In a world of radical inequalities and bitter partisan divides, one thing apparently still unites us: nobody can focus. Recent events (“gestures broadly at everything”, to quote the internet meme) seem to have turned everyone’s brains to mush. “We can proofread and check things,” the art historian Susan [...]

Some reading, and actually listening to my wife, has led me to the theory that many of my problems stem from not drinking enough water. I made that sound as if we had an intellectual to and fro about it, but in truth I came to bed one night and told her I’d just done a wee that looked like Lucozade and she commented [...]

am lying on my back in the den I made, my book perched like a little tent on my stomach. I stare at my bamboo roof and listen to a tapping sound – a carpenter bee nesting inside one of the canes, I decide. I’ve been lost in thought, and realise it’s late in the day – the last hour before the sun dips into the [...]

We need pain. It seems contradictory to say it, particularly now that we have so many ways of dealing with it and switching it off. Pain not only tells us something is wrong, it also protects us. If you slam the car door on your hand, it’s going to hurt. You will have damaged the soft tissue; all the muscles and [...]

“To the outside, it would look ugly,” chuckles Sarah Garner, an infectious disease specialist. “It’s yelling, screaming, pulling faces, sometimes clawing at my skin. Making jerky random movements. Lots of pummelling of [...]

I refuse to address the conundrum of what diet to deploy on your excess tum. It just seems so wrong, after all we’ve collectively been through, to embark on anything resembling self-denial. Instead, let’s focus on nutrition for exercise, as whatever’s happened, your routine has probably changed. Maybe you’ve [...]

The place looked like something out of an old horror film: all paint-chipped walls, dusty windows, and menacing shadows cast by moonlight. I walked through a gate, up a flight of creaking steps, and knocked on the [...]

When was the last time you were really scared? You might think, that time I lost my child in a shopping centre, or the moment the doctor told me it was serious, or the night I was followed home from the bus stop, or as I was walking up to the stage to give my big [...]

The last time I played basketball was in mid-March. My teammates and I – I’ve played basketball every week with the same group of guys for over 10 years now – laughed about the coronavirus. We stopped shaking hands but we weren’t socially distanced. Some made “joke coughs” and there was a general feeling [...]

The coronavirus crisis is having a significant impact on children’s sleep, with anxiety and lack of routine causing serious disruption, experts and charities have [...]