A woman who had a nasty hangover was left horrified after discovering her symptoms were actually a sign of cancer.

Amber Orr, from Ballymena in Northern Ireland, woke up with tummy pain and extreme nausea in March 2019 and assumed it was just due to heavy drinking with friends the night before.

However, when the 24-year-old was still suffering from ‘unbearable’ pain and throwing up days later, her mother rushed her to hospital.

There, doctors discovered the social work student’s appendix had ruptured and perform emergency surgery to remove it. 

But rather than her medical ordeal being over, further tests revealed that the rupture was triggered by a cancerous tumour in her abdomen. 

Amber had been partying with friends in Belfast in spring 2019, when she was 19-years-old.

Despite brushing-off her illness the next day as the after-effects of alcohol, her symptoms lasted for another two days.

She said: ‘When I woke up feeling sick, I blamed it on being hungover.

‘But as the day progressed, I realised it wasn’t a hangover.

‘I kept getting this unbearable pain in my side and I was throwing up.’

Her mother then took her to Antrim Area Hospital when she showed no signs of getting better. 

Medics monitored Amber overnight, suspecting that she had an UTI — an infection of the urinary tract that can cause pain in the lower tummy.

But after spending another 48 hours in hospital, she was rushed into surgery because her appendix — a finger-shaped organ with no known function — had burst. It’s usually not clear what causes an appendicitis. 

Amber underwent further tests and was sent home.

She assumed her health woes were over until two weeks later when she got a call from the hospital, asking her to come back in.

Once she arrived, medics sat her down and told her that test results showed she had a cancerous neuroendocrine mass — a rare tumour the can develop in many of the body’s organs.

Amber’s had been located in her appendix, before it was removed, and had also spread to her bowel.

Around 6,000 people in the UK and more than 12,000 in the US are diagnosed with the cancer every year.

Symptoms depend on where the tumour is located. Those in the bowel can trigger diarrhoea, constipation and tummy pains. 

Amber said she had ‘never thought’ that she had cancer.

She added: ‘I didn’t feel anything. It was more of a numbness. I didn’t properly digest the information until months later.

‘Cancer is a such a taboo word and subject and to hear it out loud is such a surreal thing.

‘My diagnosis also happened so fast that I honestly didn’t have time to even think about what was happening to me until the whole thing was over.’

Doctors told her that she would require surgery to remove the tumour and chemotherapy to kill any surviving cells.

But the procedure in May 2019, which removed half of her bowel, successfully cleared her of the cancer — meaning she didn’t require further treatment.

She has now been in remission for four years.

However, it continues to impact her mental health.

She said: ‘I can’t count the number of hours I’ve spent crying and breaking down because of how cancer has made me feel.

‘Whether that be physically, from the scars on my body, or mentally, from the anxiety and depression from treatment and fear of it returning.

‘You don’t realise just how much cancer impacts your mental health.

‘My mental health didn’t take a hit until after I was in remission.’

Amber is now using her experience to raise awareness of the long-term effects of cancer and the importance of early detection.

She said: ‘If my appendix hadn’t burst, I wouldn’t have found my cancer until it was terminal.

‘I try to use my story to encourage others to check themselves and listen to their bodies.

‘I also want to give them the confidence to book appointments and stand up for themselves when they feel something isn’t right.

‘Cancer doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t matter your age, gender, or race.

‘I want to give back to the places that helped, like the Teenage Cancer Trust and Young Lives vs. Cancer, by fundraising, because without the help of their social workers and nurses, I know for a fact I couldn’t have made it out the other side.’

Amber will be starting her degree in social work this month.

She added: ‘I am looking forward to getting my degree and hopefully becoming a social worker for the NHS, working specifically with cancer patients.

‘If I can help even one person the way that they helped me, I know that I’ll be doing something right.

‘As much as cancer has changed my life, it doesn’t define who I am.

‘It shouldn’t get to take over my life and make me afraid to live.’

Thought Hilton hotels were all cookie-cutter properties favouring the bland over the beautiful?

Think again.

Le Hameau des Pesquiers Ecolodge & Spa on the French Riviera is one of the more memorable reminders that the U.S hospitality behemoth also offers accommodation that’s delightfully unique.

This gem, which opened in July 2022, is part of Hilton’s ‘Curio Collection’, a set of ‘individually remarkable hotels’.

Le Hameau des Pesquiers lives up to the billing, I discover, being alluringly artisanal and transfixingly fetching, with sincerely charming service thrown in for good measure.

It’s a magical place to stay in a spellbinding location, with beaches that rival the Maldives just moments away.

The property lies in the Port-Cros National Park, on a stunning double tombolo that connects the port area of Hyeres (a favourite holiday spot for Queen Victoria) with the picturesque Giens peninsula – with the paradise ‘Golden Islands’ of Porquerolles, Port-Cros and Le Levant short ferry rides away.

In front of the hotel is the sparkling Mediterranean, behind the Pesquiers salt marshes – inhabited by flocks of flamingoes – and all around are eye-catching trees.

Le Hameau des Pesquiers is a haven, and like all the best havens, it’s easy to miss.

