Category Archives: Life and style

‘Women feel they have no option but to give birth alone’: the rise of freebirthing

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As Covid infections rose, hospital felt like an increasingly dangerous place to have a baby. But is labouring without midwives or doctors the answer?

On the morning of 3 May, Victoria Johnson prepared to give birth at her home in the Highlands. One by one, her three children came downstairs to where she was labouring in a birthing pool surrounded by fairy lights, the curtains tightly shut against the outside world.

Suddenly, she felt an urge to get out of the pool. “I stood up and it felt as if the weight of the universe crashed from my head to my toes.” Her waters broke – “all over the carpet, which wasn’t ideal” – and the baby started to crown. “Everyone was there, including both grandmothers on video call,” she says. “Once the baby was out, my eight-year-old son came over and said, ‘I’m so proud of you.’ And that was everything.”

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Go with the Flowbee: George Clooney reveals how he cuts his hair

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Award-winning actor admits cutting his own hair with device long before salons closed this year due to Covid

With salons largely closed until this week, male grooming has been in freefall since the start of the spring lockdown. DIY haircuts have not been successful for all. Yet one Hollywood star has proved that even in a global pandemic, bad hair is not the great equaliser we hoped it would be.

George Clooney, the 59-year-old award-winning actor and human rights activist, has admitted to successfully cutting his own hair at home using a device called a Flowbee. “My hair’s really like straw, so it’s easy,” he told CBS Sunday Morning.

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Drawing, running or a podcast in the bath: our readers’ tips for switching off after work

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How best to resist the temptation to send one more email? Try these healthy hacks to put the home back into WFH

Even though it happens in the same space as my Zoom counselling sessions, making music helps me to switch off immediately. I close the camera, switch on my synthesiser and load up the software. That simple process transports me into a sonic fantasy world. I take my voice and the sounds of many of the instruments I play, and I sculpt them.

Every week or two, I upload a tune to streaming sites. Making music used to be my profession rather than a hobby, but that distinction now gives me a feeling of immense freedom. I can create my music in any way I like. I no longer need approval or affirmation from the outside world. John Walter, counsellor, Cornwall

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‘It can’t just be me’: Guardian readers share their stories of miscarriage

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After praise for Duchess of Sussex’s disclosure, readers say there has been a culture of silence around the subject

“I was at my 10-week scan and I just felt something wasn’t right. The doctor became very quiet and I instantly knew. Then I heard the words: ‘I’m sorry, there is no heartbeat,’” says Emma Redston, a 38-year-old primary school teacher who lives in Surrey. “I remember falling to my knees, feeling like the floor had been ripped from under me.”

It was 2016 and Redston had suffered a miscarriage after becoming pregnant quickly when she and her husband, Steve, tried for a baby. She was given medicine to induce the miscarriage, and after four hours of extreme bleeding and cramps she passed her baby in her bathroom.

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‘It’s about the emotion’: why Chanel hired a chateau for a catwalk show with no guests

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The French fashion house took a team of 300 to a Loire castle for a blowout event this week, despite the pandemic preventing anyone from attending

How important is a catwalk show to a fashion house? Important enough, in the case of Chanel, to take a team of 300 – including the actor Kristen Stewart, the photographer Juergen Teller and a small army of models – to put on a show in one of the most magnificent chateaux in France, despite an audience capped at zero.

Chanel had hoped to welcome 200 guests to admire chic black-velvet coats, rich damask gowns with lace collars and double-ply cashmere embroidered with double-C logos on a promenade across Chateau de Chenonceau’s 60-metre ballroom, which spans the River Cher. This proved impossible, but – in contrast to May, when a planned show in Capri was replaced by a digital-only presentation – Chanel chose to go ahead with the Métiers d’Art event on Tuesday, even though it was viewed only online.

“The show is just the same as it would have been, but without an audience,” said Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s president of fashion. “We don’t see any other way to talk about the collections, other than having a show. We need to have impactful events to maintain a strong bond with our audience.”

