His bronzed torso is ridiculously ripped – and will, once again, cause a shift in the acceptable minimum standards for the male physique

So much for the dad bod. David Beckham, who turns 50 this year, has released pictures of himself modelling his new bodywear collection for Hugo Boss. Bodywear, if you’re unfamiliar with the term, appears to mean underwear. In the corresponding ad clip, Beckham returns home for the day in his vintage Aston Martin, Bond-style, but he can’t wait to rip off his sharp suit and slouch around in a leather armchair in nothing but his tighty-whities. He has set the bar very high for middle-aged dads who like to relax by sitting around drinking in their pants, Homer Simpson-style. If you feel at all self-conscious about your soft, squishy, beer-induced centre, Beckham’s new line of smalls will not help.

In recent years, the dad bod seemed to be on the verge of widespread public acceptance, even cautious celebration, and a lot of us were congratulating ourselves on our timing: it was not uncommon for men of a certain age to emerge from the first pandemic lockdown looking like a heap of overproved sourdough. We felt ourselves, however unintentionally, to be in the dad bod vanguard – more oven-ready than beach-ready; soft, saggy and proud.

Timothée Chalamet, Pharrell Williams and Jacob Elordi have no qualms about using one. But can our writer carry it off?

The woman at the veg shop is admiring my new ivory padded shoulder bag. Perhaps admiring is the wrong word.

“So, is this, like, a thing now?” she says.

Bag up your breadcrumbs and gather your gravy. Here’s how to use your kitchen’s most underrated asset to its greatest potential

Almost all of us have a freezer of some size, and yet so few of us maximise its potential. If you’re like me, it’s sat there filled with nothing more than a bag of peas, a half full sack of oven chips, a tray of ice cubes and some pre-pandemic fish fingers. But it’s always on, always consuming energy.

It doesn’t have to be like this – your freezer is an amazing kitchen tool; the long-stay car park of your fridge. Because the freezer has been around for so long, we forget how versatile it can be. “If the freezer had never been developed and it came out like the air fryer did, people would be like, ‘God, this is amazing!’” says Suzanne Mulholland, the bestselling author and batch-cooking expert better known as The Batch Lady.