Category: Lifestyle

My favourite part of childhood summer holidays with my dad was our trip to the Yorkshire Dales agricultural show, a respite from his usual gruelling regime of mountain walks and examining dead fauna. Between prize rams and displays of trimmed leeks we watched the fell-running races: infants and gnarled pensioners scampering up and then down […]

My dad had a pal called George who had a boat. It was a sailing boat but not a very big one – 25ft long. I don’t think you could call it a yacht; it didn’t seem very … yachty. I’m trying to downplay its yachtiness, and how privileged my childhood was, but it’s hopeless. […]

When the Taliban entered Kabul, Nilofar Bayat, the captain of Afghanistan’s female national wheelchair basketball team, knew she had to get out. “There were so many videos of me playing basketball. I had been active in calling for women’s rights and the rights of women with disabilities,” she said. “If the Taliban found out all […]

The hottest summer nights of my life were in Australia around the Christmas of 1988. My brother was on a gap year with a mate, working in a factory in Dandenong, a suburb of Melbourne. They were living in a tiny, scruffy caravan in an overgrown field when I went to visit. It had come […]

Readers replyThe voice you hear in your head when you speak is a mix of what your ears pick up from the air, plus extra bass that is conducted through your skull to your inner ear. When you hear your voice recorded, it lacks this extra bass, so it sounds thinner and weedier than you […]

It was my wife who first professionalised things. It took place in the common scuffle that kicks off around bedtime, wherein our son insists on one more final book and, inevitably, reneges on the promise the second we finish, issuing fresh demands for one more. This stalemate has been a burden on our lives since […]

Being in someone’s else’s house when they are not there (and you’re not a burglar) is a contemplative experience, like walking round a film set. It may be people that make a home, but an empty home, that once held people, still holds something. I’m in my mother’s house and she’s not here, because she’s […]