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From Martha Washington to Melania Trump: 250 years of first lady portraiture

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Portraits of presidents’ wives have evolved with the role, and although it remains highly gendered, a new exhibition aims to celebrate their contribution and to ‘rectify the absences of women in US history’

Bess Truman, US first lady from 1945 until 1953, has not become the sort of historical figure people quote on Instagram. “A woman’s public role is to sit beside her husband, be silent, and be sure her hat is on straight,” she said, even though, behind the scenes, she was nicknamed “the Boss” and wrote many of President Truman’s speeches.

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All change: India’s railways bring back tea in clay cups in bid to banish plastics

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Stations switch to humble earthen kulhads in move to cut down on toxic waste and boost incomes of village potters

A small and humble relic from India’s past is about to stage a major comeback. At all 7,000 railway stations in the country, tea will be served in earthen cups known as kulhads.

The kulhads, redolent of a bygone pastoral era, are unpainted, unglazed and have no handles, but are perfectly biodegradable and environment-friendly, which is why the country’s railways minister, Piyush Goyal, has said they will replace plastic cups as part of the government’s goal of making India free of single-use plastic.

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The rock star of retail: how Topshop changed the face of fashion

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With its celebrity collaborations and turbo-charged launches, Philip Green’s Topshop brought fun and drama to the once uninspiring business of clothes-shopping. We chart the rise and fall of the pandemic’s most glamorous corporate victim

“What’s this I’m reading in the paper? It’s a load of absolute shit, that’s what it is. What’s the matter with you? Are you stupid or what? I’ve never read so much rubbish in my life.”

It was February 2010, and I was at my desk in the Guardian office. Philip Green didn’t need to introduce himself. His habit of bellowing down the phone was unmistakable, and I had just written an article about how I was falling out of love with Topshop after a decade being in thrall to its shop floor. Green never did take kindly to criticism of the golden child of his Arcadia empire.

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Family in South Australia find live koala in their Christmas tree

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When the McCormicks came home on Wednesday, the Christmas tree in their Adelaide house had acquired a new ornament

The McCormicks went for a silver, pink and blue theme on their Christmas tree. The old plastic leaves were worn but looked beautiful with baubles on each branch and twinkling lights.

But this year the family tree included one very unexpected ornament: a wild – and somewhat confused – juvenile koala.

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Elliot Page: star of X-Men and Juno announces he is transgender

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Actor takes aim at transphobic politicians and ‘those with a massive platform who continue to spew hostility’, saying they ‘have blood on [their] hands’

Elliot Page, who rose to fame as the lead in teen pregnancy comedy Juno as Ellen Page, has announced he is transgender.

“Hi friends,” he wrote on a variety of social media platforms, “I want to share with you that I am trans, my pronouns are he/they and my name is Elliot.”

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‘We all need magic in our lives’: how Santa’s grottos moved online to beat the pandemic

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It’s 130 years since Father Christmas first appeared in a department store. But this year is the strangest one yet – with virtual calls taking the place of shopping centre visits. Is it enough to keep the ho ho hos flowing?

Five bearded men, dressed head to toe as Santa, wearing fur-trimmed face masks, file into an office building in London and sit behind wooden desks – laptops and webcams in front of them. The room has been made magical with the addition of a red and gold curtain, a snow-flecked Christmas tree and a stuffed penguin perched on top of some lockers. In years gone by these off-duty actors and former children’s TV presenters would have sat in department store grottos and worn out their knees taking the weight of Britain’s children. But they are here today to brush up their tech skills and learn how the in-store Santa can adapt and survive in the middle of a pandemic.

The seminar is led by James Lovell, a honey-voiced compere who straddles the line between practical teaching and keeping up the illusion of snow and elves. He leads the five Santas through exercises and practical advice on how to handle the intricacies of online video calls. The Santas pepper Lovell and a tech expert with questions about how they will see the children in their virtual grottos.

