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A new start after 60: I adopted a Guide Dog mum – and found true love, community and confidence

A new start after 60: I adopted a Guide Dog mum – and found true love, community and confidence

After her husband died suddenly, and her children left home, teacher Helen Smith started to question everything in her life. Then a radio programme about a shortage of Guide Dogs gave her an idea Helen Smith was cleaning her bathroom and listening to the radio, some time after the pandemic, when a story came on about a shortage of guide dogs. The pandemic had made it hard to breed puppies. One vision-impaired owner faced a two-year wait for a new dog. Knowing the importance of her own relationship with dogs, Smith was overcome with sadness for him. Right then, she thought, “Well, what am I going to do with the rest of my life?” She was living in the south of Hesse, in Germany, having moved in 1998 from Shropshire for her husband’s work. Their daughters were nine and three. The family settled. They got a dog. Smith found tutoring work and started a business teaching English. Tell us: has your life taken a new direction after the age of 60? Continue reading...

March of the penguins: the Golden Globes red carpet marks the return of the staid black suit

March of the penguins: the Golden Globes red carpet marks the return of the staid black suit

The performative male was over at the 2026 Golden Globes, where even risk-takers like Timothée Chalamet, Jacob Elordi and Jeremy Allen White did little to temper the black tie stuffiness Timothée Chalamet was the final clue. As he arrived in good time on the Golden Globes red carpet, the star of Marty Supreme put pay to speculation as to whether the chromatic marketing of the film’s ping pong balls would have him wearing orange. Instead, he wore a black T-shirt; vest, jacket and Timberland boots with silver buttons by Chrome Hearts, souped up with a five-figure Cartier necklace. Kylie Jenner, his partner and sartorial foil, was nowhere to be seen. Styled by Taylor McNeill, who was also responsible for Chalamet’s wildly amusing if chaotic red carpet campaign for the film, the look was bad boy Bond. It also set the tone for an evening of subdued tones. If we thought the penguin suit had gone extinct, we were wrong. The performative male is over – welcome to the return of the staid suit. Continue reading...

The Golden Globes ceremony ignored politics. But their big winner taps today’s unhappy turbulence | Peter Bradshaw

The Golden Globes ceremony ignored politics. But their big winner taps today’s unhappy turbulence | Peter Bradshaw

One Battle After Another engages with the tense climate of the second Trump administration unlike any other contender Now that the political scene in the contemporary United States looks like an unending string of military PR coups for the Trumpian right at home and abroad, it’s appropriate that Paul Thomas Anderson’s spectacular, mysterious counterculture epic One Battle After Another – with Leonardo DiCaprio as a clueless, dishevelled ex-revolutionary – should consolidate its current position as one of the leading movies of this awards season: winning four Globes including best musical or comedy and best director for Paul Thomas Anderson – whose fluency, productivity and pure technique and ambition are arguably making him America’s pre-eminent film-maker. The excellent Teyana Taylor got best supporting actress. This is a movie scene in which no mainstream is directly attacking the Trump regime head-on (such as, say, Ali Abbasi’s satirical Trump biopic The Apprentice) but there is something in Anderson’s film that inhales and intuits both the current febrile mood of reactionary hysteria and the tension and depression of those opposing it. Sean Penn wasn’t up for any Globes last night for his role as the bullish and yet pathetic Col Lockjaw in One Battle After Another, the oppressor despised by his masters, but I see a great deal of Lockjaw in Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio, the disposable courtiers uneasily standing ramrod straight behind the president at public events. Continue reading...