The royal family, partygate and cancel culture: can a Tory voter and a socialist find common ground over dinner?
Michelle, 34, Reading
Occupation Primary school teacher and trade union official
Continue reading...Category Archives: Life and style
From Kansas, with love: like it or not, my home defies stereotypes
Getting a place right shouldn’t be hard, so why does TV show Somebody Somewhere’s accurate depiction of the midwest feel like a miracle?
One Saturday last fall, my husband and I bought an antique clawfoot bathtub in Manhattan, Kansas. After loading it from a stranger’s backyard into the bed of our truck, we walked to The Chef, a downtown diner, figuring we might be seated quickly with half the town tailgating at the Kansas State University football game.
We drank bloody Marys on the patio among white, Black and brown diners while purple school flags waved in the autumn breeze. Our server pointed to a pile of blankets in case I got chilly.
Continue reading...Ulysses, Kelpies and Bond’s debut – take the Thursday quiz
Fifteen questions on general knowledge and topical trivia plus a few jokes every Thursday – how will you fare?
The quiz master is away, but before his departure he assembled 15 general knowledge and vaguely topical questions to dazzle the senses and expand the mind. Of course, no Thursday quiz is complete without Ron from Sparks, Kate Bush, or a hidden reference to children’s TV favourite Doctor Who. There are no prizes. It is just for fun. Let us know how you got on in the comments.
The Thursday quiz, No 45
If you do think there has been an egregious error in one of the questions or answers, please feel free to email martin.belam@theguardian.com but remember, the quiz master’s word is always final, and genuinely, he is away.
Continue reading...Can a video game be as good for my marriage as family therapy? Not this one
Dominik Diamond was drawn to It Takes Two’s depiction of a struggling couple who must work together – but discovered co-op games don’t bring out the best in him
I don’t like co-operative gaming. I am too much of a control freak to let another player screw up my good work. But I really wanted to try It Takes Two because, first, it was in every single top games of 2021 list and, second, the game is about a couple on the verge of divorce who must find a way to work together. And a little over a year ago, my wife and I were in the same situation.
In It Takes Two, the spouses become tiny dolls who must work their way through their suddenly gigantic house, solving puzzles to reunite with their weeping daughter. In real life, we did family therapy.
Continue reading...Vac to the future! Can robot mops and self-cleaning windows get us out of housework for ever?
I despise chores – so I jumped at the chance to test the latest hi-tech solutions (and simple hacks) that promise to keep domestic drudgery to a minimum
A prime candidate for secular canonisation – and a personal hero of mine – is Frances Gabe. She was a visionary, a terrible neighbour (she antagonised hers with a succession of snarling great danes and a penchant for nude DIY) and the inventor of the self-cleaning home. Gabe, who died in 2016 at 101, transformed her Oregon bungalow into a “giant dishwasher”, with a system of sprinklers, air dryers and drains, plus self-cleaning sinks, bath and toilet. “Housework is a thankless, unending job,” Gabe said. “Who wants it? Nobody!”
I agree with Gabe – and with Lenin, who condemned housework as “barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying and crushing drudgery”. My own objections are mainly founded in sloth and a vague desire to stick it to the man, but for others housework can be difficult, or even impossible.
Continue reading...A moment that changed me: I was so desperate to leave home I agreed to smuggle 80,000 Bibles into the USSR
One day a man in a tan mac and a comb-over appeared at my family’s door. I have no idea how he found me but he had an exciting proposition
I grew up in a modest, family hotel on the Dutch coast. The scenes of my boyhood were of German seaside tourists, drunken men and women at the bar, wedding receptions, and bingo nights in the function room. We slaved all year round – my father at the kitchen stove, my mother serving, cleaning the hotel rooms, and caring for three children. Books passed me by so it was an anomaly that, at the age of 12, I found myself attending a grammar school in Haarlem that churned out politicians, artists and writers.
I was embarrassed about my non-intellectual origins. Each morning, when my classmates’ fathers drove their expensive cars to solicitors’ offices, banks or ministries, my father would don his cook’s uniform. One day, when I was 14, I went to our village library. After I’d filled out the membership card, a woman said: “And now you can choose three books!” I snatched three off the shelf. The thinnest was First Love, by Ivan Turgenev. From the start, the words struck me like a hammer-blow. I was drawn in by the language and the 19th-century Russian world that the writer evoked. I’d become a reader.
Continue reading...Dior and Saint Laurent: an elevated discussion between past and future
Christian Dior delves into luxurious wearable tech, while Saint Laurent reinvents art deco with a contemporary twist.
“I’d like to start a conversation between technology and everyday life,” says Maria Grazia Chiuri backstage a few minutes before the start of the Christian Dior Fall-Winter 2022-23 show. Subtle clues on the direction of this collection are floating around her – such as a cover of Donna Haraway’s Chtulucene piece, a driving force in feminism and post-humanism.
