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My dad, Dave Tomlin, who has died aged 90, was a musician, writer and figure of the British counterculture underground from the 1960s.

In 1976, he was one of those who took over the unoccupied former Cambodian embassy in London and established a community of artists, musicians, poets, artisans and radical metaphysicians who called themselves the Guild of Transcultural Studies.

Over the years, the guild became established as an opulent venue for musical and cultural events, hosting refugees from as far afield as Chile and China and holding concerts by musicians from Morocco and India, with attenders often having no idea that their elegant surroundings were a squat. A long-running court case finally forced the guild to close its doors after 15 years in 1991, ending Dave’s dream of handing the building back to a new Cambodian government.

Born in Plaistow, east London (then in Essex), to Stan Tomlin, a packing-case maker, and Louisa (nee Goodsell), Dave escaped a future in factory work by joining the King’s Guard, where he learned the bugle to accompany the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. This was the beginning of a life of music. He became a jazz musician in the 1950s, playing clarinet and saxophone in Bob Wallis’s Storyville Jazz Band and touring with Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

In the late 1960s he joined the hippy movement, travelling nomadically around the countryside in a horse and cart, playing in experimental folk groups, including the Third Ear Band, and performing at the UFO Club in London, where he would go on at 4am: “Only when the dancers are completely exhausted will they be in a fit state to hear what we have for them”.

He became part of the London Free School in Notting Hill, a centre of radical adult education, where he taught free-form jazz. While there, Dave led annual musical processions down Portobello Road that would develop with other events into the Notting Hill carnival.

Other adventures included becoming stranded, penniless, on the island of Fernando Po (now Bioko) in Equatorial Guinea and gaining passage back by pretending, unconvincingly, to be an experienced cook and deckhand. He supported his frugal lifestyle with gardening and working as a handyman.

In his later years, Dave spent his time writing about his experiences (Tales From the Embassy was published in 2017), practising Chinese brush painting and learning to recite the alphabet backwards.

He is survived by three children from different relationships – Lee, Maya and me – and by his brother, Tony.

Steve Madden, the fashion boss best known for his links to the criminal antics depicted in the book and film The Wolf of Wall Street, is buying the UK footwear and accessories brand Kurt Geiger for £289m in cash.

Madden’s Nasdaq-listed company said it had signed a definitive agreement to buy the London-based company, which also owns Carvela, from a group led by Cinven, the private equity firm that bought Kurt Geiger for £245m in 2015. The deal is expected to be completed by the end of 2025.

Steve Madden said buying Kurt Geiger was “one of the great accomplishments” of his career, adding: “The brand is doing better and better every year, and the opportunity to collaborate with them is thrilling. I get goosebumps just thinking about it.”

Madden, who started his footwear brand in 1990, served 31 months in prison for his involvement in securities fraud and money laundering related to his dealings with Stratton Oakmont, which underwrote his company’s flotation. The illegal antics of the financial firm, founded by Jordan Belfort and Madden’s childhood friend Danny Porush, were depicted in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, based on Belfort’s memoirs.

Since leaving jail, Madden has built his company into a successful fashion brand, which has bought other brands including Dolce Vita, Betsey Johnson and ATM Collection.

Kurt Geiger, which began as an upmarket footwear store on Bond Street in London in 1963 and was once part of the former Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed’s retail empire, has expanded into handbags, swimwear, hats and sunglasses in recent years and has grown internationally, building its US sales from £10m to £140m in the last four years. It has more than 70 stores, mostly in the UK and US, and sells online and via department stores.

Last year Kurt Geiger said its underlying profits rose 34% to £40.4m as sales rose nearly 10% to £361m.

Neil Clifford, the chief executive of Kurt Geiger, said: “We couldn’t be prouder of the progress our team has made over the last few years in building Kurt Geiger London into a globally recognisable fashion brand.

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“While we’ve delivered remarkable growth in recent years, we believe we are in the early stages of our growth journey, with significant expansion opportunities available to us. With its global infrastructure and proven track record of supporting and growing its brands, we believe Steve Madden is the right strategic partner to help us reach our potential.”

