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I have memories of my stepfather carving them out in the 1980s – but they are not for the faint-hearted
Halloween is a time of tradition and I have two: reminiscing about my former homeland Belgium’s surly semi-capitulation to this unwelcome US import – an uncarved, often green squash dumped unceremoniously on the doorstep – and tirelessly talking up turnips.
Why is a swede (turnip for Scots – my heritage) lantern better than a pumpkin one? First, pumpkins – garish and slimy, the worst of vegetables but with peerless PR – are due a comeuppance. What other gourd is uppity enough to become a leisure activity in its own right? My local farm shop has pivoted entirely to “pumpkin patch” for the month, with costumed helpers and themed snacks: an incongruously wholesome way to contemplate our own mortality.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...Halloween always seemed like a consumerist American import, but that all changed when we dressed up as zombies and knocked on our neighbours’ doors
Scrooge famously hated Christmas, so I shudder to think what he would’ve made of Halloween. Armies of children roaming the streets demanding sweets, all dressed as devils and vampires, mummies and witches, werewolves, skeletons and, dare I say it … ghosts. Not to mention the shocking amount of money people spend on costumes and decorations that fall apart in seconds and refuse to biodegrade.
But the moral of his story is the same as this one: while Scrooge hid indoors counting his farthings, he missed out on the good things in life. Sure, the cost of living crisis means we can all do without another splurge of wild consumerism, but if you can enter into the spirit of Halloween, even in a small way, I really think you should.
Continue reading...World Gymnastics Championships allows the 20-year-old to showcase skills that are wowing his Great Britain teammates
During one of the final days of preparation before the preliminary rounds of the World Gymnastics Championships in Liverpool that began on Saturday, Jake Jarman was navigating his routine on the floor exercise when he stepped up to deliver one of the most difficult skills in the sport.
After five quick steps and a round-off, Jarman threw himself into a triple-twisting double back somersault in layout position. Few can manage the tucked version of the skill, but in the laid out position, with the body arrow-straight and even more amplitude required, it is a significantly more difficult.
Continue reading...Vasiliy Lomachenko returned from military service in Ukraine and beat Jamaine Ortiz by unanimous decision Saturday night to restart his quest to get another shot at the lightweight titles.
Lomachenko got stronger as the fight went on after a slow start that perhaps could have been due to his ring rust.
Continue reading...The rapper and fashion designer had it all – wealth, power, status, autonomy. But in the end it wasn’t enough
In 2009, Kanye West was riding high. 808s & Heartbreak – his fourth studio album and a marked departure from his soul-based, hip-hop sound – proved a resounding critical and commercial triumph. A foray into clothing design had culminated in a Paris fashion week sneaker show with Louis Vuitton and a shoe line with Nike, the first for a non-athlete.
No longer was West the dorky producer turned rapper agitating to break out of Jay-Z’s shadow. He had become something even bigger: a true star. The only person who could stop Kanye was Kanye – or Ye, as he’s preferred to be known of late.
Continue reading...England defender on her fellow footballer cousin, studying accountancy and why a serious knee injury brought benefits
It is five years since Gabby George became Everton Women’s first full-time professional footballer but, sometimes, that watershed moment feels more like five decades ago.
“With everything that’s happened recently, 2017 seems like quite a long way in the past,” says a left-sided defender harbouring realistic hopes of inclusion in England’s Australia-bound 2023 World Cup squad. “But it was a dream come true. I remember getting a text from the club and, literally overnight, football became a job.”
Continue reading...Rishi Sunak’s rushed 25% windfall tax is easy to minimise or avoid – and it could be replaced
It is Christmas every day for oil and gas companies, and their shareholders and executives are laughing all the way to the bank, leaving the rest of us to pick up the cost in higher energy prices, inflation, bankruptcies and a deepening cost of living crisis.
Shell’s third-quarter profits have more than doubled to $9.5bn (£8.2bn) and add up to a whopping $30bn so far this year. Most of the additional profit is not made by sudden extra investment or effort. The cost of producing oil and gas has not changed much, but the selling price has.
Juliette Garside is deputy business editor of the Guardian and the Observer
Continue reading...The retailer wants to knock down and rebuild its flagship store, or leave. It should do the latter, and let small shops thrive
An inquiry opened this week in Westminster that should be revolutionary. It is to decide, in a nutshell, whether the 50% of global carbon emissions embodied in the world’s built environment should be a factor in fighting the climate crisis. If we are all to account for the impact on global temperature rises of our eating, heating and travelling, why not our building?
