Fantastic performances from the leads – you can practically hear the eggshells cracking as Ridley tiptoes around the vanities and insecurities of husband Shazad Latif

The post Star Wars trajectory is a mixed bag for actors. Maybe you get lucky, go the Harrison Ford route and become one of the shiniest movie stars of your generation. Maybe you’re more of a Mark Hamill type – initially out in the cold, before carving out a niche (in Hamill’s case as a sought after voice actor) and going on to cult success. Carrie Fisher, of course, was always a bit cooler than the entire endeavour, and continued her work as a writer, as well as dazzling in a variety of independent films. With Magpie, Daisy Ridley, who starred as Rey in the most recent round of George Lucas’ space opera, subtly signals that she would very much like to sit at Fisher’s table, please – by developing the story of this new independent thriller, working with writer Tom Bateman and director Sam Yates to make it a reality.

Ridley plays Anette, a mum to two children, one a babe in arms, and the other, bright young Tilly (Hiba Ahmed), a child actor. The kids are lovely, but hubby Ben (Shazad Latif) is an absolute arsehole; touchy, negative, checked out, irritable, he’s the sort of guy who never once asks Anette how her day went, but gets the hump if she doesn’t pander to his every emotional need. And then when she does pander to him, he gets annoyed by her pandering. Ben is a novelist, but not a wildly successful one, and there’s clearly a part of him that blames her on some level for this as well. You can practically hear the eggshells cracking as Anette tiptoes around his various vanities and insecurities.

I need my own space and have a limited tolerance for human company … Might I actually be a moggy?

The only time I have ever mentioned my bird-lover’s slight – slight! – ambivalence towards cats in a public forum, it brought me the angriest virtual postbag of my career, so I hesitate to even mention them again. Cats are great! I feed my neighbours’ cat! My niece is a cat! (By which I mean I view my best friend’s cat as a niece-like figure; she is not a child identifying as a cat , a phenomenon some highly suggestible sections of the media got overheated about several news cycles ago.)

But I’m daring to mention felines after reading an interview with a French veterinary psychiatrist in the New York Times. Over “aperitifs in a cafe not far from the Eiffel Tower” (you can see why he chose to specialise in psychiatry – kir royale with the NYT sounds nicer than expressing a pug’s anal glands), Claude Béata explained what cats, who “like to keep themselves to themselves”, went through during lockdown.

Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist

A cracking weeknight supper packed with flavour and ‘mouth-fragrance’

I might be exaggerating, but to nine-year-old me it felt like 5,000 fishes. In 1982, there was a BBC1 TV show called Pebble Mill at One, which featured Glynn Christian as its pioneering TV chef, who I think paved the way for the likes of Keith Floyd and all the celebrity chefs who followed. Glynn used to cook privately for my parents’ business partners, and through this connection my brother Al got his 15 minutes of fame at the age of 13. I don’t remember the whys and wherefores; I just knew that he was going to cook on the television! I don’t know if there was a brief, but my pa decided that Al should cook a fish dish: namely golden pan-fried fish with ginger and spring onions. The Chinese characters for this dish translate literally as “fried, sealed fish”, which loses all of its poetry, but what it lacks in translation, it makes up for in flavour.

My father is not a soft taskmaster, so for weeks running up to the event, he must have made Al cook this dish every night, sometimes even twice a night, until he was satisfied that he had perfected the technique. He would stand behind Al, watching critically over his shoulder. The ginger was too fine, then not fine enough. The spring onions were cut unevenly. The fish was cooked, but not golden – the heat was too low; the fish was golden but not cooked – the heat was too high. I remember the focus, the concentration, the single-mindedness of those cooking sessions, and it felt as if we were having to eat 5,000 fishes in a month.

Amy Poon is the founder of the Chinese heritage food brand Poon’s London . Rachel returns next week.

The Guardian aims to publish recipes for sustainable fish. Check ratings in your region: UK ; Australia ; US .

With voting complete, election officials will now certify results before the electoral college meets in December

With voting completed in the US presidential election, election officials across the country will now turn to certifying the results before the electoral college meets in December and Congress certifies the vote in January.

Until the 2020 election, few paid attention to certification, which was seen as a bureaucratic way of officializing the results of the election. But after 2020, Donald Trump and allies, who questioned the election results, targeted the certification process as a way of causing confusion. In advance of the presidential election, there were deep concerns that the former president and allies would try and block certification of the election results, starting at the local level.

An émigré player’s artistry sings through a London street, rising over many barriers

The Kurdish Musician

She is swaddled in pink, sky-blue and veiled
in a gold hejab that with every chime
of her santoor dangles its fringe where trailed

Caesar and I both cheated death. Maybe that was why I became so attached to him

To anyone else, Caesar would have seemed an ordinary goldfish, swimming in his orange, bug-eyed way around his tank. To me, though, he was immortal, thanks to one of those family stories that mean so much when you’re a child.

Dad, a Methodist minister in Bradford, was about to leave for a church meeting when he realised that Caesar had propelled himself out of his water and on to the carpet, his orange colouring fading into the 70s brown pattern. Assuming that Caesar had swum to the great aquarium in the sky, my reverend father conducted the traditional fish funeral by chucking him in the toilet, but on contact with the water, the fish began to move.

The Yorkshire-born standups’s surreal take on a working men’s club has bagged him comedy awards and a BBC radio pilot. But even as he dreams of a Mrs Merton-style talkshow, he’s still insistent on keeping things surreal

The last time I saw Frankie Monroe, the impish, slightly grubby proprietor of Rotherham’s premier fictional working men’s club, The Misty Moon, he was in an Edinburgh basement, delighting festivalgoers with tricks, songs and cheeky characters. Unfortunately, we discovered as the show unfolded, the club was also a portal to hell. The night ended with Frankie – white-faced, in a shiny shirt and ludicrous shoulder pads – sucked into the fiery depths.

It hasn’t done him much harm. Tonight, we’re at Manchester’s Fairfield Social Club, and Frankie is hosting a pub quiz with all the swaggering charm that saw his creator, 26-year-old Joe Kent-Walters, named best newcomer at this year’s Edinburgh comedy awards .

Khalife pleads guilty part way through trial at Woolwich crown court but continues to deny other charges

Former soldier Daniel Khalife has pleaded guilty part way through his trial at Woolwich crown court to escaping from HMP Wandsworth in September 2023 but continues to deny all other charges.

More details soon …

Isolated in Brisbane, the Saints released a punk single before the Damned, Sex Pistols and the Clash. As they reform after their singer’s death, they recall their journey from school detention to Top of the Pops

The story of one of the most extraordinary bands in rock history began in the most ordinary of ways, with school kids walking down the street. “It was a Friday or Saturday night, and I was going off to the cinema,” recalls Ivor Hay. “And there was Ed and Chris, and they were going off to a party. They asked if I wanted to come. We’re 15 or 16, and we managed to get a bottle of something. We drank, and we ended up talking and singing. And that’s how we ended up doing things together.”

Ed was Ed Kuepper; Chris was Chris Bailey. And the three of them, kids in Brisbane at the start of the 70s, would become the Saints, the band that kickstarted Australian punk, the band who released their first, thrilling single (I’m) Stranded in September 1976 – before the Damned or the Pistols or the Clash had got anything out – and then arrived in the UK the following year as a fully formed maelstrom of intensity and ambition.