An Arizona jewellery designer bet the ranch on some unusual purple minerals from South Africa

A few years back, Arizona jewellery designers Randy and Janie Polk were struggling to make ends meet. Randy traded gemstones with fellow hustlers in smoky hotel rooms. He liked the bright stuff, the ‘gumdrop colours’, he tells Anthea Disney for the Observer Magazine of 6 June 1982.

When ‘some young hustlers brought him a bag full of purple rock’ from South Africa, Randy ‘didn’t know what it was. I just thought it was pretty, like grape juice,’ he reminisces. ‘Everything I made in purple or lavender sold quickly, so I was interested.’

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If the gentrification of Notting Hill brings with it lovely Dorian, then Miquita Oliver and her mum Andi won’t hear a word against it

Dorian, 105-107 Talbot Road, London W11 2AT (020 3089 9556; dorianrestaurant.com ). Small plates £19-£65; large plates £37-£145; desserts £8.50-£12; wine from £50

I’m going to tell you a story. This is a story about that which shall not be named. A word that is rarely dissected or discussed in polite society. Yes, occasionally it’s muttered casually – between close friends, in an Islington townhouse. You may even hear it whispered along the hallowed streets of London’s Broadway Market – if you’re lucky. But rarely do we take this beast apart. Not often is the brute hung, cut along its middle, for us to follow the grain of its connective tissues.

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Who would steal 22 tonnes of posh cheese, or £37,000 of smoked salmon? A rise in fraudulent orders for luxury foodstuffs has rattled the UK industry, leaving artisan producers with unpaid bills and a truckload of questions…

One day in October 2024, Chris Swales, 54, a smoked-salmon producer with a confident demeanour and a stubbled jaw, stood at the gates of an industrial estate in east London staking out the units. There were teenagers loitering about, knackered cars, XL Bullies; everyone seemed to have more than one phone. It didn’t seem like the sort of place where nine pallets of frozen fish would be delivered, but – he checked the address he had noted down from the courier – this was the place.

A couple of months earlier, Swales couldn’t have imagined that he’d be sniffing around Walthamstow on the hunt for £37,000 in missing produce, yet here he was. In August, he’d received an email – subject: “Collaboration” – from a man named Patrick Moulin, who claimed to be the buyer for Match, a French supermarket. Moulin was looking for an ongoing supplier of smoked salmon and hoped that Swales’s company, the Chapel & Swan Smokehouse in Exning, Suffolk, would provide it.

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The vehicles are not only too big and dangerous, they create a disproportionate amount of pollution that ends up in the ocean

The problem with SUVs (and EVs, which are also heavy vehicles) goes way further than your leader indicates (“ SUVs are too big and too dangerous – their drivers should be made to pay ”).

Tyre and, to a lesser extent, brake degradation is related to the weight of the vehicle: not in a linear way, but to the square of the weight, so doubling the weight increases wear and tear four times, other things being equal. Tyres are the main source of land-based microplastics entering our oceans, where they absorb and concentrate forever chemicals discharged by our environmentally reckless water and pharmaceutical industries.

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It’s deeply human to seek approval and recognition from a parent, even when we are fully grown

The question I’m a man in my late 50s. My parents were teenagers when I was born. They married so I wouldn’t be illegitimate, it was the 1960s. My parents divorced. My mum and stepdad moved up north, my father remarried and stayed down south.

My father and his wife have three children, now in their 40s. My stepdad killed himself when I was in my early 20s, but I’ve come to realise he was much more of a parent to me than my actual father.

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After years in a private sitting room, an early version of the masterpiece is expected to fetch €500,000

Auguste Rodin’s sensual portrayal of tragic lovers caught in an embrace before being killed by a jealous husband is one of the world’s most recognised works of art.

The French artist had the idea for The Kiss ( Le Baiser ) in 1882, and the larger-than-lifesize marble artwork emerged a decade later. By then, Rodin was the most influential international sculptor of the age.

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Jon Batiste joins Mika for a third series of Claudia Winkleman’s music competition. Plus: Bruce Parry’s last adventure. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, Channel 4

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A glass of Port, Madeira or Marsala is just the thing to elevate chocolate and Simnel cake

Vinte Vinte Chocolate and Port Tasting Box, Douro, Portugal NV (from £22, amazon.co.uk ; virginwines.co.uk ; tanners-wines.co.uk ) For those of us who treat Easter as a kind of secular spring-Christmas, featuring similarly liberal doses of chocolate and booze, recent movements in the trades have conspired to make next weekend more expensive than ever. Thanks to a run of poor harvests in west Africa, cocoa prices have been on the rise for years now, but things have become particularly acute this year: according to a recent story in the Guardian , prices of popular Easter eggs are up by as much as 50% on last year, yet many have simultaneously shrunk in size. The wine trade, meanwhile, has been enduring its own battle, with duty hikes and the cost of a new environmental levy among other factors pushing prices up. All of which makes port producer Fladgate’s collaboration with Portuguese chocolate brand Vinte Vinte feels like good value: a collection of four 5cl bottles of Taylor’s and Fonseca Port, with four 25g bars of chocolate (£22). A grown-up Easter gift that doubles as an introduction to the joys of wine-and-food matching.

Pellegrino Marsala Superiore Dolce, Marsala, Sicily, Italy NV (£12.50, Morrisons ) Port has the necessary robustness, depth of flavour and plenty of sugar to match chocolate’s sweetly assertive mouth-coating intensity. But the choice of which port does depend on which kind of chocolate: as the Vinte Vinte kit suggests, the darker-coloured, more darkly fruited LBV and reserve styles (such as the exuberant black forest gateau flavours of Fonseca Bin 27 included in the kit, or the vividly fruity Niepoort Ruby Dum Port NV; £19.50, reservewines.co.uk ) are better suited to dark chocolate; more mellow, cask-aged Tawny Ports (such as the kit’s 10 Year Old Taylor’s or the gorgeously suave multilayered fruit-and-nuts of Graham’s 10 Year Old Tawny; £20, Waitrose) are better saved up for milk chocolate. Port doesn’t have the monopoly on chocolate combos however. The demerara-and-dates of Pellegrino’s Sicilian fortified wine, marsala can easily sub for tawny, while the luscious pure sweet mulberry of a sweet fortified grenache from Roussillon, such as Mas Amiel Maury 2022 (£20.79, 50cl, adnams.co.uk ) can stand in for darker ports.

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As Donald Trump threatens to take over the territory, film claims its cryolite mine was plundered by Denmark

For two weeks in Denmark the subject of the documentary was “bigger than Trump”, says producer Michael Bévort. The broadcast of Grønlands hvide guld (Greenland’s white gold), a 55-minute film about the Danish exploitation over several decades of a cryolite mine in southern Greenland and the vast sums of money it generated, made waves in February in both Greenland and its former colonial ruler, Denmark. But the reaction between the two could not have been more polarised.

In Greenland, which remains part of the Danish kingdom, with Denmark still controlling its foreign and defence policies, there were feelings of anger and deep sadness. The country was in the middle of an election being watched by the world thanks to Donald Trump’s threats to take control of the Arctic island. According to a poll for Greenlandic newspaper Sermitsiaq , more than a third of voters said the documentary would influence their vote.

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