When ecstatic fans tell Barbara Kingsolver they’ve read every last one of her books, she always smiles inwardly. “I bet you haven’t,” she thinks, knowing it was a nonfiction account of an Arizona miners’ strike in 1983 that set her on the road to the bestseller list.

Admittedly, this recherché volume has never been out of print in the US. But its long-term home is on the specialist list of an academic publisher, where it nestles beside other, even chewier books about labour relations. “It was hard to place,” she says. “Every editor who read it said: wow, this is interesting. But we couldn’t sell it.” Only after her first novel, The Bean Trees, was published in 1988 did her agent send it out again, at which point an offshoot of Cornell University Press stepped in. “It’s the book nobody knows about,” she concludes, a statement only a writer who has since won just about every literary prize going could make without sounding utterly depressed (she is smiling broadly).

So, yes, she’s surprised – “I’m amazed!” – that Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike is about to be published in the UK for the first time, though the credit belongs to her editor at Faber, Louisa Joyner, who having unaccountably dug it up, approached her about a British edition. “I hadn’t looked at it in decades, and I was a little nervous to reread it,” she says. “But I’m very proud of it, and I hope it’s OK for me to say that. I feel like this is maybe the place where I found my narrative voice.” Isn’t her twentysomething self a bit of a stranger to her at this distance? “No, I think I was [already] so much the person I am today. I look back at the writer I was 40 years ago, and fundamentally, nothing has changed.

“I grew up in working-class, rural Kentucky, and in those days – hard to imagine now – almost no one was a registered Republican. Southern Appalachia was formed by the collision between labour and big capital. It wasn’t mining country, but it was tobacco country, and everyone had a sense of “it’s us or the big companies”. Of course you don’t think about these things when you’re young; you just absorb your milieu. But as I got older, I always felt the story I wanted to hear was the workers’ story. In a cafeteria, I want to go into the kitchen, and talk to those people – and they’re often the women.” Her point is that she knew all about unions and how vital they can be long before she arrived in Clifton, Arizona, in her Nissan pickup with only a tape recorder and a few high-minded journalistic ideals for company.

If Holding the Line belongs, in a variety of ways, to another era, it speaks to today nonetheless; the politics of the US in 2024 are, she believes, inextricably linked to the story it tells, a turning point in terms of American industrial relations. (And it will resonate with some British readers, too, in the year of the 40th anniversary of the miners’ strike.) But Kingsolver had little idea of this at the time – at least, in the beginning. She was working in Tucson as a scientific writer, and cutting her teeth as a freelance journalist in her spare time. Her mission on this occasion was simply to report for several news outlets on the strike that was taking place in a constellation of remote copper mining towns in the south of the state. She wasn’t, in other words, supposed to stay out there for very long.

She soon found, however, that she couldn’t look away; the drive to Clifton, the town where she was mostly based, was three-and-a-half hours from Tucson, and in the end she did it so often, she wore the tread from her tyres. The strike had begun as a straightforward dispute between a mining company, Phelps Dodge, and its unionised workforce; copper prices had fallen, Phelps Dodge was losing money, people were being laid off. When, during contract negotiations, the company insisted it required wages to be frozen, thousands of miners elected to strike.

Most commentators believed the dispute would be conventional and relatively brief, but within a month, things had shifted dramatically: squads of armoured men with teargas and automatic weapons were storming tiny, bucolic main streets; people were being jailed for nothing more than calling a neighbour a scab. It lasted from June 1983 until December 1984. By the time it was over, the trade union that represented the workers had been decertified, and half a century of organised labour in Arizona was at an end.

Kingsolver is speaking to me from her home in Virginia: a farm in a hollow surrounded by deciduous forests, to which she moved with her husband and two daughters in 2004. On Instagram, she often posts photos of her abundant homegrown crops, sometimes before mammoth pickling and bottling sessions in her kitchen: tomatoes, cardoons, padrón peppers, sweet potatoes. I can’t see any of these things on my screen now; only a bookcase is on offer. But rightly or wrongly, I feel I know all about her particular contentment: happy, productive hours at her desk followed by equally happy, productive hours outdoors. We’re very far indeed from dusty Arizona, where her 28-year-old self once spent her days carefully interviewing the women who kept the show on the road during the strike (they staffed the picket lines when the men travelled to other states in search of a wage), sitting with them on the “squeaky porch-swings of [their] slant-frame houses”. These days, after all, her characters belong only to her imagination, no Dictaphone required.

