'As a single mum, there's no one around to engineer the pantomime of your children giving a damn about Mother's Day. I feel this is ample justification for a spot of self-gifting'
The thing about being a single mum is that when your children are little, there's no one around to engineer the pantomime of Mother's Day by buying a present or helping them make a card. I feel this is ample justification for a spot of self-gifting. I often choose hand cream, since most of the year is spent grabbing some generic supermarket moisturiser that lives next to the J-cloths and Fairy Liquid.
Jointly sharing the top of this year's list are Roger & Gallet Bois D'Orange (£6), for my handbag, and Aromatherapy Associates Renewing Rose (£23), for next to my bed. Both smell delicious, cosset dry skin and even out ruddiness. Also containing rose are Aerin's easy-peasy, good-on-every-woman Rose Balm Lipsticks (£25). Somewhere between balm and classic lipstick, they're rich in moisture, subtle in colour and the packaging is impressive.
It takes just five packets of seed to grow a season's worth of greens. Alys Fowler launches our summer salad challenge.
In pictures - how to sow salad seeds
I am quietly confident that everyone can grow great salads. There's a risk your radishes may go woody; the lettuce could taste bitter or, worse, a slug may dine first; but if you fail at pea shoots and rocket, I suggest someone takes your pulse. With a bit of space in pots or beds, and a few packets of seed lettuce, radish, rocket and peas, say for the price of a couple of bagged supermarket salads, you have seeds enough for the whole season. So ditch the bag of slime in the bottom of the fridge and try a summer of home-grown salads instead.
Anyone with a window can grow pea shoots. If you can lay claim to some outside space, you can make a success of rocket, too (if it bolts, don't worry: the flowers taste lovely). Once you have mastered these two, the world is your salad bowl, so to speak.
In August 2013, a helicopter crashed in the North Sea killing four oil rig workers. It was the fifth serious incident involving Super Pumas in as many years. Survivors talk about what happened
One day last August, Paul Sharp woke in his room on the Borgsten Dolphin oil rig. He had been on the night shift, then slept for five or six hours, so it was getting on for midday. He showered, dressed, then, after lunch in the canteen, packed his bags and took them up to heli admin to be weighed. Sharp has been a scaffolder on the rigs for nearly 23 years, working two-week blocks of 12-hour shifts, often in brutal weather: horizontal snow, screaming wind, icicles as tall as a room and waves that lapped at 75ft-high platforms. He commutes from East Hull, where he was born and now lives with his wife and daughter in a neat, low house facing a church and a main road.
The flight was running late, so Sharp went back downstairs to watch TV. When the call finally came, he returned to heli admin, a small room for a large and diverse bunch: the crew, plus 18 passengers, 17 men and one woman, working as safety officers, electricians, caterers, welders; old hands like Sharp, and those for whom the whole thing was still new, such as James Nugent, who had also just come off a night shift and was on only his second trip offshore. Nugent is a tall, well-built South African, weathered and emotionally open. After a career in the film industry and running a B&B, he became a rope access instructor, specialising in work at heights or in confined spaces. We talk in a restaurant perched on a point of land just outside Newquay in Cornwall, where he lives.
Shake up your bakes by introducing flavourings normally used in savoury dishes shunning the cinnamon can make for an invigoratingly radical take on classic biscuits and cakes
Some spices are at the heart of baking: cinnamon can transform the fortunes of even the saddest apple pie, while nutmeg turns plain custard into gold. Cloves are the taste of Christmas. My favourite is just a couple of cardamom pods, split and ground, to brighten banana bread. It's easy to slip into a spice rut with such a delicious basic repertoire, but we miss out when we steadfastly stick to just these spices.
When we rigidly categorise "sweet" and "savoury" spices, our baking suffers. Black pepper, coriander, chilli, caraway, celery seed, and even mustard or juniper berries all typically accessories to savoury dishes can be used in sweet baking with exciting results. It's tempting to play to the autumnal notes of a carrot cake with a predictable spoonful of cinnamon, but why not ring the changes with a dose of caraway seeds instead? Likewise, the heat of a ginger biscuit can be bolstered by a good grinding of pepper. Carefully balanced, these spices will give a familiar cake, bun or biscuit a new lease of life.
