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As an urban-dwelling, free-spirited 41-year-old with sleep issues and a whimsical trade – writing – having a baby posed many challenges. The chief of which has been having to constantly work with two other people: baby and baby-daddy. I vowed as the due date approached to get kitted up in ways that would feel reassuring, limiting the cannonball splash effect of the new arrival. Would I be able to spend my way out of the bits of ensnarement I feared most? The answer is: sort of. Here are the items that have got me closest to living my best self as a new old mum. Call it Mum and the City.  Sleep For this, there is

In 1987, when I was 19, I started at my first ‘proper’ adult job. This was as a lowly civil service clerk, or administrative officer – filing, basically. It was a post within the Lord Chancellor’s Department – as it was known then – but which today is called the Ministry of Justice, which doesn’t sound totalitarian or sinister at all. It was an epochal life stage, and a winter that was full of scents and sensations, the way winters are in the summer of one’s years. How would we deal with a hypothetical situation where somebody – identity unknown – had dry-boiled the office kettle? Part of the process

I fell in love with London when I arrived here as a teenager at the start of the 1970s. Straight out of an American suburban high school, I’d dreamed of the great metropolis of Shakespeare and Dickens, and I vowed never to leave. Why would I, when, as Dr Samuel Johnson famously declared, ‘He who is tired of London is tired of life’? If I am to depart this city which no longer feels entirely like home, where to go? Half a century on, I regret to say that leaving the capital is the very step I’m now considering. I’m not sure I love it anymore and, to be frank,

Many previous football tournaments have had a signature motif: the Mexican wave in 1986, the irritating vuvuzelas in South Africa 2010, the firework up the backside in London in 2021. At Euro 2024, that motif has been the hurling of plastic beer glasses. They have been thrown, in celebration or anger, by the Croatians, the Serbs, the Albanians, the Dutch, the Spanish, by our German hosts and by the excitable Scots. The latter would doubtless have thrown more had they had cause, or stuck around longer. But it was their use as projectiles by England fans which attracted most media attention – and which is likely to result in a fine

Forget the extraordinary achievements – the reason we’re going to miss James Anderson is that, as a man, he’s so ordinary. Yes, he’s played more Tests for England than anyone else (188), and taken more wickets (701 and counting, at least for another day or two). Indeed his haul is easily the best by any fast bowler in the world – only the spinners Muttiah Muralitharan and Shane Warne did better, Warne by a very slim margin. Goodbye then, Jimmy, you routine superstar, you everyday hero Anderson has bowled more Test maidens than Phillip de Freitas bowled Test overs. (This is a tribute to the former rather than a dig