In 1983, she struggled to maintain the dispassion she believed was required of a good journalist. It was impossible not to take sides, and having won their trust, the people of Clifton began to refer to her fondly as the “gal” who was writing a book about them. Back in Tucson, her interview tapes began to pile up in what she describes as an “impugning” way; in the end, she wrote Holding the Line because she saw “no other decent option”. Only later did it occur to her that the story had historic implications: “This was the moment when the forces of capital teamed with governments to crush labour. A lot of it turned [in the US] on the air traffic controller strike [of 1981]. Reagan broke that strike overnight. He fired 11,000 unionised controllers in a single morning and then – this is the really shocking part – he banned them from working in the federal service ever again. It felt, in a weird way, like a military coup. We didn’t understand that the president had the power to destroy so many lives at once, and it terrified [workers]. Your working life – your professional life – could end by edict.”

Has she been back to Clifton recently? “I did for years, but [not recently], no. The women in my book mostly moved to other places. Ajo, Clifton and Morenci were classic mining towns, and once those closed, there was nothing else in them. They’re something like ghost towns now, I’d say.” But she hardly needs to take a long drive to grasp how these things play out. In Virginia, where coal mining was once king, she has seen with her own eyes what happens when stable jobs disappear.

“The mines kept out other factories and mills that might have come in. They owned everything: the land, the courthouse, the politics. When coal left this region, it left an enormous void, which created a kind of hopelessness. I love Appalachian culture. It’s community-based. It’s very self-sufficient. But you have this hopelessness that [makes people] vulnerable to politicians who say: I’m on your side. When someone comes along who says: I see you, I hear you, and what I especially hear is that the government has abandoned you, because look at your schools, your hospitals, your unemployment rates… Populist politicians have tapped into this sense that we’re on our own, that government can’t help us.”

This brings us inevitably to JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate who rose to prominence on the back of his hit 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, in which he describes the values of his family, who came originally from rural Kentucky, and the socioeconomic travails of Middletown, Ohio, to which his mother’s parents moved after the second world war. When the book was first published, it enthralled many urban liberals, who took it at face value, glad to be instructed about a world they didn’t know and possibly feared. But what did Kingsolver think? Did she hate it? And if so, how did she feel about the attention – even the acclaim – it received?

Drawing breath, she seems to grow a little taller in her seat. “I can tell you that Appalachian people felt betrayed by that book a long time before he became a Republican politician. I’ll begin by saying: anyone is entitled to write a memoir. That’s his story, fine. But for him to say that his story explains all of us – I say, no, I resent that, because it’s very condescending. There’s this subtext all the way through it that suggests we’re in a boat that’s sinking because we’re lazy, unambitious and uncreative, which I resent.”

The positive responses to the book, she believes, were born of the fact that it simply confirmed well-worn stereotypes. “I’ve dealt with this condescension, this anti-hillbilly bigotry for a lot of my life. I didn’t realise it was a problem until I left Kentucky and went to college [she went to university in Indiana] and people made fun of my accent, and said things like: ‘Look at you, you’re wearing shoes, ha ha!’” She pauses. “You know, it’s more insidious than that. Even as a writer, I feel like my whole life until Demon Copperhead [her Pulitzer prize-winning 2022 novel, which is set in modern Appalachia] I was snubbed because I’m rural, I’m from this place that’s considered backward. I’m quite used to it. But it [Vance’s book] really made a lot of us angry that this became the explanation for us.”

Her neighbours, she says, saw through him immediately: “The hollowness, the fact that he isn’t really one of us.” And perhaps this only increased her determination to write a book like Demon Copperhead, which tackles head on the agonising effects of the opioid crisis in Appalachia: “We have to talk about history. This was done to us. This region has been treated as a kind of internal colony exploited by the outside. It was just so personal for him [Vance]. There was no analysis, and no compassion. It was just: if I can survive, anyone can survive.”

How does she think Vance is working out for Donald Trump, who picked him as his running mate? She is scornful. “The bottom line is: Trump doesn’t want a vice-president. I don’t think it was a thoroughly considered decision. He’s entirely about himself. He’s not even interested in the presidency. He’s only interested in winning.” Is she anxious about the election? “Of course I’m nervous. But I’ll tell you this: I’m a lot less nervous than I was. I have immense respect for Joe Biden, he has done so much. But the image of an old man at the helm… I have enormous respect for his decision to turn over the keys to a younger generation. Almost all my friends are younger than me. I have millennial daughters. They’re so enthusiastic about a [potential] new administration, and how it will represent them.”