The quirky show Capilotractées at the Roundhouse's CircusFest brings back an old hair-raising artform with playful and sometimes painful results
On the scale of physical pain, there are certain things that inflict a disproportionate ouch: paper cuts, a prang to the funny bone, hair pulling. But if a tug on tangled tresses is bad enough, now imagine what it would feel like to suspend your whole bodyweight from your ponytail. That's not a torture technique, that's entertainment. The hair hang is an old circus act, currently being revived by two Finnish artists, Sanja Kosonen and Elice Abonce Muhonen, in their show Capilotractées, coming to London as part of the Roundhouse's CircusFest.
Kosonen and Muhonen are part of a wave of contemporary circus artists reviving old circus tricks with knowing modernity (another Finnish act, Agit-Cirk, do their own take on the cannonball-to-the-stomach strongman routine). The hair hang is thought to have originated in China and involves tying up the hair with a metal ring and then dangling from it, preferably performing a few other feats juggling, acrobatics, whatever you've got in your armoury while you're up there.
When Laura Bates set up her blog Everyday Sexism, she was told to relax: the battle for equality was pretty much won, wasn't it? Here, she looks at the extraordinary pressures on girls today
Everyone has a tipping point. The funny thing is that when mine came, in March 2012, it wasn't something dramatic. It was just another week of little pinpricks: the man who appeared as I sat outside a cafe, seized my hand and refused to let go; the guy who followed me off the bus and propositioned me all the way to my front door; the man who made a sexual gesture and shouted, "I'm looking for a wife" from his car as I walked home after a long day. I shouted back, "Keep looking!" but as I trudged home, I started for the first time really to think about how many of these little incidents I was putting up with from day to day.
I thought about the night a group of teenage boys had casually walked up behind me in the street before one of them grabbed me, hard, between the legs. I recalled the boss who'd sent me emails about his sexual fantasies and terminated my freelance contract with no explanation almost immediately after learning I had a boyfriend. I remembered the men who cornered me late one night in a Cambridge street, shouting obscenities, and left me cowering against the wall as they strolled away.
Kudos to Grant Shapps and co for managing to reveal so much about what they really think in so few words
I'm torn about the whole bingo poster thing. On the one hand, who can help but rejoice in the gifting unto a nation of such a deliciously succinct and effective piece of anti-propaganda from, by and about the government? "Cutting the bingo tax and beer duty," their post-budget poster proudly proclaimed. "To help hardworking people do more of the things they enjoy." Praise be to the Treasury department who, it is claimed, designed it, to the Gidiot who apparently signed off on it and to the Conservative party chairman who tweeted it. The latter's propensity for involvement in this kind of joyfully unmitigated balls-up (remember him justifying the bedroom tax on the grounds that two of his three children share a room?) must surely make the coining of a new verb "to Shapp things up" imminent.
Since the poster and its 11-word encapsulation of the Conservative mind was first revealed to the world, I've been lingering over it, tracing its elegant contours and marvelling at how they manage to do so much with so little. First, to spin with such abandon a penny off a pint and a cut in bingo industry tax rates that will do nothing to increase prize money or reduce entrance fees. And then to cleave the world neatly into Us and Them, and to position your party so clearly as an Us so uniformly, impenetrably overprivileged that all sense, all empathy, all imagination (and any other property that goes to make up an ability to conceive of a world in which those outside your charmed circle are not puppets but people) has withered and died.
Here's what the privacy geeks are worried about after a whirlwind week that the spies might get more out of these bills than Snowden or the people he tried to protect
This week was undoubtedly a turning point in the NSA debate. Edward Snowden said it himself on Monday, as some of the NSA's most ardent defenders, including the House Intelligence Committee and the White House, suddenly released similar proposals endorsing the end of the NSA's bulk collection of phone records as we know it.
Stopping the government from holding onto of all Americans' phone metadata would undoubtedly be a good thing for American privacy, but if you read between the legislative lines, the government might not be curtailing mass surveillance so much as permanently entrenching it in American law.
The Arab world should again embrace the principles behind this great intellectual awakening and its dream of a borderless nation
In the first months of 2014, in the midst of a crisis in Ukraine that recalls all but moribund European rivalries, much has rightfully been made of the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the European civil war that would come to be known as the first world war. But, while the great war understandably looms large in western memory, it features prominently in the cultural memory of the west Asianorth Africa region too.