There’s no roadside signage, so if you’re driving approach slowly and keep your eyes peeled for a dusty track blocked by a thick wooden security gate on the left, a few minutes south of the port area.

We arrive in a Renault SUV hire car we pick up via booking.com on the outskirts of nearby Toulon, and once I’ve hopped out to state our business to reception via an intercom, the gate slides open and I park up in the (dusty) car park – then enjoy palpably feeling my blood pressure drop.

I’m staying at the 48-room hotel with my six-year-old daughter and French partner, who grew up in Hyeres.

She is stunned at the transformation of the site – for it was occupied by eerie abandoned buildings for decades.

Between 1806 and 1990 they were owned by a salt production company that mined the nearby marshes, then fell into ruin when the operation ceased.

In 2014, the local Lelievre family – whose hospitality portfolio includes the Grand Hotel Des Sablettes and La Table du Port restaurant, both in Toulon – set about transforming the hamlet into a ‘five-star eco lodge’.

They didn’t construct any new buildings, but carefully restored the old ones, blending them into the national park and recycling surplus stones and chopped-down trees into walls and fencing in the grounds.

The 1885 ‘customs building’ that once housed officers in charge of monitoring salt exports is now the hotel reception and spa, which features an inviting indoor pool.

The ‘clock building’, which dates to 1803, used to be offices for the salt firm, but today contains rooms, a bar and the principal restaurant – ‘Saliniers’ (Saltworks).

There’s also a chapel, dating to 1875, where a service is held every Sunday morning.

Most of the buildings were used as accommodation for saltworker families. Now they’re honey-hued hotel rooms par excellence.

Ours is enormous – a family room with a giant double bed, sofabed, two terraces (front and back), outdoor hot tub and elegant wooden décor. I particularly love the over-sized vintage-style rain shower – and there’s a hat-tip too for the brush on the front porch for dusting off sand.

On-site activities? For starters, I enjoy the therapeutic experience of simply ambling around the property.

In the reception area there’s a magnificent giant wooden seahorse guarding the entrance. From there, walkways formed of small planks of wood laid over sand connect the various buildings, lorded over by towering pine trees.

There’s also a beautiful Middle-earth-esque evergreen oak decorated with little lanterns. I half expect Gandalf to stride out from behind it.

Opposite its gnarled branches is the Saliniers restaurant and its lavender-lined terrace, where we enjoy lunches, dinners and breakfasts.

The service is prompt and chirpy and the food is impressive – the sea-bass ravioli with octopus ink and slow-cooked tomatoes on the lunch and dinner menu is delicious, as is the calamari carpaccio starter.

And breakfast is an utter joy, with bowls of pastries and plates of fruit placed at every table and guests treated to a buffet that includes mouthwatering homemade jams, honey from the hotel’s beehives, and orange juice from a giant self-service Willy-Wonka-style orange-crushing machine.

The hotel has its own verdant garden that’s harvested for ingredients for several of the properties in the Lelievre portfolio.

One evening, aperitifs are served around an adjacent firepit, a thoughtful chance for guests to chat with each other and members of staff.

We sip rose as a chef procures vegetables from the garden to slice up and serve with hummus.

Taste buds are also tickled at a little picnic spot with parasols next to the beach, where superb lunches are served up from a cute little blue kitchen trailer.

And on the glorious beach itself, staff deliver drinks and organise sunloungers and parasols. No need to throw any towels down at dawn in this neck of the woods.

When we’re not at the hotel, enveloped by tranquillity, we’re lolling on the frankly astonishing beaches of Porquerolles and Port-Cros, where shoals of fish swim around swimmers’ legs in gin-clear waters, and lazing on the stunning family friendly mainland beach of L’Estagnol, a 30-minute drive away. There the water is bathtub-warm and shallow enough for small children to walk in for a good 70 metres from the shoreline. 

Le Hameau des Pesquiers isn’t quite perfect – there are slip-ups by the staff, such as forgetting to make up the extra bed for our daughter and giving us decanters of water in the restaurant, but no glasses to drink it from (every time).

But the staff are so lovely these minor oversights are easily forgivable – and besides, we’re just too relaxed in this beach-comber-chic oasis to care.

BOOK OF THE WEEK

BEHIND THESE DOORS 

by Alex South (Hodder & Stoughton £16.99, 352pp)

Most people have pretty strong feelings about what prisons should be like. Hardly anyone knows what they are like.

Half the population is convinced they are holiday camps where unrepentant villains feast on smuggled fillet steaks. The other half thinks they are unjust hellholes whose inmates should for the most part be let out.

Neither of these beliefs is correct. The truth is in some ways quite a lot worse.

The miserable result of this empty controversy is that nothing intelligent is ever done about our jails. So they grow worse. And we will pay for this.

As experienced officers retire, there will be violence and chaos will increase. And it will be unendurable to think that there are innocent people in there, at the mercy of unrestrained savagery. For there are.

Alex South — a brave young woman who became a prison officer — endured danger, misery and near-despair, and has written a superb, compelling book about these experiences. Everyone should read it. It is not what you might expect.

