Fresh Glasgow subway strike dates clash with TRNSMT festival
Unite said more than 100 workers will go on strike on Friday 11 July, Saturday 12 July and Sunday 13 July.More than 50,000 music fans will attend TRNSMT - which is being held half a mile from the St Enoch subway station - on each of the strike days.Headliners this year include Snow Patrol, Biffy Clyro and 50 Cent.
The union's general secretary Sharon Graham said: "Unite's members will no longer accept intolerable working conditions. "SPT has had years to resolve the problem and has failed to do so. Our members have said enough is enough. "We will support them all the way in their fight for better jobs, pay and conditions."The union has had a continuous overtime ban in place since 13 June and an interim offer by SPT was "overwhelmingly rejected" by its members.BBC Scotland News has asked SPT for comment.The operator previously said it remained "committed to seeking a resolution through positive ongoing negotiations".A social media post during last week said that season ticket holders affected by the strikes will receive one day of pay-as-you-go credit on their smartcard per affected day.Last month's strikes coincide with three major gigs at Bellahouston Park, which concert goers often reach via walking from the subway station at Ibrox.Singer-songwriter Sting headlined at the park on Wednesday, while rock bands Simple Minds and Stereophonics took to the stage on Friday and Saturday.
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The Sun
34 minutes ago
- The Sun
I've dated Love Island hunks & soap stars – but the WAG life is a game changer, says Laura Anderson
LOVE Island star Laura Anderson has revealed she loves being a WAG – as she fancies her footballer boyfriend even more when he's on the pitch. The Scots influencer, 36, from Stirling, has been waiting to find her soulmate after finishing runner-up on the 2018 series of the hit dating series with Paul Knops. 6 6 6 She later split up with the reality star and dated Another Level's Dane Bowers, 45, and Hollyoaks actor Gary Lucy - with whom she had daughter Bonnie - before meeting her Dundee defender beau Clark Robertson, 31. The ex-air hostess admits she used to hate watching football - but is now learning the rules so she can fawn over her fella. Laura said: 'I guess I'm a WAG now. I actually really like football. I didn't really like it before. To be honest, it just reminded me of my dad hogging the remote when we were young and I never got to watch what I wanted to watch. 'But now I like going to the games. I think he looks very sexy actually because he's quite bossy on the pitch and he's not like that day-to-day. He's such a relaxed, chilled out guy. 'So on the pitch he's always pointing and I'm like 'what the hell what's going on?'' Clark even reckons that Bonnie, who turns two in September, could be the next in line for soccer stardom. Laura added: 'Clark did say Bonnie's got a good left foot and she's actually really good at football already. 'I think I'm going to take credit for it because I started her out on the ball before I met Clark, but I think he might be trying to take credit that she's somehow following in his footsteps.' Single mum Laura, who split from Lucy during her pregnancy, quit her radio presenting gig on Capital Scotland's Breakfast Show in February. She walked away after less than a year due to suffering burnout from juggling super early rises for work while looking after Bonnie. Love Island's Laura Anderson gives tour of her HUGE new mansion with en-suite rooms and garden so big it could be a park The blonde bombshell would love to return to the airwaves one day - but until then she wants to fit everything around watching her daughter grow. Laura said: 'She is wild. It was her first day at nursery last week and I dropped her off and cried my eyes out. 'She's a sassy little thing but a mummy's girl at heart. There's so much to learn with being a mum and it's ever-changing as they grow. There's a new milestone each week. 'I need to keep up with her and meet those needs and I just want to do the best I can. There's definitely more pressure doing it alone as all the responsibility is on me. 'Sometimes I think that maybe if I wasn't doing it alone, I wouldn't be as good a mum. So I have to take it as a blessing because I do feel quite proud of myself that she's doing so well and she's so happy.' She added: 'I just fit my work around Bonnie now. There's jobs I have to knock back and I'd love to be going to London and going to these events all the time 'But it's just not worth it. I left Capital because I couldn't really be the energetic mum I wanted to be. I had to make a tough decision but I don't regret choosing my daughter over any work opportunities because they're only young once. 'I like doing brand deals and my Instagram and stuff like that because it is so flexible and I can work from home or anywhere else. 6 'I did actually love doing radio so it would be great if I could have a wee weekend show on Heart - as you get older you go from Capital to Heart apparently. 'Maybe even when Bonnie goes to school I could be back on. Right now it's just not working to get up at 4.30am five times a week.' One of the biggest changes in Laura's life since becoming a mum is the type of following she has. With 1.5million on Instagram alone, people love following her life and finding out what she's up to. Fellow mums often reach out to pay her lovely compliments and she admits it's a relief to be told she's doing a good job. She said: 'There's parts of being a mum that's relatable and I definitely feel it's a nice little community where other mums help me and then I help them back. 'You get a lot of comfort from realising you're not the only one going through things. I've had a lot of private messages from other mums telling me how much they love watching me and Bonnie and that they want to be friends with us. 'Like when I took Bonnie on holiday myself when she was young, you get other mums saying they never thought they could do it and that it helped them realise they could. 'It's little things like that that make me feel good as I see that it's the right decision for me to share if it's making someone else feel better.'
Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
British underdog uses journaling as he tries to write own Wimbledon fairytale
It is likely to be the biggest day of Oliver Tarvet 's life so far, as the lowest-ranked player in the entire Wimbledon singles draw prepares to face defending champion Carlos Alcaraz in his second-round match. Yet while many would quake at the thought of taking on the Spaniard in front of a television audience of millions, the 21-year-old will be finding focus in an unlikely activity: journaling. The British underdog even takes his notepad onto court with him. Tarvet, the world No 733, will take on world No 2 on Wednesday, but the day before the match he told journalists he was 'quietly confident I can win against anyone, Alcaraz isn't an exception to that'. He added that his pre-match routine involved waking up 'pretty early', eating soon after and listening to music to 'get into the right headspace', before 'journaling', which involves writing down thoughts, feelings and experience on paper, often as an aid to self-reflection, mental well-being and focus. 'A big thing for me, I like to journal,' he said. 'It's just a thing that I enjoy doing, you know, you can maybe see on the court.' He revealed his journal's pages 'focus on what makes me good and gives me success'. Some who practice journaling fill their notebooks with 'affirmations' – positive statements about themselves and the writer's life in an effort to reinforce their own positive beliefs. When asked by The Telegraph if he wrote affirmations in his notepad, Tarvet said: 'Yeah, it's just little triggers that keep me in the right headspace and keep me focussed, and that's given me a lot of success, but not even just matches, before and after practice. 'If there's a feeling that I like, or a thought that I like – I'll write it down so I have it on paper and that's given me a lot of comfort. 'And you know, especially when you're playing in big crowds it's important to not let the moment get too big or lose your focus and it just keeps me grounded.' The St Albans-born player cut through Leandro Riedi on an outer court match in three-straight sets on Monday, despite the Swiss player being ranked significantly higher – at 503. His surprise victory prompted questions about how much the little-known player would be able to take back in winnings. As per National Collegiate Athletic Association regulations, the University of San Diego college student is eligible to claim only $10,000 (£7,300) 'profit' a year from his winnings after expenses. The prize for reaching the second round of the championships is £99,000. It is likely that Alcaraz's team will have spent much of Tuesday frantically looking for videos of the British player to analyse. Yet, as this is his maiden Grand Slam and footage of his college matches may be hard to find, this is likely to be no easy feat. In a press conference on Monday, Alcaraz, 22, suggested he had not heard of Tarvet before the tournament, telling journalists: 'Well, first of all, I just heard his name when he qualified to the main draw.' However, while some fans may see Wednesday's match as a foregone conclusion, the Spaniard appeared to be wary of underestimating his British opponent. 'I saw… great tennis on grass, to be honest,' he said. 'I have to be ready.' Tarvet is not the first young athlete to praise the benefits of journaling, with gymnast Simone Biles and sprinter Zharnel Hughes among others who have spoken publicly about it. On Tuesday afternoon, Tarvet was seen being directed to Court 18 – a practice court in the Wimbledon grounds – after appearing to ask for directions. Wearing his University of San Diego shorts, the player was later seen carrying a pair of black headphones – no doubt to help him find the best headspace in the final 24 hours ahead of the match.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
‘I have a lot of sympathy for Elon Musk': Succession creator Jesse Armstrong on his tech bros AI satire Mountainhead
