An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
When I was a teenager, my grandmother would pick me up from school every week and drive me to the orthodontist, the aptly-named Mrs Crabbe, so she could stick more pieces of metal in my mouth, tighten something up, or twist some new jazzily-coloured elastic bands onto the brackets glued onto my teeth in a vain attempt
There is no clearer demonstration of the difference between America and Britain than their attitudes towards teeth. In America, you fix them. Doesn’t matter if they’re nearly straight. You subject yourself to years of semi-torture to achieve the American dream – a white picket fence of perfectly uniform teeth. Most perfect teeth are artificial –
There is much to bemoan about the NHS, from the cruel entitlement of its junior doctors to its zest for hiring diversity and inclusion staff when many people can’t even see a GP. I have been a harsh and consistent critic for years. I don’t like the cultish, Big Brother vibes, the gawping black hole
It’s a long time since I took a powerful drug that wasn’t dispensed by a pharmacist. Last winter, during what has become the annual post-Christmas Covid collapse, I searched in vain for the codeine cough linctus I’d been prescribed when the virus first struck four years ago. Why must we suffer because a few scrotes
They’re everywhere, it seems: in the oceans, the fish, the soil, our drinking water, our vegetables, our grains and cereals, our meat – even in us. Microplastics and smaller nanoplastics are tiny particles of plastic flubbage measuring half a centimetre or less that result from the degradation of plastic refuse, and according to recent news coverage
I’m sleeping with the actor Richard E. Grant at the minute and can highly recommend the experience. He’s reading Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage to me and has the perfect voice for it, faintly lascivious but not disturbingly so. As for the content, it’s just what’s wanted – engaging but not too stimulating.
Several years ago, I went for a swim after I’d been for a job interview. I’d just finished my lengths, had my shower, and as I wrestled my knickers back on, a voice from behind me said ‘It’s Ettie, isn’t it?’ Quite how she recognised my bare bottom I don’t know, but the woman who’d interviewed me earlier in the day was
How very nice that the King is now out of hospital, back home and, will, we are told, soon be back in business with his red boxes. Is it too much to hope that we can be spared further updates on his condition? ‘All Hail the King’s Prostate Honesty’. Oh yuck. Can we stop? We
Senior management was recently walking down the street and took a funny turn. With her habitual stoicism she ignored the swelling in her foot for two weeks until I finally persuaded her to go to the urgences (emergency room) at the local Polyclinique Pasteur, a mini-hospital in Pézenas, the town four miles from our village.
The agony could strike at any moment. Daggering pains in my lower back demanded correction. Not just painkillers, I needed a permanent cure. ‘Thai massage’ suggested the internet, so I hobbled across a tangle of east London streets and found a doorway beneath a pink neon sign. A receptionist of south Asian appearance, bundled in
Absolutely nobody feels better at the end of Dry January. Mornings are still a struggle, you’re as tired as ever, and if anything the neurotic voice in your head is even louder. Yes, you may have gone to the gym every Sunday, but how has your life improved? It hasn’t. My own Dry January was
It shames me to admit this, but I haven’t been near a public swimming pool for many a year. Hotel pools, yes; the sea – occasionally, in parts of the world with predictable warmth. But I have resisted the new wave of ‘wild’ swimming and was never a regular – to be honest even an
Would you knowingly give your daughter a birthday present that was going to increase her chances of self-harming, developing anxiety and even depression? I assume the answer would be no, yet this is what so many parents do to their children when they give them a smartphone with access to social media. You could not
A team of nurses was trying to ascertain whether my wife was pregnant. It didn’t seem very likely. She’ll be 57 in a couple of months, went through the menopause over a decade ago and has been on HRT for several years. And she hasn’t had IVF. Insofar as one can be certain about such matters,
