Category: Lifestyle

The office environment can drastically impact the way you work and even your ability to appeal to candidates. What can you do to create the right atmosphere for work? Your office and desk spaces are key parts of your working environment. They can impact your team’s culture, productivity and efficiency, as well as their general […]

Sayaka Fukuda and James Storr Brown had been trying in vain since January to get married after coronavirus disrupted their wedding plans. So when New York state announced it was legalising video wedding ceremonies last weekend, they immediately decided to get married on Zoom, and were among the first to take advantage of the new […]

Essential equipment: guide (book, app, website, or household member) to help identify birds, sense of humour. Non-essential equipment: binoculars, notebook, sense of adventure. How to do it: you just watch birds. Bird-watching is for everyone, whether you’re on your own or with your significant other, family or friends. Neither special skills nor fancy equipment are […]

It’s hard, stuck inside for weeks on end, not to notice how much your four walls could do with some paint – if, like me, you haven’t had them done for a while. To be honest, it’s been troubling me for ages – lockdown has just made it worse. As long ago as February I’d […]

It is forever fascinating to me that human cultures tend to interpret nature in such dramatically different ways. Here in the UK, much of our gardening aesthetic is firmly fixated on flowers (the greater the number of petals and the more dazzling their colour the better). But in some east Asian societies, the focus is […]

Barbara Parry* arranged to switch her phone and broadband account from Sky to Now TV in March, a week before lockdown. Instead, she was left incommunicado as her line was cancelled and her phone number reallocated. During the following four weeks, as she pleaded in vain to be reconnected, her partner contracted Covid-19. He died […]

Routine, oh how I miss you … To know what to expect, every single day, is priceless: it keeps you sound and sensible; it gives purpose and focus. But not all is lost in these days of lockdown. Old routines are transforming into new ones, and many of them, I am happy to say, revolve […]

The yellow split peas were probably wondering if they would ever see the light of day. I am now embarrassed at how grateful I am for their presence in the larder and have been treating them like precious golden coins. I used 250g of them to make a pot of soup this week, warming them […]