Demand for fertility preservation has ballooned in the last decade. New research by Monash suggests many are happy for their employer to pay for it
Last year, while working from home as a result of the Covid pandemic, Emily went through the process of freezing her eggs.
It was something the 26-year-old Australian had been interested in for several years, but she made the decision to undergo the procedure when her company introduced it as an employee benefit.
Continue reading...Darragh, 46, and Susan, 44, met in an airport hotel thousands of miles from their homes in the US. They now live in Oregon with their daughter and two dogs
In the summer of 2008, Darragh was travelling home to New York via Heathrow after a holiday in the Balkans. “Everything was delayed,” he remembers. “I was offered a room in a hotel for the night as I couldn’t get back home that day.”
He went down to the bar to drown his sorrows. “It was packed with people watching a European Championship quarter-final match. I overheard an American woman ordering a martini,” he says. When the bartender gave her a full glass of vermouth by accident, she went “ballistic”, he says, causing a huge scene.
Continue reading...Sausages are a fabulous ingredient in their own right, and should never just be served up with a pile of veg. Here’s how to use them with panache
It is easy to be lazy with a sausage. They are already seasoned, so all you have to do is cook them, put them on a plate next to some other stuff and eat them. But to simply plonk a banger next to a pile of veg is to do it a grave disservice – far better to use the sausage as an ingredient in its own right. Here are 10 recipes that do exactly that.
Continue reading...The industry has a growing number of women earning plaudits at its renowned bodegas. But are they really better than men?
“I think of my wines as barefoot children that need love and care,” says winemaker Marta Casas, holding her glass up to the light. Below her, the vineyards of Penedès roll away almost to the sea, but she could be virtually anywhere in Spain.
Just as they fought their way into the male domain of haute cuisine, a growing number of Spanish women are seeking a career in winemaking, with three times as many taking courses in oenology compared with 10 years ago. This was given an added boost in 2018 when Almudena Alberca was made Spain’s first female master of wine, one of only 149 in the world.
Continue reading...If you want to learn more about what’s going on in your gut, the first step is to turn your poo blue. How long it takes for a muffin dyed with blue food colouring to pass through your system is a measure of your gut health: the median is 28.7 hours; longer transit times suggest your gut isn’t as healthy as it could be. We are only now beginning to understand the importance of the gut microbiome: could this be the start of a golden age for gut-health science?
“The gut microbiome is the most important scientific discovery for human healthcare in recent decades,” says James Kinross, a microbiome scientist and surgeon at Imperial College London. “We discovered it – or rediscovered it – in the age of genetic sequencing less than 15 years ago. The only organ which is bigger is the liver.” And, for all that the internet may be full of probiotic or wellness companies making big health claims about gut health, “We don’t really know how it works,” he says. At the risk of sounding like the late Donald Rumsfeld, there’s what we know, what we think we know, and an awful lot that we don’t yet have a clue about.
Continue reading...Charities are warning of a surge in people struggling to cope
with animals bought last year
Animal behaviourists and charities are warning of a surge in lockdown pet regret as owners struggle to cope with pets bought during the last year.
“We have a lot of new, very inexperienced owners – people who either haven’t had pets before or had them in childhood,” said Linda Cantle from Wood Green, The Animals Charity. She said Wood Green’s free pet behaviour helpline now receives 66% more calls each month, on average, than it did last June.
Continue reading...A poll finds American adults are happy with their partnerships, perhaps because lockdown has pushed couples to grow
From the earliest days of the pandemic, experts anticipated that the stress of Covid-19 would wreak havoc on romantic relationships (and in some cases, they were right). But one recent survey suggests what few people could have predicted: for many of the couples that persevered, the pandemic may have actually improved the relationship.
According to a national poll released in February by Monmouth University, a whopping 70% of romantically committed American adults are “extremely satisfied” in their relationships. This figure marks a more than 11-point increase over previous installations of the survey, which the university has conducted for more than six years.
Continue reading...The singer, 59, talks about music, family, relationships – and reveals she’s shorter than we think
Music was my life as a kid. My earliest memory is singing as we drove through Missouri in our powder-blue station wagon. Having swing-band-player parents meant the house was filled with dancing. Music was my identity; I never thought about any other future.
I skipped school at 15 to enter a best-legs competition – and won. The contest was being run by a local radio station. I don’t remember who was judging – a bunch of dirty old men, I’m sure – but I proudly walked across that stage to victory. I may have been grounded and thrown in detention, but I kept hold of my $100 winnings.
Continue reading...At my lowest ebb, I found hope in wickedly funny Leah, who lit up the crisis centre where we met. But just months later, she was dead. Could I stop my grief pulling me back under?
Over the years there have been only a few people I would have classed as best friends. People whom I counted on in my darkest moments. When I was at my lowest, and feeling more alone than ever, I met Leah. She was an incredible person who showed me how to find joy and belonging even in the worst possible circumstances. But within less than 12 months she was dead, and life was changed for ever.
