Top Lifestyle News

Oct 5, 2026 - Lifestyle

A great way to pack in your vegetables, while adding pops of colour to your rotation of mealsI am still making large, nourishing and vibrant salads, with gado gado being one of my favourites. It is a well-loved Indonesian salad, and something I devoured almost daily when we travelled around the islands many moons ago. It is also an excellent way of eating an abundance of veg, and can be made to suit your taste. If I was going all out, I’d add tofu or tempeh, some prawn crackers and beansprouts, but feel free to make the bowl as you wish, with whatever you have to hand – have a play. Continue reading...

Oct 5, 2026 - Lifestyle

A beloved family pet, she is also the best employee ever, brilliant at her rescue work. If everyone could be more like Poppy, the world would be a better placeWhen we picked up a nine-week-old black labrador from a couple just outside Callander, Scotland, I had no idea that she would soon be an employee of mine. Poppy became the family fur baby and we realised early on how clever and empathic she is. I work as a Special Operations Response Team paramedic and we decided to involve her in my search work in 2021 when she was only a year old because we knew it would play to her strengths. She took to it immediately.Poppy and our team of dogs look for missing people. My colleagues and I then provide any medical assistance needed. She is trained to search without needing to smell someone’s scent from an item such as clothing. During training, we hide our volunteers along the riverbank, in the woods, beside lochs and canals, and set the dogs off. They have to find the people and come back. Poppy’s curious nature has served her well. She loves the undergrowth, sniffing about and finding things. Continue reading...

Oct 5, 2026 - Lifestyle

From microcheating to quiet quitting to weaponised incompetence, new terms to describe relationship failings are abundant. But that doesn’t mean there’s not space for some more ...Are you committing “attention infidelity”? The New York Times alerted me to this expression, coined by the public opinion researcher Daniel Cox in a new book on the “crisis of human connection”. It’s exactly what you’d expect: failing to focus fully on your partner because you’re indulging in what the NYT calls, rather judgily, “the banal distraction of dead-eyed scrolling”. Who are you calling dead-eyed? This reel of an armadillo in a paddling pool has my animated attention!Surely we’re all a bit attention-unfaithful – only saints don’t sometimes absent-mindedly thumb through medieval manuscript hedgehog memes while their partner relates a boring anecdote about how they thought they saw a strange bird that turned out to be a plastic bag. What I find more interesting is how we seem now to need a lexicon of relationship bad behaviour. Continue reading...

Oct 5, 2026 - Lifestyle

Based on Lagerfeld’s biography, director Nick Hooker gets access to the designer’s inner circle, but ultimately fails to find the man behind the high collar and sunglassesKarl Lagerfeld had never set foot inside a supermarket before he had one built on a catwalk in 2014, featuring models browsing aisles with baskets shopping for Chanel-branded fromage. It was classic Lagerfeld: very silly but a stroke of genius. The fashion designer was easy to poke fun at, with his white bouffant-plus-ponytail hairstyle and black leather gloves. But behind the persona was a man who spoke four languages fluently, a workaholic still running Chanel, Fendi and his own label Karl Lagerfeld into his 80s.This dutiful, uncontroversial documentary is based on William Middleton’s biography Paradise Now: The Extraordinary Life of Karl Lagerfeld. As well as archive footage of Lagerfeld, film-maker Nick Hooker gets access to the designer’s inner circle, but ultimately his documentary fails to chip away at the persona. (This is no criticism: I once interviewed Lagerfeld, a frustrating 30 minutes during which the dark glasses stayed on and he answered questions with bon mot witticisms but gave nothing away.) In a clip at the start of the film, Lagerfeld admits that he has spent so long performing a role that not even those closest to him really know who he is. Continue reading...

Oct 5, 2026 - Lifestyle

If you want to seriously oxygenate your rooms with greenery, you’re going to need a lot of space‘Plants take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen when they photosynthesise,” says John Tregoning, a professor at Imperial College London and author of Live Forever? A Curious Scientist’s Guide to Wellness, Ageing and Death. “If you’ve got enough of them, they should produce more oxygen than there was initially.”It’s tempting to think of plants as a kind of natural air filter, cleaning the air in stuffy, poorly ventilated spaces. But the reality is different. Continue reading...