Reader's Digest UK Dec 2019

R E A D E R ’ S

HEALTH • MONEY • TRAVEL • RECIPES • FASHION • TECHNOLOGY

D I G E S T

DECEMBER 2019

| S M A L L A N D

KING TUTANKHAMUN

P E R F E C T LY

The Pharaoh’s Farewell Tour

Nicole Kidman

I N F O R M E D

“IT’S SO IMPORTANT TO FEEL LOVED” INSPIRE

|

Calm Christmas

D E C E M B E R

8

Tricks To Stay Merry And Not Miserable

Ken Loach

2 0 1 9

ON HOLDING A MIRROR TO SOCIETY

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DECEMBER 2019

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Contents DECEMBER 2019

Features 16 IT’S A MANN’S WORLD Olly Mann laments the duty of sons the world over to teach their parents about tech

ENTERTAINMENT

20 INTERVIEW:

NICOLE KIDMAN

A modern-day Hollywood icon, the Aussie actress reflects on life, love and work

30 “I REMEMBER”:

p58

KEN LOACH

The visionary director looks back on his impressive filmography

HEALTH

70

40 HOW TO FALL Here’s how to avoid suffering an injury next time you fall

80

MY BIG FAT GREEK XMAS Celebrating the smells, sounds and love of a Greek Christmas

INSPIRE

58 BEST OF BRITISH:

CHRISTMAS SHOWS Even the biggest Christmas

KING TUT’S FINAL TOUR The most legendary of all ancient Egyptian pharaohs, we visit King Tut’s last tour

TR AVEL & ADVENTURE

90

humbug will find themselves in the spirit with these shows

cover illustration by Matthew Brazier

LOST IN PALERMO Exploring the glitz and the grandeur of the Sicilian capital

DECEMBER 2019 • 1

China W

ards Aw

& Spirits ine

n2d0u1s 9Vini Mu

2019

Contents DECEMBER 2019

In every issue 9 12

Over to You See the World Differently

48 52

HEALTH Advice: Susannah Hickling Column: Dr Max Pemberton

66

INSPIRE If I Ruled the World: Luke Evans

98 100

TRAVEL & ADVENTURE My Great Escape Tropical escapes

102

MONEY Column: Andy Webb

106

110

FOOD & DRINK Tasty recipes and ideas from Rachel Walker HOME & GARDEN Column: Cassie Pryce

p119

p106 116

FASHION & BEAUTY Column: Lisa Lennkh on how to look your best Beauty

118

ENTERTAINMENT December’s cultural highlights

114

122 127

BOOKS December Fiction: James Walton’s recommended reads Books That Changed My Life: Sophie Dahl

128

TECHNOLOGY Column: Olly Mann

130 133 136 140 143 144

FUN & GAMES You Couldn’t Make It Up Word Power Brain Teasers Laugh!

60-Second Stand-Up Beat the Cartoonist

DECEMBER 2019 • 3

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SENIOR EDITORS Anna Walker, Eva Mackevic EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Jessica Summers ART DIRECTOR Richard Cooke ADVERTISING Jigs Pankhania MARKETING Sarah Hughes HEAD OF FINANCE Santwana Singh FINANCE MANAGER Irving Efren MANAGING DIRECTOR Julie Leach CHAIRMAN Gary Hopkins

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Why Nigel became a LifeBook author “It started with my daughter, who’s now 33. I’ve always told her stories about what I used to do in the past. Sometimes when I hear her telling them back to people, they’re not exactly what I told her. So, she said ‘All right then, why don’t you write a book, Dad?’ I replied, ‘I couldn’t write a book. I’m not very good at that sort of thing.’ (Sometimes, I can’t even write an email!) Then she suggested, ‘Well, can’t you get somebody to write it for you?’ I thought about this, looked on the internet and found LifeBook. After one call, the rest is history.”

EDITORS’ LET TERS

In This Issue…

Something about this Christmas feels extraspecial. Perhaps it’s because it’s the last Christmas before we enter the heady reality of the 2020s. Perhaps it’s the flood of new festive albums filling the airwaves with fresh takes on our favourite cheesy classics. Or perhaps it’s pure excitment that after months of rain and chilly winds, the time to sit before the fire with loved ones and a vat of mulled wine is finally here. This issue, we’ve got plenty for you to celebrate with. On p74, Steph Green takes us to the heart of Christmas in a Greek household—overbearing family, excessive food portions and all. While on p58 we’ve got the lowdown on Christmas stage shows so merry, Scrooge himself couldn’t resist.

Wishing you a very happy Christmas, from all of us at Reader’s Digest.

Tutankhamun is one of the first names that comes to mind when we think of ancient Egypt. His mysterious life, untimely death and the story of his tomb, forgotten by the world for thousands of years, all evoke a sense of intrigue and a thirst for history. To learn more about the Boy King and the ground-breaking 1922 discovery of his burial chamber, we visited the Tutankhamun: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh exhibition in London. Featuring 150 dazzling objects from the tomb, it is not only a fascinating foray into the young pharaoh’s life, but also a thoughtprovoking journey deep into history, that’ll leave you contemplating the enormity of time and the transience of life. Read all about our encounter with Tutankhamun on p70.

Anna

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Over To You LETTERS ON THE October ISSUE

We pay £50 for Letter of the Month and £30 for all others LETTER OF THE MONTH

I read “A Patient’s Worst Nightmare” and shuddered. Sepsis is responsible for more deaths in the UK than bowel, breast and prostate cancer A Patient’s Worst Nightmare combined. We should fear it and hospitals need to be doing more to I combat infections like this.

My boss’ 34-year-old son recently died of sepsis. He wasn’t even majorly ill. Depending on the infection, sepsis can affect any organ, resulting in a diverse variety of symptoms. Very young children and the elderly are particularly at risk.

Sepsis shouldn’t be the taboo national crisis that it is.

It should receive widespread attention—hospitals seem to view it as an unfortunate and unavoidable consequence of running a healthcare facility where bacteria can be difficult to control. But too many mistakes are being made in these establishments.

I had a stay in hospital recently and there were eight bed pans full of urine in the toilet area waiting to be attended to. It is unacceptable.

– PIA AINSWORTH, Manchester HEALTH

Liza Lindham needed strong antibiotics and a week in hospital to recover from a UTI

Liza Lindham is one of millions of Europeans admitted to hospital each year who wind up sicker because of an infection acquired there

But she grew more and more tired. A few days later, she felt like she’d caught a cold, so she curled up in front of the TV. Her aches and pains got worse. By dinner time, she couldn’t eat, and was shivering violently. “Something’s wrong,” she told her husband. Liza didn’t know it yet, but she’d picked up a urinary tract infection (UTI), a common complication of catheter use, when

Photo by William leGoullon

By Eleanor Rose

t was supposed to be the best week of her life.

Liza Lindham, 32, had just given birth to her first child in Stockholm in June 2014. The delivery was tough, because the baby’s head had blocked her bladder. Medics drained the urine with a catheter.

Finally, with a healthy baby girl in her arms, Liza returned home, exhausted but exhilarated.

bacteria such as E. coli travel from the gut to the bladder. Unnoticed, the UTI progressed. By the time she reached the A&E, Liza’s temperature was 40.5°C. Sepsis had spread.

It’s anybody’s worst nightmare: going to hospital and winding up sicker. Yet healthcare-associated infections or HAIs—which develop as a direct result of medical or surgical intervention, or after contact with a healthcare facility—are common.

A 2018 Europe-wide study by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) found that on any given day in 2016 and 2017, one in 15 hospital patients had one or more HAIs. Some 8.9m are contracted every year across Europe.

The most common are UTIs, pneumonia, surgical site infections, and gastrointestinal illness from bugs such as Clostridium difficile.

Bloodstream infections—often introduced by invasive objects such as central-line catheters—are also major killers. Says Dr Carl Suetens, deputy programme coordinator for the ECDC, “The estimated burden of healthcare-associated infections is larger than the combined burden of all other infections under surveillance in Europe.”

Liza was given strong antibiotics and monitored as she recovered. She left hospital a week later. Now 37, she’s angry the hospital didn’t inform her of the known risks of catheters, or tell her about UTI symptoms or

Liza, shown with her children. She campaigns in Sweden to raise awareness of sepsis

testing. She now campaigns for the Swedish Sepsisfonden, which raises awareness of sepsis.

A large proportion of HAIs could be picked up earlier, and many need never happen at all. Dr Diamantis Plachouras, senior expert for the ECDC, says, “We know from a recent literature review that 30 to 50 per cent of certain types of infections can be prevented.” Cracking down on these illnesses is at the core of patient safety.

“Things began to go awry” Following the discovery of the antibiotic penicillin in 1928, doctors began to understand more about how bacteria spread. In 1941, the first-ever infection control officer was appointed at a hospital in the UK. 1234567890 OCTOBER 2019 • 41

40 • OCTOBER 2019

WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU! Send letters to readersletters@readersdigest.co.uk Include your full name, address, email and daytime phone number. We may edit letters and use them in all print and electronic media DECEMBER 2019 • 9

OVER TO YOU

A SHOCKING STORY It was most interesting reading “When Lightning Strikes” and good to know that there’s a nine in ten chance one will survive.

I have a fear of lightning because of a childhood encounter with it. My family used to own horses. A horse’s natural herding instinct during a thunderstorm can increase the risk of injury or death from a lightning strike; they group together for protection from the elements and, if the storm includes heavy rainfall, shelter beneath large trees—which are often attractive targets for a lightning strike.

One such day I went to get my horse, who was standing under the tree.

I knew she hated the rain so I was going to stable her. Before I got to her she was struck by lightning. I saw it happen. It was both incredible and terrifying at the same time. Her mane caught fire but fortunately the water tank was nearby and I doused her with water. We called the vet who checked her over and she had no further damage.

It scarred her for life and it definitely scarred me. I now retreat indoors if there is even a small chance of a thunderstorm.

——ANNABEL HAMMETT, Cheshire

THEATRE FOR TOTS I can relate to Olly A Crying Shame Mann’s floods of tears during theatrical performances W for children. Until I had my own two, I had no idea how an infant school nativity play could reduce me to jelly. The sight of a row of solemn little ones in their home-made costumes—especially the shepherds with their teatowelled heads—does it every time.

Oh dear! With rehearsals soon to be underway, I’d better add another box of tissues to the shopping list.

——MAGGIE COBBETT, Yorkshire IT’S A MANN’S WORLD

This month, Olly Mann reveals how a performance of Teletubbies Live unexpectedly moved him to tears

hen was the last time you cried?

You may be able to answer that very specifically, if your tears were triggered by a traumatic event. Euthanising a beloved pet, for instance. Or you may be the kind of person who cries all the time: at romcoms, at weddings, at Christmas carols; each and every time the plane lands, or the kids get a new sports kit. In that case, you probably won’t even remember when you last cried, because it’s such a routine occurrence.

I fit into neither of these categories. I’m somewhere in the middle. I cry when something truly Olly Mann presents Four Thought for BBC Radio 4, and the award-winning podcasts The Modern Mann and Answer Me This!

awful happens, of course. I shed a few tears the day my father died, and (such are the eccentricities of grief ) wept more heartily on perhaps half-a-dozen subsequent occasions, initiated by sudden, small sadnesses, such as wanting to call him for a chat, or seeing how much his grandson admired his vintage car.

I’m not a serial blubberer, though.

I’ve never been moved to tears during the final reel of a movie, or a stirring verse of poetry. But there is something that gets my waterworks running, and it’s a little embarrassing. Without fail, the one thing that always increases the flow of oxygen through my body, and provokes an instant moistening of my eyes, is… children’s theatre.

I know, it’s weird. I’m not even referring to emotional historical dramas, like Goodnight Mister Tom or The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.

Rather, I start to cry when I see anything—seriously, anything—with

16 • OCTOBER 2019

10 • DECEMBER 2019

illustrations by Finn Dean

Like Olly Mann I am moved to tears by children’s theatre.

So much so, that although our children are grown up now, we still go to our local pantomime—partly to watch the children’s reactions.

Sometimes this is their first experience of theatre and they get so engrossed in the magic that even the quieter ones cheer and shout along with the cast. I particularly enjoy the moment in Peter Pan where the children in the audience have to declare they believe in magic so that Tinkerbell can be brought back to life.

Tears always flow!

——CHRIS TAIT, Hampshire 17

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See The World TURN THE PAGE…

Fotos: © Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images

…differently A Christmas tree with wheels? The residents of Sydney, Australia, were surprised one day in 2010 to find exactly such a work of art at a local shopping centre. A hundred bicycles were used to create this vibrant, 23fttall sculpture which was made even more spectacular at night by the use of colourful spotlights. After the holiday season had passed, this tree wasn’t just unceremoniously discarded like most—all of the bicycles were completely recycled.

15

IT’S A MANN’S WORLD

Pushing Buttons Yet another tech support session with his mother almost tips Olly Mann's patience levels over the edge

F

orgive me if I’m a little tense, but I’ve just got off the phone with my mother.

An unscheduled hour.

Mum had apparently spent the morning drafting emails on her iPhone, only to find them clogging up her outbox folder, because, as it turns out, she recently reset, and then promptly forgot, her Gmail password.

So, she dialled up her friendly neighbourhood tech support: moi.

Is there anything worse in the world than providing a parent with computer lessons? Actually, yes: providing a parent with computer lessons when you are not even there.

When you are, essentially, working blind. So, when they scream, "it’s Olly Mann presents Four Thought for BBC Radio 4, and the award-winning podcasts The Modern Mann and Answer Me This!

16 • DECEMBER 2019

asking me for a password!" you have to calmly deduce what the "it" is, from a hundred different variables: perhaps the settings app on their phone, perhaps a pop-up window, perhaps a website login, or a fraudulent text message.

"Call me on FaceTime, so I can see your screen?", I pleaded.

"How can you possibly look at my iPad screen, whilst I’m using it to video call you?!", she shouted back. Answering this would have taken another ten minutes, so on we soldiered, in audio form. I cracked open a bottle of wine.

I wouldn’t object so strongly if this was a recent development; if Mum had been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century because her bank had required her to download their app, or she was selling her house through an online estate agent or something. But, no: Mum’s had dozens of devices over the years. Indeed, she got her first PC illustration by Georgie Fearns

IT’S A MANN’S WORLD

on the very same day that I did—in 1995, when I was 14, and she was… well, since I value my liberty I’d better not disclose exactly how old, but only slightly older than I am now.

She’s had 25 years of adulthood to master the basics, yet still can’t so much as copy-and-paste.

I must have endured a thousand hours of teaching Mum computing.

Some of the lessons were, I appreciate, somewhat counterintuitive: when you want to shut the computer down, you have to first press "Start"… if you require help then Google the problem but don’t, whatever you do, actually click "Help"… But, rather than pay attention to the accompanying activity on-screen, Mum always attempted to note down each sequence I taught her, with paper and pen.

This, as any millennial will tell you, is nuts. The secret to developing digital literacy is to simply look at the screen and try to work stuff out, without fear or favour. "Don’t write this down! Look at what I’m actually doing!", I’d say. Mum would write that down, too. As if somehow her hand-written encyclopedia of specific commands—"How To Save A Document", etc—would be of any 18 • DECEMBER 2019

assistance five years hence, after multiple software updates. The truth is, computer hardware is fallible, the programs aren’t always evolutionary, and the only way to build up the necessary instincts to navigate new products successfully is to invest hours of prior attention; hours that Mum has never been prepared to spend. Pages of handwritten notes are no help at all to deduce when to tap, when to double-click and when to right-click, when to click "Cancel" and when to "Close", when to pull the plug and when to Ctrl+Alt+Delete.

That intuition comes only with experience.

Lest you think I’m being ageist, may I present to the jury Exhibit B: Grandma. Mum’s mum, at the age of 93, continues to outpace her daughter at all things technological, precisely because of her willingness to get stuck in. Admittedly, she was a secretary in her younger days, so the typing comes as second nature, she doesn’t have Mum’s short temper, and she is retired with more spare time. Nonetheless, she has in recent years learned how to stream video, to order an audio book, to email a family photo, and send predictive text. True, one in five of her

READER’S DIGEST

WhatsApp messages are accidental voice memos of her saying, "Blast, I don’t want to press that!" And she did once unintentionally send me an erotically-charged emoji. But still, she’s 93. Ninety-three! Mum could surely learn a trick or two from her.

You may, rightly, be thinking: look, your mother’s your mother.

Go easy on her. Bite your tongue.

However frustrating her computer shenanigans, she carried you in her womb for nine months, and brought you up in a world without CBeebies or artisanal gin. So what if you have to spend ten minutes per week showing her which button on the remote control does Netflix (that would be the one that says "Netflix")?

So what if you’ve given over your evening to screen-grabbing her inbox and texting her the images? Other

“SHE'S HAD 25 YEARS OF ADULTHOOD TO MASTER THE BASICS, YET STILL CAN'T SO MUCH AS COPYAND-PASTE" people don’t even have a mother with whom to be frustrated. Pour yourself another glass.

This is the presiding thought that carries me through. I have plotted my revenge, though. This Christmas, I’m going to ask her for some envelopes, and some stamps. And then I’m going to write to her repeatedly, asking her how to use them. n

Natty Neanderthals Most people visualise Neanderthals as stooped or hunched, because the first Neanderthal skeleton to be discovered was arthritic. In fact, they walked upright and were far from the lumbering meatheads we imagine today.

If you're Asian or Caucasian, your ancestors interbred with Neanderthals as recently as 37,000 years ago, when they crossed paths in Europe. Inherited Neanderthal genes help fight off several nasty viruses such as Epstein-Barr, and several forms of cancer.

In southern Spain, archaeologists have discovered a yellow pigment that Neanderthals may have used as foundation for their skin.

Gibraltar is the last place Neanderthals are known to have lived before dying out.

The earliest known cave art was painted by a Neanderthal some 64,000 years ago—before the existence of modern man.

SOURCE: DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM

DECEMBER 2019 • 19

ENTERTAINMENT

20

Nicole Kidman:

“We Are All Survivors”

by Karen Overton

Nicole Kidman is universally admired, happily married, wildly successful and—apparently just as crucially for the Aussie actress—left-handed…

L

ongevity is a rare commodity in the movie business. Temperamental, unreliable and furiously cut-throat, the way actors can emerge from seemingly nowhere, then return in almost the same breath of desperate anonymity is as entertaining as it is troubling.

And yet, every now and again a film icon comes along who’s seemingly impervious to the industry’s torrent of uncertainty.

Sure, when Nicole Kidman began making serious career moves in the late 1980s she admits she was living for the moment and fearing the death knell of a journey that might be over as quickly as it began. “I think part

of being young is about being full of optimism and positivity, with a stubbornness to succeed, and I definitely had that,” she says. “And yet, at the same time, I knew this whole machine was so much bigger than me, and I can’t say I wasn’t perpetually in the mindset where I just wanted to keep this thing going for as long as I could, and when it finished it finished.”

Of course, that was 30 years ago… and she’s still here. Not only that, but the 52-year-old former wife of Tom Cruise has never lost relevance, nor found her popularity under threat.

Keeping busy is at the heart of what retains Kidman’s interest. With DECEMBER 2019 • 21

INTERVIEW: NICOLE KIDMAN

Xxxxxxxx

I HAD “ MANY YEARS

While I’m more willing to take risks these days, at the same time I won’t force myself into anything.

