The former professional footballer has struggled with his mental health for most of his life. But it took five suicide attempts for him to admit how badly he wanted to end it. He talks about how he turned the corner – and his hopes for his new post with the charity Mind

‘How are you?” I ask Clarke Carlisle. Usually when you meet people it’s a nicety. Not with Carlisle. He smiles ecstatically. “I’m incredibly well, thank you. Yeah, really, really good,” says the former footballer and incoming chair of the mental health charity Mind. “I have been consistently well – not just stable, but well – for three or four years now.”

Few people understand what it is to be mentally unwell quite like Carlisle does. And few understand what recovery means like he does. “It doesn’t happen by accident. Once you get stable that’s not the end of the journey. And that seems to be the MO of our society these days. You do something, you go into hospital and they patch you up, then send you on your way. And that’s the same with mental health. You might get some pills, have a counselling session, you might have a hug and a chat with someone, and they think that’s the end of the journey. And it’s not.”

Concerns about feeling pressure to have caesarean section, or paying for hotel in Exeter after hospital in Barnstaple suspends birthing services

For mother-to-be Harriet Knight, the suspension of maternity services at one of England’s most remote hospitals means having to face horribly stark choices.

“The next closest maternity unit is a full two hours away and we have a family history of labour taking under two hours from start to finish,” said Knight.

How does it feel to be locked into a venue notorious for its unpadded seating to experience a full-throttle Ring cycle and more? Our critic found out at the 150th anniversary of the mighty Bayreuth festival

Liszt and Bruckner were there from the start. Debussy, Mahler and Puccini all subsequently made the journey. So did writers from Virginia Woolf and Thomas Mann to WEB Du Bois, not to mention choreographer Sergei Diaghilev, anarchist Emma Goldman, British fascist Diana Mosley (wife of Oswald) and – most notoriously and fanatically – Adolf Hitler.

Culturally and politically, Germany’s Bayreuth festival doesn’t so much have baggage as its own industrial-scale luggage hangar. But it’s also prized as the ultimate place to hear Richard Wagner’s operas. One hundred and fifty years after the composer launched the festival with the premiere of his epic Ring cycle, tickets for this summer’s edition sold out within 90 minutes. No mean feat for a theatre with famously uncomfortable seats, no air conditioning and only one man’s music on the menu. The shortest work lasts two-and-a-half hours without a break.

Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
This prequel to the TV series has one joust after another, spectacular stagecraft and plenty of modern resonance

During the RSC’s 65 years, numerous Lears have lost their minds and frequent Caesars been slaughtered by their courts. Now, though, a tyrant new to its stages faces both fates. He is King Aerys II Targaryen, ancestor of one warring bloodline in Game of Thrones, the dramatisation of George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series of fantasy novels that helped TV streamers’ rise to global domination during eight HBO seasons from 2011 to 2019.

Some may balk at an institution named for England’s greatest dramatist staging an American drama franchise. There is, though, a compelling economic imperative: rising costs due to current wars (a frequent problem for Martin’s ancient oligarchs too) and Covid-era debts now exacerbated by paying back government loans means that the RSC could use another big commercial transfer – as its musical Matilda may not be immortal.

After being on the brink of divorce, Antonia and Rob have experienced a radical revival of their sex life

• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously

The perfect storm of work stress, menopause and raising kids meant our sex life slowly slipped out of view

Whitehall wants to triple their number in the UK. Yet in Slough, I saw the impact they’re having on communities

Amid headlines about the UK’s drought, Europe’s wildfires and impossible global temperatures, it was 28C when I arrived in Slough last Monday. I was there to look around Slough Trading Estate, a place that might once have conjured up images of the TV comedy The Office, many of whose laughs came at the expense of this overgrown patch of suburbia, 20-odd miles west of London.

But these days, this area of town – an incongruous mixture of old-school businesses such as Mr Clutch and Angling Direct, and vast, metal-clad leviathans that look like something pulled from JG Ballard – has become a byword for the constant expansion of datacentres, those hulking symbols of the vast computing power that big tech now requires, not least because of the ever-more complex workings of artificial intelligence.

Exclusive: Hamish Falconer wants ‘sense of renewed pace’ in post-Brexit talks while staying within Labour’s red lines

• ‘I was on my honeymoon!’: Hamish Falconer’s surprise call-up to Burnham’s cabinet

The UK will move faster and be more ambitious on achieving closer ties with Europe under Andy Burnham’s government, his new chief post-Brexit negotiator has said.

Hamish Falconer, the new cabinet minister in charge of the EU reset talks, said there was “room to be ambitious” within Labour’s red lines on Europe, which exclude reopening discussions on the single market and customs union, and he would look at the “art of the possible”.

Israeli PM says IDF will not withdraw until Hamas is disarmed and rebukes US pressure to end wars without his country’s buy-in

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has rejected a US-backed 15-point peace plan for Gaza in a rare public break with Donald Trump.

In a statement on Sunday, Netanyahu said that he was confronting a “wave of rumours about Israeli weakness and Israeli withdrawals on all fronts” and rebuked US pressure to end wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran without Israel’s buy-in.

Authorities say application to stay was made too late, as UK officials say Sweden takes ‘stricter approach’ than other EU countries

A 78-year-old British widow who has lived in Sweden for 21 years is fighting deportation from the country after authorities told her a post-Brexit application to stay had been submitted too late.

Her case is the latest of 2,500 British people ordered to leave the country after Brexit in what campaigners and the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) have said is an inexplicably hardline approach taken by the Swedish authorities. It comes two years after Sweden threatened to deport a British woman with dementia in a care home shortly before she died.

Kinahan built boxing empire while in exile in Dubai but now faces trial in Dublin charged with directing organised crime

A decade after escaping assassination and fleeing into exile, Daniel Kinahan is back in Ireland – but it is not the homecoming he wanted.

The alleged leader of the Kinahan organised crime group was extradited from Dubai in an Irish government jet on Sunday and met by a huge security operation in Dublin, marking the end of a global game of cat and mouse with European, US and Gulf authorities.