From CMAT and the Carpenters’ fresh starts to the Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun and Nina Simone’s Feeling Good, starting again is a rich theme in pop. Here are some of the best examples
It’s hard to imagine anyone’s heart not being lifted a little by Right Back Where We Started From: the euphoric rush of new love rendered into three minutes of cod-northern soul (performed, unexpectedly, by various ex members of ELO, the Animals and 60s soft-poppers Honeybus). Avoid the 80s cover by Sinitta at all costs.
I wasn’t sure journalism was for me until I ended up in a bar with a group of lawless, funny co-workers who complained long and hard about the panther suspended above us in a cage
In the mid-90s, I was working as an admin assistant on the listings magazine of the London Evening Standard, and was about to be fired. OK, I wasn’t that good at the job, but I was also done with it. It was on my mind that I needed an actual job, one that you could describe to someone: “I’m an X.” At what point did you get to say: “I’m a journalist”? And was that even a real thing? A lawyer friend had told me: “I see mine as a profession and yours as more of a trade.” I ruminated on that a lot.
Anyway, some time between my latest misdemeanour and my inevitable disciplinary letter, someone from the main paper, let’s call him Pete Clark because that was his name (everyone else will go by initials, but Pete’s dead now, and he would want to be named, I think), asked if I wanted to go to a party. It was no special occasion, just the launch of a bar; this happened every night in the 90s, even Mondays. He was 43, but all old people look the same when you’re 23, so I felt as if the viscount owner of the paper had noticed me from the top of his gold mountain and invited me to a ball.
If you don’t fancy the last warm finger or two of beer in your can, save it to bake into these fluffy, flavourful rolls
I often don’t finish a large bottle or can of beer, leaving a bit in the bottom that barely seems worth saving. When I remember, I’ll pop it in the fridge and save it to add to a stew or batter, but today’s rolls are my new favourite way of using it up.
(4AD) The standout act in the sprechgesang wave, the four-piece’s newly expansive sound carries singer Florence Shaw’s distinctive tales of mundane lives spiralling out of control
Dry Cleaning’s third album features a lot of strikingly odd lyrics. Take your pick from “alien offshoot mushroom, going the gym to get slim”; “my dream house is a negative space of rock”; or, indeed, “when I was a child I wanted to be a horse, eating onions, carrots, celery”. But it’s an ostensibly more straightforward line, from Cruise Ship Designer, that seems destined to attract the most attention. “I make sure there are hidden messages in my work,” says vocalist Florence Shaw as the track draws to a conclusion, the muscular guitar riff that’s driven it along devolving into a janky, trebly scrabble.
Initially, the lyric appears to characterise what Dry Cleaning do, and Shaw in particular. From the moment they first appeared with the 2018 EP Sweet Princess, the south London quartet have attracted adjectives such as “surreal”, “enigmatic” and “inscrutable”. Most of the British bands who emerged around the same time bearing a roughly equivalent blend of post-punk guitars and spoken-word vocals sounded angry or sarcastic or straightforwardly comedic. Dry Cleaning, on the other hand, seemed mysterious. Shaw’s lyrics were collages of overheard remarks, recycled YouTube comments, lines from adverts and non sequiturs, delivered in a voice that was too icy to sound whimsical. It’s variously been characterised as “anhedonic” and “achromatic”, but might more straightforwardly be described as sounding politely bored. She occasionally shifts from speaking into singing in an untutored voice that brings to mind Stuart Moxham of Young Marble Giants’ line about their understated vocalist Alison Statton sounding “as if she was at the bus stop or something”. It was all intriguingly confusing: here were songs that could indeed contain hidden messages, that seemed like puzzles to be unpicked.
As young people take on a messy dating landscape, they’ve created their own lexicon to match. Here’s like what phrases ‘bird theory’ and ‘monkey branching’ mean
This year marked a decade since the term “ghosting” hit the mainstream. At the time, the idea that someone could abruptly cease communication with a lover without explanation seemed like the peak of indignity. How naive we were. In the 10 years since, finding a partner has only become more confounding – an oftentimes fruitless exercise in humiliation that is increasingly pigeonholed by social media jargon.
Gen Z, a cohort who came of age during a loneliness epidemic, a masculinity crisis, and a coordinated attack on the rights of women and the LGBTQ+ community, faces a far messier landscape than their millennial predecessors could ever imagine. And so their dating glossary has grown longer and more deranged, with phrases like “Shrekking” and “monkey branching” testing the limits of your sanity.
Red flags – Behavioral quirks indicating a potential partner is bad news. Examples include calling their exes crazy, subpar tipping habits, a love of Woody Allen films, a burgeoning DJ career …
Green flags – These quirks validate your decision to pursue a mate. Examples include checking in to make sure you got home safe after a date, low screen time, owning a bed frame …
Beige flags – These usually describe niche, mostly benign quirks. Examples include being an enthusiastic birdwatcher, still carrying around a pen in their purse, paying rent in cash …
Swap chicken for beans and avoid cheeze … From a MasterChef finalist to a maker of ready meals, high-profile vegans give their favourite recipes and tips
This new year, you may be embarking on Veganuary, or have resolved to eat less meat and dairy in 2026. What are some of the simplest switches to make and most nutritious dishes to try with minimum fuss? Vegans share their tips on how to eat a balanced plant-based diet.
