Lifestyle

The weather is warming up, the outdoors is beckoning and the nights are getting lighter. It all sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? It most respects it is but for all the feel-good factor that the onset of summer brings, it comes with its own cautionary note for home owners: crime rates go up in the summer. From a homeowner’s point of view, the key concern is not so much the overall crime rate as the number of...

Brits are missing out on the big moments in life because they're too busy trying to capture them on their mobile phones. New research has revealed that four in ten say they have not truly experienced significant moments such as a child's first steps or graduation because they were too busy taking pictures for social media. Indeed, the study found one young mum missed her child’s first words because she was messing around with her phone and a student missed a crucial...

By Amy Sharpe When the sun finally showed its face last month after an endless winter, I no longer wanted my straggly long hair to be dragging me down. In the same way that some people want to trim their love handles at the first sign of sun, for me it was the locks that needed trimming. I wanted a light and fresh do – a ‘spring clean’ for my head. So I popped into The Chapel in Islington, London...

Team GB have unveiled the formal wear for the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. The suits are modelled by super heavyweight boxer Joe Joyce and gymnast Nile Wilson to highlight the diversity of sizes, with 30-year-old Joe weighing in at 17 stone and a huge 6ft 5ins tall compared to 20-year-old Nile, who is just 5ft 4in and nine-and-a-half stone. Accrington-based Simon Jersey designed the suits for 350 athletes – Team GB’s largest ever away team – in a process which...

Home renovations are expensive.  If you speak to any experienced builder, the general rule of thumb is to take your budget and double it. Trust me, I've done a few of them and my estimates have always been wildly optimistic. Roof off, floors dug up, rewired, re-plumbed, re-plastered, etc, etc...  isn't where the money is spent.  Apart from the mega bucks spent on the finish, the cash drain usually happens in the areas you can't see; insulation, groundworks, underpinning, replacing...

Brand loyalty is at an all-time high, according to a new study. Some 70 per cent of Brits rarely deviate from their favourite brands of food and drink, and folk tend to stick to the same type of tea or coffee, watch the same TV programmes and eat from the same takeaway all the time. When it comes to health and beauty, most Brits wear the same deodorant day in and day out, buy the same skin care products, slap on their...

Robert Watkins works as part of Macmillan Cancer Support’s Financial Guidance Service, a specialist team that offers financial support to people affected by cancer. When you receive a cancer diagnosis, money should be the last thing on your mind. But costs like higher household bills or travelling to hospital appointments combined with the fact that many people need to give up work means that those diagnosed with cancer are on average an additional £570 worse off a month. Money worries...

So, you’re jetting off into the sun to sit on the beach as the sea laps at your feet whilst drinking fruity cocktails. Well, kind of, because this isn’t a holiday – you’re actually packing up all your belongings and moving your whole life to start a fresh in a new country. Packing for a holiday can be difficult enough, but it is nothing compared to packing for a move. You have a house full of belongings, and you are changing...

Two mystic African fertility statues were on show in Piccadilly Circus after arriving from Ripley’s Believe It or Not! in the US. The statues were hand-carved by the Baule tribe, who live in Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) in West Africa, and date back to the 1930s. Ripley’s acquired the figures in 1993 and put them in the lobby of the company headquarters in Orlando. Within months, 13 women, including some staff and office visitors, were pregnant. To celebrate the arrival, loved-up couple...