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The USA’s Eric Lu has beaten more than 600 other pianists to win the 19th International Chopin Piano Competition. Held every five years in Warsaw around the anniversary of the Polish composer’s death on 17 October, this is one of several piano tournaments that often launch major careers, along with Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Competition, the Van Cliburn in Texas and the Leeds International. Unlike any of those, however, the Chopin competition requires contestants to perform the music of just one composer. Lu, 27, didn’t exactly need this win. He took first prize at the Leeds International in 2018 and has already released two records on the Warner Classics label. After his

By now, you have probably given up on Sober October. I’ve never done it, mainly because I’ve been sober for 15 years. There’s two things, however, that I’m truly thankful for. The first is that I gave up drinking before Instagram stories became a widespread means of social documentary. The second is that I had been sober for four years by the time the absurd country-wide rehab that is Sober October was established as a charity initiative by Macmillan Cancer Research in 2014. But if I had still been drinking, I would never have thought it might apply to me. In fact, I would have relished the opportunity to loudly

Earlier this year, I wrote here about the arsonist who’d left our neighbourhood looking post-apocalyptic. In the months that followed, the pyromaniac grew ever more reckless. Initially, he’d stuck to torching vehicles on the road, which was bad enough. But then he took it a step further. He set fire to a car on a driveway, which in turn set the house alight. The young family, who were asleep upstairs, escaped with their lives, but their home was destroyed. A collection was started, and we dropped in some cash. The organiser said that in 20 years in the area, he’d never seen things as bad as they were now. He’d

There’s a certain sort of chap who, when he hears you mention football, gets all earnest and starts talking about flat back fours. You try to stop him, attempting to steer the conversation away from tedious tactics and back on to the important stuff, such as the fact that there’s only one team in the top four English divisions whose name, when spelled in capital letters, contains no curves. He’ll look confused, disorientated, maybe even a little bit angry. Either he’ll persist with his talk of formations, or walk away completely. The correct reaction, of course, is to say: ‘Really? That’s brilliant. Let me try to work it out.’ This

I don’t know how many teenagers are given a frying pan for their 18th birthday. Perhaps my friends managed to intuit my food-writing future, despite my party piece back then being an extremely tomato-heavy bolognaise. Twenty-five years on, having somehow survived university halls of residence and flatmates using – the horror – metal utensils in it, that beautifully thick-bottomed frying plan lives at the bottom of an excessively large pile of frying pans, well past its best. But even as the pile threatens to get taller than the cupboard, I can’t bear the idea of throwing it away. I’ve loved and lost too many pans to count. I had a