Joe Pinner

Students can reduce everyday costs by registering with UNiDAYS, Student Beans and TOTUM and verifying their student status. Discounts cover food and essentials, restaurants, technology and subscriptions, gyms, travel and fashion, including savings from Boots, Marks & Spencer, Amazon Prime, Adobe, National Express, rail travel, ASOS and JD Sports. The guidance also recommends checking university-provided software and gym access, using student identification, and asking independent retailers whether an unadvertised discount is available.

Guardian readers recommend the television finales that move them most, highlighting joyful and poignant endings from Friday Night Dinner, Superstore, Heated Rivalry, The Good Place, Scrubs, Ghosts, Sleepers, M*A*S*H, Six Feet Under and Schitt’s Creek. Their choices emphasize friendship, family, queer representation, personal growth, reconciliation and satisfying character resolutions, while several finales are made more emotional by themes of mortality, farewell and the later death of actor Paul Ritter.

Wildfires in France and Spain have forced about 375,000 residents and tourists to evacuate, including nearly 260,000 people in France. Tourists in and around Lacanau Océan, Arcachon and Bordeaux describe black smoke, falling ash, darkened skies, cancelled transport and emergency evacuations. Authorities are fighting a major blaze near Bordeaux as another heatwave, with temperatures potentially reaching 40C, threatens to worsen conditions. Evacuations have severely disrupted the local tourism industry, while eyewitnesses link the increasing frequency and intensity of fires to climate change.

Joe Pinner explains how abandoning detailed itineraries, online reviews and navigation apps transformed his holidays. During a trip to Barcelona, he explored the Gothic Quarter and Eixample without Google Maps, Tripadvisor or TikTok, allowing curiosity and chance to guide him. Although some cafés and attractions were disappointing, discovering places such as Bar Cantonada and Flassaders made the experience more personal, improved his confidence in making decisions and restored the spontaneity and joy of travel.

Simon Steggall recalls how Dory, his 10kg Flemish Giant rabbit, alerted his then wife when he was slipping into a diabetic coma in 2004. Dory’s frantic jumping and licking prompted an emergency call that Steggall credits with saving his life. The rabbit later attracted media attention and became the Rabbit Welfare Association’s first honorary animal member before dying unexpectedly at two years old.