Though the complex issue of female officers in male prisons is touched on quite a lot, it is not really a huge part of the book. It is fairly obvious that these officers can do a lot of good, but sometimes at great peril to themselves.

South is a likeable and candid guide to this dark world.

Perhaps her strongest message is this. It is upon the prison officers — patient, thoughtful, courageous, diplomatic and stoical — that the safety and peace of our prisons chiefly depend. Yet they simply do not have the public esteem which is still — often unjustifiably — given to the police.

Instead, many of them go quietly crazy with the things they have to do. Now, the older, experienced men (perhaps guessing what is to come) are leaving and, as she warns: ‘A storm is coming’.

South was not fooled by the criminals she watched over, nor beguiled or tricked by them. She knew the terrible things they had done to others and sometimes tried to do to her.

She was subjected to a vile false accusation, she was covered in blood and she was knocked unconscious in a dreadful fight. Yet she tried to do good, even when it was thankless, to people who most of us would cross the street to avoid.

She and her fellow officers also sought to sustain human kindness, and to prevent harm, injury and death. They did not always succeed.

If this book is right, they will succeed even less in the future.

A hundred years ago, a fiercely moral society believed that prisons were for ‘the due punishment of responsible persons’, and there was little or no pretence that they were there to try to make people better.

Beds were hard, discipline was hard, work was hard; the cells were cold and the food basic. Warders, as they were then called, were in charge.

Now, all that is lost. But it has not been replaced by the liberal paradise which 1960s reformers presumably hoped for.

For one thing, our softer prisons are far fuller — because they no longer deter the borderline cases from committing crime. In 1961, before Home Secretary Roy Jenkins diluted the criminal justice system, there were 27,000 prisoners in England and Wales, in drug-free prisons, more or less totally controlled by the authorities.

Nowadays, there are around 80,000, in prisons swirling with drugs and weapons, where a pitifully small number of officers try to keep control, and increasingly fail. The alarming descriptions of sudden violent explosions in South’s book are a warning of the future.

Not long before she decides to leave, she writes: ‘I can’t guarantee a prisoner’s safety. There’s too much in the way. The phones and drugs and weapons and gangs and bullying. I can’t guarantee anyone’s safety. I can’t guarantee my own.’

In theory, we are trying to ‘rehabilitate’ those inside. In truth, we neither punish nor rehabilitate.

Life in prison is a series of humiliations and deprivations, just as bad in their own way as the bread and water and porridge of the Victorian age — squalid accommodation, dreary food, the forced company in shared cells of people you would normally avoid with all your might.Plus an endless undercurrent of violence and menace made far worse by drugs and weapons.

No wonder so many prisoners try to take the quick way out by hanging themselves.

If you think we have abolished capital punishment, think again. We have it in large quantities — with despair doing regular service as the hangman.

In one week, South records cutting down three hanged men. One died. One was revived but suffered permanent brain damage. Another was saved, but yelled at her, over and over again, ‘Let me die!’

Yet while some prefer death to prison, many offenders are barely touched by jail. They are not afraid of it. Actual served sentences are often shorter than the rehab courses the criminals are asked to undergo.

The feebleness of police and courts means that many criminals do not enter prison until they have already committed so many crimes they can neither be deterred nor turned into better people.

Anyway, how would modern British prisons turn their inhabitants into better people? There is little evidence that they do.

Wormwood Scrubs, West London’s vast Victorian jail, was clearly the worst (and most typical) experience of South’s time in the prison service. She was surrounded by drugs, violence was almost normal, some prisoners were so far out of their minds — almost certainly due to drugs — that they plainly ought to have been in mental hospitals.

The place was filthy, with rats everywhere. Basic security was so poor she actually witnessed a drone delivering two Big Macs to a cell window before swooping off into the London darkness.

But next time, you see, it could be delivering a knife or a gun. A storm truly is coming.

The number of men seeking treatment for erectile dysfunction has soared in recent years amid what some have described as a ‘silent epidemic’.

Viagra – the ‘little blue pill’ – is normally associated with old people but the most recent figures suggest an estimated 30 million American men now live with erectile dysfunction – nearly twice as many in the early 2000s.

Around a quarter of under-40s are though to struggle to get it up in bed, which has been linked to a rise in obesity rates, poor mental health, and an overconsumption of pornography. 

Pill prescribing rates vary by state, but research shows the ones that lean left politically tend to have more little blue pills in circulation which, men’s health experts say, could translate to more open dialogue between patients and doctors about sexual health issues that are taboo in many conservative states.  

Dr Helen Bernie, Director of Sexual and Reproductive Medicine at Indiana University said: ‘What you see from that top 10 list, those are your more progressive states, right? New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Nevada. 

‘Those are typically more progressive states where they have better reproductive rights so you would assume that maybe people talk about sex a little bit more, maybe it’s a little bit more ok to prescribe these medicines.’

Overall, Southern states had far fewer pill bottles in circulation, with the exception of Florida, where ED prescriptions made up 0.25 percent of the total filled there. 

‘Then you look at the alternative. Down south, the strong Bible Belt, there’s a lot strong religious tie and, just in general, people don’t talk about sex, we can only talk about abstinence or pregnancy. 

