ONS data for England and Wales shows 26% of heterosexual divorces in 2025 followed 20 years or more of marriage
Most couples are aware of the dreaded “seven-year itch”, when the honeymoon period wears off and real life starts to bite.
Now official data has shown that couples in England and Wales are more likely to split after 20 years. According to Office for National Statistics figures, more than a quarter of all divorces between opposite-sex couples happened after 20 years or longer of marriage.
The potter and presenter on a tricky childhood, his religious calling for clay, and cross-dressing as Adele
Born in London in 1965, Keith Brymer Jones is a potter, ceramic designer and TV judge. After a stint as lead singer of the punk band the Wigs, he became an apprentice at Harefield Pottery in London. He went on to set up his own company, and created pots and homewares for retailers including Conran, Habitat and Laura Ashley, before developing his signature Word range. He has been a judge on The Great Pottery Throw Down since it started in 2015. His new book, Firing Earth: An Unexpected History of Pots and Potters, is published on 22 October.
This photo was taken in our family home in Finchley. Socks, shorts and a T-shirt was my usual outfit for scabbing around in the garden aged 11. I was a complete and utter square.
Why is a child going “Na-na, na-na-na!” annoying the world over? I read recently that kids do a version of this in every culture and country. Fred Corbett, London
Eight is such a wonderful age. Kids are old enough to have their own interests and hobbies, but still young enough to get swept up in play and be absorbed for hours if you find the right toy for them.
By eight, children’s interests and skills are taking shape. They’re more confident readers, more strategic thinkers and curious about how things work. And while they think they’re extremely grown up, eight-year-olds still need plenty of time to play for their overall wellbeing.
Only you can know when you are ready, but a year is not long to process grief, and you seem to have doubts about this man
My longterm boyfriend died of cancer last year. We’d been together for 16 years, since I was 21 and he was 23. I had given birth to our only child three weeks before his diagnosis. My son was just shy of 10 months old when his dad died, and he’s now turned two.
I loved my late partner deeply and had planned to stay with him for ever. We were embarking on an 18-year project together, raising our son. NowI think, how can I ever be happy again?
Guardian readers reflect and reminisce about the cooking equipment that has been significant in their families
Among the wedding presents from 1963 that I still use (Letters, 9 October) are Denby ovenware, a complete set of Prestige kitchen utensils, a Victorinox paring knife we bought with money given to us for bedsheets, and smoked-glass wine and sherry glasses from a friend of my parents. When a grandchild noticed that we had rather a lot of flower vases, we had to confess that when asked what we would like as a present, we were so embarrassed that we always said “a flower vase”, knowing that it could come in at any price. It was a vintage year, 1963.
Prue Baker Brighton
• I inherited my mother’s potato masher, bought just after the war. As a newly married housewife setting up home with everything in short supply and rationing continuing, she told me that she was delighted to see the masher for sale and bought two – one for her sister. It was flimsy – a thin circular metal holed base with three wires attached, which were twisted to form the stem, and a wooden handle painted blue. History and memories in a utensil.
Sue Rawson Scarborough,North Yorkshire
I wait each year for my cumquat tree to fruit. Then I make Mum’s jam
It’s citrus season, and the trees of my streets are heavy with the bright balls of fruit. My son sometimes picks me a lemon or two on his way home from school, and I help myself to the basket of limes that hang from the fence of a nearby house. The potted plant on my balcony fruited early this season, and for weeks I watched as the hundreds of small green cumquats slowly ripened. I finally picked them when they were fattened with juice and seeds and colour, the cat squatting on the ground to watch. When I dropped a cumquat she sniffed at the skin and turned away, as if sensing the sharpness of its flesh.
Since my daughter moved out several years ago, my household has shrunk. It is now only my son and me. And the cat. A scratchy, sullen creature who delights in ignoring us both unless we are sitting in the seat she believes is hers. My son has begun cooking for himself, and so I find my services in the kitchen required less often. Except for the yearly making of cumquat jam.
As climate breakdown pushes families to starvation, many feel forced to ‘sacrifice’ daughters to save siblings. Photographer Elise Blanchard travelled the country speaking to girls as young as eight, 10 and 14 who have been engaged or married to repay debts or pay for food
‘I’m not happy about this,” says 11-year-old Khatira, who was sold into marriage to repay debts, sitting in her home in Qala-e-Naw, capital of Badghis province in north-west Afghanistan. “She was healthy before her engagement, now she is worried and cries a lot,” says her 40-year-old mother, Noor Bibi.