The inquiry is centred on a decision by M&S to demolish and rebuild its flagship art deco store in London’s Oxford Street, a structure that for some reason was overlooked for listing as historic. We are told that the “embodied” carbon that would be released by the redevelopment is 40,000 tonnes, reportedly the same as would be emitted by a petrol-driven car journeying from the Earth to the Sun. Goodness knows the distance for the forest of slabs and towers now rising out of control on London’s skyline.
Continue reading...Working in Antarctica is a wildlife enthusiast’s dream, but seeing the reality of the climate disaster up close will be brutal
Antarctica holds an almost mythical appeal. Detached from the rest of the world, its beauty is unique. It is a continent that has never seen a war, and where testing military capabilities is strictly forbidden. It is, as the Antarctic Treaty reminds us, “a natural reserve devoted to peace and science”.
And this impressive wilderness is the place I will be calling home for the next five months, as I embark on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work for the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust (UKAHT) at Port Lockroy, Antarctica. As a conservation biologist, I’m drawn to Antarctica for lots of reasons, not least my interest in the major role it plays in our climate system, and the opportunity to monitor the gentoo penguin colony that calls Port Lockroy home.
Continue reading...These children are our future. Instead of mealy-mouthed, cost-cutting exercises, we should be investing in them
“It’s everywhere! It’s everywhere!” the little girl cried with delight as she threw the bubbles up into the air, washing the mud off her hands.
An hour earlier, she had been forlornly sitting on a chair, disengaged with her surroundings, and not speaking. So we’d made mud by mixing dry red earth with water, and she had begun to paint with it, becoming totally immersed. (This state of immersion or “wallowing” is crucial to a child’s learning, forming neural links in the brain.)
Continue reading...Jeremy Hunt and Penny Mordaunt keep roles, and Jacob Rees-Mogg among those quitting as new PM picks team
Jeremy Hunt, chancellor
Had he won the Tory leadership in the summer, Rishi Sunak had been keen to appoint one of his close allies as chancellor, and he is rumoured to prefer Oliver Dowden or Mel Stride, the chair of the Treasury select committee. That may yet happen at the next reshuffle but for now Sunak has kept with Hunt, deciding that stability is the priority. Having been in post for less than a fortnight, it was the consensus position among MPs that Hunt should stay in post. He is keen to deliver the 31 October fiscal event on schedule, in an attempt to bolster market confidence.
Exclusive: ‘Povertyism’ restricts access to education, housing, employment and social benefits and must be outlawed, says special rapporteur
Prejudice against poor people is “a stain on society” that needs to be made illegal, according to a senior UN official.
In an address to the UN general assembly later this week, Olivier De Schutter, special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, will call for the term “povertyism” to be included in anti-discrimination law alongside sexism and racism “to stop destroying people’s lives”.
Continue reading...I don’t want to put him under pressure – I would just like some level of intimacy
My partner is loving, kind and wonderful. But he avoids being intimate with me because he cannot maintain an erection. I am trying hard not to take this personally. I want to support him, but he doesn’t want to talk about it. He feels pressured to perform but he doesn’t need to for me – I would just like some level of intimacy. I have gently raised the subject of Viagra, but he puts off the conversation. I have suggested we go to the pharmacy together or he goes alone, and though he has agreed, he never does. I tell him it is very normal, especially after 40. Maybe I should just accept things as they are as I definitely don’t want to pressure him.
Many men avoid sex because they are afraid they will be unable to achieve an erection. It’s easier to say to a partner: “I’m not in the mood” than face what they would consider a failure to perform. No matter how often you insist it wouldn’t matter, your husband will not believe you. An approach that is more likely to succeed is for you to mention truthfully that you have learned erectile difficulties are not necessarily age-related and need to be investigated. Let him know that, in fact, they can be symptoms of an underlying medical condition (diabetes for example) and send him to your primary care doctor. A physician may be able to calm his fears and educate and assess him – and perhaps prescribe something to counteract erectile dysfunction. At the moment, I imagine he is scared, and will feel threatened by any discussion you may initiate, so seek the kind of help that will hopefully be more palatable for him.
Pamela Stephenson Connolly is a US-based psychotherapist who specialises in treating sexual disorders.