I’ll just say straight away that I’m not interested. I think that’s something that comes with maturity, age and being secure in the fact something else will come along.”

WHERE WORKING HARD WAS MY WAY OF While Kidman’s rich DEALING WITH characterisations have provided fuel for cinema goers, SOMETHING high-quality you sense the actress has, over the years, been profoundly influenced MISSING ” six films over the past two years— Destroyer, Boy Erased, Aquaman, The Goldfinch, Bombshell and The Prom— plus TV series Big Little Lies and The Undoing, there’s a cross-platform, cross-genre pollination of drama that few of her peers can rival.

“I’m at the time in my life where, professionally, I can approach roles with a much greater sense of abandon. I’ve always wanted to be like that, but I think you have to get to that point where you realise there’s nothing to lose, and what you have can’t be taken away from you.”

“That realisation still feels very different to the past,” Kidman admits.

“In the first decade or so of getting scripts through, I would be trying to find myself a way to solve projects, always thinking how I could just make them work, even when they just didn’t fit.

22 • DECEMBER 2019

and altered by some of her roles.

“I have achieved a lot and afforded myself the opportunity to pursue fascinating characters, strong women, compelling role models. I think it’s only natural I’ve taken on a few of their characteristics and woven them into who I am today.”

Of course, the key to professional accomplishment is, without doubt, a stable home life. Kidman’s aforementioned marriage to Tom Cruise was a love affair wrapped up in Hollywood glitz, yet ultimately doomed. While the Honolulu-born actress rarely discusses the intricacies involved in the break-up of her 11-year marriage (and subsequent estrangement from the couple’s two adopted children), you sense she regards any experience as valuable.

“We’re all survivors of events and circumstances. If you’re happy with the person you are today, you should be grateful of everything you’ve been

BMX Bandits (1983)

Dead Calm (1989)

Days of Thunder (1990)

Batman Forever (1995) Australia (2008)

Grace of Monaco (2014)

D AV I D F I S H E R / S H U T T E R S TO C K

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through… the good and the bad.”

Certainly, the actress—now 13 years into her second marriage—displays the giddy excitement of having found a partner on a similar level to her, where the notions of fame, pressure, exposure and privacy are understood. And the fact that that person—country music heavyweight Keith Urban—comes from a different industry is doubtless a welcome change from the closeted nature of Tinseltown and its dwellers.

The couple have two children together—Sunday, 11, and Faith, eight; and while there has been reconciliation with those older siblings, Isabella, 26, and Connor, 24, the elder children live their lives out of the public’s gaze.

“It’s taken me a long time to come round to what’s important, and I did have many years where working hard was my way of dealing with the fact there was something missing,” Kidman admits. “I think that’s a natural human reaction—by blocking out our schedules we are, effectively, blocking out a need to confront what’s going on.

I look back on those times now and it makes me realise how important it is to feel loved. For me, our relationship, making it through, being a family, is the pinnacle.”

Kidman’s midlife epiphany certainly removes a need to scrutinise and analyse the finer details. If anything, she has become the polar

I LOOK “ BACK ON

THOSE TIMES NOW AND IT MAKES ME REALISE HOW IMPORTANT IT IS TO FEEL LOVED ” opposite of who she used to be.

“These days I tend to be a bit day dreamy,” she laughs. “I go with the flow and I’m not a huge analyser.

I don’t sit down and strategise, mostly because I just can’t be bothered, which has its plusses and its minuses.

“I like the idea of not knowing what’s around the corner. With the children, I think it’s good to expose them to different environments, different people and different countries. When you do that, you get to see just how pure and emotional young people are. It’s a beautiful thing that they won’t allow anything other than the moment to exist. I do believe we should think more that way as adults.”

Kidman’s lack of a concrete plan certainly appears to be doing her little harm. The year to come looks impossibly busy again, but DECEMBER 2019 • 25

Clockwise from the top: Bombshell (2019); The Goldfinch (2019); Destroyer (2018)

the formula holds. “I know I’m most comfortable when operating from a spontaneous kind of place. At times, that does work in my favour, but other times I can fall flat on my face.

The funny thing is, when it does go wrong 26 • DECEMBER 2019

I always castigate myself.

I think I need to be more ‘on it’ and take a bit more time to decipher these things. But I can’t do that.

It’s simply not my nature.”

It fits then that Kidman has an intriguing knack of flitting off on strange tangents. Perhaps

READER’S DIGEST

that’s at the very heart of what makes an actress great—versatility, flexibility and the ability to bounce between ideas. For every considered, informed answer in this interview, there is a wild interjection.

“You know, I’m left-handed, so that means I have a particular approach to the world. I certainly believe that left-handed people have a different approach to things and that we are wired differently… but I digress.”

Either way, professionally and personally, Kidman is in a good space, and still rallying against the industry preconception that women over 40 can’t be offered important roles. Kidman grabs armfuls of them, and will continue to do so.

“Life is about achieving things, not counting down the days to the end. As long as I am moving forward and, in my mind, achieving a lot of what I set out to do, then how could I wish for anything else?” n

Quoting Christmas Can you identify these Christmas movies based on their famous quotes alone?

1. “Seeing isn’t believing. Believing is seeing” 2. “Who told you that you could eat my cookies?”

3. “Keep the change, ya filthy animal” 4. “You, I can tell, are a leading lady. But you’re behaving like the best friend!”

5. “Six-thirty, dinner with me. I can’t cancel that again!”

6. “Welcome to the party, pal” 7. “I will honour Christmas in my heart, and keep it there the whole year round” 8. “Look Daddy! Teacher says, every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings” 9. “There’s children throwing snowballs, instead of throwing heads!”

10. “You stink! You smell like beef and cheese, you don’t smell like Santa” 11. “Christmas isn’t just a day—it’s a state of mind” 12. “It’s Christmas Eve. It’s the one night of the year when we all act a little nicer, we smile a little easier, we cheer a little more. For a couple of hours out of that whole year, we are the people that we always hoped we would be” ANSWERS: 1) THE SANTA CLAUSE 2) JINGLE ALL THE WAY 3) HOME ALONE 4) THE HOLIDAY 5) HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS 6) DIE HARD 7) A CHRISTMAS CAROL 8) IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE 9) THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS 10) ELF 11) MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET 12) SCROOGED

27

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ENTERTAINMENT

Ken Loach

I REMEMBER… …SITTING IN THE AIR RAID SHELTER in our neighbour’s back garden in the 1940s, aged around four.

We were only about eight miles from Coventry and I can recall the horror the adults felt when we heard the cathedral had been destroyed by German bombs. …MY FATHER, JACK, HAD A LOT OF AFFECTION IN HIM, BUT HE didn’t show it. He was a factory foreman and came from a mining background, and his Midlands 30 • DECEMBER 2019

working-class culture inhibited him.

He’d passed the exam to go to grammar school, but couldn’t go because his family couldn’t afford the uniform. Instead, he directed his energies towards making sure I worked hard at school, and I did eventually get into a grammar.

My mother, Vivien, was gregarious but had given up her job as a hairdresser after I was born. It was a source of pride for my father that his wife shouldn’t have to work. It was a pity for her, as she missed the social life.

A N D IA / AL A MY S TOCK P H OTO / A N L /S HUT TE RS TOCK

Ken Loach, 83, is one of Britain’s best-known directors who’s made more than 60 films, TV dramas and documentaries—including Cathy Come Home, Kes and The Wind That Shakes the Barley

I REMEMBER…

(Top) During production of Kes in 1968; (above) Starring in a Nottingham Theatre production in 1957; (right) As a baby with his parents, 1936 32 • DECEMBER 2019

READER’S DIGEST

Filming in Liverpool in 1967

…GETTING VERY PASSIONATE ABOUT THEATRE, AGED 11.

I played a nymph in the school production of The Tempest, then Bolingbroke in Richard II. After that, I started reading plays and casting them in my mind. I used to cycle to Stratford-upon-Avon, 30 miles away, and see all of the great actors of the time: Olivier, Gielgud, Ashcroft. My dad was fearful that theatre would supplant my academic studies. But we were studying literature and plays at school, so that just about justified my interest, in his eyes. …FEELING LIKE A KID IN A SWEET SHOP AT OXFORD. I was accepted to study law—which pleased my dad, as that’s what he’d have

chosen. But I spent the whole three years getting more and more into acting. In the first term, I was in a play with Dudley Moore. In the second, I was Kent in King Lear. And that was me set, then, doing a couple of plays, every term. I’m not proud, but I nearly got sent down in the second year, because I hadn’t been going to lectures. The first play I directed was The Glass Menagerie, but I didn’t do it very well. I was too prescriptive, telling the actors “do it this way”, the opposite of what I do now.

But that’s how you learn, isn’t it, making mistakes? …A LOVE OF HISTORY WITH KENNETH WILLIAMS. My first professional acting job was as an DECEMBER 2019 • 33

I REMEMBER…

understudy to Lance Percival in a West End review, One Over the Eight.

Williams was the lead and we’d talk about medieval kings and exchange books. He was hilarious but very mercurial. One day you’d be his greatest friend and the next he wouldn’t know you. …MEETING MY WIFE, LESLEY. I’d joined a repertory theatre in the Midlands, where she was a dancer and secretary. I was giving my Brer Fox to audiences of assembled school children, who’d obviously rather have been doing something else. But, despite that, she went out with me.

We met in 1961, got married in 1962 and had our first child in 1963.

34 • DECEMBER 2019

We had another one about every two years after that—five in all—so Lesley was a full-time mother for over a decade. …FEELING TERRIFIED DIRECTING Z CARS, WHEN I WAS JUST 27. I moved into theatre direction, then the BBC, who entrusted people like me to make drama, despite not knowing one end of a camera from the other.

It was broadcast live, straight into people’s homes. I was just trying to keep my place in the script and everything was passing me by. The vision mixer also had a disconcerting habit of knitting. Fortunately, she knew what she was doing and got me through it.

MI CHA E L B AR N E TT/ WOO DFA L L /K E S TRE L /KOB A L /S HUT TE RS TOCK

Actor David Bradley starring in Kes

READER’S DIGEST

…CHALLENGING THE ESTABLISHMENT WITH THE WEDNESDAY PLAY. The BBC’s director of drama, Sydney Newman, gave a group of producers, writers and directors licence to create bold productions about modern life. I did Up the Junction, then Cathy Come Home, with the writers Nell Dunn and Jeremy Sandford, in 1966. There were only two and a half channels, then, so Cathy… was a national event. Viewers were appalled to learn that people could have their children taken away due to lack of housing.

The law changed shortly after that— though homelessness is worse than ever, now. …FEELING A LITTLE BAD ABOUT A CANING SCENE IN KES. There’s a part where a little boy gets the cane because some other boys have made him hide their cigarettes. We didn’t tell the boy he would be caned because it would have taken the shock away. A little tear escaped from his eye. But he got double payment, so he was laughing all the way to the piggy bank. And maybe, in a tiny way, the scene helped end corporal punishment.

Billy Casper [actor David Bradley] is now in his sixties. We still see each other about once a year. ...THERE WAS NO MONEY FOR FILMS IN THE SEVENTIES, unless it was a Carry On or a historical epic.

Kes wasn’t a big hit and didn’t immediately open that many doors— it grew in people’s affections over the years. So I did a few TV dramas with producer Tony Garnett, such as The Price of Coal by Barry Hines [the writer of Kes].

One of them, Days of Hope (1975) was about the early labour movement and the needless sacrifice of working class men in the First World War. The right wing objected.

One criticism was that we showed the army marching in threes instead of fours. “If you can’t get that detail right, how can we trust anything you say,” people argued. ...THE EIGHTIES WERE DISASTROUS. There was still little chance of doing feature films, so I concentrated on a series of documentaries, such as one on the miners’ strike and others on the failure of other union leaders to confront Margaret Thatcher. But right-of-centre TV bosses didn’t want to hear those arguments and the films were censored.

Work dried up and I had to do commercials, which I was not happy about. Fortunately, I was very bad at them, so I didn’t do many. …A PHONE CALL FROM THE PRODUCER DAVID PUTTNAM [Chariots of Fire] turned things around. He asked me if I’d like to make a film about the British shootDECEMBER 2019 • 35

I REMEMBER…

to-kill policy in Northern Ireland. It became Hidden Agenda, which won the Jury Prize at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. I was back on the map. …DOING ONE FILM AFTER ANOTHER, AFTER THAT. A highlight was Land and Freedom, written by Jim Allen, about the Spanish Civil War. We based scenes on what we’d been told by old men and women who’d fought in the conflict. I can remember one man crying on set as we filmed an incident he’d described to us, where he and his comrades were disarmed at gunpoint by other Republican soldiers in a sectarian struggle. …TOILET MERCY DASHES IN NICARAGUA. We were filming the last scene in Paul Laverty’s Carla’s Song, a long way from the nearest village, and most of the crew had the runs. Cars had to take people back and forth to sanitation, while we were working. We did finish on time, but it was pretty arduous. …HAVING A CUP OF TEA AFTER WINNING THE PALME D’OR AT CANNES, for The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Standing around in a black tie holding a drink isn’t really my scene. So rather than going to a spectacular party after the awards, we just went off for a quiet cup of tea.

It wasn’t quite what we were supposed to do.

36 • DECEMBER 2019

...RETIRING IN 2014, ALBEIT VERY BRIEFLY. I was standing in my boots in an Irish bog [making Jimmy’s Hall] with wet feet and thought, This is probably not a sensible job for a man in his late seventies.

But, soon after, Paul Laverty, producer Rebecca O’Brien and I were talking about what was going on in the whole social security system, with sick people being denied benefits.

Telling that story was very important. It later became I, Daniel Blake [2016]. …THE DELIVERY DRIVERS WE MET FILMING MY NEW FILM, SORRY WE MISSED YOU MADE A STRONG IMPRESSION. Several of them appear in the film [about a driver with a precarious “selfemployed” contract]. We learned how they are tested to the limit getting parcels to their destination within very tight time scales. One bad accident and that’s their job gone, while they still have to keep up payments on their vans.

We hope the film will make audiences open to political change, with drivers getting proper workers’ rights, so they can lead a decent life

READER’S DIGEST

Ken Loach on the terraces of his beloved Bath City Football Club

RI CH A RD SAKE R/S H UT TE RS TOCK

and bring up a family without so much stress. …BATH IS HOME, BUT MY PARTICULAR JOY IS BATH CITY FOOTBALL CLUB. I’m a season ticket holder. The club is full of nice people who talk about something other than films—a great relief.

We have lived in Bath since 1974 and it’s a stunning place, it’s very special, despite attempts to spoil it with too many modern buildings. …SOCIETY HAS TWO FACES. One is of solidarity, support for people when they’re down. The majority of people are instinctively friendly and supportive, but you find it particularly in working-class areas.

They support each other because they have to.

The other face of society is one of harsh judgements, intolerance and sanctions. This is how the state reacts under the direction of right wing governments.

For the first time I’ve known, we have Labour leadership that isn’t like that. I think Corbyn and John McDonnell have a relationship with people that could go a long way towards ending division. This is a special moment, unlike anything else I’ve known in politics. n As told to Simon Hemelryk Sorry We Missed You opens nationwide from November 1 DECEMBER 2019 • 37

PARTNERSHIP

PROMOTION

BABY BOOMERS ‘BRUSHING OFF’ MENTAL HEALTH PROBLEMS A recent report by health insurer Bupa has found that the baby boomer generation appears to be neglecting psychological wellbeing to the detriment of mental health.

The boomers may be described as being wealthier, more active and more physically fit than the generations that went before. But when it comes to the way they feel, behave and exist emotionally, it appears they’re just not making a big enough noise.

An issue that shouldn’t be ignored In reality, they’re actually in a high-risk group when it comes to mental health issues.

Figures show that around two thirds suffer from symptoms with anxiousness, continuous low mood, feelings of hopelessness and insomnia.

Older isn’t necessarily wiser Interestingly enough, the group of 55+ people surveyed seem to behave

differently from younger generations.

They’re less likely to gauge things like stress and depression as problems and don’t feel as comfortable talking about mental health.

Many keep problems entirely bottled up. One in four (27%) tell no one about these symptoms, with fewer confiding in a partner or friend than younger generations and less than half consulting a doctor.1 Less than one in three over 55s feel confident in recognising the symptoms of conditions like depression and anxiety, compared to nearly half of 18-34-yearolds and even those who do seek help delay by over 50 days on average.2 Why they feel unable to act Lack of action stems from a lack of

awareness that the symptoms could indicate a mental health problem. One in five (22%) think their symptoms ‘don’t indicate anything serious’ and others say mental health simply ‘doesn’t affect me’.

Early action improves outcomes These issues can be headed off by those north of 55 if they seek help as soon as symptoms come calling.

That’s why Bupa’s urging people to come forward early when it comes to dealing with mental health problems.

It’s just as important as physical health and starting the conversation early – whether it’s with family, friends or mental wellbeing practitioners – can make a huge difference to getting things back to normal.

Pablo Vandenabeele, Clinical Director for Mental Health at Bupa UK, says: “Mental health issues can affect us at any age and it’s important to seek support without delay, as early diagnosis and treatment can improve recovery rates.

If you or a loved one is struggling with their mental health, it’s important to

seek medical help. Bupa’s Mental Health Direct Access offers fast access to a specialist without the need for a GP referral.”

How Bupa can help Bupa’s purpose is helping people live longer, healthier, happier lives.

In order to do this for mental health as well as physical health, they offer comprehensive support that puts them heads above all other leading UK insurers;† with Bupa By You health insurance that covers more mental health conditions and for longer. That’s in addition to their nationwide network of clinical resources for physical problems.

READER’S DIGEST OFFER 10% off Bupa By You health insurance To help more people access Bupa’s support to keep body and mind in the best shape, they’re offering 10% off Bupa By You health insurance*.

To get a quote, call 0808 302 4214 or visit

bupa.co.uk/readers-digest

Research conducted among 2,152 UK adults by Opinium Research, 19-22 March 2019.

184% of 18-34 year olds tell at least one person about their symptoms. 43% tell a partner and 50% tell a friend, compared to 33% and 28% respectively for over 55s 231% of over 55s said they were fully aware of depression and 26% are fully aware of anxiety, compared to 46% and 46% respectively for 18-34s †As of May 2019, based on internally conducted research of the consumer health insurance market. Refers to standard mental health cover when this is included in the selected health cover product. *Applies to Reader’s Digest members on quotes for new Bupa By You policies. Discounts will be reviewed on 10/09/2020 and any changes will apply to renewals and new quotes thereafter. Quotes are valid for 14 days. T&Cs apply.

Reader's Digest introduces Bupa health insurance. Bupa health insurance is provided by Bupa Insurance Limited.

Bupa Insurance Limited is authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority. Arranged and administered by Bupa Insurance Services Limited, which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.

HEALTH

Injuries caused by falling are a growing problem.

It's time to learn...

HOW TO

FA L L

by Lisa Fitterman

41

HOW TO FALL

In the spring of 2018, Hans Kuhn tripped in her garden. She had craned her head to gaze at a flock of birds, then without thinking pivoted on one foot and fell over backwards.

It hurt, but the fall could have been much worse. After all, at the age of 86, she could have broken a wrist or a hip, or suffered concussion. And, like many elderly people who fall, she could have ended up in hospital—a circumstance which, studies have shown, may lead to being unable to leave medical care.

However, thanks to an innovative physiotherapy programme offered in The Netherlands, Hans, a resident of Leusden and a retired gymnast, remembered how to fall properly.

