One of the curious things about marriage is the role it’s played in embedding commonly held views about normality. Married people are generally considered normal people. As such, they have possessed inordinate power to dictate the terms of normality in a way that single people rarely can. And yet marriage, clearly, isn’t for everyone. Plenty of people have no desire to do it. Plenty of others have done it and haven’t liked it. The stats only corroborate this. Fewer people over the years have been getting married, while the stresses…
Tag: Life and style
Six lifestyle choices to slow memory decline named in 10-year study
A combination of healthy lifestyle choices such as eating well, regularly exercising, playing cards and socialising at least twice a week may help slow the rate of memory decline and reduce the risk of dementia, a decade-long study suggests. Memory is a fundamental function of daily life that continuously declines as people age, impairing quality of life and productivity, and increasing the risk of dementia. Evidence from previous research has been insufficient to evaluate the effect of healthy lifestyle on memory trajectory, but now a study suggests that combining multiple…
Food, firecrackers and family reunions: how lunar new year is celebrated differently across Asia
For billions of people across Asia and in Asian diaspora communities around the world, this weekend marks the beginning of the lunar new year celebrations, a two-week holiday marking the end of the Zodiac year of the Tiger, and ushering in the Year of the Rabbit – or Cat, if you are in Vietnam. For the first few days commercial activity slows or stops, as people gather with their families. For many migrant workers in China, it is often the only time of the year they can return to home…
A new start after 60: ‘I was such a chicken – until I spent seven weeks travelling alone’
Nooraini Mydin’s 50th birthday passed without much of a marker, so she was determined to do something memorable for her 60th. She had always been curious about the Trans-Siberian railway but thought “how about I make it really exciting and get the train from London all the way to Kuala Lumpur?” she says. “I am such a chicken, or I was at that time. I used to get very lonely when I travelled alone.” But in August 2016 she set off with two suitcases – containing her laptop, to write…
Etles Uyghur, London: ‘You’ll be well fed, and learn a little along the way’ – restaurant review
Etles Uyghur Restaurant, 424 Finchley Road, London NW2 2HY (020 7431 5698). Starters £7.50-£9.99, mains £12.50-£16, big plate chicken £30, desserts £4.50. Unlicensed The menu at Etles Uyghur restaurant, located at the leafier Golder’s Green end of London’s Finchley Road, is not just a thrilling list of edible promises. It’s also a subtle lesson in physical and human geography. Obviously, there’s no pork listed because of the predominantly Muslim culture of the Uyghur people, which the Chinese government has been attempting to annihilate so brutally, for so long. Nor is…
Watching a film about communism, I realised I had been lied to as a child in China
I was born in north-east China in a province that was particularly heavy-handed with party propaganda. I learned to march in formation before knowing how to write, and maybe even count. Every morning at school started with a flag ceremony and obligatory salutes to Mao Zedong. Textbooks were illustrated with watercolour Lenins and Stalins, drawn to look much more handsome than they actually were. The propaganda made its way home as well. I think that, even to this day, my father knows only socialist songs. The life I’ve just described…
‘They took my world’: fashion giant Shein accused of art theft
Vanessa Bowman paints the world around her: the 19th-century village church, her back garden, the leaves on the trees in the fields where she walks her dog. Once she has chosen a scene from her rural Dorset idyll, she puts brush to canvas, sometimes poring over the details for days in her studio. Over three decades she has honed a unique style and earned a loyal fanbase, with 20,000 followers on Instagram and commissions from House & Garden, Prince Charles’s Highgrove shop and Farrow & Ball. But when she received…
Pet parties: the surprising – and occasionally dangerous – trend for animal birthday celebrations
Appearance: Either very jolly or entirely hellish, depending on your sensibility. Legality: Woolly. It cannot possibly be illegal for me to have a lovely birthday party for my adorable kitten. Let me ask you this: have you tried throwing a birthday party for a pet in China? Of course not. Well, don’t. A recent party for a dog named Doudou, in the city of Changsha, ended with the police threatening to open fire if something similar happened again. On the dog? No, on any drones used without permission. Doudou’s owner…