They’re cosy, civilised and different without disturbing things too much. Let’s do this!

At last. I have been waiting a year for this moment. I must apologise to you all. Twelve months ago, in this very organ, nay in this very diary, I noted that we were now in the hazy, lazy, crazy days between Boxing Day and New Year and thus wished you all a happy “Christmas perineum”. It should have been, of course, “Merryneum”. It has been bothering me ever since. I can only put it down to post-turkey malaise. If it helps, it is only while Googling around this subject to write this entry that I have realised that the nickname “taint” – for the fleshly rather than festive part under discussion – refers to the fact that “’t ain’t the front, ‘t ain’t the back.” I think perhaps I knew this at some level but hadn’t consciously made the connection. Anyway. I offer the knowledge to you here in some kind of twisted act of contrition.

Hundreds also hospitalised in Indore after public toilet built above drinking water pipeline appears to have let sewage into the supply

Sewage-contaminated drinking water is being blamed for killing at least 10 people, including a baby boy, and sending more than 270 others to hospital in Indore, ranked India’s “cleanest city” for the last eight years.

Residents of a congested, lower-income neighbourhood in Indore, Madhya Pradesh’s commercial capital, had been warning authorities for months about foul-smelling tap water. Their complaints went unheeded, despite the city’s much-lauded ranking for waste segregation and other cleanliness measures.

• Captain says they are ‘right people to carry on doing this ’

• Stokes believes the pair can push team to greater heights

Ben Stokes has said he has no doubt he wants Brendon McCullum alongside him as the England head coach, but accepted the Ashes defeat means the pair must sit down before the summer and work out how they can upgrade the team.

Senior figures at the England and Wales Cricket Board are wary of making sweeping changes and with Stokes seemingly safe, McCullum’s fate as head coach probably rests on his endorsement.

Once host to a poisonous gas research facility, Okunoshima is now an Instagram-friendly tourist destination

The bunny-ear designs on the window aside, there is little to indicate that the ferry has arrived on an island teeming with rabbits. Then, moments after the passengers disembark, there is activity in the undergrowth. A single rabbit scampers out, wholly untroubled by its two-legged visitors. And then another.

A short walk along the coast takes visitors deep into rabbit territory on Okunoshima, one of 3,000 islands in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea. Half a dozen of the animals chase away another as it attempts to join them in a communal meal of Chinese cabbage. The scene unfolds in front of smiling, camera-toting tourists barely able to believe their proximity to Okunoshima’s fabled – but troubled – furry residents.

The rabbits are dependent on visitors and volunteers for food.

Whether she’s a chicken-obsessed schoolboy or a hapless cop fighting a plot to bring down Notting Hill carnival, the comic actor’s dizzying range means she may soon need a bigger awards shelf

In 2020, as long-overdue conversations about race rippled out across the world, Gbemisola Ikumelo, now 39, made a decision. “I had this soul-destroying experience on a job,” she says, hersunny demeanour at odds with the grim tale. She decided to post online about the microaggressions she had endured while appearing in a play some years before, making peace with the fact that it could affect her chances at future roles, and shaking as she typed out the thread. A day passed, “and I just heard my phone going ding, ding, ding. I was convinced it was going to be backlash – but it was people sending their congratulations.” Ikumelo had been nominated for a Bafta for her short, Brain in Gear. “I felt like God was going: ‘Don’t worry.’ It was a beautiful moment.” She won that Bafta and has since scooped another. “When I won the first one, I was living in a small flat, and I felt like the [statuette] was judging me,” she laughs. “I was like, I might have to refurb or move. Now I have an office, so they’re in a very reasonable place.”

You get the feeling she should keep a few shelves free. After flirting with TV roles in the US, in 2025 Ikumelo joined the writing and acting cast of NBC’s Office spinoff The Paper. Closer to home, she also shot another series of the show that scooped her the second of those aforementioned awards, for best female comedy performance – the riotous buddy cop comedy Black Ops (she is still hopeful her brilliantly anxiety-inducing Brain in Gear will make it to a series).

