• Romance is more than a feeling - it’s a matter of health

    Dim the lights, uncork the wine and light the candles – Valentine’s Day is here! For all you love fools out there, the flowers will have been ordered days ago while your surprise Eurostar ticket to Paris is already safely tucked under your pillow. The strange intoxicating power of love can change our perspective on…

  • Why it’s time to forget about online dementia tests

    You probably remember a time when nobody dared talk about dementia. Comedians would joke about ‘mad granddad’ but no-one seriously wanted to contemplate a life without memory. Thankfully, Alzheimer’s disease charities have started to wake us up to the reality of the 850,000 people who live with dementia in the UK.. Stigmatisation is waning but…

  • Exercise machine calorie counters: they exaggerate the burn

    January is the month of the jogger. Every evening for the past three weeks, regular-looking folk have been bouncing their bits up and down our streets, running in the pursuit of getting a bit fitter. No doubt prompted by a New Year’s resolution or ill-considered pledge to run this year’s half-marathon, such noble joggers oftentimes…

  • What not to tell a child: “Clear your plate or there’s no dessert!”

    Tonight’s meal will be steak with all the trimmings and I can’t wait. Nothing – bar a heard of wildebeest running through the dining room – will stop me from finishing it. For I know it will be delicious and that the meat was expensive. My mother has taught me well: ‘waste not, want not.’…

  • The health benefits of generosity - it really is better to give than receive

    Christmas is a time for giving. This week, we will give more to charity than at any other time of the year. For, all the fundraising carol singers, shopping-bag-packing Brownies, and charity tin-shakers make it hard for even the stingiest of scrooges to keep their wallets buckled shut. But a couple of weeks ago, I…

  • ‘Leisure sickness’ - why you get ill when you stop work (and how not to)

    It must be Murphy’s Law. You soldier through the cold, dark months of winter, working your fingers into stumps trying to get everything finished before the holidays and then… the day after you down tools, you’re struck down with a cold. Of all the luck – another Christmas Day wrapped up in bed with a…

  • How to heal paralysis: modern day miracles

    Without doubt, Geoffrey Raisman is in line for a Nobel Prize. The little-known British professor has been the brains behind a breakthrough that ‘cured’ a paraplegic man. Bulgarian Darek Fidyka was left paralysed after a knife attack four years ago; images of him now standing upright shot across the globe a few weeks ago. For…

  • It’s ‘mo’ joke – moustache month is here!

    Moustaches are a bit like flares, perms and tie-dye t-shirts – they only come into fashion once a generation. Now I don’t care what the fashionistas tell me, or how many glossy fashion mags feature models sporting ‘hipster moustaches’ – moustaches are anything but hip. Surely the last person who looked cool with a tash…

  • Holy Frijoles! Swearing is a natural pain-killer

    Stubbing your toe has to rank as one of the most painful experiences ever. Beaten only, perhaps, by a bonnet lid falling on your head or trying to pass a kidney stone. Such agonies momentarily wrack the senses, making us see red while focusing our entire being on our toe – or head - or…