When her 20-year-old husband-to-be comes to her home, Khatira runs away. Since her engagement, she has stopped going outside because she “is ashamed of having a husband in front of the other girls”, says her mother.
Shepherds watch over their sheep in the hills of Bala-Murghab, Badghis province, north-west Afghanistan. By March, the pasture was already too dry for the season
Amid worries about children’s relationship to tech, the solution is often spending more time talking openly with each other
We have become obsessed with the idea that screens are destroying human connection.
The evidence seems to be everywhere. Each week headlines warn of teenagers addicted to phones, a lonelinessepidemic and the dangersof AI. The release of The Social Reckoning leads us to ask, “How bad were those guys at Meta?” and then ultimately wonder, “How bad am I if I still use Instagram?” In our day-to-day, we observe workers eating lunch alone while scrolling and friends choosing online games over offline gatherings.
Responding to an editorial on the extent of sexual abuse of pupils by their peers, a reader calls for more nuance and compassion. Plus a letter from Donna Hill
As a paediatrician specialising in the care of children who have been sexually abused, I am well aware of sexual harm that occurs in school settings by peers (Editorial 5 October). This is just one aspect of the wider issue of children and young people who sexually harm other children and young people.
Of all the children my organisation cares for, 30% are harmed by other children – data we shared with the children’s commissioner in their report in 2023 on the impact of pornography on harmful sexual behaviour on children.
Some managed to tick an extra thing off their to-do list. “After six months of testing IPL devices, epilators and then IPL devices again, I had no need to book in for my usual pre-beach wax this summer,” says Lise Smith. Rachel Ogden says testing toasters has meant knowing her smoke alarm “works just fine”.
Life had come crashing to a halt when I lost my brother. But in the cinema I found comfort and a strange solidarity
In 2022, my younger brother drowned in an accident. His death reset life as I knew it. I had been offered my first proper job; I didn’t take it. I was planning to move out; I stayed at home. At this critical juncture, with my foot on the pedal, ready to enter adult life, everything exploded.
At home, there were now three of us. We orbited separate corners of the house, each needing a different thing for comfort: for my mum, exercise; for my dad, music; for me, escape.
After Susan Brison was raped and left for dead, her husband, Thomas, did his best to support her. They are still together, while many relationships collapse after a sexual assault. What did he get right – and wrong? And why did she want him to write about her ordeal?
On a hot, still, silent noon, at a junction of dirt roads in rural France, Thomas Trezise stood scanning the horizon, looking and listening for his wife. He tried to soothe a deep foreboding. Susan Brison had headed out for a morning walk two hours ago. How could she be gone so long?
This was 4 July 1990, the start of what was meant to be a busy summer. Trezise and Brison were both assistant professors in the US – he in French at Princeton and Brison in philosophy at Dartmouth – and had just arrived at the remote farmhouse of Trezise’s French colleague. Life seemed packed with promise. “I’d found someone with whom I really wanted to spend my life and I just felt very, very lucky,” says Trezise. “Susan and I had fallen quickly and deeply in love – it was magical – and at that point, we were also trying to conceive a child. We loved being in France. I kind of felt I’d found my way. It was a good place … until it happened.”
The choir leader and presenter on not fitting in at his all-boys grammar, how synthesisers changed everything, and his ‘dithering’ start on TV
Born in London in 1975, Gareth Malone is a choirmaster and broadcaster. He began his career running youth and community choirs for the London Symphony Orchestra and first appeared on TV in 2006’s The Choir. He has since created choirs with Leicester schoolboys, Aylesbury prisoners, as well as the Military Wives, which produced the No 1 single, Wherever You Are. He lives in London with his wife and three children. His new live show, Sing-A-Long-A-Gareth: At the Movies, is on tour across the UK this autumn.
I was 15 and just coming into my own with my confidence, as you can tell by the double denim and the pose. The photo would have been taken at a party at my parents’ house in Bournemouth. When I wasn’t filling up guests’ drinks, I’d be playing some songs – it looks like I’m playing B flat major, so I suspect at this very moment it was Hey Jude.
