Let’s start by saying this: Ghislaine Maxwell deserves every last day of the 20 years she will spend behind bars for procuring young girls for her rich financier boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein to molest in massage rooms.

She is a monster in every sense of the word, and even more so, it could be argued, than Epstein himself. The sexual abuse he visited upon his victims is as horrific as anything you might imagine. It can’t be minimised or mitigated, and nor should it be. Ever.

But the horror of Maxwell’s own role in his crimes is amplified further simply by virtue of the fact she was a woman who betrayed young women who had every right to believe in her, by failing to protect them.

She has been vilified has a traitor to her gender. Somehow, t...

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In the 1980s (1983, if we want to be precise about it) there was a movie called War Games, starring Brat Packers Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy. 

It’s a good, if fairly generic, 80s teen buddy film – and there were a lot of those about at the time – in which computer whiz kid Broderick finds a back door into a US defence computer designed to simulate various war scenarios with the then-Soviet Union – and accidentally manages to trick it into thinking the Russians were launching a real nuclear strike against America.

Ultimately global thermonuclear war is averted by programming the computer, called Joshua, to play continuous games of noughts and crosses (don’t ask, that’s what Google’s for).

So, why am I talki...

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Well, that escalated quickly, didn’t it? 

There we were, meandering gently towards the end of 2021 and looking forward to what we hoped would be a relatively normal year and before you know it we saw war in Ukraine, endured an economy in meltdown, said a tearful farewell to Her Maj and watched the UK change prime ministers more often than Imelda Marcos changes her shoes.

And that was just the big stuff. 

What we all need now is a bit of peace and quiet – time to reflect and recharge, a little oasis of calm in which to breathe, take stock and re-energise ourselves for a new year with new challenges and new opportunities.

Unfort...

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Andy Warhol once predicted that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. Well, the future is now, and unfortunately – for all of us – that prophecy has now, to some extent, become a reality of regurgitated and unfiltered narcissism in which everyone has an opinion and we’re all entitled to it.  

Humans aren’t designed to be in contact with this many humans and we certainly aren’t designed to be exposed to all of their thoughts, all of the time.   

Self-help consumerism has exploded.   And like an unceasing episode of projectile vomiting...

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If you thought the relationship between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard was dysfunctional, the chances are you’ve been involved in a long-term relationship that puts that couple’s weapons grade levels of toxicity into the shade by comparison.

Our compulsive obsession with the constant stream of bad news being delivered to our social media and news accounts – or doom-scrolling as it’s often called – has been shown to have a seriously detrimental impact on our emotional wellbeing.

Yet we persist. That notification ding! is like catnip for the modern human. The screen illuminates and, like Pavlov’s dogs, we’re reaching with thumbs cocked to pull the latest piece of national or international misery into our lives.

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Over the last few weeks, it’s become more and more apparent to me that the real price of the cost-of-living crisis is our collective mental health.

I’m not here to pile on the misery – we all know it’s hell out there right now – but we all also need to understand that good mental health (or recovering from poor mental health) means acknowledging the problem and then dealing with it. 

The situation we’re all facing is bad and getting worse, so where exactly are we right now? 

I’ve often said that, as health crises go, the mental health crisis we face not just in the UK but globally dwarfs the Covid-19 pandemic by many multiples. Itâ...

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It seems sometimes as if the world has turned into a kind of global supermarket where the only thing you can buy are cheap promises.

Life has become so hideously competitive that wherever you turn there are 101 dubious offers designed to get your attention, each one promising more than the last, each one with about as much substance as fresh air.

It’s not just limited to the retail sector, it also swarms through business and life and leisure and love, and everything in between. And the noise is constant, whether you’re in the market to buy, or not.

We’re accosted at every turn by yet another not-to-be-missed change-your-life-in-an-instant deal. Itâ€...

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The inarguable truth of life is that there are only three ways that it can impact on you, and that however inclined to control freakery you might or might not be, one of them is completely beyond your control.

There are those things in life that happen as a direct result of your own decisions and actions: if you put your hand into a fire, it will hurt.

There are those things in life that you can influence: you can reduce you...

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If you’re someone who has the slightest interest in current affairs, then the last thing you probably need to read is yet another semi-informed examination of who’s to blame in the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard three-ring libel circus currently playing out in a Virginian courtroom.

I’m not going to add to the noise of speculation. In the end, each of them claims to have been abused by the other, and there’s been plenty of evidence presented to the court to suggest that perhaps that’s the closest we’ll ever get to the truth of the abuse question. 

Perhaps the most important thing to take away from the court case that’s being played out minute by minute on US daytime TV is a be...

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If you’re a film buff, chances are you’ll have seen The Batman – on the surface yet another rehash of a cinematic franchise, but in reality, one of the darkest and most disturbing films you’ll see on the big screen this year.

In the 1960s world of Adam West’s Batman, Bruce Wayne’s caped crusader alter ego was, inevitably, the matinee idol stereotype of the good guy (albeit with a somewhat camp style and corny gag portfolio) roaring to the rescue in the Batmobile from a cave almost certainly borrowed from the Thunderbirds set.

Yet, right from the outset the original DC Comics back story to Wayne’s metamorphosis into so-called superhero was unremittingly dark: after witnessing his par...

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