At the Interpets fair in Tokyo about 300 exhibitors will present their products to business visitors and pet lovers
Continue reading...Category Archives: Life and style
Experience: I carried a twin in each of my wombs
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.
Continue reading...Nappy nomads: the couples who do #vanlife with babies on board
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.
Continue reading...Doughy, fruity, toasted or … microwaved? Tell us how you like your hot cross buns
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
Continue reading...Phil Elverum’s songs of loss gave me a language for that shapeshifter, grief
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.
Continue reading...The anti-Marie Kondo: Netflix celebrates the clothes we keep
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.
Continue reading...Sticky and sweet: 17 delicious ways with maple syrup – from pecan pie to a whisky sour
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.
Continue reading...The return of the bonkbuster: how horny heroines are starting a new sexual revolution
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.
Continue reading...The Suez boat saga enthralled the world – but not those with naviphobia
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.
Continue reading...Is pornography to blame for rise in ‘rape culture’?
Analysis: experts split on whether easy access to porn has fuelled sexual harassment, abuse and assault among young people
The harrowing reports of sexism and assaults in schools detailed on the everyonesinvited.uk website has fuelled concerns of a “rape culture” in educational settings.
The disclosures have raised concerns that easy access to pornography is part of the problem.
Continue reading...Back in the swing and the swim: England returns to outdoor sport – in pictures
From pools and lidos to tennis courts and golf courses, it has been an action-packed day around England as lockdown regulations are relaxed to allow outdoor sporting activity. People will now be able to meet up legally outside in groups of six or two households and organised outdoor sport can resume
Continue reading...Marti Pellow on success, songwriting and sobriety: ‘Every day I punch addiction in the face!’
With Wet Wet Wet, Pellow was one of the biggest-selling musicians of the 90s. But heroin and alcohol soon became a problem. He talks about heroes, love and conquering his demons
Marti Pellow remembers his introduction to booze clearly. He was a young boy, about 11, and he sneaked a can of beer from his father. “I knew as soon as I had my first drink that it made me feel different,” he says. “I had a fuzzy feeling in my stomach. I liked the rush of that. It made me feel light.” By the time he was 12, he would go to dances with his friends and alcohol would give him dutch courage. “I’d ask an adult to buy me a couple of cans of lager. It gave me a wee bit more confidence to ask a girl to dance; it made me feel larger than life.”
Pellow went on to become the frontman of Wet Wet Wet, the blue-eyed soul band whose version of Love Is All Around, as featured in Four Weddings and a Funeral, topped the charts for 15 weeks and is still the UK’s biggest-selling love song. By the time he left Wet Wet Wet for the first time in 1998, three of their five studio albums had topped the UK charts (with the others peaking at No 2) and they had had 26 Top 40 hits. By then, he had also developed a dual addiction to alcohol and heroin that could easily have done for him. It did pretty much do for him, as far as the band was concerned. Sure, he rejoined in 2003, and they spent another 14 years together, but they never enjoyed the same success again.
Continue reading...Wheel life with the ladies in the van
Many middle-aged American women are selling up and shipping out, taking to the roads alone in their mobile homes
Sarah Gabriel found her life’s meaning in a small town in Kansas on a cold autumn morning in 2020. It was the hour before dawn in a Walmart car park and the 63-year-old rolled back the strip of floor underlay that serves as makeshift curtains on the windows of her 2008 Honda minivan to the awesome sight of a full moon looming above the spectral white of Walmart’s security lights.
“Here I was in Kansas, you know, like Dorothy, and the moon was doing her thing like I was doing my thing,” she recalls. “‘Hey Sarah,’ she seemed to say, ‘you’re in your seventh decade and now it’s time for your big adventure.’”
Continue reading...How lighthouse keepers show us the way in dark, isolated times
The importance of a beacon and having fortitude are key for lighthouse keepers – clues for us all when there’s little else around
Imagine being a lighthouse keeper. Before I dropped beneath the surface of this secluded, often secretive, occupation, the idea brought to mind wind-blown seagulls, or a bearded sea dog chewing his pipe. Such is the romantic notion many of us have about lighthouses. The reality is (or was, because the staffed lighthouse is now extinct) quite different.
