Category Archives: Life and style

‘An escape from dark times’: how ancient history podcasts bring comfort and clarity

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I started listening to tales of yore in 2019, when long drives with my infant son became essential. They soothed him to sleep – and transported me to a different world

Fans of Paul Cooper’s podcast Fall of Civilizations will know that it usually begins in a particular way. A traveller, often far from home, encounters a ruin that hints at a vast and forgotten story of the past.

Hiding from bandits in the desert, the Italian nobleman Pietro della Valle takes shelter in the shadow of the crumbling Ziggurat of Ur. Clambering through the rubble of a once magnificent site of Roman Britain, an unknown poet of the eighth or ninth century writes an elegy to the broken “work of giants”.

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Beware sugar highs: seven healthy ways to get more energy – from stretching to sourdough

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It’s tempting to use coffee and sweet treats as pick-me-ups, but they are only temporary solutions. Here’s how to keep yourself going for longer

The twin gods of conquering the post-lunch slump are caffeine and sugar. But such pick-me-ups are temporary: while a syrupy latte will help you power through until dinner time, you may well end up lying awake at 3am, staring at the ceiling. What if there were a way to have more energy that wasn’t unhealthy, addictive or expensive? (Those takeaway coffees add up.) Here, some experts weigh in.

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Who needs Twitter? Trump wishes happy Easter to ‘radical left crazies’

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Donald Trump is reportedly working on a social media platform of his own, after being banned from Twitter and Facebook for inciting the Capitol riot.

Related: Dominion: will one Canadian company bring down Trump's empire of disinformation?

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My rock’n’roll friendship with Lindy Morrison

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She was in the Go-Betweens, Tracey Thorn was in the Marine Girls, their 30-year friendship enhanced both their lives

On 31 March 1983, she burst into my dressing room, asking at the top of her voice, “Has anyone here got a lipstick I can borrow?” I looked up to see a tall woman in a Lurex dress, with a mass of blonde hair. Our two bands, Marine Girls and the Go-Betweens, were on the same bill at the Lyceum in London. I was 20, and she was 31. I was a tentative singer, she was a loud, outspoken drummer. I was from suburbia, she was from Brisbane, Australia. And I was still a student, while she had already been a social worker, then joined a feminist punk band called Xero. She’d hitchhiked across Europe with a girlfriend, she’d seen every art film, read every avant-garde book. She’d slept at Shakespeare and Co in Paris, she’d swum with Roger Moore, she could recite Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics. But I didn’t know any of this. I just knew that she looked like self-belief in a minidress, and that she had arrived in my life. “Who was that?” I asked when she had gone. “That,” came the reply, “was Lindy Morrison.”

It took a couple of years for us to become friends. We were opposites in many ways, and at different stages of life, but there were similarities: we both lived with the boyfriend we were in a band with; we had strong opinions about everything – feminism, love and art; we liked Marilyn Monroe, Bette Davis, Patti Smith, Simone de Beauvoir, and we had no time for a lot of the men who surrounded us in the music business. I’d watch her on stage, fierce and sweating behind the drum kit, long hair flying in her face, all energy, all concentration, and I was proud to be her friend.

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Lockdown made me do it: how we lost our will power

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From vegetarians tucking into battered sausages to ethical shoppers splurging on fast fashion, many of us have abandoned our better lifestyle choices in lockdown. Amelia Tait discovers what sent her moral compass into a spin

It started with a battered sausage – and OK, if I’m being honest, there were chicken nuggets, too. On 14 April 2020, after three years of vegetarianism and three weeks of lockdown, I shamelessly tucked into some processed meat from the chip shop. Two days later, I wrote the following in my diary: “Honestly, I’m still thinking about it. I simply can’t believe how wonderful it was.”

In truth, I was never a great vegetarian – I ate meat on my birthday, during crying jags, and often when abroad. Still, last April marked a shift in my psyche. I knew when tucking into my nuggets that this wasn’t a regular slip-up. This was an active decision to resume eating meat. I remember how I justified it to myself as I splashed on the salt and vinegar: “We’re being denied so much right now. Why should I deny myself something else?”

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‘I was the only black kid in the pool’: why swimming is so white

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Only 2% of regular swimmers in England are black. A new film examines the reasons behind the statistic

Filmmaker Ed Accura was 53 when he learned to swim, and only then through fear that his young daughter might get into trouble and he wouldn’t be able to save her.

“I live near the Thames and I said to myself, if anything happened to her and I couldn’t help, I would never forgive myself.”