“I managed to protect my head by

in orthopaedic medicine. The idea is to get seniors to be more aware of their surroundings and the limitations of their bodies, says Diedeke van Wijk, a physiotherapist who has taught the programme in Leusden for five years and includes Hans among her elderly "students".

Using an obstacle course and thick mats set up in a gymnasium, the students work hard in the fiveweek course to adapt their gait and abilities to things they encounter every day, such as a pavement with cracks, high curbs, pebbles and crowds that shrink their personal space. They also learn to react more quickly when they fall, and use reflexes to protect their heads and extremities, then manage to get

pulling my chin to my chest,” she says. “And because the programme teaches us how to get up again, I did.

It was only the next day that I went to the doctor. I was given morphine for the pain from severely bruised ribs.”

The physiotherapy programme, called Vallen Verleden Tijd, or "Falling Is In the Past," was developed 20 years ago at the Sint Maartenskliniek in the city of Nijmegen, a hospital that specialises 42 • DECEMBER 2019

up again.

Just as Hans did in the garden of the two-floor home she has lived alone in for the past seven years, ever since her partner died. With no children or grandchildren to call on for help, she has to be able to help herself. “If I weren't, then I’d end up in hospital or a nursing home—and I wouldn’t like that,” she says. “At my age, I know I will fall. I just had to learn how to do it better.”

Photo, previous spread: ©shutterstock

"At my age, I know I will fall. I just had to learn how to do it better.

I don't want to end up in hospital"

Hans on her way to her "Falling Is In the Past" class, in Nijegen, The Netherlands

Photo: Jasper Juinen for The New York Times

W

e’ve all known a senior citizen who has fallen and suffered an accident, be it a sprained ankle or worse. Perhaps it was a parent who tripped when leaning over to pet a dog. Or a grandparent who tripped on a curb and lay there, calling for help. Or perhaps it was you. Now, with the bulk of babyboomers facing down 70, people living longer than ever before and healthcare services already strained at the seams, the problem promises to grow worse.

Governments are scrambling to keep up. In 2017, nearly 20 per cent of Europe’s population was aged 60 or more, a figure expected to spiral upwards by 35 per cent

by 2050. Yet the European Union bases its statistics for seniors and falling on data collected between 2010 and 2012 and the World Health Organisation’s latest report on the issue dates back 12 years. At the time, it found that between 28 to 35 per cent of people over the age of 65 would fall each year, while for people over the age of 70, their chances increase to between 32 to 42 per cent, depending on where they live.

Programmes such as "Falling Is The Past" are helping seniors to remain more steady on their feet. In France, a pilot project called "Pare à Chute", which literally means "block a fall", found that the number of at-risk seniors in care facilities in DECEMBER 2019 • 43

HOW TO FALL

the Paris region who managed not to fall between February 2016 and April 2017 increased from 91.6 per cent to 94.6 per cent. And here in the United Kingdom, Age UK has a fall prevention programme on its website, complete with tips on how to avoid falls that include exercises and reminders to visit your optician.

But with the growing number of seniors, recent studies also show that the number of falls resulting in death have skyrocketed. Researchers at Erasmus University Rotterdam, for example, have found that the total number of people in The Netherlands over the age of 80 who died from a fall rose from 391 in 2000 to 2,501 in 2016. And a US study

the lens in the eye that occurs over years and compromises vision.

A host of medications can affect balance, including those that treat anxiety, insomnia, allergies and pain. Your feet may be gnarled from arthritis and you may have difficulty unfolding your hips and knees, key joints needed for walking properly, all of which can lead to a sense of instability and a change in gait.

“Seniors will fall,” Professor Robinovitch says. "We really need to look at ways that minimise the risk for injury. It’s like driving a car, where there are speed limits, air bags and bumpers.”

Some of the suggestions to prevent or mitigate falls are commonsensical,

"We need to look at ways to minimise injury.

It's like driving a car, where there are air bags and bumpers" found that the number of US adults aged 75 and older who died from a fall more than doubled over 16 years, from nearly 52 to 122 fatalities per 100,000 between 2000 and 2016.

Professor Steve Robinovitch, of the School of Engineering Science at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, notes that an ageing population means more people with aggravating factors such as muscle and bone loss, dementia and cataracts—a clouding over of 44 • DECEMBER 2019

like eating right and not wearing flip-flops or high heels. Hip protectors—undergarments or stick-on versions that contain about 0.7 inches of padding on either side— are recommended but not popular because they can make you appear curvier than you actually are.

When it comes to falls themselves, the website of the American Association of Retired Persons contains tips from a professional stuntwoman on how to do so

Photo: Jasper Juinen for The New York Times

Hans (far right) at a physiotherapy session during the five-wee k course, "Falling Is In the Past"

properly: keep your elbows and knees bent, protect your head, don’t try to stop your fall and, if you can, land on the "meaty" parts of your body, such as your bottom.

Professor Robinovitch notes there is work being done already on futuristic projects such as exoskeleton suits, which contain computers and software that detect when tiny motors need to activate both electric "muscles" that mimic human ones and grips that act as tendons. And his team has just completed a four-year-long clinical trial in 150 randomised bedrooms of senior long-term care facilities to review the efficacy of "compliant" or soft flooring that people can theoretically fall on with little

or no mishap. The goal was to find a balance between softness and the ability of the floor to handle wheelchairs and other heavy equipment.

“We used an inch-thick rubber sublayer beneath hospital grade vinyl," he says. "When we simulated falls on the hip and the head in the lab, the flooring reduced the impact to the hip by 35 per cent and by 70 per cent to the head. From a physics perspective, it makes sense.”

Other factors that help mitigate injuries from a fall are more intangible. For example, even though Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland have been rated among the top ten countries in the world for seniors to live in, with excellent DECEMBER 2019 • 45

social services and free healthcare, Johanna Gustavsson, who a 2017 study into variations between researches seniors and falling as seniors’ falls in 12 European part of her job as a lecturer in the countries found that the elderly in department of Environmental and Scandinavia suffered the highest Life Sciences at Karlstad University number of broken bones from falls. in Sweden, goes even further.

Carmen Franse, a post-doctoral “Along with exercise, I think as little researcher in the public health environmental change as possible department at Erasmus University is the way to go,” she says. “Often, Rotterdam, speculated that a vitamin D family members think they’re deficiency may be the underlying cause. making it safer for their loved ones “It’s possible because they get much less by moving or removing furniture or sun there in winter,” she said. taking up rugs they see as tripping Still, experts say the most effective hazards. But all this does is take way to both prevent falls and fall away the familiar—and that can better is through targeted exercise cause problems, not solve them.” programmes, especially those that If you do think changes must include weight repetitions, balance be made, she emphasises the work and agility. importance of asking the senior what 46 • DECEMBER 2019

Photo: Jasper Juinen for The New York Times

Hans weight training at home. She is determined to prevent a fall, or reduce the risk of injury if she does

READER’S DIGEST

changes he or she would like and can accept. “Be very careful with the top-down, know-all perspective."

And she notes that a companion challenge is motivating seniors to start an exercise programme in the first place, because their focus tends to be on one day at a time. “Research shows they want to spend time with people they like,” she says. “In Sweden, we have a concept called fika, or people getting together for a coffee and food. If you want to get older people to exercise, have fika and they are more likely to come.”

P

am McEntee understands the concept of fika, if not the word itself. For the Montreal resident with short lavender hair and a rolling gait from nerve damage following two hip replacements seven years ago, falling is part of life, as is getting up again. A retired information technology programmer who only

admits to being over 65, she swears by classes in tai chi and qigong for her balance and core strength—and she walks her dog, Melo, a ten-yearold labrador-golden-retriever mix, on paths covered in roots, twigs and loose stones seven days a week, no matter the weather. “Melo and I are growing old together, and move it or lose it is our motto,” she says. “And walking with friends helps my mood.”

It’s all a matter of attitude, she continues. “Above all, don’t be afraid of falling. It’s a part of life.”

Back in Leusden, Hans says she has never backed down from a challenge.

Not when she was 23 and damaged her back so badly in a gym accident, she required two operations. And not when she fell down last spring.

“Thanks to the fall prevention training, which I did twice, I can continue to live in my home, in a neighbourhood I am familiar with.”

Don't be jelly…

Jellyfish are the oldest multicellular animals on the planet—even older than the dinosaurs. Scientists have found fossils dating back 500 million years Age doesn't necessarily mean wisdom though—these jelly critters don't have brains, and they don't have hearts or lungs either If you were to cut a jellyfish in half, the remains wouldn't die. Instead they'd regenerate, creating two new jellyfish A breed of jellyfish known as Lion's Mane can grow tentacles over 89 feet long. That makes them longer than a blue whale SOURCE: CBC.CA/KIDSCBC2/THE-FEED/10-COOL-THINGS-YOU-DIDNT-KNOW-ABOUT-JELLYFISH

DECEMBER 2019 • 47

HEALTH

KEEP CALM THIS CHRISTMAS Make sure your Christmas is merry, not miserable, by cultivating a new tradition of tranquillity Susannah Hickling is twice winner of the Guild of Health Writers Best Consumer Magazine Health Feature 48 • DECEMBER 2019

Let go of festive fairytales We all need to understand that there’s no such thing as the perfect Christmas. Family disputes, lost loved ones or changed plans can all wreck your fantasies. It’s important to know how to let go and understand that you can’t control Christmas. It’s better to be realistic and search for the magical moments even amid the festive chaos.

Prioritise pleasure Often our happiest memories of Christmas are made of the simple things—enjoying a meal with your family, sitting by the fireside, playing board games. So why not sit down and consider what it is you really love about the festive season and aim to put the simple pleasures at the heart of your plans?

Sort out your schedule Jot down what you absolutely have to do and plan when you’re going to do those things. That will help ensure you don’t overcommit. If other things come up that don’t fit in with those priorities, then feel free to just say no.

It’s important to understand that we can’t—and don’t have to—do it all.

Plan for "me" time While creating that Christmas schedule, make room for quality time by yourself. It could be a soothing bath or a cycle ride or catching up on a box set. That will help you feel as if you’re in control of your life and not being overtaken by events.

Ask for help When you’re planning a party or Christmas dinner, ask guests to bring a contribution, such as a dessert or a centre piece for the table. That will ease the stress of catering for a crowd.

Make gifts mean something It's so stressful making multiple trips

to the shops, seeing the credit rack up and your bank balance plummet.

Consider holding a “Secret Santa” event so that everyone just buys one substantial gift for a member of the family or group of friends. Or consider an experience—if you’re a grandparent, how about filling 12 envelopes with a slip of paper with an outing written on each and giving it to the grandchildren? The activities might be a trip to the zoo, a picnic in the park, beachcombing at the seaside. It’s also a way of creating lasting memories.

Plan meals, then forget about them Obviously, we don’t mean you should neglect to feed people! But you can make your life a lot easier by preparing dishes that can be left alone in the oven or slow cooker rather than those that you have to attend to all the time. This allows you to spend more time with your guests and actually enjoy the party.

Share the love into next year When you see your diary filling up with social events in the run-up to Christmas, consider pushing some of them into January. It will take the stress out of the holiday season and give you some catch-ups to look forward to in the New Year. n

For more weekly health tips and stories, sign up to our newsletter at readersdigest.co.uk DECEMBER 2019 • 49

H E A LT H

Slowly does it Don’t wolf your Christmas dinner down, but break up each course with activities. For example, you could sing carols after the starter and exchange presents before dessert.

How To Recover From Overeating Planning to stuff yourself like a turkey this festive season?

If so, take these steps to beat afterdinner bloating: Don’t starve yourself While you might want to save yourself for your Christmas lunch, it’s wiser to have a light, healthy breakfast so you’re not tempted to eat way more than you should when the meal of the year arrives.

Start with water Instead of tucking into a hefty starter or nibbles, down a tall glass of water.

This will help you feel full and stop you overeating.

50 • DECEMBER 2019

Cut back on the fizz Don’t overdo the champagne or sparkling water—those bubbles can make your tummy feel uncomfortable.

Go easy on the Brussels While sprouts are one of your five a day, they are—how do we put this politely?—renowned for their flatulent effect, so limit your intake.

Don’t talk too much Admittedly, it sounds a bit unsociable given that Christmas Day is the most likely occasion for sitting down to dine with family and friends. Bear in mind, though, that simultaneously talking and eating can make you swallow air and feel bloated.

Finish with herbal tea A nice hot cup of ginger and peppermint can aid digestion and help banish bloating and gas.

Don’t crash out on the couch While you might be feeling sorely tempted to head for the sofa after a hearty Christmas lunch, lying horizontally can provoke heartburn, as stomach acid will rise without gravity to stop it.

READER’S DIGEST

Ask The Expert: Sleep Dave Gibson is a naturopath, hypnotherapist and osteopath. He runs sleep advice clinics in North London and thesleepsite.co.uk How did you come to be a sleep expert?

Previously I worked in advertising and then retrained as an osteopath.

I became a sleep therapist and hypnotherapist because everyone that I was treating had some kind of issues around sleep.

Why is sleep so important?

Firstly, it’s important for physical recovery. We get growth hormones at night to help the body repair and grow. But mentally it’s important too. Cognitive function, short-term memory, our ability to learn, creativity, mood—all those are restored at night. In the longer term, if we don’t sleep properly, we are more prone to diabetes, heart attacks, strokes. Equally, our immune function suffers.

What are the main causes of insomnia?

Stress is the main issue for most of us. But access to the internet 24/7 is a growing problem. It’s not just about the blue light emitted by screens,

but also about hyper-stimulation of the brain.

What quick tips can you offer people to help overcome it?

Address long-term insomnia with your GP. In the short term, cut out all caffeine, including cola and energy drinks, to check your sensitivity, then introduce a maximum of two cups in the morning only. Always get up at the same time. Learn to nap again.

You can nap ahead if you’re going to be up late, but don’t sleep after 3pm.

How can people sleep better in the long term?

Opt for a Mediterranean diet, take a magnesium supplement to see if it helps you sleep and exercise a bit more. Couples should go for a super king bed if they can. The width of a mattress is just as important as the quality, especially if you're a couple.

But don’t be afraid to sleep in single beds if that’s what you need because of snoring or different sleep/wake times. A tidy room helps too. n DECEMBER 2019 • 51

HEALTH

I

In A Silent Way Dr Max Pemberton reflects on the medical world’s evolving views on sexuality Max is a hospital doctor, author and columnist. He currently works full time in mental health for the NHS. His new book, The Marvellous Adventure of Being Human, is out now 52 • DECEMBER 2019

t was spring a few years ago, and I was waiting for the lift in my block of flats when the old man standing to my right turned to me. “I bet there have been some advances since my day, haven’t there?” he asked. I wasn’t sure what he meant. “You’re a doctor, aren’t you?” he continued and beckoned at my name badge, which I’d forgotten to remove. “I used to be a surgeon—years ago. I’m 89 now.”

He held out his hands, as though they were evidence of his past profession.

The lift came and we both got in.

“So you must have been practising when the NHS was born?” I said, “what an amazing time to have been a doctor.” We were interrupted by the lift doors opening. This was my floor.

“Why don’t you come in for tea sometime? I’m Anthony” he said, so a few days later I found myself sitting in his flat eating custard creams. I’d been there an hour when the front door opened and another man in his eighties walked in, carrying shopping bags. “This is my brother-in-law, Geoff”, he said. We talked about the theatre and the opera and a bit about medicine. Later, I learned from

another neighbour that Anthony rarely left his flat, as he found it difficult to walk and Geoff, who was now his carer, was too frail himself to push a wheelchair. I offered to take Anthony out myself and over the course of that summer, it became quite a regular thing. One day, while we went round the park, he began to talk about Geoff. “We’ve lived together for 50 years you know. I dread to think how he’ll manage when I’m gone” he said, looking at me, then down at the ground. “Max, I’ve got something to tell you. It’s about Geoff: he isn’t my brother-in-law” he said, hesitating.

“Oh, I know” I interrupted “he’s your partner.” Anthony looked at me in amazement.

“You knew?” he asked. I nodded and didn’t mention that the entire block knew.

“Don’t tell them you know though”, a neighbour had said to me “they’re very sensitive about it.” As we sat on the park bench and he talked about the harassment and persecution that he and Geoff had experienced as a result of their sexuality, I realised why they were so sensitive. Anthony had to keep his private life a secret for his entire working career. He had lived lies for so long that now, he found it hard to accept that attitudes have changed. Even when homosexuality had become legalised in this country, he explained, there was still dreadful prejudice towards gay people, particularly within the

medical establishment. Despite being a world expert in his branch of surgery, he feared that he would lose his job if his secret came out and he had been blackmailed by a colleague

HE HAD NEVER BEEN ABLE TO RELAX AND

ENJOY THIS LIFE WITH GEOFF AND NOW IT WAS NEARLY OVER

for years. I tried to explain to him that things were different now—that there were gay doctors and nurses and that no one thought anything of it. He was disbelieving. It was so sad to see this frail, weak old man, still bowed down by a secret that had dogged him his entire life. He had never been able to relax and enjoy his life with Geoff, and now it was nearly over. While it’s tempting to look back on the past and remember it with fondness, it’s important to remember that sometimes things change for the better. I’m proud that we live in a liberal society and of the advances made in medicine since Anthony qualified as a doctor. One of the greatest is that doctors and nurses can just get on with their job, regardless of their sexuality. n DECEMBER 2019 • 53

HEALTH

The Doctor Is In Dr Max Pemberton Q: I think my granddaughter, who is 15, might be suffering from an eating disorder as she has recently lost significant weight. I’m not sure how to bring this issue up with my daughter-in-law without causing offence by suggesting she should have noticed herself. What should I do next?

—Debbie, 62 A: Thank you for your letter. Dramatic weight loss in someone this age is indeed very concerning and it’s right that you are worried. We know that eating disorders are on the rise in teenagers. We also know that the evidence shows that the sooner they receive treatment then the better the prognosis. Yes, these conversations can be tricky, but you owe it to your granddaughter to speak up if you are concerned. There may be another reason for her recent weight loss but it’s fair to assume it might be an eating disorder until proven otherwise. She will need to be assessed by a 54 • DECEMBER 2019

specialist in eating disorders in young people and so will need to be referred to her local service by her GP. You could try speaking to her first and offer to go with her to her GP. Try to find a time when you are both calm and won’t be disturbed—and not before or after a meal. People with an eating disorder often don’t think they have a problem so if this doesn’t work or she declines this offer, then I think you should bring it up with your son and daughter-in-law in a calm and matter of fact way. You should prepare yourself that your granddaughter may be angry or defensive—this is common in people with an eating disorder. Do be as informed as possible about eating disorders. Beat is an eating disorder charity that offers a lot of information.

Their helpline is 0808 801 0677 and their website is beateatingdisorders.org.uk. n Got a health question for our resident doctor? Email it confidentially to askdrmax@ readersdigest.co.uk illustration by Javier Muñoz

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WELLWOMAN ENERGY

HEALTH

Repetition is the key to successful recall, as our memory expert Jonathan Hancock explains

Repeat After Me…

S

ometimes, repeating information helps you to remember. Recite a poem enough, or sing along to a song whenever it’s played on the radio, and it’ll soon be lodged in your brain.

However, think how many times you’ve looked at your watch. Can you describe it from memory? And we’ve all seen countless ten-pound notes—so why can’t we remember every detail of their design?

