Celebrity Big Brother star Louis Walsh appeared visibly stunned on Friday evening after he was booed by the live audience. 

However, it wasn’t all smooth sailing for Louis, as when hosts AJ Odudu and Will Best announced the eviction nominees, boos could be heard coming from the crowd each time his name was mentioned. 

After hearing the boos, Louis appeared shocked and gasped, however, he quickly brushed them off by pulling a face to show he was not bothered by their dislike towards him. 

Despite the crowd’s negative reaction towards him, Louis managed to survive the eviction. 

 However, the same can’t be said for celebrity chef Levi Roots and former Love Island winner Ekin-Su Cülcüloğlu, as both stars were voted out at the same time. 

The live eviction comes after a dramatic nominations twist during Thursday’s episode, where housemates had to vote face-to-face. 

It comes after Louis revealed that he was diagnosed with a ‘rare’ type of cancer in 2020 as he spoke about the major health scare for the first time during Friday’s episode of Celebrity Big Brother. 

The Irish music manager confessed he had Waldenstrom’s Macroglobulinemia, a rare type of blood cancer, but has since been given the all-clear after receiving treatment in Dublin during lockdown. 

And now friends of the star have opened up about Louis’ illness and explained that is the reason he has been sleeping so much in the ITV reality show. 

The star has been seen napping often in the Big Brother house, with his pals revealing ‘you can see how frail he is’.

Speaking about his health to The Mirror, his friends said: ‘Louis is in remission currently but you can see how frail he is and that he has lost a lot of weight. It’s also the reason why he’s sleeping so much, it all took a lot out of him.’   

Louis revealed during the episode that the cancer diagnosis came as a ‘shock’ and gave him a ‘reality check’ and his pals explained that it was the driving force behind him signing up for the Big Brother show. 

 They continued: ‘The whole experience was the main driver behind signing up for the show. He’d been really ill and just wanted to enjoy life again and thought “What the hell”.’ 

They added: ‘It’s little wonder he has decided to immerse himself in the Celebrity Big Brother house. It’s almost as a reaction to what has happened. It was quite the ordeal, not least as the cancer is so rare that it took a while to get diagnosed.’

Louis discussed his health with Levi and Ekin-Su on Friday he told the pair that ‘no one knew he was sick’. 

Levi asked how Louis spent the Coronavirus lockdown, he replied: ‘I was sick, and I think nobody knew I was sick. I had cancer. A mild version, a rare one.’

Levi asked: ‘Which part? Pancreatic Cancer?’

‘In my blood, I didn’t even know that I had it until I went to the hospital, and then they checked me, checked me, checked me, then they found it.

‘They said it’s a rare one, and I said [shrugs] gone. replied Louis.

The music manager admitted being diagnosed with cancer left him in ‘shock’ and gave him a ‘reality check’. 

He continued: ‘It did affect me mentally, I got to be honest with you. [Points to his head] It’s just up here, even when I go past a hospital I almost get sick. 

‘It’s all gone, I’m fine. It was just the shock of being sick and that word…nobody wants that word.

‘I have it blocked out, a reality check, you see so many people sick and it’s terrible.

‘In my world, it was all about pop music and all that. I didn’t think of anybody getting sick or anything like that. And that was like wow reality check, you’re in the real world.’

Waldenstrom’s Macroglobulinemia (also known as lymphoplasmacytic lymphoma) is a rare form of low-grade lymphoma (a type of bone marrow cancer), which is associated in most cases with the presence of an excessive amount of abnormal protein in the blood. 

Before entering the house, Louis revealed he had signed up to the ITV show to have fun after attending two recent funerals for friends that gave him a reality check about his mortality. 

 He told the Mirror: ‘I don’t want to be in my final chapter, I want to live. I want to enjoy myself. I don’t want to die. But then it makes sense that you get to this age and think, why not? Life’s too short. 

‘I’ve lost some people in my life recently and that changes you. I went to two funerals. Yeah, It’s a reality check, for sure. It makes you think about what life is all about. It makes you rethink what’s important and what you care about. Losing friends makes you think about your own mortality.

