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Tuesday

Maxine Frith

I’ve had it with neurotic dog owners

‘She’s overweight! You should weigh her every week and if she puts on so much as 50g, immediately reduce her diet,’ one commenter said. Another castigated me for not using organic shampoo, and someone else told me off for my poor choice of outdoor coat. Under every post were furious debates, judgements and accusations. I adore Dixie. She is coming up for four years old and I want the best for her. But she is, after all, a standard short-haired dachshund, not a human toddler – and frankly it all seems a bit much. The number dogs being given fluoxetine, the same drug used in Prozac, has increased tenfold over

Daniel Sokol

Men, baldness is nothing to fear

I am bald. Over the past few months, three events have reminded me of this fact. The first was on X (formerly Twitter). I was defending an article I had published in the British Medical Journal, in which I argued that doctors should behave professionally on social media. In response to my post, an irate doctor called me an ‘egghead’. The second was the revelation that my close friend Calvin, 46, had flown to Turkey for a hair transplant. He was not even bald, just thinning. Et tu, Calvin? The third took place only moments ago, and prompted me to write this piece. I was trying to spice up a

Harry Mount

The Odyssey is more real than we thought

Odysseus is back on his eternal journey to Ithaca – and he’s sailing towards your cinema screen. Ralph Fiennes is playing Odysseus in The Return, released last week. And Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, starring Matt Damon as the cleverest of the Greeks at Troy, should be out next year. I criss-crossed the Mediterranean for three years, in the wake of Odysseus, for a book – and I’m convinced The Odyssey is true. OK, the monsters, like man-eating Scylla and the one-eyed Cyclops, might not have existed. And you’d have to be a Zeus-fearing type to believe in the gods toying with Odysseus’s fate on Mount Olympus. But the catastrophic storms that

Monday

Ian Evans

For better, for worse: confessions of a rural wedding venue owner

Employing a marksman to shoot pigeons inside our wedding barn on the morning of a ceremony was not something included in the venue-owner’s manual. For the animal-loving bride, blood-splattered dead birds were preferable to her guests being splattered later that day – an understandable moral sacrifice on her behalf. The birds had sneaked in via an open owl hole window in the roof, something we hadn’t spotted until the unwelcome visitors caused a flap. It was one of the many challenges we faced owning and running a rural wedding venue, a high-pressure business where expectations are enormous and responsibilities seemingly endless. It’s 16 months since we sold up but the memories came flooding back when I

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

The hot cross bunfight

There’s a well-known clip from daytime TV show This Morning where celebrity chef Gino D’Acampo is cooking a classic Italian pasta dish. Holly Willoughby, one of the presenters, tastes it and says: ‘Do you know, if it had, like, ham in it, it’s closer to a British carbonara?’ D’Acampo, in his Italian-accented perfect English, looks at her in horror before replying: ‘If my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike.’ This phrase goes round and round in my head as I stand agog in my supermarket’s bakery aisles. Where once there might have been one choice of hot cross bun as we hurtle towards Easter – perhaps one

Antonia Hoyle

Could Ozempic cure your phone addiction?

It’s already known for whittling down waistlines – and now Ozempic looks set to have the same effect on wine consumption. Research recently published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry found semaglutide, the weight loss medication also sold under the brand name Wegovy, reduced cravings in people with alcohol use disorder.  The study by California’s USC Institute for Addiction Science divided 48 participants into two groups and found those injected with semaglutide drank less in each sitting than those offered a placebo. It is not the first research to link the jabs – originally designed as a diabetes treatment – to lower incidence of substance abuse. In October it was suggested in

Sunday

Julie Bindel

Small plates are a scam

The drift began with the Anglicised version of tapas – a word meaning ‘to cover’, or ‘lid’, that originally described the small pieces of food used to cover and protect drinks. But ‘small plates’, now a mainstay of those fashionable, overpriced restaurants that pride themselves on being the antidote to stuffy and formal, have dominated the restaurant world for more than two decades. In Venice once, in the early 1990s, I ended up in a backstreet bacari, which is a booze and snack joint, as I couldn’t afford the restaurants in the centre. It was full of working men, and cheap as chips. Huge platters of cold mussels, cured ham,

Saturday

Charles Walford

Forget Adolescence: this is the Netflix drama teenage boys should watch

Boris Johnson didn’t like Adolescence. In his Daily Mail column last week he acknowledged the fine acting of the most talked-about television programme of the year, but still concluded that it was ‘tosh’. The problem, he felt, was that it wasn’t based on a real-life crime, which somehow lessens its worth as a lesson for our times in the eyes of the former Prime Minister. I’m not sure his logic fully holds up to scrutiny (nor, for that matter, does Keir Starmer’s plan to show Adolescence in schools). But if it is real-life drama that Boris wants then Netflix, with impeccable timing, this week released another one of those sports

Friday

Penworthy

Three bets for Ayr tomorrow

Tomorrow’s Coral Scottish Grand National (3.35 p.m.) has attracted a field of 23 runners with a pot of more than £112,000 to the connections of the winner. Irish trainer Willie Mullins, fresh from his stunning achievements at Aintree last weekend, has six runners in the race as he tries to become champion trainer in Britain for a second successive year. It’s impossible to rule out another Mullins victory but the bookies are running scared of his horses and the forecast favourite, Chosen Witness, looks to be particularly poor value. I have put up two horses for the race with mixed fortunes so far. Magna Sam, suggested each way at 50-1,

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Will I ever pee again?

When I was a girl, around 13 or so, my mum started calling me, half-enviously, half-fondly, ‘The Camel’, due to my ability to retain water. Every Saturday morning we’d go shopping at the Bristol city centre department stores; she’d need the toilet maybe three times, but I wouldn’t need it at all. ‘Have you “been”?’ she’d ask me before we left the house. ‘No!’ I’d snicker, spitefully. When we got home after four hours out, I’d make a point of sprawling on the stairs, chugging Corona cherryade by the gallon and gossiping with a mate for around an hour before I finally ‘made my toilette’. It became part of the

Andrew Watts

Does Cornwall have a pasty problem?

I assumed that the headline in the Mail about ‘pasty wars’ would involve some grievous insult to Cornish pride, including something other than beef, onions, potato and turnip; perhaps pointing out that the turnip was actually a swede. Instead, it was about how a deli in Mousehole, where I live, was charging a tenner for a pasty – albeit served on a plate (presentation is half the battle) with a side salad. The Mail journalist wrote that it was ‘shocking’ that a pasty in a restaurant overlooking what Dylan Thomas called ‘quite the loveliest village in England’ [sic] would cost more than a pasty from an industrial estate off the

Thursday

Owen Matthews

Has the Kremlin talked Trump out of sanctions?

After a two-hour phone call last month, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin announced that an improved bilateral relationship between the United States and Russia ‘has huge upside’, including ‘enormous economic deals and geopolitical stability’. Days later, however, Trump said he was ‘pissed off’ with Russia over its foot-dragging on a ceasefire in Ukraine. Putin’s demand, moreover, that Ukraine’s government be replaced with a transitional one had made him ‘very angry’. Trump warned that if a deal couldn’t be struck, then the US would ‘put secondary tariffs on all oil coming out of Russia… That would be that if you buy oil from Russia, you can’t do business in the United

Wednesday