Shortly after the first Covid lockdown ended, doctors began to notice something so strange that at first they struggled to explain it. There appeared to be a sudden rise in the number of children being referred with Tourette’s syndrome. Tourette’s is a rare neurodevelopmental disorder characterised by repetitive, involuntary movements or sounds called ‘tics’. While
Do you take it? If not, the chances are you’ll know someone who does. In an age of insomnia, melatonin has become a must-have sleep aid; as ubiquitous as yoga or herbal tea. In America, it is available over the counter and, according to The National Sleep Foundation charity, 27 per cent of adults take it. The
Last summer, I became a participant in a covert drugs deal. I have never considered doing anything illegal, but I was desperate. This is how it happened. I was on a weekend away with friends, some of whom were women in their forties and fifties. I discovered that one friend, who lives an ex-pat life
Tis the season to eat salads and wear skimpy clothes. At least, that’s what we’re led to believe, egged on by adverts featuring bikini-clad models, barely-there fashion in shops, television series such as Love Island that equate sunshine with slender figures and the perennial expectation that we should by now be ‘beach body ready’. We’re undoubtedly
When I tell friends, ‘You never hear people talking about the upside of Alzheimer’s’, they look at me like I’ve said something about Hitler being nice to animals. In general, a mention of dementia will ruin any conversation. People freeze up at the thought. It’s true that having a relative with dementia is hard and the
In an interesting piece for Air Mail, Linda Wells writes of ‘The secret lives of tanorexics’, asking: ‘What drives these bronze obsessives – and why won’t they ever learn?’ She questions her sun-baked friends about why they are so intent on doing a thing which they are warned will ruin their complexions and make it
Seeing Boris Johnson’s byline in the Daily Mail, I felt a flare of the affection which made me break free from my blue-collar tribalism and vote Tory for the first time in 2019. I remember thinking that the experience was rather like losing one’s virginity; worrying about it for months, then secretly planning it, then
Over dinner with a friend last week, halfway through a bottle of Merlot, I noticed her eyes starting to glaze over as I spoke. Normally, I’d be offended – but it’s something I’ve experienced a lot lately, and I’ve only got myself to blame. I was in the middle of telling her a story about my
The final trimester of pregnancy is a strange time. You’ll be told to rest, as if you can somehow bank sleep. The reality is likely to be a dash to buy everything you need, as well as don’t need (a hi-tech ‘nappy bag’ for instance). Once the baby arrives, even trying to get out of
‘New year, new you’, or so they say. And as sure as eggs is eggs (particularly for the high protein advocates), new year’s resolutions for many will have revolved around the quest for a new body. I use the word ‘body’ specifically because our prevailing culture keeps finding new and alarming ways to reduce us
In his memoir Spare, Prince Harry has revealed he ‘enhanced his calm’ during the birth of his son Archie in 2019 by taking ‘several slow, penetrating hits’ of the canister of laughing gas in his wife Meghan’s hospital room. He described how when a nurse returned and tried to give Meghan a dose for pain relief, there
A few months ago I wrote a piece for The Spectator about the surge in popularity of Elf Bars and the potential health risks of these colourful e-cigarettes. But disposable vapes are now posing a different kind of problem – for the planet. These single-use devices, which last for around 600 puffs, head straight to landfill after users suck
I struggled to pull myself out of bed in the morning. I slept for hours at lunch breaks and was having a hard time focusing. I was working six days a week as an editor at one of the world’s largest newspapers. I needed to concentrate. It was my first year there on a fixed-term
I thought I knew how to breathe properly. My years of studying dance at various institutions have all involved tuition on breathing and its relationship with movement and posture. So I was sceptical when I joined my step-sister Octavia’s online breathwork classes – what more was there to learn? My first class was in lockdown,
Have you seen the colourful sticks with blue lights hanging out the mouths’ of most teens and many adults? Elf Bars are the colourful and sweet disposable vapes causing a wave of dependence across all age groups. While the government is looking to rid the nation of tobacco smokers, electronically delivered nicotine is becoming
