A good mattress improves your sleep, say mattress makers – and they would, wouldn’t they? But they’re right. The older I get, the more I know it. When I was 20, I could sleep anywhere: a friend’s floor, a filthy sofa – even a phone box one night. These days I won’t get a single…
The average mattress is just six years old when it gets chucked out, according to the National Bed Federation. That’s an awful lot of foam and springs going to landfill. Should you stick with an uncomfortable bed for the sake of the planet, or choose more wisely next time you go mattress shopping? The Guardian’s…
If you’re a regular at specialist coffee shops in the UK – the kind where baristas carefully weigh out your grounds on tiny hypersensitive scales and practically frogmarch you from the premises if you order syrup – you may have noticed that americanos have fallen out of favour. In these fancier coffee spots, everyone’s dependable,…
An Italian doctor has been placed under investigation after giving his cat a Cat scan at a hospital in Aosta before performing a life-saving operation on the feline. Gianluca Fanelli took the animal, called Athena, to Umberto Parini hospital in the northern Italian region, where he is a manager of the radiology unit, after she…
In the year since I moved into my flat, I’ve received a few notes under the door. Some were warm welcomes – most notably, a Swiftie-style friendship bracelet from my downstairs neighbour, who’d heard me (“very faintly!”) listening to the new album. Others were Christmas cards, or courtesy notes warning of forthcoming maintenance or outages….
The final month of summer heralds peak season for grapes, new varieties of stone fruit and a glut of salad leaves in every shade of green. Figs are in their prime and about 99c each, says Brendan North, owner of Paradise Farm Markets in Tamworth, New South Wales. “You usually pay $1 to $1.50 for…