Category Archives: Life and style

To end FGM, the UK must protect girls everywhere, not just in Britain | Charlotte Proudman

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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.

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Worldle, Sweardle, Byrdle? A guide to the maze of word game apps that aren’t Wordle

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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.

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How we met: ‘I was trying to have a baby alone when we matched on a dating app’

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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.”

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I had anorexia in the 1970s – and it came back in lockdown | Ask Philippa

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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.

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Mulletfest 2022: Australians let their hair down for the mane event

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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’

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Lena Zavaroni: fame, anorexia and the tragedy of a 1970s child star

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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.

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David Gandy: ‘I’ve done my share of underwear shoots’

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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.

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Miss the office? Michael Schur – master of the workplace sitcom – on why we should relish our return

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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?’

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Warsan Shire talks to Bernardine Evaristo about becoming a superstar poet: ‘Beyoncé sent flowers when my children were born’

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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.

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You be the judge: is it OK for my boyfriend to keep butter in the cupboard?

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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

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Intimate or irritating: are voice notes killing the phone call?

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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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Going the distance: the ‘Boris bikes’ being spotted around the world

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Stolen London hire-scheme bicycles sighted in unlikely destinations as annual thefts rise

They have been a feature of London’s streets for nearly 12 years: the docked public bikes for sharing that are billed as one of the easiest and quickest ways for people to make shorter journeys. Or in some cases, it seems, considerably longer ones.

Among the hundreds of bikes that go permanently missing from the 14,000-plus fleet every year, a handful have been tracked down to distinctly non-London locations, including Australia, the Gambia and Turkey, a freedom of information request has disclosed.

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Prada flexes its muscle with mashup of lo-fi and ultra-glamorous

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With its collection of cotton vests and showstopper coats, label brings to Milan catwalk what it does best

With Kim Kardashian in the front row and her half sister Kendall Jenner on the catwalk – a resurgent Prada is flexing its muscles, as the big hitters of Italian fashion jostle for position in the post-pandemic era.

With Gucci returning to the city’s fashion week for the first time since February 2020 and Giorgio Armani, who cancelled two January events during the Omicron surge, throwing his hat back into the ring with two shows, the competitive edge has returned to Milan’s catwalks.

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‘The ultimate single woman’s icon’: how Mrs Maisel is an inspiration across the years

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From defiantly turning her back on male approval to her seamlessly snappy defiance of the ‘women aren’t funny’ trope, Midge is a warrior whose example still resonates

The best line so far in The Marvelous Mrs Maisel – the Emmy award-winning comedy drama about a New York-50s-housewife-turned-standup-comic – isn’t a joke she delivers in a set on a dingy club stage. It isn’t even one of the endless, off-stage zingers by creator Amy Sherman-Palladino (also behind Gilmore Girls). It is, in fact, the searing three-word reply that Midge (Rachel Brosnahan) fires at her husband, Joel (Michael Zegen), halfway through season one, when he asks why she won’t give their marriage another shot: “Because you left.”

In that moment, Mrs Maisel becomes the ultimate single woman’s icon. In a world that measures her success and identity by her marital status, she makes the decision to be a single mother and blindly embrace whatever is ahead. While the social stigmas attached to being unmarried might have relaxed since Midge’s time, the reality today is this: in 2019 five hospital trusts and six clinical commissioning groups banned single women from accessing IVF; our prime minister once said the children of single women are “ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate”; single people feel priced out of owning a house while couples have a double income; and – take it from someone who knows – if you’re not standing on a soapbox shouting “single, fierce and independent!”, friends and family assume you’re sitting at home feeling sad with the cat (or without the cat, because the landlord won’t allow it).

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They have agents, do auditions and can still steal a scene after filling their nappies – meet the baby actors

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Rafael, star of The Ferryman, has been paying taxes since the age of one, while Adiya received glowing reviews for her portrayal of Lyra in The Book of Dust. Say coochy-coo to the babies treading the boards

When their son was seven months old, strangers used to ask Kat West and Jaime Vallés if they fed him sedatives. “No, I don’t drug my baby!” West recalls with mock incredulity. “That was the weirdest question.” But it wasn’t: as Vallés reminds West, someone once asked if their son was animatronic.

West and Vallés were subject to this line of questioning because, for about six months in 2019, their baby boy Rafael played Bobby Carney in The Ferryman. Bobby, as you might have gathered, is also a baby – the youngest character in the Olivier-winning Troubles drama by Jez Butterworth. For the show’s production team, and ultimately its audience, a real baby was miles better than a doll. “The live baby added to the verisimilitude of the production,” said Tim Hoare, associate director at the time. During its Broadway run, four different babies became Bobby, with Rafael playing him four times a week.

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‘Aggressive’ marketing of formula milk flouts code, warns WHO as it urges curbs

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‘Misleading’ messages from $55bn-a-year industry are ‘unethical’, says report, which calls for plain packaging rules similar to tobacco

Countries should clamp down on the “aggressive” and “unethical” marketing of formula milk for babies, including forcing companies to sell products in plain packaging, a report by the World Health Organization and Unicef has said.

In research, commissioned 41 years after the global health community drew up guidelines aimed at regulating the industry, experts found that the marketing of formula had “no limits” and had become more “unregulated and invasive” in the digital age.

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New York Fashion Week: inclusivity centre stage at raw and diverse Telfar Clemens show

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Brand delivers an assault on the senses with Telfar TV interspersed with live experimental jazz and sportswear-influenced clothes

The motto of Black-owned New York fashion brand Telfar is “It’s not for you – it’s for everybody”. If this has been hailed as a win for inclusivity, the epic show at New York fashion week was about defining what that meant for designer Telfar Clemens and his collaborators. A press release, handed out to guests, asked “how can a Black business with almost entirely Black customers - be the result of someone else’s inclusivity?”

The exploration of what inclusivity means to Clemens and collaborators was an assault on the senses.

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