Category Archives: Life and style

Fatigue is an oppressive cocoon. It has made me seek joy wherever I can

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I have not ‘overcome’ anything, but I am happy and hopeful. Chronic illness is sometimes described as a form of grief, but I prefer to think of it as beginning the next stage

Four years ago, I caught the flu – and I am still stuck in bed, struggling to breathe. A bit like those with long Covid now, I developed postviral fatigue after a short illness. You could say I was into viruses before their mainstream second album.

Born with a muscle weakness, I was already familiar with the fragility of the human body. But the overnight change, post‑flu complications, hit me like a truck. In the early days, stuck on a ventilator and barely able to move, my brain was so traumatised that I thought my bedroom curtains were on fire. I didn’t even have curtains.

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Escape your comfort zone: I am terrified of driving – but behind the wheel I find new confidence

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After one too many rainy nights waiting for the bus, I decide to face my ultimate fear. Can I learn to drive, despite a disastrous attempt in my teens?

It has been 10 years since I last stalled a car. I was 18 and drifting across several lanes of an A-road roundabout while my driving test examiner gripped his seat. It was my second attempt at taking the test and my brain had turned into sweaty spaghetti. As I casually cut in front of an HGV, the examiner gasped and demanded I take the next exit. I mirrored, signalled and manoeuvred, found a safe space to pull up, and promptly stalled metres from the curb.

I failed – of course I did – and didn’t get back in the driver’s seat in a hurry. I finished school and went to university, always deferring the prospect of booking another test. Years passed, priorities shifted, and even though I kept telling myself that driving is a scourge on the environment, a decade of scrounging lifts from my friends and family has taken its toll.

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I tried to run from my brother’s death – but therapy helped me confront my traumatic past

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My tank was empty. No matter how much I willed myself to carry on as normal, my body and mind resisted. It was time to stop running

When my older brother died, the first thing I thought about was work. I had just moved to New York from London, so my family had to break the news over the phone, grappling with my grief while still sucker-punched by their own. But if you had asked me at that moment, I would have told you there was no grief.

Instead, I immediately began thinking about which editors I was going to have to let down. What work might fall by the wayside for ever? I quickly calculated the upsides of my “time off”. At least I would have more time to spend on that long article that was due. Then I thought about going for a run. Or shouting at somebody. Mostly, I thought about getting off the phone. It was all an inconvenience. Had my family – always so keen to remind me of where I had come from and who I was never going to get to be – just passed on this news to ruin my day?

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Healing myself the Pagan way: how witchcraft cast a spell on me

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Witchcraft and its deep connection with nature restored my mental health

Witchcraft has always played a large role in my life. While many kids were learning badminton or taking trombone lessons, I was reading up on spellcraft and ways to plant my herb garden. I grew up in the late 1990s when my cultural life became saturated with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Channel-hopping without stumbling across a young woman with magical powers was virtually impossible. But the draw wasn’t just the empowerment that spells and telekinetic forces threw my way; I was intensely charmed by witchcraft’s connection with the world outside and the earth around me.

In the evenings I spent time in my garden wrapped up in scarves and blankets to watch the different phases of the moon pass each night; I learned the names of wildflowers growing at the side of the road where no one cast a second glance and wondered how I could use them in a spell. These small things gave me an overwhelming sense of calm, so enthralled was I by constellations, intricate root systems and the dashes of magic I found around me. Perhaps witchcraft was in my blood – my very first word was “moon”.

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‘Let’s go Brandon’ Santa Tracker caller insists he meant no disrespect to Biden

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Jared Schmeck, 35, tells Oregonian he has ‘nothing against’ president to whom he repeated ‘Fuck Joe Biden’ rightwing meme

The caller who ended a conversation with Joe Biden with the rightwing meme “Let’s go Brandon” – which means “fuck Joe Biden” – has insisted he was joking and meant no disrespect to the president.

“At the end of the day I have nothing against Mr Biden,” Jared Schmeck, 35, told the Oregonian newspaper. “But I am frustrated because I think he can be doing a better job. I mean no disrespect to him.”

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‘Landmines all the way down’: the guilt and frustration of breakthrough Covid

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The never-ending pandemic forces people to do their best to balance living a decent life and making responsible choices

When Sean Williams, 50, caught a breakthrough case of Covid-19 in November, he felt guilty and embarrassed. His 14-year-old tested positive, too; both were “double-vaxxed” and probably caught it from his 11-year-old daughter, who got it in school two days before her scheduled first vaccination.

“It’s impossible to talk about without going through this whole tortured thing about how careful you were before you got it,” says Williams, who lives with his family in New York City. “Also, this horrible feeling that you have to stutter your way through a clarification that you do believe in science, you did get vaccinated, you’re, like, not a fascist, even. It’s landmines all the way down.”