If you would like advice from Pamela on sexual matters, send us a brief description of your concerns to private.lives@theguardian.com (please don’t send attachments). Each week, Pamela chooses one problem to answer, which will be published online. She regrets that she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions.
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Continue reading...The chronic condition has an array of physical and neurological symptoms, but most remain misunderstood
From overwhelming fatigue to brain fog that makes it impossible to complete daily tasks, long Covid is having a devastating impact on people’s lives around the world.
But with no test for the chronic condition, it has proven difficult to measure how many people are living with the syndrome weeks, months and even years after contracting the virus. It is an umbrella term describing an array of physical and neurological symptoms, including ones like memory issues.
Continue reading...Nevada’s athletic commission voted to oversee league of the controversial sport that has already seen one competitor die
Cue the Will Smith jokes: the much-maligned president of the UFC, Dana White, has the green light for a new venture – the Power Slap League.
Though much remains uncertain about the new league, slap fighting is pretty much what it sounds like: two people face each other and take turns smacking one another on the side of the head with an open hand.
Continue reading...What are you supposed to cook with it, apart from ready meals and mug cakes? Without a proper oven, I’m eating like a bin-diving gull
We’ve got builders in and are now kitchenless, with only a microwave, a kettle and our terminal toaster, limping on with 0.5 functioning slots, for sustenance. Perfect, you would think, for a woman who declared she was never cooking again once her kids left home. Ideally, I would now assume my ultimate form, living off olives and dry martinis like a Dorothy Parker tribute act, but I fear it’s too soon for that: we’re all going to have to work until we’re 100 now the government has trashed our pensions. I’m unclear if I even have one, and if you can’t locate your pension, it’s best to assume you’re never retiring.
So the microwave it is. Coincidentally, it’s having a cost-of-living crisis moment as the most energy-efficient appliance (6p to cook two baked potatoes compared with 24p in an electric oven according to one expert). But what to put in there? I’m no stranger to ready meals, but stacks of dubiously recyclable plastic containers and pierced films are too depressing for the long haul. I know they are great for melting chocolate, and Nigella warms milk in her microwavé, but those are the fixings for a mug cake at best, not a meal. I’ve been scouring healthy eating blogs for what to make without a work surface. Tinned beans and sweet potatoes (high on my vegetable blacklist) feature heavily – worthy but unappealing.
Continue reading...Arriving in Sheffield set the gifted Italian, now 51, on a path via Aston Villa and Bradford to being a huge cult hero in the game
Walking into a small cafe in Bermondsey, south London, Benito Carbone looks like the sort of man who has never made a mistake in his life. Only a certain type of person can pull off the pinstripe that adorns his tailored suit. But any illusions of pomp and grandeur are quickly swept aside: from the first handshake Carbone is disarming, warm – insisting that I call him “Benny” – and happy to admit that when it comes to mistakes, he has made a few.
Perhaps that is not surprising for a player who had 18 clubs across a career that spanned four decades, including spells at Torino, Napoli, Internazionale, Sheffield Wednesday, Aston Villa, Derby County, Middlesbrough, Bradford, Parma and even Sydney FC. Remarkably, Wednesday are the only club he played at for more than two seasons and it is where he is most fondly remembered in England. And yet Carbone concedes that signing for the Owls was one of his biggest errors.
Continue reading...Three Billboards and In Bruges writer-director Martin McDonagh reunites Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell in this deliciously melancholy tale set in remotest 1920s Ireland
Tragedy and comedy are perfectly paired in this latest jet-black offering from Martin McDonagh, which, like the writer-director’s previous film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2018), seems a strong contender for the Oscars’ best picture race. Reuniting the two stars of McDonagh’s 2008 debut feature In Bruges, it’s an end-of-friendship breakup movie that swings between the hilarious, the horrifying and the heartbreaking in magnificent fashion.
It’s 1923, and on the fictional island of Inisherin the sounds of the Irish civil war (“a bad do”) can be heard across the water, providing suitable background noise for the internecine struggles to come. Every day at 2pm, dairy farmer Pádraic (Colin Farrell) calls on his best friend, Colm (Brendan Gleeson), and the two head to the pub. They’re a chalk-and-cheese pair: the former a simple soul who can talk for hours about horse poo; the latter “a thinker” who writes music, plays the fiddle and falls prey to bouts of existential despair. Circumstance has made them inseparable.
