Category Archives: Life and style

Yotam Ottolenghi’s recipes for Valentine’s Day

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A three-course showpiece to prep in advance, so you can spend more time with your better half: burnt aubergine with feta and harissa oil, prawns in vanilla and rum butter, and a chocolatey coffee mousse to finish

This time last year, many of us were looking forward to a special, one-to-one supper with a loved one. The partner we live with, for example, but perhaps forget to go on dates with; a special meal, quality time, stories saved up to be shared. The past year has, of course, brought a whole new meaning to the idea of “quality time”, and I’m not sure anyone has any great stories they’ve saved for this Valentine’s dinner. Be kind and cut yourself some slack: forget about the top new chat and focus instead on a top new meal. Pat yourself on the back for making it this far, and raise a large glass of something you adore.

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‘They are scared to try new things’: how is home school impacting young children?

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After nearly a year of disrupted learning, primary school children in the UK have missed key milestones - as well as their friends. What will be the long term cost?

• In pictures: pets, plants and cuddly toys: a child’s eye view of home schooling

It is fair to say that Wells, eight, does not enjoy remote learning. “It’s horrible,” he tells a group of fellow year 4 children over a video call. “I can see my friends, but I can’t talk to them.” Emily, nine, finds home schooling tough, too: “It’s really, really boring. I’m sad. But I like being able to play with my guinea pigs.” Flora, also nine, agrees lockdown learning isn’t all bad: “It’s fun solving maths problems with my granny on Skype, and I get to have yummy snacks, like chocolate biscuits, all day.”

But they would all prefer to be at school. “There’s less distraction,” says Betty, who has two younger siblings and is expected to work independently in the afternoons. “When you’re in class, you can talk to your teacher and ask for help,” Ainhoa says. “Privately,” Wells adds. “You get their individual attention.” The children talk about feeling frustrated, stressed and even exhausted at the end of the school day. “Sometimes I just want to scrunch up the paper into pieces,” Ainhoa admits. “I really miss playing with my friends in the playground,” Flora says.

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‘It is only now I realise the toll the pandemic has taken’: a letter from the other side of Covid

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I moved from London to New Zealand, where the sense of normality is surreal

Read more: Laura Barton on how a daily call to California got her through lockdown

New Zealand doesn’t exist. So goes the meme, an internet in-joke arising from the frequency with which the island nation is left off world maps, and amplified by the whimsical news stories that often emerge there. For instance: a city road was recently closed for an entire month to allow safe crossing for a family of sea lions. How is New Zealand even real? As a citizen, with a black-and-silver passport to prove it, I have caught myself asking that question since I arrived back here from London a month ago. How can this place – where you can hug your parents, go to bars with your friends, and live life more or less like it’s 2019 – be only a flight away from the one I left behind?

I left London, where I’d been living since 2017, a few days before Christmas, just as coronavirus cases started rising again rapidly, and the government braced, too late, for another lengthy lockdown. “Getting out, are you,” a man had said, eyeing my bags on the bus to the Piccadilly line. At each stop on my journey to Auckland, totalling three planes over nearly 24 hours, my phone had lit up with news of the rapidly deteriorating situation I’d just fled. Two weeks later, I was released from my government-managed quarantine hotel into New Zealand, where there had been no local transmission of coronavirus since November. It felt as if I had slipped into another world through the back of my hotel wardrobe.

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Experience: I got married with months to live

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The only photos were taken on my phone by an oncology nurse, but they reflect the joy we were feeling

I met Emma at a horrendous “mingling event” one wet spring evening in 2015. We connected immediately, and after a couple of dates I think we both knew we had a future together. By Christmas, Emma had moved out of her flat in Hove and into the house I lived in for my job, as site manager for a Brighton primary school. We’d talked about wanting kids on our very first date; we were both in our mid-30s and it seemed important to be upfront.

Our son, Archie, was born in 2018 and by the time he was toddling he was like my shadow, following me as I fixed things and helping put away tools. It never occurred to me I might not get to see him grow up. I’ve always been fit and healthy, and when I suddenly started losing weight last summer my first thought was, “Great – now I won’t need to spend so much time at the gym.” But I was losing my appetite, too, and soon people were saying, “James, what’s up? You don’t look great.”

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‘When I tell people, they might laugh’ – George Clooney and the men who sew

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More ‘sew bros’ have taken up the fine art of stitching in the pandemic. What’s so appealing about this crafty pursuit?