A consultant paediatrician warned medical colleagues treating her son that they had failed to give him life-saving antibiotics hours before he died from sepsis, an inquest has heard.

William Hewes, 22, a history and politics student, died on 21 January 2023 of meningococcal septicaemia at east London’s Homerton hospital, where his mother, Dr Deborah Burns, worked.

Burns brought her “very ill” son into the A&E at the hospital just after midnight and told her colleagues he was seriously ill and needed treating for meningitis, the inquest into his death heard on Thursday.

A doctor prescribed 2 grams of the antibiotic ceftriaxone within minutes of Hewes’s arrival and the medical team knew the drug had to be given as soon as possible. But due to a communication mix-up between the duty emergency registrar, Dr Rebecca McMillan, and nurses, the “life-saving” drug was not administered within the vital first hour of treatment, the inquest heard.

Burns said her son only got the antibiotics after she warned Dr Luke Lake, the acting medical registrar on duty at the time, about the failure to administer the drug. In written evidence read to the court, she said: “I told him I didn’t think William had the antibiotics. Luke reassured me, that they had been written up earlier. I replied: ‘Yes, but they have not been given.’”

Lake told the inquest he had realised earlier that the drug blunder had occurred after checking on Hewes’s chart. But questioning him, the family’s barrister, Neil Sheldon KC, said: “The reality is that Dr Burns did prompt you to question whether or not antibiotics had been given and it wasn’t something you queried independently.”

Lake replied: “That’s not how I remember things. She may have chased. I can’t be crystal clear.”

Earlier, McMillan recounted her distress when she realised at about 1.17am that the drug had not been administered by nurses as she requested.

She said: “I do recall standing outside the resus room with [nurse Marianela Balatico] where she asked if I was OK and said that I looked really upset when I realised that antibiotics had not been given.

“We had a conversation along the lines of we didn’t understand how this had happened. We were both upset when we realised that this hadn’t happened.”

Fighting back tears, McMillan said one of the “learning points” from Hewes’s death was the need “to be clearer who I’m giving instruction to”. She added: “I obviously thought that my instructions had been clear enough. I have thought about that moment over and over.”

The coroner, Mary Hassell, had relayed Balatico’s previous evidence to the court when the nurse admitted the instruction to give Hewes antibiotics had “slipped my mind” as she focused on relieving his symptoms.

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The court also heard the doctors treating Hewes argued about how soon he should be admitted to the intensive care unit after his symptoms deteriorated. McMillan said she was concerned that she had to plead with Dr Mathuratha Sivasubramaniam, the intensive care registrar responsible for admission, the court heard.

Sivasubramanian advised continuing Hewes’s treatment in the emergency unit and waiting for further assessment before admitting him to intensive care.

The coroner said: “It sounds like an argument.” McMillan replied: “She wasn’t behaving with the same urgency that I was conveying.”

McMillan also said there was confusion between the three doctors over who was responsible for Hewes’s care. She said: “My worry is that I don’t think it was completely clear between the three of us who was keeping complete oversight and who had primacy for caring for William.”

The inquest continues.

Downing Street could become a notably less appealing place to work in the coming weeks, with cleaners and catering staff at No 10 scheduled to begin a month-long continuous strike over pay and conditions.

The strike, scheduled to last from 24 February to 25 March in No 10 and the Cabinet Office, is an extension of a wider dispute that has already taken place in a series of government departments.

The Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, which represents the workers, is seeking a pay rise and improvements to conditions in areas such as holiday entitlement and, more widely, is trying to persuade the Labour government to bring staff employed by an outsourcing company into official roles.

The staff, employed by the facility services firm ISS, work permanently in the departments. While the PCS says the decision on the dispute rests with the government, the Cabinet Office says it is a matter for ISS.

As well as workers at No 10 and the Cabinet Office, the strike will include staff at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, the Department for Education, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and the Department for Business and Trade. The PCS is covering their pay over the period.