“I want to open a feminist outlook on what we envelop our bodies in, and how that has the power to free,” Chiuri says of a collection that she conceived as a discussion between technology, tradition and emancipation, and between past, present and future.
Continue reading...To end FGM, the UK must protect girls everywhere, not just in Britain | Charlotte Proudman
British women and girls are still being cut abroad and foreigners who are vulnerable are denied asylum by the UK
‘But why should we care about a practice that is being performed overseas?” It was a blunt question put to me by an audience member at a conference on female genital mutilation. Should we care because of a commitment to human rights? Our collective duty to prevent suffering? We have a moral obligation to end the practice in Britain and also to focus efforts on eliminating it globally.
After spending many years researching FGM, I have spoken to women who vehemently support it and those that actively resist it. If we are going to end FGM, it is important that we hear all women’s voices, however uncomfortable that may make us.
Continue reading...Worldle, Sweardle, Byrdle? A guide to the maze of word game apps that aren’t Wordle
Whether you are frustrated by the smash hit puzzle, or hungry for more, there are endless alternatives out there - but which are the best?
The debate continues to rage among Wordle players: has the New York Times ruined it? Why are there suddenly so many double-letter days (SWILL, seriously?); so many frustrating solutions that hinge on a single, ambiguous letter? And what about “caulk”? Has something changed? Or are people just losing interest? Since Wordle caught the world’s attention, there has been a fast-flowing stream of copycats and humorous takes on the word-guessing game, based on everything from swearing (Sweardle) to choral music (Byrdle) to geography (Worldle). If you’re looking for something different, though, rather than just an inventive twist on the same theme, the Android and Apple app stores have many other word games you can play on your phone. Fans have been quietly enjoying some of these for years – some offer a daily five or 10 minutes of puzzle fun, while others let you sink as much time into them as you want.
Continue reading...The ever-shrinking parking space: are UK car bays really getting smaller?
In Saltash, Cornwall, drivers were astonished to see parking bays half the size of a normal car – but elsewhere the problem may well be that cars are being supersized
Name: Parking spaces.
Age: Los Angeles got its first car park – possibly the first car park – in 1922.
Continue reading...How we met: ‘I was trying to have a baby alone when we matched on a dating app’
Emmy was on en route to Athens to try artificial insemination when she started chatting to Andy. Now they have a child together
After turning 30 in 2018, Emmy made the life-changing decision to have a baby alone. “I had always really wanted children,” she says. “But when I did a fertility MOT, I discovered I had low egg reserves.” Single, and reluctant to wait for a suitable partner to come along, she began the process of IVF. “I naively thought it would work, but I had a couple of miscarriages in the early stages.”
In February 2020, she travelled to Athens to try artificial insemination by a donor. “I’ve lived and worked in Greece and loved it. It was cheaper and I had friends to stay with,” she says. Before she landed, she matched on a dating app with a man from Liverpool called Andy, and they began to chat. “I’d been single for about four years and was quite happy in my own world,” he says. “But I was open to meeting someone and I found Emmy really engaging.”
Continue reading...I had anorexia in the 1970s – and it came back in lockdown | Ask Philippa
The loneliness that triggered this was not your fault, says Philippa Perry. Have self compassion and get professional help
The question In the 1970s, I was anorexic and was in hospital for months as a teenager after being admitted as a medical emergency weighing just 5st. In those days, treatment was harsh, drug-based and punitive in tone.
I recovered to live a fulfilling life. I was married for 30 years, raised two children, worked as a teacher and ended my career as head of a large comprehensive school.
Continue reading...Mulletfest 2022: Australians let their hair down for the mane event
The annual festival that celebrates a hairstyle that’s all business at the front and party at the back returned to Kurri Kurri over the weekend. Contestants of all ages flocked to the New South Wales town for the chance to show off their quintessential Aussie hairstyles and compete for the best ’do in categories including ‘grubby’, ‘ranga’, ‘vintage’ and ‘extreme’
Continue reading...Lena Zavaroni: fame, anorexia and the tragedy of a 1970s child star
Zavaroni was in the charts at 11 and died after years of illness aged 35. Her father talks about their family life as a new stage show about her is about to open
There are a few recordings of television interviews with Lena Zavaroni around online. One with Russell Harty where he comments that her eating disorder must save on restaurant bills and another when Terry Wogan tells her to eat up so she can get back to “your chunky self”.
The little girl with the big voice was 10 when she appeared on Opportunity Knocks – television’s predecessor to Britain’s Got Talent and Pop Idol – singing Ma! He’s Making Eyes at Me, 11 when it was a hit and 13 when she was diagnosed with anorexia, a barely known illness then called the “slimmer’s disease”. Before she died in 1999 the girl from Rothesay on the Scottish island of Bute had hosted her own TV shows, performed at the White House and shared a stage with Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra and Lucille Ball. She remains the youngest artist ever to have a record in the Top 10 UK albums chart. Lena was huge.
