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If you’re young, hot and desperate for affirmation, the status symbol du jour is an Instagrammable protein shake in a single-use plastic cup sporting the logo of an upmarket gym, private members’ club or boutique supermarket. How depressing. Like so many vacuous trends, the status shake originated in LA, where the go-to spot is Erewhon – a supermarket so health-obsessed and expensive that it makes Whole Foods look like Lidl. At Erewhon, famous faces such as Hailey Bieber, Kourtney Kardashian and Gisele Bündchen don’t just drink status shakes, but ‘collaborate’ on them, creating their own signature blends which sell for up to $23 (about £17). It seems to me that

There is nowhere in May more beautiful than England with the hawthorn out, the clear light and a thousand shades of green. And there is nowhere more beautiful in England than Glyndebourne, the Sussex opera house between the Downs and the coast. Every visit to the ancestral pile of the Christie family brings joy and we lucky folk who caught the new production of Parsifal were granted double rations. Wagner’s final music drama is a first for Glyndebourne and completes a triptych of the Master’s late work, following productions of Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. As Larkin wrote of Sidney Bechet: ‘Oh play that thing!’ Music-lovers have

No man treads in the same river twice, wrote Heraclitus in the fifth century BC. No doubt that clever old bird was on to something, but nowadays it seems that we need to be careful about treading in rivers at all. It was reported last week that the River Loddon in Hampshire has been granted legal personhood by a local council, inspired by a document known as the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Rivers. The UDRR, created in 2017, was created by an organisation called the Earth Law Centre, and makes some pretty sweeping claims on behalf of our fluvial comrades, including the ‘right to flow’, the ‘right to

Our Serbian guide Zoran is a jovial fellow and as we rumble through the streets of Belgrade in our minibus he regales us with a joke about the difference between the various nationalities of the former Yugoslavia, all now with countries of their own. ‘We Serbs are rude,’ he says, ‘but the Croatians are self-centred, the Bosnians are thick, the Montenegrins are lazy and the Macedonians are just Serbs with a speech defect. As for the Slovenians, they are so polite they must be gay!’ Joking about each other is a definite improvement on fighting each other, as per so much of their history. The countries on my Balkan tour

Usually when I start listening to a true-life podcast, I don’t know how it ends. That’s not the case with The Smuggler, BBC Radio 4’s new investigation into people smuggling. Across ten episodes, its Orwell Prize-winning presenter, Annabel Deas, tells the story of ‘Nick’, on the face of it an unlikely protagonist. Nick is white, English and a former soldier in the British Army. He’s also a friend of mine. We met in jail in 2021 and have stayed in contact ever since. So I know Nick’s story. I even know how it ends. Despite all this, I found myself absolutely gripped by The Smuggler. This is partly because it’s

They were a stalwart of Britain’s towns and cities from the 1970s until their disappearance in 2007 – and now Virgin is set to bring its Megastores back to the high street. According to the Times, the Virgin Group has in mind at least one central London site as a possible location for a new Megastore. Its chief executive, Josh Bayliss, said he wants to return the ‘human connection’ to the Virgin brand. Quite right. We should applaud this news, not just on nostalgic grounds – but for financial, aesthetic and communitarian ones too. Like so many once-familiar high street names, Virgin Megastores may have succumbed to supermarket competition and the online shopping revolution, but that