‘And so perhaps doctors aren’t asking their patients about sexual activities so they’re not prescribing as much of the medication. It’s taboo.’

It is for this reason that Dr Bernie said that the true number of men with erectile dysfunction is likely much higher than the estimated 30 million. 

If a doctor living in a conservative-leaning area where sex is not freely discussed does not bring up a taboo subject in the safety of the exam room, the patient likely won’t either.

Erectile dysfunction is often a biomarker for a man’s overall health. An inability to get or maintain erection could be a result of undiagnosed high cholesterol or blood pressure or even a warning sign of cardiovascular disease.

Dr Bernie added: ‘I mean, that’s the most simple question you’re going to have to ask: Do you have any problems achieving or maintaining an erection? And by asking that simple question, you will get an answer and it will open up the dialogue between the patients to be able to actually ask questions and seek treatment options for preventative health.’

Erectile dysfunction is most often considered in older men because of the many age-related changes the body undergoes such as naturally declining testosterone levels, weakened pelvic muscles, and a loss of the necessary nerve function that helps the brain communicate with other systems in the body that leads to an erection. 

But in younger men, the source of the problem is often psychological. Performance anxiety and high levels of stress can affect the delicate balance of hormones in the body and functioning of the nervous system.

Testosterone levels typically peak at around the age of 20 followed by a slow descent throughout the rest of adulthood. At their highest, testosterone levels should be anywhere between 300 and 1,200 ng/dL. Once men hit their mid-thirties, testosterone levels begin declining by at least one percent per year.

Pornography use and overuse can also contribute to ED. Constant exposure to explicit images and videos desensitizes the viewer, making the brain less responsive to sexual stimuli such as your partner standing in front of you naked. 

And repeat exposure to porn can lead to the same disruptions in the brain as do hard drugs. 

The brain’s reward system releases dopamine when something that feels good happens, whether it’s finding food in the middle of a desert, snorting cocaine, or watching hardcore porn. 

Over time, the brain becomes used to the images and videos and does not get the same heavy hit of dopamine when the person presses play. This hinders the brain’s reward system and makes it more difficult for the brain to get excited for the real thing. 

But people’s penchant for porn likely won’t change any time soon. Internet viewing has ticked up consistently over the past two decades, suggesting that the pool of young men with ED will expand. 

And as the US population gets grayer by the year, the prevalence of erectile issues could potentially increase still further, translating to even bigger profit margins for the companies behind blockbuster drugs like Viagra and Cialis. 

Devil Baby is looking pretty angelic today, with her waist-length blonde hair and beguiling blue eyes. 

As an online model and influencer, she has long wanted to be famous, although not, perhaps, like this.

Orla Sloan, who gave herself the nickname Devil Baby, achieved a celebrity of sorts last week when she appeared in court and admitted harassing and stalking England football star Mason Mount, his Chelsea team-mate Ben Chilwell and Scotland international Billy Gilmour.

After a one-night stand with Mount, the 22-year-old bombarded the footballers with threatening messages from 21 phone numbers.

Devil Baby was her online alter ego. ‘Beware of the devil baby, Mason,’ she warned Mount, who has 36 England caps and is currently the subject of a possible £72 million transfer to Manchester United.

She warned: ‘I can morph at any second.’ Separately, she told Gilmour: ‘I will hunt you down.’

There was more: a claim she’d had an abortion after sleeping with Gilmour (with whom she has never had sex), a reference to ‘Gary Lineker’s list of closeted gay players’, and sinister collages of Mount and Chilwell with other women.

She would starve before she stopped her campaign of harassment, she told Mount: ‘I’m not buying food any more so I can get more [phone] numbers. I will be faster than you.’

Orla knows now, having escaped a custodial sentence by a whisker, that the whole Devil Baby thing sounds demented.

She is embarrassed, sorry and can’t believe she didn’t anticipate the real-world consequences of her digital ‘kiss and troll’ campaign.

She says: ‘The online world is so removed from the real world. You don’t have the same sense of perspective because you’re just in your bedroom, on your phone.

‘It doesn’t feel the same but, in reality, people are watching what you’re doing and it’s affecting their lives.

‘What I did was wrong. I regret sending all those messages, hurting those people [Mount, Chilwell and Gilmour] and their families.

‘No one deserves that. Nobody wants to feel unsafe, like they’re being threatened.

‘There’s a huge lack of control online. You wouldn’t walk down a street naked in real life. 

‘There are measures in place to stop you. But, online, you might. It’s very open. You feel you can do whatever you want.’

Orla’s humbling in court offers a fascinating insight into a generation of young people whose lives are dominated by their social media persona. She hopes that her own story – and wrongdoing – will be a salutary lesson to others.

She says: ‘I want everyone who is tempted to look at me and think twice before they act online. It’s so easy to press a button and create a fake account and then go that one step further.

‘There’s no magical barrier between social media and real life. If you do something that’s wrong on Instagram, it’s wrong in real life as well.

‘That collision between my online life and the real world, the law, was a shock. It’s all in your face, the court, the cameras, not like social media where you are in control and you can curate.

‘It’s only until it got to the point where I had to go to court, and potentially to prison, that I could see what I had done.’

