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Hinduism is diverse. Every region, caste and devotee worships differently which means that when there’s a big event no one knows what to do. Practices vary between communities. Sindhis do things differently to, say, Sikkimese. And they vary across different regions too. Sindhis in the Indian city of Pune, where my grandparents were from, do things differently from Sindhis in London, where my mum lives. After a lengthy discussion, which involved a séance-like conference call with overseas relatives, we persuaded ourselves to ditch him Everyone knows the main rituals of a Hindu funeral: you feed cows each day before breakfast, you are expected to be, at least temporarily, a teetotal vegetarian,

I was invited to speak at a conference in Barcelona in the late 1990s. At the end of a very long, hard day, my genial Spanish feminist hosts invited me to dinner, telling me they would meet me in the hotel lobby at 10.30 p.m. I almost went into some sort of traumatic shock. I was aware of the Catalonian reputation for eating late – sometimes as late as midnight, at weekends – but I was having none of it. I have been told by waiters that a bottle of wine is ‘too much for a lady on her own’ I bade my colleagues farewell and found myself a gorgeous

It didn’t matter that it was 33˚C. Starbucks staff across Britain spent the beginning of September putting out pumpkin-themed menus, selling customers pumpkin spice lattes in pumpkin-shaped mugs, to be drunk alongside a slice of pumpkin-flavoured loaf cakes, a pumpkin seed cookie, or a brownie cut into pumpkin shapes and frosted in hazardously orange icing. Happy fall, y’all.   The minor humiliations don’t stop me – I’m a creature of nostalgia and these drinks don’t taste bad, either The hot early autumn didn’t stop us obsessives: there is, inevitably, an iced pumpkin spice latte. The spice mix in question, of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, clove and sulphur-based preservatives doesn’t necessarily have to

Cast your minds back to 2005, a time when it was considered cool to record your favourite song to use as a ringtone on your phone, iPod Nanos were everywhere, the Crazy Frog drove every parent in the country crazy, and Ronaldinho was named the best football player on the planet. A lot has changed in the 18 years since, The Crazy Frog has been permanently silenced, no one (except yours truly) still records songs to use as ringtones, and Ronaldinho has served time in prison. What happened to him, a man who was, for sheer entertainment value, arguably the best football player to ever walk the face of the

There are certain things that are so shocking they can only be said by close friends. And as the British have been in a close friendship – an entente cordiale – with the French since 1904, I am here to say it to our neighbours across the Channel: I’m sorry, mes amis, but your food is the worst in the world. There are more McDonalds in France, per head, than anywhere in Europe Such a claim needs evidence. So let’s start with that essential emblem of aspirational French cooking: the menu degustation. Over the years, as a travel hack, I have learned to shudder when I see this phrase –

It’s a pretty typical 1930s-built semi in the outer London suburbs: four bedrooms, living room, dining room, kitchen, average back garden and unusually large front garden with a lawn and mixed shrub borders. Or rather that’s what it was until it changed hands earlier this summer and the new owners had different ideas. Now that that front lawn and its surrounding borders are gone. In their place is an extended paved area that has enough space to park at least six cars, maybe eight. Not a blade of grass has survived. The bulldozing of this domestic garden in north London coincided with the Ulez expansion, joining other recent anti-car measures