DOCTORS have urged passengers to pick up a simple £2.99 item to avoid pain during flights.

Many flyers can experience sinus pain when on a flight – caused by changes in pressure.

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This is caused aerosinusitis and, unlike “aeroplane ear“, which can be solved by popping your ears, it doesn’t have an easy fix.

However, doctors say that simple congestion relief medicine can do the trick – which can be picked up for as little as £2.99.

Dr Richard Lebowitz, an ear, nose, and throat (ENT) doctor at NYU Langone Medical Center, told the Thrillist website: “The sinuses are air-filled spaces – that is, empty spaces – in the bones of your face, and they have little openings in them, so they can equalize pressure.

“They’re normally just always open, but they can get blocked from swelling or inflammation of the sinus lining.”

Dr Richard explained that this could cause intense pain for flyers.

He said:  “The sinus needs to equalize pressure, too. But there’s no way for it to do it, so it just keeps getting worse and worse over the course of that descent. It can be really excruciating at times.”

Moving on to the simple treatment, Dr Richard said: “You can try to reduce the swelling of the membranes that can block the opening, so that would mean using the same things you’d use if you have this problem with your ears – Rin and Sudafed.”

He added that in extreme cases, doctors may prescribe oral steroids for inflammation – and in even more extreme cases, a surgical procedure can be undertaken.

He said: “It’s very easy to fix the problem if you’re someone who has this regularly and flies a lot or professionally.

“You have to open up those sinus drainage halfway surgically. Once you do that, the problem goes away.”

Aerosinusitis can be extremely uncomfortable for some passengers.

Erica Klauber, 39, recalled experiencing severe pain and even fearing she was having an aneurysm while on a business trip in 2013.

She said:  “I remember looking at the guy next to me.

“I was like, ‘Should I reach out and tell him? Do I have the faculties to tell him that this is it?’”

However Dr Richard reassured travellers that as painful as may feel, aerosinusitis is “not really a big deal”, adding: “Once the pain has resolved, the problem is resolved.”

He added that while many patients fear their heads might explode, “that isn’t a real thing. Your sinus cannot explode or implode. It just hurts a lot.”

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The EU is stuck in a paradox. Virtually everyone agrees that most of Mario Draghi’s recommendations for raising productivity growth are good ones. Yet hardly anyone expects that member states will muster the agreement to pool the sovereignty and resources needed to realise them.

The reasons are many. Some of Draghi’s most consequential ideas have long been bedevilled by the political differences of 27 countries, national commercial rivalries or by leaders’ unwillingness to prioritise what often come down to highly technical measures — especially against vocal domestic constituencies.

One or more of these reasons have so far held back the banking and capital markets union (CMU). They have also delayed bigger joint investments in carbon transition and defence, completing the single market, and making international economic policy more strategic without losing the benefits of Europe’s openness.

On top of it all, Europe’s traditional Franco-German integration motor looks as obsolescent as an internal combustion engine in China. Paris is paralysed by elections that produced a parliament without a majority; Berlin by a government that has long since fallen out of favour with voters and even, it seems, with itself. Even where they ostensibly agree — a year ago they published a joint road map to CMU — they are not propelling the EU forward.

If anything is going to get done, it will not be by traditional methods. What if, instead, one could identify a group of nations that trusted each other enough and had sufficiently similar policy preferences to form a “coalition of the willing” for the deeper integration Draghi and others call for? Provisions in the EU treaties for “enhanced co-operation” allow as few as nine countries to do so with the full support of EU institutions when broader agreement is elusive.

So look north. The three Baltic and three Nordic EU members already collaborate as the “Nordic-Baltic Six”. The Nordics have had passport-free travel and free movement of people for 70 years. The region’s countries see eye-to-eye in areas from financial regulation and fiscal matters to defence, security, trade and climate.

Add in Ireland and the Netherlands to regroup what some years ago was known as “the New Hanseatic League”, and you have the EU’s most developed capital markets. Together, these eight approach France in population. They match it in economic size. And they have strength in numbers.

It is not hard to imagine a cohesive bloc centred on the “NB6” recruiting enough other countries — maybe different ones for different policy areas — to maintain the nine-country quorum for enhanced co-operation.

