Winger was one of the first big-money academy transfers, part of a child labour market that has barely been questioned

“What’s your name?”

“Raheem.”

Soaring fish prices, labour costs and changing tastes all spell bad news for Britain’s chippies. Is this the end for the seaside staple – or will a few innovators succeed in keeping them alive?

One day in 2007, Darren Sudlow drove past the old stationmaster’s house at Padgate station, in Cheshire, noticed it was empty and decided to lease it. “He just fell in love with the place,” says his son, Kieran, who was 11 at the time. “He said he always wanted a fish and chip shop, for some reason.” Despite having worked as a joiner up to that point, Darren made a go of it, and the Plaice Station, as he named it, was a success from day one. “He worked like mad to get it open and then realised that the hard work hadn’t even started, and he had a queue out the door,” says the younger Sudlow.

The family lived nearby. Kieran Sudlow, who is now 30, worked at the Plaice Station as a boy, peeling potatoes, washing dishes after school, then cooking at the range when he was 16. He went on to become a chef, working in Australia for a few years, then returning to help out at the chippy part-time when needed. Business had always been pretty good. They won local awards and had a loyal customer base. But one day in March, Kieran remembers, his father came in and told him: “‘I think the fish and chip shop’s going to go.’ He said, ‘It’s not making money. I can’t see it carrying on.’”

Notorious for ultra-violent movies like Drive and The Neon Demon, the Dane had lost the will to direct until ‘the Tom Cruise of surgeons’ saved his life – and triggered an astonishing creative rebirth

Nicolas Winding Refn has his phone out, showing me one of the goriest scenes he’s ever been involved in. Given that the Danish director’s movies have involved hands getting sliced off, eyeballs being gouged out and a son reaching deep inside his mother’s womb, that’s certainly saying something. In this video, the camera is fixed upon a beating heart when suddenly – slash! – it gets sliced open with a knife. We travel into the open chamber, as needles arrive to pierce through the muscle. Unsettling and compelling, could this be a future Palme d’Or winner?

Unlikely. You see, Refn isn’t the director of this footage; he’s actually the guy lying conked out in the operating room while a surgeon attends to him. Requesting that someone films your own heart surgery is a very Nicolas Winding Refn thing to do. “At first they said no,” says the film-maker known for Drive, Bronson and The Neon Demon. “But then they said, ‘As it’s you, we’ll record it.’”

In towns and in the countryside, I see SUVs and pickup trucks driven without care or conscience. It’s the Magafication of transport

Where is lawbreaking not just visible, but designed to be seen? Where is antisocial behaviour worn as a badge of honour? Where is pleasure gained directly from causing distress? And where is reckless endangerment often ignored by the police or treated with the mildest of punishments? The answer is on the roads.

Last month, three men in the West Midlands were convicted of street racing. Two were driving at over 80mph in a 40mph zone. The third clocked over 90mph in a 30mph zone. The West Midlands has long been blighted by organised racing, sometimes involving 200 cars or more and hundreds of spectators. The result is a long catalogue of deaths and life-changing injuries, including some caused when racers have left the road and ploughed into onlookers or pedestrians. And there are plenty more accidents where the police have little idea whether racing is to blame, for as soon as they happen, the drivers disperse.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Does your child’s favourite show give them a chance to reflect, or does it move too quickly for its lessons to sink in?

• A version of this piece was originally published on Aeon as The bombarding of childhood

I am at the airport gate waiting to depart, watching passengers hurry past with rolling suitcases and paper cups of coffee. A small boy sits very still beside his mother. He holds an iPad close to his chest, almost in a cramp, clutching the screen as if it might otherwise run away. I hear loud clapping hands and squeaking children’s voices. I lean over and see a cartoon character in green snatch a toy from another character in pink. The pink character begins to cry, tears splashing like sprinkles from its enormous eyes. The green character shouts sorry. Instantly, the tears stop and a wide smile replaces them before I have blinked. And, before I have even worked out whether the characters are speaking English or Arabic (as the mother does to the boy), the scene has changed and the two characters are rowing a boat with a random song in the background. The boy’s eyes dart on the screen from right to left, centre, down. His body is still but his attention is being hurried from cue to cue.

This is the problem I have come to think of as the pace of children’s media.

Readers describe feelings of rejection after submitting hundreds of applications but getting a handful of interviews

Hundreds of job applications, exhausting searches and relentless rejection – the experience of attempting to get back into the workforce after losing their jobs in their 50s and 60s has proved an ordeal for some Britons.

For some, those efforts prove fruitless and lead jobseekers to reluctantly take early retirement. Others may have to rely on benefits to pay the bills while they continue to job hunt.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen says such a partnership is for the European Union’s ‘common strength’

Meanwhile, we are getting some interesting lines from Paris that the French president, Emmanuel Macron, convened the chiefs ⁠of ⁠the ​different political parties to discuss the ​crises ‌in ‌the Middle East ‌and Ukraine and their consequences on the energy market.

The meeting will ‌be held on Friday morning at 10:30am local time on Thursday (that’s 9:30am UK) and military and intelligence officers will share ⁠the information they have ​provided to ​Macron, his ​office said ​in ‌a ​statement.

The Conservatives want to brand Burnham’s administration as a ‘traditional tax and spend socialist government’

Labour won’t let Andrew Griffith forget Liz Truss. This is what it said overnight in response to the trail of Griffith’s speech.

We won’t take any lectures from the Tories on the economy - not least when it was only last week that Andrew Griffith was praising the “lots of good things” in Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget.

Andrew Griffith was the very person who abolished the Office for Tax Simplification after the tax code ballooned to 23,000 pages - why on earth would anyone believe him now? After making IR35 worse, freezing VAT thresholds and imposing reams of red tape, businesses won’t forget the Tories’ betrayal.

[Craig Mackinlay and Robert Colvile] will produce a report taking evidence from small business and self-employed organisations. While they will have a wide remit, they will consider in particular these key questions, and report in December:

-Why have past attempts to reduce the regulatory and compliance burden on small business and the self-employed failed, and what specifically should be done to reduce the burden successfully?

Body found in pond in Suffolk village of Brantham, where Noah was last seen on Tuesday afternoon

Police searching for a three-year-old boy who went missing from a playground on the Suffolk-Essex border have found a body.

Noah Woods was last seen at 3pm on Tuesday in Merriam Close, Brantham, near Manningtree, before becoming separated from a relative.

Charles Spencer’s book, Swan Song, alleges comments were made during argument over Princess of Wales’ funeral arrangements

Prince Charles told Earl Spencer days after the death of his sister Diana, Princess of Wales, that “rest assured, we’ll forget her soon enough”, it is alleged in a memoir to be published this month.

Charles Spencer’s book, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, contains the claim that the comments were made by the now king during a heated argument over funeral arrangements.