Good things are rarely described using the suffix ‘bro’ but the rise of the ‘sew bros’ could be an exception. That’s the name that’s been given to the growing number of men who are taking up the fine art of sewing, who can now add George Clooney to their numbers.

The father of three-year-old twins, who came out as a self-haircutter in December, told AARP magazine: “I do a lot of sewing the kids’ clothes … and my wife’s dress that tore a couple of times. I was a bachelor for a long time and didn’t have any money, and you have to learn how to repair things.”

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We need to talk: the linguistic clues that reveal your relationship is over

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A new study shows that months before a breakup, a partner’s language can change subtly. Here’s what to look out for

Name: The language of breakups

Age: Timeless. Ever since Eve ate that ill-fated pomegranate, romantic relationships have been problematic. And people have to find a way of saying goodbye. But this particular ...

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The real thing: my battle to beat a 27-year Diet Coke addiction

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I have been obsessed with the sugar-free soda since I was four, spending £500 a year on up to seven cans a day. This is what happened when I tried to quit

The greatest love story of my life has been with a carbonated beverage.

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t addicted to Diet Coke. Some memories: I am sitting at the kitchen table at my grandmother’s house in northern Cyprus, screaming because my mother won’t refill my yellow-and-green patterned glass. I am four or five years old. My grandmother looks on, disturbed, as I wail disconsolately. My mother does not give in.

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‘I feel so good I may never drink again!’ Readers on their success – or failure – during dry January

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Readers explain whether they looked, felt and slept better – or if they turned back to alcohol to cheer up a miserable month

I don’t drink every day, but I do drink every weekend and I usually drink a fair amount. I did dry January (and February) two years ago when my wife was eight months pregnant with our son, but I’m finding it much easier this year because I don’t have the opportunity to go out and socialise. The thing I miss most about drinking is visiting the pub with some friends – without that it’s certainly easier. Duncan Ward, operational resilience manager, West Sussex

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‘I document America’s strange beauty’: the photography of My Name Is Earl’s Jason Lee

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He played a redemption-seeking redneck on TV, but lately the actor has found solace off-screen, travelling with his camera. He talks about slackers, the Mallrats sequel and breezing into one-horse towns

Jason Lee knew he was in trouble when he stepped on the set. The year was 1992, Sonic Youth were at their peak and he was starring as a doomed skateboarder in their latest video. As a music obsessed, pro skateboarder with acting aspirations, he felt he had a point to prove. To add more pressure, it was for the song 100% – the band’s classic ode to a murdered Black Flag roadie – and the video was being co-directed by one of his skateboarding friends (some guy called Spike Jonze).

“I was really trying my hardest to focus,” says Lee. “I was like pretending to be Robert De Niro on the set, really trying to get into it and make it count and make it real and believable.”

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‘Making our home safe again’: meet the women who clear land mines

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After decades of war, more and more women are working to remove lethal mines and IEDs from the fields and cities of their homelands. It’s dangerous, but it’s helping to rebuild their lives

As a child, Hana Khider dreamed of Sinjar. Born and brought up in Syria, she remembers her mother telling her stories about the district in northern Iraq where her relatives lived. “I always imagined it in my mind,” she says, smiling over our video call. “It was beautiful and peaceful.” Today, Sinjar is her home. She lives with her husband and three children in a village close to Mount Sinjar, which she describes as “very special to our community”. Khider is Yazidi and they believe the mountain was the final resting place of Noah’s Ark. The rocky peak has long been considered a sacred refuge for persecuted people.

It was the mountain that saved her and more than 40,000 other Yazidis when they fled Islamic State in August 2014. Driven from their villages, they camped on the mountain for months – some for years – after a genocide that, according to the UN, saw 5,000 Yazidis massacred and up to 7,000 women and girls captured and sold as sex slaves to Isis members. “We feared for our lives,” Khider, now 28, says, explaining how Isis fighters surrounded the mountain. Luckily, she escaped to Kurdistan, where she lived in an internally displaced persons (IDP) camp until her village was liberated. Her family returned in May 2016. A few months later, she applied to work as a deminer at the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a charity that finds and clears mines in places of conflict.

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My husband died a year ago. Here’s what he taught us about life and love

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A year after her husband Joe Hammond’s death from motor neurone disease, his widow reflects on grief, parenting through loss, and survival

How do you decide upon a day to die? For my husband Joe and me, that meant finding out when the doctors we needed were available, then we took note of our two sons’ school holidays and, finally, we looked at the carer rota for that month. Who could we trust with Joe’s death as much as we had trusted them with his life?