We first met at Scarborough Survivors, the mental health crisis cafe I started attending in December 2018. I was 21, homeless and sofa-surfing, and I didn’t want to be alive any more. The cafe – open until 1am every morning – was my last option. It was a Saturday night, just before Christmas. Leah came in wearing a bright pink Adidas tracksuit and one of her many pairs of Nike Airs. Her thick Welsh accent echoed around the place, and as soon as she started talking, the atmosphere changed. I could tell from the off that humour was one of her coping mechanisms. It was hard to tell how old she was; I sensed some immaturity, but also a deep wisdom. I later learned that she was only 28, and the wisdom came from experiencing unimaginable trauma.
Continue reading...Inspired by Erika Eiffel, who married the Eiffel Tower, this surreal debut tells the story of a woman who falls in love with a big, swirling fairground ride. Its director explains all
Just imagine the pitch. “I want to make my debut film about a girl who falls in love with a funfair ride. Um, that’s it.” But, however improbable it may seem, Zoé Wittock didn’t just get Jumbo bankrolled, the film was also screened at Sundance. And it’s every bit as strange, and quite a bit richer than you might expect.
Jumbo tells the story of Jeanne, played by Noémie Merlant, who lives with her sexed-up single mother near an amusement park, and also has a job there as an after-hours cleaner. One night, while spit-cleaning the knobs on a new fairground machine, Jeanne realises she has fallen in love with “him”. And so begins a giddy rites-of-passage story, with the intoxication of flashing lights and the sensuality of oil standing in for the dopamine rushes and tentative bodily exchanges of first love.
Continue reading...I slept under the escalator, surrounded by plastic barriers – the PA announcements would jerk me awake
I was working as the marketing manager for an insurance company in Abu Dhabi when civil war broke out in Syria, the country of my birth. I’d left five years earlier, aged 25, but military service in Syria is mandatory, and the outbreak of war meant I would be expected to return. But I didn’t want any role in the killing machine.
When I refused to join the army, the Syrian embassy wouldn’t renew my passport. Without it, I couldn’t extend my work visa, so I was out of a job. For the next few years, I was forced to live under the radar – remaining in the United Arab Emirates illegally. I sold my belongings and worked off-grid when I could, sleeping in public gardens or stairwells. At the end of 2016, I was finally taken in by the police. After two months in an immigration detention jail, I was deported to Malaysia.
Continue reading...One hot teenage summer, I made a lifelong friend. Years later, it turned out there was much more between us
It was the summer of 2000 when I fell in love. I would love to say it was hot, but it was probably raining; weather doesn’t bother you when you’re 14 and smitten. My baggy jeans were drenched in south London gutter scum, with knee-high puddle water stains and my try-hard skater shoes that had never once touched a skateboard, ugly as hell and a size too big.
It was the school holidays and a group of us had been kicked out of a daytime house party by an angry briefcase-swinging dad who had returned home early from work to find 30 drunk teenagers in his really nice house. And now we were party-less, location-less, desperately searching for a place to carry on.
We hadn’t meant to knock on the door of a boy I shall leave unnamed (because he was an afterthought and I don’t want to hurt his feelings) but inside his house was Hugo White, also aged 14, sitting on the stairs, innocently, with a massive smile, big blue eyes and rosy dimpled cheeks, his feet in bobbly socks. Instantly, I felt my heart skip a beat.
Those days were spent on a giant trampoline in our friend’s garden while an old, overprotective, blond labrador padded around us. Failing that, we would spread out in giant crop circles on the common, spotlit by the sun and then the street lamps, and the reds and silvers of the night drivers. Sharing purple bottles of cider and beer, sharing rain-soggy cigarettes, smiles, phone numbers, jokes, stories and kisses – sadly never mine – singing our growing pains out to the swollen moon.
Hugo and I began writing letters and making mix tapes for each other. We talked on the phone most nights, his landline number tattooed on my brain. Our homes were opposites: mine chaotic and restless, his manicured and restrained. We lived in each other’s pockets. We could, because we were “just friends”. But I would be lying if I said that every time he kissed a girl I couldn’t hear my heart break. I felt like I decomposed into water, the way Amélie does in the cafe scene, more than once.
But, regardless, I had made a lifelong friend. When my parents split up, Hugo bought me a strawberry Ribena from the newsagent. When Mum married my now stepdad, Hugo was at the ceremony to grip my hand. Hugo bundled me into a cab when I got mugged (there was nothing in my rucksack except for an old, matted, unused tampon with a salt and vinegar crisp attached to it – the real theft was of my dignity). Hugo sat in a pink bathroom with me when I was throwing up and I, in turn, apologised to strangers on the night bus home as Hugo’s vomit pebble-dashed their shoes. When we were 16 and Hugo’s mum died, I stood by his side at the funeral. Out of my depth. Not knowing what to do with his pain, his grief, his grace, his beauty. This love.
