The best guest leaves the smallest footprint but the longest shadow. Here are sevens tips to enhance your odds of a return invitation

Over the years, I’ve spent many a weekend at the holiday homes of generous friends. Some might say I’m a seasoned freeloader, but I prefer to see my role as that of life-enhancer. With just the right balance of bonhomie and shutting-the-heck-up plus a healthy measure of home helper, I have been the lucky recipient of many repeat invitations.

The perfect weekend guest is the one who leaves the smallest footprint but the longest shadow. As holiday season approaches, here are some tips that will enhance your odds of a return invitation.

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Artificial intelligence doesn’t just incrementally erode the rights of authors and other creators. These technologies are designed to replace creative workers altogether

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Back in 2022, when ChatGPT arrived, I was part of the first wave of users. Delighted but also a little uncertain what to do with it, I asked the system to generate all kinds of random things. A song about George Floyd in the style of Bob Dylan. A menu for a vegetarian dinner party. A briefing paper about alternative shipping technologies.

The quality of what it produced was variable, but it made clear something that is even more apparent now than it was then. That this technology wasn’t just a toy. Instead its arrival is an inflection point in human history. Over coming years and decades, AI will transform every aspect of our lives.

Songs arise out of suffering … the complex, internal human struggle of creation … [but] algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer … What makes a great song great is not its close resemblance to a recognisable work. Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past.

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With subversive scripts and a spotlight on local talent, this former principal boy is busy revolutionising pantomime – but there’s still room for bawdy gags

Few people have their spindle-pricked finger on the panto pulse like the writer-director Susie McKenna, whose festive formula has set the tone of theatre’s Christmas canon for decades. Within panto land, her name frequently attracts the prefix “legend”, and no wonder; a former principal boy (the panto’s young male protagonist role, traditionally given to a woman) who steered two decades of festive outings at the Hackney Empire in east London, in the process rerooting theatre’s once-commercial juggernauts in the local community. There she staged fairytale reimaginings of everything from Puss in Boots to Mother Goose; in 2019, she retold Dick Whittington as a young Jamaican who boarded the Empire Windrush in search of his fortune in London.

This year, McKenna turns her attention – and her locally anchored, uplifting, politically witty scripts – south of the river, to Catford’s refurbished Broadway theatre, in the borough of Lewisham, south-east London, where a “modern remix” of Sleeping Beauty opens next month .

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As the stage version of his take on Great Expectations opens in Adelaide, the novelist looks back at a right royal kerfuffle – and a memorable encounter with a London cabby

It was 1997. Peter Carey was the ballsy Australian author who, having already won the Brits’ biggest literature prize (the Booker) and shrugged off any shred of colonial insecurity, saw fit to reimagine one of the greatest works of English literature – Great Expectations by Charles Dickens – from the perspective of an Australian convict.

A year later, Jack Maggs won the Commonwealth prize – but it wasn’t until he was at the ceremony that Carey, a vocal republican, learned that his prize included a meeting with Queen Elizabeth II.

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Offline Club brings digital detox concept to London for those wanting real-life connections and relaxation

For some of us, being without our smartphones for a few hours prompts panic: think of all the messages we would miss. For others, however, going off-grid sounds like bliss. Now, those looking to escape the doomscrolling can go cold turkey – for a few hours, at least.

The Offline Club , which has made a name for itself by hosting phone-free hangouts in the Netherlands , has brought its concept to London. On Wednesday, the Guardian visited one of the company’s no-phone zones, hosted in a church in West Hampstead.

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Have you tried chardonnay lately? You’ll find it crisper and lower in alcohol than it was in its 90s pomp

One of the strict rules of wine writing is that if you’re going to talk about chardonnay, you have to mention Bridget Jones . Other rules include how sherry articles must always contain a reference to grannies or vicars, and anything about German sparkling wine must be entitled The Joy of Sekt . Failure to comply with these diktats means instant expulsion from the shadowy Circle of Wine Writers.

That said, for readers of a certain age, chardonnay is synonymous with Bridget Jones. And not just any chardonnay, either, but an orange-coloured, oaky, slightly sweet Australian chardonnay drunk out of a 25cl glass at All Bar One. You don’t get more 1990s than that.

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People lining up for recent retail offerings in Birmingham and Hampshire are just part of a long tradition, say experts

In the early hours of Wednesday inside the Bullring shopping centre in Birmingham there were scenes reminiscent of a political sit-in, or perhaps an emergency shelter. Clips shared on social media show hundreds of people sitting or lying quietly on the floor, tightly packed together. “Regretting life decisions at the moment,” wrote one TikTok poster . “Currently 5.12am… Glad to be here but vvv sleep deprived someone send help.”

Happily, that young woman revealed, she was number 259, meaning that in a few hours she would be given some beauty products for her trouble. This was the overnight queue for the opening of a branch of the cosmetics retailer Sephora, with hundreds sleeping on the shopping centre floor for the opportunity to visit the new store and, for the lucky first 500, receive a gift bag. Numbered tickets had gone well before midnight.

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Figures also reveal both men and women having less sex – but number of partners over lifetime increasing

The French have a certain reputation when it comes to the vie d’amour . But the latest national study on the country’s sexual behaviour may offer a reason to rethink.

According to findings from the National Institute of Health and Medical Research, the age at which French people are having sex for the first time is increasing.

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Sheffield Octagon
Despite scoring two No 1 albums this year, the band remain charmingly self-effacing on this 30th anniversary tour

Shed Seven were plucky Britpop underdogs who notched up 15 Top 40 hits, though their success was certainly eclipsed by Blur, Oasis and Pulp. The chances of them scoring two No 1 albums within a calendar year three decades later must have seemed as likely as singer Rick Witter landing on the moon, but 30 years after their debut, this year’s chart-topping A Matter of Time and orchestrated collection Liquid Gold made them only the 20th act to achieve this feat since the charts started in 1952.

“We’ve joined an elite,” grins Witter. “The Beatles, the Jam, Queen … and Blue.” Chuckles all round, but Witter’s self-effacing quip recognises that his band’s enduring outsider status has made them tremendously relatable. Moments later, when he sings High Hopes – about determinedly keeping going despite setbacks and knockdowns – there’s barely a hand in the audience that isn’t raised in the air.

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