By Amy Sharpe In April I completed a feat I never believed I would: I ran a marathon. Yep, I tackled the 26.2 mile beast in Manchester and lived to tell the tale (though my chafing scars mean my armpits will never look the same again). Now I will spare you the clichés about ‘The Wall’/ best experience of life/atmosphere from crowds etc. And I’m not going to whinge on about how you can be as ‘fit and fulfilled’ as...

Like most people I went to a bog standard Comprehensive school; the teachers did their best with the range of children from a variety of backgrounds, and limited budgets. So news that private schools will receive more than £500m in tax rebates over the next five years, will anger many people who couldn’t afford to attend, or send their children, to fee paying schools. A tiny percentage of the UK are able to access these elite schools and the social...

  As it emerged that Prime Minister Theresa May was keeping Jeremy Hunt as Health Secretary in her post-election cabinet reshuffle his name was unfortunately mispronounced TWICE in one day by TV reporters. The unpopular Health Secretary who has presided over cuts and closures in around 40% of mental health trusts was subjected to the same "Freudian slip" twice, as on live TV the letter ‘C’ was added to his surname, once on the BBC:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDbSfa7jI8A   and again live on...

Hubert O'Hearn with Bianca da Silva We were somewhere around Belfast on the edge of the Mourne Mountains when the rains began to take hold. I remember saying something like "We'll still be on time ; absolutely you should drive..." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge, bowler-hatted DUP drummers, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an...

“Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is 100%” said R D Laing. He also said “Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be a breakthrough.” Alice Birch seems to explore these not quite perfect opposite attitudes to mental ill health in her new play Anatomy of a Suicide. During two hours of relentless dialogue and repetitions of life cycles we see three generations of women lurch back and forth between a kind of sanity...

Yesterday a relaxed looking Jeremy Corbyn went on the Andrew Marr show to tell the nation he is ready to take on the Tories, if another election is called, and to win. He told Andrew Marr it is ‘quite possible’ that there will be another vote either this year or in 2018. Corbyn said he is also going to create his own Queen's Speech, based on the Labour manifesto, to be considered by parliament. As the Conservative Party appear to...

It’s official, a new study has declared today, life really was "better in the old days". If only it had been released a week earlier the Tories might have fared better in the General Election, tugging at our nostalgic longing for a time gone by. As it was people voted for progress, although it's a vote too late in some instances. For a start, much of the Brexit vote was down to people's belief that things were better in the...

By Michael McNulty Mark Cousins’ Stockholm My Love is an exercise in patience. A frustratingly dull film with the pretentions of a film school graduate, who has gorged on likes of filmmakers such as Terrence Malick, then picked up a camera and disappeared down a rabbit hole of contemplation, exploring themes of urbanism, love, loss and the human spirit. Alva (Neneh Cheery), an architect, has been struggling to come to terms with accidently hitting and killing an elderly man with...

The vote to leave the EU has led to a "crash" in the number of European nurses registering to work in the UK. According to figures obtained by the Health Service Journal the NHS could be about to face its worst nursing workforce crisis for 20 years. Data shows the number of EU nurses registering with the NMC to work in the UK peaked at 1,304 in July 2016, a month after the referendum. However it has since dropped significantly, with...