Lifestyle - Saturday, June 20, 2026

At the beginning of her relationship with Dave, Barbara Reszke was sceptical. But when he joined her in Mexico, a wave of relief and excitement washed over her Find more stories from the moment I knew series In 1992, I travelled from Adelaide to Poland to reconnect with my extended family. One afternoon, I came across a newspaper advertisement for the Warsaw Summer Jazz Days festival. On a whim, I decided to go, hoping to see Jack Bruce perform songs from his Cream days. It was a Sunday afternoon and I arrived early at the concert hall. As I made my way to the bar, I overheard an Englishman struggling to order hamburgers. I stepped in to help, placed the order in Polish, turned to him and said, “She’ll be right, mate. Just pay the money, the food will be ready in 10 minutes.” Continue reading...

The ice cream, panzanella and pasta our colleagues can’t wait to make all season long.

We’re well into strawberry season now, but which punnets are the pick of the crop and which hit a sour note? • The best supermarket strawberry jams, tasted and rated Back in 1994, I used to pick strawberries in Dorset to earn extra pocket money. It was gruelling but delicious work. We’d shuffle on our hands and knees down furrowed rows of plants, picking those beautiful, fat red berries and trying not to eat too many along the way. We were paid by the punnet, which at my picking speed amounted to less than £1 an hour, unlike the impressively fast seasonal workers who came to our village every summer. I scored the strawberries below on sweetness first, using a Brix refractometer, which measures the sugar content of fruit and veg (each Brix point represents 1% sucrose in the juice by mass). Sweetness isn’t everything, however, and some of these berries had a lovely, complex, honeyed or floral flavour. Tartness is important, too, for bringing balance and a refreshing quality to the eating experience. As a general rule of thumb, go for fruit with a bright red body, fresh green leaves and a powerful but fresh aroma. Continue reading...

“I will foster until the child has somewhere to go,” said foster father Peter Mutabazi. “If there is no one else, I want to be their final dad.”

The furniture designer turned photographer was drawn to the colourful geometry of a multistorey car park in Japan Takeshi Aruga was en route from hospital back to his home in Okegawa, Japan, when he took this photograph. He’d had a consultation with a dermatologist, and while his house was a couple of miles away, good weather encouraged him to walk. Along the way, he passed PAPA Ageo, a sizeable shopping centre popular with locals. This blue sign board outside the multistorey car park caught his eye. “On the side visible to drivers coming down, it usually displays a message like ‘Thank you for visiting’ along with directions for turning left or right to avoid traffic congestion,” Aruga says. “Just behind is a red box, likely for a fire extinguisher.” Continue reading...

The Brazilian city is welcoming a record number of foreign visitors, who are drawn to the beaches, the dining scene and the drone videos on favela rooftops.

The artist on his need for order, an embarrassing Christmas costume, and the people he hopes to meet in heaven Born in British Guiana (now Guyana), Frank Bowling, 92, moved to the UK aged 19 and did national service in the RAF. In 1962, he graduated from the Royal College of Art with the silver medal for painting. He moved to New York in 1966, where he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, and exhibited his “map paintings” at the Whitney Museum in 1971. In 2005, he became the first black artist to be elected a Royal Academician, and Tate Britain staged a retrospective in 2019. His exhibition, Seeking the Sublime , is at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, until January 2027. He lives in London with his wife. When were you happiest? Recently, as people began to understand what I am trying to do in my painting. Continue reading...

From Dunbar and Shakespeare to Free the Weatherfield One, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz 1 How many times does the sun rise each year at the north pole? 2 Which board game inspired the creation of QR codes? 3 Five of the six cataracts of the Nile are in which country? 4 In what decade did Germany print a 100-trillion Mark note? 5 Who warned of a “global heat trap” and “climate instability” in 1988? 6 Which rhythm section had the surnames Dunbar and Shakespeare? 7 Free the Weatherfield One was a campaign to liberate whom? 8 What was the main language of the Inca empire? What links: 9 Barringer, US; Chicxulub, Mexico; Vredefort, South Africa; Wolfe Creek, Australia? 10 Smokin’ Joe; Fighting Marine; Neon Leon; Easton Assassin? 11 American Legion; Theodor Escherich; Daniel Salmon; staff; twisted berry? 12 Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr; Larry Bell, Dion DiMucci and Bob Dylan? 13 Bass beer; bleaching allowed; major seventh chord; youth hostel? 14 Cole Allen; Thomas Crooks; Ryan Routh? 15 1558 (25); 1689 (26); 1702 (37); 1837 (18); 1952 (25)? Continue reading...

The vibrant port city offers a more relaxed and budget-friendly base for exploring this beautiful coastline by train and ferry The ferry from Salerno to Amalfi town was set to take about 35 minutes, and we were debating whether to risk the windswept top deck, fearful our packed lunches might fly into the Tyrrhenian Sea. (My father and I were taking a pragmatic approach on our Italian holiday, opting for light midday meals to save space for the primo and secondo courses at dinner, and ample lemony desserts.) As our ferry sped across glittering water, we admired the views as the Amalfi coast unfolded, incandescent with charm. But we could also see the crawling traffic on the narrow roads that cling to the cliffs. That could have been us, up there in one of those toy-sized rental cars, squeezed between a tourist coach and a fed-up local leaning on their horn. Thankfully, we were on a boat instead, sea breeze in hair and coffee in hand. Continue reading...

We’re trying to buy an electric car. But my bank and the showroom ‘manager’ have other ideas It is a rainy Monday morning and my wife and I are in a car dealership about a mile from home, walking around a shiny new vehicle and peering into its windows. “It looks bigger than our car,” she says. Continue reading...