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The Norwegian footballer Erling Haaland will, upon commencement of his new nine-year contract extension with Manchester City, be paid £1 million a week. On pocketing his first colossal pay cheque (which includes sponsorship income), Haaland will cruise past his rivals in the traditional European leagues. Real Madrid’s Kylian Mbappé is forced to get by on a paltry €45 million a year, Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah on his derisory €18 million, and Ballon d’Or winner Rodri with his piddling £9 million. The Finnish government used to pay its greatest artists an annual stipend Has the world gone insane? One million pounds a week, for kicking a ball around for a couple of

I used to think that one of the few things that men had over women was their lack of manifest vanity. Not that men weren’t vain, but apart from turning their chests into Doritos at the gym or dyeing their greying locks that unnatural shade of black, there were very few ways for them to enact these impulses. That was, until hair transplants. One of the men in my local corner shop was proudly peacocking the follicles sprouting from his forehead As it turns out, hair transplants aren’t actually a new thing. According to my research (Google), modern hair transplant techniques were pioneered in Japan in the 1930s. Despite being

This year I shall have lived in Edinburgh for a quarter of a century. I fell in love with the city on the 23 bus travelling from the New Town to the Old Town. There was so much architecture. Gothic and Georgian, medieval, baronial. So many turrets and finials, tollbooths and towers. I was drunk on the stuff. Add pomp – a Royal Mile, a castle, a palace. Then the libraries, art galleries, museums. And that’s before you get to bookshops and Edinburgh’s proud moniker, the first Unesco City of Literature. What other city has a railway station (Waverley) named after a novel or a high street (Princes Street) with