Seeing something repeatedly isn’t a guarantee you’ll remember it. How many students read and reread their notes, only to find the information hasn’t magically remained in their brain?

But the right kind of repetition does work. The secret is to do something with your subject matter.

That’s why regular physical movements create muscle memories, but also why you can learn by whistling a tune repeatedly. And you can bring the same active approach to any kind of learning. Try it with the following information—the capitals of the ten most populous US states:

California: Sacramento Texas: Austin Florida: Tallahassee New York: Albany Pennsylvania: Harrisburg 56 • DECEMBER 2019

Illinois: Springfield Ohio: Columbus Georgia: Atlanta North Carolina: Raleigh Michigan: Lansing

Study the states for a few minutes. Create reminders for the ones you don’t know.

Maybe all the movie stars in California get the sack (SACramento), or a Texas oilman drives an old AUSTIN car. Then, use repetition to establish long-term learning.

1. Recap the material straight away. Run through it in your mind to ensure you’ve gathered and understood everything you need, and to start committing it to memory.

2. Return to it: tomorrow, a couple of days later, and at increasing intervals after that.

3. Test yourself—or get someone else to. Reinforce anything you didn’t get right.

4. Re-use the information in some way each time.

You could record yourself talking about it from memory, illustrate it with doodles, or even teach it to someone else.

See if it works with the state capitals, then start taking the same approach with other things you want to learn.

Recap, return, reinforce.

You’ll soon see that it’s the “repeat prescription” for a better memory.

Jonathan’s new book, The Study Book, is out now from John Murray Learning

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Did you know that one in four adults aged 55 and over tell no one if they’re struggling with their mental health?

Leading UK health insurer, Bupa, has found baby-boomers are neglecting their wellbeing. They want to help more people access support for mind and body.

An issue that shouldn’t be ignored Two thirds of the over 55s reported experiencing mental health issues. Yet, many keep quiet. One in four (27%) tell nobody, with fewer confiding in a partner or friend than younger generations and less than half consulting a doctor.1 Even those who do seek help delay by over 50 days on average.

Why they feel unable to act Lack of action stems from a lack of awareness that the symptoms could indicate a mental health problem. Less than one in three over 55s feel confident in recognising the symptoms, compared to nearly half of 18-34-year-olds.2

How Bupa can help Not only do Bupa cover more mental health conditions than any other leading UK health insurer†, they provide continued support from specialists through life’s ups and downs.

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184% of 18-34-year olds tell at least one person about their symptoms. 43% tell a partner and 50% tell a friend, compared to 33% and 28% respectively for over 55s.

231% of over 55s said they were fully aware of depression and 26% are fully aware of anxiety, compared to 46% and 46% respectively for 18-34s. †As of May 2019, based on internally conducted research of the consumer health insurance market. Refers to standard mental health cover when this is included in the selected health cover product. *Applies to Reader’s Digest members on quotes for new Bupa By You policies. Discounts will be reviewed on 10/09/2020 and any changes will apply to renewals and new quotes thereafter. Quotes are valid for 14 days. T&Cs apply.

Reader’s Digest introduces Bupa health insurance. Bupa health insurance is provided by Bupa Insurance Limited. Bupa Insurance Limited is authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority.

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INSPIRE

The Snow Queen, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

BEST OF BEST OF

British British

Scottish Ballet celebrated their 50th anniversary in 2019, and what better way to close the season than with an ethereal performance of The Snow Queen?

This glittering Christmas tale— inspired by the Hans Christian Anderson story—takes audiences on a journey from a bustling Christmas market, through to a fairy tale forest and the imposing Snow Queen’s palace. Based on the same story that inspired the Disney smash hit, Frozen, it’s set to the spellbinding music of RimskyKorsakov, performed by a live orchestra, and choreographed by Christopher Hampson, Scottish Ballet’s artistic director.

If you find yourself enraptured by the glittering ballet, you can also enjoy several supporting events, including a pre-show talk and a behind-the-scenes tour.

December 7–29, scottishballet.co.uk/ event/snow-queen

CHRISTMAS

© Nicola Selby and Eve McConnachie

SHOWS

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BEST OF BRITISH

The Wizard of Oz, Leeds Playhouse It’s a classic Christmas Day movie choice, but this year, rather than enjoying the adventures of Dorothy and friends while half asleep and full of overcooked turkey, why not take in the colourful story on the big stage, at Leeds Playhouse?

Dorothy’s humble life in Kansas is quite literally turned upside down when a tornado rips through her village, flinging her and her trusty

60 • DECEMBER 2019

dog Toto into the world of Oz. From there, they follow the yellow brick road towards the Emerald City where the mysterious Wizard of Oz promises to magic them back to Kansas.

Soar over the rainbow with this vivid production inside the newly refurbished theatre.

November 20–January 25, leedsplayhouse.org.uk

READER’S DIGEST

Cinderella, The Vaults, London The Vaults have a well-earned reputation for utterly immersive performances, and this Christmas production of Cinderella by Not Too Tame is no exception.

Below the vaults of Waterloo station, the creative team have constructed a traditional English pub, in which all the characters audiences remember from their childhood collide, spilling pints, meeting their mates and pouring their hearts out on the karaoke machine.

There’s even the chance to buy your pint from the on-stage bar or stay behind after the curtain drops for a spot of festive karaoke. It's the perfect

alternative to traditional panto for theatre-goers who have grown tired of repeatedly shouting, “He’s behind you!”

Says artistic director and founder of Not Too Tame, Jimmy Fairhurst, “Cinderella is a great night out, that is accessible to anyone and everyone who enjoys a few drinks, a sing song and time with their friends and loved ones after a hard day’s graft. This show is a culmination of several years of honing our craft and the 360-degree live experience is a testament to our ability to throw a kicking party.”

November 22–January 12, thevaults.london/cinderella DECEMBER 2019 • 61

BEST OF BRITISH

Miracle on 34th Street, Playhouse, Liverpool Imagine a Christmas without magic or whimsy—just the cold hard “facts”.

There is no Father Christmas. No reindeer, no flying, no workshop of elves. In fact, the entire holiday caters more to singing the praises of capitalism, than bringing authentic Christmas cheer. So say six-year-old Susan and her mother, until a chain of distinctly un-Christmassy events come together to bring the spirit of the season back into their lives.

Whether you favour the 1947 original, or the twinkly-eyed cast of the 1994 remake, nearly every Christmas-lover holds a special place in their heart for Miracle on 34th Street. This musical incarnation of the much-loved films brings a new

62 • DECEMBER 2019

charm to the story and includes the singalong favourite “It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas”.

Says artistic director Gemma Bodinetz, “I can’t wait to bring a little magic to Liverpool with a show that I think will delight the whole family.”

December 7–January 4, everymanplayhouse.com/whats-on/ miracle-on-34th-street

READER’S DIGEST

Swan Lake, Northern Ireland Tchaikovsky’s hauntingly beautiful music is inseparable from the canon of truly great ballet, and this Christmas, Ballet Ireland are bringing one of his best works to stages across Ireland.

Swan Lake tells the story of Princess Odette, who was transformed into a swan by an evil baron—a spell that can only be broken if somebody who has never been in love before not only falls for her, but swears to marry her.

Unbeknownst to the lovers, a dark swan—the daughter of the evil baron—has her own part to play in the sorry tale, and their love looks set to be

doomed to tragedy. Made even more famous by its influence on the 2010 horror flick, Black Swan, Swan Lake remains perhaps the greatest love story of modern ballet. This Ballet Ireland production offers hypnotic choreography, high drama and exquisite costumes.

The swan queen herself is played with great strength and elegance by Ballet Ireland’s principal dancer, Ryoko Yagyu, and the astonishing talent of this small ballet company more than makes up for their size.

November 6–December 22, balletireland.ie/on-stage/swanlake

63 103

BEST OF BRITISH

White Christmas, Dominion Theatre, London One-time war buddies Bob and Phil team up after the conflict to make their living as a song-and-dance duo, and can’t help but fall for a beautiful sister act…

If you’re dreaming of a white Christmas, look no further than the film that has sound tracked every subsequent holiday season since its release. Irving Berlin’s White Christmas, which originally starred Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, and Vera-Ellen, has now

64

been adapted for the stage, taking over London’s Dominion Theatre until January 4.

With its sing-along soundtrack and hilarious snow-capped hijinks, it’s impossible not to be charmed by the stage incarnation of this classic film.

Featuring the original music and lyrics by Irving Berlin and choreography by two-time Olivier Award-winner Stephen Mear.

November 16–January 4, nederlander. co.uk/whats-on/white-christmas

READER’S DIGEST

Swiss Family Robinson, The Core at Corey Cube, Northamptonshire Introduce the kids to a tale of adventure from your own childhood with this rollicking family show from the award-winning comedy theatre company, New Old Friends.

Far from the snow-frosted caper of other Christmas shows, Swiss Family Robinson will cast you ashore a sizzling desert island, where our shipwrecked heroes—plus the family dog—must use every ounce of creativity they have to thrive and survive in their new home.

Says New Old Friends co-founder Heather Westwell, “This story is a

real feel-good family tale of overcoming adversity and the joy of togetherness, which feels perfect for Christmas. We couldn’t be more excited about the ingenious machines that Fritz makes. If we get them right, they will be unlike anything else you have seen on stage before.”

December 6–29, newoldfriends.co.uk Have you seen a particularly enchanting Christmas show in recent years? Email readersletters@readersdigest.co.uk and let us know DECEMBER 2019 • 65

If I Ruled The World Luke Evans Luke Evans is a British actor best known for his roles in such blockbusters as Clash of the Titans and Beauty and the Beast.

He’s now releasing his first music album, At Last Recycling would be compulsory.

It blows my mind how much plastic one person can accumulate within a week. People should be held accountable for not recycling, as nobody has an excuse to not do it.

I went to the slums in Mumbai a few years ago with Save the Children and one had 9 million people living in it. It’s next to the biggest rubbish tip in Asia and they can’t do anything about it. When you see it, you just think, My God, is it already too late? It’s a scary prospect.

66 • DECEMBER 2019

There’d be a day that all religions celebrate together. I’d call it a Multireligious Celebratory Day. It would involve capital cities having open days, cathedrals covered in Buddhist shrines and candles, or Buddhist temples having an altar with Jesus Christ on it, just mixing it all up.

Religious disagreements cause so many problems in the world—if people could see that we’re all on the same track, the world would be a better place.

I’d eliminate animal enclosures.

Especially for larger animals such as orcas, whales, dolphins and tigers— they shouldn’t be in captivity.

I remember going to a zoo when I was about 14 and seeing a polar bear rocking back and forth. This rocking happens in humans as well, it’s a sort

INSPIRE of calming solace that we do when we’re lost and we have no one to calm us. When you see an animal doing it, it’s heart-breaking. The only way [captivity] would work is if we had big safari parks where research and conservation could be carried out in a more fitting environment.

Young people would talk to their elder relatives more. I left home at 16 and made an effort to reach out to my grandparents often. I didn’t realise when I was young how important it is to know what they’ve been through.

Young people these days move so fast, and there’s so much vanity—it’s all about this “selfie” mentality. The truth is, we’re all going to get old. If we’re lucky, we’ll all live to be as old as our grandparents. And wouldn’t you like there to be somebody interested in asking you questions when you’re their age?

I’d name and shame online bullies.

Anonymity on social media and the internet brings the worst possible outcomes: suicide, self harm. There are young people among my family and friends who are suffering from online bullying and they don’t know who’s bullying them. These people are pathetic, weak cowards and they shouldn’t be able to hide behind a fake profile. I’m 40 years old and I’ve been through a lot in life so it doesn’t bother me, but for impressionable young people it must be horrific. They

might be dealing with their hormones, sexuality or a difficult upbringing, and now on top of that there’s anonymous bullying. It shouldn’t be happening.

Everyone would have a talent. It’s very important to find a passion.

I don’t necessarily mean something life-changing, but everybody should be given the opportunity to find something they love to do because it’s like therapy. I love to sing, so when I shower I sing out loud and get out feeling like a different person.

It’s cathartic. It can be anything: dog walking, gardening, acting, singing, building. We don’t do that enough.

Imposing religion on children would be banned. You could only choose a belief when you’re old enough to understand what it means.

[Faith] should be a personal choice, and if you don’t want it at all, that’s equally acceptable. When I was 16, I chose not to be part of any organised religion and it’s liberating to have made that decision on my own.

Religious beliefs influence many aspects of your life—what you eat, how you dress, who you speak to—so it has to be a choice made by you, no one else. Many people don’t have that opportunity and suffer because of it. n As told to Eva Mackevic Luke Evans’ album At Last is out on November 22 DECEMBER 2019 • 67

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TUT’S FINAL TOUR

INSPIRE

Ancient Egypt’s most notorious pharaoh visits London for the very last time…

by Anna Walker and Eva Mackevic

I

t’s 1922, anD archaeologist Howard Carter is desperate. He was hired by the fifth Earl of Carnarvon 15 years previously to oversee excavations in the Valley of the Kings, but while other Egyptologists are discovering glorious things through their digs in this ancient land, he has unearthed nothing more than a mummified cat, and time is running out. Carnarvon has agreed to fund just one more season of digging…

That final season was to prove perhaps the most important in all of Egyptology. Just as they neared giving up hope, a chance discovery by a local boy looking for a place to prop a bowl of water, suggested the top of a staircase was jutting out of the ground. Howard’s first explorations warned of disappointment—the evidence of two historical robberies led to concern that the tomb may now contain nothing at all. But what he eventually unearthed would shape the way the modern world viewed ancient Egypt forever.

In his journal, Carter wrote, “I inserted the candle and peered in…At first I could see nothing… but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold— everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment—an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by—I was struck dumb with amazement.”

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With the discovery came global fame for Tutankhamun, who died aged just 19.

Ancient Egyptians believed every man dies twice—first, when he loses life, and again the moment his name is uttered for the last time.

Carter’s discovery was to make King Tut, the Boy King—ironically obscure in his own time—immortal…

After years of touring the world to sell-out shows, in 2019, Tutankhamun embarked on his final world tour before being laid permanently to rest in the new Grand Egyptian Museum. His journey, which began in California and received great acclaim in Paris, will take him as far from home as Japan, Sydney and South Korea.

From now until May 2020, he stops off at London’s Saatchi Gallery. Here’s a glimpse of the treasures you’ll witness if you choose to pay one last farewell to the most notorious pharaoh of the ancient world…

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GUARDIAN STATUE This life-sized guardian statue is one of a set of two that vigilantly watched over the entrance to Tut’s burial chamber, and was one of the first things Carter saw upon entering the tomb. While strikingly lifelike and commanding as a whole, it’s their eyes that immediately draw your attention because of their unnerving remoteness.

No matter where you find yourself in relation to the statues, they never seem to be looking directly at you. Curator Tarek El Awady explains that this is because the statues were made for the afterlife, meaning they need to be looking farther than our world—they need to be looking into the eternal life of the king. It’s one of the objects that has left Cairo for the first time and one that the exhibition’s organisers refer to as “a big win.”

SKIFF STATUETTE Buried alongside the Boy King were a variety of tools and statues designed to help him on his path to the afterlife. Though pharaohs were buried in the Valley of the Kings, it was believed that the netherworld began upon the horizon, at the place where the sun sets, and that the dead would have to undergo an arduous journey in order to join the sun god, Ra, for eternity. This scene of Tutankhamun on a skiff shows the young king using a spear aboard a light boat in order to catch fish for the long days of his journey—the magic placed on these objects by the ancient priests would mean the tools and vessel could become a reality for the king in his journey.

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T U T ’ S F I N A L TO U R

GILDED WOODEN NAOS One of the most mysterious objects discovered in Tutankhamun’s tomb and on display at the Saatchi, is this ornate gilded wooden naos. Never before has a depiction of the relationship between a king and his queen been discovered with this level of detail—it shows that King Tut and his wife (and half-sister), Ankhesenamun were extremely close.

Inside the shrine, Carter found a stand for a statue, but no statue itself, only footprints on the base of the stand, where the statue should be. Many interpretations as to its meaning have been offered over the years, but Tarek El Awady perhaps makes the most convincing when he suggests it was a stand for a statue of the god Amun, whose name means “the hidden one”.

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DUCK CONTAINER Not every discovery from the tomb is so mysterious, however—some appear downright comical. This container in the shape of a cooked duck was filled with the remains of a real, mummified duck. A priest would have cast special magic upon the bird before its death and consequent embalming, which would ensure that, should the Boy King wish to eat duck in the afterlife, his desire could be granted. There are many similar containers on display at the Saatchi, including beef ribs and a shank of meat.

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COFFINETTE You might be surprised to learn that organs were dealt with separately during the mummification process in ancient Egypt.

Each organ had a specially designated case in order to protect it during the passage to the next world. King Tut was no different and this beautiful, gold inlaid canopic coffinette was designed to store the young pharaoh’s liver.

COLOSSAL STATUE The final room of the exhibition is the quietest yet the most awe-inspiring one. Its sole inhabitant is the colossal, quartzite statue of Tutankhamun. Ten-foot-tall, he stands proud in this dimly lit room as enigmatic traditional Egyptian music fills the air. Every once in a while, a woman’s voice whispers his name with solemnity and pathos...

“Tutankhamun”, to remind us that the great pharaoh is still living his eternal life, as his name is far from forgotten.

Anywhere he travels in the world with the exhibition, this is the room that the visitors spend most time in. As the organisers reveal to us, visitors often come here to seek solace, or to reflect upon personal grief or trauma. The ancient Egyptian notion of being forever alive in the memories of other people is a comforting and resonant one in the face of loss.

DECEMBER 2019 • 75

him toured Upon the world finally during the 1960s entering the and 70s, then again tomb and catching a few years ago, and the first glimpse now with our current of the treasure The wishing cup exhibit. He has seen trove it had been many different cities, harbouring for many different cultures, thousands of years, many wonderful things.”

Howard Carter uttered two This current exhibition, words in response when Lord celebrating the 100th anniversary of Carnarvon asked him what he could the discovery, is the biggest one yet, see. He said, “wonderful things.” touring ten cities around the world Interestingly, those also happened before returning to Egypt forever. to be the words inscribed on one Out of the 150 items on display, 66 of the first of many objects they have never travelled outside of Egypt discovered on that fateful day: the before, making it a very exciting, but magnificent alabaster chalice which incredibly precious venture which Carter nicknamed the “wishing cup” requires meticulous attention to after the prayers and wishes for the organisation and security.

Boy King that it bore.

John Norman, the managing It read: “May you live thousands of director, likens it to moving around years. May your eyes see wonderful a presidential candidate: “There are things.” In many ways, that wish undisclosed trucks and locations, did come true, according to Tarek and the security is quite similar El Awady. “King Tut is the most to that of a military operation. It’s travelled king from ancient Egypt. very discreet—it happens, and All these exhibitions dedicated to 86 • DECEMBER 2019 76

READER’S DIGEST

nobody even knows it’s happening”.

But before the artefacts are shipped off to their next destination by a special fine arts division at FedEx (who work with museums across the world, including the Louvre), they must undergo a lengthy prep and packaging process that in itself resembles mummification.

Each of the 150 objects has a specifically built travel case which lives within another case—enclosed within yet another case, so there are three cushioned cases protecting it in total.

Says John: “It takes us a week to de-install all the objects in the exhibition, there is a process and formality of doing that. Then the objects go to the new city and it takes another week to ten days to condition, report, and to install the objects.”