Here, we continue to live with the consequences of foreign intervention in the wake of the great war, of new borders drawn that failed to recognise the economic, social and environmental interdependence of the Arab lands in the Levant. The current polemics between the west and Russia while Ukrainians and Syrians fight, suffer and die are darkly reminiscent of the colonial mindset of a century ago.
The unwillingness to charge appropriate amounts of council tax on the properties of the super-wealthy is inexplicable. Some London boroughs could multiply their top rate by more than 100
An upbeat letter arrived recently from my local council, which is the London borough of Islington. Despite cuts in central government funding that mean the council has had to find £122m savings between 2011 to 2015, the letter was pleased to say that the council tax would be frozen for the fifth year running, thereby saving the average payer £375 to date. As I'm in band G, the second-highest, the tax due during the next year will again be £2,101.45 to be divided between Islington and the Greater London Authority, minus a discount of £100 given to "older persons".
To hand over £167 a month in exchange for schools, libraries, social services, road mending, street cleaning, refuse collection etc looks a tremendous bargain, though, of course, the expense of these things is mainly met from the business rate and general taxation via central government grants, which have also subsidised the freeze. The controlling instinct of Westminster never lets local government get above itself. And property ownership, being the a sacred fact and leading aspiration of British life, mustn't have too noticeable a cost other than interest on the money borrowed to pay for it.
Brent council's new initiative is a worthy attempt to help parents forced into unsocial working hours, but is symptomatic of our inability to value family over economic activity
'Brent council is set to offer 24-hour childcare places." That sentence has all the makings of a Twitterstorm. You can imagine it causing controversy in an era before Twitter; that tinderbox crackle where, before you even know what you think, you know you're about to get into a really big fight.
On closer inspection, 24-hour childcare isn't the baby factory it sounds like; these are not nursery places, strip-lit municipal halls full of travel cots, where you drop off your bug-eyed, exhausted young at 3am so you can pull a cleaning shift that starts at 5am. These are childminder places, inexpensive (£5.33 an hour) and in a home environment. The idea didn't start in a thinktank full of 28-year-olds telling each other through glass partitions that Alzheimer's can be really easy to manage, so long as the carers have a group texting app. It started with Muhammed Butt, the Labour leader of Brent council. "My wife has been a childminder since before I was a councillor. People come to her and tell her what they need. She's been feeding that back. Parents are now working two or three part-time jobs, not full-time jobs. And a lot of these jobs are in anti-social hours. Where do they leave their children? They need somewhere safe and reliable. Mondays to Fridays, 8 until 6, that's what they'll get from a nursery, and it isn't enough."
Ed Miliband's 'cost-of-living crisis' is just a symptom of a market system not delivering the prosperity its proponents promise. We need mutual respect between bosses and workers
Poor Ed Miliband. He is neither the problem nor the solution. Instead, he's the inevitable product of a Labour party that doesn't know what it is or what it wants. That's the problem. The Labour party doesn't know what it's for any more, and it has ended up with a leader who doesn't know, either.
It's not a socialist party any longer. It is not dedicated, as it once was, to achieving workers' ownership of the means of production. Yet the reinvention Blair provided, in 1997, has been rejected, by voters and members. Miliband doesn't have an alternative, and when he stood as party leader, he didn't offer one. What is the Labour party now dedicated to, or what should it be dedicated to? Such a question tends to elicit responses such as "social justice" or "equality of opportunity". These may be pleasing concepts. But they are goals, rather than definitions. For me, it's quite simple. The Labour party can reinvent socialism pretty easily. It should stand for the idea the fact that workers are the means of production, and should therefore be treated with respect. That's true to the party's traditions, and also happens to strike at the heart of many of this country's difficulties.
Children's minister Edward Timpson was mocked as an out-of-touch toff when he became an MP. But his parents fostered nearly 90 children when he was growing up ideal training for his current role, he says
One night in the House of Commons, trying to stay awake for a vote, Edward Timpson picked up Harold Macmillan's diaries in the library. "He was complaining about what an imposition it was to have to go back to his constituency once a month, and harking back to the halcyon days when it was an annual visit. You turned up on the train and there was a brass band on the platform and you waved out of the window, made a speech and disappeared back to London."
