Relationships

The porn star Bonnie Blue offers a straightforward explanation for her decision to join OnlyFans. She was in her early twenties, married to her teenage sweetheart, pursuing a career in recruitment and living in Derbyshire, the county of her birth. As she told an interviewer last year: ‘I used to work an office job, nine to five, sit in rush hour, get given 20 days’ annual leave. And for a while I’d accepted that. I was like “OK, this is what life is. This is as good as it can get.”’ But Blue (whose real name is Tia Billinger) wondered if life might not have more to offer her. So

If we were really an island of strangers, as Sir Keir Starmer attested this week, then it might be OK. The real problem is that we have to interact with the bastards, so they cease being strangers and start being people who have a function in our lives. The old cliché had it that in the UK you were never more than ten metres from a rat and this is probably still true, except it’s five metres in Birmingham. But it is also true that you are never more than ten metres from a skank. A foreign skank, a British skank, makes no odds. Someone pig-ignorant and witless but possessed,

My late parents perpetually promoted their marriage as the best in the history of the universe. Because this cult of two was hardly subtle, others readily detected what they wanted to hear, so fawning social admiration of what lovebirds they were made them even worse. For us kids, this Trumpesque superlative (how they’d hate that adjective) wasn’t remotely as traumatising as divorce, but still – the romantic hagiography was a bit much. In our adulthoods, our own sad little relationships could never compare, and our parents seemed to feel sorry for us. While big proponents of marriage as an institution, they seemed to regard their children’s marriages as pale imitations

Monday, and Camden council have yet again failed to empty my food waste bin. They never miss my rubbish or dry recycling – it’s only ever the smelly stuff. I give my neighbour’s brown bin a little kick. Emptied! This feels personal. I call the council. ‘Look, this is a nightmare,’ I say. ‘This is the second week in a row. Are we on a blacklist?’ Pause. ‘Our operatives are too busy to keep lists,’ says the lady. Hang on – you mean if they weren’t so busy, they would? Things my husband and I have bickered about this week: my devotion to an ugly but comfortable pair of rubber

Agnes Callard is a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and she lives with her current husband and her ex-husband. At the same time, yes. They raised the kids together as well (two from her first marriage, now 21 and 16, then one from her second, now 11). I mention this not as gossip, but because her approach to her marriage is an example of how she lives philosophically. Her latest book, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, is an argument about how we shouldn’t take cultural norms and rote-learned advice for granted. Instead, we need to talk with others, regularly, about the reasons for our

‘Sorry sir, the rules clearly state that all single men must be accompanied by a woman.’ As the frustrated guest is ushered off the premises, my female companion and I are welcomed into a grand reception room where the organised sex party is being held. A barmaid offers us some complimentary condoms and a handful of Quality Street, along with some fluorescent orange punch served in plastic cups. Should we be engaging in small talk or ripping each other’s clothes off? No one seems to know The organisers of tonight’s paid event claim they cater for the world’s ‘sexual elite’ but there’s something disarmingly ordinary about the snaggle-toothed mid-lifers trooping

Have you been to a ‘divorce party’ yet this season? If you haven’t, not to worry, there’s still time. Divorce season lasts for the whole of January, I’m told, so there’s a couple of weeks left to celebrate. And if perhaps the details of your own nasty separation aren’t yet finalised, or if your lawyer and your ex have between them drained the champagne fund, then why not simply nip into town and crash someone else’s? You’re bound to find one. Perhaps in the future there will be un-wedding lists, allowing guests to repurchase things the ex took Divorce parties have become so popular here in London that several of