Her voice soundtracked the 60s and 70s, but the revolution silenced her. The legendary singer finally has her say, in this uneven memoir
If you ask any Iranian to name the most important female pop star in our country’s history, they’ll say Googoosh. Nobody else comes close. Over six decades of revolution, suppression and exile, Googoosh has gone from singer to cultural icon, a symbol of a country’s grief for its murdered, imprisoned, and muzzled artists, and a living link between pre-revolutionary Iran and the diaspora.
Googoosh was just three years old when she started singing in small halls and cabaret venues where her father worked. By her teens she was a film actor and a fashion icon. In the 60s and 70s, when my mother was a teenager, Googoosh was everywhere: on television, in films, magazines, on the radio. She kept recreating herself – her style, her moves, her hair. (My mother and many of her university classmates copied Googosh’s famous wispy haircut.) For a while, this bold, creative young woman shaped how westerners saw Iran, and how a generation of Iranian women understood modernity, femininity and public life.
We’d like to find out more about the impact of AI on jobs now. With this in mind, we want to hear from people who have been training AI to replace their current roles. What has the experience been like? How do you feel about your future at your company? Do you have concerns?
Hydrated skin and some trips to the gym – I’ll be embracing better beauty habits next year
I’m not given to making new year resolutions, but by coincidence I have recently made a number of pledges to adopt better beauty habits. I believe that even someone in this job, who already moisturises and UV protects religiously, can still find areas for improvement.
Once again, I have pledged to drink more (or indeed some) water. After decades of tea dependency, I never find myself thirsty in the way others describe, and so force myself to hydrate only for the sake of my skin (to which it makes a noticeable difference) and well, aliveness. To this end, I’ve bought one of those ridiculously enormous mugs influencers drain several times daily, and hope to make my way through perhaps one by bedtime.
Symptoms of the virus include diarrhea and vomiting and it infects about 684 million people globally every year
Norovirus is the term for a family of about 50 strains of virus that all share one miserable endpoint: copious time in the bathroom. Every year, an estimated 684 million people globally come down with it.
Norovirus is a kind of infectious gastroenteritis, “an inflammation of the bowel and the colon that can cause diarrhea” and vomiting, explains Dr Ambreen Allana, an infectious disease physician based in Texas.
After years of worrying that running or sneezing would leave me needing fresh underwear, a quick, minimally invasive procedure changed my life
Some of my earliest memories feature my mother’s leotard-encased body bouncing to Jane Fonda with abandon. A similar carefree fluidity prevailed a decade later, as her feet struck hard-packed sand on a shorebreak jog. Twelve-year-old me panted alongside, so desperate to be made in her image that I tolerated heated cheeks and shaking quads. Their trembling barely subsided during the one stop we made, for her to wade into the waves and pee.
But it got easier to keep up after she gave birth to my youngest brother, with her squatting in the bushes every 10 minutes or so. Soon, even that wasn’t enough to staunch the flow. She gave up and switched to hiking. “I should have done more Kegels,” she quipped.
As 007 makes his gaming return, you can climb a mountain in Cairn, play a scaredy-cat in Resident Evil, and play a criminal couple in GTA VI
Live your mountaineering fantasies and brave the elements in a wonderfully illustrated climbing game. You must carefully place climber Aava’s hands and feet to make your way up a forbidding mountain, camping on ledges and bandaging her fingers as you go. Like real climbing, it is challenging and somewhat brutal.
• PC, PlayStation 5; 29 January
It was the end of a fabulous decade, when spontaneous, unpredictable parties seemed not just possible but typical. A new millennium was dawning. What could possibly go wrong?
‘We wish you peace,” said Tony Blair as the clock struck 8pm. It was New Year’s Eve 1999, a Friday night, and I was on the banks of the Thames. Britain’s fresh-faced prime minister – only two years into the job – was giving a gimmick called The British Airways London Eye its first spin. The Eye was physically unremarkable and harrowingly slow, but it didn’t matter because it only had a five-year lease and definitely wouldn’t still be around a quarter of a century later, littering the skyline.
It was the end of the 90s and, as the Thatcher/Major doldrums whizzed out of view like the subplot of Sliding Doors, we maintained a Bridget Jones-like innocence and entrusted the future to guys like Blair, Peter Mandelson and Bill Clinton, who didn’t seem like (respectively) warmongers, abuse excusers or sex pests.
Staying up to date on wellness trends can be tough. What if you get sat next to an energy healer at a dinner party? What are you going to talk about? Raw milk is already sort of passé.
Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Here are the wellness trends everyone was discussing in 2025, and what you need to know about them.
