The actor has sustained a ‘nick to the head’ in what she told former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard was a minor incident
Cate Blanchett has sustained a cut to the head following a chainsaw accident at her home in East Sussex.
The Oscar-winning actor, who relocated from Sydney to Crowborough last year, was asked how lockdown was going by former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard on her podcast last week.
Continue reading...Scientists use kirigami techniques to create a sole with pop-up, high-friction spikes
The Japanese art of paper cutting and folding, or kirigami, has led to mind-bending 3D structures from 2D sheets, including spectacular pop-up designs. But now researchers have been getting to grips with the technique for a very down-to-earth reason: creating non-slip shoes.
Scientists have revealed they have developed a kirigami-inspired sole, where tiny spikes pop up from its surface as the shoe is bent during walking. The team found the spikes enhance grip, which could help prevent potentially fatal falls.
Continue reading...What happens when your natural sleeping pattern is at odds with the rest of the world?
For as long as she can remember, Jenny Carter has gone to bed late and not woken up until late the following morning, sometimes even the early afternoon. Growing up, she didn’t have a bedtime, and at university she preferred to write her essays between 6pm and 10pm. She loves evenings. They’re when she feels the most creative and can concentrate the best. But that’s not when her employer or society expects her to be productive.
“Going to bed at a ‘normal’ time feels so unnatural to me,” she says. “But society just doesn’t cater for people whose sleep cycle doesn’t fit the generic 9 to 5.” She has got into trouble at work for her timekeeping, which has led to disciplinary action. “I’ve had to write off so many events, meetings and opportunities, because they were in the morning and I just knew I wouldn’t be awake.”
Continue reading...Kardashian family member reacts angrily to magazine’s claim she spun ‘a web of lies’
A row has broken out between one of the world’s leading business magazines and the youngest member of reality TV’s most famous family over the value of her cosmetics company.
Forbes magazine has accused Kylie Jenner, the youngest half-sister of Kim Kardashian West, of spinning a “web of lies” to inflate the size and success of her business. It claimed her family went to unusual lengths to present its youngest adult member as being richer than she was.
Continue reading...Cross-party group proposes ending UK abortions after 24 weeks for minor disabilities
Abortion laws in Britain could be changed under cross-party proposals to ban late terminations on the grounds of minor physical abnormalities.
The abortion (cleft lip, cleft palate and club foot) bill, led by the Conservative MP Fiona Bruce and supported by 13 MPs, will be presented in parliament on 3 June.
Continue reading...There’s a replacement to your pre-lockdown workout right outside your door. Experienced runners explain how to get started
The gyms, pools and squash courts are shut. Joe Wicks is showing you how to get fit in your living room, but really all you want to do is get out of your living room. Now is the time to go for a run.
If you are worried you’re not a running type, don’t be. I wasn’t either until I decided that I didn’t feel safe going to the gym in mid-March. Eight weeks later, I finished my first half-hour run, covering an apparently respectable 4.83km in the process. Almost anyone can be a runner, it turns out. So why not give it a try?
Continue reading...Following reports worldwide, experts are warning that pandemic is pushing back progress on prenatal and maternity care
After Denisa’s son was born premature at 26 weeks she was unable to hold him, but spent as much time as possible near his incubator so he could get used to her voice. By the time he was well enough to be held by his mother, a state of emergency had been declared in Slovakia and Denisa was told to vacate her bed and leave the hospital to make way for Covid-19 patients.
The rush of patients never came, but strict rules meant she was unable to see her baby until he was discharged six weeks later. “Instead of a hug, I went home empty-handed only with my head full of questions,” she says. “Each day without my baby was taking away my strength and harming my mental health.”
Continue reading...Sweet, comforting and endlessly flexible, flapjack is the perfect lockdown bake. Whether you’re a vegan, a hipster or a millionaire, we’ve got you covered
Perhaps I am over-generalising, but I feel that the flapjack rarely migrates from the home economics class into everyday adult life. Yet at this moment, it hits all the notes: it is wholesome, very simple, you can bake it with children and you can throw any old nonsense in to no obvious ill effect. Plus, it needs no flour, which is great if you can’t get hold of any, and oats are incredibly good value. There is no kitchen alchemy involving things that have a habit of going wrong – no raising agent, no uncertainty from adding an egg.
