Category Archives: Life and style

The era of Covid ambivalence: what do we do as normalcy returns but Delta surges?

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We imagined a gleeful summer of pandemic relief. Instead, new anxieties have replaced old ones

We were promised a Hot Vax Summer.

The term – a riff on Hot Girl Summer, the hit 2019 summer single – emerged this spring as predictive shorthand for the (perhaps literally) orgiastic welcome of a post-vaccine reality. But, as might be expected of a phenomenon named for the last great summer anthem of a world before Covid-19, Hot Vax Summer connoted more than a gleeful exchange of fluids. It came to signal a best-case scenario for a time of transition. Pure celebration and best lives lived. In simplest terms, relief.

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Tom Daley: ‘I took up crochet during the pandemic’

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The diver, 27, talks about fear on the diving board, marrying an older man, becoming a father and maintaining his six-pack

I’ve always been an adrenaline seeker. I love rollercoasters, waterslides – diving is an extension of that. I grew up by the sea in Plymouth. From an early age my parents encouraged my brothers and me to swim in case we got into trouble in the water. Diving gives me that mix of being in the water, but at the same time the adrenaline rush of jumping off something really high.

I went through a stage of not being able to take off on the diving board. When I was younger and my arms and legs were growing at different rates, I used to get scared to go out there. I would stand on the end of the board and literally not be able to move my body. It’s called Loss Move Syndrome, where you suddenly freeze mentally and physically, forget how do to things. Even today, there are times when I get scared standing on the 10m board, but you need that little bit of fear, that adrenaline rush, to make you focus, to stop you making mistakes.

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Teenage skateboard superstar Sky Brown: ‘I begged my parents to let me go with Team GB’

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When she lands in Tokyo, Sky Brown will become one of the UK’s first Olympic skateboarders – and, at 13, the team’s youngest ever member. Will her next trick be a gold medal?

The sun is setting on another hazy summer evening in Oceanside, California, a city 35 miles north of San Diego, and a tiny figure is flying through the sky. She bends her knees, clutches the end of her skateboard and comes gliding down an enormous ramp, her sun-bleached surfer hair bouncing in the wind.

“That was sick!” Sky Brown shouts, as she makes an immaculate landing. The skateboarder is ranked third in the world and on 4 August will take to her board to represent Team GB at the postponed Tokyo Olympics. When she competes in the women’s park event, she won’t just be one of the UK’s first ever Olympic skateboarders, she will also be Team GB’s youngest ever summer Olympian. Aged 13 years and 23 days, she will surpass Margery Hinton, who was 13 years and 44 days when she swam at Amsterdam in 1928.

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How public ‘apologies’ are used against domestic abuse victims in Chechnya

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Activists say Ramzan Kadyrov’s regime uses televised confessions ‘under duress’ to hold back women’s rights, despite changes in society

Khalimat Taramova, the 22-year-old daughter of a prominent Chechen businessman, sits demurely on a velvet sofa ornately embellished in gold. She is wearing a modest dress and a headscarf. With her on the sofa are three men dressed in suits. They are appearing on Grozny TV, the state television channel of Russia’s Chechen Republic.

Only a couple of weeks before the programme was shown on 14 June, Taramova fled her home, where she said she was subjected to violence after going against her family’s wishes. She sought help from a group of women’s rights activists, the Marem project , who let her stay in a flat owned by one of its members in the neighbouring republic of Dagestan. In a video released on social media on 6 June, she pleaded for the Chechen authorities not to come looking for her.

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Leaving burnout behind: the pain and pleasure of starting a new career in my 50s

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I spent 30 years as a journalist before deciding to become a secondary school teacher. While a complete career change is rare, it is one of the best moves I ever made

I had my first midlife crisis in 2006. It started at 7am on a cold January morning when my mother got out of bed, made herself a cup of tea, had an aneurysm and died.

I was a 46-year-old married newspaper columnist with four children, who appeared to be living a more than satisfactory life. But as the sudden axe of grief fell, I looked at my career, which was going better than I’d ever thought possible, and thought: I don’t want this any more.

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Famous, but not ultra famous: meet the internet’s ‘in-betweeners’

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They’re known by their faces, work, or names, and live a life of semi-stardom – all because they showcased their craft on the internet

You probably know Sarah Bahbah by her name, or her work – but you probably wouldn’t be able to pick her out in a crowd. You may have seen her recent cover shot of DJ Khaled for GQ; or you may know her other visual art work – like her subtitle series, which uses cinematic stills with her inner dialogue as captions, featuring big names like Noah Centineo and Dylan Sprouse. But a few years ago, the 29-year-old was relatively unknown. Then, all of a sudden, she posted a collection of photographic stills based on sex and takeout, and woke up to find herself near famous.

Now she has more than a million followers on Instagram, but Bahbah first recognized her new level of fame when she started to pass the barbecue test – that is, when you are invited to a gathering where you don’t know anyone, and a stranger asks if you’re familiar with your own work. “It’s happened numerous times,” she says. “I would just be sitting there listening to someone talk about my work, in this room full of strangers. That’s such a cool feeling to have – knowing that no matter where you are in the world, because of the internet, people discover you on their own terms and connect to your work.”

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Guidance to induce minority ethnic pregnancies earlier condemned as racist

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Draft Nice guidelines for England, Wales and Northern Ireland will not solve poorer maternity outcomes for women of colour, say doctors

Proposed guidance that recommends inducing labour at 39 weeks in pregnant women from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds has raised concerns from doctors and midwives and been branded “racist” by activists.

White women with uncomplicated pregnancies should be offered an induction of labour at 41 weeks, according to the draft guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice). The institute’s clinical guidelines such as this apply in England, Wales and Northern Ireland but do not cover Scotland.

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‘Very pragmatic’: 42% of Australian women are open to egg freezing as a work perk

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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.

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How we met: ‘My flight was delayed, I went to the bar – and found my future wife’

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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.

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Absolute bangers! 10 brilliant sausage recipes – from risotto to perfect pizza

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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.

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Salud! Spain’s female winemakers use their intuition to rise to the top

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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.

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Unlocking the ‘gut microbiome’ – and its massive significance to our health

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Scientists are only just discovering the enormous impact of our gut health – and how it could hold the key to everything from tackling obesity to overcoming anxiety and boosting immunity

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.

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Yappy dogs, moody cats… why lockdown owners are full of ‘pet regret’

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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.

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More sex. Fewer fights. Has the pandemic actually been good for relationships?

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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.

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Sheryl Crow: ‘Surviving breast cancer redefined who and how I am’

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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.

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‘Everything I do now is for her’: the woman who saved me from rock bottom

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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.

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‘I know it’s weird’ – Jumbo: the film about a woman who falls in love with a funfair ride

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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.

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Experience: I lived in an airport for seven months

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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.

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