The involvement of No 10 cleaners is particularly resonant given the focus on their role during coverage of repeated lockdown-breaking parties in and around No 10 during Boris Johnson’s time as prime minister.

An official report on the parties cited incidents of red wine spills left for cleaners to deal with, and “multiple examples” of a lack of respect shown to cleaning staff and security officials.

Staff at some of the departments have been on strike intermittently since October, but after another ballot of PCS members this will be extended. While the offices will be picketed, civil servants and ministers are free to cross these, as they are not involved in the dispute.

As well as the direct dispute on pay and conditions, the PCS is putting pressure on ministers to act on previous pledges to gradually end the outsourcing of jobs such as cleaning, catering and security in government departments.

The union says a possible compromise on the dispute is awaiting a decision by the Cabinet Office, but has been stuck for several months.

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The Cabinet Office rejects this, saying it is entirely up to ISS or other external employers to negotiate with the union. It adds that the contracts are also held by the Government Property Agency, an arm of the Cabinet Office that manages office buildings, rather than by specific departments.

A PCS official said current contracts with PCS and other outsourcing firms such as G4S and OCS run out in three years, and that talks about bringing people on to civil service contracts needed to start soon.

A spokesperson for ISS UK and Ireland said: “We are disappointed that this action is going ahead. We value the contribution of every ISS team member and will continue to work towards a resolution.”

A consultant paediatrician has been unable to work at the hospital that failed to save her son from a sepsis infection, after “feelings of betrayal” towards her medical colleagues who ignored her warnings about errors in his treatment.

William Hewes, 22, a history and politics student, died on 21 January 2023 of meningococcal septicaemia at Homerton hospital in east London, where his mother, Dr Deborah Burns, had worked for more than 20 years.

Appearing at the inquest into her son’s death, Burns said: “It is impossible for words to describe adequately the pain of this immense loss and the feelings of betrayal that I feel about William’s death and the aftermath.”

Bow coroner’s court heard that Burns had been “unable to work” at the hospital since witnessing a series of medical blunders at her son’s bedside.

In a statement read to the court, she said: “From my direct experience as a witness, plus what I’ve seen in the notes and in statements, it’s my opinion that the medical staff involved in William’s care failed to observe him in any clinically useful way.”

After bringing her son to the hospital’s A&E department shortly after midnight, Burns asked medics repeatedly to administer life-saving antibiotics in the vital first hour of his treatment. On Thursday, the inquest heard that antibiotics were not given until 1.25am because of a misunderstanding between a doctor and nurses.

On Friday, Burns told the inquest: “In terms of antibiotics, I believe that these were only given when they were because I was there. I raised a concern about the lack of antibiotics eight times before they were administered.”

In her statement, she said she grew increasingly desperate by her son’s bedside.

She said: “William had one cannula in his left antecubital fossa [a dip in the front of the elbow] with no three-way tap, which meant he could only have one medication at a time. He was given fluid, two doses of morphine and paracetamol before he was given antibiotics. By 1.15am I had become desperate and tried to squeeze some of the paracetamol through in order to free up the cannula for the antibiotics.”

Burns explained she had to help one of the resident doctors treating her son. She said: “The medical registrar told me that he was unfamiliar with the intravenous morphine, compelling me to advise him, which I did, as I wanted the antibiotics given.”

She also highlighted delays in transferring her son from the hospital’s resuscitation (resus) area into intensive care.

Burns said: “I witnessed that the emergency department and medical registrars were clearly not happy that the intensive care registrar would not accept referral of William. I believe that he was left unmonitored and untreated in resus for far too long.”

Burns said mistakes continued in intensive care. She said: “His care was no better on the intensive care unit until it was too late. When the decision was made to intubate I was in deep despair. I had a suspicion that we would lose him completely, as his blood pressure would fall on intubation.

“I decided to call William’s father – we are divorced – as I suspected that he would never see William again if he did not come to the hospital as soon as possible.”