What has your experience been of trying to future-proof your career? Have you retrained or moved jobs because your previous career path is at risk of an artificial intelligence takeover?
Sex is an appetite like any other and there is much you can do to make it a priority, from making sure you find the time for it to building your confidence and maintaining intimacy throughout the day
If you have sex, chances are, you’ll have a good day. But scheduling it makes it feel like a chore. And unlike any other chore or fitness enterprise, you conceive it more as self-indulgence than self-improvement, and as such, even if you’re already in a relationship, it’s hard to find that chin-out determination to get it done. Yet sex is an appetite like any other, a necessity like any other, a nourishment like any other. If you let it go dormant the effect on your relationship might be as if one or both of you are on a permanent diet – and also lonely. That might be fine for both of you, but for many of us, sex is a thing worth prioritising.
At its core, before you introduce any other domestic obstacles, it’s a two-person job, so you have to be attuned to one another; you can’t just decide unilaterally. To take this in ascending order of hurdles; if you’re a childless couple, the main block is going to be each other – not being in the same mood at the same time, not being in the house at the same time. This is true for your entire relationship, not just sex; I once interviewed a fertility doctor, who described working with a couple, trying to find an appointment time for when one was ovulating and both were in the country. They scrolled through several weeks before they managed it. “I felt as if I was beginning to get to the bottom of why they couldn’t conceive,” she said.
PC, Xbox, PlayStation 5; Embark Studios The breakout hit, which has players coming together (or turning on each other) to battle intimidating robots in an apocalyptic future, is worth the hype
Arc Raiders is an extraction shooter from Embark Studios – so, a game where you deploy into a map full of other players and do as much shooting and looting as you can before making an escape. This is my first real go at the genre, and it’s excellent. It has smooth, only occasionally cumbersome combat, sound design that scratches the brain just right and robotic enemies that genuinely terrify. And it satisfies my constant need to sift through my inventory and rifle through every drawer.
But I have to keep my head on a swivel: Arc Raider’s player v player element means I can get jumped for my precious cargo by a malicious rival at any moment. And also, the knowledge that this game was made with the help of generative AI voice acting makes me slightly ashamed of how much I enjoy it. I play every game sheepishly looking over my shoulder (and my character’s) in case someone in-game takes my sought-after blueprint, or someone in real life kicks down my door to call me a hypocrite.
Young men swapping Nike Tech fleeces for quarter-zips are all over TikTok, as well as staging IRL meetups worldwide. What’s behind the growing movement centring a once unremarkable garment?
As I’m wearing a quarter-zip jumper and sipping on an iced matcha, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s my last day of term before the school holidays. The giveaway is it’s a Saturday in London’s Soho, and I’m surrounded by 20 or so young men between the ages of 13 and 21 who are all here for London’s first ever “quarter-zip meetup”.
Organised, rather bizarrely, by sibling rappers OKay the Duo, the meetup is the latest manifestation of a growing tongue-in-cheek trend for quarter-zips and matcha that has taken over TikTok globally. Previous meetups have taken place in Houston and Rotterdam.
There was no shortage of fun and video games in the Diamond household in the last 12 months. Which ones did we play so much our thumbs hurt? And which one saved my soul? Let the ceremony begin … • The 20 best video games of 2025
So, how was 2025 for your household? Was it really all as good as you pretended it was on Facebook? Full of A-grades for the kids and riotous themed fancy dress birthday parties for the grownups? Or was it a sea of disappointment with only occasional fun flotsam? And was any of it actually real, or are we all now seven-fingered AI slop beings with Sydney Sweeney’s teeth?
I have gathered my thoughts (and the Diamond household) together, whether they wanted to or not, to reflect on the most important thing in any given year: which video games we enjoyed the most. Without further ado:
PS5, Xbox, Switch, PC Have you ever wanted to romance your record player? Date Everything! offers players the chance to develop relationships with everyday objects around your house, in a fully voiced sandbox romp featuring over 100 anthropomorphised characters. Wonderfully meta; you can put the moves on the textbox, or even “Michael Transaction” (microtransaction – get it?) himself. Meghan Ellis
We’d like to hear from independent retailers about how changes to online searches has affected them. We’d also like to find out from customers about how easy it is to track down independent retailers
We’d like to find out more about how your business has been affected by changes to online searches amid the rise of AI.
Independent businesses have traditionally relied on online advertising for increased visibility and sales, even if they are based on the high street. However, with the introduction of AI mode and AI Overview summaries on Google, and the proliferation of LLMs such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini, people are altering their search habits, which may affect the online visibility of small businesses.
Dying is a process and in a person’s final hours and days, Nickie and her Threshold Choir are there to accompany people on their way and bring comfort. Through specially composed songs, akin to lullabies, the choir cultivates an environment of love and safety around those on their deathbed. For the volunteer choir members, it is also an opportunity to channel their own experiences of grief and together open up conversations about death
With thanks to onscreen contributor, Lindsey, who died since the making of this film
Connexion