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Bake me happy: 10 deliciously different mince pie recipes

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From the perfect traditional version, to brownie hybrids, deep-fried delights and a throwback from 1591, homemade never looked so good

Nothing should make the heart sink quite as much as the phrase “homemade mince pies”. The chance of failure is simply far too high. Pick a bad recipe and you run the risk of serving up a tray of inedible pastry bin lids gummed together with a miserly Marmite smear of mincemeat.

But it doesn’t have to be like this. An endless array of mince-pie variations are now available to the home cook, ranging from the traditional to the exotic. Depending on your skill level and personal preference, you should find some level of success with the recipes below.

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Scandal’s Kerry Washington: ‘My mother’s nightmare was for me to be a starving actress’

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She hit the big time playing the high-powered political fixer Olivia Pope. In real life, she has spent years campaigning for Kamala Harris and her fellow Democrats. So what’s someone who lives and breathes politics doing in Ryan Murphy’s musical The Prom?

In a rational world, somewhere deep in the Democratic National Committee headquarters, a small staff would be hard at work planning Kerry Washington’s presidential bid. “Washington 2028: Tough on Scandal” or “2032: Ms Kerry Goes to Washington” – the slogans just write themselves. Whether Washington could be persuaded to run for office is another matter. She is, she insists when we meet via a video call, too self-effacing for politics. “I feel you really have to decide that you’re the one, like: ‘I’m the one to solve this problem!’”

She is much more comfortable directing attention elsewhere. “For most of my career, I was really a character actor,” she says. “People didn’t connect that the girl from Ray was the same girl from Last King of Scotland, was the same girl from Save the Last Dance. And I loved that, because I got to disappear into these other people and it wasn’t about me.”

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‘I stopped trying to control my body’: the women who gave up grooming in 2020

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From shaving to threading to dyeing to painting, the little touches that used to seem so important have been squeezed out by the pandemic. And many Britons are all the happier for it

During the first lockdown Afsaneh Parvizi-Wayne, a 55-year-old entrepreneur, went for a drive around London. “I remember looking in the rear-view mirror,” she says, “and I noticed all these little hairs coming out of my chin. That was a bit of a shock. Like, bloody hell, I’ve really been growing these out.”

Parvizi-Wayne is of Iranian heritage, and hair removal is a big part of her culture. “Grooming, for Iranian women, it’s essential,” she says. For her entire life, from puberty onwards, Parvizi-Wayne had scrupulously removed her facial hair. “It was like a jack-in-the-box reaction,” she says. “If I saw a hair, I’d go to the salon.” If she failed to do so, a relative or family friend would take care of it for her. “Iranian aunties literally pin you down if they see a stray chin hair,” she laughs. “They pull out a piece of string to thread you then and there.”

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Fendi’s magic touch: the woman behind the world’s most famous handbag

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Artisans from every corner of Italy are putting their spin on Fendi’s iconic Baguette bag. Its designer, Silvia Venturini Fendi, explains why

Last year, Silvia Venturini Fendi was on holiday with her girlfriends in Palermo when she came across a small bottega run by a middle-aged artisan and his father. Enchanted by the beautiful handmade homewares on display, she spent all morning in the store-meets-workshop buying up pieces for her Roman home. A passionate preserver of Italian artisanship, she asked where the third generation was? The man’s daughter, despite knowing how to make everything, was only interested in becoming a fashion model, he said. “What a pity,” Venturini Fendi replied. “She should come here and continue all these incredible things you’re doing. Sometimes you look far when you don’t see great things happening under your eyes.”

The man implored her to convince his daughter and, in classic spontaneous Italian style, it wasn’t long before Venturini Fendi was on the phone sharing her own enthusiasm for family businesses. “The way you learn is by watching people working,” she tells me. “There’s no instruction manual – artisans have to pass on and show their creativity.”

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Climate ‘apocalypse’ fears stopping people having children – study

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Survey of 600 people finds some parents regret having offspring for same reason

People worried about the climate crisis are deciding not to have children because of fears that their offspring would have to struggle through a climate apocalypse, according to the first academic study of the issue.