Dr Ron Daniels, an intensive care consultant and founder of the UK Sepsis trust, said Hewes could have been saved if he had been given antibiotics within minutes and intensive care treatment had been brought forward by two hours.

He told the court: “If we took 100 22-year-old adults in William’s condition, more than 50%, in fact, more like 70% to 75%, would survive.|

Daniels added: “Based on the evidence I put forward, together with 23 years of clinical experience, I strongly believe that had William received timely care, according to national and international guidelines, he would have had at least a 50% chance of surviving this illness.”

Dr Mathuratha Sivasubramaniam, the duty intensive care registrar, said she initially refused to admit Hewes to the unit, because he was showing signs of improvement.

Neil Sheldon KC, the barrister for the Hewes family, questioned the reliability of Sivasubramaniam’s statement. The coroner, Mary Hassell, explained that Sivasubramaniam could not be questioned because she had since left the UK.

Petr Dlouhy, an intensive care consultant, was informed about Hewes’s deteriorating condition shortly after 3am. He told the court he would have advised transferring Hewes to intensive care earlier if he had been informed sooner about his worsening condition.

He said: “If I had heard that he looks very unwell and has a high heart rate and low blood pressure, and an already impaired kidney function, obviously I would admit him.”

Asked if earlier admission could have saved Hewes, he said: “I don’t know if it would have made a difference.”

The inquest continues.

Kirk Haworth, the owner and head chef of the east London restaurant Plates, hates the word vegan. “At least seeing the word on a menu,” he says. “​Plant-based cooking ​i​s not a trend. Not for me, anyway. I’ve been doing it for eight years and it’s just in my soul now.” And yet this week, Haworth became the first UK chef to win a Michelin star for cooking only plant-based food.

Plates is small, with just 25 covers. There are two sittings but it is full until the end of April. The phone is always engaged, and they can only cope with reservations today and tomorrow. For everything else, send an email.

“It’s been like this since we opened – we had 76,000 people trying to book, and the website crashed,” he says. The restaurant opened a few months after he won the TV show Great British Menu. “I’m not sure anyone’s reviewed it yet because they can’t get a table.”

The diners, then, are diehard Haworth fans, and come in two sizes. The couple next to me have been waiting nine months for a table (it only opened in July), while a man waiting for the loo says he enjoyed his meal but had been brought by a friend “and had no idea what this place was”.

Except for the two City guys discussing salaries at the bar, people have travelled from outside London, take photos of the outside but rarely of their food, and are noticeable for being dressed up rather than well-dressed. Hoxton is, after all, the ground zero of scuzzy hipsters, and this is an unusual location for a Michelin-starred restaurant – being just off the Old Street roundabout, and down the road from east London’s more storied Turkish and Vietnamese restaurants.

It used to a be a restaurant/bar that closed after the pandemic – as did about 14% of restaurants in central London – but it was a vegan one, suggesting there is something in the filtered tap water.

To the food. It is a tasting menu, but a generous one. Among Haworth’s favourites is a dish of slow-cooked leeks that comes crowned with a handful of frozen verjus (pressed unripe grapes). He also likes the barbecued mushrooms.

But it is the ones that should, by rights, be meat that stand out. A lasagne that feels like lasagne except made from mung and urad beans; the whole thing is then served – as if to remind you, again, of what it is not – with a thumb of cucumber. Then there is bread, or rather, a bread-ish croissant rolled into a swirl and served with green “butter” made from cashews. Asked why the non-butter butter is still called butter, Haworth says simply: “Butter is a perception.”

Nowhere on the menu is the word “vegan”. Nor “plant-based”, “dairy-free” or even “cow-lite”. “Look, I hate imitation,” he says of the now popular fake meat and cheese market. Although beetroot has an uncanny ability to mimic beef, the meat and fish are not so much doctored as completely swapped out.

Everything here strikes a balance between casual and assiduity. Even its name, Plates, betrays nothing except that there will be a lot of them. The semi-open kitchen, which has that monastic serenity you only get when food is not cooked to order, is surrounded by a chef’s counter made from four felled London trees.

