Campaigners believe Holyrood crisis may prevent women from coming forward to report harassment
The Salmond inquiry is having a significant impact on the momentum for change brought about by the #MeToo movement, according to experts and campaigners on workplace harassment.
They have told the Guardian the political crisis convulsing Holyrood has also had a “chilling” and “demoralising” effect on women in terms of their confidence in reporting unacceptable behaviour.
Continue reading...Are Muslim women being asked to change too much of themselves in order to fit in?
“Modest fashion” has been a defining style for the past decade. The trend for oversize silhouettes and loose layers has united fashion fans, religious and secular, and has been in part an attempt by western brands to buy into the lucrative market of Muslim consumers. This shift has also seen the headscarf become increasingly acceptable, even covetable, in western fashion, with Nike, Uniqlo, Liberty, Tommy Hilfiger and Dolce & Gabbana among the brands selling scarves overtly tailored for use as hijabs in recent years.
Islamic dress, however, remains a lightning rod for controversy. Hijab bans are continually discussed in France while Switzerland is to hold a referendum on burqas this week, even as governments around the world encourage the use of face masks. China, too, has persecuted women for wearing the hijab.
Continue reading...Juggling babies and a job is always difficult – what are the particular pressures for performers and how is the industry taking steps to improve?
Followers of Royal Ballet principal Lauren Cuthbertson cheer ardently for her Juliet, Manon and Sugar Plum Fairy, but are in raptures about her latest role, as mum to baby Peggy, born in December and already the toast of Instagram. Cuthbertson is one of a flurry of dancers at the Royal who are about to give or have recently given birth, in a serendipitously timed lockdown baby boom.
It’s a long way from the early days of the company, when founder Ninette de Valois set the tone. “‘You’re pregnant darling, goodbye!’ That’s how it was,” says Jeanetta Laurence, a dancer in its touring company in the 1960s and 70s. Even now, she says: “It’s hard to think of another industry where having a baby is so intrusive to the work. I’m in awe and wonder at how they manage it.”
Continue reading...The new HBO documentary in which Mia and Dylan Farrow revisit their 1992 allegation against Woody Allen claims to be an even-handed investigation. But its failure to present the facts makes it feel more like activism
“HBO Doc About Woody Allen & Mia Farrow Ignores Mia’s 3 Dead Kids, Her Child Molester Brother, Other Family Tragedies” was the headline on one US showbiz site, above its review of the four-part documentary, Allen v Farrow, about the continuing battle between Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, now entering its fourth decade. But this review was very much an outlier. In the vast main, reaction to the strongly anti-Allen series has been overwhelmingly positive, with Buzzfeed describing it as a “nuanced reckoning” and Entertainment Weekly comparing it to the recent documentaries about Michael Jackson and Jeffrey Epstein. This reaction is more of a reflection of the public’s feelings towards Allen – particularly in the US – than of the documentary, which sets itself up as an investigation but much more resembles PR, as biased and partial as a political candidate’s advert vilifying an opponent in election season.
Related: Allen v Farrow review – effective docuseries on allegations of abuse
Continue reading...Getting fit isn’t all about Lycra and sweat, our everyday activities can also work wonders, with a bit of effort
You don’t have to be grunting in a gym or grinding out the laps of the park to get a sweat on. Incidental exercise can be just as beneficial, and much easier to incorporate into daily routines. “It’s any activity that is part of daily living,” says Prof Emmanuel Stamatakis, an expert in physical activity at the University of Sydney, “rather than something that is done for the purpose of fitness, health or entertainment.”
Stamatakis tells me that incidental exercise, which is termed “intermittent lifestyle physical activity” by academics, is under-researched. But a paper he co-authored in 2018 found that sudden bursts of high-intensity incidental exercise – bounding up a flight of stairs, for example – could be highly beneficial from a health point of view, undermining the long-held belief that physical activity has to last at least 10 minutes to be worthwhile. “All physical activity counts and has a health benefit,” says Stamatakis. But how best to incorporate more incidental exercise to your life? The experts weigh in.
Continue reading...Whether talking to family, friends or strangers, calls hardly ever end when both parties are ready
So you just called to say “I love you” – but how long should you stay on the phone?