I tried every which way, with the “help” of an outrageously careless 10-year-old, to get one wrong, just for the suspense. There were rumours that tin size was important, that the wrong dimensions messed with the texture. It is true that a thinner flapjack will have a more biscuity, less squidgy mouthfeel, but biscuity is still fine, otherwise why would people eat biscuits? It is also true that the finer the oats, the more they hold together in the finished product, but even jumbo oats didn’t fall apart as I had been led to believe. But if this really worries you, you can make them finer by whizzing them first in a food processor, anyway.
Continue reading...There has never been a better time than lockdown to fix things around the house. The Repair Shop’s Jay Blades and other experts offer tips on how to do it yourself
The lockdown is a good opportunity to learn to repair some commonly broken items. Not only do many of us have more time on our hands than usual, but shops are closed so we can’t easily replace items, and many expert restorers are shut, too. Prolonged proximity to your belongings, and a keener eye on your finances, may have given you a newfound appreciation for your stuff and the planet’s resources. These days you can find a wealth of fix-it tutorials online, but here’s where to start.
Continue reading...Author Bernardine Evaristo, broadcaster Hugh Pym, playwright James Graham and more pen letters to themselves, to be opened in May 2021
James Graham, playwright
Continue reading...A Billy bookcase is made every three seconds. But with a third of people admitting to throwing away furniture that they could have sold or donated, does the cheap furniture boom have a heavy environmental price?
Jo Jackson remembers the day when it was clear that nothing was going to be the same for a while. It was mid-March and Made.com, an online purveyor of millennial-friendly furniture, had big plans for growth in the year of its 10th anniversary.
Continue reading...Cooking and clearing up has been relentless – and that’s without adding a special birthday cake to my range of signature dishes
I’m sitting down to write this having just cleaned fox poo out of the tiny grooves in the soles of my four-year-old’s sandals. She also, somehow, smeared it all over her legs, her dress, my legs, my shorts. The only plus I can take from it is that, for once in our crowded corner of south London, social distancing was not an issue.
Of course, even in non-coronavirus times, 98% of anecdotes about young children end in someone being covered in something or other. But for many parents – at which point I insert an enormous caveat to make it clear that I’m talking about those who haven’t been infected, or made redundant, and aren’t frontline workers, and are extremely lucky enough to still be operating in a strange bubble of “normal” – I’d suspect that the greatest challenges of the past few weeks, and moments of profoundest despair, have come in the kitchen.
Continue reading...She’s written hits for Lizzo and Rita Ora, plus a string of her own. Next up: an album she wrote with fans while on lockdown in LA
Nineteen years post-Pop Idol, there is not much left to demystify about the way pop music is made. Fans follow the industry’s movements as obsessively as football supporters do the Premier League; songwriters and producers have their own followings. There are podcasts where artists explain a song’s path from genesis to completion. And yet, watching Charli XCX handwrite lyrics live on Instagram over the past few weeks, straight from her brain to her notebook to thousands of viewers, felt like a borderline masochistic degree of exposure – the equivalent of me livestreaming my way through every sentence of this piece. I’d rather walk down the street naked.
On 6 April, XCX – 27-year-old Cambridge-born Charlotte Aitchison – announced she was making an entire album, How I’m Feeling Now, while in lockdown at home in Los Angeles. She would share every step: lyric-writing and video-shooting; progress-stalling allergic reactions; tearful late-night Instagram confessions that she thinks she expects too much of her collaborators (later deleted). Fans were given carte blanche to give feedback and contribute visuals. “Sometimes it’s nerve-racking,” she says, when I ask if this amount of openness makes her feel vulnerable. “Other times bad comments will sway me, but I need to roll with the punches. If people don’t like it, it’s OK. The idea is to have some kind of interesting tension, to make the music feel different, and representative of the time that we’re in.”
Continue reading...Photographer Robert Ormerod uses his aerial camera to document how neighbours are finding solace in their green spaces. By Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett
Robert Ormerod had just moved house when lockdown began. “We lived in a flat before. We moved for a garden,” he says. “So when this kicked off, we couldn’t believe how lucky we were to have moved in time.”