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My mum loves me, but doesn’t really know me | Dear Mariella

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You’re frustrated about this, and you have the right to confront your mother with these emotional challenges, but to what purpose, wonders Mariella Frostrup

The dilemma I am a 50-year-old gay man. When I was young I was cast in the role of the “good” child – my mother’s antidote to my rebellious siblings. I behaved well, did fine at school and sought my mother’s approval and love. As a result I hid my sexuality. I was left in no doubt from her that being gay was “dirty”. She frequently told me I should not go to her if I had any worries as she would not be able to cope if all her children had problems. I came out to her when I was 19. She sought to control the narrative, requesting that I didn’t tell anyone until she felt the time was right. Relieved, as she told me she still loved me, I complied.

I don’t know if my mother’s love for me was conditional, because I didn’t test it. I recognise that she worked extremely hard with four young children and a husband setting up a business. I am still bound up in many of the same patterns of behaviour as when I was a child. She just wants to hear I am happy, but doesn’t if I am not. I smile, regardless of how I am actually feeling. So she doesn’t really know me and loves a vision of me that isn’t who I am. I wonder if I have the right, at this stage in our lives, to change a relationship that she appears content with?

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Maker of Lil Nas X ‘Satan shoes’ blocked by Nike insists they are works of art

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  • MSCHF cannot sell 666 pairs of controversial sneakers
  • ‘Conceptual art collective’ bemoans legal reverse

The maker of the rapper Lil Nas X’s controversial “Satan shoes” responded to a lawsuit from Nike by claiming the sneakers were works of art.

Related: Satan shoes? Sure. But Lil Nas X is not leading American kids to devil-worship | Akin Olla

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Sir Tom Jones: ‘The knicker throwing started in the Copacabana in New York in 1968’

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The singer, 80, on enthusiastic audiences, singing Sex Bomb at 90, meeting a young Michael Jackson and losing the love of his life

I’ve been singing since I was a kid growing up in Pontypridd in South Wales. I would sing in school. I would sing in chapel. Any chance I got to get up and sing, I took it.

I was quarantined for two years with tuberculosis. I was in hospital or confined to my house from 1952 to 1954, from the age of 12 to 14. There was an old gas lamp-post at the end of the street I could see out of the window from our house where the local kids used to gather. I used to think, “When I can walk to the lamp-post again, I’ll never complain about anything as long as I live.” I still see that lamp-post in my mind and think, “What am I complaining about?”

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Meltdown: Ravneet Gill’s recipes for using up Easter egg chocolate

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Who wants to turn their excess Easter eggs into chocolate fondant, chocolate cereal clusters and chocolate and hazelnut spread? Bring it on!

Can you bake with Easter egg chocolate? Sure you can. After getting my hands on a variety of Easter eggs this year (dark chocolate, caramelised white chocolate, orange-flavoured, nougat-filled mini eggs, the ones with pretzels stuck all over them … ), I found a place for them all: melted and turned into something else. For these recipes, I encourage you to use up whatever chocolate you have. Easter eggs are typically sweetened (even the dark varieties), so taste them beforehand (as I’m sure you have already) and judge if you need to add any salt, for example.

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Let’s have an answer! Take our fiendish University Challenge quiz

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Ahead of the grand final of the brain-squeezing series next Monday, test your mental mettle with 15 questions set by the show’s quizmasters

The opening scene of which of Shakespeare’s plays comprises just 61 words, the longest of those words being "lightning", "hurlyburly" and "graymalkin"?

Macbeth

Twelfth Night

Timon of Athens

Comedy of Errors

What term for a type of particle accelerator also applies to a type of electromagnetic radiation generated by charged particles spiralling in magnetic fields?

Cyclotron

Gamma

Synchrotron

Collider

The works of which Italian artist, born in 1449, include St Jerome in His Study and the frescoes for the Sassetti chapel in Florence? His numerous apprentices included Michelangelo.

Fra Angelico

Domenico Ghirlandaio

Leonardo Da Vinci

Sandro Botticelli

For which film set in Rome did Paolo Sorrentino win the 2014 Academy Award for best foreign language film?

Life Is Beautiful

The Great Beauty

Parasite

The Postman

What bird does the British Trust for Ornithology describe as: "By far the biggest passerine, with a similar wingspan to a buzzard. The bill is strikingly long and heavy"?

Long-tailed tit

Rook

Raven

Tawny owl

In March 1969, the Ussuri River was the scene of armed clashes between which two major powers?

China and the Soviet Union

The Soviet Union and the US

China and the US

The UK and Argentina

In April 1912, Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly solo over which body of water, crossed earlier by Louis Blériot?

The Channel

Atlantic Ocean

Black Sea

Lake Superior

Described as "the little town keeping the lights on in France", Arlit in Niger was until 2021 the site of one of the world’s largest mines of which toxic metal?