‘I want to enjoy myself more. I want to see the world. Everywhere. I don’t have a bucket list. I don’t like that word. I just want to see the rest of the world. I just want to enjoy life – live, love and laugh. I don’t want to be older and think if only I had done that. I don’t want to do that no. There’s no time for regrets. I’m happy. I’m honestly happy at the moment and this has given me an extra nudge to go and enjoy life even more.’

It comes after viewers were left furious when Louis ordered Nikita Kuzmin to ‘stop crying’ in tense scenes on Thursday night. 

Louis scolded the Strictly star, 26, during the shocking face-to-face nominations, when the latter began crying while voting for the former. 

The housemates were ordered to kiss the co-star they nominated – and when a sobbing Nikita approached Louis after saying he was lazy around the house, the septuagenarian spat: ‘Stop crying for God’s sake’. 

Nikita – who stated: ‘I don’t think Louis has helped around the house as much as everyone else has, that’s my reason’, before Louis’ slur – has scored legions of fans since entering the house, many of whom swarmed Twitter after the moment. 

Angry fans penned: ‘LOUIS TELLING NIKITA TO ‘STOP CRYING FOR GOD’S SAKE’ YOU ARE A BITTER EMOTIONLESS OLD MAN LEAVE MY BABY ALONE… @kuzmin__nikita is so pure Louis is vile we must protect Nikita at all cost!!!…’

 

 

Running the country requires being fit as a fiddle – so for the two men competing for the top job in this year’s general election, it couldn’t be more important to look after their health.

However, Labour peer Peter Mandelson has ruffled feathers within his party today after suggesting leader of the opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, needs to ‘shed a few pounds’ ahead of his campaign to win over the electorate.

It’s not the first time Starmer’s health has been under the microscope – last year the Mail on Sunday reported his own frontbench had held discussions on whether or not they should stage an intervention on their leaders weight after claiming he had added ‘a few extra pounds’.

Despite such reports, the Labour leader does seem to lead a fairly healthy lifestyle, following a pescatarian diet and playing five-a-side football in North London whenever he can.

Similarly, the health of Rishi Sunak has come under scrutiny in recent months, after the prime minister revealed he carries out a diet of intermittent fasting and doesn’t eat a single thing on Mondays.

Sunak, a fan of Peloton, also set tongues wagging when he was reportedly spotted rocking up to a Taylor Swift-themed spin class in California last year – much to the surprise of other people booked onto the class.

But, policies aside, how does the prime minister shape up to the Labour leader in the fitness stakes? FEMAIL takes a closer look into their diets and exercise regimes to find out…

Exercise 

It’s clear the Prime Minister values an active lifestyle – and he has made many headlines for his various fitness pursuits.

Back when he was chancellor, Rishi revealed that he started his days with a 6am Peloton session to Britney Spears songs.

Mr Sunak’s favourite exercise instructor is Cody Rigsby, 36, a professional dancer from New York who describes himself as an ‘opinionated homosexual’ to his 1.3 million Instagram followers.

Rishi has been enamoured with the £1,750 Peloton, which requires a monthly membership, since he got one in 2021 – when sales of the modern stationary bike boomed by 172 per cent during lockdown.

It features a large touchscreen tablet fixed between the bike’s handlebars so users can join virtual exercise classes from across the world.

Mr Sunak said having his exercise routine punctuated with the dulcet tones of the American star’s pop tunes is ‘no bad thing’, according to The Times.

In February 2020, Rishi revealed taking on the role of the chancellor of the exchequer wreaked havoc on his routine, and while he would like to take part in the classes twice a week, he is unable to.

However, when possible Rishi would finish his workout before he saw his children in the morning and started work at 7.45am.

It is believed he may have picked up some of his Californian lifestyle habits when he lived in the sunshine state while studying at Stanford University and met his wife Akshata Murthy, 43.

Rishi also revealed he likes mixing up his workouts with treadmill runs or high intensity interval training (HIIT) sessions at a community leisure centre in Richmond, north Yorkshire.

Last May, he was snapped posing with a jogger after taking part in a 10km fun run.

The prime minister was among hundreds of runners taking part in a race in the North Yorkshire town of Northallerton, within his Richmond constituency.

But after the race, he was pictured standing next to ‘avid parkrunner’ Nick Dent, who said he outran the Prime Minister with a time of 47 minutes and 46 seconds in the ‘tough’ contest.