Orla’s court appearance has put paid to her summer job working as a beach club hostess on the Greek party island of Mykonos, and has seen her return home to her mother’s modest semi in Exeter.

Friends have dropped her, the men who once queued for her attention have – unsurprisingly – run a mile and she accepts that prospective employers will look hard at her criminal record.

She still can’t explain coherently why she did what she did, but it was most likely a toxic combination of rejection and the ‘you go girl’ version of female empowerment that exists on the internet after Mount made it clear their sex had been a one-night-only performance.

Orla’s barrister, Michael Cogan, told the court: ‘Unfortunately she thought there was more to it. She is not only young but also naive.

‘She believed there was something in the circumstances when everyone else knew there was nothing. 

‘She has been sucked into a world where instant gratification is achieved only by being seen with rather more successful people. She has been extremely immature and naive and as a result of that, vulnerable.’

When challenged, Orla today says that her use of the name Devil Baby was ‘meant to be a joke’. But that was not how it was perceived by her victims – or the law.

Westminster magistrates were told Orla met the footballers when Chilwell invited her fellow model friend to a party at his home via an Instagram message.

Afterwards, she and Mount slept together once. The pair continued talking for six months until Mount decided the relationship ‘wasn’t going to progress to anything more’ and cut contact.

It was then that the footballer was subjected to a ‘bombardment of messages’ which led him to fear she would turn up at his home or the Chelsea training ground.

Her online harassment of Chilwell led him, too, to wonder if it would spiral into a face-to-face encounter. 

Gilmour, on the receiving end of her most obnoxious online behaviour, was left taking pills to sleep at night and cutting contact with female relatives and friends to protect them.

His performance on the pitch fell victim to his nerves and his club ramped up security for him.

Yet asked if she ever intended to do the men any physical harm, Orla is appalled and squeaks: ‘No, never, never…’

You could be forgiven for thinking that this story begins at that party in Chilwell’s Surrey home. But it doesn’t.

It starts when a girl from Exeter with 11 GCSEs drops out of sixth-form college instead of sticking at her A-levels and takes a minimum wage job as a pot-washer in a local restaurant, only to realise that she could earn up to £35,000 a month (she claims) on the subscription website OnlyFans.

‘I was in the kitchen, washing up, and I thought, ‘Imagine if only one single person subscribes for a tenner, that’s more than I’ve earned in the last hour’.’

Fake it until you make it, she reckoned, adding hair extensions which cost £1,000 every four months, a bee-sting pout, cheek and under-eye fillers, fake eyelashes and fake nails, and a fake tan bill of £60 a month. (Given that her cleavage doesn’t match a frame so small she can still fit into clothes labelled Age 12, I’m guessing her boobs are fake, too.) 

Had her one-night stand with Mount blossomed into a relationship, it goes without saying that the Cartier love bracelet (fake), Louis Vuitton handbag (fake) and Dior weekend tote (fake) would be real.

The revenue from OnlyFans enabled her to move to London while still only 19, and rent flats in arty Primrose Hill and riverside North Greenwich. 

She bought a cockapoo puppy called Jupiter and focused laser-like on her work which was, by her own admission, ‘fully explicit’.

She claims that she has never done porn or worked as an escort but did take jobs such as a champagne ‘bottle girl’ – delivering bottles to nightclub tables and dancing for punters.

So if she thought she had been invited to Chilwell’s party along with a fellow OnlyFans model for her conversational skills, she was being incredibly jejune.

She and Mount progressed from the private cinema room up the spiral staircase and into bed, where they spent the night together and parted without any awkwardness the next morning. ‘There were hugs and goodbyes,’ Orla says.

To his credit, Mount behaved politely, messaging her a few hours later to ask for her number.

But when she hadn’t heard from him a week later, she tried to provoke a response with a very unwise message of her own.

‘Not the right thing to do,’ she says now. ‘I should have just turned off my phone. Since when did chasing anyone work?’ 

Later, she began sending Mount long messages, saying that she felt anxious and lonely in London: ‘I think he felt threatened by them, overwhelmed, like he didn’t want the responsibility.’

Mount asked her to stop the texts and blocked her number, but she began messaging him from different numbers, using 21 in total. 

She says it pained her that he told her he was ‘busy’. ‘It hurt me because it wasn’t how it was in my head,’ she reveals.

‘I thought it was going somewhere – but no, it wasn’t going anywhere. So I did feel quite rejected.’

The scene was set for the creation of Devil Baby. She told Mount: ‘I really want to say sorry and if you could just talk to me and tell me how you feel I would really appreciate it because I’m finding it hard to move on from the situation.

‘You must accept my apology and say sorry to me or you will unlock a new character called ‘Devil Baby’, so let me apologise and make it right.’

Did she ever think it would end in court? ‘No way. It wasn’t meant to hurt them in a bad way, it was more trying to embarrass them in front of their friends.’

Her persistent trolling resulted in a police request to attend a voluntary interview at a police station. 

The allegations against her were taken so seriously that she was arrested and taken into custody as she got off the train.

‘They took everything, includ-ing my phone,’ she says. ‘I was panicking.’