His behaviour is certainly inappropriate, but take a quiet moment to try to find out where the anger is coming from
My partner and I have been together for 25 years and we have two sons, aged 14 and 16. Both are football crazy and have played since they were very young. My partner’s competitive nature was one of the things I initially found attractive about him (I wanted someone with drive).
However, this side of him rears its ugly head when our kids play matches. He shouts, criticises and, worst of all, swears at teenagers. I’m so embarrassed by itand it’s also affecting the boys. Their teammates hear their dad and it’s creating tension. I’ve tried to speak to him about it but he brushes it off. Our boys and the coaches have spoken to him too, but to no avail.
It’s not often I get the chance to admire my handiwork, but I have finally fixed a light switch
For a single strange moment, everything appears to be in hand: the garden is tidy and free of dead branches, thanks to Gardening Steve; the back door, which refused to close properly for most of the summer, has fixed itself in the cooler weather. I’ll take that as a win.
The bathtub’s clawed feet are sitting on two long planks, safely spreading its enormous load evenly across the squishy, sinking bathroom floor. There are, theoretically, further repairs to be undertaken here, but I’ve reached an age where I’ve had to make sharp adjustments to my idea of what constitutes a permanent solution. If nothing else happens, this will do.
In the UK, one in five families are affected by permanent estrangement – it’s not a decision to be taken lightly. These are the questions experts suggest you ask yourself before cutting a relative out of your life
It’s important to be certain you aren’t walking away because it feels more manageable than addressing challenging issues. “Sometimes estrangement is exactly what’s needed for safety and healing. Other times it functions as an attempt to avoid grief, conflict, disappointment or the painful acceptance that a parent cannot become the person one longs for,” says Joshua Coleman, a clinical psychologist and the author of Rules of Estrangement. “Distance alone doesn’t resolve those emotions.”
After retiring at 83, I had a new lease of life creating social media content with my grandson. Then I broke the crowd surfing world record
In 2013, aged 87, I was playing basketball with my grandson Ross in Ohio while he was home from college. He made a video of me blocking his shot, posted it online, and people really ate it up. We started doing comedy skits together and now have more than 4 million followers on Instagram.
After doing lots of short videos, we decided to make a documentary about my life. As part of it, we compiled my bucket list. One of the things I wanted to do was break a world record. Ross and I spent months thinking of something that would be outrageous, but also fun and inclusive. We settled on me becoming the world’s oldest crowd surfer.
It used to be quite normal to pop next door for a coffee or invite friends over for dinner. But not any more. What’s behind this change – and just how damaging is it?
‘I really loved hosting at home years ago, before I had kids, when my house wasn’t filled with toys and I had lots of time to plan and shop,” says Rehanna, 41, from Birmingham. Now, if she’s catching up with friends, she would rather go out. “I can’t host and cook at the same time, so if I have people over it will usually be a cold buffet I have made earlier. There are so many really nice restaurants where I live that I’d prefer to go out and try something new than make an old favourite at home.”
Personally, I’d never say no to a cold buffet – but Rehanna’s story is not unusual. In the US, the number of people who regularly host friends or family fell from 42% in 1975 to 12% in 2026 – a 70% drop over the last 50 years. In the UK, the numbers are not much better: last year, a poll of 2,000 adults found that more than four in 10 British people avoid hosting at home due to the clean-up it requires. And while chef Nigella Lawson is back on TV screens demonstrating her culinary prowess on The Great British Bake Off, it wasn’t long ago that the self-proclaimed domestic goddess revealed even she had “got out of the habit” of hosting formal dinner parties.
Òran Mór, Glasgow Blythe Duff and Mark Barrett are excellent as two people helplessly bound to each other in this bitter two-hander
The arrival of a first baby changes everything. It is not just the upheaval of fitting the child into your life: the shift is also psychological. Children become parents. Parents become grandparents. Responsibility and accountability move down a generation.
That is why, in Jonny Donahoe’s knotty, bitter two-hander, a man known only as Son (Mark Barrett) has called on Mother (Blythe Duff) after an eight-month gap. She is spikily indifferent to his appearance, here in her back garden where she is burning family photographs on a bonfire. Despite the frosty reception, he must persist.