‘A tough Northallerton 10K but really pleased with a chip time of about 47:46 on an undulating course ~ and I also beat this guy…’ Mr Dent said in a caption to the picture posted on Twitter.

The runner’s victory over the prime minister came after Mr Sunak said: ‘I haven’t done any exercise in a long time, I’ve been a little bit busy, but I’m going to try and do it in under an hour. It’s great to have everyone here so thanks for coming.

Last August, Rishi took his family on what was thought to be their first holiday together in four years.

The PM maintained his fitness regime and was reported to attend a Swift-themed indoor cycling session during the family holiday.

Downing Street did not deny reports the PM  took part in a workout class in LA set to the Shake It Off singer’s music.

A SoulCycle participant said Mr Sunak was at the Swift-themed indoor session. Hannah Harmelin posted a video on TikTok saying she spotted the PM at the end of a 7am class in Santa Monica.

Asked if Mr Sunak was a ‘Swiftie’ – as fans of the mega-star are known – the PM’s official spokesman told reporters: ‘I’m not going to guide you away from it.’

While Rishi undertakes various forms of exercise on a daily basis, Keir keeps it simple with weekly football games. 

He’s regularly photographed on the pitch taking part in five-aside games with friends at Sunday league for Homerton Academicals in north London.

Engaging in the group sport was described as a ‘normal’ routine for Keir back in 2022 after he was ambushed by a mob of anti-Covid restriction demonstrators while leaving a five-aside match, according to The Independent.  

More recently, in January 2024, the Labour leader could be seen throwing his hands into the air after letting two balls slip past him as goalie.

And when he’s not on the pitch himself, he’s donning red and white to cheer on his beloved Arsenal.

While he’s a diehard Arsenal supporter, it’s not the only team Keir follows, and last August he called for the Lionesses to be given honours after their inspirational World Cup campaign.

The Labour leader demanded formal recognition for their efforts. He said: ‘The Lionesses have galvanised the whole nation through their historic achievement in becoming the first England team to make the World Cup final.

‘But they’ve also inspired a generation of women and girls to play football, take up sport, and to remove any doubt in their minds that they too can go all the way in their chosen field.

‘There’s no doubt that they should be recognised by the honours system.’

The leader of the Labour party also takes an interest in tennis, having watched Wimbledon live from the royal box in 2022.

The politician was spotted among the seats in Centre Court’s Royal Box, alongside his wife Victoria, on women’s semi-finals day.

As well as engaging in a public display of affection with his spouse, Sir Keir was also seen sharing jokes with fellow attendees.

Dietary requirements 

The leader of the Labour Party follows a pescatarian diet – and has done so for over 25 years, despite admitting he still pines for bacon sandwiches and a chicken curry.

So, why does he cut out meat? For health and environmental reasons. In a 2020 interview on Sky’s Ridge on Sunday, the Opposition Leader said: ‘I gave up [meat] as a matter of principle years ago on the basis that eating meat wasn’t the right thing for the body and the planet but I have to say, I miss meat.’

Asked what he specifically missed he looked wistful and replied: ‘Oh, bacon sandwiches, chicken curry, you name it, almost everything!’

The 61-year-old extended his diet onto his children and didn’t let them eat meat until they were 10 years old.

Speaking on the Table Manners Podcast, hosted by pop singer Jessie Ware and her mother Lennie, the Labour leader said he and his vegetarian wife Victoria did not have meat or fish in the house when they were raising their son and daughter.

Once their son turned ten, Keir and Victoria said he could ‘do what you like’, and he immediately started eating KFC and McDonald’s.

However, he told Jessie and Lennie that his daughter has still never eaten meat or fish.

It marks a clear shift from Keir’s diet growing up, a time when meat was a staple part of his diet with foods including ‘sausages, mash, meat, and vegetables’ making a regular appearance on the dinner table. 

Sir Keir has spoken previously about becoming vegetarian 25 years ago, before reintroducing fish to his diet.

He said he found avoiding seafood ‘too much’, but described his wife as a ‘proper vegetarian’.

‘I struggle with it because I love meat. I love it. If you give up fish or meat on a matter of principle you still hanker after it,’ he said.

