The assorted items that I would class as rubbish sold within five minutes – and I have never wanted so much to engage in dialogue with a buyer

We have a lot of differing opinions about Vinted activity in my household. My son thinks [sic] “old people have a massively inflated idea of how much things are worth”, so he would never flog anything on my account, lest he get tainted with oldness. It was hard to know where to start on this argument, between “maybe we just have nicer stuff”; “the worth of everything is determined by the price people will pay for it, in a citizen economy”; and “I am not old”.

My daughter, conversely, is happy to funnel her wares through me, which is how I arrived at peak Vinted, its very spirit in a single item: I posted a bag of random tat for £2. It sold within five minutes.

How do you sell turkey and all the luxury trimmings when the world’s in chaos and the cost of living crisis continues? It’s no surprise that this year’s adverts are a complicated lot

There can’t be anyone skirting closer to burnout, more deserving of our sympathy and complicated respect, than the people who conceive Christmas ads. The goal is straightforward: make people feel good about Christmas so that they spend more than they otherwise might. Amp up the love and affection of the season; play down the labour (emotional and otherwise); make everyone feel a bit hungrier and thirstier – job done.

This must be at least the fifth year, though, that the world looks so perilous, so fraught and vexed, so sad and chaotic, that what’s an honest supermarket to do? The retailers weathered the first Covid Christmas, when demand for nut multipacks and pigs in blankets was poignantly low; then they weathered Christmas 2021, when restrictions came back so unexpectedly that it wasn’t unusual for a household to have 14 times as much turkey as they could possibly eat.

As the exam regulator consults about introducing onscreen exams amid complaints of hand fatigue, a young aspiring journalist goes head-to-head with a self-professed expert

This week it was reported that students could soon be sitting their end-of-year exams on laptops after pupils complained of hand fatigue, saying their muscles “are not strong enough”.

With Ofqual preparing to launch a public consultation on the introduction of onscreen exams, we decided to conduct a test of our own, pitting the Guardian columnist Zoe Williams, a seasoned hack of the pen-and-paper generation, against George Francis Lee, our gen-Z journalist in training.

He’ll soon be going back on the hunt for bent coppers – but not before a wild revenge tale of divorcees going rogue. The star talks feeling inferior to Meera Syal, his life in the US and why he’s thrilled to be typecast

While we embark on the inhumanly long wait for the new season of Line of Duty, which starts shooting in January, you’ll see Martin Compston – the show’s hero and true north – a number of times. Twice as you’ve never seen him before, and once, in Red Eye, in the form that you’ve come to know and love him: brisk and taciturn, brave and speedy, the man you’d trust to save the world while the dopes all around him can’t even see it needs saving.

But first, The Revenge Club, in which he is a revelation. The setting is a support group for divorcees, a ragtag gang united by nothing but the fact that they’ve been summarily dismissed by their spouses. “There’s no other reason for these characters to be in each other’s lives,” Compston says from his home in Las Vegas (more on that later – much more). “They’re all desperate and lonely and in dire need of companionship. They’re all, in their own ways, broken, which makes for this explosive mix.”

We need people from Europe to move to the UK – but also a way to give Brits the opportunity to build the futures they crave

Announcing her new Youth Matters plan – £500m to “boost resilience and teach skills” – the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, spoke of a “violent indifference” from the political establishment towards young people that had been going on “for decades”. She’s not wrong. We can look at all of the ways in which young people have seen their economic prospects and work opportunities systematically destroyed – and see that they all date from 2010.

First, the tripling of the tuition fee cap saddled them with debts that have become astronomical, particularly for degrees that are socially beneficial, such as medicine and nursing; this, incidentally, from a coalition in which one party explicitly promised never to do that. Yet for all its boldness in setting fire to manifesto promises and playing fast and loose with a generation’s future, the tuition fees policy didn’t actually deliver a sustainable funding plan for tertiary education – instead leaving it to cross-subsidise with foreign students, whom the political establishment has spent the past five years trying to chase out of the country.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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There are apparently breakthroughs on the way for those with sleep disorders – which sent me down a rabbit hole of research...

I met a guy in pharmaceuticals who told me about a bunch of cool breakthroughs in sleep meds: mainly, we may be on the brink of a new Wegovy, but in this case it’s a drug to cure narcolepsy. I suggested the two things are not quite the same, given that obesity is a global epidemic and narcolepsy is fairly rare. He countered that the way the drug works might also have applications for insomnia; similar to the Post-it note having been invented by someone trying to create the world’s strongest glue.

Anyway, in the course of this, I discovered the test for type 1 narcolepsy, which is that you’re put in a room with zero stimulation – nothing to read, no one to chat to, perfect silence, perfect temperature – and timed on how long it takes you to fall asleep. If it’s under eight minutes, you’re narcoleptic. But the average, for a person with no complaints in that area at all, is 22 minutes. I was completely incredulous. This is a grip on consciousness more or less the same as a house cat. Bored? Go to sleep. Even a dog will have a quick look for something to eat first.

They had different opinions on social media, asylum seekers and ‘woke’ politics, but which Stewart Lee sketch got them both laughing?

Samuel, 34, London

Occupation Communications professional