The researchers surveyed 600 people aged 27 to 45 who were already factoring climate concerns into their reproductive choices and found 96% were very or extremely concerned about the wellbeing of their potential future children in a climate-changed world. One 27-year-old woman said: “I feel like I can’t in good conscience bring a child into this world and force them to try and survive what may be apocalyptic conditions.”

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The only thing most of us will be wearing this party season is slightly smarter pyjamas | Grace Dent

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‘I’ve given up trying to control anything now,’ I announced last Tuesday while breakfasting on a packet of jelly babies

Food has lost much of its meaning for me. Well, its meanings, to be more accurate. A typical late autumn of eating has its rhythms: shortly after decorative gourd season and past toffee apple weekend (both cancelled due to lurgy), many of us move seamlessly into pre-Christmas hoarding and restraint mode. The hoarding begins with a casually snaffled box of stollen slices or a little bag of Lindt chocolate Christmas tree decorations, chucked into the shopping basket “just to get things started”. Then a shufti around Marks & Spencer’s food hall, where the displays of shortbread in commemorative tin boxes (those nice ones your mother used for her sewing kit) always bring a sense of minor panic that holidays are comin’ and I am unprepared. Begin the lists, open the iCal, commence the slightly terse intra-family emails. Panic!

I do not have a yuletide shopping delivery slot. That dodgy shelf in my chiller will not survive a fortnight of festive season fridge Jenga, and a better woman than me would have made her own figgy pudding by now. But, as I say, the hoarding won’t happen this year. The big Dent jamboree is cancelled. And the restraint – which runs in parallel from about now to late December – is off, too. About now, I generally have in the diary at least two festive gatherings where I envision myself slinking in wearing some frock that will require me to be a bit hungry for at least 22 days and say things like, “No, I love running five miles pre-dawn dodging flashers – it centres me”, and, “Toast is too filling and carby. I’m so happy with this bircher muesli.” The only thing most of us will be wearing this party season is slightly smarter pyjamas.

Life is quite bizarre now that the usual run-up to New Year has been steam-rollered. How empty does late November feel without a low, bubbling, passive-aggressive email chain between siblings about how much room a nut roast takes up in an oven? I feel oddly bereft without any invites to a mock-Bavarian Christmas market where I can drink £8 glasses of glühwein and eat a reheated wurst on the waltzer while listening to David Guetta. This week I noticed the first of the “What to do with Christmas day leftovers” tips and tricks in the papers. The notion of having so many visitors that you might be caught with a glut of food already seems oddly archaic.

Buying, planning and hoping for things to run like clockwork is a mug’s game. The rules are that there are no rules. “I’ve given up trying to control anything now,” I announced last Tuesday while breakfasting on a packet of jelly babies. I think it was Tuesday. It may have been Thursday. The Gregorian calendar feels so meaningless these days. Anyway, each baby was so chunkily delicious, and their pudgy little lightly frosted bellies slid so soothingly down my throat, that they felt momentarily like love and order. This one lemon, yum yum. This one raspberry, schlurp. I rarely ate sweets before the pandemic, but now, in the blur of news about possible vaccines, permanent restaurant closures and the millions of wonderful hospitality workers who will no doubt need to retrain in cyber, they’re the only thing that piques my attention some days.

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Shivering Dublin bay swimmers slighted for their ‘fancy fleeces’

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Choppy waters as clash of ‘newbie dryrobe types’ with ‘hardy’ bathers swells into debate on tribes and snobbery

James Joyce opened Ulysses with a reference to the “scrotum tightening” effect of swimming in Dublin bay, but these days there is a secondary, somewhat more visible effect: dryrobe bashing.

A boom in the popularity of sea swimming in Ireland has filled Dublin’s bathing spots with people wrapped in fleece-lined hooded robes – and for some of the old-timers it feels like an invasion.

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