The couple’s son is now aged 15, while their daughter is 12. Describing their parenting, Sir Keir said: ‘We don’t have meat or fish in the house, we don’t cook it, until they’re about 10 obviously they’re just eating with us.’

He added: ‘And then at the age of 10 we said, ‘you can do what you like’ and our boy said ‘great’, so the moment we go out there’s a Deliveroo for Kentucky Fried Chicken or McDonald’s.

‘So he’s taken full, sort of, liberty with the license to do what he likes.’ However, Sir Keir said his daughter ‘has never in her life tasted meat or fish’.

When Lennie Ware challenged Sir Keir that many vegetarians cook meat for their children, he replied: ‘We never did.’

The Labour leader also insisted the family has no issue if their son wants to order non-vegetarian meals when they eat out. ‘We’re not bothered by that,’ he said.

Meanwhile, Rishi takes a different stance when it comes to meat, eating all but beef due to his Hindu faith.

The 43-year-old’s position might come as a surprise following his mother-in-law’s devotion to pure vegetarianism – having even sparked a Twitter debate after revealing she takes her own food with her everywhere she goes.

Sudha Murty, 73, who claimed she is the reason for the British Prime Minister’s success, describes herself as a ‘pure vegetarian’ – meaning she does not even eat eggs.

On a popular food show called ‘Khaane Mein Kya Hai?’, roughly meaning ‘What’s for lunch/dinner?’, the mother and grandmother revealed that ‘one of my biggest fears is that the same spoon may have been used for both vegetarian and non-vegetarian dishes’.

‘So, when I travel, I look for a pure vegetarian restaurant. And I carry an entire bag full of food,’ she said.

The remark quickly caused a storm on social media, with opinions divided between those criticising and supporting her.

Typical breakfast 

Rishi is said to opt for a healthy choice of Greek yogurt and blueberries for his breakfast each morning. 

But weekends are where the real breakfast magic happens in the Sunak household.

He told The Times: ‘We have a full cooked breakfast on Saturdays and on Sundays we alternate between pancakes and waffles… we do pancakes American-style, so the thin crispy bacon, blueberries, strawberries.’

And while the Prime Minister is often associated with a healthy lifestyle, he made waves online after claiming he enjoys a McDonald’s breakfast from time to time.

Rishi was mocked in 2022 after he claimed to always enjoy a McDonald’s breakfast wrap when out with his daughters – despite the item having not been on sale since March 2020.

The Tory leader was accused of a faux pas during a TV interview, in which he was quizzed about what he ordered when he recently visited a McDonald’s restaurant.

Appearing on ITV’s This morning , the former chancellor was asked the ‘killer question’ of what items he had chosen from the McDonald’s menu.

‘I was there at about I think, gosh, 7.45 in the morning or 7.30 – so it was not a burger and nuggets! I got breakfast,’ Mr Sunak replied. ‘I get a bacon roll with ketchup and the pancakes.’

Asked by show host Rochelle Humes if he had also ordered a hash brown, the Conservative MP added: ‘I didn’t yesterday but if I’m with my daughters then we get the wrap.

‘With my eldest daughter… if I’m with her, that wrap with the hash brown and everything in it is what we do.’

But aficionados of McDonald’s were quick to point out that the breakfast wrap hasn’t been on sale for nearly two-and-a-half years.

Meanwhile, Keir has caused surprise after revealing his breakfast go-to, but for a different reason.

The 61-year-old has kept his favourite breakfast foods relatively under wraps.

However, during a 2021 Labour Party conference, Keir was snapped holding a plate of breakfast foods after taking his pick from a buffet.

Keir walked round the buffet, but instead of piling eggs and pancakes on his plate like most tend to, he went for a much healthier choice, consisting of fruit, fish, and cheese.

In an image shared by The Times, Keir looked pleased with his choice, despite the fact that others might consider his choice to be on the stranger side.

Alcohol  

Keir Starmer has been seen to enjoy a pint of beer on many occasions, whether that be after playing in a football match or after work. 

However, it’s Rishi that rejects alcohol in favour of soft drinks, and he famously admitted to being a coke addict, before clarifying the drink not the drug.

And while he’s a self-professed lover of  carbonated drinks, alcohol is not a liked beverage for Rishi.