It was the start of the proceedings which resulted in a 12-week jail sentence – suspended for 18 months – a 30-day rehabilitation order, 200 hours of unpaid work, £300 each to be paid to Mount and Chilwell and £500 to Gilmour, £85 costs and a £154 victim surcharge.

There is also a five-year restraining order preventing her from contacting the three men directly or indirectly. 

Orla is grateful not to be behind bars and thinks that she has grown up a lot in the past couple of years.

She is still trying to work as a model and influencer but has long since deleted her lucrative OnlyFans account.

She accepts the court verdict and the genuine fear and distress she caused the three footballers.

If she’s learned anything, it’s that in the nexus where men such as Premier League footballers meet girls like her, there’s only going to be one winner after a no-strings fling.

‘I didn’t see it coming. I was very stuck in my own world,’ she says. ‘I didn’t meet many people. I was quite lonely and being on OnlyFans just made me more lonely.

‘And sad, too, because of what I was doing. I was putting myself out there, but not having any real connection. It’s very superficial.

‘There are so many people online trying to do what I am doing. Influencing is a cut-throat world and there’s a whole hype around famous people. If you’re naive and young and doing social media, you want to impress them.

‘I guess I just felt like I wasn’t good enough for him [Mason Mount] and I didn’t like that feeling. I wanted to be good enough –but I just made it worse.’

And then she fixes that angelic hair, touches up her lipstick and interrogates her phone, to see how many views and ‘likes’ her accounts have had so far today.

Britain is in the midst of the first spell of unbearably hot weather for the year but it could be just a taster of what’s to come in a few decades. 

Scientists predict that temperatures across the UK in 2080 will be high enough to trigger ‘wide-scale mortality’, much like the European heatwave of 2003. 

In a single summer week in 2080, temperatures will hit 41C (105F) in London while weekly averages will be 28C (82F) in large parts of southern England. 

This compares to London’s peak summertime temperatures of 31C (87F) and southern England’s weekly averages of 20C (68°F) in the 1970s.

Manchester, meanwhile, will push past 38C (100F) at least once a week during a 2080s summer, and Plymouth and Glasgow will likely hit 35C (95F) weekly.  

Last year, the UK set a new temperature record of 40.3C (104.5F) – but multiple regions will push past this on a weekly basis by 2080, the predictions show. 

Temperatures in the biggest cities, namely London, tend to be hotter than the rest of the UK – and will continue to be so in the 2080s – due to densely-packed buildings and more concrete and tarmac that absorb heat more quickly. 

The study was led by Professor David Coley at the University of Bath’s Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering, who stresses that it is in the extremes of weather, not the mean climate, where much climate change risk lies. 

‘Climate change is normally discussed in terms of seasonal averages, as this is what is meant by the word climate,’ said Professor Coley. 

‘I believe this a possible mistake, as few of us naturally grasp how even small differences in climate imply hugely different worlds.’ 

The team cite the European heatwave of 2003, which killed 14,000 people in Paris alone, showing the dangers of extreme temperatures rather than average temperatures. 

In the last 20 years alone there has been a 54 per cent increase in heat-related mortality in people older than 65, with a total of 296,000 deaths in 2018. 

‘It’s such heatwaves and cold snaps, and a lack of preparation for them, that will increasingly kill people,’ said Professor Coley. 

‘We need to think about climate change in terms of changing weather.’

For their study, Professor Coley and colleagues produced a series of detailed weather projections for 11,326 UK locations at 3-mile-square intervals for the year 2080. 

Using weather generator software and a newly developed algorithm, the team built upon Met Office climate predictions to create the projections.

After inputting the climate prediction data into the software, the weather generator produced 3,000 examples of possible weather forecasts for 2080. 

By then looking for heatwaves and examining how they changed over time, they discovered that there will be heatwaves of similar form as the 2003 Paris event.

However, these will be ‘with even higher temperatures’, suggesting the likelihood of ‘largescale mortality’. 

The authors say climate change has the potential to undermine many of the gains in public health over the past 50 years, which will ‘exacerbate existing inequities’.

Vulnerable populations, such as the elderly or those with pre-existing medical conditions, will be disproportionally affected. 

‘Exposure to high temperatures impact individuals via various routes from heat stress and heatstroke to exacerbations of respiratory and cardiovascular disease,’ they write. 

What’s more, the UK is badly prepared for temperature increases as buildings and infrastructure are not heat-resistant enough. 

‘No temperature record exists of the internal conditions within the buildings in which the 14,000 deaths occurred in Paris in 2003,’ the team say. 

‘The predicted situation in London is similar to that found in Paris, but with the peak temperature being higher in London and the night-time temperature in London being considerably higher. 

‘It would therefore not be unreasonable to conclude that in the future the UK can expect events with moralities of similar number as Paris suffered.’ 

Weather files containing the extreme weeks for 11,326 locations have been prepared by the academics and made available online, while the study has been published in the journal Building and Environment.

Britain’s nanny state is expanding with greater restrictions on junk food, tobacco and alcohol than many comparable countries, a study reveals.

