Second home owners are poised to fight back as Cornwall prepares to impose double council tax – leaving councillors fearing for their budget

Cornwall councillor Steve Arthur is convinced that this year’s council budget will have a large hole in it because of tax-avoiding second home owners.

Arthur, a local businessman who runs a holiday cottage firm in Perranporth on the north Cornish coast, expects many of the county’s second home owners to nominate their children as council tax payers.

Bright and light, cool-climate wines have a style all of their own

Iona Elgin Highlands Sauvignon Blanc, Elgin, South Africa 2024 (£17.99, virginwines.co.uk) From ‘oak-aged’ and ‘wild-ferment’ to ‘single-vineyard’ and ‘hand-picked’, wine producers and sellers have a habit of dressing up descriptive phrases as implied shorthand for quality. They’re not alone in that, of course, or even the worst offenders: no wine term is as insidiously irritating as ‘pan-fried’ or ‘handcooked’. Still, it can be grating when something unexceptional, even a little banal about the where and how of a wine’s production is presented as the key to its unique brilliance. I’ve grown wearily sceptical in recent years, for example, of the incessant use of ‘cool climate’ as a term of praise, not least when it’s used to describe wines from places that aren’t, in the global context, very cool at all. Still, there are moments when its use is both factually justified and helpful in preparing potential buyers for a particular set of stylistic cues – and Virgin Wine’s new, pristine, scintillatingly fresh and pure-fruited sauvignon blanc made by Iona in South Africa’s coolest region, Elgin, is undeniably one of those moments.

M&S Lyme Bay Bacchus, Devon, England 2023 (£15, Marks & Spencer) English wine – to borrow from the title of drinks writr Henry Jeffreys’ witty, gossipy 2023 book on its latter-day transformation from amateurish hobbyist’s playground to serious, venture-capital-infused business – is all about making the best of Vines in a Cold Climate. And for all that our domestic summers may, on average, have grown significantly warmer over the past few decades (and, in the process, made it much easier to ripen grapes much more consistently from year to year), wine production even in southern England is still very much on the northern margins. Necessarily, then, the wines made there are still marked by the high acidity and low alcohol that are the key character traits associated with cool-climate winemaking – characteristics that are very much attributes in the two styles with which England has so far had most success: tongue-tinglingly energetic sparkling wines (such as the reliable, well-priced Coates & Seely Brut Reseve NV; £36.95, coatesandseely.com); and crisp, dry, spring-meadow aromatic whites (such as M&S’s leafy, grassy bacchus).

On the streets of Windsor even some who don’t like the US president say the UK ‘can’t afford to fall out with America’

The pageantry of a state occasion is something Joanna Chin usually enjoys. She stood on Thames Street in Windsor, outside the castle, to celebrate the Queen’s 90th birthday and Harry and Megan’s wedding. Will she come out for President Trump?

“I can’t stand the man,” she said. “It’s difficult to even believe it’s happening – that somebody like that can be president of the United States. He’s dangerous.”

Sometimes we slip into exchanges that feel more functional than meaningful, and leave us feeling unseen

The question I am hoping you can help me make sense of the feeling that I just don’t matter any more. I’m 50, divorced, with three children (aged 20, 17 and 15). My ex seems to have given up parenting – to the extent that he recently remarried without even telling them.

My parents are elderly and my mother has been in and out of hospital, but they live five hours away, so it’s hard to help. I changed jobs in the middle of last year, leaving a company I spent 25 years working for, where I was senior and respected. And my job there involved helping people more than in my new one. My role now is in a flatter organisation and helps fewer people (but is much better paid). Finally, my children are amazing.

Although the pill has dangers, too many are turning to the ‘egg-timer model’ on their phones

In response to Martha Gill’s compelling, well-researched commentary on decades-long stagnation of research into contraception, I would add that it is alarming that – accompanying rising disenchantment with contraceptive pills – there is a well-documented drift towards increased use of the rhythm method of contraception (“The pill hasn’t been improved in years. No wonder women are giving up on it”, Comment).

This method has widely and misleadingly been promoted as “natural”. It is based on the simplistic notion that a menstrual cycle follows a reliably regular pattern, which I call the “egg-timer model”. The core assumption is that ovulation occurs only during a four- to five-day period in mid-cycle, known as the fertile window. The rationale of the rhythm method is that conception can be avoided by restricting coitus to the remaining, non-fertile cycle days.