Category Archives: Life and style

How we stay together: ‘We’re the middle-aged couple walking down the street holding hands’

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Angela Kitzelman and Don Jarmey joke their secret is having ‘no goals’, a philosophy that’s worked for the pair over more than three decades

Names: Angela Kitzelman and Don Jarmey
Years together: 36
Occupations: public servant and lab technician

“If you can travel together successfully, that is a sign of a strong relationship,” says Don Jarmey. “If you can sit for 41 hours on a bus from Istanbul to Budapest with about 2 metres of snow outside, where the bus stops three times in that 41 hours and you still love each other at the end, then yeah.”

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Ray Mears: ‘You won’t see me on I’m a Celebrity – I’ve done all those things for real’

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The woodsman and TV presenter, 57, on trademarking his name, surviving a helicopter crash and planning for the worst

I grew up in the analogue age and feel very privileged. It encouraged me to look outside for stimulus and fostered a degree of self-reliance that we’ve lost. But I do think children today are given more reign to be themselves. My generation was not inspired to have spirit in a way you see so much now.

After I left school, I went to work in London. I can’t even remember what I did. I was in an office with 20 other people and everybody smoked. It was horrible and probably spurred me to go and work outdoors.

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My brother used to bully me. Now, when I hear from him, I panic

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It’s OK not to take his call, says Annalisa Barbieri. You are not responsible for his happiness

I am 22 and my brother is 24. I am married with a child; he is single. We grew up in a rocky family situation and were removed from our parents’ care and placed in a children’s home when I was five and he was seven. I don’t remember much before that, but he bullied me a lot growing up. For a while now I’ve been dealing with anxiety related to him – every time I see his name pop up over text, I freak out. I hate it when he calls or visits and I feel drained afterwards. He doesn’t deal with rejection well, so I feel I have to take the call. Deep down he’s a good guy who has issues, but I really want to figure out why I have this anxiety with him; I don’t have this issue with anyone else. I can’t afford therapy but I’m trying my best to work this out.

It sounds as if you and your brother are dealing with trauma connected with your childhood. “Freaking out” when you see someone or their name pops up on a phone is a sign of this, and bullying is a trauma, quite aside from everything else you both suffered as children.

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A room with a view: the Twitter account that spent a year staring into people’s homes

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As the pandemic forced us inside and online, Room Rater was one Twitter account giving doomscrollers a well-needed levity break. A year on, co-founder Claude Taylor explains how he plans to keep going

With its stately lamp and verdant window view, Hillary Clinton’s “Zoom room” is nicer than most. So when Room Rater – a Twitter account which scores the video conference backgrounds of high-profile figures – gave it nine out of 10 last spring, Clinton took her disappointment to social media: “I’ll keep striving for that highest, hardest glass ceiling, the elusive 10/10,” she tweeted at the account.

Judging the backgrounds on video calls has been the armchair sport of the past year. Room Rater just happened to screengrab these moments. As we doomscrolled through bleak statistics online, it was cheering to see shots of Meryl Streep’s sterile shelves or the copies of Fahrenheit 451 and The Twits propped up behind Boris Johnson at a school in Leicestershire. Scrolling through the posts a year after it launched, these images have become emblematic of just how quickly coronavirus forced all of us inside and online.

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‘Own your grey hair and be powerful’: women on no longer dyeing their hair

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With hairdressers closed for most of the pandemic, we asked you to tell us why you stopped dyeing your hair and what it means to you

I had an epiphany one day. I couldn’t stand the demarcation line. My hair had been so damaged from all the processing. Covid had everything shut down. It was time. I didn’t feel it was necessary to hide behind hair dye any more. I took the shears to my own hair and mowed it all off. The second picture is two and a half months of new, fresh, regrowth.

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The dogs keeping office workers company through lockdown

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Owners say taking four-legged friends to work helps tackle loneliness and livens up Zoom calls

“Dogs are just like ‘play, eat, sleep’ – they bring me back into the moment. I think we can all learn something from that,” says Carole Henderson, who has been taking her “furry backup” to the office for the last few months.

They are not so good at making the tea and things get a bit rowdy when the delivery man comes round, but Henderson’s labradors Barney and Rusty, and labradoodle Lily, have been her sidekicks for the last decade. As well as being excellent foot-warmers, they have helped her emotionally with getting through solo months in the office.

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Dog interrupts live weather report from Moscow – video

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A correspondent's live weather report was interrupted by a dog who snatched her microphone and ran off with it. Nadezhda Serezhkina, who works for the Russian-language broadcaster Mir TV, could then be seen running after the dog who still had the colourful microphone in its mouth. The dog, and the damaged microphone, later joined Serezhkina for the end of her live broadcast

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Esther Perel on life after Covid: ‘People will want to reconnect with eros’

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The acclaimed sex and relationships therapist talks pandemic breakups, the psychological toll of working from home and why she still feels like an outsider in America

A global pandemic tends to strain interpersonal relationships, and the world’s most famous couples therapist, Esther Perel, has been working to save as many as she can – or at least help us understand why they’re failing.

“We know that disasters and crises often function like relationship accelerators,” she tells me over Zoom, speaking from the office of her New York apartment. “A disaster heightens our sense of mortality, of precariousness, of ‘life is short’. And when life is short, you may say suddenly, ‘Let’s move in together, let’s have a child, let’s get married.’ Like, ‘What am I waiting for?’” But you might also say: “If life is short, I’m not doing this for another 20 years.”

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‘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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