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Sunday with Neil Gaiman: ‘I’m left to make things up, uninterrupted’

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The writer on hiking, overeating – and bedtime stories

How are your Sunday mornings? Right now I’m in Edinburgh – my Sundays start in a hotel room, alone. Midweek, I’m up at 5.30am to make it on set. The first thing I do is text my wife Amanda in New Zealand with a message for my son. If I’m lucky with the time difference I can read him a bedtime story.

Do you work? I love to write. On Sundays it’s a joy. It’s a gift that nobody else is working. It’s the day I have to really write – the best bit of the job – when most of my time is spent doing admin and emails. We’ve got three TV shows on the go, there’s a lot to do, but right now on Sundays I’m left to make things up, uninterrupted.

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I agreed to be a bridesmaid, but now I’m dreading it

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Extract yourself from the role and life will get a whole lot better

The question I am due to be the bridesmaid at my friend’s wedding. She’s been engaged for five years. The whole thing has had to be rearranged twice due to the pandemic and now it’s on for 2022.

When she became engaged, I was one of her only mates. We had been teenage friends and used to go out drinking and partying. She started working and became sensible and ambitious, met her fiancé and settled down. I went to college, met a bunch of people I bonded with and we started to drift apart. She asked me to be her bridesmaid more than four years ago and I think it was because at that time there were not many other people she could ask.

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My winter of love: I was homesick in New York. The quiet Danish poet was just what I was longing for

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We met in a cafe and struck up an intense friendship - soon we were kissing for hours on park benches. Then he asked me to join him on a trip to Iceland

There was a strip of cafes and bars that ran alongside Tompkins Square park in the Lower East Side in New York and none of them minded if all you bought was a single coffee and sat all night long. So I did just that. It was the late 90s, I was 19 years old and I had never lived in a city before. I sat night after night in these cafes, reading books, watching people, drinking too much coffee. I didn’t really have anything else to do, I didn’t know anyone, so I’d sit and watch the East Village whirl around me.

I wasn’t the only lonely kid, though. After a while I noticed another sitting night after night in Café Pick Me Up, a studious young man feverishly filling up notebooks. Café Pick Me Up was a cosy little place with a low pressed-metal ceiling, crammed full of tiny tables, with French cafe chairs and mellow lighting. If you were to write a romcom featuring a meet cute, you’d set it there.

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‘If I don’t end up in intensive care, it’s a bonus’: the beauty and pain of being the world’s best endurance swimmer

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From jellyfish in the Caribbean to hypothermia in the English Channel, swimming hasn’t been easy for Chloë McCardel – but can feel ‘so wild and free’

We’re not off to a good start. I’m fumbling with my cap, the rubber clinging to my head lopsidedly, my hair straggling out. I take it off to start again and the woman who has swum the fickle English Channel more times than any other human, the “Queen of the Channel”, instructs me in how to correctly apply a swimming cap.

Chloë McCardel and I are going for an ocean swim at Bondi. She dives into the foamy sea ahead of me – more slender mermaid than broad-shouldered Amazonian. Knee deep, I feel the current suck at my flesh. It’s not one of Bondi’s better days. Chest deep, I realise I’m being dragged out and my very amateur ocean-swimming abilities are no match for this surf. Panic rises. McCardel is an impatient white-cap in the distance. What was I thinking, suggesting a swim with superwoman?

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The person who got me through 2021: Heather Phillipson’s sculpture brightened my trips to hospital

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On my way to have painful medical tests, I felt dejected. Then I saw a giant dollop of whipped cream with a cherry on top in Trafalgar Square

Most people were keen to leave 2020 behind but had I known what was coming in 2021, I might have chosen to stay there. From the first days of January I started to experience extended bouts of dizziness – a feeling that the ground was moving beneath me, with bursts of tinnitus, nausea and head pressure thrown in.

One thing I can tell you about near constant dizziness is that it’s not the ideal state to be in if you are trying to homeschool a four-year-old, entertain a stir-crazy one-year-old and hold down a full-time job. As for fun activities: just looking at a playground roundabout was enough to send me spinning out.

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Christopher Eccleston: ‘I am anything but macho’

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The actor, 57, on having a breakdown, aiming high and moving through life gently

My first memory is cycling to the top of the path outside my childhood home, on a yellow kids’ bike with fat grey tyres. I turned on to the road and said aloud: “I’m me, doing this, now.” I was heading away from the home and people I loved, off on my own adventure.

The love I felt as a child was unconditional, especially from my mother. I loved Dad deeply, but was wary of him. It was idyllic, our gang of kids playing out on a Salford council estate. My children are middle-class Londoners, but I sit on the porch and let them play in the street just like I did.

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The person who got me through 2021: Awkwafina made me hopeful for success in dark days

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In Nora from Queens, Awkwafina’s adorable loser alter ego was inspiring. Faced with constant failure, she kept going, with wit and warmth

During the past 20 months I’ve become addicted to TV shows about women trying and failing to make it. Broad City, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, 2 Broke Girls: it’s like looking in a mirror, if I could be bothered to do even that. But the absolute fabulous queen loser of all is Awkwafina, in her self-created show Nora from Queens.