After losing a year to havoc and job-slashing at Nasa, the pressure is on billionaire administrator Jared Isaacman

With astronauts set to fly around the moon for the first time in more than half a century when Artemis 2 makes its long-awaited ascent sometime this spring, 2026 was already destined to become a standout year in space.

It is also likely to be one of the most pivotal, with new leadership at Nasa in billionaire private astronaut Jared Isaacman, and the tycoon-led private space industry assuming more than a mere supporting role to help win for the US its race with China back to the lunar surface.

The Bonfire Party by Sean O’Brien; Plastic by Matthew Rice; Retablo for a Door by Michelle Penn; Jonah and Me by John F Deane; Intimate Architecture by Tess Jolly

The Bonfire Party by Sean O’Brien (Picador, £12.99)
This sombre collection showcases O’Brien’s varied use of forms and subject matter, exploring themes of history, remembrance of war and political conflict, death, time, the passing of friends and loved ones as well as human desire and culpability. A central sequence entitled Impasse is inspired by Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels. These poems plunge us into the landscape of the detective hero’s world, a process O’Brien describes as “analogous to dream-life, where certain motifs (cities, railway stations, libraries in my case) recur without ever abolishing the mystery that animates them”. The penultimate poem of the final sequence ushers in an elegiac, pensive tone as the speaker reminds us not to forget “birdsong / the descant of the rising lark / that never ends, composed of silence”. The book reinforces O’Brien’s authority as a chronicler of our times, “love and death consorting as they must”.

Plastic by Matthew Rice (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99)
This book-length poem explores the experiences of a night worker turned poet. Structured as a continuous narrative, it illustrates the frustrations, inequities and relentless cycle of 21st-century manual labour: “The night is proletarian, a morgue of ghosts / given the present is a borderline”. Rice documents the tragic incidents and surreal imaginings that occur within the nightmarish confines of a plastic moulding factory. “Once, in this building, a kid clocked off night shift / for good at the end of a rope / another’s heart gave out at 3am / performing a task as menial as mine.” This sardonic, bleakly moving book interrogates ideas of working-class masculinity and intergenerational trauma, with “hell as an idea of what work could be”; there are glimpses of hope in poetry itself, “the treasure buried in my father’s field”.

• Briton to make United Cup debut against Naomi Osaka

• Billy Harris replaces Jack Draper in Great Britain team

Emma Raducanu believes she is on the right path towards greater success in 2026 as she prepares to begin the new tennis season as Great Britain’s leading player at the United Cup in Australia.

Raducanu, the British women’s No 1, will make her debut in the mixed-gender team competition on Sunday against Japan’s Naomi Osaka. “I think for me it’s just about stacking the good days,” said Raducanu on her hopes for 2026. “I’ve been putting in some good practices. Even if each practice isn’t as perfect as you want it to be, I think just the consistency of it is the most important thing. That’s what really helped me last year. So I just hope to carry that on and enjoy the tennis, enjoy the process of what I’m doing, which right now I am.”

Multinational boosts online chatter after social media users showcase product’s widespread use in life hacks

As a product discovered more than 150 years ago on a Pennsylvania oilfield, the humble pot of Vaseline may not seem like an obvious target for social media algorithms.

Yet the brand’s emergence as a TikTok talking point has placed it at the forefront of an advertising revolution, in which large companies are spending big on content creators and putting fewer resources into promoting products in traditional media.

About 40 people died in Crans-Montana bar fire, with investigators saying it could take days to identify all victims

• Switzerland resort fire – latest updates

Investigators have said it could take days to identify all of the victims who died in the fire that tore through a crowded bar in the Swiss ski resort of Crans-Montana, as a local official said many of the injured were in a life-threatening condition.

About 40 people were killed in the blaze that engulfed the town’s Le Constellation bar, which was packed with mainly young revellers celebrating the new year, and about 115 others injured, many of them seriously, authorities have said.