The next step was a meeting with the relevant doctors; what incredible women they had been throughout our whole, surreal journey. They asked us how we imagined the process might unfold, during which Joe would receive a huge amount of morphine to sedate him enough that his ventilator could be removed. We were bemused. What were the options? Apparently, some people choose to watch television and the programme of choice is Countdown. This gave Joe and me the giggles. We said we thought we’d manage without more conundrums than we already had.

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Tim Dowling: I know what I weigh. Our new scales are wildly out

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I realise that the last time my fixed notion of what I weighed was affirmed by actual measurement was at a doctor’s appointment five years ago

On my third pass through the kitchen in the morning, I see a recently delivered box sitting on the floor. I consider the possibility that it might be for me. The package is addressed to my wife, but there’s still a slim chance I am the final intended recipient. I lift the box: it’s heavy. For the moment, I can take the investigation no further – my wife is not at home.

At some point in the afternoon, I look out the window of my office shed towards the house and see my wife standing in the kitchen. I cross the garden. My wife does not look up when I enter – she is staring intently at her feet. The box is on the table between us, empty.

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Everyday Covid mistakes we are all still making

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Can we do more as individuals to help slow the spread of coronavirus? We ask the experts

Covid-19 infections in the UK are reducing but remain stubbornly high, despite a month of lockdown measures. So could we be doing more as individuals to curb transmission of the virus? A virologist, a psychologist and a public health expert share their views on some of the Covid-19 mistakes that we are all still making.

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She survived in the wild against all odds. I took her class to learn how

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Woniya Thibeault, the runner up on Netflix’s Alone, is offering an eight-week survival course, teaching more than how to skin a deer and tie a knot

Left to fend for herself on Arctic land, with only 10 pieces of gear – among them a sleeping bag, a pot, and a bow and arrows – Woniya Thibeault didn’t just want to survive. She wanted to find joy in the process of surviving.

Scattered miles apart in the same rugged wilderness were nine other contestants looking to outlast one another and win big on the History Channel’s popular survival reality series Alone. In it, contestants compete to stick it out in the wilderness for the longest time with limited resources – all have the option to tap out if it gets too much. The prize money – $500,000 – would have changed Thibeault’s life, but winning wasn’t her top priority. She was there for the experience.

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Amanda Gorman signs modeling contract after star turn at inauguration

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Already a fashion sensation, the 22-year-old joins IMG Models, the same agency as Gigi and Bella Hadid

Amanda Gorman, whose performance of her poem The Hill We Climb during Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration drew widespread praise, has signed to IMG Models, the same agency as Gigi and Bella Hadid.

The 22-year-old US national youth poet laureate, has already become a fashion sensation. The red satin Prada headband she wore during the inauguration ceremony led to the item selling out, while her yellow coat (also Prada) caused searches for “yellow coats” to increase 1,328% (according to fashion search engine Lyst) in the wake of her appearance.

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Orange appeal: 17 mouth-watering ways with marmalade

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From cake to pudding to panna cotta to pork ribs, this seasonal treat is endlessly flexible. And let’s not forget the cocktails …

We may never know how many surplus jars of marmalade were created during the lockdown year, just for something to do. There is, however, still time for one final push: marmalade – as detailed in this masterclass recipe from Felicity Cloake – is traditionally made with sour Seville oranges, which have a notoriously short season, due to end in just a few weeks’ time.

You don’t have to use Seville oranges, of course. You can make perfectly serviceable marmalade from regular oranges, or even from spent orange rinds, following Tom Hunt’s example. Non-traditional marmalades can also be derived from other fruits, such as pink grapefruit, as Nigel Slater demonstrates.

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From ancient Egypt to Cardi B: a cultural history of the manicure

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Nail art dates back millennia, taking in complex social codes, cultural appropriation, modern slavery and the sexism of lockdown rules for beauty salons

“How to Take a Nail Selfie!” “Fruity Manicure Inspo!” “Kylie Jenner Slammed by Fans for Nearly Poking Out Stormi’s Eyes With Ridiculous Claw Nails.”

The glut of hyperbolic nail-related headlines online points to our obsession with the endless possibilities open to the plate at the top of our fingers. In the internet age, the manicure, in all its incarnations, is a traffic winner. It peppers a plethora of Pinterest boards; the hashtag #nails has been posted 151m times on Instagram; nail artists are stars in their own right; and countless women will assert that manicures are a form of self-care. Detractors dismiss it all as frivolity.

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