Continue reading...After our GCSEs, my first girlfriend and I took our tent to Reading festival and found levity in a very difficult year
There is a peculiar romance to British summer music festivals. Some kind of consequence-free hedonism emerges when you combine bouts of torrential rain with the rancid stench of overflowing chemical toilets, the stomach-fizz of morning beers, and the itch of last night’s glitter pressed into your unwashed skin. It makes for the perfect conditions to distract the head and, for once, indulge the heart.
It was the summer of 2010 when I camped out at Reading festival, the August blow-out that 16-year-olds from the UK’s south-east use as a putrid marker of their transition from secondary school to college; from adolescence to something approaching young adulthood.
Continue reading...Families spread across rich and poor countries are acutely aware of relatives’ lack of access to vaccine
For months she had been dreaming of it and finally Susheela Moonsamy was able to do it: get together with her relatives and give them a big hug. Throughout the pandemic she had only seen her siblings, nieces and nephews fully “masked up” at socially distanced gatherings. But a few weeks ago, as their home state of California pressed on with its efficient vaccination rollout, they could have a proper reunion.
“It was such an emotional experience, we all hugged each other; and with tears in our eyes, we thanked God for being with us and giving us the opportunity to see each other close up again and actually touch each other,” she says. “We never valued a hug from our family members that much before.”
Continue reading...You can’t move frictionlessly from being in a relationship to being close friends, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. Something needs to change
I’m living with my ex-partner after mutually deciding to break up a few weeks ago. We rent a two-bed house and have a cat. The issue is my ex wants to stay in this living situation for the next few months and has no urgency to find alternative accommodation. I feel the urgency but don’t know what to do and whether to move back with my parents or stick it out.
I feel this is very unhealthy and the ritualistic habits developed over time are still happening … dinner, sleeping in the same bed, cleaning duties, shopping. Am I unrealistic in thinking that we should have some physical distance between us, or is this normal? I’m not sure what to do. It may sound selfish but I don’t want to be the one with all the upheaval, especially as I have worked so hard to make this house a home.
Eleanor says: I think you already know this, but might want permission to really believe it: as a fairly firm rule, you can’t move frictionlessly from being in a relationship to being close friends.
While my teenage friends were going wild in Faliraki, I was in a serious relationship. But at 21, I broke up with my boyfriend and flew to Disney World for romantic adventures
“So, you want Mickey Mouse to help you get laid?”
I knew it was a mistake to attempt small talk with the man at immigration. Or to tell him the real purpose of my visit.
Continue reading...There are only 21 lesbian bars remaining in the US – a vertiginous drop from 200 in the 1980s. The much-loved Cubbyhole is one of them
Everyone at the Cubbyhole has an origin story.
Mona Williams was 21, queer, and had been kicked out by their family when they first arrived at the quaint little lesbian bar on a street corner in New York’s West Village. They had Googled “lesbian bars in New York” and found themselves outside the bar a few hours later, alone and not knowing what to expect.
Continue reading...Hospitalised with an eating disorder as a teenager, she recovered to become a campaigner. Her mission? To show that eating disorders aren’t always visible
Hope Virgo’s description of her descent into anorexia is so harrowing and filled with danger that meeting her in real life – in the south London flat she shares with her fiance – is like meeting the personification of triumph or optimism. “In the media, you see the same stories, the same distressed, emaciated person; you hear of people dying,” Virgo says. “We need to hear those stories, but at the same time, I really believe that a full recovery is possible. I think we lose sight of that glimmer of hope.”
In her book Stand Tall Little Girl, she gives the figures to back this up: 40% of people who have had an eating disorder never think about it again; 15% are unable to fight it off and are stuck in it; and 45% of people find a way to live with it, using coping mechanisms. Virgo’s pioneering work has an overarching purpose: to say, in her words and through her actions, that recovery is possible. It’s a rescue mission launched from regular life into a world of crisis – in which no one is seen as irrecoverable.
Continue reading...There is so much more to do with an avocado than just mash it up, whether you decide to make a grilled peach salad, Mexican chicken soup or fabulous ice-cream
Avocado has three main uses: the first is avocado toast; the second is guacamole; the third is being held aloft as a totem for why millennials will never be able to afford their own homes. This is all rather unfair. The sheer number of air miles that it takes to reach your plate is often so vast that an avocado should be a treat. Thoughtlessly slapping one on a piece of toast simply won’t cut it. Here are some more distinctive uses for this ingredient.
Continue reading...Transportation and dry cleaning make it the worst green option for consumers of fashion, study finds
A study has revealed that renting clothes, long touted as one of the “answers” to fashion’s sustainability crisis, is worse for the planet than throwing them away.
The study, published by the Finnish scientific journal Environmental Research Letters assessed the environmental impact of five different ways of owning and disposing of clothing, including renting, resale and recycling.
Continue reading...