After a group stage that delivered an average of 3.6 goals a game we look at the match-ups in Morocco that start on Saturday

Senegal, winners of the Afcon in 2022, have arguably the best collection of players, including the experience of Sadio Mané and the explosive talent of Nicolas Jackson, and are superior to their east African opponents. But Sudan, who qualified for the tournament despite the tragedy of a horrendous war in their country, certainly match the Lions of Teranga in fortitude. Sudan, coached by the Ghanaian Kwesi Appiah, who led his home country at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, played all their qualifiers away from home, with the war, which began in April 2023, shutting down a thriving domestic league. The Sudan striker John Mano told the BBC: “Some of them [people in Sudan] cannot watch the matches … They can’t even listen on the radio … We are trying to free our country, through the football way.” An win for Sudan would be one of the fairytales of the tournament.

Brian King Joseph claims the rapper and actor was ‘priming’ him for ‘sexual exploitation’. Smith’s lawyer has called the allegations ‘false, baseless and reckless’

Will Smith is being sued by a violinist from his 2025 tour, who claims the rapper and actor exhibited “predatory behaviour” and was “deliberately grooming and priming” him for “further sexual exploitation”. Brian King Joseph is also pursuing the performer and his company Treyball Studios Management for wrongful termination and retaliation in a suit filed in the superior court of California.

Joseph alleges that he was hired for the tour in support of Smith’s new album, Based on a True Story, after first appearing on stage with Smith in December 2024. The suit claims that Smith once told Joseph, “You and I have such a special connection that I don’t have with anyone else.”

A helpless baby elephant has won the Thai public’s sympathy but her case has shed light on the pressures facing herds across Asia

Khao Tom, a two-month-old elephant, plays with a wildlife officer, nudging his face and curling her trunk around his wrist. When she lifts her trunk in the air, signalling that she is hungry, the team at the rescue centre seems relieved – she has not been eating well. A vet prepares a pint-sized bottle of formula, which she gulps down impatiently.

Khao Tom has been in the care of Thailand’s national parks and wildlife department since September, when rangers rescued her from a farming area inside Lam Khlong Ngu national park. Born with a congenital disorder affecting her knees, she struggled to keep up with the herd. Within days of her birth, her mother had moved on without her.

There are many knock-on effects of working nights or early mornings, and often employers could do more to protect staff. But there are small, simple changes that can make all the difference

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Approximately 8.7 million people in the UK work night shifts, but humans are not meant to be awake at night. “It goes against our natural circadian cycle,” says Steven Lockley, visiting professor at the Surrey Sleep Research Centre, University of Surrey. “We have a clock in the hypothalamus in the brain, and that clock has evolved to control many aspects of our physiology.” This includes metabolism and immune system, hormones, and heart, lung and brain function. “We’ve evolved to be awake in the daytime and asleep at night. When we do shift work, we’re going against what our natural rhythms want us to do.”

This is true not just for those who work in the dead of night, but for those who work early and evening shifts. It means, says Lockley, “you’re not sleeping at the right time. Night shifts are the worst example, but all of these [shift patterns] move away from the circadian desire to keep a stable sleep-wake cycle.”

• Both transfers being driven by Nuno Espírito Santo

• Sterling rejects West Ham, with Fulham favourites

West Ham are poised to boost their attacking options by signing Gil Vicente’s Pablo Felipe and Lazio’s Taty Castellanos at a cost of up to £47m.

Both deals have been driven by Nuno Espírito Santo, who is looking to help his struggling side’s fight to stay in the Premier League by adding more firepower. West Ham considered a move for the Wolves striker Jørgen Strand Larsen but decided against making a bid after concluding that his £40m valuation was too high.

US had accused Italian pasta companies of selling products at unfairly low prices

The US government has slashed proposed tariffs on Italian pasta that would have almost doubled the cost of many brands for shoppers.

Donald Trump had threatened to impose tariffs as high as 92% on Italian pasta companies, after accusing 13 producers including Barilla, La Molisana and Pastificio Lucio Garofalo of selling their products at unfairly low prices.

