"Thinking of a world beyond ourselves." Getty |
The two keys to happiness |
Celebrities "on the wane" love to give advice about how to be happy, says Craig Brown in the Daily Mail. In her 2020 book Happiness Becomes You, Tina Turner wrote: "Thank you for being you, exactly as you are." The former TV personality Noel Edmonds tells readers of Positively Happy to memorise the phrase: "I am a special person. I am allowed to be happy in what I do." And in Thrive, Huffington Post founder Ariana Huffington tells readers to "forgive yourself for any judgments that you are holding against yourself". But I have to say, in my experience "one of the surest paths to unhappiness is to read books that tell you how to be happy". |
Instead, psychologists might have the answer: a recent study of 1,700 men found that those who went fishing were "significantly happier than the rest of us", and less likely to suffer from depression and anxiety. Another trick is hard work. "Busy people are happy people," is what Gyles Brandreth's old headmaster told him, and those five words have "informed his entire life". David Hockney, 86, and Melvyn Bragg, 83, are two more great examples of keeping busy – and content – into old age. Can both approaches be true? Fishing involves "doing virtually nothing"; working is about "doing as much as you possibly can". But fishing and working are both ways of "thinking of a world beyond ourselves" – and beyond the reach of self-help gurus. |
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Watch for his bite: the commander-in-teeth. Tasos Katopodis/Getty |
Villain Commander, one of Joe Biden's dogs, who has bitten yet another Secret Service agent. The two-year-old German Shepherd has now nipped his master's bodyguards 11 times in total, which the president's press secretary blames on the stress of living at the White House. Major, an older Biden hound, was involved in so many "biting incidents" he had to be rehoused with family friends. |
Hero Tucker Carlson, at least for Russian state TV. The former Fox News host, who has long taken a Kremlin-friendly line on US aid to Ukraine, had a 20-minute excerpt of a recent interview with Texas's attorney general broadcast on Rossiya 24, Russia's leading news channel. Carlson dismissed the idea he had approved the move as "absurd". |
Villain Pret, which appears to be doing all it can to exacerbate the cost-of-living crisis. Over the past year, the restaurant's prices have shot up by five times more than the average industry increase. Its most popular item, the tuna and cucumber baguette, has risen by 42% to £4.25. The chicken caesar baguette has gone up even more, jumping 46% to £6.80. |
Villain Amateur cartographer and extreme pedant Eberhard Jurgalski, who got legendary climber Reinhold Messner stripped of two Guinness World Records. Messner's titles – for being the first person to climb the globe's 14 highest mountains, and for being the only one to do so without extra oxygen – were removed when Jurgalski successfully argued he had reached the wrong peak of Annapurna in Nepal: one that was a mere 8,083m, rather than the 8,091m peak 65 metres away. |
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THE PRIVATE ISLAND: The 270-acre Torsa Island, off the west coast of Scotland, features a three-bedroom farmhouse in a sheltered spot with panoramic views over the mouth of Loch Melfort. The 19th-century stone building has been thoroughly modernised, and now has a boot room and a conservatory. Nearby are several dilapidated farm buildings, and the island, home to sea eagles, roe deer and otters, has more than 2.5 miles of shoreline. Oban train station is an hour away by car and ferry. £1.5m. |
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The extraordinary cost of insuring Tom Cruise |
On the set of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011), the insurers made the mistake of telling Tom Cruise he couldn't do a big set-piece stunt on the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, says Alex Mayyasi in The Hustle. So the actor made the obvious choice: "he fired the insurance company and found another one". Once the new cover was in place, he got straight back to filming the scene, in which, attached to a rope, he jumps out of the world's tallest building and runs down its side. "He nailed it on the second try." |