Bismuth

Mercury

Lead

Uranium

What colour links the field of the flag of the Basque country, William Morris’s house in Bexleyheath and leading football clubs in Belgrade and Salzburg?

Red

Green

Purple

Blue

Who wrote the Nebula-award-winning novels Doomsday Book and All Clear?

George R R Martin

Neil Gaiman

Connie Willis

Ursula Le Guin

Nenagh, Clonmel and Cashel are towns in which inland Irish county, bordering Galway and Cork?

Kerry

Tipperary

Kildare

Offaly

According to Jeff Bezos, what "has some magical ability to turn off the politeness gene in the human being"?

Online reviews

Social media

Email

Hunger

In materials science, the ratio of the contractile to the tensile strains is named after which French scientist, born in 1781?

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Charles Friedel

Siméon-Denis Poisson

Louis Pasteur

Which English cathedral is noted for stained-glass rose windows known as the Dean’s Eye and the Bishop’s Eye?

Lincoln

Durham

Ely

York Minster

Totem and Taboo, and Civilisation and Its Discontents are early 20th-century works by which thinker?

Otto Rank

Frantz Fanon

Carl Jung

Sigmund Freud

15 and above.

You may not confer – and you certainly don't need to, with a score like that! Bravo

14 and above.

You may not confer – and you certainly don't need to, with a score like that! Bravo

13 and above.

You may not confer – and you certainly don't need to, with a score like that! Bravo

12 and above.

You may not confer – and you certainly don't need to, with a score like that! Bravo

11 and above.

You may not confer – and you certainly don't need to, with a score like that! Bravo

10 and above.

And at the gong ... you've done pretty well. Not quite well enough to be in the University Challenge final ... but who needs that kind of stress anyway?

9 and above.

And at the gong ... you've done pretty well. Not quite well enough to be in the University Challenge final ... but who needs that kind of stress anyway?

8 and above.

And at the gong ... you've done pretty well. Not quite well enough to be in the University Challenge final ... but who needs that kind of stress anyway?

7 and above.

And at the gong ... you've done pretty well. Not quite well enough to be in the University Challenge final ... but who needs that kind of stress anyway?

6 and above.

And at the gong ... you've done pretty well. Not quite well enough to be in the University Challenge final ... but who needs that kind of stress anyway?

5 and above.

Oh, do come on! You tried your best, but unfortunately there's no way you're going through to the next round

4 and above.

Oh, do come on! You tried your best, but unfortunately there's no way you're going through to the next round

3 and above.

Oh, do come on! You tried your best, but unfortunately there's no way you're going through to the next round

2 and above.

Oh, do come on! You tried your best, but unfortunately there's no way you're going through to the next round

0 and above.

Oh, do come on! You tried your best, but unfortunately there's no way you're going through to the next round

1 and above.

Oh, do come on! You tried your best, but unfortunately there's no way you're going through to the next round

The University Challenge grand final airs Monday 5 April at 8.30pm on BBC Two

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Experience: I carried a twin in each of my wombs

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The medical staff had never seen anything like it. They told us the chances were one in 50 million

The day I gave birth, there were 24 people in the room, most of them fascinated medical students. At 10.11am they watched as my daughter, Bonnie, came into the world, and five minutes later they saw Watson emerge, from my other womb.

The twins were not our first children. Our eldest daughter, Agyness, was born two months early, in 2015, but doctors said early labour was “one of those things”. When I became pregnant with Margot, born six weeks early, in 2017, scans revealed a bicornuate uterus, which means it’s heart-shaped. But no one spotted the second one.

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Nappy nomads: the couples who do #vanlife with babies on board

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As the vanlife community grows up, a new generation is being born into the bohemian travelling lifestyle. Doosie Morris meets the couples who take their lives, and babies, on the road

In October 2020, 34-year-old Karstan Smith had just returned from a 15,000km drive. Four months earlier the Newcastle native had set off in a 1968 Kombi panel van with his childhood sweetheart, Maxine, and their baby daughter, Zuri, and headed north. Within a week of being home, he’d thrown out 90% of his clothes, purchased a map of Australia and a box of thumbtacks and started planning the next family adventure.

For most parents the first year of family life is a wild enough ride in its own right, the very steepest of learning curves, never mind enduring the whole discombobulating scenario while living in the back of a van.

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Doughy, fruity, toasted or … microwaved? Tell us how you like your hot cross buns

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Some people eat hot cross buns the right way and some eat them the wrong way. Which side are you on? Tell us in the comments

Now that Easter is finally upon us, we can stop arguing about the correct time for hot cross buns to appear on bakery shelves and move on to the more contentious question of the correct way to eat them.

