The Guardian - Life & Style • Jan. 26, 2026, 5:13 p.m.

There’s lots of deep umami flavour in this crunchy, rubbly side or salad Brussels sprouts are for life, not just for Christmas. They’re still making a regular appearance in our house, from shredded and stir-fried with chilli and spice, to roasted and dressed, as in this salad.

And what a salad it is: with a caesar-esque dressing, it is crisp, salty and crunchy, and hits all the right notes. You can bulk it out, if you like, by topping it with a few soft, jammy boiled eggs cut into wedges or some shredded leftover chicken.

However, it is pretty perfect as it is, as a light lunch or side. Continue reading...

The Guardian - Life & Style • Jan. 26, 2026, 5:13 p.m.

Hunkering down in January; hiking boots for outdoor adventures; and cold-weather beauty essentials • Don’t get the Filter delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Congratulations, you’ve made it through more than 75% of January, Blue Monday and all.

Extra kudos if you got through it without booking a holiday amid the onslaught of sun-soaked adverts, although I confess I’m not tempted. Would I rather spend hours on a plane with 200 strangers who had prosecco for breakfast, or hibernate until spring?

I’ll take hibernation, thanks. Especially now that I’ve learned to do it properly.

The Guardian - Life & Style • Jan. 26, 2026, 5:13 p.m.

The distractions of daily life can make writing a book a frustrating task, so I sought boltholes offering creative support and solitude in inspiring landscapes The idea for my novel came in a rush: as I walked over the Thames on the Golden Jubilee Bridge in central London, the scene at the heart of it leapt out of the deep blue dusk and clung on to me until I committed to writing it into existence. A few months later, it became depressingly clear that the half-hour snatches of writing at the end of my working day just weren’t going to get me over the finish line.

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The Guardian - Life & Style • Jan. 26, 2026, 5:13 p.m.

While there may be benefits to the treatment, anti-ageing probably isn’t one of them – which is something better left to the professionals ‘Red light therapy, where LED lights are shone on your skin, has been around for a while,” says Afshin Mosahebi, a professor in plastic surgery at University College London. But what was once an expensive treatment you’d go to a professional to receive is now becoming widely available in the form of light-up masks you can wear at home.

“ Reasonable reports show that the treatment is good for wound-healing,” says Mosahebi. This is why it is recommended for inflammatory skin conditions such as acne, dermatitis and psoriasis, as it increases circulation, decreases inflammation, and improves cell regeneration.

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The Guardian - Life & Style • Jan. 26, 2026, 5:13 p.m.

Unlike journalling, sticking glossy pictures and ribbon scraps helps me explore how I’m feeling in in a language only I can decipher Read more summer essentials I had always associated scrapbooking with grandmas and bored children, so, imagine my surprise when – as a twentysomething with a Big Girl Job – I found myself enamoured of printing, cutting, and sticking random bits and bobs into a book. If, like me, you’ve racked up a disconcerting amount of screen time, you may have stumbled across a multitude of craft-inspired social media posts made primarily by young women.

Described as “junk journalling”, the hobby is distinguishable by an affinity with collecting and storing physical mementoes, such as tickets, receipts, packaging and Polaroids. Continue reading...

The Guardian - Life & Style • Jan. 26, 2026, 5:13 p.m.

Despite living on an island, David Warr avoided the water for five decades – until a swimming teacher made the link between his fear and a childhood trauma When David Warr was 11 he thought he was dying. At his school swimming lesson, he jumped in and swam – then realised with horror that his feet couldn’t feel the bottom.

He recalls his teacher, standing on the side of the pool, shouting at him to “just swim” and his own immobilising fear. “I thought, ‘I can’t.

I don’t know what to do.’ I started to panic hard. I thought, ‘She’s going to let me die.’” Warr, 61, has blocked out how he reached safety, but for five decades he refused to go out of his depth again.

The Guardian - Life & Style • Jan. 26, 2026, 5:13 p.m.

Holding multiple jobs without your employer’s knowledge has boomed in the age of hybrid working. Is it a canny response to job insecurity – or a fast track to getting fired?

Name: Polygamous working. Age: It’s really a post-pandemic phenomenon.

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The Guardian - Life & Style • Jan. 26, 2026, 5:13 p.m.

Academics draw on lived experience in their global peacebuilding work as they foster dialogue between opposing groups and look to give victims a voice “I’m less concerned with villains and heroes than I am with how the next 50 years can be more peaceful than the last,” says Richard English , professor of politics at Queen’s University Belfast. It’s a refreshing perspective in a world where peace often seems impossible, and the complexities of conflict are readily reduced to narratives of good versus evil.

Queen’s is a Russell Group university at the forefront of global peacebuilding and reconciliation research. It’s a research institution that influences academic thought, shapes policy, and transforms lives in conflict communities worldwide.

The Guardian - Life & Style • Jan. 26, 2026, 5:13 p.m.

After the failure of his police career, Jack came to live with us, caring for the whole family indiscriminately. When I was sickest, and felt unlovable, he reminded me I was loved Jack, the cocker spaniel, was sacked by the police.

His career as a detection dog was an utter failure – he was more interested in people than cannabis and made some embarrassing mistakes, including begging for treats from potential offenders rather than alerting officers about drugs. A colleague told me about a police dog that needed a home and so Jack arrived – via police van – at our house.

He was lithe, glossy black and animated. He ricocheted around the house, knocking over children and pot plants.

The Guardian - Life & Style • Jan. 26, 2026, 5:13 p.m.

Traditional bodybuilding advice has been to push workouts to the point of failure, and that soreness is an indicator of effectiveness. But recent studies show there’s another way Until pretty recently, the conventional wisdom about building muscle was that it worked via a system you might think of as “tear and repair” – the idea being that working out causes microtears in the muscle fibres, which trigger the body’s repair processes, encouraging the muscles to come back bigger and stronger.

That’s why many old-school trainers will tell you that there’s no gain without pain, and why a lot of bodybuilding advice includes increasingly byzantine ways of pushing your biceps and triceps to the point where you can’t do another repetition: the more trauma you can cause, the thinking goes, the more “swole” you can become. Continue reading...

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