It goes without saying that Kingsolver’s career was stellar long before Demon Copperhead was published. Novels such as The Poisonwood Bible, about a family of Baptist missionaries in Congo, and The Lacuna, which pieces together the story of a man whose friends include Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, were acclaimed, prizewinning bestsellers. But even she seems to feel that Demon Copperhead, her most recent book, a retelling of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield that won her a second Women’s prize for fiction as well a Pulitzer, is special – not least because it has changed perceptions of Appalachia.

“I know that it has,” she says, “because I hear that from people every day. It broke the – I don’t know what to call it – grassroots ceiling.” Starting out, she tells me, there were male writers at the top of the pile, women’s literature in a special category, and then, far below both of these, rural writers – where they remain to this day. “They’re just not respected, I’ve always known that. I’ve felt it, in interviews, time and time again. But I long ago gave up the expectation of that kind of approval, I guess I’m just a rebel – and this book [Demon Copperhead] broke through that. It won the big prizes, and it got all the attention, and it stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year. And this seems important to me because it looks straight at the bigotry rural people face.”

Identity politics has helped people like her, she says: it has chipped away at the parameters of what subjects are deemed acceptable. For readers, Demon Copperhead is a bridge over the urban-rural divide; a “window on a world” in which doctors are in such short supply that women commonly have to drive to another state to have their babies, as happened to Kingsolver’s own daughter.

She had wanted to write such a book – her great Appalachian novel – for a long time, but the project seemed daunting, maybe impossible. On a book tour in England in 2018, however, she stayed at Bleak House in Broadstairs, where Dickens wrote David Copperfield (it’s now a B&B), and everything became clear. Alone, late at night, in the writer’s former study, she felt “the presence of his outrage”, and his voice urging her to “let the child tell the story”.

On the flight home, she reread his great tale of an orphan, the book of his own that he loved best of all, and saw how she could rework it to write about the “lost boys” of Appalachia, where 40% of children have parents who have either died as a result of opioid addiction, are incapacitated by one, or are in prison. Mr Creakle’s boarding school would become a tobacco farm, and the blacking factory, a meth lab; Uriah Heep would be transformed into a soccer coach called U-Haul, and David’s friend Steerforth into Demon’s pal, Fast Forward.

It’s almost outrageous, I tell her: a woman from Kentucky taking on Dickens. She laughs. Her career as a writer, she says, still amazes her – “I get up surprised every day that I do this for a living” – perhaps because her path towards it wasn’t entirely straightforward. The daughter of a doctor, she spent part of her childhood in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an experience she later drew on for The Poisonwood Bible; at university, she began by studying classical piano on a music scholarship before – on the realisation that she didn’t want to spend her life “playing Blue Moon in a hotel lobby” – switching to biology. “I had a wild childhood. I was always catching bugs and lizards and learning the names of things, so science was natural for me. But it also seemed practical. I was lucky to get to college; a lot of my friends had babies by the time they were 17. I had this sense, almost like having been shot into space, of needing to make good use of my time.”

It says something for the conscience of the Church of England that, in 1955, it put up a plaque alongside the former shrine of Little Hugh in Lincoln Cathedral, apologising for the harm it had done by falsely accusing Jews of the ritual slaughter of the boy in 1255.

That Jews habitually murdered gentile children for blood with which to make Passover matzoh, was a popular superstition throughout Britain and Europe in the middle ages. “These fictions cost many innocent Jews their lives,” the plaque reads, “[and] do not redound to the credit of Christendom, and so we pray: Lord, forgive what we have been, amend what we are, and direct what we shall be.”

That it took the Church of England 700 years to amend “what [it] had been” should not detract from the honesty of that amendment, particularly if we remember that the “blood libel”, as it has become known, was still alive and kicking in the modern era, with occurrences of it recorded in Russia and even America as recently as 1928.

Ask wherein the appeal of this libel lies and the answer has to be the necessity for Christians not just to defame Jews and make a clear distinction between Old and New Testament morality, but to set the Jews apart from the entire human family; depraved, accomplices of the devil. And, of course, to justify hunting them down and massacring them.