Such a coalition could start with two crucial ingredients for a more dynamic European economy: CMU (more common rules, supervision and financial trading) and a “28th regime” of corporate law as an opt-in alternative to national incorporation for companies wanting to do business and raise funds at scale.

The economic prize is evident. An already innovative region with better-working capital markets than the rest of Europe would boost the ability of EU entrepreneurs to raise capital and scale up activity without having to move across the Atlantic. The region’s financial sectors would benefit.

There are political advantages, too. These countries could build something they want without being held up by the need to compromise with the wider bloc. To be more ambitious about it, the mere prospect of such a coalition might ungum deadlock as other states fear being left behind. Alternatively, others would come in later, but on terms the early adopters had already defined. There are big first-mover advantages to being pioneers.

The irony is that, more often than not, these nations have been like-minded in putting a brake on integration, not furthering it. So this approach would require a profound change of outlook for Europe’s northern flank. Rather than small-country bit players suspicious of the continental powers, the region would need to see itself as a leader of Europe in a newly dangerous world. Also, the European Commission would have to welcome enhanced co-operation as a lever for progress, not a threat.

But the leadership for this exists. The likes of Finland’s president, the deeply pro-European Alexander Stubb could take the initiative for leaders in the region. They should dare to inspire their citizens to be agents of change rather than a wary resistance to the EU’s traditional powers. If successful, such inspiration would not be contained in the EU’s northern flank. Rise to the challenge together, and they could transform the politics of an entire continent.

martin.sandbu@ft.com

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French energy giant TotalEnergies is studying whether to start trading copper, potentially paving the way to expand its vast oil trading operations into metals for the first time to capitalise on the energy transition.

Rahim Azouni, senior vice-president of crude, fuel and derivatives trading, said the company has been “studying the case” for trading copper, in remarks made at a closed-door conference in London, according to several people who attended.

Azouni cited the energy transition as the reason to consider expanding into copper trading, but added that it had not yet decided to do so, people who heard his remarks on Wednesday told the Financial Times.

TotalEnergies already has a vast trading arm that handles oil products, gas, power and new fuels, though it does not disclose the size of its trading activities. 

His remarks come as a growing number of oil traders are expanding into metals to capitalise on the world’s need for copper, which is used in electricity cables, buildings and electric vehicles. The race for cleaner energy is also boosting demand for aluminium and nickel.

While global copper demand is expected to surge over the next decade, the oil market has been lacklustre this year with China’s reduced demand for the fossil fuel keeping prices low despite war in the Middle East.

Traders and trading firms that have built their fortunes around trading oil, recording bumper profits during the energy price volatility since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, are increasingly moving into metals to capitalise on demand. 

Vitol, the world’s largest independent oil trader, has recently returned to metals trading, a business that it exited in 2014.

This year it poached two aluminium traders from a rival firm, and is focused on aluminium as part of its energy transition strategy.

Geneva-based commodity firm Mercuria is also expanding into metals, building a 60-person metals trading unit under Kostas Bintas, formerly the co-head of metals at rival Trafigura.

Even hedge fund manager Pierre Andurand, one of the world’s top-performing energy traders, has shifted to focusing on copper and other metals. Earlier this year he predicted that copper would reach $40,000 a tonne over the coming years, quadruple its current price. 

Tom Price, resources analyst at Panmure Liberum, said that low volatility in the oil market, and long-term changes in energy systems, were driving the shift to metals.

“They can see oil demand and the oil market in trend decline, and they are trying to de-risk that world, by switching to [the] metals world,” said Price, adding that the transition might be difficult for companies built around oil trading.

“These markets aren’t structured the same way as oil,” he said. “In principle they can do it, but in practice it will be a struggle.”

TotalEnergies Chief Executive Patrick Pouyanné has previously said that the energy transition is likely to increase energy prices in the long term, although the group is now also bracing for a period of lower prices in liquefied natural gas as more supply comes online, especially from 2027 onwards.

That has added to Total’s incentive to buttress its earnings, with the company telling investors on Wednesday that it was confident it could “de-risk” its LNG activities and operate profitably.

TotalEnergies declined to comment on the copper trading plans.

Additional reporting by Sarah White

“There are actors who have a stratospheric rise straight after drama school and there are others that happens to later on,” says Adeel Akhtar, star of Sherwood, Utopia and Fool Me Once, drily noting that he is in the latter category.