⚽ Read Jacob Steinberg on Maresca’s Chelsea departure
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Eddie Howe is having none of the idea that Newcastle have no plan B, reports PA Media, and rejected suggestions they were under the cosh in their win at Burnley.

Howe bristled at suggestions they had come under an onslaught at Turf Moor and there was nothing they could do about it. He said: “An onslaught? What, against us? Have you seen the stats of the game? You must have been watching a different game then. There was no onslaught.

“Yes, we had moments, of course. We had moments the other way. I would never describe it as that. If it was an onslaught, I’d give you my opinion and say, ‘Yes, I thought it was’.

More than 100 people still in hospital, many severely injured, after fire in Le Constellation bar in Crans-Montana that killed at least 40

Here is an image of Emanuele Galeppini, who was the first victim of the fire to be named (see 9.02am GMT).

In a post on its website, the Italian Golf Federation paid tribute to a “young athlete who embodied passion and authentic values”. While numerous news outlets have shared this news, officials are yet to confirm the names of any victims.

Paul Ovenden argues time spent discussing political prisoner was symptom of government struggling to focus

Efforts to free Alaa Abd el-Fattah regularly distracted Keir Starmer’s government from focusing on bread-and-butter domestic political issues, according to one of the prime minister’s closest former advisers.

Paul Ovenden, who stood down last year as the prime minister’s director of strategy, said the case of the British political prisoner became a “running joke” among those in government frustrated by the slow pace of change.

From Doom and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes to Metropolis, Hollywood hasn’t predicted the most stable of years ahead

2025 sounds more futuristic. Maybe it’s the “f” sound on “five.” But 2026 is one step beyond, and it’s where we are now, with every science-fiction-style development – principally the widespread adoption of AI – looking dystopian, or maybe worse. (Doesn’t it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually work a bit better?) Didn’t anyone warn us about this?

The answer, at least with regards to our sci-fi movies years ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is yes and no. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly take the ape population with us). Some of them are visionary; others just look like bad green screen. But it’s worth examining where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we’d be situated by this time in our planet’s evolution. So let’s take a look at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to teach us.

The return of hit bonkbuster Rivals, the horny hockey show taking the world by storm, Richard Gadd’s follow-up to Baby Reindeer … and Buffy is back! Here’s your complete guide to 2026’s unmissable television

As the writer of conspiracy thriller Utopia and Covid-era relationship drama Together, Dennis Kelly has form for creating darkly perceptive TV drama. This excellent series stars Josh Finan (whose performance in The Responder earned him a Bafta nomination) as Dan, a philosophy teacher with a troubled family past, working in a prison. As he explores issues around freedom, luck and destiny with the inmates, he starts to wonder if he actually belongs behind bars like his abusive father. Soon, his anxieties threaten to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• BBC One, 3 January

The novelist on how The Rainbow made him want to write, the strange genius of Penelope Fitzgerald and finding comfort in Tintin

My earliest reading memory
Sitting on the sofa with my mum reading Mabel the Whale by Patricia King, with beautiful colour illustrations by Katherine Evans. I think it was pre-school. My mother was not always a patient teacher, and I was often a slow learner, but the scene, the tableaux, in memory, has the serenity of an icon.

My favourite book growing up
Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth. It’s a story set in Roman Britain; the Eagle is the lost standard of the ninth legion. I was a boy already obsessed by all things Ancient Roman (the alternative to the kind of boy obsessed with dinosaurs). One of the places I remember reading it is in bed with my dad. On Sunday mornings my brother and I would climb into the big bed. My parents had long since split up. There was a picture on the wall, a modest reproduction of Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus. To me, this voluptuous woman gazing at herself in a mirror was my mother. It’s interesting to me how the setting in which you read is such an integral part of the reading experience.

BPG hopes to find buyer for Grade II-listed structure by summer after slump in profits and rising costs

Brighton’s historic Palace Pier has been put up for sale after a decline in tourist numbers, a drop in profits and increase in costs in recent years.

The leisure group that owns the 126-year-old structure, which has appeared in famous films including Brighton Rock and Quadrophenia, said it hoped to find a new owner by the summer.