‘I really tried [to drink alcohol],’ he told The Times. ‘My family all drink, my wife definitely drinks. It massively irritates her that I don’t.

‘My parents do, my dad was upset that I wouldn’t share a glass of wine with him but thankfully my younger brother came along and that was all right.’

During the 2022 interview Rishi went on to recall that he once did some shots with his family in the lead up to his wedding, but didn’t like the taste.

And while his family and friends described him as happy while drunk, drinking alcohol was never an activity Sunak relished, even during his youth.

Favourite treats  

Keir offered insight into his favourite treats during the Table Manners podcast with Jessie and Lennie Ware last year.

When asked what his final meal would be if he was on a deserted island, he named a selection of relatively healthy Indian foods.

The meal included a seaweed salad for starter, tandoori salmon from his favourite curry house in Glasgow for main, along with dahl, plain naan and pilau rice.

And he’d round things up with a baked lemon cheesecake while sipping on a glass of pinot grigio.

In comparison, Rishi has more of a sweet tooth. On top of his love of Coca-Cola, the Prime Minister has also declared his love of cinnamon buns, specifically ones from Gail’s Bakery.

Despite Sunak observing an intermittent fasting diet – meaning he restricts his calorie intake on certain days of the week – on more lenient days he eats a sugary pastry after his Greek yoghurt breakfast.

Eating routines 

If Keir follows diets, he has kept it out of the public eye. Meanwhile, Rishi has taken a different stance and disclosed he follows an intermittent fasting regime. 

At the start of this year, Rishi said fasting on a Monday is an ‘important discipline’ which allows him to indulge later on.

Despite his demanding schedule as Prime Minister, Mr Sunak said avoiding eating for 36 hours at the start of each week is good for a ‘balanced lifestyle’.

The self-confessed ‘Coca-Cola addict’, who has a preference for a Mexican variety made with pure cane sugar, said fasting helps him to combat his ‘weakness for sugary things’.

Mr Sunak told the BBC : ‘I’m not sure people are that interested in my diet but I tend to try and do some fasting at the beginning of every week as part of a general balanced lifestyle but everyone will do this differently.

‘I think it’s important we have healthy lifestyles, that’s part of what I do, but I also have a weakness for sugary things which I indulge in the rest of the week.’

Asked about how he fasts for a day despite the demands of his office, Mr Sunak said: ‘That’s an important discipline for me but it means that I can then indulge myself in all the sugary treats that I like for the rest of the week, which I tend to enjoy.

‘That’s where I balance it with my job and everything else.’

Friends of Mr Sunak told The Sunday Times that he does not eat anything for 36 hours at the start of each week, from 5pm on Sunday until 5am on Tuesday.

Downing Street insiders disputed the timeline but confirmed that he typically fasts on Mondays.

On a drizzly Friday morning, Sara Sutherland wakes up smug in the knowledge that today she won’t have to drag her children out of bed for the rigmarole of the school run.

Instead, she and seven-year-old twins, Charlotte and Harriett, will be flying to Barcelona for the day.

But unlike other parents who dare pull their children out of school for a family holiday, Sara won’t be receiving a fine from the local authority for non-attendance.

For the scientist, from York, is one of a growing number of parents ‘flexi-schooling’. Part of the week children attend school as normal, and for the rest they are schooled from home. Or — Spain.

While many parents shudder at the memory of home-schooling during lockdown, some middle-class families are going to extraordinary lengths to enable their children to attend school part-time, spending the rest of their week learning whatever, and wherever, takes their fancy.

The trend, also driven by the increased flexibility offered by many workplaces, reflects a change in attitudes to education. According to a YouGov poll for the Centre for Social Justice, nearly one in three parents (28 per cent) feel the pandemic showed it is not essential for children to attend school daily.

This month, amid soaring absence rates, Education Secretary Gillian Keegan announced investment in attendance hubs, mentors and other strategies to get more children back into the classroom.

But record numbers of parents are taking advantage of little-known rules which, at a headteacher’s discretion, allow children to be educated at home up to two days a week.

In 2010, about 450 children were being flexi-schooled in the UK. Today, there are more than 15,000 members of a Facebook group set up to support families looking to flexi-school, although the exact numbers are not known as no official records are kept.