After spending 3,000 years in oblivion, Tut is once again being treated like royalty and living his dream of travel and adventure, attracting millions of people around the world to pay him a visit and marvel at his cherished belongings.

Though insignificant in life, in death he achieved the goal of every pharaoh—to cross the vast ocean of time and achieve immortality. n Tutankhamun: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh is on at the Saatchi Gallery until May 3, 2020. For tickets, visit tutankhamunlondon.com DECEMBER 2019 • 77

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INSPIRE

A Greek Cypriot

Christmas

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Steph Green reminisces about growing up in a Greek Cypriot household and all the delicious flavours that accompanied her every Christmas illustrations by Alice Cleary

A TA S T E O F G R E E K C H R I S T M A S

What’s Christmas like in your household?

“My dad and my uncles fight over who gets to eat the lamb brain,” says Toula, the main character in the 2002 film My Big Fat Greek Wedding. “And then my Aunt Voula forks the eyeball and chases me around with it, trying to make me eat it because it’ll make me smart. We’re always together, just eating, eating, eating.”

Perfectly summing up the sheer obsession with food found in Greek households, this film is often offered up as an example when Greek people are asked about their festive traditions. There are as many as 335,000 Greek Cypriots living in the UK today, with each bringing with them family traditions and recipes that remain in generations and Christmas traditions year after year­—with many of these revolving around eating, eating, and yet more eating.

Despite this, Greek Cypriot baking in particular doesn’t hold as much widespread revere as other countries’ reputations like France or Italy. The best Cypriot bakers won’t have attended esteemed cookery schools or have perfected their techniques in formal training; sometimes 82 • DECEMBER 2019

recipes are haphazard, based on instinct, and vary from household to household. However, there’s one common thread: family tradition and lineage, with recipes being perfected through the sacred rite of hospitality and passed on from parent to child.

Though Cypriot baking now no longer conjures up the image of peasant women kneading bread in whitewash-walled village houses, the smells of their creations still linger today in households across the United Kingdom.

My mother, Theodosia, inherited this sense of above-and-beyond hospitality from my grandparents, who emigrated from Patriki, a tiny village in Cyprus (and the birthplace of George Michael), to London in the 1950s.

“Christmas is a time for welcoming people into your home: not just

“If a passerby drops in unannounced, it’s imperative to feed them" family," she explains, "but friends and neighbours too. You’d always make sure there was more food in the house in case someone popped in. You’d never offer a cup of tea or coffee and not bring something out.”

My aunt, Koulla, echoes the same sentiment. “If a passerby drops in unannounced, it’s imperative to feed them. You give them all the food you’ve prepared and don’t eat any yourself, in case they want

more. You wait until they’ve left, even if you’re starving.” It’s true— go to any Greek home and they’ll scramble to feed you whether you’re hungry or not, expectantly waiting for you to finish every crumb.

Refusing food in a Greek household is almost a form of sacrilege.

I have many Yuletide memories from my childhood—the drama that unfolded when my sister DECEMBER 2019 • 83

A TA S T E O F G R E E K C H R I S T M A S

dropped a photo frame on my head in 2006, or how every year we pretend not to notice that my bappou (grandad) cheats by putting a joker up his sleeve as we play gounga (rummy)—but the most vivid and prevailing memories are of the delicious aromas that would float from the kitchen while family members baked. Up to my elbows in sticky dough as Nat King Cole warbled from the speakers, I always loved baking with my mum around this time, painstakingly shaping kourabiedes or helping her measure

to the communal family Christmas meal: “if you make the macaronia dou fournou then I’ll bring the koubebia.” The soft glow of candles by the worktops lights a production line of stretching, measuring and rolling from aunt to mother to yiayia (grandmother); this is what Christmas means to many Greek Cypriot families living in the UK. The most common smells you’d find emanating from a Greek Cypriot kitchen in December are clove, cinnamon, orange, honey, rosewater and mastiha. Mastiha,

“Now in my twenties, I still hold a sort of manic love for the festive season” fruit for the Christmas cake.

Now in my twenties, I still hold a sort of manic love for the festive season and its food, much to the amusement and mild annoyance of my loved ones, and I’m not alone; for religious or simply cultural reasons, the festive season in particular holds a deified role in Greek Cypriot households around the country.

Weeks in advance shopping lists are drawn up, rosewater stores are restocked, bottles of zivania brandy procured, orders put in at the local hellenic bakery. Families coordinate and barter over who’ll bring what 84 • DECEMBER 2019

with its pine and cedar flavour, is an important ingredient used liberally in many Greek Cypriot Christmas recipes. A liqueur flavoured with resin obtained from the mastic tree, it forms in distinctive "teardrops" on the Greek island of Chios.

Once dried, the resin can be chewed—hence the English term "masticate"—or can be distilled with alcohol and sugar to make mastiha. You’ll find this subtle yet unique flavour in kourabiedes, a crescent-moon or round shaped biscuit found in every Cypriot house at Christmas. These crumbly,

buttery, shortbread biscuits are made with ground almonds and flavoured with mastiha, rosewater and vanilla, with a whole clove pressed into each biscuit before baking which represents the spices gifted by the three wise men to Jesus at his birth. Once baked, you sprinkle them liberally with a suitably snowy layer of icing sugar.

Versions of the kourabiede can be found throughout the former Ottoman Empire, from the Iranian qurabiya to the Moroccan ghoriba, but the icing sugar is unique to the Greek version.

Another favourite Christmastime treat in my household is galaktoboureko, grainy semolina custard encased in filo pastry and then drowned—and I mean drowned—in a clear sweet syrup that has been flavoured with either lemon, orange or rosewater.

Traditionally, families would use galaktos butter—a strong-tasting blend of sheep and cow’s milk—but ordinary butter is often used in the UK, producing a delicious tray of sticky sweetness that has turned a deep, crispy golden brown in the oven.

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Like many other cultures, Greek Cypriots have their own form of the fried dough snack—though of course, ours is soaked with a hot honey syrup, whereas many Arabic incarnations use cardamom or saffron. Crispy on the outside and fluffy in the middle, loukoumades are little balls of deliciousness sprinkled with cinnamon and chopped walnuts, with the name from the Turkish lokma meaning "mouthful". Melomakarona are also a Christmas staple, known for their spicy hit of flavour and crumbly texture. These dairy-free cookies 86 • DECEMBER 2019

use a semolina dough made using extra virgin olive oil, with varying family recipes deciding to put the focus on orange or spice.

Either way, ingredients used tend to include cinnamon, clove, orange zest and brandy, and once baked the cookies are drenched in a hot honey syrup—I’m sure you’re sensing a pattern here—and rolled in chopped walnuts. It doesn’t need pointing out that Greek desserts always include an eye-watering amount of sweetness—it’s no surprise that my bappou still likes to have four sugars in his tea.

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New Year’s Eve also carries its own baking traditions. Vasilopita, a moist orange cake that has been baked with a pound coin in the mixture, is sliced and doled out at midnight, with whoever unearths the hidden coin in their slice set to enjoy a year of good luck. Although the aforementioned photo framemaiming incident occurred in 2006, this was also the one and only year that the coin appeared in my slice, although I can’t quite remember whether my ten-year-old self enjoyed a lucky 2007 or not.

ago; dog-eared and honey-stained A slice of homemade recipe books are slowly gathering vasilopita dust on the shelf in favour of frequenting online recipes and artfully edited food blogs. I rarely reach for our family copy of Traditional Greek Cooking from Cyprus and Beyond anymore, where my mother has painstakingly added essential handwritten notes—“double the cheese!”, “use fresh mint, not dried!”—in the margins. The first-generation immigrants of the Cypriot diaspora are ageing—my grandparents

“Stained cook books are gathering dust in favour of online recipes" As expected, though, these traditions vary from family to family: I’ve only ever enjoyed one year of having the winning slice, but my best friend, Christina, tells me that her yiayia messes with tradition and inserts more than one coin depending on how many young grandchildren there are.

As Greeks continue to raise their families in the UK, traditions are slowly beginning to wane.

Multitudes of Greek bakeries are reducing the need to make everything from scratch like my yiayia would always do 50 years

are both now in their midnineties—and their children are adopting more and more anglicised traditions. The ratio of melomakarona to mince pies is slowly tipping. And yet, when December rolls around, Greek Cypriot families still make the time to recreate the buttery, crumbly biscuits of their youth. The baking aromas permeate the room and spread joy.

Gastronomy is the catalyst for nostalgia and togetherness, and, for me, the spirit of the festive season has never smelled so sweet. n DECEMBER 2019 • 87

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Whilst it has many important bodily functions, the role it plays in skin health and in slowing the ageing process of your skin is significant – it strengthens and improves the integrity of your skin, it provides structure and firmness, it improves moisture and dryness levels and in combination with another skin protein called elastin - it helps maintains skin elasticity and plumpness.

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bio-available form of hydrolysed collagen peptides, researched over many years as a front line skin health nutrient.

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TR AVEL & ADVENTURE

Lost In PALERMO

By Antonia Quirke

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Photo: © Andrei Rybachuk/Shutterstock

With its mix of grit and grandeur, the Sicilian capital has something interesting to offer, wherever you wander…

Palermo's Cathedral Santa Vergine Maria Assunta combines Arab and Byzantine architectural styles

P

art Greek, part Phoenician, part Roman, part Arab, the city of Palermo is made of strong stuff.

Snugly spectacular in its bay setting at the foot of Sicily’s Monte Pellegrino, it looks—as a garibaldino* approaching it from the sea once said—like a city imagined by a poetic child. Colourful relics of Arab domination mix with the Norman and Baroque, so the back of a building might look entirely different from its front or sides.

The city has always struck me as impeccably gallant: an acceptance of this, a pragmatic incorporation of that. Beauty, rot, and salvage.

Renaissance palaces next to hovels, more than 100 churches and oratories, and the domed roofs of one-time mosques—all reminders of countless invaders.

Sunbathing one afternoon in the roofless remains of a Greek temple that sits by the pool at the Grand Hotel Villa Igiea, I noticed that someone had drilled holes through its ancient columns to fix an electric plug for a minibar.

Momentarily I was outraged. But as a cloud of cabbage whites idled past an American supine on his lounger, time thickened with that drugging Sicilian intensity that comes on as Helena Dove

*a follower of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the mid19th century Italian general and nationalist 92 • DECEMBER 2019

though gigantic pyres have been lit on the surrounding hills, and I lost track of my indignation.

In the hotter months, you notice the city’s rampant dereliction more.

Streets and squares in the historic centre, still shattered from the 1943 bombardments, unpack their rubble like the innards of pillows, leaving little trails even into the famous La Vucciria market with its stalls selling multicoloured slinkies and pigs’ trotters.

In the collapsed Piazza Garraffello you’ll find an anatomically immaculate, gigantic heart graffitied on the wall opposite what was once an elegant bank. Beyond a stretch of myrtle hedges off the via Squarcialupo, outside the Conservatorio di Musica Vincenzo Bellini, students sit on 17th-century stone slabs, murmuring to one another, heads touching.

Where am I now? I’m lost. There may be a lovely simplicity to the old city’s layout—two straight roads dividing everything into four quarters—but my three maps each tell me something different, especially when the streets condense in the southeastern Albergheria quarter into alleys where teenage boys race their boxer dogs alongside pimped-up scooters. Here I saw a man leading a harness-free, sun-tired horse into a dim Moorish courtyard, his fingers scratching its nose.

Horses are everywhere in Palermo.

On the motorways in the early

Photos: (top) © shutterstock. (bottom) courtesy of The Grand Hotel Villa Igiea

LO S T I N PA L E R M O

READER’S DIGEST

(Top) Palermo's mix of architectural styles is a reminder of the city's countless invaders; (bottom) The remains of an ancient Greek temple stand next to the swimming pool at the Grand Hotel Villa Igiea

LO S T I N PA L E R M O

hours of the morning they are raced illegally, the survivors left to gently plod tourists in comfy little traps to and from the Catacombe dei Cappuccini, where the embalmed corpses of monks hang from hooks.

One such tour, through the shabby grandeur of the streets by the Quattro Canti—a grand, rounded intersection of elaborate balconies and cornices— should last 30 minutes, but becomes an hour (roadworks, the milling of pedestrians). A furious argument rages between driver and tourist, and the police get involved, making flamboyant gestures in everyone’s direction. You feel sure it will end with a swipe on someone’s temple.

But as usual it dissipates to nothing, overlooked, as everything in this city is, by stone saints and shrines to the Virgin, who is to be found even in the knife shop off the Piazza Caracciolo with her eyes raised in a peasant’s ecstasy, surrounded by a halo of candles and meat cleavers.

M

y friends Luca and Domenico tell me that whenever they pass a derelict building in the city, they feel a mounting rage. To the English, such a thing is an absurdly romantic prop of the past, but to a Sicilian it is an expression of the foulest moral decay. The mafia, for so long in control of the construction industry here, cares only for quick-buck new buildings, not old. They would raze

94 • DECEMBER 2019

the entire city to the ground if they could, rages Domenico, and stick up a forest of brutalist high-rises, like they already have in what remains of the olive and lemon groves that enclosed the old city walls. Mafia, mafia, mafia. It is the secret litany of every exchange.

In the afternoon, off the Piazza della Kalsa, I watch the evening begin.

At 4pm come the swallows in a rapid, swooping carnival. At 5pm a man starts frying cockles in a cauldron. At 6pm another man makes his chickpea pancakes for a few cents each, and people queue to transport bags of them away on Vespas. At 7pm fresh swordfish is put on ice, and braziers are lit outside restaurants in readiness for early diners.

From the open doors of a nearby church comes the sound of choir practice. A waiter tells me that this is the choir of a priest once cherished for his ability to heal, for the laying on of hands. Apparently, some years ago he had gone to prison in connection with celebrating mass with a mafia fugitive. “He has changed,” says the waiter solemnly.

“Now he is sad.”

Struck by their seriousness in contrast to the wacky Neapolitans, I once asked Luca if he thought Sicilians were pessimistic. “Oh no,” he said, carefully shaking his head, “not pessimistic. But our wisdom lies in expecting the worst.” You can feel this grief in the churches. The statue

Photos: © shutterstock

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of a spindly Christ with deep welts in his knees in La Gancia on the via Alloro. The fake head a couple of chapels along, made to look like Christ immersed in a fathomless sleep. In Palermo they love nothing more than a stricken Jesus, and a cherub, thighs rippling with so much fat you can scarcely believe that mere cement keeps the creature stuck on.

Even the food here tastes extra visceral. Spleen sandwiches. Caponata made with aubergine the colour of deep bruises, simmered until its skin eases away like a stocking in your mouth, leaving just the tanned flesh that feels slightly like cannibalism.

Wild mulberries in the Ballarò market.

Still-bleeding tuna, squashed figs and honey as rust-dark as henna.

Once, on a flight to the city during a blustery February, the woman across from me recited the rosary from take-off to landing with only a

break to buy a scratchcard from the stewardess. “In Naples,” Domenico says, “all hell is sure to break loose, but they know it will be OK. In Palermo, we just pray all hell doesn’t break loose in the first place.”

Drive 30 minutes out of the city in spring to the fishing village of Sferracavallo, and eat fresh DECEMBER 2019 • 95

LO S T I N PA L E R M O

Pastries on display in Palermo

seafront gelateria Latte Pa. Fourteenyear-old girls with salt-mussed hair stand about imperiously. The boys hold themselves more shyly, infinitely younger-seeming.

In Sicily, says Luca, the girls are a nightmare. “Mio dio,” he sighs, “the bowing and scraping required, the declarations of eternal love—really they think they smell like paradise, it’s just ridiculous.” I console him with ice cream flavoured a tooth-raspingly sweet double-caramel nougat.

“Better than Naples?” Luca 96 • DECEMBER 2019

TRAVEL TIPS Lodging: Gorgeously romantic and elegant, BB22 lies behind a rundown square whose few remaining residents play tango records out of their windows at night and passers-by stop to dance.

Via Pantelleria 22 (Angolo Largo Cavalieri di Malta), doubles from 110 euros, bb22.it. Tucked away in the ancient Arab quarter, Chez Jasmine has a little roof terrace overlooking a church dotted with hundreds of swallows.

Vicolo dei Nassaiuoli 15, there are only two rooms, priced from 75 euros, chezjasmine.biz.

Dining: Trattoria Torremuzza serves fresh swordfish cooked on braziers in the street, and a caponata with flaked almonds worth crossing the city for.

Walk to Ilardo for ice cream afterward.

Via Torremuzza 21, about 40 euros for two. Two minutes’ walk from the Teatro Massimo, the small Trattoria Del Massimo serves the best spaghetti or ragu with seafood. Plazza Guiseppe Verdi 25/26, about 40 euros for two.

What to Do: Via Chiavettieri is the best street for people watching. It comes to life after 5pm, when bar owners put out their tables and start serving wine and olives. By 11pm the street is packed. The anti-pizzo (extortion) movement runs deeply personal walking tours about the history of the mafia in Sicily and the civil anti-mafia movement in Palermo that is finally rebelling against it, addiopizzotravel.it.

Photo: © shutterstock

sea-urchin spaghetti while watching the multicoloured fishing boats rocking so intensely beyond the sharp rocks that when you get up to leave you walk with a sailor’s roll.

A little closer to town is the resort of Mondello, where wealthy palermitani built elegant weekend villas in the early 1900s, and where from June to October crowds of school-free teenagers buy ice cream at the

READER’S DIGEST

challenges. I nod. “Let them have their pizzas,” he mutters.

Ice cream is worshipped in Palermo, where many claim it was invented. In betting shops, hardened gamblers stand in front of TV screens with eyes screwed up in anxiety, licking frantically on a cone. In café after café, businessmen thrash out deals over hilariously fluted, whipped-creamed nostra coppas. At Ilardo, moments from the Piazza Santo Spirito, or at La Preferita further into town, mothers and daughters lean against walls eating brioche buns filled with mint choc chip.

After such a cold binge, the warm glow of Palermo’s stone hits the eye anew. The city was once known as the granary of ancient Rome—wheat was grown in vast estates outside the walls—and it’s as though the shimmering crop cast the place a golden yellow.

There's nothing for it but to walk as far as your legs will take you, through the Piazza Magione with its lushly flowered cloister tucked into one corner, and marvel at how in the middle of this crammed city you can suddenly feel as though you're

in some remote Persian village. Then out onto busy Via Guiseppe Garibaldi, past the cabinetmakers’ workshops, faded palaces, and emporiums piled with panamas (how Palermo adores a hat). Only here and in Rajasthan have I seen shops entirely devoted to mending the wheels on suitcases or the rope soles on canvas shoes.

Palermo pulls you along with smells of roasting coffee and rotting boxes of oleanders. Street football games divide to let you pass, and housewives lower baskets from their high apartments down to fishmongers, sarcastically haggling five floors up into the windless air. This is the world’s best city to be lost in, the best place to be aimless. Sooner or later you’ll find a main street, or recognise the man who sells dried persimmons, or the museum with the wall painting by the Inquisition-tormented sailor accused of romancing a mermaid.

This is a city that becomes familiar faster than others, and with such a vivid intimacy it’s as though you had been here before, and each step and turn is already a memory. n Antonia Quirke/ Condé Nast Traveller. © 2014 by Condé Nast Publications Ltd.