Land lights – those charming beacons you’ll find on the coast, the distinctive red stripe of Portland Bill or the thimble-shaped watchpoint at Llanddwyn – are appealing, but for me the sea towers hold the greatest allure. I’m talking about those majestic, improbable stations rising audaciously up out of the ocean – the Bell Rock, the Bishop, the Longships. The famous Eddystone, south of Plymouth, is the fourth built on that reef, in an effort that spanned almost 200 years. Its neighbouring “Smeaton’s Stump”, the remains of a third manifestation, serves as a stark reminder that water is not meant to hold buildings.
Continue reading...‘Virtual meetings aren’t going anywhere soon’: how to put your best Zoom face forward
Has a year of video calls made you self-conscious? Don’t turn your camera off: just relax and deploy a few of these beauty tips
Thought we were a nation of narcissists pre-Covid? Well, a global pandemic has taken things to a whole new level. It’s safe to say nobody planned to spend quite so much of the past year staring at their own grainy reflection, but with everything from weddings to work meetings forced online, our bid to stay connected with others has meant being constantly confronted with our own faces.
And not all of us like what we see. There’s a big difference between sharing a carefully filtered selfie on Instagram, and catching yourself slumped in front of the screen during your fourth video chat of the day, the cat cleaning its paws in the background as you stare in horror at your dark circles. What with the unflattering lighting, unforgiving camera angles and the fact that none of us has been inside a salon in months, it’s no wonder we’re sick of the sight of ourselves. But what effect does it have on our self-esteem? And can we do anything to boost it?
Continue reading...Forget fast fashion – here are the six key trends you need for 2021
Join the slow lane in these relaxed looks that will see you through spring, summer and beyond
Goodbye fast fashion, hello slow fashion. The age of the flash-in-the-pan trend is over; the lifespan of the trends that matter is now counted in years, not months.
To put this in broadsheet language, slow fashion is fashion’s third way. No need to make a stark choice between buying into the fast-fashion cycle (consumerist horror show, but jazzy) and swearing off fashion altogether (admirable, but a bit joyless). Slow fashion charts a different course. It is about looking agreeably current, rather than up-to-the-minute. It is about nailing the hemline or the dress shape that defines the decade, rather than the season. It keeps one eye on fashion, but its feet on the ground, remembering that clothes are not disposable.
This is an exciting moment. You know that thing when something really complicated goes wrong, and the first thing you do is turn it off and then on again? And sometimes, it works? Well, that’s basically what we’ve done to fashion. It’s had a reset. Fashion was on pause for the pandemic, but now it is back on – and it’s better than it was before.
Continue reading...Julia Ormond: ‘What do I dislike about my appearance? That my career is dependent on it’
The actor on her love of dogs, granting wishes and Ryan Gosling
Born in Surrey, Julia Ormond, 56, starred in Peter Greenaway’s 1993 film The Baby Of Mâcon. She went on to appear in Legends Of The Fall, First Knight and The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button; her latest film, Reunion, is available on digital platforms. She has a daughter and lives in Malibu, California.
What is your greatest fear?
Heights.
Charlotte Rampling: ‘I am prickly. People who are prickly can’t be hurt any more’
She’s best known for her dark, difficult roles, and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. The actor talks about swinging in the 60s, family tragedy – and why she’s still got It
‘That photoshoot was such fun,” Charlotte Rampling says. “I was pinging.”
“You were pinging?”
Continue reading...Forgotten how to socialise? Here’s your post-lockdown primer
Six ways to bring some pizzazz to those first socially distanced interactions as restrictions are lifted
From Monday in England, people will be able to meet outdoors either in a group of six (from any number of households), or in a group of any size from up to two households, including in private gardens.
While this is exciting, it may also be a little daunting – many of us will have forgotten how to socialise normally during the long months of lockdown. Here’s a quick refresher course on the art of making conversation under current guidelines:
Continue reading...Blind date: ‘Describe him in three words? Better suited elsewhere’
Nicki, 26, charity worker, meets Kris, 29, musician
What were you hoping for?
It was something new for me, so I went in with an open mind.