The queues were “absolutely crazy”, says Gavin Hudson, the owner of the cycle repair startup Butternut Bikes. As lockdown descended he began fixing old bikes in the parking lot of a Methodist church in north London, before moving his services to a furloughed pub in Crouch End. However, the surge in demand for [...]

Ever since my gym teacher stood, arms folded, laughing at my inability as a four-year-old to tuck myself into a ball and perform a somersault, exercise has been a foreign [...]

Federal health minister Maggie De Block has criticised plans by four other EU countries to buy up millions of doses of a British-Swedish vaccine against Covid-19, disregarding a programme run by the European [...]

People have embraced novel ways of staying fit during the coronavirus lockdown, with an NBN survey finding that one in two Australians who worked from home have also tried online fitness classes. But those who rely on equipment for their workouts or group classes to motivate them, will no doubt be over the moon when [...]

Exactly how terrible are the next months and years going to be? As a generally apocalyptically minded sort of person, I’ve been feeling some pride in watching my favourite question become everyone else’s favourite question, too; it’s like being a 19th-century aristocrat and seeing your debutante daughter become [...]

I am afraid of what I will become without touch. Already the frayed edges are beginning to show. So much of my life and the lives of so many women is found through touch. We touch our babies, we hold them to our breasts and bellies, we wash our ageing mothers’ bodies and comb and braid our daughters’ hair. We [...]

In 1939, in a sermon preached at Oxford University in the midst of a different global crisis, CS Lewis made a distinction that’s worth revisiting today. It wasn’t the case, he pointed out, that the outbreak of war had rendered human life suddenly fragile; rather, it was that people were suddenly realising it [...]

Limit news – especially before bed Winding down without screens has always been key to getting a good night’s sleep – and it is more important than ever, says the sleep consultant Maryanne Taylor. More of an issue than the stimulating effects of blue light is the sense of being overwhelmed by the news. It is [...]

In 2000, in his book Bobos In Paradise, the US commentator David Brooks noticed that the emerging class he called “bourgeois bohemians” had a particular fondness for rough textures: slate kitchen counters, coarse rugs, stone fireplaces, and so on. Where their parents prized smooth surfaces, these countercultural [...]

It’s been a long, wet winter. Everybody has got colds, and now we are braced for a coronavirus epidemic. Boosting our immune system has rarely felt more urgent, but, beyond eating more tangerines and hoping for the best, what else can we [...]