Customers sit on mustard banquettes, the large Holiday Inn opposite hidden by cafe curtains. There is only one loo, but it has a huge basin carved from polished rock. The Michelin inspectors described it as cosy rather than cramped. But what looks cosy, in other words, is actually more posh.

In the truest three-figure Michelin tradition, there are some at-table sauce pouring performances. Plumes of dry ice fog hover over some dishes and you are told which cutlery to use, and in which order. The mocktails – including the “yuzuade” – are fun but unnecessary. And some of the textures – some teeth-squeaking puffed rice – are a little overwhelming. Then there is the price – £90 before you’ve had anything to drink, which feels a little mighty for vegetables. Still, there are enough single diners dropping £150 to remind you this is a destination.

The Michelin system is not what it used to be. According to a report by University College London, starred restaurants are statistically more likely to close down than highly rated venues without the accolade. At this week’s ceremony, there were fewer new one- and two-star restaurants compared with last year, and only one three-star addition. But that does not mean it is not difficult to get one. “I’d like to say it’s harder to get a star with plant-based food, but I’ve cooked both and it’s hard all round,” says Haworth, who trained at the French Laundry, which is famous for its oysters and caviar.

The meal is finished with a cacao gateau covered in raw caramel. This is the dish that won him the Great British Menu. As such, it is twice the size of everything else. When it first opened, there were three desserts on the menu. When they drop a course, it is the risotto that makes way, not the rice pudding.

Though Haworth concedes the current food system is not sustainable, it was only after being diagnosed with Lyme disease that he explored a plant-based diet, finding it helped mitigate the symptoms. “But that’s just me. Most of the people who come in aren’t vegan. I’d say 99%. That must show you something.”

As a street market trader at Portobello market, London, I thought the trader’s perspective might be of interest regarding your article (Barter, bid and bag a bargain! Vintage experts on 21 ways to buy secondhand treasures, 13 February).

Your guide is spot-on with the tip that, if you are a buyer, being polite and friendly is always the way to go. Also, if you find a good seller, become a regular customer – I give huge discounts to my regulars without them asking.

A few points. If you are a seller at a market and you know buyers are “bidding” prices down then you will always price your stuff higher so there’s some wiggle room. Continuously bidding down prices on stuff just leads to price inflation.

Second, a lowball offer is only likely to annoy the trader – so don’t go too low, be respectful. Third, my perspective is that someone will always buy at the price I want. It’s then just a waiting game. I say no all the time and, like most traders, I judge my income over a year, not on one sale.

Finally, not everyone has the time to find the £1 bargain at a car‑boot. It can take years of 5am starts to eventually get that bargain. And generally the only people who have that time are people who have the kind of wealth to afford to pay more.

Most market traders charge a fair price, many live on low incomes and we save you that time of finding and authenticating a rare piece. Focusing on quality rather than price is a better strategy for a buyer, and a guide on how to recognise that quality – and rarity – would have been of more interest. Perhaps you could publish one of those.

You buy the right piece, even at what might be considered a high price, and in a year it can have doubled in value.
Andrew Spooner
Portobello market, London

Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.

The popular celebrity venue Chiltern Firehouse in London will remain closed until further notice after a fire forced about 100 people to evacuate on Friday lunchtime.

The London fire brigade (LFB) said 125 firefighters and 20 fire engines attended the blaze at the restaurant and luxury hotel on Chiltern Street in Marylebone after a 999 call was made at 2.52pm.

The fire started on the ground floor of the Grade II-listed building, one of London’s first purpose-built fire stations, and spread to the second and third floors and the roof.

It raged for six hours before a firefighter near the scene said it was “completely under control”, adding that the four-storey hotel will probably need a “large refurbishment”.

André Balazs, the owner of Chiltern Firehouse, confirmed no one had been hurt in the fire, and said it was “fully contained” by 9.30pm. “Our guests and staff safely evacuated.”