New research suggests no matter who we’re talking to, or what we’re talking about, conversations rarely conclude when the two individuals want them to end.
Continue reading...Beans are not just delicious but good for us – and the planet. They’re also amazingly versatile
Judith Choate loves beans. “Everything about them is good,” says the American chef and food writer. “They’re cheap, they’re highly nutritious. They’re good for the planet: when farmers farm them, they put nutrients back into the earth. I can’t even think of anything bad about them, except the one thing that people object to, which is they do take some time to cook.” Choate has now written The Mighty Bean, a book packed with simple recipes to encourage more of us to love legumes. Here are some of her tips to make the best of beans.
Continue reading...The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts
Why do some places have dust and others not? Our house seems to need redusting days after a full deep clean, while a colleague told me she could leave her holiday home in Sweden for a year and come back to a spotless space. Is it the population density? Legacy of industrialisation? Car pollution?
James de Malplaquet
Send new questions to nq@theguardian.com.
Continue reading...Social distancing has reminded us what a crucial role touch plays in our wellbeing, says social and cultural historian Joe Moran
When was the last time you touched someone you don’t live with? One day last March, probably; you’re not sure of the date. Did you shake hands with a new colleague at work? Did your coat brush against another commuter’s on the train? Did someone bump your elbow and mutter an apology when rushing past you on an escalator? If you’d known that was the last time you’d make contact with the body of a stranger, you’d have paid more attention.
And what about the 8.2 million British adults who live on their own? Many will have gone nearly a year now without so much as a pat on the arm from another person. Touch is the sense we take most for granted, but we miss it when it’s gone. Psychologists have a term for the feelings of deprivation and abandonment we experience: “skin hunger”.
Continue reading...The pandemic exposed gender inequality, shattering the fragile jigsaw of support that allowed women with children to work. Radical action is necessary to prevent women’s rights backsliding a generation
“It is so hard, I cannot describe it.”
“I burned out, completely.”
Continue reading...Spate of audacious and often violent robberies leads to boom in sales of high-security animal accessories
A spate of dognapping in recent months has led to growing numbers of owners buying lockable, steel-core collars and leads that cannot be severed by bolt cutters as they walk their pets.
Dog theft has risen as animals available to buy have become scarcer since the pandemic began. The average cost of a puppy doubled to nearly £1,900 last year, and some breeds are worth more than £6,000.
Continue reading...As I grew up, the majority of black women I saw on TV were fair skinned. Those who looked like me were never cast as the lead
I’ve been building a profile as a writer and broadcaster long enough to know that there will be public storms. Some creep up on you, others you sense brewing, and some have been lingering in the background for a lifetime.
A couple of weeks ago, I posted on social media about having “lost out” on hosting a documentary to a lighter-skinned black woman. The subject of the documentary was maternal mortality in the UK, and the harrowing fact that black women are five times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. This is something I have campaigned on for several years, wrote about in my book I Am Not Your Baby Mother and experienced first-hand when I almost died a few days after the birth of my first child in 2013.
Continue reading...Every year, thousands of British children are conceived with the help of donor sperm. But few ever meet their siblings...
Caroline Pearson, a podcast producer from London, was a few days into her maternity leave when she discovered that her unborn daughter had two sisters. She had visited a website a friend had told her about, which allows recipients of donated sperm (such as her) to search for families who have used the same donor. If they’ve registered with this website, they could be anywhere in the world, since the US sperm bank chosen by Pearson and her husband, Francis, ships internationally, and the website, Donor Sibling Registry (DSR), is also US-based with an international reach. Pearson couldn’t resist, and typed in the donor’s reference number.
“Suddenly, I was overwhelmingly curious,” Pearson says. She didn’t expect to find anything – let alone two families living within a half-hour radius. The first profile was a single mother to a two-year-old girl, living nearby in London. It seemed an extraordinary coincidence. Caroline was “totally giddy”; her partner Francis, a photographer, was cautious. “I tried to rein things in,” he says. “Caroline was pregnant and we were already dealing with becoming parents, and the donor process. But all this other stuff, it was so unknown. I’m practical and you think: yes, that could be amazing – but what if they’re awful people?”
Continue reading...Ken, 60, sales director, meets Shelley, 63, Spanish interpreter
What were you hoping for?
A great conversation with a view to possibilities.