Politics in 2014 could not be more different. Timpson, like most MPs, lives in his constituency, Crewe and Nantwich. The 40-year-old Conservative children's minister is a weekend dad, staying in London during the week, and doesn't like it. "I miss those impromptu, intimate moments that just being together brings. I voted for more family-friendly hours and I think we could go a lot further."
Piece imagining an encounter between a buttoned-up man and a flirtatious flower scoops £5,000 prize, with Maggie Sawkins picking up Ted Hughes award for innovation in poetry
A poem that imagines an erotic encounter between a buttoned-up man and a seductive flower has won the National Poetry Competition, with the poet Linda France plucking the £5,000 award for Bernard and Cerinthe.
Hailed by the judge Jane Yeh as a "strange narrative" that is "truly imaginative and musical as much a pleasure to read on the page as it is on the tongue", the poem describes Bernard's "shock to find himself, sheltering / from the storm in a greenhouse, // seduced by a leaf blushing blue / at the tips, begging to be stroked".
'Who would play me in a film of my life? Tony Blair'
Rory Bremner, 53, was raised in Edinburgh and studied at King's College London. An impersonator and comedian, by the late 80s he had his own TV show, Now, Something Else, and contributed to Spitting Image. In the early 90s, he made the Bafta-winning series Rory Bremner Who Else? and went on to host Bremner, Bird And Fortune. He is making his West End acting debut in Relative Values at the Harold Pinter theatre until 21 June.
Manager says Manchester City win will open up significant gap
David Silva makes squad, Sergio Agüero out with leg injury
UNHCR ambassador pays tribute to victims of 1995 Srebrenica massacre and meets women raped during war in Bosnia
Angelina Jolie has paid tribute to the victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre after urging the international community to stop the use of sexual violence as a war weapon.
Jolie was accompanied by the British foreign secretary, William Hague, while on a trip to Bosnia.
Rodgers says sacking by Reading in 2009 was pivotal moment
Became more clinical manager while at Swansea City
Five aircraft have spotted 'multiple objects of various colours' after the air and sea search was moved 1,100 km north on Friday
Stockport nurse held on suspicion of tampering with medical records has been charged in connection with poisoning deaths
A nurse has been charged with three counts of murder in connection with poisoning deaths at a hospital, Greater Manchester police said.
Victorino Chua, 48, was held last year on suspicion of tampering with medical records at Stepping Hill in Stockport.
Ceremonies take place in England and Wales as people take advantage of new law permitting same-sex marriages
David Cameron has hailed the first same-sex marriages in England and Wales as sending a "powerful message" about equality in Britain.
Jordan Belfort, who was jailed for 22 months for securities fraud, admits that the Oscar-nominated film based on his memoir had no need to exaggerate the sex and drugs
Original cast of science fiction classic reunite in studio for live performance as part of Radio 4's Character Invasion season
The original cast of the surreal science fiction comedy classic The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy are returning to the theatre where they created the show more than 30 years ago for a one-off performance.
Simon Jones, who played Arthur Dent in both the radio and TV versions of the space travel adventure, even slipped on the dressing gown worn by his character during his adventures.
Edward Timpson says he misses children during week and believes fixed holiday dates for MPs would be beneficial
The children's minister, Edward Timpson, has said he misses his children during the week and that parliament should "go a lot further" to make its hours more family-friendly, primarily by setting fixed holiday dates so that MPs can guarantee to their children when they will be around the family home.
The MP for Crewe and Nantwich spends Fridays and weekends in his Cheshire constituency, living alone in London during the week. "I obviously don't see the children, which I wish was different," he told the Guardian. "The fact is, children thrive on routine and stability and one thing that would make a massive difference is to have regular recess dates so we can plan ahead in the knowledge that arrangements won't fall apart, causing huge disappointment."
Culture secretary will come under renewed scrutiny after the Telegraph says she will repay some money and apologise
Culture secretary Maria Miller made a profit of more than £1 million on a property at the centre of an investigation into her use of taxpayer-funded expenses, it is reported.
The Commons standards committee is considering the cabinet minister's claims under the second home allowance in relation to the property in Wimbledon, south-west London.