It has been said often enough that there could hardly have been a more unlikely crime to charge Jews with, given the strict taboo on blood sacrifice and the extreme laws against blood contact and consumption laid down in the Torah. But there lies the further efficacy of the libel – it denies Jews their beliefs, their culture and their nature. It is hateful to be accused of what you haven’t done, but more hateful still to be accused of what you would never dream of doing and what you cannot bear to see done.

Hence the hurt, the anger and the fear that Jewish people have been experiencing in the year since Hamas’s barbaric massacre of Israelis on 7 October and the no less barbaric denials, not to mention celebrations of it, as night after night our televisions have told the story of the war in Gaza through the death of Palestinian children. Night after night, a recital of the numbers dead. Night after night, the unbearable footage of their parents’ agony. The savagery of war. The savagery of the Israeli onslaught. But for many, writing or marching against Israeli action, the savagery of the Jews as told for hundreds of years in literature and art and church sermons.

Here we were again, the same merciless infanticides inscribed in the imaginations of medieval Christians. Only this time, instead of operating on the midnight streets of Lincoln and Norwich, they target Palestinian schools, the paediatric wards of hospitals, the tiny fragile bodies of children themselves. Even when there are other explanations for the devastation, no one really believes them. Reporters whose reports are proved wrong see no reason to apologise. No amendment of their calumnies. What is there to apologise for? It could have been true.

Ask how Israel is able to target innocent children with such deadly accuracy and no one can tell you. Ask why they would want to target innocent children and make themselves despised among the nations of the Earth and no one can tell you that either. Hate on this scale seeks no rational explanation. Hate feeds off the superstitions that fed it last time round. The narrative of these events requires a heartless villainy and who more heartlessly villainous than those who severed the arteries of Little Hugh of Lincoln?

I don’t accuse the BBC and other news outlets of wilfully stirring race-memory of the child-killing Jew of the middle ages. But we don’t have to mean harm to do it. We can wreak havoc just as well by being lazy, by letting our unconscious do the work of thought, by dipping into the communal pile of prejudice and superstition and letting it pepper up our reports.

Events don’t make it on to television through a camera lens alone. What we see is only what an editor chooses for us to see. Yes, somewhere under the rubble is a truth, but closer to the surface is drama.

And if the aim of editors has been to horrify, they have succeeded. Who has been able to watch the evening news on television three nights running without wanting to scream? Scream for those beautiful and broken children, the innocent victims of war, maimed, orphaned, wandering lost through their ruined cities. Scream if you’re a Palestinian, scream if you’re a Christian, scream if you’re a Jew.

A mistake or misascription here, an over-credulousness there, do not a conspiracy make. And I do not minimise the tragedy that has befallen Palestinian children. But when television becomes another mourner by their graveside it can feel as much like propaganda as news. Only compare reporting from Gaza with reporting from Ukraine. Bombs have fallen there, too, but how often is the burial of Ukrainian children the lead story?

Such bias as I have described – conscious or not – has contributed not just to the anxiety level of Jews but to the atmosphere of hostility and fear in which they now live. If you are one of those who believe there is no smoke without fire – Roald Dahl, remember, said there had to be some reason no one liked the Jews – these pictures from Gaza will confirm your conviction that Jews are the devil’s confederates. The litany of dead children corroborates all those stories of their insatiable lust for blood. Maybe the Church of England was wrong to apologise.

Howard Jacobson is a novelist, broadcaster and university lecturer

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It is “impossible” for the People’s Republic of China to become Taiwan’s motherland because Taiwan has older political roots, the island’s president has said.

Lai Ching-te, who took office in May, is condemned by Beijing as a separatist. He rejects Beijing’s sovereignty claims, saying the island is a country called the Republic of China that traces its origins back to the 1911 revolution overthrowing the last imperial dynasty.

The Chinese nationalist government fled to Taiwan in 1949 after losing a civil war with Mao Zedong’s communists. Mao set up the People’s Republic of China, which continues to claim self-governed Taiwan as its territory.

Speaking at a concert ahead of Taiwan’s national day celebrations on 10 October, Lai noted that the People’s Republic had celebrated its 75th anniversary on 1 October and in a few days it would be the Republic of China’s 113th birthday.

“Therefore, in terms of age, it is absolutely impossible for the People’s Republic of China to become the motherland of the Republic of China’s people. On the contrary, the Republic of China may be the motherland of the people of the People’s Republic of China who are over 75 years old,” Lai added, to applause.

