Iam sitting in the road, in Primrose Hill, during a global pandemic, when Meg Mathews starts loudly telling me about her vaginal atrophy. All right, we’re at a café table…
Category: Lifestyle

Want a bicycle by Christmas? ‘If you leave it till December there will be no stock’
The massive surge in demand for bicycles during the Covid-19 shutdown has caused shortages of bikes worldwide, with the industry warning that anyone leaving their shopping too late is likely…

I lent my mother my old phone. Now she’s read my text messages – and discovered untold secrets
If you could call anywhere the canary in the coalmine of incompetence and chaos, it would be care homes. At the start of the coronavirus crisis, it was the UK…

Welcome to October’s Observer Food Monthly
‘Even though I left my scientific career a while back, that process of thinking hasn’t gone away,” says Nik Sharma, in his dazzling new book The Flavor Equation. This is…

Bubbles, bacteria and me: Sandor Katz on why fermentation isn’t a fad
When people meet Sandor Katz and learn that he writes about and lectures on fermentation, they often give him “the face”. Katz, on a video call from rural Tennessee, wrinkles…

Adeel Akhtar: ‘People are ready to stretch their ideas on diversity’
Idon’t know if it’s the heat – it’s 35C on the late summer day we meet for lunch at an outside table at the Canton Arms on south London’s busy…

Nadiya Hussain: ‘I want to blend in. But the truth is, I’m never going to blend in’
Nadiya Hussain has never published a baking book. She has never fronted her own baking show before either, having had her life changed by appearing on the big one, the…