Quote, Unquote "When one door closes, another one opens," was first said by inventor Alexander Graham Bell, and followed with, "but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we don't see the ones which open for us."

SOURCE: BIOGRAPHY.COM

DECEMBER 2019 • 97

TR AVEL & ADVENTURE

My Great Escape:

Incredible Istanbul Carolyn Ross from Buckinghamshire on her trip to the ancient city of Constantinople

T

he sun sinks into the Sea of Marmara in a fiery blaze, turning the water into molten copper. Smudging into the horizon lies Asia and, plying these golden waters, vast tankers in huge numbers make their way through the Bosphorus heading north-east towards Russia.

While watching the unceasing traffic of these enormous vessels that pass back and forth through the channel connecting the western world with the east, it strikes home how important Istanbul is geographically.

A gloriously vibrant, colourful mixture of religions and cultures, there is much from Istanbul’s past that can still be seen today. Currently undergoing restoration, the Hagia

98 • DECEMBER 2019

Sophia—originally a Greek Orthodox church, then an Islamic mosque and now a museum—accurately reflects the shift in Istanbul’s civilisation over the ages. Visitors can see ceiling panels where an Islamic geometric design has been superimposed over a faded Christian cross; and where four decorative winged angels are

now blind having had their faces covered with star-shaped metallic lids to conform with Islam.

The Topkapi Palace is a beautifully preserved edifice in marble and gold built in the 15th century as the main residence for the Ottoman sultans. It also boasts a strategic passage known as the Golden Road; a narrow corridor of honey-coloured stone which leads from the harem to the Sultan’s private quarters.

Among these fabulous monuments are carts selling pomegranate and orange juice; carpet shops and jewellers; bazaars full of spices, lamps, Turkish delight and— usefully—handbags. Their vendors, who give the tourists a hard sell but whom, when faced with a smiling but decisive “no”, accept defeat with good grace, and content themselves with calling after you: “Perhaps tomorrow will be my lucky day!” n Tell us about your favourite holiday (send a photo too) and if we print it we’ll pay £50.

Email excerpts@readersdigest.co.uk DECEMBER 2019 • 99

TRAVEL & ADVENTURE

TROPICAL ESCAPES FOR INSTAGRAMMERS: MALDIVES Not only can you watch the sunset in hammocks suspended over the ocean from the swanky Angsana Velavaru resort’s accomodation, but each villa comes with an infinity pool and a rooftop terrace for massages (angsana.com).

FOR SEA DOGS: CUBA Experience yachting without any of the hard work. On week-long charters in Cuba, staff will cook for you, and sail your six-cabin boat through the Los Canarréos archipelago, stopping at uninhabited islands and by dolphin pods (dreamyachtcharter.co.uk).

FOR PRIVACY-SEEKERS: SRI LANKA It’s possible to rent opulent villas— serviced, or entirely yours—for good prices in Sri Lanka. Cookery classes, whale-watching, leopard safaris and trips to Kandy or Galle can then be bolted on (realholidays.co.uk).

FOR SOLOS: THAILAND One Traveller operates tours for mature singles, with no private-room supplement. Its two-week Thailand trip packs in Bangkok, Buddha statues, beach time, an elephant sanctuary and an island visited by James Bond (onetraveller.co.uk).

FOR WILDLIFE-LOVERS: COSTA RICA Last Frontiers’ tailor-made Costa Rican itineraries include seeing sloths, scarlet macaws and monkeys, plus staying at the safari-style Kasiiya Papagayo camp, whose spa and two perfect beaches are ringed by rainforest (lastfrontiers.com). n

by Richard Mellor

Travel app of the month SPLITWISE, FREE, IOS AND ANDROID Travelling in a group? Log all expenses, from meals to taxis, and at the end Splitwise will do some maths, and work out who owes what to whom 100 • DECEMBER 2019

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MONEY

How To N Protect Your Presents This Christmas Andy Webb reveals his top tips on how to make sure you don’t waste your money when Christmas shopping 102 • DECEMBER 2019

o matter how much thought goes into it, there’s always the chance a present you give isn’t right. Perhaps it’s a jumper that doesn’t fit. Maybe someone else has already given them the same book.

Or, whisper it, someone might just not like what you’ve given them.

Then there’s the risk that only once it’s unwrapped do you discover that the gift is broken or of poor quality.

With any of these it could mean those gifts end up in the bin.

With presents that come in voucher form, there’s also the danger Andy Webb is a personal finance journalist and runs the award-winning money blog, Be Clever With Your Cash

that they might be unredeemable if the retailer goes under. And don’t ignore the increased threat of theft during the longer winter nights.

Although these are worst case scenarios, with any of these examples the recipient doesn’t get a present and you’ve wasted your hard earned cash—a lose-lose outcome.

But these new year nightmares can be avoided. When you’re out shopping for Christmas gifts for friends and family, it’s important you follow these simple steps.

Check for a longer returns period Many shops extend their returns policy in the run up to Christmas, meaning even something bought in November’s sales could be returned in January. However, this varies from retailer to retailer, so check what the policy is before buying.

While you’re at it, also check whether they’ll give a refund or just a credit note (if anything at all). It’s of course important that you let the people you’re giving the gift to know you are happy to return items that aren’t right—otherwise they might not say anything.

Get and give a gift receipt If you want to avoid the awkwardness of someone telling you they’re not keen on your gift, then make sure you also give them a gift receipt.

Most retailers should be happy to provide one and it’ll entitle the

holder to swap the unwanted or duplicate gift for something else in store. One drawback is that this is harder to obtain if you’ve ordered an item online.

If you can’t get a gift receipt, make sure you keep hold of the standard one you’ve been given, as you’ll need this to make the return.

ALWAYS CHECK REVIEWS AND FORUMS FOR ANY WEBSITE YOU’RE UNSURE ABOUT Take back faulty items Problems with presents might not be discovered until well into 2020, long after those returns periods have ended. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have any rights. For 30 days you have a legal right to a refund if it’s not up to scratch. Within the first six months, you can ask for a repair without proving the damage wasn’t inflicted by you. After this you’ll need to prove the damage has been there from the start. You will of course need proof of purchase and it doesn’t apply if someone simply didn’t like the gift.

Shop safely online At Christmas we’re more likely than any other time to search out bargain DECEMBER 2019 • 103

MONEY

prices for the perfect gift, but be wary of online shops you’ve never used before.

Use a dodgy one and the gift might not arrive, and you could lose your money.

Check reviews and forums for any website you’re unsure about, and only enter card details into websites with a padlock symbol in the browser frame where you type the web address.

Pay with a credit or debit card This year we’ve seen wellknown brands such as Debenhams, Thomas Cook, Topshop and Coast verge on collapse or disappear from our high streets completely. With many retailers struggling, and this trend likely to continue next year, any that go under could impact your consumer rights—if there’s no shop to return an item to, you can’t get your money back. And this scenario could even mean items ordered don’t arrive—leaving you out of pocket.

To protect your purchases, it makes sense to pay with a card rather than cash. If something costs more than £100, use a credit card as you get extra cover thanks to Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act. This means the card provider is equally as liable for a refund as the retailer.

It’s handy if the shop no longer 104 • DECEMBER 2019

exists or isn’t replying to you. For smaller purchases made on either a credit or debit card you can use the Chargeback scheme to get money back. Here, the bank will try to remove your money from the shop’s bank account if it can.

Give cash over gift cards Any gift card or experience voucher you buy is only valid if the retailer still exists. If they go under, the vouchers are worthless. It’s better instead to give cash with a suggestion of where someone should spend it, such as money towards a nice meal or a winter coat.

Don’t scrimp on postage If you’re sending any presents in the post, make sure you select a delivery service which includes cover for loss

READER’S DIGEST

THOUGH IT’S LOVELY TO HAVE GIFTS AROUND THE TREE, IT CAN BE AN ADVERT FOR THIEVES or damage. It’ll cost you a little more, so don’t forget to factor that into your budget.

Check your home insurance On the same subject, make sure your home is insured for all the extra presents you’ll have in your home in the run-up to Christmas, and the ones you’ll receive too. It could be that your insurer automatically increases your cover in December, but if not you need to check both the overall limit is enough for everything

in your home, and whether anything new exceeds the single item limit. It’s also worth making sure expensive gadgets aren’t excluded.

Make sure you also check whether places like sheds, garages and car boots are included in your insurance policy. These are often popular places to hide presents, but as they’re outside the home, you could find any claim for thefts from them is rejected.

Don’t put your presents on display Finally, though it’s lovely to have gifts around the tree, it can be an advert for thieves. Keep curtains closed, and ideally don’t put your presents out until Christmas Eve. And of course longer nights make it easier for burglars. Make sure your home is secure. Don’t leave windows open, and have lights on in the house when you’re out. n

Test Your Winston Churchill Numerical Knowledge Each of these statements about the British leader desribes a number, and your job is to choose which of the statements completes the empty sum ___ + ___ = 130 A. Last two digits of the year in which he became prime minister for the first time B. His age in years when he died C. Last two digits of the year in which he became prime minister for the second time D. Length of time, in years, that he was married to Clementine SOURCE:RICHARD OSMAN’S HOUSE OF GAMES

(ANSWERS: 40, 90, 51, 56, A + B) DECEMBER 2019 • 105

FOOD

Turkey Stroganoff Serves 4 • 2tbsp olive oil • 2 onions, thinly sliced • 100g butter • 400g large flat mushrooms, 2cm slices • 60g plain flour • 800ml turkey stock • 3tsp sour cream • 400g leftover turkey • 1tbsp mustard • ½ lemon, squeezed • To serve: rice, mashed potato or polenta • To garnish: 1tsp sweet paprika, fresh thyme Rachel Walker is a food writer for numerous national publications. Visit rachel-walker.co.uk for more information

If a whopper of a turkey leaves you with litres of stock, then celebrate the Christmas bounty by getting creative.

A homemade stock forms a flavoursome base for soups and stews and makes this stroganoff feel luxurious 1. Heat the olive oil in a frying pan and gently sweat the onions on a medium-low heat for 20 minutes until soft and sweet. Remove from the pan and set aside.

2. Turn up the heat and add 40g of butter to the frying pan. When it starts to foam add the mushrooms, (in batches, so the pan isn’t overcrowded) and cook on both sides until golden. Remove from the pan and set aside.

3. Heat the remaining (60g) butter in a saucepan. Mix in the flour and cook the thick paste for one minute until it’s a dark straw colour. Add the turkey stock 200ml at a time, stirring until the liquid is fully absorbed and the sauce becomes thick and glossy. Remove from the heat and then add the sour cream, leftover turkey, mustard and lemon juice.

4. Finally, stir the onions and mushrooms into the sauce. Spoon over rice, mashed potato or polenta and garnish with a generous pinch of sweet paprika and fresh thyme.

TIP: “Light meat or dark” can divide the Christmas dinner table, but when it comes to cooking with leftover turkey, darker leg meat is best—it has a more robust flavour and is often juicier, as it’s cooked closer to the bone.

106 • DECEMBER 2019

photography by Tim & Zoé Hill

Drinks Tip… A Russian stroganoff is great with chilled sipping vodka (Finlandia is my favourite, £18/70cl, Ocado), but for those who are “drying out” after the excess of the festive season then Adnams’ Ghost Ship is a fantastic alcohol-free beer (£1.59/300ml, Tesco)

NOVEMBER 2019 • 105

FOOD

Serves 4-6 • 225g self-raising flour • 125g chilled butter, cubed • 125g caster sugar* • 100ml milk • 1 egg • 100-200g leftover Christmas pudding • 1 large Bramley apple, cubed (about 300g) * optional to split 100g caster sugar / 25g brown sugar

Show us your take on these dishes!

Just upload the picture to Instagram and tag us, @readersdigest_uk 108 • DECEMBER 2019

Bramley Apple Christmas Tray Bake The soft and sharp chunks of apple studded throughout this sponge are great with leftover Christmas pudding.

This seasonal bake can be served as a warm pudding with lashings of custard, or left to cool, cut into squares and drizzled with a glace icing—perfect for teatime after a blustery winter walk

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C and use the inside of the butter wrapper to grease an 11in dish or deep tray.

2. Use your fingertips to rub the butter into the flour until it takes on a breadcrumb-like texture.

3. Stir in the sugar/s and then create a well in the centre.

Use a fork to gently whisk together the milk and egg. Pour it into the well and stir the mixture into a loose batter—if needed, add another small slosh of milk.

4. Use your hands to gently break up the leftover Christmas pudding into small bitesized pieces and then stir it into the batter, along with the small apple cubes.

Tip the mixture into the dish/tray and then bake for 40 minutes until a skewer comes out clean, when inserted.

5. Serve with pouring cream, custard or brandy sauce. n

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HOME & GARDEN

Set the scene for a festive feast by dressing your table with these extra special yuletide touches

A Festive Feast

G

et creative when it comes to styling your Christmas table and pick a theme that echoes the rest of the decorations around the house. Red, green and gold is a timeless combination if you’re after a traditional look, or go bold with black and copper for something with a more contemporary edge. A runner or tablecloth is not only a good way to protect your table from knocks and spills, but it will make a focal point from which to build up your Christmas Day styling.

Depending on how much room you have on the tabletop, a centrepiece is sure to add a little wow factor.

Homes and gardens writer and stylist Cassie Pryce specialises in interior trends and discovering new season shopping 110 • DECEMBER 2019

It can be as simple as a cluster of candles, or a series of vases filled with baubles. Alternatively, you could even try your hand at a DIY piece using festive foliage or decorations the children have made. If you’re short on space, why not create a hanging centrepiece above the dining table?

Paper pompoms or paper stars can be strung up between the walls or from the ceiling, just take care to avoid any overhead lights.

For larger groups, it’s often a good idea to use place settings to avoid confusion over the seating plan.

Pick up some inexpensive baubles at your local supermarket and use a permanent marker to write on guests’ names, then pop these alongside each seat for a pretty styling idea.

For a more rustic touch, spray paint pinecones and add a tag to each, or use vintage luggage tags tied to the napkins for a quick solution. n

Traditional Touches Norway spruce pre-lit artificial tree (6ft), £349; cocktail clock in matte pepper grey, £45; gold charger plate, £2.99; Mikasa Julie red wine glasses, £12.99 for four; Bonnie tartan runner, £22.99; Bonnie tartan napkins, £16.99 for four; Holly Bells crackers, £16.99 for six, all Dobbies

HOME & GARDEN

A Christmas To Remember Jessica Summers offers some easy DIY ways to make your garden feel twinkly and festive

W

ith so many wintry treats growing at your disposal, you don’t have to look far to make a show-stopping welcome wreath for your front door. Forage in your garden for pretty twigs, ivy leaves and bright berries. If you can find any fallen pinecones to add to the mix they’ll make a lovely addition. Then, curl your finds around a bendy twig that you’ve fashioned into a circle and add any fairy lights or metallic spray you might have, to make it appear extra festive.

Instead of cutting down a pine tree that will inevitably rot in your sitting 112 • DECEMBER 2019

room come the end of December, why not try planting one outdoors so it can flourish all year round? Place it in a spot viewable from your house so you can enjoy it every day and adorn it with homemade ribbons and ornaments.

Lighting up a garden at Christmas can easily rack up a hefty electricity bill and waste a huge amount of energy needlessly. This year, invest in high quality solar-powered lights that will brighten your space with the most festive cheer possible.

Entwine fairy lights around your planted tree, line your pathway with ground lights and hang twinkly bulbs above your seating area to create a starry canopy effect. n

ADVERTISING FEATURE

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FASHION & BEAUT Y

'Tis The Season To Shine Sequins at the ready—the season of all things sparkly is upon us. Here's how to style them…

T

he holiday season is nearly upon us, with its flurry of parties and festive gettogethers. By New Year's Day I'm ready to put an end to all of the chaos, but at the start of December, nothing sounds more appealing to me than a season of parties dotting my diary like a twinkling string of fairy lights. I love any excuse to get dressed up for an event, even if it's just drinks with the neighbours or the other parents from school.

As always, the question is what to wear. I want to be comfortable, but also want to mark the occasion by wearing something extra special.

What do I do? I dig deep into my wardrobe. I pull out the sparkly jumpers, the sparkly shoes, or the sparkly skirt that has been patiently waiting for its time to shine. This Lisa Lennkh is a banker turned fashion writer, stylist and blogger. Her blog, The Sequinist, focuses on sparkle and statement style for midlife women

114 • DECEMBER 2019

is the season we can even get away with wearing glittery eyeshadow.

My advice is to pull out all the stops; there will never be another festive season in 2019!

Most of my holiday events are smart-casual parties; I don't need to wear a cocktail dress to most of them. I wear my regular wardrobe items, and simply add a sparkling item or two… or three! If I'd normally wear trousers and a jumper, I'll make it a sparkly jumper, and add a pair of sparkly heels. If I'd normally wear a suit, I'll put a sequin tank top underneath, wear a rhinestone hair clip (if ever there was a time of year to get away with wearing them, it's now!), and keep the glittery theme going strong with a shiny shoe or sequinned bag.

The one item I insist every woman have in their wardrobe is a sequin skirt; holiday season is the time to get major mileage out of it. You see different people at every event, so you can wear it on repeat. If you need an excuse to buy one, consider me your enabler. My go-to holiday drinks

outfit is a silver sequin skirt, a grey or black fine-knit jumper, a pair of statement earrings, and either a glittery shoe or a suede boot, depending on where I'm going. This same silver skirt (which I've had for years) can be made winter-wedding elegant with a sheer blouse and a camisole. In the summer I wear it with a white tee shirt or a belted camouflage jacket and flats... any excuse to wear it really. You might buy it for a holiday event, but I promise you, you'll find lots of other ways to wear it throughout the year. A basic denim jacket, a chunky-knit jumper, a Breton tee, and a long line cardigan are just begging to be glammed up by a sequin skirt. Choose a good basic colour like silver, black, or navy to get started, and a suitable length. Wear it just as you would any other skirt—try to forget there are sequins as you style it. You don't even have to blow the budget on one; my current favourite sequin skirt (a matte dark red) is one I found on eBay. Sequins aren't just for Christmas, but the festive season sure is a good place to start. I hope you put on some sparkle this holiday and continue to wear it throughout the coming year. n DECEMBER 2019 • 115

FASHION & BEAUTY

Men: Save Your Skin!

Jenessa Williams on the best skin care products for men

A

geing is a natural process, but there are plenty of ways to do it gracefully. Women’s antiageing beauty has been a booming industry for decades, but products targeted at men are fast catching up, with a countless array of products promising to turn back the clock. But how do you sort the youthful from the useless?

As far as we’re concerned, male age is most noticeable in three areas—the hairline, the eye line and the jawline.

Your first port of call should be a good volumising shampoo. Kevin Murphy’s plumping wash is full of nettle extract and vitamins A&C to strengthen thinning hair, and

116 • DECEMBER 2019

Oleanolic acid to fight follicle ageing. Team it with minimal conditioner to allow it to do its very best work.