Related: What’s good now? An expert guide to sustainable fish for Easter

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Phil Elverum’s songs of loss gave me a language for that shapeshifter, grief

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After my first boyfriend died, Elverum’s Microphones and Mount Eerie helped me make sense of a bleak world

I first encountered the music of Phil Elverum in August 2010, a month after the death of my first boyfriend. That summer I spent hours sitting numbly in the park with my headphones on, listening to Elverum describe a landscape without colour or movement: “no black or white, no change in the light, no night, no golden sun”. That dissonance between internal and external worlds made sense to me as I watched children play and rollerbladers pass by in the sunshine as if everything was normal.

I listened over and over again to his album The Glow Pt 2, released in 2001 under the name the Microphones, trying to make sense of the previous six months. I met Marc in my first year at university: a pretty, hyperactive French boy who shimmered into my life at a club night in Birmingham. I fell in love with his perfect sweep of sandy blond hair, the way he played piano with the exaggerated melodrama of his beloved symphonic metal and video game soundtracks and his habit of wrapping a USB cable around his neck like a protective amulet.

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The anti-Marie Kondo: Netflix celebrates the clothes we keep

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Worn Stories looks to unravel the tales behind the most treasured items in our wardrobes – but is such meaning and emotion easily conveyed via television?

I am not a minimalist: I don’t want to live with extreme amounts of nothing. I like “things”, and I like my things, which means I have several boxes of clothes, bags and shoes in my possession that have accompanied me through the best part of two decades. One of the boxes is my best and largest suitcase. When I was still travelling fairly regularly, I would have to empty out the contents of the suitcase and pile them somewhere else for my return, a process that feels a bit like uncovering memories and repressing them again, two weeks later, with a zip that goes all the way around.

Given the displacement of a series of house moves in my earlier 20s, the fact that I even still possess the navy corduroy American Apparel hotpants I wore to go clubbing at university (now, for users of the fashion app Depop, a vintage item), or the 70s-era yellow, white and purple-striped T-shirt I was wearing when I had an encounter with the far more colourful Iris Apfel, the interior designer, feels nothing short of miraculous. Today, I can recite what I was wearing to interview various figures in my former role as an editor at a fashion magazine, outfits carefully planned though liable to go awry, like when the zip on my green, chequered skirt broke off while meeting Chloë Sevigny.

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Sticky and sweet: 17 delicious ways with maple syrup – from pecan pie to a whisky sour

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If you’ve been saving it to pour over pancakes, here are some brilliant new options, including bacon lollies, mouthwatering aubergines and some very grown up Rice Krispies

I’ve often fancied getting into the maple syrup game – buying some Canadian woods, drilling some holes, hanging some buckets under some spigots. It seems like a low-stress pastime, and you get summers off.

It turns out that they don’t hang buckets under spigots much any more. These days, they run hundreds of feet of blue plastic piping between the trees, a giant sap collection network that feeds a big tank. Watching YouTube videos of men assembling these vast systems is also, it turns out, a pretty low-stress pastime.

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The return of the bonkbuster: how horny heroines are starting a new sexual revolution

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I longed for novels about female desire - women empowered by sex and their expressions of lust. So I sat down and wrote my own

The idea for my novel Insatiable emerged from a simple question: where were all the horny women? I knew that we were secretly legion. In fact, I suspected that I was surrounded by women, sitting on buses, standing in queues, staring out of the window and simultaneously entertaining all kinds of filthy daydreams. After all, millions of us had bought and read Fifty Shades of Grey. Even if half the sold copies were bought by people who wanted to mock it, that left millions of genuinely horny women unaccounted for – and buying the sequels.

I was not transported in the way I had hoped; I did not find Christian sexy, I did not relish the BDSM and, most of all, I struggled to connect with the beautiful, blank lead character, Anastasia. She seemed similar to every other sort-of-horny woman I had seen on screen, a sexual object before she was a sexual subject, a person who had to be perfect and prove herself desirable before she was allowed to pursue desires of her own.

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The Suez boat saga enthralled the world – but not those with naviphobia

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Stuck container ship triggered people with fear of ships and sea wreckage and megalophobia, the fear of large objects

When Grace Gibson was texted a picture of the giant container ship Ever Given stuck in the Suez canal, she clenched.

The image – of the gargantuan vessel wedged sideways into the canal – and the lone excavator working to free it – struck most as absurd. Against the massive underbelly of the ship, the equipment looked tiny. But for Gibson, a 26-year old Angeleno, it immediately evoked discomfort.

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