I sat there in my pyjamas, headset against my ear, and knew I was not doing the right thing

I’m not psychic. During the six months I spent working as a telephone psychic, my only supernatural gift was the ability to sound fascinated by a stranger’s love life at 2.17am. Yet for hundreds of billable hours, I sat on my living room floor wearing plaid pyjamas and a telemarketing headset, charging callers by the minute for insights into their lives. Perhaps this made me a con artist, but I wasn’t a dangerous one.

When it started, I’d recently quit my job as an editor at a publishing company to write a novel while doing telemarketing shifts from my kitchen table. Instead of knocking off a bestseller, I found myself cold-calling strangers about energy bills while gripped by writer’s block and an inconvenient yearning to have a baby.

This all-day Essex cafe next to a garden centre is a scone-fuelled delight

A tipoff to try the Tin Roof Cafe in Maldon came with prior warning: I wouldn’t get a table easily as this all-day spot serving brunch, lunches and sweet stuff from the in-house bakery is constant, scone-fuelled bedlam. Red brick walls, greenery throughout, alfresco spaces, allotments growing fresh veg and herbs. Capacious, family-run, dog-welcoming, pocket-friendly. There’s bubble and squeak with hand-cut ham, Korean-style chicken burgers and a vegan burger called, rather brilliantly, “Peter Egan” after, I’m guessing, the animal-loving actor who played Paul in Ever Decreasing Circles.

Could this place be any more adorable? No, but still, brace yourself. “It’s one in, one out,” I was told. “There’s a seated holding pen at the front where you wait for a table. Stand your ground in there. There’s loads of sharp-elbowed garden-centre folk. I think they’re there for the Basque cheesecake.” Ah, yes, the equally vast Claremont garden centre, just a few steps away. Cake, as we all know, is catnip to gardeners. Sends them daft. Come for 20 litres of alkaline topsoil and a terracotta trough, stay for the seasonal pavlova and thick wodges of billionaire’s shortbread. That’s millionaire’s shortbread with an extra layer of caramel decadence. Clearly real billionaires would never eat this shortbread, as they’re all on longevity hunts fuelled by OMAD (one meal a day), that meal being a posh spin on Trill budgie food.

In the search for stability, some western nations are turning to a country that many in Washington see as an existential threat

If geopolitics relies at least in part on bonhomie between global leaders, China made an unexpected play for Ireland’s good graces when the taoiseach visited Beijing this month. Meeting Ireland’s leader, Micheál Martin, in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China’s president, Xi Jinping, said a favourite book of his as a teenager was The Gadfly, by the Irish author Ethel Voynich, a novel set in the revolutionary fervour of Italy in the 1840s.

“It was unusual that we ended up discussing The Gadfly and its impact on both of us but there you are,” Martin told reporters in Beijing.

It was life-affirming to meet the residents of Rainbow Way in Minehead. But so much still stands in the way of Labour’s vision for social housing

I met Carole Guscott, a retired former carer, on a clear winter’s morning in the Somerset town of Minehead. She was walking her whippet, Gracie, on the way back to her new flat, past the local Premier Inn and on to a cul de sac called Rainbow Way. “I knew as soon as I saw it,” she told me. “I just thought: ‘I can make this place my home.’”

Up until recently, she was living in a private rented place near the centre of town and paying £780 a month in rent. For four years she had known that Rainbow Way was being built. She also knew that its houses and flats were an example of something that is vanishingly rare in post-Thatcher Britain: new council housing, which meant security for the people chosen to be the tenants but also intense competition for places.

As sleep hygiene becomes received wisdom, growing numbers turning to one-to-one consultants for support

Before he sought out an adult sleep coach, Thorsten had spent countless hours trawling online advice about sleep.

“I devoured advice and implemented it all,” he said. “From the moment I got out of bed, virtually everything I did was tailored towards getting a good night’s sleep the following night.”

Amid the tumult of the WEF in Davos this week, some investors are leading the way by ditching US government bonds

There is a way to file for divorce from Donald Trump and Europe needs to grab the opportunity.

To the public it will look as if nothing has changed. But behind the scenes the EU and the UK could close the joint bank account and cut up the credit cards, or at least set in motion a form of financial separation that limits the power of a controlling former partner.

Pair testify that Pretti did not hold weapon and was trying to help woman federal agents had shoved to the ground

Two witnesses to the killing of Alex Pretti have said in sworn testimony that the 37-year-old intensive care nurse was not brandishing a weapon when he approached federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday, contradicting a claim made by Trump administration officials as they sought to cast the shooting of a prone man as an act of self-defense.

Their accounts came in sworn affidavits that were filed in federal court in Minnesota late Saturday, just hours after Pretti’s killing, as part of a lawsuit brought by the ACLU on behalf of Minneapolis protesters against Kristi Noem and other homeland security officials directing the immigration crackdown in the city.

Home secretary is chair of party’s NEC, which will decide if Greater Manchester mayor can seek return to parliament

The Labour party must do all it can to avoid a “psychodrama” over Andy Burnham’s possible return to parliament, Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, has warned.

Mahmood is chair of Labour’s national executive committee (NEC), which was due to meet later on Sunday to decide whether Burnham should be allowed to seek selection for the Gorton and Denton byelection, which would involve him giving up his Greater Manchester mayoralty.

After anger at claim alliance’s troops ‘stayed off frontlines’, US president says British forces are ‘great and very brave’

Donald Trump has said UK soldiers who fought in Afghanistan were “among the greatest of all warriors” after previously drawing criticism for his claims that Nato troops stayed away from the frontlines during the conflict.

In a post on social media on Saturday, the US president said: “The great and very brave soldiers of the United Kingdom will always be with the United States of America.

Yellow warnings for heavy rain remain in place across parts of Northern Ireland, Scotland and south-west England and Wales

Downpours and high winds are likely to continue after Storm Ingrid wreaked havoc in the south-west and washed away part of a historic pier in Devon, the Met Office said on Saturday.

It has been a wet weekend for many, with yellow weather warnings for heavy rain in place across parts of Northern Ireland, Scotland and south-west England and Wales.