In a statement, the LFB said: “Crews worked hard over a number of hours in challenging circumstances in a complex historic building and successfully contained the fire to one property, preventing it from spreading to neighbouring properties.

“Firefighters will remain on scene throughout the night, damping down hotspots.”

The restaurant is on the ground floor of the building, and an eyewitness said they had been told the fire had “started in the kitchen” and then “went upstairs”.

“The restaurant was emptied and there [were]lots of very glamorous people milling around outside, shivering,” the witness added. “They were very smartly dressed and I don’t think they expected to be waiting in the cold … You can smell the smoke outside but I did not see any flames.”

Another eyewitness, who works nearby, said he saw “the whole street full of smoke”.

“There was really thick smoke and it got into the other street as well … the visibility was awful,” Guy Fischman, 23, from Richmond, London, told PA.

By 5pm, the road had been closed off, he said, because of the number of fire engines trying to fight the fire.

“[The fire] definitely got bigger than expected. I didn’t expect it to get so big seeing as the fire brigade got there quite early,” he said. “The whole street was shut off and you could see the smoke from quite far away … it was crazy.”

He added that he was “in complete shock” about seeing the thick smoke and flames: “My coat stinks of smoke right now … I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that in the UK or in London.”

Crews of firefighters from across London were deployed to the scene, including from Euston, Kensington and Chelsea, Paddington, Soho and West Hampstead fire stations.

By 5.30pm, about two hours after the fire started, thick black smoke was billowing from the roof and firefighters began using an aerial platform to pump water on to the area.

Videos on social media showed flames at the top of the building being doused by fire officers on a crane, while smoke comes out of the roof.

LFB firefighters said a cordon was likely to be in place overnight, preventing access to the streets surrounding the five-star hotel.

Shortly after it opened in 2014, the restaurant was reported to be “single-handedly feeding the celebrity sections of the tabloids”, a place where paparazzi “loll and glower, ready to pounce on the luminaries who swarm [there] like candle-crazed moths”.

It was given 5/10 for value for money and 7/10 for food by restaurant reviewer Marina O’Loughlin, and described as a place that “seems to be almost permanently accessorised by Kate Moss”.

Bill Clinton, Bono, David Cameron, Keira Knightley and Lindsay Lohan have been photographed at the venue in the past. Madonna and Naomi Campbell are also among its celebrated clientele.

Balazs said: “It is with heartfelt gratitude and appreciation that we watched a remarkable 120 firefighters from [more than] 14 stations rapidly descend on what they told me was a hugely sentimental building for so many of them.

“We know in fact one of those who rushed to the Chiltern Firehouse this evening had been stationed in the building when it was a fire station 30 years ago. I am truly grateful to all of them as I am sure that this is not the Valentine’s Day evening they had in mind.”

This article was amended on 17 February 2025 to remove a statement that the fire had begun in the ducting of the building. This was the latest information available at the time of the incident. The London Fire Brigade has since said that the fire was started by burning wood falling from a pizza oven and igniting the void between the basement and ground floor.

Nestled between an original Donkey Kong arcade machine, a mint condition OutRun racing simulation game and booths wired up with GameCubes and Nintendo 64s, the engineer Luke Malpass works away dismantling a broken Nintendo Wii.

There has been a steady stream of people bringing in their old game consoles for repairs or modifications, on the house, to Four Quarters, a retro games arcade in Elephant and Castle, which has been transformed into a games clinic for two days.

Gabriella Rosenau, 35, brought in her broken Wii that had been in the garage “for years”. “I still play my brother’s old Nintendo 64 and I love it, but I’d really love to get [the Wii] fixed.”

“I’ve done the odd bit of Call of Duty and the PlayStation stuff, but I have more of an interest in the retro games,” she adds.

Rosenau is part of a growing community who are ditching contemporary video games and picking up the consoles from their childhood, or even before their time. And gen Z gamers are following suit, with 24% owning a retro console, according to research by Pringles.

