Category Archives: Life and style

Dear Gwyneth Paltrow, welcome to everyone else’s sad-potato life

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As the health guru and actor reveals she went ‘off the rails’ by drinking every day during lockdown, I say those rails are our lives – is this a sales pitch?

In these dark times, it’s nice to be reminded of our worth every now and again. And, with that in mind, perhaps we should all now repeat a quick affirmation: you are more powerful than Gwyneth Paltrow.

Of course you are. In a recent interview, Paltrow revealed that she had gone “totally off the rails” during the Covid pandemic by drinking two alcoholic drinks a night and eating some bread. “I mean, who drinks multiple drinks seven nights a week?” she said. “Like, that’s not healthy.”

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Shaun Ryder: ‘I was a heroin addict for 20-odd years, but there’s been no damage off that’

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From ADHD to alopecia and learning the alphabet at 28, the Happy Mondays singer has had a wild, eventful life. He discusses hedonism, parenting – and why he has to spend so much time correcting Bez

Shaun Ryder is being uncharacteristically quiet. That’s because he’s mistakenly stuck himself on mute and can’t work out how to turn on the microphone of the computer he’s on. We spend a rather amusing (and awkward) five minutes mouthing silently at each other, pointing fingers and shrugging shoulders, while Ryder wrestles with his device, occasionally spinning it around so that he appears upside down. Eventually, though, an unmistakable Salford accent comes crackling through my speakers: “Can ya hear me now?”

Loud and clear, Shaun, which is good because I’ve got a burning question that demands answering. Earlier this year, Ryder contracted Covid-19, along with his entire household (Ryder lives with his second wife, Joanne, and their two daughters). He was sick for three weeks, with bouts of fatigue that dragged on after that. But, according to best pal Bez – his partner in crime through the hedonistic days of Happy Mondays and Black Grape, and currently appearing with Ryder in the more family-friendly TV show Celebrity Gogglebox – the virus had a very unusual side-effect: it caused the hair Ryder had lost through alopecia to grow back. We’ve learned to be endlessly surprised by this virus, but is this really true?

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No shame: the podcast taking on the Arab world’s sex and gender taboos

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Eib is now in its seventh season, fearlessly tackling subjects from Beirut’s drag queen scene to Jordanian widows’ rights

Rude, fault or blemish; flaw, disgrace or shame. The word has many shades, but nearly every woman who grows up in Arabic-speaking households knows its singular weight. “Anything related to women is eib,” says Tala El-Issa, from her home in Cairo. “If they want to talk about their bodies, it’s eib, their problems – eib. Just being a woman is almost eib.”

When the team at Sowt, an Arabic podcasting network based across the Middle East, wanted to create a show that charged fearlessly into the region’s taboos around sex and gender, the title was obvious. “Eib” is now in its seventh season, the company’s longest-lasting podcast and its most popular.

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Mission menopause: ‘My hormones went off a cliff – and I’m not going to be ashamed’

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An estimated 13 million women in the UK are living with the menopause. So why are so many enduring the turmoil of its symptoms without help and support? It’s about time that changed. Portrait by Suki Dhanda. Illustration by Anna Kiosse

We are witnessing a tipping point: the rise of Menopause Power: a growing activist movement which will change the Change in the same way that Period Power fought period poverty and stigma. On social media, on podcasts and in newspapers, there’s a huge menopause conversation, as confrontational as it is celebratory. I’ve just produced a Channel 4 documentary, Davina McCall: Sex, Myths and the Menopause, and there’s nowhere we don’t go: losing jobs to hot flushes, vaginal dryness, memory loss, orgasms after menopause, and the shocking misinformation we’ve been fed on hormone replacement therapy.

But above all, we give the menopausal taboo the kicking it has long deserved. As Davina McCall, who’s presented everything from Big Brother to Long Lost Family and had her first hot flush at 44, says: “I was advised not to talk about it, that it was ageing and a bit unsavoury, but clearly that didn’t work out very well, because I’m sitting here talking to you… I’m not going to be ashamed about a transition that half the population goes through.”

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How we stay together: ‘You’ve got to either take space or give space’

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Metaphorically and literally, Clive and Mary have spent their almost four decades together learning to speak each other’s language

Names: Clive Smallman and Mary Haropoulou
Years together: 38
Occupations: academics

Clive Smallman and Mary Harapoulou were polar opposites when they first got together, they say. He was an agnostic Englishman while she was religious and Greek. Now, after almost 40 years together, while many differences remain, some things have shifted. Mary recalls the Greek proverb about adding a drop of water to wine. “It means that you dilute the feelings a little,” she explains. “You don’t harass, [demanding] ‘I want to do this or that’. You find the common ground.”

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Italy’s birthrate is falling. Can the storks help?

