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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...We air both sides of a domestic disagreement – and ask you to deliver a verdict
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Lakshmi spends her entire salary on the cats, then says she can’t afford to go on holiday with me
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...There have been no end of complaints about some of the trees being put up –from a metal one in Cardiff to a puny one in Grimsby
Name: Disappointing Christmas trees.
Height: As much as 25m.
Continue reading...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.’”
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...Move over, Miracle on 34th Street and Elf. As we face another troubled festive season, there will be some surprisingly saucy viewing
Name: Blue Christmas films.
Age: New.
Continue reading...Season three of the daddy issues drama speaks volumes about the monstrous Man Club that rules society – and even billionaire’s daughter Shiv Roy can’t escape its sadistic clutches
Everyone eats their share of dung beetle surprise on Succession – HBO’s unrepentant daddy issues drama – but the women’s portions come heavily seasoned with the patriarchy’s favourite ingredients: sexism and misogyny. Even billionaire’s daughter Shiv Roy (played by Sarah Snook) can’t escape it. “It’s only your teats that give you any value,” her brother Kendall (Jeremy Strong) shouts after she rejects his offer to join him in another one of his patricidal business plans. Even before then, he couldn’t help but put a pin in her dreams of taking over the company: “You are too divisive … you’re still seen as a token woman, wonk, woke snowflake.”
“I don’t think that, but the market does,” he explains.
Continue reading...For a thoughtful, less consumerist Christmas, make sure to tell the truth about your purchases, spritz musty clothes with vodka and invest in vintage wrapping paper
It’s not a pair of box-fresh Bottega Veneta boots, or cashmere spun from the wool of a rare-breed yak, that will ensure you strike gifting gold with fashion fans this Christmas: it’s the revelation that you bought their present secondhand.
Once a dirty word, secondhand is an increasingly valued quality (the global “preloved” fashion market alone is worth $130bn). A survey conducted by the online secondhand marketplace Vinted found that one in six of us are committed to giving preloved only this Christmas, and buying secondhand can also help to combat the £42m worth of unwanted Christmas gifts sent to landfill each year.
Continue reading...She overcame racism and abuse to break Hollywood, romanced Brando, dated Elvis to make him jealous, fought hard for civil rights and won an Egot. Now in her 10th decade, she is busier and happier than ever
Rita Moreno pops up on my computer screen in a bright red hat, huge pendant necklace and tortoiseshell glasses. “Well, here I am in my full glory,” she says from her home in Berkeley, California. And glorious she sure is. Moreno is a couple of weeks short of her 90th birthday, but look at her and you would knock off 20 years. Listen to her and you would knock off another 50.
Can I wish you an advance happy birthday, I ask. “Yes, you can. Isn’t it exciting?” Moreno is one of the acting greats. But she could have been so much greater. She is one of only six women to have bagged the Egot (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards), alongside Helen Hayes, Audrey Hepburn, Barbra Streisand, Whoopi Goldberg and Liza Minnelli. Yet she has spent much of her career battling typecasting or simply not being cast at all.
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