The UK has the most restrictive tobacco regulation in Europe and the second harshest food and drink rules, according to the 2023 Nanny State Index.

It ranks in the middle of the pack, at 13th out of 30, for alcohol restrictions but has among the highest alcohol taxes.

Overall, the UK is now the 11th most meddlesome country for lifestyle restrictions, up one spot since the last ranking in 2021.

However, the UK and Ireland have the most liberal policies on e-cigarettes, the research by the Institute of Economic Affairs and the European Policy Information Centre shows.

Turkey is the most restrictive place to eat, drink, smoke and vape in Europe, while Germany is the most liberal.

The league table gives each European country a score out of 100 according to how it regulates private lifestyle choices.

The UK is ranked the worst country in Europe to be a smoker due to its high taxes, plain packaging and smoking ban.

It has the second most restrictive food and drink policies including a tax on sugary drinks and food marketing restrictions.

And Britons also face among the highest alcohol taxes in Europe, with Scotland enforcing minimum alcohol pricing and banning some alcohol discounts.

Overall, Turkey takes the top spot in the ranking, followed by Norway and Lithuania in second and third respectively.

Germany gets the lowest score, making it the most liberal country in Europe, followed by Czechia and Italy.

Today’s ranking comes as the Conservative government and Labour opposition are considering further nanny state measures including banning ‘buy 2, get 1 free’ offers, extending restrictions on food advertising and expanding the sugar tax.

Report author Christopher Snowdon, head of lifestyle economics at the IEA, predicts that ‘things will only get worse’ with more nanny state regulations on the way.

It says the UK’s overall rating is significantly improved by a ‘common-sense approach’ to e-cigarettes, which are the least restrictive in Europe.

Furthermore, the UK’s alcohol duties have fallen in real terms after being frozen for several years although that is set to change with a large tax hike in August.

The report says that despite rapid growth in regulations, there is little evidence that ‘paternalistic policies’ are effective.

It finds no correlation between stricter drinking, eating, smoking, and vaping regulations and higher life expectancy.

Mr Snowdon said: ‘With the UK introducing some of the world’s most nannying policies on food, it’s no surprise to see it rising up the league table against stiff competition.

‘The UK scores poorly in every category except e-cigarettes where it is the best in show.

‘Scotland and Wales drag down the overall score by having minimum pricing for alcohol, and the UK as a whole is the worst place in Europe to be a smoker.

‘With alcohol taxes rising sharply this year and more food regulation to come, things will only get worse.’

The number of countries that now place sin taxes on sugary drinks has risen from five in 2017 to twelve in 2023 and in most countries, taxes on sugary drinks also include artificially sweetened beverages.

Fifteen of the countries have a tax on e-cigarette fluid, up from eight in 2017.

The report says: ‘The big picture is one of a constantly expanding nanny state raising prices and trampling freedom.

‘The blame for this lies mainly with domestic governments, although the European Union is always keen to interfere and has banned flavoured heated tobacco products since the last edition was published (with an exemption for menthol).’

A friend of E. Jean Carroll who testified the writer called her ‘five to seven’ minutes after she was allegedly raped by Donald Trump celebrated Carroll’s victory in court in a video interview.

Appearing remotely before MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, key witness Lisa Birnbach claimed that in the four years since she urged Carroll to come forward, the case has weighed ‘on my neck and back like no other’.

Adding she ‘never thought this day would happen’, the award-winning journalist – whose bylines can be found in both the New Yorker and The New York Times – hailed the decision handed down by federal jurors as ‘incredible.’

Earlier in the day, Birnbach took the witness stand to sensationally claim she was the one fellow writer Carroll first reached out to after the alleged encounter in 1996.

Her testimony was one of several handpicked by prosecutors in the civil trial to sway jurors into holding Trump liable for sexually abusing and later defaming the 79-year-old columnist, who at the time of the alleged assault was at the height of her career.

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‘It’s incredible validation – incredible vindication,’ said Birnbach, who herself is a NYT bestselling writer, of how her and Carroll’s lengthy battle to bring the case to court culminated in a $5million payout Tuesday.

‘It’s good. I feel wonderful,’ she told O’Donnell on Tuesday. ‘It’s been a long road.’

That road, Birnbach earlier in the day revealed, actually began nearly three decades ago, when she received a frantic call from Carroll who claimed she ran into Trump at the luxury department store.

At first, the two eminent Manhattanites allegedly began to shop together, with Carroll telling Birnbach, 66, she was helping Trump shop for a female friend.

At some point, Carroll said the real estate mogul led her to a dressing room, before pinning her to a wall and penetrating her with his penis.

The phone call happened minutes after the alleged assault, and Birnbach said Tuesday that throughout, Carroll did not use use the term ‘rape’ to characterize the altercation, instead calling it a ‘fight.’

Birnbach then allegedly told Carroll to go to the police, but said the writer at the time was adamant that she did not want to report the alleged incident. 

Carroll allegedly was ‘hyperventilating’ throughout the call, Birnbach said, adding that she appeared to be ‘still processing’ what had happened.

The testimony was enough for a Manhattan jury on Tuesday to find the former liable for sexually abusing Carroll, and then defaming her in a post to social media this past October.

The jury of six men and three women took only three hours to reach their verdict, acquitting Trump – who was a no show during the two weeks of testimony and claimed Tuesday that he doesn’t even know ‘who [Carroll] is’ – of rape, but finding guilty of the other two charges. 

Speaking to O’Donnell, Birnbach hailed her friend’s legal win as a sentimental victory – while not mentioning the hefty $5million in payouts awarded to Carroll.

‘I was doing errands today not thinking there would be a verdict,’ Birnbach – the writer of the 1980 tome The Official Preppy Handbook’ – explained.

‘When I got a text from a lawyer saying verdict in 15 minutes – and I hightailed it to my lawyer’s office, and I was in a conference room with the lawyers who helped me out.’

She recalled: ‘I was terrified in the few minutes waiting for it. 

‘When I heard the first ‘no,’ I panicked and thought, ‘It wasn’t going to be favorable for E. Jean Carroll.’

‘We found out that it was. I could not be happier or prouder of my friend.’ She added that she was toasting Carroll’s victory with a glass of rosé.

She added of how she and others were deposed over the past year by Trump’s attorneys, whom she said ‘used every trick in the book’ to hold up the proceedings.

‘It’s been a weight on my neck and back like no other,’ Birnbach said.

‘I really, really never thought it would happen. It just seemed to go on and on. 

‘But telling the truth is a very freeing and fortunate position to be in,’ she continued.

‘And being a good friend is a very fortunate and good position to be in.  So, right now, I feel very good.’

Earlier in the day, the jury awarded Carroll $2 million for Trump’s sexual abuse, as well as $20,000 in punitive damages, as well as an additions $1 million for the October defamation, and another $1.7 million for harm to Carroll’s reputation – as well as $280,000 more in punitive damages.

At the time of the alleged assault, Carroll was a Manhattan media celebrity in her own right – thanks to her advice column with Elle magazine, Ask E. Jean, and her cable TV show of the same name.

Trump asked her to help him choose a gift for a girl and after some ‘playful banter’ they went up to the sixth floor to the lingerie department.

As Carroll told it, she thought the whole thing was a ‘fun New York story’ – made all the more amusing when Trump told her to try on a see-through bodysuit. She told him to try it on, continuing the banter as he showed her into a changing room.

But then the mood suddenly became ‘dark’, Carroll told the jury.

Trump ‘shut the door and shoved me against the wall,’ Carroll said. She told the court: ‘I pushed him back, and he thrust me back against the wall, banging my head.

‘He put his shoulder against me and held me against the wall’.

Carroll could not see Trump as he allegedly penetrated her but she could ‘certainly feel that pain’.

After fighting him off, she ran outside and called a friend, Lisa Birnbach, a journalist, who told her to go to the police.

Carroll also spoke to Carol Martin, the former TV anchor, who told her to keep quiet as Trump would ‘bury her’.

She did exactly that for 20 years until 2019 when he had become President and she wrote a memoir publicly accusing him for the first time.

Carroll claims that Trump set out to ‘destroy’ her, calling her a liar and saying her allegations were a ‘hoax’.

She endured a deluge of hate mail and tweets and allegedly lost her job with Elle because her readers couldn’t trust her any more.

Under cross examination from Trump’s lawyer Joe Tacopina, Carroll became emotional when asked repeatedly why she didn’t scream.

‘Mr Tacopina,’ Carroll said, ‘I was born in 1943. I am a member of the silent generation. Women like me were taught and trained to keep our chins up and to not complain.

‘The fact that I never went to the police is not surprising for someone my age. We were not ever trained to call the police, ever. I would rather have done anything than call the police’.

When Tacopina repeatedly asked why Carroll didn’t scream, she fired back: ‘You can’t beat up on me for not screaming’.

Carroll cried and uttered one of the most memorable lines of the trial: ‘I’m telling you, he raped me, whether I screamed or not!’

Judge Kaplan allowed other accusers to give evidence in what Carroll hoped proved a pattern of behavior.

Tacopina told jurors that Carroll invented her claims after hearing about a 2012 ‘Law and Order’ episode in which a woman is raped in the dressing room of the lingerie section of a Bergdorf Goodman store.

Carroll ‘cannot produce any objective evidence to back up her claim because it didn’t happen,’ he told jurors. 

He accused her of ‘advancing a false claim of rape for money, for political reasons and for status.’

In questioning Carroll, he sought to cast doubt on her description of fighting off the far heavier Trump without dropping her handbag or ripping her tights, and without anyone around to hear or see them in the lingerie section.

The lawyer pressed her about – by her own account – not screaming, looking for help while fleeing the store or seeking out medical attention, security video or police.

Carroll reproached him.

‘I’m telling you he raped me, whether I screamed or not,’ she said.

There is no possibility of Trump being charged with attacking Carroll, as the legal time limit has long since passed.

For similar reasons, she initially filed her civil case as a defamation lawsuit, saying Trump’s derogatory denials had subjected her to hatred, shredded her reputation and harmed her career.

Last fall New York state gave people a chance to sue over sexual assault allegations that would otherwise be too old. Carroll was one of the first to file.