Lifestyle
As lockdown leaves her student community stranded, Annalise Murray and her flatmates get creative with the help of TikTok and an abundance of television.
Leah Mueller, the voice of everyday America, returns to Talking Soup with a tale of love, music, and work from 1980s Chicago.
When the desire arises, Ken Cumberlidge occasionally wishes he could wear women’s clothes. In this personal essay, he reflects on what this might mean in modern society.
Jan Nasrullah Rylewicz joins Talking Soup with a reflective piece on how technology can take over one’s life, and the desire to not see it happen to those we love.
In a series of ill goings-on across a life spent travelling the length and breadth of the world, Frank Sonderborg recounts a few cautionary travellers tales.
Skint but with the mouth-watering prospect of working as a potwash in the local pub, famous for its aroma of old farts, Holly Watson reluctantly goes to a job interview.
In a powerful piece, Ramona Long reflects on her mother’s death from Covid-19, and looks back at her relationship with the beauty shop, one of the few all-female spaces in a male-dominated world.
In a new series on parenthood, Yvonne Hardman, 45-year-old mother of three teenage boys, gives us a stark but witty warning about what is in store for any potential parents.
As part of a new series on parenthood, Dee Caples takes a look at the huge perspective shift from childhood to adulthood, and debates what parts to keep and what to throw out when we raise our own children.
Nanny Pam and me are watching This Morning; there’s a woman on talking about how she’s been cheating on her husband with a ghost. The TV presenter asks if she has ever been intimate with the ghost. Nanny Pam stares at the TV while her Rich Tea biscuit breaks off into her coffee.
Summer’s over and like it or loath it, football is back. Green and white hoops are the colours of debatable success, conjuring up images of Sporting Lisbon, Real Betis, Celtic, maybe even Yeovil Town and as UE Sants graced the packed ‘Energia’ stadium, clad in the virescent and wan kits that defined last year’s halcyon days in Spain’s fifth tear ‘Primera Catalana’.
There are four Zadusnice in a year, one for every season: summer, autumn, winter and spring, and they always fall on Saturday. Saturday is the day of week devoted to the dead in Serbian culture. And Serbs are funny people. They are outgoing and talkative, and they love to socialize with one another, laugh and make jokes anywhere, even in the cemetery.
Mouth open as he presses cold metal against each tooth. Leaning over me, he recites codes I don’t understand to his assistant. When it’s over, he smiles and tells me, to my surprise, that I have good teeth. Good, straight teeth. It means more to me than it should. I tell myself he says that to all his patients. Within reason.
Last week David pulled his pants down in the class and farted in another boy’s face. David farts all the time. He loves the smell and sound of his own farts as do the rest of the class, chortling away when he breaks wind for the tenth time in the hour. David is also a racist, making Chinese eyes or calling the Latin-Americans dirty monkeys. David is 13 years old. There’s not much of a positive spin you can put on that ergo the utter bollocks above.
The affair happened more than ten years ago. We worked together on a project with four other colleagues. She was married and had two small children. During the holidays, she texted me several times saying that she was thinking about me. The first two or three messages, I ignored. I erased them. I seriously thought she was a no-go. The fourth time, I wrote back: “You’re married.” I thought that would end it….
