I have often wondered how it might feel to carry the responsibility of devastating news. Nobody wants to be the one to break it, knowing that their words will bring someone else's world crashing down. But how would it feel to be faced with the task of informing loved ones of your own impending demise? If I had the chance, I would have asked my nan this question.She carried her cancer for months, telling no one. Determined, it would seem, to live her days in denial of . . .

The relationship had become like a favourite jumper; it was wearing thin at the elbows and didn’t really fit any more, but neither of us had the heart to throw it out. Four years of Saturday nights and Wednesday evenings and Sunday mornings had built up a level of comfortableness which was wonderful until we realised we’d somehow become friends who shared a bed. “Look how superior we are to other couples,” we’d think. “We . . .

Your body: you ignore it while you can and then you hit 35 and the little bugger starts to draw attention to itself. It generally begins with a hangover. Not a twelve-vodka-tequila-shots-on-an-empty-stomach-hangover, but an inability to bounce back from two glasses of wine sipped in a civilised manner over dinner. “Why do I have a headache?” you ask your body. “Illness,” you . . .

I started sweating when I was twelve. During school games, wet patches came under the armpits of my t-shirt. Bitter and sticky, it was different to anything my body had smelt of before and called for only one thing: deodorant.  I knew what deodorant was because my classmates used it. They sprayed it over themselves first thing in the morning, not yet practised in how much to use or where best . . .

Tanya Wexler’s third film, Hysteria, is about a blossoming romance set in Victorian England. So far, so rom-com. Except, the vibrator happens to be the main character.  Mortimer Granville, an English doctor treating hysteria, invented this small but powerful instrument in 1880. That’s a true story. And Wexler set herself the challenge to tell its invention through the lens of comedy, . . .

To me, Courtney Welch is a real-life superhero. By day she has a high-flying job in the City and is a devoted wife and mother, but at night she straps on her skates and becomes Bette Noir, a gum shield-wearing member of the Ultraviolent Femmes, one of London’s most successful roller derby teams. She is best known as the co-founder of London Rollergirls, the league that spearheaded the . . .

We liked the sound of the Flower Appreciation Society right from hearing the name. There was a ring to it that seemed to say that florists Ellie Jauncey and Anna Day were doing something rather interesting. Indeed, the pair use native British flowers, a surprisingly rare find among florists, and eschew formal arrangements for natural ones that let the flowers just be flowers. For all their creative prowess, Ellie and Anna are a down-to-earth pair. Anna is training to . . .

A story from oh comely issue eleven. I was a lousy office temp, the despair of my agency. I'd blundered my way through several positions, leaving a trail of botched account books and frozen switchboards in my wake. As a result, they sent me to the worst places on file. I'd just spent a week answering the phone in an office that smelled like ham, and the week before that having my bottom patted by a . . .