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Last year, the population of Europe’s fourth biggest economy dropped by the equivalent of a city the size of Florence. Yet the northern hamlets of Val d’Ultimo have found ways to buck the trend

Read more: As the global family shrinks, migrants and the planet benefit

As if having a baby wasn’t expensive enough, fathers of newborns in the mountain hamlets that make up Italy’s Val d’Ultimo have an additional cost.

In a revival of an ancient myth that white storks deliver babies, carved wooden storks carrying a newborn child in a sling are a common feature outside homes in the valley.

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UK watchdog bans Max Mara advert over model’s ‘gaunt’ appearance

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Advertising Standards Authority says ad that ran in Sunday Times magazine was irresponsible

A Max Mara advert has been banned for featuring a model with an “unhealthily thin” and “gaunt” appearance.

The Advertising Standards Authority, which received three complaints about the ad, said the model had been photographed from the side, drawing attention to the shape of her body and highlighting her very thin frame and the protrusion of her hip bone, which was visible through her dress.

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‘We go after them like pitbulls’ – the art detective who hunts stolen Picassos and lost Matisses

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Christopher Marinello has spent three decades finding missing masterpieces, recovering half a billion dollars’ worth of art. He talks about threats from mobsters, tricky negotiations – and bungling thieves

One summer morning in 2008, Christopher Marinello was waiting on 72nd Street in Manhattan, New York. The traffic was busy, but after a few minutes he saw what he was waiting for: a gold Mercedes with blacked-out windows drew near. As it pulled up to the kerb, a man in the passenger seat held a large bin-liner out of the window. “Here you go,” he said. Marinello took the bag and the car sped off. Inside was a rolled-up painting by the Belgian artist Paul Delvaux, Le Rendez-vous d’Ephèse. Its estimated worth was $6m, and at that point it had been missing for 40 years.

Marinello is one of a handful of people who track down stolen masterpieces for a living. Operating in the grey area between wealthy collectors, private investigators, and high-value thieves, he has spent three decades going after lost works by the likes of Warhol, Picasso and Van Gogh. In that time, he says he has recovered art worth more than half a billion dollars. When I call him, he answers, then abruptly hangs up. “I was just on my way to a police station to recover a stolen sculpture,” he explains later, apologising.

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‘You love me? I can’t take that to the bank’: Johnny Vegas on money, fame and grief

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Lockdown and the loss of both parents have transformed the entertainer. He talks about the disappointments of TV, outgrowing his comic persona – and his move into the glamping business


I remember the buzz around Johnny Vegas at the Edinburgh fringe in 1997. Everyone knew a star was being born – but a star of what, exactly? No one had ever seen anything quite like this overweight northerner, screaming and sobbing at his audience, raging at life’s injustices – then breaking off for another bout at his potter’s wheel. Was this comedy, ceramics or a Lancastrian on the verge of a breakdown?

But the oddity – that defiance of categories – couldn’t sustain a career. A handful of years after becoming the first newcomer to be nominated for the Edinburgh comedy award, Vegas went mainstream as a man with a monkey sidekick in an ad campaign for the pay-TV service ITV Digital. People shouted “moonkeh” (St Helens accent not optional) at him in the street. He became – and remains – a well-loved household name, albeit for a brand of (hoarse, boozy) comedy that part-obscures what made him extraordinary in the first place.

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Top New York restaurant Eleven Madison Park goes vegan

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Daniel Humm, owner of foodie haven with three Michelin stars, says modern food system ‘simply not sustainable’

One of New York’s top fine dining restaurants is abandoning meat and going for a plant-based menu after its chef and owner posted a message on its website saying the modern food system was “simply not sustainable”.

Daniel Humm is the driving force behind Eleven Madison Park, which has won three Michelin stars and is one of the top names in Manhattan’s elite foodie scene.

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Beyoncé looked glorious on my magazine cover. ‘Are you going to lighten her skin?’ my boss asked

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Being urged to retouch then re-retouch the singer’s photo left Justine Cullen shaken. In this extract from her new book she recalls the ‘cookie cutter’ cycle her industry was trapped in

I stood and knocked tentatively on my publisher’s office door, holding a printout of my latest cover gingerly in my fingertips. The cover I held in my sweaty hands this time was Beyoncé, and she looked … well, she looked like Beyoncé. She looked perfect.

The publisher held the cover in her hands and looked at it approvingly. “It’s wonderful,” she said, nodding. I gave a relieved little sigh and turned to leave the room. But, just as I got to the door, she glanced back up from her computer screen and piped up, nonchalantly, as though having an afterthought: “Are you going to make her skin a little lighter?”

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Lucky review – spirited Ghanaian romcom captures the social media age

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An idling student enlists the help of a wideboy friend in pursuit of a hot date in a comedy that veers between likable and laddish

Here is a vibrant, idiosyncratic portrait of Ghanaian youth, bursting with wisecracks and a boyish restlessness. There is an amateurish shakiness to the visuals, but the film overcomes this with a lot of charm and an innate understanding of its young subjects.