Facial hair can also show age, so keep yours in check with a rich aftershave balm that maintains moisture. L’Occitane are well-known for their indulgent hand creams, but their facial products are also chockfull of revitalising fatty acids and antiinflammatory birch sap that will soothe any irritations. Complete your morning routine with a quick slick of eye gel, and you’ll be good to go— Recipe For Men’s version will make quick work of any lingering puffiness or crow's feet. Age may be just a number, but in your bathroom cabinet, it’s a simple rule of three. n

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FILM

HHHHH

Sometimes the pressures of adult life get too overwhelming and all we need is for someone to look us deep in the eye and tell us that it’s OK. Which is exactly what we get from Tom Hanks in his sweet, magnetic portrayal of America’s favourite childrens’ TV personality, Mr Rogers. Made by the acclaimed director Marielle Heller, the film follows the bizarre relationship between the TV icon and Lloyd Vogel, a jaded journalist tasked with profiling him. Lloyd’s not exactly happy with the assignment; his speciality is biting, cerebral prose that earned him a “difficult” reputation. So

much so, that Fred Rogers is just about the only celebrity willing to be interviewed by him. Though they’re off to an awkward start, Mr Rogers eventually gets deep under Vogel’s skin, covertly aiding his long-neglected emotional pain. With Hanks’ tour de force performance (which doesn’t seem too far removed from the actor’s real-life avuncular persona), a marvellously offbeat tone that blurs the line between hostile realism and innocent animation, and a stylish soundtrack, the film is a touching musing on childhood, family bonds and forgiveness,and a loving ode to America’s icon of kindness. You might find yourself brushing off a tear or two as you think about your own forgotten inner-child—and it’s OK.

118 • DECEMBER 2019

RE A D E RS D IGE S T.C O.UK/CULTURE/FILM

Tom Hanks delivers a thoughtful message about acceptance and understanding as America’s favourite TV icon, Mr Rogers

© SONY

A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

FILMS

HHHHH DRAMA: THE NIGHTINGALE It’s obvious from the start this is not going to be a cheery film: Irish convict Claire leads a gruelling life of labour and ridicule under the lecherous eye of Lieutenant Hawkins and his group of boorish English soldiers in the bleak colonialera Australian wilderness. Yet what might sound like a rather miserable beginning is still a walk in the park compared to what’s coming: several rapes, murders and other variations of gratuitous violence later, we simply get desensitised to their

intended purpose, while the cartoonishly exaggerated “goodies” and “baddies” are plain embarrassing to watch. A textbook example of how an important issue can be butchered by simplistic execution.

© U N I V E R S A L / V E R T I G O R E L E A S I N G / S I G N AT U R E E N T E R TA I N M E N T

HHHHH ROMANCE: LAST CHRISTMAS Co-written

by Emma Thompson. Starring box office gold dust Emilia Clarke and the impossibly charming Henry Golding. A sweet plot about an unlucky-in-love, department store elf. Everything about this Christmas romp has you wanting to like it. But a lazy script and predictable HHHHH twist make for disappoiting viewing.

DOCUMENTARY: QT8 Delve into the Thompson’s role as Emilia’s Eastern stories behind the making of Tarantino’s eight overwhelmingly successful movies, European mother could have been its saviour, had it been played by a in the company of his favourite collaborators and muses, from Jamie Foxx different actor. Alas, her thick accent lends some to Lucy Liu. The doc reminds us what makes QT one of the most celebrated film of the film’s more tender moments a sense of directors alive while keeping us giddy humour, in place of with excitement through entertaining much needed nuance. trivia and witty interviews yet never brushing over some of the more troublesome aspects of his career.

by Eva Mackevic 119

TELEVISION

xx

HAVE I GOT NEWS FOR YOU/WOULD I LIE TO YOU? BBC1; BBC IPLAYER What is it? The BBC’s Friday night panel show staples, back for Series 58 (HIGNFY) and Series 13 (WILTY?) respectively.

Why should I watch them? It’s funny how these two shows have come to coexist over time. The emergence of the livelier WILTY?, in which David Mitchell and Lee Mack spin ever more fantastical yarns, caused HIGNFY to get more openly political, reflecting the agitated state of a nation trying to navigate the Brexit impasse.

THE YOUNG OFFENDERS BBC1 AND BBC3; IPLAYER What is it? The Irish heartwarmer centred on two tracksuited gadabouts returns for its sophomore run.

Why should I watch it? Irish comedy is on a tear right now with Derry Girls and the indefatigable Sharon Horgan’s myriad projects. This one’s softer, but it’ll raise chuckles of recognition from anyone who’s spent time around musky adolescent males.

Best episode? The series opener— which sees Conor (Alex Murphy) entrusted to protect an egg as part of a responsible fatherhood scheme—is a cracker.

Best character? The relationship between Conor’s wingman Jock (Chris Walley) and Linda (Demi Isaac Oviawe) is unlike anything else on TV right now.

by Mike McCahill

THE GOOD PLACE NETFLIX Final run for this funny, charming fantasy: will the Architect (Ted Danson) guide our heroes towards the happy ending they—and we—deserve?

120 • DECEMBER 2019

MODERN LOVE AMAZON PRIME An all-star ensemble (Anne Hathaway, Tina Fey, Dev Patel) bring stories from a New York Times column enjoyably to life.

STATE OF THE UNION BBC IPLAYER Stephen Frears and Nick Hornby put Chris O’Dowd and Rosamund Pike through couples therapy in ten brisk, perceptive slices of life.

BBC IMAGES

WHAT TO STREAM THIS MONTH:

MUSIC READER RADAR: LUKE RUSSELL, SECURITY SERVICES MANAGER WATCHING: ZOMBOAT ITV2 It’s about a zombie apocalypse in Birmingham where the four survivors try to escape on a canal boat.

It’s as daft as it sounds but really good tongue-incheek fun!

ONLINE: WIKIPEDIA I love having a glass of wine and reading a featured article from the home page or an “On This Day” event and learning about things I wouldn’t normally see.

LISTENING: WHEN DIPLOMACY FAILS APPLE PODCASTS Zack Twamley looks at lesserknown conflicts in history and how they happened.

It’s really entertaining and informative.

READING: THE KORAN I’m an atheist but deeply intrigued by religion and read all the great religious texts. Even for a person who doesn’t believe in God I find wisdom and moral lessons in books like this.

2019 IN MUSIC by Eva Mackevic

POP: When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? by Billie Eilish This mouthy 17-year-old’s name has been on everyone’s lips lately and for good reason. Bold, brash, rude and standoffishly unapologetic about it all, Eilish is a refreshing new voice that—just like the times we live in—feels troublingly but arrestingly post-everything.

HIP-HOP: Nothing Great About Britain by Slowthai 2019’s breakout rapper is not one to mince his words as demonstrated on his ferocious debut album. Tackling the subjects of race, class and mental health with ballsto-the-wall intensity and manic, Joker-like charisma, he titillates, excites, inspires and frightens.

FOLK: Designer by Aldous Harding A quirky, melodically inventive record that’s deeply steeped in acoustic folk, Designer is buoyant and easy on the ears, enriched by discerning, poetic lyrics that roll off the tongue beautifully.

JAZZ: Flamagra by Flying Lotus Music production extraordinaire, Steven Ellison, spent ten years making his latest album and boy, was it worth the wait. A tightly structured but madly unrestricted farrago of funk, jazz and electronica, Flamagra further cements his status as one of the most envelope-pushing jazz artists around.

ROCK: Can You Really Find Me by Night Moves This syrupy but sleek collection of ten poppy earworms spans everything from dreamy psychedelia to 1970s folk-rock via Britpop and a pit stop in Hawaii. Start with the elated “Keep Me in Mind” or the tuneful “Angelina” which sounds like a tender prequel to Stones’ “Angie”.

E M A I L YO U R R E C O M M E N D AT I O N S TO R E A D E R S L E T T E R S @ R E A D E R S D I G E S T.C O.U K

BOOKS

December Fiction A gripping technological thriller and a cosy Christmas romance—this month our top reads couldn’t be more different The Assistant

by S K Tremayne (HarperCollins, £12.99) However rational we like to imagine we are, most of us, I suspect, can’t help thinking of our electronic personal assistants as people (certainly in our house Alexa is always “her” rather than “it”). But what if they began to behave like malevolent people?

That’s the intriguing starting point for S K Tremayne’s brilliant new thriller.

Main character Jo is a 30-something journalist living in a friend’s posh north London flat—when one night an assistant called Electra tells her, “I know your secret. I know what you did to that boy.” It/she’s not bluffing either: Jo has an incident in her past that would ruin James Walton is a book reviewer and broadcaster, and has written and presented 17 series of the BBC Radio 4 literary quiz The Write Stuff 122 • DECEMBER 2019

her if it was ever revealed. So is she going mad, like her schizophrenic father who believed the TV was talking to him? Or is someone trying to make her think she is?

This is clearly a good idea for a novel.

But what makes The Assistant so great is how thoroughly Tremayne carries it through, and how horribly plausible he makes it all seem. The book has you in its grip by about page 20—and, almost sadistically, just keeps on tightening that grip from there.

Snowdrops on Rosemary Lane

by Ellen Berry (Avon, £7.99) It’s not unknown in women’s commercial fiction for the heroine to relocate from the city to follow her rural dream. In this case the dreamer is 43-year-old Lucy, who as a girl regularly visited the Yorkshire village of Burley Bridge that featured in Ellen Berry’s two previous books. Back then, she fantasised about one day living in the picturesque Rosemary Cottage. Now she moves from Manchester to open a B&B there. Yet, while this warming winter read definitely knows how to

READER’S DIGEST

give readers what they want and expect, Berry also adds to the mix a powerful depiction of grief (no spoilers) and some bittersweet observations about the uneasy relationship between middle-aged children and their parents.

Even by relocating-heroine standards, Lucy is perhaps a bit slow to realise that her feelings for a handsome, kindly and single male neighbour mightn’t be wholly platonic.

Luckily, though, as we wait for the penny to drop, Berry supplies plenty of other things to enjoy—piling up the subplots with aplomb and deftly handling a large cast of characters who between them provide a highly appealing portrait of village life through the seasons.

Name the author Can you guess the writer from these clues (the fewer you need the better)?

1. His birthday, April 2, is now International Children’s Book Day. 2. In later life, he would receive a “national treasure” stipend from the Danish government.

3. A vision of a Christmas tree is central to his story “The Little Match Girl”.

Children’s books for Christmas A Baby Touch: Happy Christmas (Ladybird, £5.99, Ages: baby to toddler). This hugely popular series, which is designed to stimulate a child’s senses from birth onwards gets into the festive spirit.

Mr Scruff by Simon James (Walker, £12.99, Ages: 3-6). Lovely, funny rhyming book about the friendship between a boy and an abandoned dog.

Dr Maggie’s Grand Tour of the Solar System by Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock (Buster Books, £12.99, Ages: 7-11).

Beautifully-illustrated and fact-packed guide for budding young astronomers.

The Fowl Twins by Eoin Colfer (HarperCollins, £14.99, Ages: 9-12).

Seven years on from his worldconquering Artemis Fowl series, Colfer introduces us to Artemis’s 11-year-old twin brothers and their fabulously action-packed adventures.

American Royals by Katharine McGee (Penguin, £7.99, Age: young adults). At a time when many youngadult titles tend to the earnest, this JillyCooper style romp—without the rude bits—has a lot of shamelessly escapist fun with the notion of America having a royal family of its own.

Answer on p126 DECEMBER 2019 • 123

BOOKS

RD’S RECOMMENDED READ

The Squire Of Knotty Ash

I

n 2018, Michael Billington, the Guardian’s long-serving drama critic, said that the “two theatrical geniuses of the British stage” in his lifetime were Laurence Olivier and Ken Dodd.

And, as Louis Barfe’s absorbing biography makes clear, it was always on stage—rather than TV—that Dodd was at his best, and his happiest.

Even in his late eighties, he toured constantly and his live shows famously ran for four or five hours.

Indeed, Dodd was part of British life for so long that it’s easy to forget what a peculiar performer he was—not only in his appearance and distinctive tattyfilarious vocabulary, but 124 • DECEMBER 2019

also in his mix of straight oneliners with the creation of a whole alternative world of jam-butty mines and Diddymen.

Barfe takes us through Dodd’s fascinating life and career with great clarity, some impressive sleuthing and obvious affection. He also reminds us how seriously Dodd took the business of laughter. As a boy, he holed himself up in Liverpool’s Picton library to research the history of comedy. As an adult, he compiled a study of which gags went down best in which parts of the country (although this, too, was turned into a gag: “You can tell a joke in Manchester and it won’t get a laugh in London. They can’t hear you.”)

M O V I E S TO R E C O L L E C T I O N LT D / A L A M Y S TO C K P H OTO

A biography of one of Britain’s best-loved comedians

READER’S DIGEST

Dodd’s driven side was reflected as well in an unashamed love of money, which led to his 1989 trial for tax evasion: the subject of a bravura chapter in the book, which leaves us in no doubt that he was pretty lucky to be acquitted.

But let’s return to Dodd’s earliest showbiz days for this extract, which takes place in Knotty Ash—to some people’s surprise, a real Liverpool suburb—where he lived throughout his life…

‘‘

Despite being ‘a shy youngster’, Dodd developed the urge to be a performer very early on and found his parents to be full of encouragement. For his seventh birthday, he received a Punch-andJudy set from his father and began inviting his school friends around for concerts in the backyard.

The next step of his stagecraft development came in the post.

Every week, he’d buy all of the boys’ story papers and devour the tales of derring-do, but the advertisements were just as appealing. ‘I used to read this wonderful intellectual magazine, this paper called The Wizard,’ he told Sue Lawley [on Desert Island Discs] in 1990. ‘I used to write away for these itching powders and things like a seebackroscope… a thing you put in your eye and you can see if an assassin is creeping up behind you, which is very important when you’re eight. I read this advertisement one

day, it said “Fool your teachers, amaze your friends, send sixpence in stamps, become a ventriloquist… and learn how to throw your voice.”

So this tickled me no end. I sent away for this little booklet and I became a ventriloquist.’

Dodd told this story in just about every interview he gave. There is often a disparity between show business anecdotes and the truth, with stories becoming ‘improved’ beyond recognition. However, apart from a little polishing over the years, including a slight tightening up of the wording of the advertisement, a search through the back issues of The Wizard proves this one to be accurate.

Over several weeks in October and November 1937, Ellisdon and Son of 246 High Holborn, London, WC1, advertised their range of novelties, culminating in a full-page advertisement in the week of Dodd’s tenth birthday. Alongside the Magic Nose Flute (‘Produces very sweet music that somewhat resembles a flute’), Professor Goubert’s course in

Happiness and Tears: the Ken Dodd Story

by Louis Barfe is published by Head of Zeus at £20

DECEMBER 2019 • 125

BOOKS

hypnotism and the aforementioned Seebackroscope, there it is: BOYS! Learn to throw your voice. This book by Prof Foxton tells you how. Lots of fun fooling teacher, policeman or friends. THE VENTRILO. A little instrument fits in the mouth out of sight used with above for Bird Calls, etc. Anyone can use it. Never fails. A full course book on Ventriloquism, together with the Ventrilo. Price 6d. Postage 1½d.

Soon after the book arrived, Arthur Dodd was satisfied that his son was following Professor Foxton’s advice sufficiently to warrant the acquisition of a dummy, or as Dodd called it ‘a ventriloquial figure’. The arrival of Charlie Brown* inspired Dodd to practise the craft and he ‘mastered the technique in a year’.

’’

* A name later made famous in ventriloquism

by Arthur Worsley, while at the same time being very hard to say when throwing your voice. Dodd would later ask [his Diddyman dummy] Dickie Mint if he wanted ‘a big bottle of brown beer or a shandy’. Mint always went for shandy, Dodd’s response being a very knowing ‘Good’.

And the name of the author is…

Hans Christian Andersen, author of no fewer than 168 fairy tales, including “The Princess and the Pea”, “The Ugly Duckling”, “The Little Mermaid” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes”.

126 • DECEMBER 2019

Completely discomknockerated: Some of Ken Dodd’s best jokes It’s a long show here tonight. If you look under your seats you’ll find a will form.

This morning the BBC sent a car for me.

Luckily it missed.

In the 1800s, one of the MPs in London decided to introduce tax. Back in those days it was 2p in the pound. I thought it still was.

A comedian went to heaven and they said he could only go in if he’d done something really brave. He said “I stood up in Belfast and said ‘To hell with all the Protestants and the Catholics’.”

They said “When did you do this?”

He said, “About ten seconds ago.”’

I do all the exercises every morning in front of the television—up, down, up, down, up, down. Then the other eyelid.

Freud said that a laugh is a sudden explosion of psychic energy. Of course the trouble with Freud was that he never played second house Friday night at the Glasgow Empire.

I just read a book about Stockholm Syndrome. It started off badly, but by the end I really liked it.

Books That Changed My Life Author Sophie Dahl began her working life as a teenage fashion model, but books and words were her first love The Amber Spyglass

by Philip Pullman My husband [jazz musician Jamie Cullum] introduced me to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy when we were newly dating. I’d just moved back to London, and spent a summer lost in the story of fierce Lyra Belacqua.

She’s a brilliant heroine: clever, sparky, funny, loyal and vulnerable.

Philip Pullman’s books ring with wisdom and truth. I’m still hooked on his writing; so much so that we named our first daughter Lyra. In a great, full circle, I’m going to be interviewing him for the launch of his new book, The Secret Commonwealth.

Love and Trouble

by Claire Dederer Love and Trouble is so insightful about womanhood, sexuality and marriage. It’s also about coming of age in a pre #MeToo era and how that and the responses of adults around Dederer as a young woman shaped her.

There’s so much in this book that’s important— conversations around sex and consent, and an adolescent’s right to explore their sexuality and potency without adults thinking that it’s an invitation.

I’m so glad that this stuff is now being placed under the microscope and that we’re having the conversation.

FOR MORE, GO TO READERSDIGEST.CO.UK/CULTURE

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase

by Joan Aiken The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken is everything that you could want a good story to be. It’s atmospheric and crawling with villains and adversity!

As a kid I had a nerdy thing about secret passages and orphans, and this book is full of both. The heroine in my own children’s book, Madame Badobedah, Mabel, is not an orphan, but there is a secret passage—old habits die hard. n Madame Badobedah by Sophie Dahl, illustrated

by Lauren O’Hara, is out now, published by Walker Books DECEMBER 2019 • 127

TECHNOLOGY

Christmas Toys For Connected Kids When you’re getting gadgets for the little ones in your life, there’s a world beyond just tablets and earphones—as Olly Mann discovers...

Olly Mann presents Four Thought for BBC Radio 4, and the award-winning podcasts The Modern Mann and Answer Me This!

128 • DECEMBER 2019

MOVE IT For those days when you want to scoot to school but cycle back, the rechargeable VIRO Vega (£269, age 8+) does both.

Pull a lever and it transforms from a stand-on electric scooter to a sit-down electric bike, and its neon stylings are as eye-catching as its 10mph speeds. For younger ones, the Xootz Bubble Scooter, (£39.99, available in blue or pink) is a decent first scooter for toddlers, with adjustable handles and an anti-slip footplate, but with a killer USP—it shoots bubbles out the back, for some serious kindergarten cred.

ABOUT TIME If your 5-12-year-old is nagging you for their own smart device, but you’re hesitant about them accessing social media or calling strangers, the GPS-tracking Spacetalk Kids Smartwatch (£199) is a solid choice. It looks like a cool smartwatch, and includes a fitness tracker, but doesn’t download games or apps, and only allows registered Contacts to call. For younger ones, the Natural History Museum Dinosaur Projector Watch (£10, age 3+) has a fluorescent face and dino-print strap, and projects ten colour dinosaur images on to the wall. Roarsome!