Continue reading...Richard B Woodward, who has known McCarthy for 30 years, on the reclusive author’s love of scientific thinking, and why he will publish two novels in two months after a 16-year wait
• Read an exclusive extract from Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger
For the last 20 years or so, the most likely place to find the publicity-shy novelist-playwright-screenwriter Cormac McCarthy would be at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. Co-founded in 1984 by Murray Gell-Mann, the 1969 recipient of the Nobel prize in physics, SFI is a thinktank for maverick brainiacs, a flexible category that, in the judgment of the late polymath Gell-Mann, perfectly described McCarthy, his friend and MacArthur Foundation “genius” award winner.
Until recently on many weekdays, the writer could be heard at SFI, clattering away on his portable typewriter from behind his office door. An affable member of this elite community, with no specific tasks to perform, he would regularly emerge for afternoon tea or attend talks by SFI scholars and visiting academics on topics that interested him, such as complex systems theory or quantum computing.
Continue reading...Farmers say having solar sites allows them to subsidise food production during less successful years
Farmers have urged whoever succeeds Liz Truss as UK prime minister to abandon plans to ban solar energy from most of England’s farmland, arguing that it would hurt food security by cutting off a vital income stream.
Truss, who resigned on Thursday, and her environment secretary, Ranil Jayawardena, hoped to ban solar from about 41% of the land area of England, or about 58% of agricultural land, the Guardian revealed last week.
Continue reading...Iranians brought trainers and technical support to Crimea to help Russians use drones ‘with better lethality’, White House says
Iran has significantly deepened its involvement in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by providing technical support for Russian pilots flying Iranian-made drones to bomb civilian targets, the White House has confirmed.
The national security council lead spokesperson, John Kirby, said on Thursday that it was the US’s understanding that the Iranian advisers were in Crimea to provide training and maintenance – but not to actually pilot the drones – after Russian forces experienced difficulties in operating the unmanned flying bombs.
Continue reading...Give basics (and tin openers), food that doesn’t need cooking and add some snacks. Here’s what charities need to meet the demand for emergency food parcels
“Some people, in the run-up to Christmas, think ‘oh, there’s a fancy packet of biscuits, that would be nice’ but we need basic things,” says Kathleen Neilly, who runs West Lothian food bank. Currently, that includes tinned meat and tinned vegetables, as well as personal care items such as shampoo and shower gel. She has enough pasta to last around a year. Other food banks report ongoing shortages of long-life juice and milk. Check your local food bank’s latest shopping lists. Many are within the Trussell Trust network, or can be found through the Independent Food Action Network (IFAN), and many have their own social media accounts.
Continue reading...Comedian Rob Delaney writes about the death of his young son with heartbreak and a deep honesty shot through with humour
The first homework our English teacher set us at secondary school was to write a short essay jauntily entitled “The Day That Changed My Life”. Among various 12-year-olds’ accounts of finding medieval coins on a beach and performing a clarinet solo on a skiing holiday, I wrote five pages on the death of my father two years previously. I hadn’t written about it before, hadn’t really spoken much about it, and was a little disappointed when, in his comments at the end of the piece, my teacher explained that he had demurred from giving it a mark. It felt wrong, he wrote, to be examining such a topic with too critical an eye.
I didn’t agree. It had felt fantastic to write it, to see the most significant event of my young life given shape, structure, even story, however inelegantly. I had wanted to know how it made other people feel. Maybe it would spark a dialogue with my new classmates. Instead it felt like my teacher had turned away from the messiness of it all, leaving me further stranded in that remote emotional cottage-in-the-woods where all young bereaved people find themselves. I also knew, though, that he was trying to be kind. And that if he had put a red pen through my description of my family’s howls of pain by the sitting room windows and scribbled “Get to the point!” in the margin, I might have asked to change schools. That’s the problem with people in grief. Can’t do right for doing wrong.
Continue reading...Okadas have long been a way to beat the city’s famous traffic jams, but their links to crime and accidents have seen them ordered off the roads
At rush hour the densely packed traffic of Lagos should be buzzing with okadas, the motorcycle taxis that weave through the heaving streets, bearing passengers clinging on for dear life, hoping to beat the notorious jams.
But last month authorities banned the motorbikes, thought to cause almost 50% of all traffic accidents in Nigeria’s most populous city, throwing thousands of people out of work. Among them is Fatai Ogunbanwo, who sits idly beside a provision store in Somolu, one of the 10 districts hit by the ban, his okada nowhere in sight.
Continue reading...