“One of the most important meanings of these celebrations is that we must remember that we are a sovereign and independent country.”

China’s Taiwan affairs office did not answer calls seeking comment outside office hours, the Reuters news agency said.

The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, in a speech on the eve of his country’s national day, reiterated his government’s view that Taiwan is its territory.

Lai, who will give his own keynote national day address on 10 October, has needled Beijing before with historical references. In September, he said that if China’s claims on Taiwan were about territorial integrity then it should also take back land from Russia signed over by the last Chinese dynasty in the 19th century.

With Reuters

My wife – and best friend– of the past 38 years can no longer say the word “hippopotamus” or count backwards from 100, or draw a watch face on a piece of paper. Sometimes she leaves the oven on or forgets to turn off the kitchen tap, and yesterday she wandered into the wrong stairwell of our apartment block.

Two years ago, at the age of 60, Cathie was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s and our lives changed irrevocably. There were no soothing words from the family doctor as a bureaucratic error had sent us the PET scan that confirmed our fears. We read the results together and one of us, the weaker one, cried for a week. Then I pulled myself together and focused on what’s important.

Since then, we’ve sold our Blue Mountains house and moved back to Brisbane where we were born. Cathie wanted warm weather and to be close to her parents, and our youngest son. Most of all, she wanted a dog. Enter Biscuit, a 3.5kg toy poodle and the best anti-Alzheimer’s medication invented. Cathie has smiled and laughed more since Biscuit entered our lives than ever. It has left me feeling sheepish that I wasn’t attentive or entertaining enough these past few decades, such is Biscuit’s unrelenting positivity.

We both feel blessed.

Of course, Biscuit sleeps between us. In the morning, it’s often a few minutes before Cathie acknowledges me, such is her focus on the dog. I savour every moment.

Cathie exhibited none of the risk factors for Alzheimer’s. She had an excellent diet; an active social life; was very fit – only a few years ago we cycled from Marseille to Norway. We regularly spent months cycling in foreign lands. I’m grateful now that we didn’t wait until retirement to travel. Cathie still wants to see the world, still wants to explore exotic tastes and meet new people.

Everyone reacted differently when we told them the diagnosis. Most people have been supportive, aware that regular social events are our lifeblood. Cathie lunches with friends, volunteers at the local Salvos, takes bellydance classes on Friday as a student, even though she taught it for 20 years. We have more dinner party invitations than at any time in our lives.

Alzheimer’s is not the loss of memory. A relative, on hearing Cathie’s diagnosis, suggested she might have it as well because she sometimes forgets things. I sucked in a deep breath before explaining that Alzheimer’s attacks more than memory. Yes, Cathie forget things. But it’s the unexpected stuff that hurts. Cathie’s language skills have changed dramatically. We don’t care that she can’t say hippopotamus, but she now rarely speaks in sentences, or can find the accurate word, or pronounce a range of simple and not-so-simple words. My worst fear is that she’ll stop trying to verbalise.

I’m learning to never ask “either-or” questions. Beach? Or bushwalk? Cathie will look confused for a few seconds, smile gently and say yes. I’m always humbled at how often she says yes. She’s up for anything, as long as Biscuit can accompany us.

Cathie prefers colourful dresses and tops, where previously she favoured what she called the “Greek grandmother look’” of black on black. While I cook most evenings, she’s determined to keep trying. We joke whether the result will be of her usual delicious standard or a “Mrs Cropley”.

I hate visiting the neurology department of our hospital. They are sensitive and kind and professional, and I watch them measuring Cathie’s changes. We use the word “changes”. It sounds better than “losses”. Last visit they offered Cathie a higher dose of an antidepressant, because despite the headlines of “major Alzheimer’s breakthrough”, there’s little the doctors can do than this, and to monitor the losses. Sorry, the changes.

I’ve made my living as a writer for 40 years. Since Cathie’s diagnosis, I haven’t been able to face a new manuscript. Writing a book is more than sitting at a desk each morning. It’s living with the characters while walking the dog, or cycling, or doing the shopping. The emotional energy of creating … I’d rather spend it with Cathie and Biscuit.

Every day I detest Alzheimer’s and what’s it’s doing to the person I love. And every day I’m in awe of how Cathie responds to its ravages. Quietly, stoically, with patience, and sometimes tears, before hugging Biscuit and me.

She kisses my bald head when we sit on the lounge. She never did that before the diagnosis. I know what the disease is taking, but Cathie responds with gestures such as this. When we visit our youngest son and daughter-in-law, she washes the dishes piled on the bench, or helps Joe cook, or chats to Rose about clothes and travel.

I know there will come a time when Cathie no longer recognises me, or Joe, or Rose. Or our eldest son Jack and his wife Emma. Or, shudder, our precious grandson, Billy. She’ll sit in a chair staring out the window, at a world shrunken and frail, Biscuit asleep on her lap.

For now, I smile whenever possible. We live one moment at a time, and marvel at the accuracy of cliches.

I prefer today rather than tomorrow.

Tyrell Malacia

The first signing of the Erik ten Hag era, ticking the key criterion of coming from the Eredivisie. It’s difficult to say too much about a player who last featured in June 2023. The left-back made a lot of appearances in his first season but a knee injury has kept him out for 16 months. Rating 1/5

Antony

When the club paid £85.6m for the Brazilian winger, they were expecting a world beater but got ineptitude. Antony will go down as one of the worst pound-for-pound signings. Ten Hag knew him from Ajax and thought he could lead the new era at Old Trafford, but he has been a painful disappointment, putting the blame at the Dutchman’s door. Off-field issues have been a further problem for the 24-year-old who has played one Premier League minute this season, having slipped down the pecking order. 1/5

Casemiro

At the time, he was what United needed but came with a high price tag of £50m plus add-ons for a midfielder over the age of 30. After almost a decade of success with Real Madrid, he had a winner’s mentality, helping United qualify for the Champions League in his first season, but an ageing body. He has been unable to cope with the pace of the Premier League over the past 15 months. 2/5

Lisandro Martínez

Another who moved with Ten Hag from Amsterdam. The combative defender has been one of the more positive arrivals, adding steel to a defence that has too often been weak. Injuries have been a problem but when available is always first choice. 4/5

Wout Weghorst

A desperation signing when United needed an extra striker and could not find anyone suitable at short notice, making an available Dutchman the best option. Tried his best after joining on loan from Burnley but was never at the required standard nor did he fit into the system, netting zero goals in 17 Premier League outings. 2/5

Christian Eriksen

Has never looked like what United need in midfield, lacking speed and is insufficiently robust. Occasionally offers glimpses of the world-class midfielder he once was but those days are behind him. On the upside, at least he did not cost a fee. 3/5

Jack Butland

The goalkeeper never played but was on the substitutes’ bench 20 times. N/A

Marcel Sabitzer

United’s financial situation has seen them dip far too regularly into the loan market. The Austrian’s high point of a forgettable spell was scoring twice in a Europa League quarter-final against Sevilla but the club did not make his move permanent. 2/5

Rasmus Højlund

A striker with potential but like others before him has lacked service. The £72m fee seemed excessive at the time, considering Atalanta paid a quarter of that to sign him 12 months previously. A reminder that United have not been smart in the transfer market for a long time. 3/5

Mason Mount

Kickstarted the second summer of transfer business but it was never particularly obvious where he would fit into the team with others already at the club who could play in his position(s). Injury meant he never got going in his first season and has interrupted the second already as he struggles to remind everyone of the player he once was at Chelsea. 2/5

André Onana

Was available for nothing when his former Ajax manager Ten Hag arrived at United, but let his reputation grow at Inter, forcing United to invest £45m in the Cameroonian goalkeeper. Was unconvincing in the early part of his Old Trafford career but has become a steady performer in an indifferent team. 3/5

Sofyan Amrabat

Another familiar face to Ten Hag, joining on loan on deadline day at the end of the summer 2023 window. Never looked comfortable playing for United, not helped by playing in numerous positions, but did produce a fine FA Cup final performance against Manchester City. 3/5

Altay Bayindir

The Turkish goalkeeper played twice and was victorious on both occasions, giving him a 100% record as a United player. No one else can boast that. 2/5

Jonny Evans

A shock signing when the veteran centre-back returned to the club aged 35, a decade after leaving. Played a lot more games – sometimes at left-back – than he expected and even earned a one-year contract extension, having rarely let anyone down. 3/5

