rural Oklahoma where the FBI caught up with him two days after the bombing. He had the same crew cut he’d sported in his army days and stone cold eyes.
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© Photograph: Anonymous/AP
© Photograph: Anonymous/AP
Recent research suggests our brain power is in decline. Is offloading our cognitive work to AI driving this trend?
Imagine for a moment you are a child in 1941, sitting the common entrance exam for public schools with nothing but a pencil and paper. You read the following: “Write, for no more than a quarter of an hour, about a British author.”
Today, most of us wouldn’t need 15 minutes to ponder such a question. We’d get the answer instantly by turning to AI tools such as Google Gemini, ChatGPT or Siri. Offloading cognitive effort to artificial intelligence has become second nature, but with mounting evidence that human intelligence is declining, some experts fear this impulse is driving the trend.
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© Illustration: Guardian Design
© Illustration: Guardian Design
UK brands are finding ever-inventive ways to quench consumers’ thirst for non-dairy alternatives
With white-suited operatives tapping buttons on huge machines and its walls a tangle of heavy-duty pipes, the sprawling complex in the Northamptonshire countryside could pass for a Bond villain’s lair, were it not for the comforting porridge smell.
But rather than plotting world domination, the site’s owner, Navara Oat Milling, is piggybacking on Britons’ growing thirst for plant-based alternatives to dairy. At regular intervals, trucks loaded with up to 30 tonnes of oat flour trundle eight miles up the road to the Alpro factory in Kettering, which churns out over 200m litres of plant milk a year.
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© Photograph: PR
© Photograph: PR
Appraisal of international public affairs leaders warned companies against aligning with ‘polarizing’ Trump ally
Associating with the Donald Trump administration’s multibillionaire adviser Elon Musk and misusing artificial intelligence are among the most surefire ways for companies to damage their brands, a new survey of more than 100 international public affairs leaders found.
Those findings stem from an appraisal conducted by the Global Risk Advisory Council, which was chaired by the head of the US Small Business Administration during Joe Biden’s presidency, Isabel Guzman.
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© Photograph: Nathan Howard/Reuters
© Photograph: Nathan Howard/Reuters
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