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 [...]

One in five Europeans is exposed to harmful levels of noise pollution, and this number is set to rise in the next decade, with road traffic the biggest culprit, a new study has [...]

I knew I had a problem when I realised that my days were bookended with despair. My blood would be boiling along with the kettle as I listened to the radio while making my first cup of tea of the day, and I would go to bed either seething or feeling forlorn about everything that was going wrong in the world after [...]

What’s not to love about a kitten that makes you giggle at its playful capers, or a cat that cuddles its warm body into yours and purrs blissfully while you stroke its soft fur? While many of us relish the company of our feline friends, for others it’s a miserable experience: sneezing, red eyes, hay fever, itchy [...]

I am a radiator-hugging hater of being cold. It makes me tense and tetchy. But what if you are in your house, heated to 18C (64F), wearing a scarf so long and fluffy that it wraps around you four times and buries your chin, and you are still chilly? What if you are the one in the office always huddled under a shawl, [...]