To help native birds through the winter, I put out honey. It worked a treat until one chased the rest off – and then turned on me

The error took place last autumn when I offered honey to the nectar feeding birds in my neighbourhood in a bay-side suburb of Melbourne. Our grevilleas, which would normally attract them, hadn’t flowered, and my stopgap would hopefully see Australia’s native birds through the winter. With luck, magpies, pardalotes and ravens would discourage intrusion by an increasing population of common mynas – notorious for their aggressive displacement of native species.

It worked, at first. Wattle birds visited in greater numbers. One, whom we named Wally, aggressively saw off the mynas. He arrived wan and thin, and I watched him grow plump and hale.

Based on a 2003 memoir, this remarkable documentary shows the incredible bravery these young men showed in the face of battle and unrelenting bigotry

Here is the remarkable story of the US army’s “Soul Patrol” unit in the Vietnam war: the all-Black Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol (or LURP), a six-man team of largely teenage African American soldiers, within Company F 51st Infantry. Their duty was to go behind the Vietcong enemy lines, each carrying 150lbs of kit and an M16 assault rifle, and in conditions of terrifying danger report on the enemy’s movements. One heart stopping anecdote is about a panicky member of the unit, who had never seen fireflies before, and became convinced he had seen a Vietcong insurgent in the undergrowth, smoking a cigarette. The film also reports on their later, poignant reunion as old men, using their contemporary home-movie footage and dramatically recreating some scenes.

It is based on the 2003 memoir of the same title by unit member Ed Emanuel (who had gone into journalism in civilian life), based on his own experiences and those of his comrades who he had been able to track down. The publication of the book itself was intended to bring other ex-soldiers out of the woodwork, which it duly did. The Soul Patrol was at one level a special forces unit, an elite squad that was tough, capable, resourceful, operating at the highest standards of soldiering – and yet it was also subject to racist exploitation as cannon-fodder. This was what many in the unit came to suspect, and one interviewee here recounts his almost hallucinatory sense the enemy itself had spared them from certain death in the jungle, aware of their awful sacrificial purpose.

The right has found a new way to denigrate young people, but it is fatuous to assume that Britons of any age would not protect what is dear to them

Young people won’t go to war for Britain. So claimed numerous headlines last week, responding to findings in the British Social Attitudes survey. Except that the phrasing of the question was whether respondents placed importance on “the willingness to serve [in the military] in a time of need”, perhaps forgivably low for people thinking about things of more immediate importance to them such as getting on the housing ladder, getting a pay rise or finding employment at all.

Less than a quarter of under-35s regarded this as of high importance, and so here we are subjected to the same moralising as any vaguely leftwing politician who hesitates on the stock television interview question: would you push the big shiny red nuclear button? “An unbelievable attitude on display!” laments LBC’s Tom Swarbrick in response to a 23-year-old caller, Josh, who can’t imagine a circumstance where he would ever feel able to kill another person.

Jason Okundaye is an assistant Opinion editor at the Guardian

From naked tennis to Richter-scale juddering near wildfowl, Jilly Cooper’s bonkbuster features a whopping 33 romps. Ahead of season two’s return this week, gird your loins as we celebrate the busiest buttocks in Rutshire

Rejoice! Rejoice! Five months after it staggered off with its leotard around its ankles, Rivals has returned with six more bundles of ineffably filthy joy. Let perms be unconfined. What is Rivals about? Some say the bonkbuster is a fond take on the shoulder-padded excesses of the late 1980s. Others that this adaptation of the late Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles is a flambéed critique of the era’s social and political mores, as the haves and have-somes fossick for glory among the cufflinks and consortiums of upper-class rural England.

And it is. But only slightly. Because what Rivals is really about is bums. Here a bum, there a bum, everywhere a bum bum. From the boisterous buttocks of the lower orders to the globular “cans” that besmirch the House of Lords, each of the series’ featured arses serves as a bouncing beacon of glee throughout Rivals’ many, many sex scenes. How many sex scenes? An astonishing 33 thus far, with the six new episodes promising more of the same, with clanging bells on.

Hiring a personal tutor to learn French as we explore the beautiful city of Rouen proves a refreshing and affordable alternative to language school

I’m walking beside the River Seine in the French city of Rouen when I realise that I’ve been speaking French – without pausing to find a word or struggle with grammar – for five whole minutes. Anna, my French “prof” for the week, nods encouragingly and so I continue. It’s a breakthrough moment, if only for my confidence.

This is the last day of a DIY language course that I devised when Rouen’s language schools told me they were full for the only week I could get away. When I then enquired about their private tutors, I was told no one was available. This turned out to save me a pretty penny: language school tutors cost €60 an hour while Anna – who I discovered on the website Apprentus – is a cost-effective €19 an hour.

Errors in entry and exit records leave some Britons wrongly flagged as having overstayed post-Brexit 90-day limit

• EU sues IBM and two European firms over entry/exit border system

The writer Jojo Moyes is facing a two-year EU travel ban and €10,000 (£8,300) fine because of glitches with the bloc’s digital security controls.

She is one of a number of UK travellers who say their trips to the EU have not been properly recorded since the introduction of the EU digital entry and exit system (EES).

Redesigned flagship laptop has a fantastic display, killer performance and the first touchscreen on a Mac, but comes with a serious price tag

Apple’s MacBook Pro has been redesigned for the first time in five years, getting slightly slimmer, significantly lighter and adding a fantastic new OLED display with the first touchscreen on a Mac.

The new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR display comes in two sizes, 14in and 16in, but rather than replacing the standard MacBook Pro they sit alongside them as an even more expensive option. The OLED machines start at £2,899 (€3,299/$2,899/A$4,599) – a £400 or equivalent upgrade on the matching spec LCD models – serious prices for serious work machines, not helped by significant cost increases driven by RAMageddon.

From the Specials and the Beat to Paul Weller and Sade, Janette Beckman’s glorious black and white photographs perfectly captured British music in the late 1970s and early 1980s

The unlikely friendship between French and English composers Maurice Ravel and Ralph Vaughan Williams has inspired a tender and generous novel

In 1907, composer Ralph Vaughan Williams confided to the critic Edwin Evans that he was finding his own music “lumpy and stodgy”. His musical education at the Royal College of Music, and indeed classical music in England in general at that time, had tended towards the Teutonic – Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, Wagner – and their heavy contrapuntal style dominated his work. To free himself, he told Evans, he planned to spend some months studying under French composer Vincent d’Indy, who taught at the Paris Conservatoire. Evans’s colleague, Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, had other ideas. He proposed that, rather than the traditionalist d’Indy, Vaughan Williams should take lessons with his close friend Maurice Ravel, by then one of the most admired young composers in France.

The two men could hardly have been more different: Ravel petite, fastidious, intensely private, an avid collector of intricate mechanical toys; Vaughan Williams bulky, dishevelled, bluffly nonconformist, and possessed of a fascination for English folk music that Ravel found incomprehensible. But though they got off to a poor start (in their first lesson Ravel set Vaughan Williams to compose a little minuet in the style of Mozart, an exercise the Englishman refused in no uncertain terms to consider), the three months they spent together in Paris marked the start of a friendship that would profoundly touch both men and their music.