Category: Lifestyle

Name: Dog poo wormeries. Age: They’ve been around for a while, but thankfully you didn’t know about them. Until now. Appearance: Like little Japanese tea houses full of dog mess and worms. Why would I want something like that? Because, as a pet owner, you should be disposing of your dog’s waste responsibly. I already […]

Naomi Lewis was nursing a broken heart at the start of 2005, after splitting up with her boyfriend a few months earlier. She had recently moved into a new flat in Swansea, alone, and befriended Saffron, a woman who lived above her in the building. “In January, Saffron went on a bad blind date to […]

I’m one of the least likely people to go vegan. I love meat – I’ve tried rattlesnake, bone marrow and even alligator. I always assumed giving up meat would make you feel weak and tired, plus I could never imagine voluntarily eating tofu. But then my 12-year-old daughter, Nancy, discovered climate activist Greta Thunberg Greta […]

Name: Allison Barnes Age: 62 Public servant turned visual artist When I left school I trained as a teacher. Back in those days, teaching was what girls from the country did: teaching or nursing. When I graduated, in the early 80s, there were no jobs for teachers at all. There was a recession. I was […]

Every year my mother would make a bowl of Japanese New Year’s Eve noodles for my American father and me. “Just this one tradition,” she would entreat; she didn’t like American New Year, and longed for Japanese-style festivities. One year, I found one of my noodles tied in a knot, which she assured me was […]

Lockdown 3.0. My plan, before this exciting new iteration was announced, was to write about Francis Bacon’s cooking: I’ve been reading a new biography of the artist, and on every other page is a description of the wondrous meals he would produce for friends, seemingly out of nowhere (oysters, fish, cheese, grapes). But all that […]

I have eaten the Waterfield’s Lancashire plum cake that was in the bread box, and that I was saving for Sunday. Forgive me, it was delicious. So sweet and full of plump vine fruits. I ate the Mrs Botham’s landlord fruit cake steeped in Timothy Taylor pale ale, too. It’s a riff on Christmas cake, […]