What started as a passion project for Malpass, restoring consoles to their former glory, quickly evolved into a full-time business. At its peak during lockdown, his company RetroSix employed 16 people to cope with demand. He puts this down – in part – to people being stuck at home. “People were bored, finding things at home and searching for things online.

“We originally were just selling on eBay, we didn’t even have a site, and eBay were limiting our sales because they thought it was fraudulent,” he says. “It literally took over.”

RetroSix still gets hundreds of requests each month from people hoping to get their consoles fully working and playable, or upgraded. This has “stabilised”, Malpass says, though the community is still expanding.

“There’s a whole variety of people who are into this now. The older-than-me generation, so sort of late 40s, early 50s, who tend to be PC-based with Amigas and Commodores. Then my age, so people in their 30s, who are very much into the Game Boys, the Mega Drives, Super Nintendo Entertainment Systems, things like that.

“And then there’s a younger generation that are either into [the] Nintendo DS, things they played with that are starting to become retro, or they’re just really obsessed with retro as a whole. So you do get people in their 20s that are more obsessed than we are, even though they didn’t grow up with it,” he says.

Malpass has amassed a large following on social media and has 61,700 subscribers on his YouTube channel, AngelSix, and 44,100 followers on RetroSix’s TikTok, where he shares videos about repairs and his inventions with the community.

The young people who engage online say they are reaching for retro games because of the distinctive gameplay, and for the chance to “switch off”, Malpass says.

“You turn your console on at the top, you’re gaming. There’s no stress, there’s no internet, you’re not competing against the world. You’ve got yourself in a game, you feel a sense of achievement as you’re going and that was originally what you used to do,” he says.

“I think younger generations have got a lot more stress now, growing up in the social media world is mentally very challenging. [Retro video gaming] is their safe place. It’s like their escape,” he says.

Matthew Dolan, a software developer in his 40s, brought along parts of his Game Gear console. His passion for retro gaming and technology stems from nostalgia and childhood memories playing games his father had written for him on the BBC Micro. “It was a great introduction to technology,” he says.

“You get all that joy from just literally playing it. Going through batteries, planning your long car journeys out based on how long they’ll last,” he says. “They’re not relying on flashy graphics in the same way [as contemporary games].”

Going one step further, Dolan now fixes and adapts consoles himself, and says he spent £7,000 on the hobby last year. “I got some of that back, from selling things on, but it’s not cheap.”

He got stuck trying to repair some of the chips on his Game Gear and needed Malpass’s expertise. A repaired Prestige Edition Game Gear console from RetroSix costs £298.80. The LED edition costs £334.80 and mods or servicing on the console start at £36.

Game Boy

A handheld game console developed and manufactured by Nintendo. It first came out in Japan in 1989 and was released in Europe in 1990. It is estimated more than 118.7m Game Boys and Game Boy Colors have been sold worldwide, making it one of the most successful handheld consoles of its era, popular owing to its compact design and affordability.

SNES

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System, also known as the Super NES, was the second home video game console released by Nintendo internationally. It was first released in 1990 by Nintendo in Japan and reached Europe in 1992. It is estimated that the SNES sold 49.1m units worldwide by the time it was discontinued in 2003.

Xbox original

The Xbox console was Microsoft’s first games console offering and the first instalment in the Xbox series of consoles, first released in Europe in 2002. At the time, it sold for £299 and was competing with Sony’s PlayStation 2 and Nintendo’s GameCube. The second-generation Xbox 360 was released in 2005.

Amiga

A line of personal computers produced by Commodore International from 1985 until 1994, until its bankruptcy. Other companies continued producing the Amiga after this. The Amiga 1000, also known as the A1000, was the first personal computer released by Commodore International in the Amiga line. It was known for its advanced graphics and sound. Popular games include Alien Breed, Syndicate, Sensible Soccer and Eye of the Beholder.

Game Gear

A handheld gaming console, released by Sega in Japan in 1990 and in Europe the following year. Game Gear primarily competed with Nintendo’s Game Boy, the Atari Lynx, and NEC’s TurboExpress. During 1991, about 520,000 Game Gears were sold across Europe, with more than 130,000 of those being sold in the UK.

