On holiday in his home town of Aurillac, the photographer was drawn to a pretty puddle of reflected umbrellas

Guillaume Lavrut was visiting the small French town of Aurillac with his wife and three children when he took this photo. The family were looking for souvenirs together and exploring the streets when they happened on a canopy of umbrellas. Aurillac is home to one of the world’s oldest umbrella factories and is regarded by many as the umbrella capital of Europe. For Lavrut, however, a visit to Aurillac is about returning home.

“My family are from there, so we go every summer. It’s so difficult to reach that we need at least a day to get there, but it’s worth it,” Lavrut says. Its peaceful, relaxed atmosphere offers something different from their homes in Paris and Nantes. “The capital is constantly bustling, and Nantes can be busy at times, too, but Aurillac is lost in the mountains, and nature is omnipresent.”

The McFly singer on getting kicked out of Busted after two days, peeing himself on stage and learning to love his ‘big chin’

Born in London, Tom Fletcher, 40, attended the Sylvia Young Theatre School and founded McFly in 2003. The band had seven No 1 singles, won a Brit Award for best pop act and continue to perform. In 2016, Fletcher published his first solo-written book for children, The Christmasaurus, which was shortlisted for a British Book Award. His titles have been translated into 40 languages. Paddington: The Musical, with music and lyrics by Fletcher, is at the Savoy theatre until next May. He is married to podcaster and author Giovanna Fletcher , has three children and lives in Hertfordshire.

When were you happiest?
On stage with my band.

With a child in college and a spouse who’s a professor, I have front-row access to the unfolding debacle that is “higher education in the age of AI.”

These days, students routinely submit even “personal reflection” papers that are AI generated. (And routinely appear surprised when caught.)

Read a paper longer than 10 pages? Not likely—even at elite schools. Toss that sucker into an AI tool and read a quick summary instead. It’s more efficient!

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We’re a few weeks away from the debut of the fifth and final season of Stranger Things —at least the first of three parts of it—and Netflix has dropped one doozy of a trailer that shows things looking pretty bleak for our small-town heroes of Hawkins.

(Spoilers for prior seasons below.)

As previously reported , S4 ended with Vecna—the Big Bad behind it all—opening the gate that allowed the Upside Down to leak into Hawkins. We’re getting a time jump for S5, but in a way, we’re coming full circle, since the events coincide with the third anniversary of Will’s original disappearance in S1. The fifth season will have eight episodes, and each one will be looong—akin to eight feature-length films. Per the official premise:

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It’s spooky season, and what better way to spend Halloween weekend than settling in to watch a classic Hollywood ghost story? To help you figure out what to watch, we’ve compiled a handy list of 15 classic ghost stories, presented in chronological order.

What makes a good ghost story? Everyone’s criteria (and taste) will differ, but for this list, we’ve focused on more traditional elements. There’s usually a spooky old house with a ghostly presence and/or someone who’s attuned to said presence. The living must solve the mystery of what happened to trap the ghost(s) there in hopes of setting said ghost(s) free. In that sense, the best, most satisfying ghost stories are mysteries—and sometimes also love stories . The horror is more psychological, and when it comes to gore, less is usually more.

As always, the list below isn’t meant to be exhaustive. Mostly, we’re going for a certain atmospheric vibe to set a mood. So our list omits overt comedies like Ghostbusters and (arguably) Ghost , as well as supernatural horror involving demonic possession— The Exorcist, The Conjuring , Insidious— or monsters, like The Babadook or Sinister . Feel free to suggest your own recommendations in the comments.

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An international study found cool people are extroverted, open, hedonistic, adventurous, autonomous and powerful. At best, I have three of these traits. Could I change that?

Who would you say is effortlessly, undeniably cool? Charli xcx, certainly. David Bowie, of course. Yoko Ono and Fran Lebowitz – or do they just wear a lot of black? I’m not cool and never have been. As a teenager, I was a swot at a school that prized sports. As an adult, I’m always wearing a backpack. I’m garrulous, risk-averse, lazy with my personal presentation and not convinced that any drug beats eight hours’ sleep. “Cool” feels to me like the stock market or Michelin restaurants: none of my business.