As with most photographers, his ability to work has been limited, so Ormerod hit upon the idea of shooting his Edinburgh neighbours in their gardens. These outdoor spaces have been a boon for millions of families across the UK, who have over the past two months used their patch, however small, to get some fresh air, exercise, escape, grow their own food or get to know the wildlife.
Continue reading...With violence against women endemic in the country, new initiatives are desperately needed but slow to arrive
Lucas da Silva* sits in a cell while he waits to hear from the court what will happen to him.
The 33-year-old is not in a prison, but at Casa da Mulher Brasileira (“house of the Brazilian woman”), a centre for survivors of violence in Campo Grande, central Brazil, that is open 24/7.
Continue reading...As a model, she was the face of the 60s, and went on to have a busy acting career. She discusses her new podcast, and life in swinging London
So enduring is that image of Twiggy – side-swept hair, heavy eyes, delicate neck – that it’s strange to think she was a model for only four years.
But Twiggy is an expert at reinvention (or “branching out” as her joke goes). The schoolgirl known as Lesley Hornby became Twiggy, the face of the 1960s, recognised then and now by a single name. At 21, she became the all-singing, all-dancing star of Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Boy Friend, which won her two Golden Globes. She has performed on Broadway, recorded albums and been a TV presenter. In her 60s, she turned fashion designer, with several collections for Marks & Spencer. Last year, she was given a damehood.
Continue reading...The musician, who died on Saturday aged 87, was a pioneer in looks as well as sounds, influencing everything from James Brown’s quiff to Prince’s midriff
‘Little Richard scared my grandmother in 1957,” wrote John Waters in 2010. While his grandmother’s fear was largely about the singer’s sound – that trademark shriek at the start of his hit Lucille – his look had a formative impact on the 11-year-old Waters. It is thanks to Little Richard that the film director has the deliciously fake pencil-thin moustache that his fans know and love today.
Waters’ moustache is just one example of Little Richard’s influence on fashion and style. Images of Little Richard, born Richard Penniman, in his 5os heyday show a proud, decade-appropriate quiff – forget Chuck Berry and Elvis, this was the best in the business – plus a mascara-ed moustache, panstick makeup and the look of kohl around his eyes. James Brown, who was a Little Richard impersonator, learned the power of good hair from him. The Godfather of Soul began his career in the late 50s with a quiff worthy of Little Richard.
Continue reading...A new generation of poets in Afghanistan is exploring the physical side of love – and isolation is their inspiration
It has been weeks in lockdown for Hoda Khamosh, but the 23-year-old has managed to stick to a routine. This includes sitting down in the afternoons to write poetry, mostly with an erotic spin to it.
In the absence of touch and seeing friends and loved ones, she – along with many others – has turned to erotic poetry, convinced that, “it will help to get through these difficult days”.
Continue reading...This could be the perfect time for couples to boost their sex life
For many of us right now, sex couldn’t be further from our minds. Our usual routines have been turned upside down and the way we are living can be challenging for even the most harmonious of relationships. But what if we viewed this time as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reset and refresh our sex lives?
The fact that sex isn’t a priority for a large proportion of people fits with findings from sex research along with, well, common sense. Stress and anxiety are known to reduce our sexual desire and a preoccupation with the news, our finances, the health of our loved ones, or how much is in our store cupboards, can understandably slow the wheels of our sex life to a standstill.
Continue reading...They have a middle-class reputation, but one outdoor school near Nottingham is reconnecting disadvantaged 10-year-olds with nature and a sense of freedom
When Kate Milman was 21, she paused her English degree at the University of East Anglia to join protests against the Newbury bypass. It was 1996, and the road was being carved out through idyllic wooded countryside in Berkshire. She took up residence in a treehouse, in the path of the bulldozers, and lived there for months. It was a revelation. She lived intimately with the catkins, the calling birds, the slow-slow-fast change in the seasons. Despite being in a precarious position as a protester, she felt completely safe and her brain was calmed.
“You know when you go camping and go back to your house, and everything feels wrong? The lighting is harsh and everything seems complicated indoors. It just got under my skin, this feeling – that [living in the woods] is like being at home.”
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