In literary terms, Britain was a duller place 15 years ago: Booker judges looked for novels that “zip along”, editors were saying no to Deborah Levy and the publisher Jacques Testard couldn’t get a job. There was nothing for it but DIY: new houses, like Testard’s Fitzcarraldo Editions, and new prizes for new authors shut out by the risk-averse mentality that prevailed after the 2008 recession. Leading the way was Liverpool-born, Ireland-raised writer Eimear McBride, whose 2013 debut A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, a looping soliloquy published by Norwich startup Galley Beggar Press, won the inaugural Goldsmiths prize for experimental fiction as well as the Women’s prize (then known as the Baileys), traditionally a more commercial award, in a sign that the thirst for novelty perhaps wasn’t so niche after all.

McBride’s new novel, The City Changes Its Face, is a stand-alone sequel to her second book, 2016’s The Lesser Bohemians, which was told by teenage drama student Eily, who comes to London from Ireland in the mid-90s and falls for Stephen, an actor 20 years her senior, with an estranged daughter Eily’s age, living overseas after her mother couldn’t hack Stephen sleeping around – a snag for Eily, too.

The action resumes here in 1995, yo-yoing between the recent past – in particular, a momentous visit by said daughter, Grace – and a narrative here and now in which Eily hasn’t been leaving the house after a breakdown and Stephen is in a West End show, kissing his female co-lead on stage, something Eily’s sort-of not-quite OK with. McBride’s cutting between time frames repeatedly leaves us poised on one ticklish moment only to switch to another – whether Stephen has returned from work to find Eily and Grace drunkenly quizzing each other, or he’s just been left bloodied by a shattered jar of piccalilli during a row with Eily at home, where innocuous-sounding exchanges about sandwiches and tea can’t mask the volcanic undertow bubbling up from the individual miseries of their past (addiction, abuse, self-harm).

What unfolds is a two-for-one trauma plot involving love between bruised souls who aren’t walking on eggshells so much as tiptoeing blindfold across a tripwired minefield. This being McBride, it’s the telling that’s as important as the story; in seeking to portray what it’s like to live in a body and a mind, she operates at a frequency most novelists ignore, intuitively able to recognise how something so apparently insignificant as the position of type on a page – indentation, spacing, line breaks – can be pressed into communicating nuances of thought and emotion. And as in The Lesser Bohemians, frequent interruptions in a tiny font are deployed to show Eily quibbling with herself (there are more conventional tools for that, but McBride fights shy of commas and speech marks, never mind brackets).

The novel’s drama lies ultimately in the dance of Eily’s thoughts as she decodes Stephen’s words, calibrates her own, watching his gestures, craving, ultimately, for the validation she finds in his desire. Anything that makes that place harder to reach, whether Grace’s arrival or his refusal to ignore the marks on Eily’s wrists, fuels tension. For Eily, Stephen’s solicitousness for his daughter represents a threat, even though she likes Grace, who likes her too. The novel is most alive in that humanly messy tangle of almost unaccountable selfishness and anger, not least when her hopes of getting back into bed with Stephen – who is plagued by anxieties of his own – are stymied by Grace throwing up after one too many whiskies with Eily in the pub.

While it’s not period fiction – there are mentions of Kwik Save and the bookseller Samuel French but not John Major or Britpop – there’s an elegiac quality to the still-ungentrified dossiness of its north London setting, where any problem can be eased for a time by the discovery of a forgotten four-pack, a cadged ciggie or nipping out for chips. And while the end of the book leaves us hanging, true, the ceaseless friction to its central relationship means it carries far more oomph than McBride’s previous novel, 2020’s unsatisfyingly wafty Strange Hotel. You sense that in revisiting The Lesser Bohemians she’s continuing a project that’s far from done, and this reader, at least, would be glad if she decides the life of Eily is the place to be.

The City Changes its Face by Eimear McBride is published by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply