Category: Lifestyle

It’s late at night on the hottest week of the year and the air is made of meat. I am lying in the dark thinking about the Olympians’ cardboard beds. A runner posted pictures of the beds – long boxes, creatively stacked – before they were installed at Tokyo Olympic Village, explaining they’d been designed […]

Sunday morning starts… Between 5.30 and 7.30am, whenever my son, Reuben, decides to wake up, jumping on my face aggressively while shouting, ‘Daddy let’s go outside.’ I might try to steal another hour in bed by putting on Paw Patrol, but I love that he just wants to be in nature all the time. A […]

You can’t argue with the magnificence of a beautifully executed black-winged eye. Except I would argue that its colourful counterpart is equally wonderful. A bit 80s yes, but it can, as per Valentino AW21, be super modern. A little colour tones down the severity of a black liner, adds a fun dimension and is less […]

First of August. The dog days of summer. We will have lost three hours of daylight since the solstice by the end of this month. Time for gardeners to focus. It’s the weeks of school and other holidays when more of us are more likely to be away – though maybe less this year. If […]

JING Jasmine Pearls Sparkling Tea (£17.95, jingtea.com) The British have been reducing their daily intake of tea for decades – a long, steady decline that has coincided with the seemingly inexorable rise of coffee. But for all the inroads made by Starbucks and Costa, pods and AeroPresses into our daily lives, tea retains its place […]

To celebrate the centenary of Marcel Proust’s birth, Derek Patmore provided a tour d’horizon of the great modernist for the Observer Magazine (‘The Paris of Proust’, 30 May 1971). Proust particularly admired the painter Jean Béraud’s sublime evocations of the Parisian belle époque and his L’Arrivée des Midinettes, featuring the Place de l’Opera, graces the […]

The scar on my chest is seven inches long. At the top of my sternum, the incision site, it’s white and waxy, slowly fading on its journey south. But the last inch is a raised, red, rubbery knob of keloid tissue – a constant reminder, not that I need it. It will be a year […]