My kids are all absent, but here’s a transatlantic phone call with my brother and our extremely deaf and elderly father to fill my Saturday afternoon

It is a recent tradition that our adult children spend the night back at home with us the day before they travel anywhere far away. As parents we may have a diminishing relevance in their lives, but we remain very handy for the airport.

I hear the middle one pull the front door shut behind him at 5.45am on Saturday morning, off on a week-long business trip. When I next wake up it’s almost 9am, and the house seems emptier than ever.

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Sofie Hagen loves sex – so why has it been 3,089 days since she’s had any? (1m27s); A flat white can now set you back up to £5.19 – but should we swallow it? (25m13s); and psychotherapist and Observer columnist Philippa Perry addresses a reader’s personal problem (43m51s).

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We would like to hear from adults in the UK who have recently had to move in with their parents

We would like to hear from adults in the UK between the ages 28-42 who have recently had to move in with their parents. Why did you make the move? How has the experience been? Tell us all about it below.

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I’ve tried peanut butter and bacon pizza, and had a caviar one, too

There is nothing I like more in this world than pizza. I grew up in the early 90s in Connecticut, where my dad owned a pizzeria called Kenny V’s until I was three. I still have his old restaurant sign in my garage.

For the last six years, I’ve eaten pizza every single day. Sometimes it might just be a slice, but most days I will get through a whole one. My favourite is a classic American deep-pan pepperoni. I also love tomato and cheese on a nice thick crust, so a plain margherita will never go amiss.

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She may not realise the effect she’s having on you, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. Try to be clear with her about what would help

I had my first child around one year ago and the previously amicable and warm relationship with my mother-in-law has since become cool and standoffish. I feel my mother-in-law is emotionally manipulative and puts a lot of pressure on my husband, and in turn me, to spend time with my daughter. I think these feelings initiated for me when she was too present in our home in the first hours and days of my daughter coming home. On reflection, it feels as though she was invading a space that was very private and intimate at a time when I was exhausted, sore and vulnerable and unable to hold my boundaries myself. Since then I have been resentful and felt she was taking advantage of my exhaustion to get intimate time with her newborn granddaughter, as opposed to respecting what was the right thing for me. I now feel a need to keep her at arm’s length for fear she will again overstep.

My husband is supportive but ultimately feels pulled by his mother’s emotional manipulation. All in all, she is a kind woman, and I don’t think she will have even considered that her behaviour was an overstep. I don’t really know where to go from here, as I do want my daughter to have a relationship with her grandmother, but I also don’t want my mother-in-law being involved in as many aspects of my life as I know she desires. What can I do?

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It’s time for the language orals. Cue countless stilted conversations about imaginary pets and books that kids haven’t actually read

“What do you think is the greatest threat to the planet, and why?” I ask my 16-year-old.

“Earthquakes. Because buildings fall. And this causes animals to die.”

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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Ian Russell says parental controls could weaken trust and ‘punish children for tech firms’ failures’

• Ian Russell: Tech companies need to change

Government proposals to ban the sale of smartphones to under-16s and raise the minimum age for accessing social media risk causing more harm than good, the father of Molly Russell has warned.

Ian Russell said it was “no surprise” there is a groundswell of pressure for tougher regulation of social media platforms but said plans for a fresh crackdown were flawed.

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Pots of slime, pig heads, sexy dolls… we were only looking for a present for my son’s fourth birthday

This week I found myself in a large toy shop in a retail park off London’s North Circular. We were looking, in a pleasant panic, for a present for my son’s fourth birthday. His birthdays always hit me in an odd way, a bit like those slaps round the face they have in films to stop the woman screaming. Because: he was born at the beginning of the pandemic and, just as his early developmental stages like sitting up or eating solids worked as a marker of time having passed, of us having survived, so do his birthdays. It is four years, this means, since those tight, hot days of the first Covid lockdown, of sanitiser-cracked hands and the brisk hell of home schooling, and every time the anniversary comes round I find myself having to sit down, take a breath.

Anyway, this toy shop, good God. Do you have any ideas what toys are today? I was not prepared. There are the board games, which include your Guess Who’s and so on, but they are overwhelmed by other games called things like, Who Can Poo On Who and Fart School and Diarrhoea of a CEO and I may be misremembering titles slightly yes, but this was very much the gist, boxes with rabid cartoon characters covered in phlegm and instructions that involve, for eg, burping one’s name.

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Taken over several years, the British photographer’s latest series shows her world narrowing as loss, and lockdown, strike

Lydia Goldblatt describes her book Fugue as a “story about mothering and losing a mother, intimacy and distance, told through photographs and writing”. It is a companion volume, in some ways, to an earlier project, Still Here , about the unsettled, intense landscape of love and loss generated by her father’s death. “The cultural silence around these emotions,” Goldblatt writes, by way of introduction, “the difficulty of navigating and giving voice to them, has made me want to suffuse them with colour and light.”

The pictures in Fugue were made over four years, beginning in 2020. The world of some of them is circumscribed by lockdown, life narrowing to the bubble of family. The photographer’s young daughters are insistently present in the pictures, climbing and clinging and needing notice. “Abundant” is her word for them. Her mother is already an absence; the words in the book chart not only her loss but also the responsibility of clearing and decanting her London home.

Fugue is published by Gost (£45) in June. An exhibition of the photographs, with Robert Morat Galerie, will be on display at Photo London 2024 , Somerset House, 16-19 May

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