In his twenties, Akhtar was “unemployed for years”; at 30, to reduce living costs, he set up home in a van. “It’s hard to know whether it was simply the difficulty of being an actor,” he says, “or whether it was the context in which I was acting, which was that there weren’t many parts available for people like me.” Did he ever think about giving up and doing something else? “All the time. But one thing my parents instilled in me was that if you start something you’ve got to finish it.”

Akhtar, 44, and I are talking at his publicist’s office in London’s Fitzrovia (he lives south of the Thames in Camberwell). After a string of successful TV and film appearances, it’s safe to say that those lean years are behind him, though experience has taught him not to take anything for granted. Recognisable by his hangdog features — he has been described as looking permanently “sleepy”, which he concedes is accurate — his is a face viewers will know, even if they can’t always summon a name.

He excels at portraying underdogs or men struggling to keep a lid on their darker impulses. He first made his mark as a blundering jihadi who accidentally blows himself up in Chris Morris’s 2010 satire Four Lions. In 2016, he brought unexpected tenderness to the role of a man who kills his daughter after she resists an arranged marriage in Murdered By My Father, and in the first series of Sherwood he played a shy widower who kills his son’s fiancée and goes into hiding. Both parts earned him Bafta Awards for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, respectively. Collecting his award for Sherwood, he said: “It feels a little bit like a miracle.”

The miracle wasn’t that he won, he says now, but the presence of so many Black and brown faces at the ceremony, among them his friend Meera Syal, who played his mother in the BBC comedy drama Back To Life. He had similar feelings recently when he went to see Slave Play, Jeremy O Harris’s drama about interracial couples, at a theatre that hosted Black Out nights for people of colour. “There is something really powerful about not being a minority in a room,” he says. “It sort of feels miraculous when the [usual] feeling is you defining yourself as what you’re not as opposed to what you are.”

Akhtar’s latest role is in the BBC crime drama Showtrial, which is back for a second series. He plays Sam Malik, an insomniac lawyer hired to defend a police officer accused of the murder of an environmental activist. The officer in question is Justin Mitchell, played with chilling charisma by Michael Socha (This is England, Being Human). While Mitchell makes no secret of his loathing towards the victim, and for climate activists generally, Malik tries to hide his dislike of his cocksure client, who protests his innocence but whose guilt seems certain.

“We’re sitting in that tension,” says Akhtar, “because everyone has a right to a defence . . . The show is interrogating whether that makes Sam’s job easier or more difficult — and I think it’s both.”

Long scenes between Akhtar and Socha in a police interview room have the feel of a play, both in their intensity and the simplicity of the staging. “It was very much a tennis game between us,” Akhtar says. “When I was acting opposite Michael, and he was saying something really confronting, the reactions that we had were very much in the moment. That must be what it’s like, to defend somebody who’s charismatic and who can make you slightly buy into their worldview. And then you have to shake it off and think, ‘No, that’s not how the world is or should be’.”

Playing a solicitor wasn’t a stretch for Akhtar, who, many years ago, nearly became one. His father, a first-generation immigrant from Pakistan, worked as an immigration officer at Heathrow airport before retraining as a lawyer. His son was expected to follow in his footsteps. “It wasn’t even a discussion,” Akhtar recalls. “He said, ‘You’re going to be a lawyer’ and even filled out my [university application] form.”

But Akhtar made no secret of his love of acting, even though British Asians were few and far between in the films and TV shows he watched. He recalls seeing My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and noticing how “these people were defined by their characters and their idiosyncrasies and not simply their race. It lit something up in my brain to know that could exist.”

It was his mother who sent him for speech and drama lessons at school: “She just wanted me to say my T’s properly.” Later, unbeknown to his father, she helped him get into the National Youth Theatre. At 16, he and some school friends put on a production of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming. It was his first experience of teachers telling him he was good at something, and led to the realisation that “art can really mirror the life that you’re living. And it can be a beautiful release from the tensions that you’re feeling. I found it intoxicating.”

Nonetheless, after school, Akhtar adhered to his father’s wishes and completed his law degree. But just as he was preparing for his legal practice course, fate intervened with a trip to New York. His girlfriend at the time was auditioning for the Actors Studio Drama School, so Akhtar volunteered to be her scene-study partner — “I was there to help her with her lines and make her look good.”