Awkwafina plays a bizarro-reverse-mirror version of herself as a nearly thirtysomething bum, living in her childhood home with her grandmother and her widowed father. It’s pure lockdown comfort TV, with every petty slight and worldly favour soothed away by familial love. Nothing Nora from Queens does ever works out, and yet it’s always fine in the end. Attempted jobs, moneymaking schemes, love interests and opportunities for growth come and go, with all the wit and humour being incidental. The laughs come from off-the-cuff comments, the quickest physical reactions and scathing jibes, but the emotion is gooey and true. And that’s how I live now – with Nora from Queens as my more adorable, charismatic, sexy, funny, hipster-chic proxy. I actually have the same sloppy tracksuit bottoms, oversized T-shirts, thick dorky glasses and button-down overshirts that Nora wears in the show. If she gets up at noon every day in TV fantasyland, heck, I do it every day in reality. And if she fails at everything while refusing to leave her childhood home or embrace adulthood, well, me too – and I’m 10 years older than Awkwafina herself and 15 older than the show’s character.

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‘It’s so liberating’: India’s first salon run by transgender men

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Founder Aryan Pasha wants La Beauté & Style to be an inclusive and comfortable space, as well as tackle prejudice and provide employment

The beauty treatments listed at the new La Beauté & Style salon are much the same as those offered by the dozen or so other parlours that dot the traffic-heavy Dilshad Extension area of Ghaziabad, 17 miles (28km) east of Delhi. But that is where the similarity ends.

The wall behind the reception desk is painted in rainbow colours; a mural of a trans man with flowing multicoloured locks decorates another wall; a woman wearing a sari is having her eyebrows plucked next to a trans man who is telling a stylist how he would like his hair cut.

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Welcome to Cabeça, the Christmas capital of Portugal

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Every year this hilltop community becomes Christmas Village, a rustic, artisanal festive wonderland attracting visitors from far and wide

José Galvão does not look much like an elf. At 79, he has the weather-burned face and strong labourer’s hands of a man born in the mountains of central Portugal. Yet, for months he’s been beavering away behind the scenes to bring to life what must be one of the world’s friendliest and least showy Christmas celebrations.

Every Christmas for the past eight years, the 170 or so residents of Cabeça in the Serra de Estrela mountain range transform their remote village into a rustic winter wonderland. The idea sprang from a competition run in 2013 by the local council, but has since taken on a life of its own, attracting a growing flow of visitors from across Portugal every year.

Sitting just off the central plaza with some of his old-boy friends, José breaks off his chinwag to show me the three-inch folding knife in his pocket. “I’m no expert, but I do a bit of carving,” he chortles through a gap-toothed smile. “We’ve all got to muck in, certo? Cabeça is the Christmas Village after all.”

He is right on every count. Following his directions, I walk 100 metres or so down one of Cabeça’s narrow streets. Pop-up stores and market stalls line the route, which is busy with Portuguese day-trippers on the hunt for festive fun.

I briefly stop at Loripão, a bakery from the next-door village, which has rented a villager’s front room for the fortnight’s celebrations. It’s a paradise of all things sweet and sugary, and its biggest seller by far is the bolo rei (king cake) – the rounded sugary bread topped with crystalised fruits that adorns every Portuguese sideboard at Christmas.

Outside, decoration are strung between the square granite houses that characterise the local architecture. Everything is homemade, from the heart-shaped frames swaddled in ferns to the moss-covered stars studded with red berries.

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My winter of love: I was not expecting a hot first date. Then I found love in a terrible pub

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Ten years after my dad died, I felt rudderless – a manchild still making sense of life. But suddenly, surprisingly, I met someone with whom I had an immediate bond

For most of the winter of 2011-12, I was a slightly reluctant member of the Guardian’s spin-off dating site, Guardian Soulmates. I was still in my 20s, just about, and pouring the energy and naivety of youth into a busy social life, a career as a writer of newsprint ephemera and a room in a shared flat. I think I was also a bit lonely and rudderless – a manchild still making sense of life 10 years after the sudden death of my dad. Whatever it was, something was missing.

By late February, I had been on half a dozen first dates – and no second dates. I was getting tired of the whole thing. It was all so procedural. But I’d agreed to meet a girl called Jess, whose profile handle – “good_grammar_is_hot” – had somehow not entirely put me off.

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Stella McCartney got pay rise while fashion firm took furlough cash

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The designer’s salary rose to £2.7m last year while her company claimed almost £850k in government support

Stella McCartney took a near £2.7m salary from her fashion company last year, up more than £220,000 on the year before, while the business claimed almost £850,000 in support from the government’s furlough scheme.

The designer’s pay went up despite a 26% fall in sales to £28.4m in the year to 31 December 2020, as sales in the UK more than halved, while the company recorded a pre-tax loss of £31.4m, according to accounts for Stella McCartney Limited filed at Companies House. The group made a £33.4m pretax loss the year before.

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