Fiona Lindop says she will always be grateful to the TV presenter for establishing the Meet-a-Mum Association
Esther Rantzen (Obituary, 1 October) is rightly remembered and honoured for her wide-ranging charity work, including establishing Childline and the Silver Line. One of the charities that she pioneered was the Meet-a-Mum Association (Mama), founded in 1979. Mama established a network of local groups offering friendship and support for new mothers.
In 1984, I was a young mum with a toddler and a two-week-old baby, and had just moved to Hertfordshire from South Yorkshire. Mama was a lifeline that helped me become part of the new community with access to support, and I joined the local Mama committee soon after.
From Day of the Dead to Samhain, celebrating autumn is centuries old. Now, I want this to be a moment of magic and connection for my kids
Darker nights are drawing in, there’s a hint of a chill in the air and the supermarket’s seasonal aisles are groaning with spooky paraphernalia. Halloween is coming. Every year about now, I tell myself I’m going to get my hands on a pumpkin and bake a pie like the ones my mum would make with us when we were little.
Halloween wasn’t a huge deal in our house, and neither was baking, but I hold warm memories of helping my mum go through the steps that led us to one delicious latticed pumpkin pie and one ugly jack o’lantern that we would display in the window with pride.
For generations, professional photographers have captured the country’s pupils in all their awkward glory. But an increasing number of parents are using AI to avoid paying them
My wife is obsessed with everything that’s happening in the US. She literally spends all day sitting on the couch, watching videos and reading opinion pieces. She’s originally from America and has been living abroad for 25 years and she has family in the US, so I get that she needs to feel connected to what’s happening. But it’s constant. Whether we’re eating, watching a TV show or movie, when we’re talking about something completely unrelated – everything, every topic, either starts or ends with outrage.
I’ve told her she needs to take at least one day off all social media, but she won’t do that even for an hour. It stresses her out more and more every day, but she just keeps going back to it – and it has been really affecting me, more lately than ever. On weekends I stay up late playing games (my way of winding down after a week of work) and she’ll go to bed early. And during those times sometimes I just sit and cry. Everything that’s happening is so stressful, and there’s nothing we can do about it. I just wish I could rip away her phone and let her breathe! I don’t know what to say or do. Is there anything that could help?
Karin Wulf (9/2026), "The Family History of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, and the Politics of Genealogy": "a team ... has been working with a strand of Thomas Jefferson's hair to compare recovered DNA with that contributed by descendants of Sally Hemings ... More problematic is the failure of most of the flurry of media attention ... to resist tired and tiresome framings ... History regularly skips or dismisses the essential history of family." Wulf's other posts on "Reading Family History" (2, 3, 4, 5, 6), her course on "Gender, Sexuality and Family in the Early Modern Atlantic World," and other posts / tidbits. Also this month, an interview with Marcia Biederman on a later family's history: "the true story of an Alaska Native woman" with "villainous relatives: the mother- and sister-in-law from hell, who welcomed Agnes by showing her to a stark, unheated attic room." Via.
There is a lot going on right now regarding the safety of kids online.
In the United States, the majority of state legislatures have passed age verification laws requiring a variety of websites to more rigorously verify the age of their visitors. In the United Kingdom, Canada, Norway, Spain, and Germany, lawmakers are considering bans on social media access for anyone under the age of 16—Australia passed its ban in 2025. In schools across the world, smartphones have been removed from classrooms, hallways, and cafeterias. And online, some of the most popular apps and video games with children, such as Discord and Roblox, have implemented default restrictions on what young users can find and who they reach.
Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we bring back Anna Brading, editor-in-chief of Malwarebytes Labs and director of content and, perhaps most importantly, mother of three. With a long career in cybersecurity—and an equally long time spent reading, writing, and assigning some of the cybersecurity world’s most pressing headlines—Brading has a unique perspective on what is most dangerous to her children online.
Brading’s list of priorities is long, and includes improper image use, “online nastiness,” and Roblox, but she has a few rules and guidelines to help. She sets a one-hour-a-day video game limit on the weekends, restricts YouTube to a communal and monitored activity, and requests that no one share photos of her children online without her express permission. Importantly, she also reminds parents to trust their guts.
“If the norm now is mental health issues or online grooming or non-consensual porn or constant comparison, then I’m okay without my kids fitting in. I would say be radical, buck the trend, don’t do what everybody else is doing. Say no to things you don’t feel comfortable with.”
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