Related: 20 best African films – ranked!

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Iguanas with chips: Florida seeks solution to invasive reptile problem

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  • ‘Tag day’ initiative opposed by some owners of exotic pets
  • State official ‘proud that Florida is looked at as a leader’

From Key West’s high-summer Hemingway Days, in which bearded hopefuls vie for the title of best Papa lookalike, to the annual hunt for the elusive (and imaginary) skunk ape, Florida is renowned for its calendar of curiosities.

Related: Toilet-invading iguanas among invasive species now banned in Florida

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Leigh-Anne Pinnock of Little Mix: ‘Being Black is my power. I want young Black girls to see that’

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In her early days with the girl band, Pinnock felt invisible and couldn’t understand why. Then the role of race became clear

Leigh-Anne Pinnock has been living the pop star dream ever since she was 19 and stepped on to a stage to audition for The X Factor, singing Rihanna’s Only Girl (In the World). She has now spent almost a decade in one of the UK’s biggest girl groups. But she had a difficult start with Little Mix, and not because she didn’t get on with her bandmates. She felt “invisible”, and would regularly cry in front of her manager. “I just couldn’t seem to find my place, and didn’t know why,” she said in a magazine interview in 2018. “I didn’t feel like I had as many fans as the other girls. It was a strange feeling.” She had, at that point, finally realised what the trouble was. “I know there are girls of colour out there who have felt the same as me,” she said. “We have a massive problem with racism, which is built into our society.”

If she expected the interview to change anything, she was disappointed. “I really did feel as if it fell on closed ears,” she says today, speaking from the Surrey mansion she shares with her footballer fiance, Andre Gray. “It was almost like people just weren’t ready to talk about race then.”

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Could you wear a dress for 100 days?

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When Emma Beddington took part in a challenge to wear the same dress for 100 days, she wasn’t expecting to feel the positive force of sisterhood alongside a few neat cleaning hacks

Could you wear the same thing for 100 days? I could, because I don’t care about clothes. I do not like how they look on me, a 46-year-old woman whose hobbies are cake and sitting still, so I stick to navy or green trousers in summer and black trousers in winter, coupled with plain tops and jumpers. I suppose that could be chic, or ingenious, a Zuckerberg-esque Silicon Valley hack, but it’s neither. It’s just a bit depressing.

Sometimes my best friend sends me links to clothes she likes – slinky silk dresses, pretty tops – and I say, “I can totally imagine you in that.” I can, but I can’t imagine myself in anything other than my tedious uniform. My ugly jumpers and toothpaste-stained trousers are “hate dressing” I fear, a widely reported pandemic phenomenon in which you wear things you do not even like as a sort of fabric protest against the general awfulness of everything.

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Mend your clothes and do yourself some good

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Care and repair is an invaluable mantra for your wardrobe, your mental health, your wallet and the planet

In today’s society, many of us go through our whole lives without ever working with our hands; we live, we work, we eat, we buy, we repeat. Everything is made and delivered at a blistering rate, from fast food to fast fashion and, although this may keep the economy buoyant, it’s not necessarily good for our mental health, or for our planet.

But during the past year of lockdown, we have been forced to stay still. The hamster wheel has stopped, and for some of us – without young children to keep entertained – this has provided a unique moment of quiet contemplation. We have suddenly found ourselves with time to spare; time to tackle those half-finished projects and abandoned hobbies – and an increasing desire to be creative, and make things with our hands.

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‘Stop the Breast Pest’: MP’s ‘horror’ at being photographed while breastfeeding

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Stella Creasy launches campaign to change law after a boy took pictures of her feeding her baby on a train

An MP has described her “horror” after she was photographed while breastfeeding on public transport, as she and a fellow MP launch a campaign to criminalise the taking of such pictures.

Stella Creasy, the Labour MP for Walthamstow, said she was breastfeeding her then four-month-old on a overground train near Highbury and Islington in north London when she noticed a teenage boy laughing and taking pictures.

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Julia Donaldson: ‘I worry some children will be unable to sing’

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The bestselling author of the Gruffalo is concerned about the limits coronavirus has placed on the lives of her young fans

Children are not, says Julia Donaldson with a smile, going to write to her directly about the pandemic. Her assistant has just delivered a fresh pile of post, and the author shuffles through a stack of opened letters to make the point: “Children aren’t going to write, ‘Oh dear I feel so lonely or overcrowded’ – they are just writing their usual, ‘There were four kittens called mitten, litten, nitten and kitten.’ They are so sweet, some of the things they write.”

If, as well as her permanent affection for the nation’s children, there is mild exasperation at being asked to act as their spokesperson as they emerge from another lockdown, it can be forgiven: as the creator of such beloved characters as the Gruffalo, Tiddler and Zog, the former children’s laureate, actor and singer-songwriter has long been expected to help her readers think, rhyme and imagine for themselves.

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