After he got home, the school rang and said they liked what he did on stage and suggested he study there. Akhtar dropped everything and went for it. The course, he says, was “very method-y. It was all about rigour and living the part. They used to do this thing called the coffee-cup exercise, where we would spend ages drinking an imaginary cup of coffee. You had to feel the heat, you had to smell it. After I left, I thought: ‘why not just drink a cup of coffee?’”

Nowadays, he employs a way of working that doesn’t involve imaginary hot drinks: “I’ve got kids, I don’t have time for all that stuff,” he says with mock exasperation. “[Acting] can be complicated or you can be loyal to your first instincts when you read something and not stray too far from that.”

‘Showtrial’ is on BBC1 and iPlayer from October 6

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THE Italian island of Giglio is home to wide sandy beaches and hidden coves, and it remains largely untouched by hordes of holidaymakers.

Set in the Tyrrhenian Sea, Giglio is just one of the seven major islands that form part of the Tuscan Archipelago.

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The string of seven islands, which include the more commonly known Elba, were said to have been formed by the scattered pearls of the goddess Venus’s necklace.

Covering just nine square miles, Giglio is home to just 1,100 residents.

While this number swells somewhat in the summer months, the Italian island remains largely untouched by British holidaymakers.

Home to the island’s ferry port, Giglio Porto is the main town on the island.

The harbour is backed by a string colourful houses where the majority of the island’s residents live.

From Giglio Porto, day-trippers can rent a small motorboat, which means they can explore hidden coves that aren’t reachable from land.

There are also several scuba dive centres located in Giglio Potro where scuba divers can hire equipment and book onto underwater tours, to explore shipwrecks, sea caves and coral walls in the waters surrounding Giglio Porto.

Other towns on the island include Giglio Castello and Giglio Campese.

Located on the top of a hill, Giglio Castello is an ancient medieval village that’s home to formidable city walls and winding cobblestone streets.

Meanwhile, Giglio Campese is home to Giglio Campese Beach, the largest beach on the island.

The dark red sand is the most tourist-focused spot on the island, with visitors able to rent out sunloungers and parasols.

Other beaches on the island include Cannelle Beach, which has fine white sand and crystal-clear waters and Caldane Beach, one of the smallest beaches on the island.

Visitors can reach Giglio on a direct ferry service from Porto Santo Stefano on the Tuscan mainland.

Ferry journeys take roughly one hour with tickets starting from £11 per person.

And there are plenty of other secluded spots in Italy only locals seem to know about, including Ponza.

Ponza

Ponza is part of the Pontine archipelago in the Tyrrhenian Sea, and it is home to beaches that rival Capri — but for a fraction of the price.

One of the more rustic Italian islands, with its untouched natural landscapes, hidden coves and sea caves.

To get there, you can hop on a train from Rome’s main station, Termini, to the port city of Anzio. The journey takes just over an hour and costs around £5.

Meanwhile, here are the 100 best beaches in the world to visit in 2024 – and four from the UK have made the cut.

And one tiny UK town has been compared to a stunning Italian island.

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Of all the places classical composers have written music, backstage at a basketball arena while on tour with Kanye West has to be one of the most unusual. But that is where Caroline Shaw found herself snatching moments as the rapper performed his 2016 album The Life of Pablo, some of whose tracks Shaw had sung on, written for and helped to produce. “He is a creative mind that invites a lot of possibilities,” she says, “very open ears yet also very closed ears — knows what he likes, knows what he doesn’t.”

As we sit in the glassy café of Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw concert hall, rain heaving down outside, she says West’s porous, slightly chaotic way of working influenced the piece she was writing then, “inviting a lot of texts in, a lot of ideas, letting them combine in a certain way . . . It’s antithetical to how you’re taught to work as a composer, which is the cabin in the woods. You write one thing, you are very close to the page and every dot and every line matters.”

Her approach could not be more different. “I’m thinking about eight different things at once, how do you invite them in and work really quickly to make something that feels very new and very exciting?” She withdrew from West’s orbit after he praised Donald Trump in 2016, then reconnected with him after a couple of years, but “it was tenuous and I haven’t been in touch since 2019 or so.”

