Lifestyle

A beginner's guide to budgeting  Budgeting can feel like a daunting prospect for some, if you haven’t paid attention to your bank account each month actually looking at how much you have left midway through could have you spiraling into a pit of despair – but it doesn’t have to be this way! If you’re new to budgeting, here’s how to get started instead of burying your head in the sand and watching the numbers tick over into the minus moments...

Whether you’re thinking of taking up road biking to boost your health, cut the cost of a commute or live a greener lifestyle, there are very real benefits to be had. But, if you’ve been out of the saddle for a while, are anxious about being on busy roads or are just wondering how a road bike differs to other types of bicycle, Formby Cycles offer some of their best advice for beginners:   What is a Road Bike? Road...

Review: Goosebumps Kids, The Vaults, Waterloo A looming half-term is enough to give most parents in the capital sleepless nights but this time around there’s a new attraction to keep even the most terrifying of little monsters entertained. Staged deep underground in the creepy vaults beneath Waterloo Station, Goosebumps Kids brings to life RL Stine’s bestselling children’s horror stories in a spine-tingling theatrical adventure aimed at five- to 11-year-olds. Not quite knowing what to expect, my nine-year-old son and I...

Sometimes things can get fraught in the workplace. Many workplaces are a strange melting pot of people from different backgrounds, forced together in a bid to meet the aims and ambitions of a company, and their own ambitions. It’s perhaps to be expected that people thrown together in this way might well disagree about things, especially if under pressure. A disagreement is fine, but if it festers and grows into a dispute then it can harm a business. In 2014-15...

The weather is warming up, the outdoors is beckoning and the nights are getting lighter. It all sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? It most respects it is but for all the feel-good factor that the onset of summer brings, it comes with its own cautionary note for home owners: crime rates go up in the summer. From a homeowner’s point of view, the key concern is not so much the overall crime rate as the number of...

Brits are missing out on the big moments in life because they're too busy trying to capture them on their mobile phones. New research has revealed that four in ten say they have not truly experienced significant moments such as a child's first steps or graduation because they were too busy taking pictures for social media. Indeed, the study found one young mum missed her child’s first words because she was messing around with her phone and a student missed a crucial...

By Amy Sharpe When the sun finally showed its face last month after an endless winter, I no longer wanted my straggly long hair to be dragging me down. In the same way that some people want to trim their love handles at the first sign of sun, for me it was the locks that needed trimming. I wanted a light and fresh do – a ‘spring clean’ for my head. So I popped into The Chapel in Islington, London...

Team GB have unveiled the formal wear for the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. The suits are modelled by super heavyweight boxer Joe Joyce and gymnast Nile Wilson to highlight the diversity of sizes, with 30-year-old Joe weighing in at 17 stone and a huge 6ft 5ins tall compared to 20-year-old Nile, who is just 5ft 4in and nine-and-a-half stone. Accrington-based Simon Jersey designed the suits for 350 athletes – Team GB’s largest ever away team – in a process which...

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...