Category Archives: Life and style

Catch them if you can? Meet the exotic pet detectives

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Skunks, iguanas, terrapins, big cats… Britain has more invasive and exotic animals than you imagine. Meet the search and rescue enthusiasts dedicated to capturing them and keeping them safe

Sometime in 2016, Chris Mullins received a message about a missing skunk. Mullins, 70, who lives in Leicestershire, had founded a Facebook group, Beastwatch UK, in 2001 as a place to document exotic animal sightings in the British countryside, so it was natural for news of this sort to trickle his way. In that time there had been a piranha in the Thames and a chinchilla in a post box, so a skunk on the loose in a local village seemed a relatively manageable misadventure. He loaded up some traps and headed to Barrow upon Soar to see if he could help locate the wayward creature.

Mullins, who has a white beard, smiling eyes and maintains a steady, gentle rhythm when he speaks, had always nurtured a passion for wildlife – chasing it down, catching it. The interest took hold amid a challenging childhood. Aged five, Mullins was victim of a hit and run that left him with amnesia and he spent two years in hospital before his parents sent him to a special school to catch up with his education.

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Sunday with Claudia Schiffer: ‘Wine, cheese and a game of cards is my winter favourite’

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The model and actor cooks apple pancakes or else pasta bolognese, stares at the clouds, walks the dogs, enjoys a calm family day

What does Sunday feel like? Calmness. I wake up naturally, no alarm. Monday to Friday, I’m up at 7am to make breakfast and do the school run. We live in the English countryside: rolling hills, fields, farmland. I love being surrounded by nature. Even when it’s raining I just watch the clouds.

Do you cook? We normally have a long brunch with local produce – I like making my mother’s apple pancakes. That and pasta bolognese are about the only things I can cook. Drinking is seasonal: summer is perfect for a rosé; red wine, cheese and a game of cards is my absolute favourite winter afternoon.

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We’re in our 70s and he’s perfect – except he doesn’t want sex…

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A compatible friend needs treasuring. You might need to look elsewhere for sex

The question I met Tom online. We have now been dating for nearly two years, sometimes on Zoom as we live three hours away from each other. This is long-term relationship potential – except, from my side, for one thing.

I am a deeply sexually alive person. Sex is an immense joy to me. Not only the explicit physical acts of it, but also the sharing, the play, all the openness and openheartedness. Tom is divorced and I suspect has not had much sexual experience. I think he is sexually repressed. I have always been open with him about wanting our relationship to become fully sexual. It never has been.

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Are you dreaming of a booze-free Christmas? Join the (soda) club

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The market in no- and low-alcohol drinks is booming in the UK as more people swap the festive hangover for mindful drinking

The concept of a Christmas without champagne, wine or whisky is counterintuitive to many. But this festive season, growing numbers of Britons are eschewing alcohol and gearing up for a teetotal – or at least partially so – celebration, according to retailers.

Sales in the no- and low-alcohol category, also known as “NoLo”, are expected to grow by 17% in the UK this year, reports IWSR Drinks Market Analysis, and will hit almost 19 million cases and a value of $741m (£558m). Meanwhile, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and Tesco all report that sales of NoLo drinks have seen huge rises year on year, a trend they expect to continue in the run-up to Christmas, amid a rise in “mindful drinking”.

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‘I dread Christmas. My husband won’t get jabbed’: The families split over Covid vaccines as they plan holiday gatherings

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We talk to three people faced with moral crises over reconciling family festivities with the risks posed by coronavirus

Christmas is meant to be a time filled with joy, but for many families it can underline divisions between parents, children or siblings and bring unresolved tensions to the surface. This year adds a particular issue to that dynamic – whether or not individual family members are vaccinated.

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Louis Theroux: ‘I’ve always found anxiety in the most unlikely places’

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The broadcaster, 51, talks about his first memories, last meal, lockdown resets and his brainier older brother

I always felt like the second fiddle to my older brother Marcel, who I thought was impossibly brilliant and mature and seemed to be reading more or less from the womb, although I’m two years younger, so I wouldn’t have known that first-hand. I was the sideshow: the funny one, the ridiculous one my grandparents said was “good with my hands”, which at five or six I embraced. It was only as I got older I realised it meant, “might not want to stay in school past 14 or 15”.

From childhood I’ve always found anxiety in the most unlikely places. Aged six I remember watching maypole dancers skipping around and braiding these ribbons into beautiful patterns at my south London primary school and even though I was still in the infants and wouldn’t be doing it for years, I thought, “I’m never going to be able to fucking dance around a maypole.” All through my life I’ve tended to experience future events in a negative way. It’s always been a source of looming discomfiture.

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I was told the 12 steps would cure my addiction. Why did I end up feeling more broken?

