‘What should I do?” Whether openly stated or implicit, this is the question a new client usually raises in their first therapy session. People come to see me for many reasons: relationship problems, addiction and mental health difficulties, such as anxiety. Increasingly, I have found that beneath all of these disparate problems lies a common…
Antonia Murphy has always loved water. It can be warm or icy, wild or maintained in a municipal facility. Although “not a great swimmer”, she is a confident one. So when she moved to Edinburgh two years ago, she promptly checked out the public leisure centre. She was captivated by the alluring, deep blue of…
“If you’d asked me a couple of months ago, my answer might have been different,” says Dr Rosalind Simpson, a medical dermatologist at the University of Nottingham. Historically, she says, daily washing was seen as problematic. It was thought that it might alter the skin’s microbiome, stripping away natural protective oils and beneficial bacteria. People also…
When you think of the Bloomsbury Group – the writers, artists and intellectuals who congregated at 46 Gordon Square in London in the early 20th century – you might think of Virginia Woolf; the Omega Workshops, which brought fine art to modernist designs; Charleston, a farmhouse in Sussex, frequented by core members who painted every…
How is the ideal heterosexual girlfriend supposed to behave? This played on my mind after I watched Companion, a film about a loutish millennial man named Josh with a robot girlfriend named Iris. Iris was designed to be the perfect girlfriend, and so she regards Josh with total devotion and admiration, and prioritises their relationship…
