It's been a good week for ... stressed-out chefs

If you’ve ever spent hours in the kitchen preparing a three-course meal for six dinner-party guests, you’ll know the pressures that can result: will everything be cooked to perfection and be ready in time? Is that Gordon Ramsay dessert – slow-baked quince with crème catalan, Pedro Ximinez gélée and acacia honey granita – just, well, too extravagantly ambitious for you?

Imagine, then, the pressures that come with being an acclaimed chef with no fewer than three Michelin stars. Five hundred meals a day going out of your kitchen – and any one of them could be assessed by a Michelin inspector. Kudos, then, to Sébastien Bras, fêted owner of Le Suquet restaurant in Laguiole, who has asked Michelin to strip him of his three stars on the grounds that he would like to cook first-rate food without the attendant pressures of accolades and of lurking inspectors.

Bras, whose cooking has been Michelin-described as “spellbinding”, says: “Today, at 46 years old, I want to give a new meaning to my life ... and redefine what is essential.” He says it doesn’t matter if he becomes less famous as a result. Michelin “notes and respects” his request, which will be given due consideration.

It’s been a bad week for … goldfish

Australian scientists have warned people not to flush their unwanted pet goldfish down the loo. A news report from Perth, Western Australia, says “feral goldfish” the size of footballs have been invading freshwater rivers via estuaries, posing a potential death threat for native species, wreaking environmental havoc and stirring up sediment.

The President of the British Veterinary Association, Gudrun Ravetz, has described the practice of flushing away one’s pets as “a pretty abhorrent way of disposing with an animal”, adding: “We’d hope that it isn’t happening in Britain.”

Sadly, however, it does happen from time to time. In 2009, a goldfish was rescued from a South Lanarkshire sewage plant. It’s understood that the creature – named, for some reason, as Poo - had merely wanted to give new meaning to his life, and redefine what was essential.