When he gets to his London office on the morning this piece is published, Jesse Armstrong will read it in print, or not at all. Though the building has wifi, he doesn't use it. 'If you're a procrastinator, which most writers are, it's just a killer.' Online rabbit holes swallow whole days. 'In the end, it's better to be left with the inadequacies of your thoughts.' He gives himself a mock pep talk. ''It's just you and me now, brain.'' Today, the showrunner of Succession and co-creator of Peep Show is back at home, in walking distance of his workspace. He could be any London dad: 54, salt-and-pepper beard, summer striped T-shirt. But staying offline could feel like a statement too, given Armstrong is also the writer-director of Mountainhead, a film about tech bros. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Open AI's Sam Altman, guru financiers Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen: all these and more are mixed up in the movie's characters, sharing a comic hang in a ski mansion. Outside, an AI launched by one of the group has sparked global chaos. Inside, there is snippy friction about the intra-billionaire pecking order. Mountainhead feels like a pulled-back curtain. But Armstrong also resisted another rabbit hole: spending time in Silicon Valley for research. He tried that kind of thing before. Contrary to rumour, Succession never did involve backdoor chats with the children of Rupert Murdoch. Once the show became a phenomenon, though, he did meet with masters of finance and corporate media, picking their brains for insights at luxe New York restaurants. 'And they'd be charismatic, and namedrop the 20 most famous people in the world, and I'd feel this buzz of excitement by association. Then later I'd look at my notes, and what they'd actually said read like complete inane bullshit. 'Make the move!' 'Be the balls!'' So Armstrong returned to his office and, more generally, his kind. 'I'm a writer,' he says, 'and a writer type. And I'm happy with other writer types.' In America, when Succession exploded, you could sense an assumption the mind behind it must be an English Aaron Sorkin: a slick character as glamorous as the world he wrote about. Instead, here was the dry figure who compares making Mountainhead to an early job at budget supermarket Kwik Save. (Both, he says, boiled down to managing workload.) Rather than stalk Sam Altman, he read biographies and hoovered up podcasts. Amid the oligarchs' tales of favourite Roman emperors, he kept finding a common thread: a wilful positivity about their own effect on the world. 'And it must be delightful to really believe, 'You know what? It's going to be fine. AI's going to cure cancer, and don't worry about burning up the planet powering the AI to do it, because we'll just fix that too.'' Part of the trick, he says, is perspective. At a certain level, money and power give life the feel of an eternal view from a private plane. 'Whereas reality is standing in the road, dodging cars, thinking 'Oh God! This is fucking terrifying!'' Success and Succession have not made Armstrong an optimist. But they did give him the professional heft to direct Mountainhead as well as write it, and to do so at unprecedented pace. Film and TV move achingly slowly; it was last November that he decided he wanted to make a movie about the junction of AI, crypto and libertarian politics. By May, he was preparing for it to come out. He says now he wanted Mountainhead to be 'a bobsleigh run. Short, and slightly bitter, and once you're on, you're on.' His voice quickens recalling a first meeting with Steve Carell, who he wanted to play Randall, 'the group's dark money Gandalf'. This was January. Without a script, Armstrong could only tell the actor the story he'd loosely planned. Carell sat in silence. 'I thought, 'Well, this has gone very badly.'' Then he said yes. 'At which point it was like, 'Fuck. This is actually going to happen. Now I have to write it.'' By March, the film was being shot in a 21,000 sq ft mansion in Deer Valley, Utah, then on the market for $65m. Carell aside, the cast included Cory Michael Smith, Ramy Youssef and Jason Schwartzman. For Armstrong, directing his first feature on a berserk turnaround was made easier by a deep fondness for actors. Standing in front of a camera, he says, paralyses him with self-consciousness. 'So I honestly find what they do magical.' His own lack of talent as a performer proved important to the younger Armstrong. Between 1995 and 1997, he worked as an assistant to Labour MP Doug Henderson. It was an interesting time to have the job, with Tony Blair about to enter Downing Street. Is there a Sliding Doors world where a rising star assistant becomes an MP himself? One where, by now, Jesse Armstrong is home secretary? He shakes his head for several seconds. 