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Wednesday

Tanith Carey

Did Churchill have ADHD?

If ever a mental health diagnosis can be called ‘fashionable’, it’s ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. The mere mention of it can trigger moans that it’s nothing but the latest ‘woke’ way to pathologise fidgeting, lack of self-discipline and bad parenting. So if you’re in that camp who rolls their eyes everytime you hear the term, prepare to be irritated. I’m going to argue this so-called ‘new’ condition is responsible for nothing less than changing the course of British history. ADHD is real, and it’s had consequences throughout history: few more surprising than the qualities it bestowed upon Winston Churchill. As an author of psychology and child development books, as well

Margaret Mitchell

Japan is great, but it defeated me

It’s great having toilets with warm seats that shoot water up your bum until you need somewhere to throw up. After eating two kilos of raw, vengeful tuna, I was leaning over a hotel loo in Osaka and all I wanted was to rest my clammy forehead on a cold plastic seat. Six hours earlier, I had watched a man carve up a metre-long bluefin tuna on Dotonbori Street. It appeared very much still alive, apart from the limp way its mouth fell open when the fishmonger turned it upright on its belly. ‘Very, very fresh!’ he hollered, whacking it to bits. ‘Very, very, very delicious!’ I took his word,

John Sturgis

My canal boat obsession is causing me trouble

We had steered our narrowboat into the lock at Swineford on the navigable section of the Bristol Avon before 8 a.m., heading upstream, back towards Bath. Two and a half hours later, we were still there. We were stuck. Having worked the lock’s paddles, our boat had climbed the requisite 10 feet to be level with the stretch of river ahead. We were poised to open the lock gate and press on towards the Kennet and Avon canal. This, however, meant having to push against the swirling waters of a tidal river. There were only two of us, one still recovering from hip surgery, and pushing the gates of this

Tuesday

Philip Womack

In defence of the personal statement

Ucas, the organisation in charge of university admissions, has announced that it’s bidding bye-bye to a crucial teen rite of passage. It is killing the personal statement. No longer will admissions tutors beetle their brows over flowing paragraphs about when you built an orphanage in Malawi using only a spoon, or how really, really passionate you are about late medieval poetry. Instead, it has decreed that wannabe grads must now answer three dour questions. This move is designed to help those from disadvantaged backgrounds, who do not, in the eyes of a Ucas spokesperson, have access to teachers and family members able to help: and who could argue with that? Well,

Mark Nayler

Meet the pianist who actually makes recitals fun

No matter how much you love music, going to a piano recital can be an uncomfortable experience. A sombre-faced pianist plays in an atmosphere of hushed reverence, perhaps swaying and grimacing to simulate profundity. If a sonata is performed, outbreaks of guilty coughing will occur throughout the audience between movements. It’s an unwritten rule that clapping’s only permissible at the end. When the concert’s over, the pianist walks off stage after a couple of stiff bows, without ever having said a word, and everyone can finally breathe again.   The annual series of summer piano recitals performed in Oxford by British pianist Jack Gibbons is nothing like that. Now in its

Monday

Robin Ashenden

I miss the food of Eastern Europe

When you live abroad for long periods of time, you get accustomed to certain foods which, returning home, you can’t find anywhere, and the sense of a habit unwillingly broken is acute. If the foreign country is Thailand or Italy, you stand a good chance of finding dishes approximate to those you’ve left behind in a local restaurant. But if your working life has been spent in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and you live well outside London, you must learn to make them for yourself or do without. In the warm hotel restaurant, after freshly brewed black coffee, I was given a glass of heated honey vodka

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Have I failed as an artist?

I suppose you could say that I’m an ‘amateur’ artist, that art is my ‘hobby’. In fact no, I take that back. I’m no amateur hobbyist dabbler. I’m an artist. I’m a bloody artist. If you take something seriously, the hobby label grates. And I take art seriously. I might not be on track to making it in the art world (but who knows?), but I have gradually decided that it is a key part of my creative life, subtly joined to the other stuff. Six years ago I went back to college, part-time, for a year, to study fine art I am having this moment of soul-searching because I’m