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.”
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.”
Continue reading...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.”
Continue reading...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.”
Continue reading...Kate, 25, whisky marketing associate, meets Maz, 24, charity worker
What were you hoping for?
A lovely evening, or a funny anecdote.
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.”
Continue reading...‘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.
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.
Continue reading...At least 30% will go to the women-led grassroots organisations that have been ‘critical’ through Covid pandemic
The UN is to spend $25m (£19m) from its emergency fund to address what has been called the “shadow pandemic” of gender-based violence against women displaced by wars and disasters.
The money will be divided between the UN population fund (UNFPA) and UN Women, and at least 30% of it must be given to women-led local organisations that prevent violence and help survivors access medical and legal help, family planning, mental health services and counselling.
Continue reading...Roasted, fried or raw, this versatile vegetable is great for salads, curries, steaks and tapas. And don’t forget the always comforting cauliflower cheese
In culinary terms, cauliflower is often described as a blank canvas, partly because it does not taste of much on its own, but also because it is so very, very white. These days, cauliflower also comes in coloured versions: yellow, orange, purple or the pale green of the fractal-patterned romanesco variety.
But if you are buying the white stuff, it should be snow white, with no grey or brown patches or dark flecks. The florets should be dense and firm, and should not smell in the least cabbagey – past-it cauliflower will only become more sulphurous with cooking. Remember, a blank canvas is what you are after.
Continue reading...The ugly green coat in the HBO drama The Undoing has usurped a starry cast that includes Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant. But what are the show’s makers trying to say, exactly?
The real star of The Undoing, HBO’s absurd marital melodrama, is not Hugh Grant, the Manhattan skyline or even the pair of David Hockneys hanging inside a vast penthouse in episode one. It’s a coat.
Sludge-green, calf-length, with wide lapels and a hood, this coat is worn again and again by Nicole Kidman’s character, a gnomic therapist called Grace, as she floats down Madison Avenue, through Central Park and even into the prison on Rikers Island, brooding over her marriage to a man who may, or may not, have just murdered his lover with a lump hammer.
Continue reading...Top public health officials are taking their own advice about scaling down the holiday amid the Covid-19 pandemic to heart
In October, Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation’s foremost infectious disease expert, said in an interview that his children would not be coming home for Thanksgiving this year and encouraged other Americans to avoid large celebrations in order to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
Related: Thanksgiving won't be the same this year – but there’s plenty to be thankful for | Nancy Jo Sales
Continue reading...During the pandemic it has become a buzzword for successfully steering through adversity. But what exactly is resilience - and can you cultivate more of it?
It was after her block of flats burned down that Sadi Khan thought, finally, things could not get worse. She had married at 19, and for four years her husband had subjected her to horrific violence on an almost daily basis. She had been punched and kicked, financially controlled and constantly told she was stupid; once, a friend arrived at her flat and found her lying unconscious after an attack. So the day she accidentally set fire to her flat while cooking was simultaneously the day she lost everything and the day she started again. “He’s beaten me, I’ve lost everything,” she says. “What more can go wrong?”
Her father arrived the following day, and wanted to take her home. “I think that was the turning point,” says Khan. “When my dad was in front of me, saying: ‘Come home, let me look after you.’ I thought: ‘No, I don’t need looking after. I’m still alive. I burned the flat down, I’m still alive. I’ve been beaten up, I should have been dead five times over, but I’m still alive.’”
Continue reading...Peter Taylor, 73, and Mary Moogk, 72, met in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, in 1976. They live in Oshawa, Ontario
Peter Taylor moved to Niagara-on-the-Lake, a historic town in Ontario’s wine country, in 1975. “I joined a yachting company and started work building sailboats.”
The following February, his mother introduced him to an old family friend, who had a daughter about his age. “Our fathers had met in the forces,” he says. “I didn’t know Mary at the time.” Afterwards, he was invited to their family home for dinner.
Continue reading...I hadn’t seen my friend for months, but when we did meet, it wasn’t the Labour party’s problems, her MA or my house move we talked about …
There is a shortage of rescue dogs in the UK, particularly staffordshire bull terriers. No one knows why. Maybe all the existing staffs lost their mojo during the first lockdown, and it has interrupted supply. People might be stockpiling staffs, ahead of Brexit shortages. This is only of the mildest imaginable interest when you are not actively seeking a rescue dog, but my friend B was and, for ages, it was all we talked about. She would send links from Spanish dogs’ homes, and now I could probably get a translation job, provided all you needed me to translate was “un perro sociable y amigable”.
Anyway, Jem eventually arrived, speaking no English but with no discernible Spanish either. When we met in the park, B told me how almost everything about domestic life confused the hell out of him. He would stand on the sofa staring at his paws and swaying about as if he were on a boat, and lift a pie clean out of your hand. From this, she concluded that he had been raised not by humans, but by other dogs. Then we talked for ages about his stance and gait, the way his rolling shoulders gave him a beautiful wildness, but also made him look a little bit like a CGI terror robot from The Maze Runner, and how his stocky, slightly bowed legs were reminiscent of a young Dennis Waterman.
Continue reading...Independent Sage proposes community celebrations with food and drink in the street
Christmas could be turned into a communal outdoor celebration – with hot drinks and mince pies consumed in the street – scientists have suggested, in alternative plans drawn up for safer festivities.
In a set of proposals compiled by Independent Sage – a group formed in response to concerns about a lack of transparency in scientific advice given to government – they say the rules over the festive period will depend upon the rate and level of infections at the time.
Continue reading...Some literary minds crave a full-throttle rush. For others, it’s the peace in birdwatching, kayaking or finding refuge in the trees
Before lockdown, I occasionally got uneasily into a sea kayak with my kids – usually unbalancing it and tipping us all in the water. Then they exchanged the big multi-seater kayak for two lighter two-seaters, which I can actually lift.
Continue reading...Ironic take on corporate attire reboots yuppie look in age of The Crown and new Gossip Girl
In the ultimate moment of fashion revival, the 80s yuppie look is back – but with a difference. The “yindies” (young ironic nostalgic dresser), is bringing back the suited, Wall Street look but with a touch of knowing self-reference and elements of preppy style too.
The first cast photograph of the new Gossip Girl reboot, the current season of The Crown, which features Diana Spencer’s 1980s Sloane Ranger chic and the navy suit jacket of Donald Trump impersonator Sarah Cooper, have all riffed on the classic powersuit silhouette.
Continue reading...