Sergio Reguilón

An underrated loan signing from Tottenham as United needed a left-back. Was allowed to return in January, which was a mistake considering his steady presence and the inability for Luke Shaw or Malacia to stay fit. 3/5

Leny Yoro

The 18-year-old defender is a £52m long-term investment but has been prevented from making his debut after suffering a pre-season injury. N/A

Manuel Ugarte

United’s potential gamechanger in defensive midfield with Casemiro’s decline. Too early to judge whether the 23-year-old Uruguayan signed from PSG will be the transformational signing but his performance against Spurs drew criticism from Marco van Basten who called him “idiotic”. 3/5

Matthijs de Ligt

Another who worked with Ten Hag at Ajax and has plenty of experience for a 25-year-old centre-back. The manager hopes his partnership with Martínez can provide the stability in defence United have lacked for a long time but is yet to show the class his CV promises, giving the impression of being too slow in mind and body. 2/5

Joshua Zirkzee

When an out-and-out striker to challenge Hojlund was needed, United went for a player Ten Hag describes as a “nine and a half” as his first signing of the past summer. Produced a wonderful finish on debut against Fulham but has not scored since and does not look likely to be prolific. 3/5

Noussair Mazraoui

Another of Ten Hag’s former charges, the Morocco international grew up in the Netherlands, joining from Bayern Munich. The versatile defender can operate in numerous positions and is bedding into the team. 3/5

I was a young dancer based in Queensland when in 2012 I got my first international gig at the Leipzig Ballet in Germany, and a year later a beautiful Brazilian named Naiara joined the company. Her personality was infectious and I was instantly drawn to her high energy and natural charisma.

I was attracted to her from the jump and tried to put some moves on, but we were so young – just 22 and 19. I guess she thought I was just playing the field and wasn’t interested in taking it there with me. But we were good colleagues and socialised a lot together. For three years we coasted along that way and were never paired together as dancers.

It wasn’t until I got another job in Switzerland and knew I’d be leaving the company that I goofily approached her in the studio to confess the chemistry I felt between us and the respect I had for her as an artist, and a person. It was a shot in the dark, but I could see it shifted her interest in me.

Before I left for the new job, our company toured in Colombia and romance blossomed. Back in Germany we started spending a lot of time together. By 2016 I was in love. There was this beautiful simplicity to our dynamic. From early on we could be together in silence – dancers are good at communicating without words. I could feel her, I could understand her; that happened so quickly for us.

Between gigs in 2017 – me in Switzerland, Naiara in Germany – we had a summer break and I invited her to Australia to meet my family. Our closeness grew ever deeper, but we knew we were headed into the unknown of a long-distance relationship once we got back to Europe.

It was an eight-hour journey between Leipzig and Basel, but we never let more than a fortnight pass without seeing each other. For some couples distance can create a chasm, for us it brought us closer together. But it wasn’t without its challenges and after about a year she presented me with an ultimatum – we had to be in the same city.

As the pandemic bore down in 2020, I managed to get into the same company she was dancing for in St Gallen, Switzerland. Because of the rules around physical contact during Covid, the fact that we were a couple and living together meant we were paired together for duets, finally.

I remember one day in the studio there we were rehearsing a difficult lift. Naiara assured me my grip was wrong. I kept telling her it was the right thing to do. She kept telling me, “It’s wrong, it’s wrong.”

Despite the risk she obliged me and went into the jump 100%. Partly, I think, to prove she was right, but also because she knew that even if things went wrong, I would catch her. Which I did, just before her head hit the floor.

I felt so silly that I hadn’t double-checked it and believed her, but I understood at that moment how implicit her trust in me was, and how much responsibility I felt towards her. In the moments she’s above my head and our eyes meet, it’s like we are looking into each other’s souls – it’s profound connection, ultimate trust.

I feel like we are in complete balance together. In life and in dance we know where each other’s going, it’s a joint instinct which is so beautiful to share. It’s like we are dancing our way not just through our choreography but through our day-to-day life together. In 2022 that synchronicity brought us to Australia when we joined the Sydney Dance Company.

In the studio and at home, we’ve shared many scary moments together, pushing the limits of our trust for and responsibility to each other’s hearts and bodies. But whether we are doing a duet or making dinner, that sense of vulnerability and nurturing each other makes me feel love. True love.

• Piran Scott and Naiara de Matos appear in the Sydney Dance Company’s production of Momenta at the Arts Centre Melbourne, 8-12 October.