Natasha Radmehr

IT IS 8.45 in the morning and I am number 17 in the queue. The phone line opened mere seconds ago, but clearly I don’t possess fingers fast enough to win the most challenging game show in town: Who Wants To Be Seen By Their Doctor?

FOR some people, like my sister’s boyfriend Dave, wearing a pair of odd socks is intentional. A style statement. But if you ever see me in a non-matching pair, know this: I am not trying to spice up an outfit by adopting a jolly sartorial quirk. I have simply been left with no choice, because my underwear drawer is an absolute riot.

DR Farrokhroo Parsa was a trailblazer. And she paid for it with her life.

Youth Elixir. Wrinkle Repair. Age-Defying. I might be old enough to get my bathroom renovated (and send progress photos to friends as if showing off a newborn child), but any stranger casting an eye over the glut of anti-ageing creams lining my cabinet shelves would wonder why I hadn’t installed grab bars to hoist my decaying body out of the bath.

“I CAN’T predict the future, so I can’t tell you what to do,” the mortgage adviser said with the weariness of a man who had uttered variations of that sentence thousands of times. I was asking if I should fix my rate for two years or five, remembering conversations with my dad about how steeply the interest rates had climbed in the early 1990s. At one point he was paying an interest rate of 15% and working 14-hour days in a takeaway just to stay afloat. Is it going to get that bad again,

LAST year, I worked for a social enterprise, helping unemployed people find jobs. Every day I’d strap on my headset like a pilot without a plane and settle in for a sometimes-turbulent stream of phone calls. One day, I chatted to a man who had just spent a long time in prison. As well as trying to find work, he was adjusting to a world that looked very different to the one he’d left behind in 1997. He couldn’t figure out what broadband to get, or even if it was affordable, and was having p

I DIDN’T anticipate getting fully sucked into the Love Island vortex this year. I thought I’d pick away at an episode here and there, tapas-style, thereby broadening my small-talk repertoire beyond the cost of petrol without spending almost every evening of my summer bikini-deep in reality TV. Having never seen it before, I was unaware that trying to limit yourself to a few episodes of Love Island is akin to eating just one little patata from a heaving bowl of bravas. Impossible, in other wo

If there’s a word guaranteed to give me the boak, it is the word woke, which has been co-opted by fusty conservatives to pillory anyone vaguely left-leaning. On Saturday, educationalist Professor Alan Smithers became the latest to set my teeth on edge with it by saying schoolboys are being let down by “wokeism”, which apparently upholds the gender attainment gap.

The sun may soon set on summer, but that doesn’t mean you can’t plan a getaway. You’re never more than an hour or two's drive from a wild beauty spot in Scotland, and an explosion in rural retreats in recent times means you don’t have to rough it in the wilderness.

My legs are splayed and resting on stirrups. A man peering beneath my gown carefully brushes my cervix with vinegar and I try not to smart. I am not in some strange condiment-based fetish club, though I’ve no doubt one exists somewhere (insert Mayo Clinic gag here). I am mid-colposcopy, a procedure that women are invited to undergo if their cervical smear test has returned abnormal results, as mine did a few months ago.