Compliance with lockdown is proving increasingly hard for people in relationships who don’t live together
Since most of the UK went back into lockdown on 5 January, people have once again been forced to “stay at home, save lives”. But with “pandemic burnout” on the rise many say compliance is proving increasingly difficult.
People in relationships who do not live with their partner have been in a tough position throughout the pandemic. Faced with the prospect of breaking lockdown or breaking up, many couples have opted for the former.
Continue reading...Marathon runner Eddie Izzard, solo sailor Pip Hare and explorer Levison Wood explain what they have learned about enduring the seemingly unendurable
It just goes on and on, doesn’t it? Despite the millions of vaccinations, and Boris Johnson’s “roadmap” for easing the lockdown, this pandemic is feeling increasingly like an endurance test – a marathon, followed by another marathon, followed by another. Or trudging for miles and miles across the desert for day after day. Or sailing alone around the world, battling storms and loneliness. How do you keep going? There are people who know a thing or two about that – keeping going, endurance, deserts and storms. Perhaps they might even have some advice.
Continue reading...Law would widen strict rules in country where thousands suffer complications from unsafe terminations
A bill to liberalise Malawi’s abortion laws will be debated by MPs today in the face of opposition from faith groups.
If passed, the termination of pregnancy bill would allow abortions when a woman’s mental or physical health is in danger, in cases of rape and incest, and when there are serious foetal abnormalities.
Continue reading...Popular all over the world, stew is always a comfort, whether it comes as a Lancashire hotpot, French daube or a summery mix of courgette, mint and butter beans
Stew doesn’t have a poor reputation so much as bad branding. The name itself has an aura of disappointment about it, especially the way my children repeated it back to me, after they asked what we were having and I told them. “Stew!” they would say, with heavy emphasis on the “Ew!” It probably doesn’t help that “stew” shares an etymological source with the word typhus.
It is perhaps for that reason that we are often drawn to more exotic names for what is essentially the same idea: tagine, ragout, daube. But a basic, unfussy, slow-cooked stew can rival any of these, as Felicity Cloake’s perfect beef stew demonstrates. As with most beef stew recipes, this one begins with browning the meat on all sides, in batches, and then removing it before adding anything else.
Continue reading...The TV presenter thinks our newfound love of walking will persist after lockdown. She talks about hiking around Britain’s coast, the joy of newborn lambs and the true meaning of liberation
It is a rare day that Kate Humble doesn’t get up and get outside, walking out from her farm in the Monmouthshire countryside. “I want to be outside for the first hour or two of the day: no phone, no distractions. I’m sure we all wake up with a million things going on in our heads, all these disjointed thoughts, worries and anxieties. For me, that part of the day, when all I have to think about is one foot going in front of the other and not falling over, creates a headspace that allows all my thoughts to settle in a way that feels much more manageable.”
Humble is a walker – she wrote a 2018 book on the subject, and is presenting a new TV series on it – but the last year has turned many of us into walkers, too. Whether for exercise, to break the monotony or to snatch the chance to walk and talk with a friend, for those of us lucky enough to be physically able and safe to venture beyond the front door, a stroll has become a highlight of the day. “We’re scrabbling to find positives of this situation, and I think one is that it has turned our focus back on to what’s on our doorsteps, whether it’s the wildlife in our gardens, or the beauty of our urban parks,” says Humble. As an ambassador for Living Streets, the charity that campaigns for a better walking environment in towns and cities, Humble hopes the pandemic may speed up the shift away from car-dominated urban spaces. With fewer cars on the road, “I think people have realised that walking is often quicker, healthier, just generally a nicer way of getting around.”
Continue reading...You don’t get joy from work – not many people do, says Eleanor Gordon-Smith – but you won’t get more of it sitting at the computer promising yourself you’ll work soon.
I have always had a problem with work, I don’t have much internal motivation to do any and a lot of anxiety about it. Now I am supposed to be working from home I feel even more disengaged. I get up at 11am, then procrastinate around the internet for a few hours.
I do appreciate having a salary and it would logically make sense to try and keep my job. My colleagues are all running themselves ragged working and home schooling and all that stuff. I hate the idea of all that rushing about. How can I change my attitude, and persuade myself do a few hours work every day?
Continue reading...