Lifestyle

By James Healy-Pratt The Germanwings Airbus disaster in the Swiss Alps is a tragedy no family should have to go through. The immediate cause of the disaster seems to be intentional pilot conduct but on a wider level, it highlights a failure of joined-up thinking about air safety. The cold hard truth is that the disaster was preventable. Commercial airliners were used as human-guided missiles in the September 11 2001 attacks in the US. Decades earlier, airline hijackings were also...

I just signed up for my second half marathon of the year. Am I insane? Quite possibly. Let me talk you a little bit through my first half marathon - of this year and of my life - which I completed in the relatively decent time of 2.07.56 in February. Enjoy this journey through my thoughts and feelings as I ran (and did not stop running) for over two hours. Start Line to Mile 3 So there’s a lot of...

By Jasmine Stephens, Family Editor Memories of childhood holidays are some of those that stay with you for life. When I was a kid, our summer days were spent eating chips in cones on the shingle beaches of Leysdown and during the evenings we would career around the caravan park clubhouse, chasing the lights of the disco ball until we were so tired we were lulled to sleep on the bench seats by the Birdie Song. In later years, my parents...

Snoop Dogg smoked weed at the White House Snoop Dogg - are we calling him that again? Wasn’t he Snoop Lion for a time? Why was that? We’ll never know. I mean, a simple Google would tell us, but let’s not get bogged down in the specifics. Anyway, Snoop Dogg was on a talk show in America recently and he mentioned that the weirdest place he’s ever been high is the White House. As in, the President’s actual abode. Here,...

By Jack Peat, TLE Editor There is a stigma around men visiting spas which, in my time, I have been as much a purveyor of as a victim. In laddish circles even the use of hair conditioner can seem a bit iffy, so throw body clay and cucumbers into the mix and your man credentials become steadily eroded. But there's evidence to suggest that the use of beauty products and regimes is becoming an accepted part of 21st century manhood. Research...

By Nathan Lee, TLE Correspondent  A British baby boy has become the first child in Europe to be born free from a list of devastating genetic disorders thanks to groundbreaking IVF treatment. Five-month-old Lucas Neagu had a high chance of inheriting a muscle weakening disease which runs in his family. But his parents underwent pioneering embryo screening treatment meaning he will never suffer from the condition and 200 other genetic disorders. Mum Carmen Neagu, 27, saw her father suffer with Charcot-Marie-Tooth(CMT) disease and was worried Lucas would inherit...

By Jasmine Stephens, Family Editor Let's face it, we've all done it; encouraged the kids to embrace some screentime to get half an hour's peace, but a new survey has discovered that 70% of parents think that their children spend too much time on smartphones and tablets while on holiday. The survey of 2000 people by floridatix.com found that staying inside to play on their gadgets had also meant that 50% of children had missed out on enjoying a sunny day,...

By Jasmine Stephens, Family Editor Like most mums I generally approach a family holiday with a mixture of excitement, endless checklists and yes, perhaps, sometimes a bit of apprehension as well. I was more than embarrassed, therefore, to be worried about traffic jams and forgetting the sun cream when I heard about the turmoil of sadness, fears and hopes that recently-widowed Nikki Scott faced when she decided to take her children on a holiday alone for the first time since...

By Alice Weightman, Founder and Managing Director of Hanson Search and The Work Crowd More and more of us are now deciding to leave the security of a permanent job behind, opting instead for the freedom of freelancing, self-employment or contract work. However, these feelings of independence can suddenly feel very restrictive when it comes to planning a family. This needn’t be the case: freelancing and family really can go hand in hand. Working on a project basis can help...