The usual advice was getting me nowhere. If I really wanted to embrace running, I’d need to go off-piste. It was a journey that took me to some very strange places …I’ve always hated running. I’ve tried several times in the past, even made it work for a week or two, then stopped. I hated the excess of pain, the minimal gain. I never experienced runner’s high, only runner’s low. I despised the weather, come rain or shine, and the fact I had to be out in it. But most of all I hated the plodding, the tedium, the sheer mundanity of the run. Is that really how I’d choose to spend my one precious life?Then an old football injury returned, with a vengeance. Doctors had previously rebuilt my kneecap, added titanium and rendered me bionic. But they’d not anticipated Natasha Bedingfield, come midnight at a wedding, and the extremity of my dance moves. My kneecap went a-wandering. It started to catch and click-clack, like castanets. A physio soon gave me the news I’d always dreaded: I had to start running, outside, properly, and often. Continue reading...

12 Aug 2026 04:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

There are more than 70,000 hysteroscopies every year in England alone. The NHS calls them ‘low complexity’ – yet a shocking number of patients complain of inadequate pain relief and medical staff who refuse to take them seriouslyIn February this year, Beth Harris sat in the day surgery waiting room of her local hospital and tried to steady her nerves.She was there for a hysteroscopy, in this case to remove a fibroid. A thin surgical instrument with a lens, a light, a blade and an irrigation system for pumping saline solution would be inserted through her vagina and cervix, into her womb. The saline solution would widen the womb and the fibroid would be shaved away. Her hospital had advised taking paracetamol or ibuprofen an hour before the appointment, which Harris had done. However, the appointment was for 1pm, and by 4pm, she was still waiting in her hospital gown, surrounded by other patients. Continue reading...

16 Aug 2026 13:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

In 1926, Henry Ford gave his employees both Saturdays and Sundays off – and the two-day chunk of time to party, pray or simply do nothing was born. Now it’s changed beyond recognitionFor 11 years, from 1929 to 1940, the Soviet Union did not have weekends. Instead, to increase productivity citizens were allocated a day off in every seven at random. With 80% of the population at work on any given day, factories never had to power down.A letter from a disgruntled worker to Pravda newspaper, published soon after the implementation of this new working calendar, outlined the problems: “What is there for us to do at home if our wives are in the factory, our children at school, and nobody can visit us?” the letter-writer asked. “It is no holiday if you have to have it alone.” Parents found themselves at home while their children were at school, or with kids unsupervised while they were on shift. With no shared day off, extended family gatherings became impossible. The workforce became demoralised and listless, the projected spike in productivity never materialised, and the policy was first modified, then abandoned altogether. Continue reading...

16 Aug 2026 05:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

The winner of The World’s Ugliest Dog Contest, Jinny Lu, took home the big prize in the annual and peculiar competition, which calls attention to the benefits of adopting rescue dogs. The 50th Annual World’s Ugliest Dog contest was held at the Sonoma County Fair in Santa Rosa, California, with contestants from as far away as PolandWorld’s Ugliest Dog contest 2026 – in pictures Continue reading...

17 Aug 2026 03:31 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

Because I’d visited so often to print things, she made me feel that someone had witnessed the journey I was on, all the way through to its difficult conclusionRead more in the kindness of strangers seriesMum’s disease progressed slowly at first, and then in a really big rush. After years of battling early onset Parkinson’s, in 2015 we were suddenly told she only had six months left.I was living in Brisbane, Australia, and Mum was in a care home 600km away in Taree, so I began flying down every second weekend to visit. At the time, it was still common to print out your boarding pass – or at least, it was for me; I was a bit late to the tech game. Continue reading...

16 Aug 2026 15:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

The Guardian travelled 100 miles along the EU’s longest river, where some residents are struggling to secure drinking waterFor centuries, the rock was seen as a warning. When it began to emerge from the Danube, beneath Gellért Hill in Budapest, it meant the river had fallen so low that floating mills could no longer operate, crops were probably failing, and hunger would almost certainly follow. That is why, in the Hungarian capital, where over time the boulder became little more than a legend, it was named Ínség-szikla – the Rock of Starvation.Today, amid record-low water levels on the Danube, the rock has not only emerged from the water, but surfaced almost in its entirety, along with the sandy riverbed on which it rests, astonishing geologists and government scientists sent to examine it. And, much as the rock was said to warn, Hungary is now facing an unprecedented energy crisis that has forced the country to shut down all but one of its Danube-cooled nuclear reactors for the first time in 44 years. Continue reading...

16 Aug 2026 10:37 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

Student unrest sweeps India, Portugal and Mexico as grievances and pressure for good grades in tough job market collideFamilies with teenagers in education know the private, hidden pain of exam season. But this year, what might have been a summer of quiet family anxiety has erupted in several countries into public unrest.Exam-related turmoil has led to mass student protests in Mexico after nearly 60,000 university applicants were forced to resit tests amid suspected cheating, while Portugal’s disastrous attempt to digitise school exam marking sparked the country’s worst education crisis in decades. Continue reading...

16 Aug 2026 07:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN