Labour’s downbeat manifesto for a downbeat nation reflects the feeling that voters want action now – not grandiose words

“Look at that,” said a middle-aged woman delightedly, stopping halfway down the street in Great Yarmouth to nudge her friend. “Life is crap!”

She was pointing to a stall selling slogan T-shirts for a fiver, all bearing those three words in several bleak variations: life is crap because your ex got the house, life is crap because you’re out of wine, or … well, fill in your own version. I heard plenty over three days of travelling up the east coast, where Labour is targeting a string of Tory-held former fishing ports and seaside resorts where life for many is no holiday.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Guardian Newsroom: Election results special. Join Gaby Hinsliff, John Crace, Jonathan Freedland and Zoe Williams on 5 July

Plans to fund adult care have been derided as a ‘dementia tax’ or a ‘death tax’. The carers I visited showed me that what they need is both urgent and simple

In a church hall in suburban Croydon, south London, a familiar Beatles medley plays. The crowd sways and sings along, and an 80-year-old woman reaches out to hold her husband’s hand.

Paul has vascular dementia and can no longer speak, but he smiles occasionally as if in recognition. His wife, Jill, says they were sent home after his diagnosis with nothing but an information booklet and the sinking feeling that they were on their own, since there’s nothing much the NHS can offer. A care worker comes in for half an hour twice a week, but otherwise Jill looks after Paul while waiting for heart surgery herself, and worrying about what they’ll do when she has her operation. Recently he was hospitalised with an infection, and she found him “trying to get out of bed on his own because he doesn’t know how to use the buzzer, and he was terrified”. But at least this therapeutic Singing for the Brain group, organised by the Alzheimer’s Society for people with dementia and their carers, is a weekly chance to get out of the house and be with people who understand.

Underlining his credentials as a creative thinker, the economist and Labour candidate for Swansea West offers a hopeful vision of the nation’s future – spurning leftwing utopianism as well as tackling 14 years of creeping decline

As proposed national rallying cries go, perhaps this one lacks swagger. But its modesty is deliberate, as the economist and Observer columnist Torsten Bell’s surprisingly hopeful new guide to halting this country’s crumbling decline explains. Chest-beating political promises to put the Great back into Great Britain are, he writes, really just distracting from the real issue, which is that the British are exceptional all right – only not in a good way. We stand out from our pack of medium-sized, richer-than-average countries for our low productivity, chronic wage stagnation and American-style high inequality (but sadly without the higher growth of the US).

We have truly world-beating housing costs, higher than any other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country but Finland, but magically still deliver less living space per capita in return than famously cramped New York; we boast, if that’s the word, fewer hospital beds than all bar one other OECD nation.

She is quitting the Commons with no regrets. The UK’s first female foreign secretary discusses chauvinism, Corbyn, contempt for politicians – and her worst period in office

• Goodbye to all that: the MPs standing down at the general election

Hanging near Margaret Beckett’s desk in parliament is a cartoon, drawn by her cousin, of things she has loved. It depicts her and her late husband, Leo, surrounded by the trappings of ministerial office, alongside their trusty caravan. Even as foreign secretary, she refused to give up holidaying in it, battling to establish secure phone lines on campsites and trundling through France with her close protection officers following in a camper van. If some found it incongruous, she didn’t care.

“I remember when I was at college, at some do or another, people were passing round the bottle and I was – like everyone else – swigging out of it. And somebody was saying: ‘Oh no no no, you’re not somebody who should ever be seen swigging out of a bottle.’ It was the same sort of reaction,” she says, with a hint of satisfaction. There is a stubborn streak in Beckett, a dogged refusal to be pigeonholed or cowed, that has underpinned an extraordinary half-century in politics.