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In this quasi-religious programme, ‘working the steps’ is the remedy for any problem, but for me the cracks soon started to show

Eight of us sat together in a circle in a wooden shed, an outbuilding at a large country house, somewhere in the south of England. The door was ajar, and spring light flooded the room. “Can anyone name any treatment methods for addiction, other than the 12 steps?” asked a counsellor.

“Cognitive behavioural therapy?” offered a patient.

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Abuse, intimidation, death threats: the vicious backlash facing former vegans

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Going vegan has never been more popular – but some people who try it and then decide to reintroduce animal products face shocking treatment

In 2015, Freya Robinson decided to go vegan. For more than a year, the 28-year-old from East Sussex did not consume a single animal product. Then, in 2016, on a family holiday in Bulgaria, she passed a steak restaurant and something inside her switched. “I walked in and ordered the biggest steak I could have and completely inhaled it,” she says. After finishing it, she ordered another.

For the previous year, Robinson had been suffering from various health problems – low energy levels, brain fog, painful periods and dull skin – which she now believes were the result of her diet. She says her decline was gradual and almost went unnoticed. “Because it’s not an instant depletion, you don’t suddenly feel bad the next day, it’s months down the line. It’s very, very slow.” In just over a year, the balanced plant-based food she cooked daily from scratch, using organic vegetables from the farm she works on, and legumes and nuts vital for protein, had, she felt, taken a toll on her body.

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Experience: I was attacked by a dog while climbing a volcano

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He came back and sunk his teeth in again. The pain took my breath away as I felt his fangs in my flesh

I was backpacking in Panama over Christmas in 2018, and planned to climb Volcán Barú. At 3,474m, it is the highest peak in the country and one of the only places on earth from where you can see the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans at the same time. It is an active volcano, but last erupted around 1550.

I set off before sunrise. It was a little chilly, so I had pulled on tights under my trekking trousers. I intended to reach the top by midday, then return before dark to get a lift to my hostel.

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From utopian dreams to Soho sleaze: the naked history of British nudism

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A new book details how nudism began as a movement of intellectuals, feminists and artists, only to be suppressed by the state. But our attitudes to nakedness also tell us a lot about ourselves

When Annebella Pollen was 17, she left behind her strict Catholic upbringing for the life of a new-age hippy, living in a caravan and frolicking naked among the standing stones of Devon, while earning a living by modelling for life-drawing classes. That early experience, followed by a relationship with a bric-a-brac dealer, shaped her later life as an art historian. “I’m very interested in things that are culturally illegitimate,” says Pollen, who now teaches at the University of Brighton. “A lot of my research has been looking at objects that are despised.”

Foraging trips with her partner to car-boot sales alerted her to a rich seam of 20th-century nudist literature that is still emerging from the attics of middle England: magazines whose wholesome titles – Sun Bathing Review or Health & Efficiency – concealed a complex negotiation with both public morality and the British weather. This is the subject Pollen has picked for her latest book Nudism in a Cold Climate, which tracks the movement from the spartan 1920s through the titillating 50s, when the new mass media whipped up a frenzy of moral anxiety, to the countercultural 60s and 70s, when the founding members were dying off and it all began to look a bit frowsty.

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Proximity to green space may help with PMS, study finds

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Research adds to growing evidence of the health benefits associated with natural environments

Living near green space could reduce the physical and psychological symptoms of premenstrual syndrome (PMS), researchers have found.

A first-of-its-kind study of more than 1,000 women aged 18 to 49 living in cities in Norway and Sweden found that women who across their lifetime live in neighbourhoods with more green space are less likely to experience PMS symptoms than those living in less green neighbourhoods.

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The most unusual movie sex scenes – ranked!

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Lady Gaga and Adam Driver give us animal grunting in House of Gucci and Agathe Rousselle mates with a car in Titane – but that’s tame compared with some of the sexual themes cinema has found to explore

In 1933, the Austrian star Hedy Lamarr (who also had a remarkable parallel career as an inventor) appeared in the Czech erotic drama Ecstasy playing Eva, who gave us the first female orgasm in movie history. This is simply an extended closeup on her face, after her lover’s head has disappeared from the bottom of the frame, as she abandons herself to pleasure and rapture. There were some telling cutaways – to her hand, fondling some material, and also one of her pearl necklace dropping to the floor. Afterwards, Eva languorously smokes a cigarette, doing her bit to establish one of cinema’s great post-coital tropes.

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El Salvador ‘responsible for death of woman jailed after miscarriage’

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Inter-American court of human rights orders Central American country to reform harsh policies on reproductive health

The Inter-American court of human rights has ruled that El Salvador was responsible for the death of Manuela, a woman who was jailed in 2008 for killing her baby when she suffered a miscarriage.

The court has ordered the Central American country to reform its draconian policies on reproductive health.

