Lifestyle

Home renovations are expensive.  If you speak to any experienced builder, the general rule of thumb is to take your budget and double it. Trust me, I've done a few of them and my estimates have always been wildly optimistic. Roof off, floors dug up, rewired, re-plumbed, re-plastered, etc, etc...  isn't where the money is spent.  Apart from the mega bucks spent on the finish, the cash drain usually happens in the areas you can't see; insulation, groundworks, underpinning, replacing...

Brand loyalty is at an all-time high, according to a new study. Some 70 per cent of Brits rarely deviate from their favourite brands of food and drink, and folk tend to stick to the same type of tea or coffee, watch the same TV programmes and eat from the same takeaway all the time. When it comes to health and beauty, most Brits wear the same deodorant day in and day out, buy the same skin care products, slap on their...

Robert Watkins works as part of Macmillan Cancer Support’s Financial Guidance Service, a specialist team that offers financial support to people affected by cancer. When you receive a cancer diagnosis, money should be the last thing on your mind. But costs like higher household bills or travelling to hospital appointments combined with the fact that many people need to give up work means that those diagnosed with cancer are on average an additional £570 worse off a month. Money worries...

So, you’re jetting off into the sun to sit on the beach as the sea laps at your feet whilst drinking fruity cocktails. Well, kind of, because this isn’t a holiday – you’re actually packing up all your belongings and moving your whole life to start a fresh in a new country. Packing for a holiday can be difficult enough, but it is nothing compared to packing for a move. You have a house full of belongings, and you are changing...

Two mystic African fertility statues were on show in Piccadilly Circus after arriving from Ripley’s Believe It or Not! in the US. The statues were hand-carved by the Baule tribe, who live in Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) in West Africa, and date back to the 1930s. Ripley’s acquired the figures in 1993 and put them in the lobby of the company headquarters in Orlando. Within months, 13 women, including some staff and office visitors, were pregnant. To celebrate the arrival, loved-up couple...

Scientists have unveiled a formula for why socks go missing. The so-called 'sock loss index' has been created by Psychologist Dr Simon Moore and leading statistician Dr Geoff Ellis and takes a variety of sock-related factors into account to calculate the probability of socks going missing. For the mathematicians out there, it looks something like this:  (L(p x f)+C(t x s))-(P x A) Samsung commissioned the scientists to promote the launch of its new AddWash washing machine which allows you to...

In my formative years I spent a lot of time exploring the exotic night-life of the North, and one thing that never ceased to amaze me was the courageousness of the local lady folk. Mini skirts in Newcastle in freezing cold weather, high heels on the cobbled paths of Leeds' Corn Exchange and low cut tops on a wind-swept night in Manchester always made me feel rather guilts for chucking a jumper on over my shirt and wearing a nice padded...

Erectile dysfunction (ED) is a worry for all men and while most believe it’s an older man’s problem, it is actually quite common among younger men. In fact, 25 per cent of patients diagnosed with ED were under 40 in a 2013 study in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. Of this 25 per cent, almost half suffered from severe ED. ED can be a big problem, but what can you actually do about it? What are the facts? There are...

Sleeping bags for children, surely just another gimmick to get more cash out of parents? How wrong I was.  I think this could be the most amazing sleeping bag ever made...  and I want one. My son was lucky enough to test out the Vango Starwalker Junior Dragon sleeping bag for a fun filled ‘night at the museum’ sleepover. It was a very fitting environment to test a dinosaur-esque sleeping bag. When it arrived I was struck by how small and...