Shaw, 42, occupies an unusual position, then: composer, singer, violinist; the youngest winner — at the time — of the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2013 for Partita for 8 Voices, a work requiring almost shocking dexterity; collaborator with megastars West and Rosalía; reworker of influences from Schubert to Abba. (Her spare version of “Lay All Your Love On Me” with American quartet Sō Percussion turns a horny invitation into a haunting spiritual invocation.) It might not make such sense — until you hear any of her work and the singularity of her voice becomes immediately clear.

There are plenty of opportunities to do this in the next year. As well as touring Oslo, Paris and large US cities this autumn, Shaw has been named 2024-25 composer in residence at London’s Wigmore Hall, which has programmed her in several concerts, and she has written the soundtrack to Ken Burns’s new documentary on Leonardo.

The Leonardo da Vinci score required an immense amount of music — about two and a half hours, Shaw estimates — but it played to her strengths. She was able to collaborate with her longtime partners Attacca Quartet, Sō Percussion and Roomful of Teeth, an extraordinary vocal band, and it allowed her to write shorter pieces for smaller ensembles. “Being able to create a world within four minutes is really exciting,” she says.

Her string quartet Plan & Elevation, inspired by the grounds of a historic Washington estate, is a scant 15 minutes yet manages to suggest, in its sparse Baroque mode, pitted with plucked violins and spacious silences, not just a human alone in the grounds but at a questioning remove from the universe, and sympathy for both states. Attacca Quartet’s Andrew Yee told me: “There’s something in the way that she sees the world that is kinder than I think most people see it, and it comes through in her music.”

Shaw, who was born in North Carolina in 1982, started learning the violin aged two, taught by her mother, and sang in church choirs, which exposed her to the sacred music whose influences percolate her work, from early plainsong to 16th-century polyphony and into the modern era. After degrees in violin performance, she was accepted into Princeton’s PhD composition programme without any formal training.

Since then, her career has shot off in many directions but chamber music has remained central, which is why it was surprising to hear she had taken on an opera commission. However, that’s no longer part of her schedule. “I’ve decided I’m not meant for that right now,” she says. “I’ve learnt to know what I can do and what I can’t do, what I’m good for and what is not the right thing.”

What she wants to do is stand up for the small: “For young composers, [there is] the idea that the greatest achievement is an opera or a big orchestra piece or these things that signify status or arrival . . . The stuff that feels the closest to me, the most honest, is the string quartets, the small things, or collaborating with people I know.”

Collaboration repeatedly comes up as an idea. Shaw once said that what she saw of contemporary classical music “wasn’t what I was looking for”; more than composers demanding feats of virtuosic prowess, the scene was dominated by “a values system and a priority system . . . that was decided by people 50 years ago”.

What she desired was to write “something that I wanted to hear . . . and things I hoped the people making the music, which sometimes includes myself, would genuinely enjoy and feel comfortable being themselves in.” That can mean co-creating songs, as with Sō Percussion, or giving Attacca Quartet freedom to interpret her scores. (Attacca has won two Grammys for its recordings of Shaw’s music; Shaw herself has four.)

The classical music world’s dynamic has changed greatly in recent decades, Shaw says, but still has a way to go. For example, why should concerts always contain full works? She likes “the idea [of] mixing up movements of pieces rather than ‘We must perform the entire Haydn quartet’, but hearing a little bit of this next to something else”.

To play devil’s advocate, that sounds like it will end in programmes of greatest hits, the 1812 Overture over and over again. Not so, volleys Shaw: “Think about it in terms of the things that don’t get performed . . . because we’ve played those other two movements of that quartet that aren’t really that good.” She laughs. “I would like to create an open conversation about ‘Some music isn’t that good and some music is really great, and you know when you hear it.’”

The straitjacket of classical programming has a high opportunity cost. “If 60 per cent of the concert is music that isn’t really that good, it’s not like we’ve preserved that, we’ve just lost the potential for a huge audience to hear something that is really good . . . That’s the big takeaway: some music just isn’t that good!”

A lot of people in classical music would never say that.

“We never say that,” she says, both a joke and an indictment.

Caroline Shaw’s first concert as composer in residence at Wigmore Hall takes place on October 9, wigmore-hall.org.uk. ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ is on PBS in the US on November 18 and 19, pbs.org

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