I used to remove myself from experiences in favour of chasing matches. Now I’m fulfilled by the company of real people

Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. For a while I was swiping so much I was barely thinking. Dating apps had hijacked my fingers, brain and evenings. I’d swipe left, mindlessly and without even looking, under the table at group dinners or during TV ad breaks. I’d fanatically check my new matches at the end of each day. “This is modern dating,” I’d tell myself. “It’s a job. I have to keep on going. This is the key to my happy ending.”

For months, this was my normality. But unsurprisingly, the lifelong romance I was looking for never materialised. As I sat on my sofa on yet another Sunday night ready to swipe until I ran out of steam, I decided I’d finally had enough. Even if my screen was flooded with likes or messages, my forays into dating app culture had rarely ended with in-person dates. I’d spend hours agonising over a single response – I needed to be funny, cool and captivating but not give too much away. But why was I so desperate to impress a distant stranger trapped behind a screen? What was I doing all the monotonous swiping for? I decided I needed to go cold turkey and figure out why I had been sucked in so completely.

Anya Ryan is a freelance journalist

The actor argues that the law has changed elsewhere; now it’s time for the UK to show compassion

I’ve been campaigning and raising money for assisted dying for decades, but now we have an icon like Esther Rantzen talking about it, suddenly the game has changed. My mother died in 1964 and some time after that I decided to join the Euthanasia Society, which is now called Dignity in Dying. When I looked after my mother-in-law, she was begging to get off the planet but nobody would help her. After that there was my husband Eddie [Kulukundis, theatre and sports philanthropist] who had dementia. He was such a gentle man, a pleasure to look after for 14 years. But 18 months before he met his maker, he said in an aggressive way, which was quite unusual for Eddie, “I just want to die.”

I cared for my two sisters, both of whom lived well until they were 94. But the last five weeks of my sister Anne’s life was horrendous because of how much agony she was in. Every few minutes she was saying, “Please help me. Why can’t they help me to go now? I’m not going to get any better. I have no future. I will never move again. Please.”

University Hospitals Sussex admits errors, failures and surgeon disagreements in case of Ken Valder

A troubled NHS trust has apologised to the family of a man who died after a series of delays led to him waiting four times longer for an operation than a national cancer target.

Before he died in November 2022, Ken Valder, 66, a former tax inspector and voluntary steward at Brighton & Hove Albion football club, complained of “delays after delay” to his treatment for oesophageal cancer.

Britain may be chilly, but from Greece to India, people are dying due to record temperatures. The death toll will grow without urgent action

While Britons don jumpers and complain about the unseasonable cold, much of the world has been reeling due to excessive temperatures. India has been in the grip of its longest heatwave in recorded history, with thermometers hitting 50C in some places. Greece closed the Acropolis in the afternoon last week as temperatures hit 43C; never has it seen a heatwave so early in the year. Soaring temperatures in the Sahel and western Africa saw mortuaries in Mali reportedly running short of space this spring , while swathes of Asia suffered in May .

Mexico and the south-west of the US have also endured blistering conditions; it was particularly shocking to hear Donald Trump pledge again to “drill, baby, drill” at a rally that saw supporters taken to hospital with heat exhaustion. These bouts of extreme weather are increasing as the climate crisis worsens . Although the El Niño weather pattern contributed to heatwaves over the last 12 months, they are becoming more frequent, extreme and prolonged thanks to global heating. By 2040, almost half the world’s inhabitants are likely to experience major heatwaves , 12 times more than the historic average.

Survey finds more people blame Brexit than anything else for supply problems

Almost half of adults in the UK have struggled to get medicine they have been prescribed – and more people blame Brexit than anything else for the situation, research shows.

Forty-nine per cent of people said they had had trouble getting a prescription dispensed over the past two years, the period during which supply problems have increased sharply.

One in 12 people (8%) have gone without a medication altogether because it was impossible to obtain.

Thirty-one per cent found the drug they needed was out of stock at their pharmacy.

Twenty-three per cent of pharmacies did not have enough of the medication available.

With nearly 60% of NHS cataract operations outsourced, critics say it is sapping funding for more serious conditions

Hundreds of thousands more NHS patients a year are having cataracts removed in England in a boom driven by private clinics – but funded by taxpayers.

Doctors say the trend, which now means nearly 60% of NHS cataract operations are outsourced to private providers – up from 24% five years ago – is piling pressure on already stretched NHS finances and sapping the funds needed for more serious conditions that can lead to blindness.

Lonely people are more likely to get heart disease, strokes, anxiety, depression, dementia … Add it all up, and they’re 26% more likely to die early. How do you avoid joining the unhappy millions?

I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about a lonely old age. Closing in on my 61st birthday, eight years into a very happy marriage, I’ve got a wife, two teenage stepkids, an older daughter by an ex, a grandson and four siblings. Most of them at least tolerate me; a few even tell me that they love me. But maybe I’m taking too much for granted. People die, drift apart, fall out – and anyone who knows me will tell you that I can be very irritating.

Fifteen or 20 years from now it’s not inconceivable that none of my family will want to have much to do with me.

Researchers say transcranial direct-current stimulation can reduce ‘love trauma syndrome’

Breaking up, as the Neil Sedaka hit goes, is hard to do. The emotional pain of a romantic split can be so severe it has its own clinical name – love trauma syndrome, or LTS.

But help could be at hand for those seeking to mend a broken heart. Research shows wearing a £400 headset for just a few minutes a day may ease the misery, negativity and depression that can accompany a failed relationship.

Her mother was furious at having no control over the end of her life. Now the actor is channelling that anger into getting the law changed

It was during the process of my mother [actor Diana Rigg] dying of terminal lung cancer that her frustrations of having no agency became clear. My husband, Guy [Garvey], had recorded tapes of his father speaking before he died and it felt like the natural thing to do with Mama. She and Guy talked about life, love and her career. Then there were recordings about the right to die. At this stage she was in the hospital, when it was the end. By this point she was an angry woman.

When the grief of her death had subsided enough that I was able to listen to the recordings, I realised I had an urgent mission. I owed her this. To share her statements on assisted dying. Ma had seen buddies go slowly and had nursed my dad’s mum and had always said, “Will you pull the plug if it gets too bad? Put the pillow over my face?” When it came down to it, I had to say to her, “I’ll do everything in my power but I’ve got a three-year-old son. I can’t go to the clink because I’m suffocating my mother. I’ll do anything and everything. But not that.” Dignitas would have been an option but was not possible as it was Covid and a bureaucratic nightmare.