Category Archives: Life and style

‘Hosnia had dreams’: grief in Kabul as girls’ school targeted

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Hazara community in mourning but defiant after more than 60 people killed in school bomb blasts


Latifa and Hosnia had been sharing a wooden bench in their classroom at Kabul’s Sayed Al-Shuhada school for the past three years.

When Latifa transferred to Sayed Al-Shuhada, the two girls were immediately drawn to each other and became best friends, always together in their free time, studying side by side, walking home together after school. They found comfort in each other’s presence; support in a place that has never been easy for girls and women.

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Rape is being used as weapon of war in Ethiopia, say witnesses

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Ethiopian nun speaks of widespread horror she and colleagues are seeing on a daily basis inside the heavily isolated region of Tigray

Thousands of women and girls are being targeted by the deliberate tactic of using rape as a weapon in the civil war that has erupted in Ethiopia, according to eyewitnesses.

In a rare account from inside the heavily isolated region of Tigray, where communications with the outside world are being deliberately cut off, an Ethiopian nun has spoken of the widespread horror she and her colleagues are seeing on a daily basis since a savage war erupted six months ago.

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Would you pay £99,000 for this self-lacing Nike? Sneakers Unboxed review

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Design Museum, London
From battered Vans to box-fresh Adidas, how did sneakers become an $80bn-a-year global industry? This fun show has all the answers – including how to get really fat laces

‘It was all about being the freshest,” says Koe Rodriguez, toothbrush in hand. “That’s how you pulled honeys, how you got respect from the hard rocks. That’s how you laid your game down. It was all about being fresh.” The hip-hop historian’s not talking about his teeth, though, but his sneakers.

Rodriguez appears in Just for Kicks, a 2005 documentary about sneaker culture that also features an MC explaining his painstaking monthly shoelace-cleaning ritual. Treating his precious laces as if they were the finest cashmere, he would carefully scrub them between his clenched knuckles, then pinch out the water, squeeze them with a towel, and press them with the tip of a hot iron, to make them as wide as possible. “They gotta be fat,” he insists.

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‘We became a crew’: how lockdown forged unlikely friendships

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From a conversation about an orchid to a telephone buddy scheme, Guardian readers share their friendship tales

One of the biggest challenges of the pandemic has been keeping in touch with friends with social distancing and other Covid restrictions in place.

But for some these changes instigated unlikely friendships with people they might otherwise never have met. Five Guardian readers share how these friendships have helped them get through the past year.

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Trading up: one woman’s quest to swap a hairpin for a house

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Demi Skipper would like a new house, but she’s not buying one. Instead she’s planning a daring strategy of trades – and millions are following her journey

While many of us were still finding novelty in group Zoom calls last May, Demi Skipper decided she was going to get a house. But not using money. Instead, she was going to trade items.

Now the owner of one of only a few Chipotle celebrity cards in the world, and hoping to reach a house by the end of summer, the 29-year-old’s journey started where many voyages do: in a YouTube hole.

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Doctors in London report fivefold increase in children swallowing magnets

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Button batteries and magnets found in certain types of children’s toys associated with complications

There has been a fivefold increase in magnet ingestion over the past five years in young children amid a steady rise in hospital admissions in London caused by the swallowing of foreign objects, doctors have said.

While most of the time objects pass out of the body naturally without incident, button batteries and small permanent magnets found in cordless tools, hard disk drives, magnetic fasteners and certain types of children’s toys have been associated with complications.

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‘Crumpets have been my saviour!’: readers on their 14 best comfort meals of lockdown

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Food has felt more important than ever this past year – particularly meals that offer solace. From rösti to Coco Pops, here are the dishes that got us through

For me, lockdown has meant an absolutely manic schedule, working from home with back-to-back Zoom calls and long hours. Crumpets have been my saviour. Yes, factory made, perfectly consistent and versatile: top with yoghurt and frozen berries at 8am, blue cheese and leeks at 1pm, followed by eggs and spinach at 7pm, and you have a full day’s menu. For a bit more lockdown spirit, I tried the sourdough version (delicious if squishy) and making my own (I promise you, it’s not worth it). Sophie, data analyst, St Albans

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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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