I’m not alone. In a recent YouGov survey , a third of respondents said they weren’t cool at school, with only 10% reporting that, yep, they actually were. Half claimed they were “somewhere in between”.

Arts professionals complain of ‘cruel’ bureaucratic process since grant processing platform crashed in July

Arts organisations and artists have said they are still in “funding limbo” with mounting bills and uncertain futures after this summer’s crash of Arts Council England’s grant processing platform.

ACE’s online portal, Grantium, was used by artists to submit and manage funding applications. But when it crashed in July, it left thousands of applications for vital funding in doubt – a situation that persisted for several months until applications reopened in late September.

The replacement that Netflix has chosen for lead actor Henry Cavill is utterly lacking in his predecessor’s likability. The ex-Neighbours actor is a scowling lunk who brings a wildly uneven vibe to this fantasy drama

The Witcher is a maverick, a lone wolf, a loose cannon who won’t play by the rules. “He knows no fear,” gasps an underling as the Witcher looks at a horse and frowns, fearlessly. But the Witcher is preoccupied. The winds of change howl around his thigh boots and perturb the weave of his wig. “Your silence is especially loud today, Witcher,” observes sidekick Milva (Meng’er Zhang), as the Witcher – who, for the purposes of drama/HMRC, is also known as Geralt of Rivia – frowns at another horse. But the Witcher/Geralt doesn’t want to talk about why he doesn’t want to talk. Not because the most recent instalment of the beloved Netflix series with which he shares a name saw his family rent asunder by the forces of darkness (although, to be fair, this probably hasn’t helped). But because the wandering monster-hunter has awoken in season four of The Witcher to find he is no longer being played by Henry Cavill, upon whose mountainous shoulders rested the first three seasons of this unapologetically preposterous fantasy-drama. Instead, Geralt is now Liam “Younger Brother of Chris” Hemsworth, who used to be in Neighbours. In a very real sense: strewth.

The metamorphosis clearly weighs heavily on Geralt, who spends the first episode of the new series flaring his nostrils and peering anxiously into the middle distance, as if concerned Harold Bishop might suddenly appear from behind a shrub and club him with a mace. The maverick’s malaise is understandable: Cavill’s are big thigh boots to fill, the actor’s granite-jawed charisma providing an often deeply confusing show with its near-monosyllabic anchor. But now, with Cavill off to brood in pastures new, the final two series of The Witcher (the oversized rubber axe is poised to fall at the end of season five) must look to Hemsworth’s flaring nostrils for their protagonism. How fares the extraordinarily violent fantasy-drama in the wake of such a seismic regeneration, my liege? Let us clamber aboard a faux-medieval horse and head into the rugged wilds of season four to search for clues.

The Witcher season four is on Netflix

Her latest work is built on dark, minimal beats and groups of dancers moving in unison. It’s sensual, visceral and, she says, totally intuitive

A couple of summers ago I was in a club in Manchester, dancing alone in the dark, when bodies suddenly flooded the dancefloor. Androgynous men and women all dressed in skin-tight, skin-coloured lace. Their lithe limbs and torsos flinched and flickered; they slithered and strutted. They were alluring and unhuman, sexy and weird. I was in the middle of ROSE, an immersive dance collaboration between record label Young and Sharon Eyal, an Israeli choreographer now based in France, who has become one of the most in-demand on the contemporary dance scene over the last decade. In her works that have come to the UK – Killer Pig, OCD Love, Saaba and more – Eyal’s strangely intoxicating choreography taps into the sensibility of nightclubs and catwalks, as well as something much more primal in the gathering of bodies to move as one together.

There is something intimidating about these dancers and their distorted bodies, gorgeously confident and coolly aloof; I wondered whether Eyal herself would be intimidating, too. She doesn’t do a lot of interviews. But on video call from her home outside Paris she smiles. She’s a little guarded, enigmatic, hard to get a handle on. Not the kind of artist who wants to explain her work (like Margot Fonteyn, who when once asked about something she’d performed, said: “I told you when I danced it”).