Cruise isn't the first Hollywood star to need bespoke insurance. In 1919, the silent film actor Harold Lloyd lit the fuse of a fake bomb with a cigarette, but it started smoking so much that he put it to one side. "Then it blew up." He had been given a real bomb by mistake. Since then, film sets have been paying hefty premiums. Actors with a history of injuries or drug problems can become uninsurable – Robert Downey Jr was only allowed to play Iron Man because he accepted a measly $500k salary to offset the cost of insuring him. There are also odd stipulations about after-hours conduct: Russell Crowe joked that he wrestled with tigers in Gladiator but was forbidden from having a friendly kick-around with the crew. And while Tomb Raider's marketing touted Angelina Jolie performing risky stunts, the on-set insurance agents actually insisted she be "hand-held by safety men in green spandex suits". |
Brand when he was guest editing The New Statesman |
"How do you not see something that's right in front of you?" asks Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times. I've been wondering that myself since the Russell Brand story broke, because the comedian was right in front of me – "literally in my workplace", at The Guardian – and I didn't see it. Like so many on the left, I was convinced by his columns that he was on the correct side. "My side. The side that was against nasty politicians and the evil Daily Mail and so on." When he went on Newsnight in 2014, he was so "obviously idiotic" that I wrote a piece about it, but because he was on "my side", I still included this line at the end: "Brand is, I have no doubt, one of the good guys." |
Partisanship is a "helluva drug". But there does seem to be a special vein of nastiness on the left when it comes to women. Gerry Healy, leader of the Workers Revolutionary Party in the 1970s and 1980s, was accused of being a rapist yet "vehemently defended by supporters". In 2013, a 19-year-old accused Martin Smith, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, of rape. Again, the SWP "swept the allegations under the carpet". People say things have changed since the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Billy Bragg were cosying up to Brand. But they haven't, really. Rather than praising a comedian who joked about "choking women with blow jobs", far-left men today express their misogyny by "sneering at women for defending their rights" on trans issues. Labour MP Jess Phillips wasn't making it up when she said: "Left-wing men are the worst – the actual worst." |
Sorry, you'll have to change the shoes. Getty |
Menswear has been full of "anything-goes abandon" recently, says GQ, but "quite frankly, some of you have been allowed to dress yourselves unchecked for too long". With that in mind, here are some "new sartorial edicts". It's better to be overdressed than underdressed. If an outfit works, repeat it over and over again. "Never wear shorts to the movies or on a plane." Create a work uniform for yourself, so you can differentiate between on- and off-duty. Don't wear trainers with suits. All shoes look better with socks, but don't match your socks to your shoes. "Never wear flip-flops outside of the beach or pool." And finally, don't get too obsessive. "It's cool that your jeans are from Japan, but you don't have to tell everyone." Read the full list here. |
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"The spice with the Midas touch" |
In common usage, "vanilla" means plain, and "having no special or extra features", says Ligaya Mishan in The New York Times. But there's a disconnect between this "genial vanilla of the mind" and the "heady, almost unruly scent and flavour" of the real thing. Depending on where the beans are harvested, vanilla "may taste dark-sweet, of smoke and cherries; or earthy as chocolate and coffee; or buttery, or caramelly or plummy; or stung by the faintest numbing hint of anise". Back in the 18th century, the spice was associated not with blandness but lust: one German physician prescribed it as "the Viagra of his day"; the Marquis de Sade purportedly used it to spike his dinner party desserts. |
Vanilla beans themselves are surprisingly expensive – sometimes more so, "weight for weight", than silver. After a 2017 cyclone devastated Madagascar, where about 80% of natural vanilla is grown, prices topped $600 a kilo. That's why more than 99% of the world's vanillin, the bean's main flavour compound, is artificially synthesised from petrochemicals. Only in the past decade has consumer pressure prompted a resurgence of real vanilla, just as people now care more about the beans in their coffee and their chocolate. And rightly so. Vanilla is a "deceptively reticent" flavour – one that cedes the spotlight but "transfigures" other tastes. "It calms and contours, steadies and exalts." It is, truly, "the spice with the Midas touch". |
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"People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election." Otto von Bismarck |
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