MIC DROP Got an X Factor wannabe under your roof? The primary coloured KS Mini Mover 20 (£24.99) from GB-based Kitsound is a splashproof, durable Bluetooth speaker for young kids, boasting a built-in mic—and optional MicroSD slot so parents can control the playlist. Teens with TVs, meanwhile, will enjoy the Roxi Ultimate Music Console (£99, inc. one year subscription), a voice-controlled jukebox featuring 35 million songs, many with karaoke style on-screen lyrics. The funky remote control also functions as a mic, which is rather too laggy to duet convincingly with the stars, but great fun at parties.

GET CREATIVE 4-8-year-olds who’ve graduated from PlayDoh will be ready for the Tech Will Save Us Electro Dough Project Kit (£29.99), which, with a little parental supervision, uses coloured dough to create electrical circuits, powering light and sound devices.

Their older siblings can geek out with the LEGO Movie 2 Movie Maker Building Kit (£35, age 8+), which includes all the props and accessories required to make your own stop-motion masterpiece. It even has an adjustable stand for your smartphone, and a free app to assist.

FUN & GAMES

You Couldn’t Make It Up Win £30 for your true, funny stories!

Go to readersdigest.co.uk/contact-us or facebook.com/readersdigestuk A friend was chatting to his work colleagues when one of them—a young girl who had a boyfriend with bad anxiety issues—arrived to work very happy and excited and exclaimed, “He'll be OK now, I've taken him to a psychopath!”

JANET REEVE, London

RACHELLE HARDING, Cambridgeshire

My 17-year-old daughter was looking at her friend in her newest outfit.

“You're so slim” she commented to her friend.

Knowing that she wanted to lose some pounds herself, I mentioned she could do something about it if she wanted.

“That's a great idea,” she retorted, and offered her friend a large slice of 130 • DECEMBER 2019

"You're fake news!"

chocolate gateau from the fridge.

JANA AITCHISON, Birkenhead

I walked into my regular newsagent's and after a quick chat with the young shop assistant I left the shop without my paper.

I returned and explained that I must be showing my age. She didn’t reply so I jokingly said, “You’re supposed to insist that I don't look old.”

Without hesitation or any change of facial expression she replied, “But the customer is always right.”

KEITH LODGE, Yorkshire

c a rto o n: gu to d ia s

We were at a magic show, and after one fantastic trick, a voice in the crowd screamed out, “Gosh, how did you do that?”

“I would tell you,” answered the magician, “But then I’d be forced to kill you.”

After a moment, a male voice shouted out, “Can you tell my mother-in-law?”

My dad asked me what “IDK” meant on a text message.

I told him, “I don't know.”

So he said, “I'll go and ask your brother then.”

PIA AINSWORTH, Manchester

My daughter told me that her baby had cried continuously because she had to take him out of the sink where he was having a bath.

“Mummy, why is he crying?” Asked his older brother, Theo.

“Because he didn't want to get out of the sink,” she replied.

“Maybe when he grows up, he can be a plug!” offered Theo.

LISA HORNER, Essex

While out shopping with my husband, I bumped into an old workmate I hadn't seen for years.

After she'd spent what seemed like an eternity telling us about the new man in her life, she gushed, “When he showed me the engagement ring it simply took my breath away.”

When we finally managed to get away, my husband muttered, “I'm surprised she had any breath left to take.”

ANN BENNETT, Staffordshire My wife and her sister's husband have never seen eye-to-eye.

When my sister-in-law told her she

was having trouble selecting a suitably-bred stallion for her mare, my wife couldn't help commenting, “What a pity you didn't take as much trouble with your own choice of partner as you are with your horse.”

SHERYL COOPER, London

I got home from work the other evening and asked my son if he’d had a good day.

“I've been watching TV all afternoon” he replied.

“Much on?” I asked.

“Just a T-shirt, jeans and trainers” came his reply.

DAVID WEBB, West Sussex

Fortunately, my husband is a good cook, because I am not. I try my best though. One day, I was attempting a roast beef dinner which I thought was ready to serve.

He came to check, then shook his head and exclaimed, “This beef is so undercooked that it’s starting to eat the vegetables!”

BETHANY WEBSTER, Denbighshire DECEMBER 2019 • 131

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FUN AND GAMES IT PAYS TO INCREASE YOUR

Word Power Whether you're from Walla Walla, Washington, or Wagga Wagga, Australia, we double-dare you to master this month's quiz-all about words with repeating sets of letters. Don't go gaga, though!

By Emily Cox & Henry Rathvon 1. baba n.—A: rum-soaked cake.

B: intently. C: promptly.

B: maternal relative. C: mild bruise or scrape.

9. nene n.—A: endangered state bird

2. muumuu n.—A: radical militant.

of Hawaii. B: forbidden behaviour.

C: cheap trinket.

B: lagoon in an atoll. C: a long, loose dress.

10. tam-tam n.—A: pouty look.

B: gong. C: skiing maneuver.

3. pupu n.—A: tree with yellow fruit.

B: sea breeze. C: Asian appetiser.

11. chin-chin n.—A: broom.

B: type of dog. C: salutation or toast.

4. chichi adj.—A: frigid, icy. B: loose, lanky. C: showy, frilly.

5. Isis n.— A: fiery river of Hades.

B: Egyptian nature goddess.

C: rainbow personified.

12. juju n.—A: West African music style. B: trophy. C: candy.

13. couscous n.—A: semolina dish.

B: Moroccan beach strip.

C: Congolese dance.

6. furfur n.—A: about 1.25 miles.

B: dandruff. C: bow-shaped pasta.

14. meme n.—A: perfect imitation.

7. tsetse n.—A: type of fly. B: Greek

B: recycling symbol. C: idea or trait that spreads within a culture.

hierarchy. C: opposing force of energy or gravity.

15. bulbul n.—A: songbird.

8. chop-chop adv.—A: sarcastically.

B: knobbed head on a cane.

C: croak of a male frog.

DECEMBER 2019 • 133

WORD POWER

Answers 1. baba—[A] rum­soaked cake.

Nothing completes a holiday feast like Becky's homemade baba.

9. nene—[A] endangered state bird of Hawaii. A bird lover, Marty was delighted to see the nene up close during his trip.

2. muumuu—[C] long, loose dress.

Natalie was jealous of the authentic muumuu her sister brought back from her honeymoon.

10. tam-tam—[B] gong. Lauren was fascinated by the tam-tam player in the orchestra.

3. pupu—[C] Asian appetiser. Art's favor­ite part of the meal? The pupu platter of fried shrimp and egg rolls.

11. chin-chin—[C] salutation or toast.

Neville looked forward to saying "chin­ chin" to his classmates at the reunion.

4. chichi—[C] showy, frilly. As we'd predicted, Lucy got just what she wanted: an over-the-top, chichi engagement ring.

12. juju—[A] West African music style.

Featuring a breathtaking rhythmic beat, Alec's juju composition relies on heavy percussion.

5. lsis—[B] Egyptian nature goddess.

Certainly, Bob Dylan was inspired by the mystical Isis when he penned his famous song.

13. couscous—[A] semolina dish.

Our family's couscous recipe is five generations old.

14. meme—[C] idea or trait that spreads within a culture. The abuse of the word "like" is an unfortunate meme dating back WORD OF THE DAY* to the 1980s.

HUMICUBATION 15. bulbul—[A] songbird. The bulbul Lying on the ground penitently makes frequent appearances in Alternative suggestions: Persian poetry, Emily "Lullaby to sing baby bears to learned during her sleep for hibernation" graduate studies.

6. furfur—[B] dandruff. "I have a great remedy for that furfur on your dog's coat," Tiffany offered.

7. tsetse—[A] type of fly. Sleeping sickness, a dis­ease marked by lethargy and confusion, is transmitted by the tsetse fly.

8. chop-chop—[C] promptly. Yes, the soup arrived chopchop, but I seriously doubt it's homemade.

134

"Humming a song while solving a mathematical cube root."

VOCABULARY RATINGS 9 & below: So-so 10–12: Be-all end-all 13–15: Out-and-out master

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Brainteasers Challenge yourself by solving these puzzles, then check your answers on p139 55

45

Place Your Chips 10

10 80 40

5

25 5

25 5 75

25

60

45

50 65

55

Jerry Mander’s Old Tricks Your name is Jerry Mander. Not for the first time, you’ve taken a bribe to draw voting districts so that George Cherry remains mayor instead of getting defeated by his more popular rival, Les Indigo. This map shows which candidate each household supports. Divide it into three districts of five contiguous households so that Cherry (red) will get the majority of the votes in a majority of the districts. For a district to be contiguous, each household must share a border with at least one other, and shared corners don’t count. The tree represents a park that won’t be a part of any district.

136 • DECEMBER 2019

(Place Your Chips) Fraser Simpson; (Jerry Mander’s Old Tricks) Roderick Kimball of enigami.fun

You have a stack of poker chips that are each worth £5, £10 or £25. You need to place them on the squares of this grid— but no more than one chip per square— so that their value totals the amount of pounds shown for each row, column and long diagonal. Not every square needs to have a chip on it. Several chips and one blank space (designated by a star) have been placed to get you started.

Can you finish the grid?

FUN & GAMES

Stuffing If you try to fit these pieces into a 4 x 4 square, you’ll need to overlap them. Without rotating them, how can you do it so that only matching letters overlap?

B D A B C

D B A C A

C C B B A C A C D D

A A C D B

(Stuffing; Evening Up the Odds) Darren Rigby; (1 to 25) Jeff Widderich

Evening Up the Odds You have ten balls numbered 1 through 10. They go into a bag, and you randomly draw them out one at a time. What’s the probability that you draw all five of the even ones (not necessarily all in a row) before getting four of the odd ones?

4

1 to 25 Move the numbers from the outer ring onto the board. Each number must be placed in one of the five cells that lie in the direction indicated by its chevron. The numbers must snake together vertically, horizontally or diagonally so they link in sequence from 1 to 25. (For example, 2 must be adjacent to both 1 and 3) There’s only one solution. Can you find it?

24

19

3

10

11

21

13

14

17

20

9

23

8

2

6 25

1 18

22

5 15

12

7

16

DECEMBER 2019 • 137

BRAINTEASERS

CROSSWISE Test your general knowledge.

Answers on p142

ACROSS 1 Single things (5) 4 Marine calamity (9) 10 Abominable snowman (4) 11 Teacher (10) 12 Form of bowling (6) 13 Termination of a pregnancy (8) 14 Stiffness in the joints (10) 18 Peruse (4) 19 Needless bustle (4) 21 Eye-glasses (10) 24 Statue support (8) 26 Like some mammoths (6) 28 From, eg, Portsmouth or Basingstoke (10) 29 Taverns (4) 30 Opponent (9) 31 Prolonged pain (5)

DOWN 2 Female cousin of your daughter (5) 3 Capital of Bhutan (7) 5 Minor Biblical prophet (5) 6 Execute (7) 7 Earthquake scale (7) 8 Dark brown (9) 9 Capital of Austria (6) 15 Home (9) 16 Ask for a loan (3) 17 Not sweet (3) 20 Wand showing sovereignty (7) 21 Lounges (7) 22 Frustrate (6) 23 Shutting (7) 25 Kind of month (5) 27 Fabric woven from flax yarns (5)

READER’S DIGEST

£50 PRIZE QUESTION

BRAINTEASERS ANSWERS

Can you identify these 2019 World Athletics Championship gold-medal-winning athletes and the events in which they excelled?

Place Your Chips 25

10

10

10

25

10

10

10

10

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5

5

5

5

25

10

10 25

10

5 5

25

A

Jerry Mander’s Old Tricks

B

0 C

Stuffing B C B A

THE FIRST CORRECT ANSWER WE PICK WINS £50!*

D A B B A C A C D C D B

Email excerpts@readersdigest.co.uk

Evening Up the Odds 2/9.

1 to 25 4

24 19

D

3

10 11 21

13 18 19 15 14 13 14 17 17 16 20 12 11 20 9

23 22 21 10

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ANSWER TO NOVEMBER’S PRIZE QUESTION A: Charles (Spencer) Chaplin B: “Benny” Alfred (Hawthorne) Hill C: Sidney (Joel) James D: Oliver (Norvell) Hardy

AND THE £50 GOES TO… WILLIAM CHEUNG, Middlesex

FUN & GAMES

Laugh!

Win £30

for every reader’s joke we publish!

Go to readersdigest.co.uk/contact-us or facebook.com/readersdigestuk

My therapist and my dentist both cancelled my appointments this week.

Now I’m obsessing that one thinks I have bad breath, and the other thinks I’m overly-emotional, but I can’t be sure which is which.

Comedian ALEX KEALY

I’m self employed, which sucks, because I still hate my boss.

Comedian ANTONIO AGUILAR

have slept in this bed?”

I replied, “About 50.”

She asked, “Is that part of the comedian lifestyle?”

I told her, “Yeah! If I weren’t a comedian, I wouldn’t have to Airbnb my room every weekend to make rent.”

Seen on Reddit

I wouldn’t complain if my flight was cancelled due to a storm. I would complain if I got to the airport and my flight was the only one that wasn’t cancelled. Imagine!

“Jet flight E4597 is gonna have a go of it!”

Comedian JOSH WIDDICOMBE Whenever my girlfriend and I get into an argument, she gives me puppy dog eyes and I forget what we were fighting about. Mainly because I am terrified by the number of dogs she’s blinded.

Seen on Reddit

I had this woman in my bed recently, and we were about to fool around when she asked, “How many women 140 • DECEMBER 2019

I want to have children, but my friends have scared me off. One of them told

Did you hear about the flea who went to THE MOON? Lunatic.

Seen online

DRAW THE LINE Twitter account @PoorlyDrawnAnimals is dedicated to creating hilariously simple pet portraits

me that she was in labour for 36 hours. I don’t even want to do something that feels good for 36 hours!

Comedian RITA RUDNER A farmer’s dog goes missing and the farmer is left inconsolable. His wife says to him, “Why don’t you put an advert in the paper to get him back?”

The farmer does so, but after two weeks, no one has called and the dog is still missing.

“What did you write in the paper?” asked his wife.

“Here boy,” replied the farmer.

JASON TRUBY, Hertfordshire

British people are like coconuts. Hard on the outside, but sweet once you crack us.

Also, full of alcohol and holding an umbrella.

Comedian MILO MCCABE I used to supply Filofaxes for the Mafia.

Yes, I was involved in very organised crime.

Comedian MILTON JONES DECEMBER 2019 • 141

LAUGH

When I was a child, my parents paid for me to have boxing lessons. It’s a great sport to put your child into if you think that hitting your kid is wrong, but you still feel like somebody should be hitting your kid. Submitted via email A biker goes to his doctor complaining of hearing problems. “Can you describe the symptoms to me?” his doctor asks.

“Of course,” the biker says. “Homer is a fat, lazy, yellow idiot and Marge is a skinny bird with blue hair.”

Comedian BILLY CONNOLLY In Scotland, we have mixed feelings about global warming, because we all get to sit on the mountains and watch the English drown.

Comedian FRANKIE BOYLE

A guy goes into an empty bar and orders a drink. Suddenly he hears a voice saying, “Nice suit!” He looks around but sees nobody other than the bartender polishing some glasses.

A little while later the same voice says, “Nice tie”. The guy looks around and finally asks the bar tender if he said anything.

“No,” he replies. “It was probably the peanuts. They’re complimentary.”

Seen online Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. via readersdigest.co.uk

MOTOR MOUTHS Twitter users share stories of their epic motoring fails @CTaylor8: My dad hired a taxi to drive him round a car park because he couldn’t find his car. @NewsomScoob: I was playing Aerosmith’s “Dream On” as loud as I could in my car.

A stone flew up and cracked the windshield. For a second though, I thought Steven Tyler’s voice had broken the glass. @CraigLefferts: I accidentally rear-ended the person in front of me while my daughter was in the car. Everyone was fine, but my daughter went around telling everyone that our car kissed another car’s butt. @PottsyMJ: My mum was driving me and stopped at a light. She rested her forearms on the wheel and wondered who was honking so loudly.

Turns out her breasts were pushing her own horn!

CROSSWORD ANSWERS Across: 1 Units, 4 Shipwreck, 10 Yeti, 11 Instructor, 12 Tenpin, 13 Abortion, 14 Rheumatism, 18 Read, 19 Fuss, 21 Spectacles, 24 Pedestal, 26 Woolly, 28 Southerner, 29 Inns, 30 Adversary, 31 Agony Down: 2 Niece, 3 Thimphu, 5 Hosea, 6 Perform, 7 Richter, 8 Chocolate, 9 Vienna, 15 Household, 16 Tap, 17 Sec, 20 Sceptre, 21 Settees, 22 Thwart, 23 Closing, 25 Lunar, 27 Linen

60 Second Stand-Up We chat to the loveble comedian, Ed Gamble WHAT’S THE BEST PART OF YOUR CURRENT SHOW? I enjoy doing all of it. I’ve done the show so many times, for over a year now so it tends to change night to night, it depends on the audience and what they enjoy.

WHAT INSPIRES YOUR COMEDY? I talk a lot about my dad in the show, he’s a big inspiration in terms of comedy, not necessarily in a flattering way. I also tend to get quite angry about very little things, so it’s the smaller things in life rather than the big things that inspire me.

DO YOU FIND ANY PARTS OF THE COUNTRY TO BE FUNNIER THAN OTHERS? Not funnier necessarily, some audiences I’ve really enjoyed filming for but I also enjoy discovering new areas. Places that have a sense of humour about themselves are the best kind of gigs.

IF YOU COULD HAVE A SUPERPOWER, WHAT WOULD IT BE? I’d like to be able

to shapeshift into anything or anyone at any given moment. Mainly to get through airports, I’d turn into a pilot and just walk through.

DO YOU HAVE A MEMORABLE HECKLE? [Hecklers] are never helpful. They sometimes think it’s helpful but it’s just annoying to be honest. They’re not well timed, you can’t hear them properly and all they do is disturb everyone else around them.

IF YOU WERE A FLY ON THE WALL, WHOSE WALL WOULD IT BE ON? It’s got to be Buckingham palace. We all want to know if the royals are up to the same sorts of things as we are.

But not the bathroom or anything, mainly the royal kitchen. I’d like to see behind the curtain in Buckingham Palace but I don’t need to see anything lewd. n Ed Gamble tours the UK until December 20. Visit edgamble.co.uk. Watch Ed’s latest special Blood Sugar on Amazon

FOR MORE, GO TO READERSDIGEST.CO.UK/INSPIRE/HUMOUR

DECEMBER 2019 • 143

LAUGH

Beat the Cartoonist!

In the

January Issue

CELEBRATING BEETHOVEN

Think of a witty caption for this cartoon—the three best suggestions, along with the cartoonist’s original, will be posted on our website in mid-December.

If your entry gets the most votes, you’ll win £50.

Eva Mackevic on our enduring fascination with music history’s darkest genius

Submit to captions@readersdigest.co.uk or online at readersdigest.co.uk/fun-games by December 7.

We’ll announce the winner in our February issue.

October’s Winner Our cartoonist will have to endure yet another month without his crown as his caption, “It’s no good Igor, we have to make a bolt for it” couldn’t compete with our reader, Julian Cadman, who won voters over with his funny suggestion, “Go easy with it today… that was a monster filling”.

Congratulations, Julian!

144 • DECEMBER 2019

My Carbon Neutral Life We meet people who have made dramatic changes to their lifestyle in order to be kinder to the planet

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