If you want to stir up online controversy, wooden spoons are the perfect tool with which to do so. Every few years, influencers go viral with warnings about how the wooden spoons in your kitchen are covered in disgusting gunk and if you don’t boil them immediately you will poison yourself and everyone you love. … Read more
Standing in a Scottish seaside village, I am confronted by two smart red doors and a curious figure standing in a niche above them: a man, one hand clutching a staff, the other shading his eyes as he gazes out to sea. There’s a flintlock pistol in his belt and he’s dressed in tattered rags. … Read more
It was, says Chris Lemons, “very much a normal day at the office”. Until things went wrong. But when they went wrong, they went wrong very badly, very quickly. The “office” was actually the bottom of the North Sea, where Lemons was left without air for almost half an hour. Lemons was working as a … Read more
I have been married for three years and no longer have any sexual desire. I am deeply in love, but my husband says I have stopped initiating physical intimacy and he hasn’t felt wanted for a long time. We have very young children, so I am exhausted all the time. He fantasises about exotic romps … Read more
Name: Floodlighting. Age: The term – said to be coined by the author and psychologist Brené Brown – is new. The toxic dating practice it describes may have been going on for longer. Floodlighting? Let me guess, is it taking a first date to the evening football match at Anfield, although you know they are … Read more
Slow down In the age of true fibre broadband the speeds available can be tremendous – and providers often try to upsell people to expensive, higher-speed packages. One way to save money is to pay for only the speed you need. For most households a speed of 100Mbps is likely to be enough, although it … Read more
Joanna Thomas* was working for a UK government department when she received a bonus. Her earnings, as had been the case since she got married in her early 20s, went into her only bank account: a joint one shared with her now ex-husband. The cash landed in the account in the morning. By the afternoon, … Read more
Netflix could solve this problem if it would just give me a big red button to nuke my kids. Like, not actually nuke them. But, yeah, blow those freeloading teenagers off Netflix whenever I choose. Such a beautiful, all-powerful button should only be on the app of the primary account holder – you know, the … Read more
When I got a nasty case of indigestion just before the UK-wide Covid lockdown in March 2020, I assumed it would pass in an hour. A pizza was the initial culprit, molten with cheesy goo and drenched in garlic dip. A week later, though, it hadn’t gone away and I was struggling to swallow due … Read more
Standing on the sun-warmed sand, we watch swell lines rolling towards the shore. Surfers dot the water, eyes trained to the horizon, waiting for their next ride. My eight-year-old daughter glances up at the unrelenting blue sky. “Are you sure this is winter?” she asks. We’ve just arrived in Praia da Luz, a small beach … Read more