Continue reading...No garden? No problem! Cultivating small areas
Limited outside space needn‘t stop you growing an impressive display of flowers and edibles, installing water features or even having a stab at keeping bees
Continue reading...David Gandy: ‘I’ve done my share of underwear shoots’
The model, 41, on his dangerous youth, micro-managed middle age, dancing with J-Lo and seeing giant pictures of his crotch in Times Square
My childhood, in Essex, was run-of-the-mill. My parents were grafters, starting businesses from home, and they were both very present in my life while also deeply committed to their jobs. It was instilled into me that nothing is earned unless you work for it.
How I avoided serious injury in my teens remains a mystery, given how stupid my friends and I were. We’d climb the steepest hills and descend on roller-skates passing busy junctions; as we got older, we drove cars too fast into hedges and fields. I had an appetite for risk until 27, when mortality became very real.
Continue reading...Miss the office? Michael Schur – master of the workplace sitcom – on why we should relish our return
As we slowly rediscover a world of bad wifi and slow lifts, the US Office writer and creator of Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine explains why he can’t wait to get back
One of the first things we knew back in early 2020 was that we wouldn’t be going to work for a while. We thought that we would take a quick break – a week, maybe – and then reassess. So we cleaned out our cubicles and desks, and grabbed a few snacks from the kitchen (and toilet paper from the bathroom). One week became two, which became a month, which became a series of question marks spanning endlessly into the future, as the Zooms and FaceTimes and home office conversions gradually made the very idea of spending our workdays with other people seem like a quaint memory. Like childhood birthday parties, or answering machines, or properly functioning democracy.
Some of us might never go back. Every so often we will hear about companies reassessing their relationship to the office, which has been proved unnecessary or at least outdated.
‘In 1987,’ photographer Steven Ahlgren says, ‘when I was bored and unfulfilled, working as a banker in Minneapolis, I began taking frequent trips to look at a painting by Edward Hopper, Office at Night. What first drew me was its setting, which I related to each and every workday at the bank. But what kept pulling me back was its ambiguous narrative – who were these two people, what was their relationship, and why was the woman looking at that piece of paper on the floor?’
Continue reading...Warsan Shire talks to Bernardine Evaristo about becoming a superstar poet: ‘Beyoncé sent flowers when my children were born’
One is a breakout poet, the other is a Booker-winning champion of Black talent. They swap notes on class, impostor syndrome and the day pop’s biggest star came knocking
When an email from Beyoncé’s office first landed in Warsan Shire’s inbox, she assumed it was some kind of prank. It wasn’t. Beyoncé – the real Beyoncé – was inviting Shire, a 27-year-old British-Somali poet from Wembley, north-west London, to collaborate. The result was the revolutionary 2016 visual album Lemonade, on which Shire is credited with “film adaptation and poetry”; her verses are read aloud between songs. Shire has also since contributed work to Beyoncé’s 2020 film Black is King and wrote a specially commissioned poem, I Have Three Hearts, to announce the singer’s 2017 pregnancy with twins.
But even before Beyoncé came knocking, Shire was starward bound. After a responsibility-laden adolescence, spent combining writing with co-parenting her three younger siblings, Shire published her debut chapbook of poems, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth in 2011, aged just 23. In 2013, she was appointed the first Young People’s Laureate for London and in 2015, her poem Home became a viral anthem for the refugee crisis. Shire’s first full poetry collection, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head, comes out next month. In between these professional milestones, she also found time to meet and marry a Mexican American charity worker called Andres, move continents, and have two children.
Continue reading...You be the judge: is it OK for my boyfriend to keep butter in the cupboard?
She thinks butter belongs in the fridge; he thinks it’s fine sitting out. We air both sides of a domestic disagreement – and ask you to deliver a verdict
• If you have a disagreement you’d like settled, or want to be part of our jury, click here
My boyfriend insists on keeping butter in the ‘pantry’. To me it’s strange and unhygienic
Continue reading...Intimate or irritating: are voice notes killing the phone call?
For some generations, voice notes have replaced text messages and even phone calls. But are they the future of communication – or just plain annoying?
I lay on my bedroom carpet looking at the blue of the ceiling, feeling like I was in a teen movie. My phone buzzed and I picked it up to respond to my crush’s last text – except this time it wasn’t a text, but a voice note, a short audio file you send via Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp. It was the first time I’d heard his voice – it was flat, low and attractive. He asked me how my day had gone. My stomach fluttered because I knew this meant he wanted to get closer to me, yet I also freaked out because there was so much pressure to get my response right.
At first, I ignored the switch in communication and started typing out a message, because I hate my voice – the way I can hear my nerves prickle through my speech, the high pitch of my intonation and the number of times I say “like”. But don’t voice notes feel so much more intimate? Hearing the subtleties of the other person’s speech, as if they were whispering in your ear – and I wanted to get closer to him. So I focused on getting comfy, and pushed the record button. In response to his “How was your day?” I started telling him about the bike I had just got. “It hurts so much on your vulva. I only lasted about 10 minutes before I limped off.”
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