Latest articles from Natasha Radmehr

Opinion Natasha Radmehr: Well, here's another nice mess I'm very happy with

FOR some people, like my sister’s boyfriend Dave, wearing a pair of odd socks is intentional. A style statement. But if you ever see me in a non-matching pair, know this: I am not trying to spice up an outfit by adopting a jolly sartorial quirk. I have simply been left with no choice, because my underwear drawer is an absolute riot.

Natasha Radmehr: So why are we so bad at predicting the future?

“I CAN’T predict the future, so I can’t tell you what to do,” the mortgage adviser said with the weariness of a man who had uttered variations of that sentence thousands of times. I was asking if I should fix my rate for two years or five, remembering conversations with my dad about how steeply the interest rates had climbed in the early 1990s. At one point he was paying an interest rate of 15% and working 14-hour days in a takeaway just to stay afloat. Is it going to get that bad again,

Natasha Radmehr: You've got to love Martin Lewis, the angel who is now focused on saving lives

LAST year, I worked for a social enterprise, helping unemployed people find jobs. Every day I’d strap on my headset like a pilot without a plane and settle in for a sometimes-turbulent stream of phone calls. One day, I chatted to a man who had just spent a long time in prison. As well as trying to find work, he was adjusting to a world that looked very different to the one he’d left behind in 1997. He couldn’t figure out what broadband to get, or even if it was affordable, and was having p

Natasha Radmehr: Love Island should be harmless fluff not a worrying descent into misogyny

I DIDN’T anticipate getting fully sucked into the Love Island vortex this year. I thought I’d pick away at an episode here and there, tapas-style, thereby broadening my small-talk repertoire beyond the cost of petrol without spending almost every evening of my summer bikini-deep in reality TV. Having never seen it before, I was unaware that trying to limit yourself to a few episodes of Love Island is akin to eating just one little patata from a heaving bowl of bravas. Impossible, in other wo

Natasha Radmehr: Gender stereotypes have no place in the classroom

If there’s a word guaranteed to give me the boak, it is the word woke, which has been co-opted by fusty conservatives to pillory anyone vaguely left-leaning. On Saturday, educationalist Professor Alan Smithers became the latest to set my teeth on edge with it by saying schoolboys are being let down by “wokeism”, which apparently upholds the gender attainment gap.

Natasha Radmehr: Women’s Health Plan has admirable ambitions, but is it achievable?

My legs are splayed and resting on stirrups. A man peering beneath my gown carefully brushes my cervix with vinegar and I try not to smart. I am not in some strange condiment-based fetish club, though I’ve no doubt one exists somewhere (insert Mayo Clinic gag here). I am mid-colposcopy, a procedure that women are invited to undergo if their cervical smear test has returned abnormal results, as mine did a few months ago.