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The urinary leash: how the death of public toilets traps and trammels us all

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Britain has lost an estimated 50% of its public toilets in the past 10 years. This is a problem for everyone, and for some it is so acute that they are either dehydrating before going out or not leaving home at all

For about an hour and a half before she finishes work and gets the bus home, Jacqui won’t eat or drink anything. Once, while waiting at the bus stop, and suddenly needing the loo, she had to head to the other end of town; the public toilets nearby had closed. She didn’t make it in time. Jacqui, who has multiple sclerosis, which can affect bladder and bowel function, says: “I go everywhere with a spare pair of knickers and a packet of wipes, but it’s not something you want to do if you can help it.”

Jacqui was diagnosed with MS five years ago, and in that time she has noticed a decline in the number of public toilets. Of the ones that are left, one only takes 20p coins, “and in this increasingly cashless society, you have to make sure you always go out with a 20p”. The other block of loos are “up two flights of stairs or the lift, so it’s not the most suitable access”. If she is out for the day, she will research where the loos are, and it has meant missing out on trips with friends, such as to an outdoor festival, where the loos just weren’t accessible enough. The MS Society has given her a card, which she shows in cafes requesting access to their loos when she’s not a customer, and every person she has flashed it to “has been wonderful”. But, she adds: “You use it as a last resort because you don’t really want to burst into a cafe in front of people and say: ‘Excuse me, I need to wee.’”

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Rescue me: why Britain’s beautiful lockdown pets are being abandoned

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The cats and dogs that helped us through the pandemic are increasingly being dumped in the street or handed over to charities – and shelters are dealing with the fallout

On a cold, steely grey day in a farmyard in Essex I meet Spike. Thick-set, broad-chested, narrow-eyed, he has a look that says “don’t mess with me”, and he has tiny, pointed ears that have been cut to make him look more intimidating.

Spike is an XL bully; bully stands for American bulldog, XL means bred to be bigger. They are fashionable among a certain type of dog owner, says Ira Moss, founder of the rehoming charity All Dogs Matter. We’re at its kennels near Waltham Abbey in Essex. XL bullies – along with cuter, “more designery”, says Moss, French bulldogs, dachshunds, cockapoos and cavapoos – “were the top five lockdown dogs”. And they are being abandoned like never before. Sadly, it’s not just dogs. Animal charities and vets have reported everything from cats to cockerels being left. And they are braced for Christmas to be even busier.

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A moment that changed me: when my beloved teacher taught us about mortal sin

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I had impressed Mr Priamo with my passion for winning. In questioning his certainty I learned the eternal value of doubt and ambiguity

Even before I entered his class, I knew Mr Priamo, the sixth-grade teacher at my Catholic elementary school, as the small, powerfully built man who strutted the hallways, and especially the gymnasium, with the ease of an athletic star. In golf shirts and trousers that pulled too tight at the rear, he appeared to be in perpetual motion – an illusion enhanced by his booming voice and jangling keys, the storm of gum-chewing and cologne that encircled him. It was my first encounter with a kind of masculine drag, an adult embodying a role so fully and so well it was impossible to tell where that bit ended and the real person began. Having crafted my own persona as a low-key academic prodigy, I watched him as a cub might regard the leader of a rival clan.

The prospect of submitting to the instruction of someone as brash and sports-metaphor prone as Mr Priamo intrigued me. He was my first male teacher – a relief, following a year in which two female co-teachers (eager to prove a point, it seemed to me, about wanting something too badly) had denied me the top scholastic prize, breaking a three-year streak. Though useless on the track and the basketball court, I impressed Mr Priamo due to the stealthy resolve with which I secured and guarded my standing in his class. Among the first things I learned under his tutelage was that to share a passion for winning is to share a lot.

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Mother jailed for harming baby hits out at ‘unjust’ appeal ruling

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Lawyers and campaigners fear decision not to grant appeal against conviction risks silencing other victims of domestic abuse

A mother jailed for harming her baby has accused the courts of “injustice” after judges accepted she was a victim of abuse but ruled against an application for an appeal against her conviction made on the grounds that her violent ex-partner coerced her to lie at her trial.

The woman, known as “Jenny”, was convicted in 2017 of causing or allowing serious harm after her child sustained skull fractures and bleeding on the brain. The baby’s father was her co-defendant but was acquitted on a lesser charge.

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Prickly present: dancing cactus toy that raps in Polish about cocaine goes viral

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Walmart removes listing by third-party seller after Ontario woman discovers one of toy’s songs is about cocaine and hopelessness

A word of warning before you go toy shopping this Christmas: beware the rapping cactus.

The toy, marketed as educational, may teach your children more than you want them to know, as a woman in Brampton, Ontario, discovered the hard way. The miniature, bright-green dancing cactus Ania Tanner bought sings in English, Spanish and Polish while squirming to the beat. After buying it for her granddaughter, Tanner discovered that one of the songs in its repertoire was an explicit tune about cocaine and hopelessness.

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