'I just wasn't good at the job. Fundamentally, I didn't understand politics.' He knows it sounds odd, having later written for insidery Westminster comedy The Thick of It. 'But I couldn't do the acting. I didn't get it. I always thought like a writer, so in meetings where I should have been building my career, I'd just be thinking, 'That's weird. That's funny. Why did you say that?'' (Armstrong once wrote for the Guardian about a meeting with then Conservative minister Ann Widdecombe, in which she sat under two posters: one a lurid anti-abortion message, the other Garfield.) Instead, he segued into comedy, and soon after Peep Show, the beloved squirm of a sitcom co-written with Sam Bain. At first glance, Succession is the obvious prequel to Mountainhead, a former newspaper empire giving way to tech superpower. But Armstrong sees a closer link between his new film and Peep Show: 'Because it's about men, and male hierarchies, and the pathos of men trying to connect.' He is tickled by the thought of his own story world, in which characters from different projects collide. 'You can see Super Hans arriving at Mountainhead on a scooter, delivering the ketamine.' Then he pauses, suddenly anxious. Could he make sure I'll mention Bain if I talk about Peep Show? 'Because it was always Sam's show as well.' And Hans owed so much to actor Matt King too, he says, 'and then, of course, there's David Mitchell and Robert Webb.' Should Armstrong ever make an Oscar acceptance speech, we will be there a while. Making sure due credit is given is of a piece with his near-pathological modesty. (He is a keen footballer. Which position? 'Terrible.') Being fair-minded matters too. He adds a postscript to his memory of leaving Westminster. 'I'd also say I don't in any way feel superior to people who do make a career in politics. I still believe we need good, professional politicians.' Turning back to Mountainhead, his even-handedness reaches a kind of event horizon. Armstrong , it transpires, feels sorry for Elon Musk. 'Musk has done huge damage in the world, particularly with Doge, but I have a lot of sympathy for him.' The owner of X was brutally bullied as a schoolboy and according to a 2023 biography, had a difficult relationship with his father. 'This is a traumatised human being,' says Armstrong. Still, not every bullied child ends up making apparent Nazi salutes onstage. 'Yeah. That wasn't great.' But there are other sides to Armstrong. For all the hints of bumble and awkwardness, he has also had the discipline to build a stellar career. And the more measured he is in person, the more Mountainhead feels like the work of a grinning Id, rising up to take a scalpel to his subjects, with their pretensions to philosophy, and dark indifference to life. ('I'm so excited about these atrocities,' a character beams as the world goes violently awry.) But his sympathy has its limits. 'I do think the cocoon they're in makes it hard for them to remember other people are actually real. But they've also been quick to give up trying. And some definitely feel the superior person shouldn't have to try anyway.' More to the point, though, Armstrong finds the tech moguls funny. Much of the grimness of a Musk or Thiel is also brilliantly ridiculous: the epic lack of self-knowledge, the thinness of skin. Having studied them as he has, would he expect his real-life models to be enraged by the film? 'Oh no. They'd instantly dismantle it in a way that would be 50% completely fair, and 50% totally facile. But they wouldn't see any truth to it.' Still, Mountainhead is something very rare: a movie that feels as contemporary as TikTok. For Armstrong, after Succession and now this, you might think stories about the moment had become addictive. He frowns. Is a period piece next, in fact? Victorian bonnets? 'Maybe. Genuinely maybe. Because I'm not actually that drawn to ripped-from-the-headlines ideas.' The frown deepens. 'Am I not? I don't know. I'm losing faith in my own answer, because I evidently am. I mean, I'm not going to claim I don't like writing about right now. But honestly, at the same time – I'd be pleased to get out of it.' Mountainhead is available to own digitally now