Sara has fully embraced this hybrid approach for her daughters.

‘I wanted the girls to have the experience of classroom learning, and the benefit of a professional teacher, but I was worried about “invisible child syndrome” — the well-behaved, bright students who don’t cause any trouble getting less attention than their peers,’ says Sara, 52.

‘In too many schools, great teachers are stretched across 30 children, and they end up being forced to carry out more crowd control than teaching.

‘I want to encourage Harriett and Charlotte to lead the way with their own education — I’m the facilitator for the learning they want to do. Their minds have been opened — they learn piano and violin, they’ve started to learn French.

‘Because they were so excited by learning a language, we took them to the South of France for a few days.

‘We take the girls outside whatever the weather. Sitting inside with workbooks doesn’t suit all children. There’s something really special about being able to go pony riding on the beach. It’s wonderful for their mental health.

‘Flexi-schooling is hard work, though. They probably learn more on the days they are at home than when they are in school.’

Currently, 51 schools in the UK are officially listed as actively supporting flexi-schooling, including 14 secondary schools. However, a further 366 will consider it on a case-by-case basis, according to a UK Flexi-schooling map, created by parents and flexi-schooling practitioners.

It means some parents are going to extraordinary lengths to find a school willing to allow part-time schooling.

Rachel Gourley, headteacher at Huxley CE Primary School near Chester, says there’s been unprecedented demand for places since the school adopted flexi-schooling in July 2021.

Having seen it in action in a previous role, she recognised its potential for improving the fortunes of the rural primary — facing closure and with low attendance records — when she took on the headship.

She says it’s not uncommon for pupils to live an hour or more’s drive from the school — meaning a two-hour school run for parents.

‘Many other schools are closer to the big villages, but since offering flexi-schooling, we get requests for places all the time,’ she says.

‘I’ve had to turn down some children because I felt the journey was just too far.

‘One desperate mother wanted to bring her son from Worcestershire, a two-hour drive. I felt awful saying no, but I really didn’t think it was in the best interests of the child.’

Even more surprising, then, to learn that Huxley Primary is not an outstanding school — it was graded as inadequate by Ofsted, just as Mrs Gourley took over.

‘We were just putting our flexi-schooling arrangements in place when Ofsted visited,’ she explains, ‘and they worried that children weren’t covering a whole curriculum. We now have a rolling curriculum, so flexi-schoolers don’t miss the same lessons every week, and Ofsted were impressed with that when they came back. Our parents know what we have to offer their children, and they don’t seem bothered by the rating.’

When Sara Sutherland failed to find a suitable state school that would allow flexi-schooling, she took a financial hit.

She is paying £2,500 a term for her daughters to attend a local private school, which lets them spend two days a week learning at home.

Coupled with Sara leaving her full-time job as a commercial laboratory manager to support the girls, it’s been a big financial sacrifice, but not one she would change.

Sara says: ‘We have an older son, who had an absolutely awful time at school. The rigidity of it and pressure of exams was far too much. This time, I wanted it to be different.’

It’s an attitude that chimes with the YouGov poll, in which only 70 per cent of parents were confident their child’s needs were being met at school, a figure that dropped to 61 per cent at secondary school.

‘For our family, going down to one wage is better than having two parents slogging their guts out for material things,’ Sara adds.

‘My husband often has to work away, so if the girls were at school full-time, they might not get to see him. This way, we get family time.

‘We don’t have a top-of-the range car, we’re frugal, but being able to take holidays using term-time days does save a bit of money, too.

‘We go on day trips around where we live in Yorkshire, too. The girls loved visiting the James Herriot museum at Thirsk and Eureka! the national children’s museum in Halifax, plus a coal mining museum.

‘They’re always learning. They can read a menu in a cafe, work out how much change we will be given, talk about where in the world the food has come from.

‘The girls are able to go back into school and show their peers everything they have been up to.

‘And the school has even copied some of my ideas. We took the girls on a camping trip to a children’s adventure park, for example, and within a few weeks the school had planned a residential there.

‘And straight after the girls went on a trip to France, their class had a French day where they wore French clothes and ate French food.’

While the government might want to get more children back into school, Sarah Sudea, founder of Finding the Flex, which provides flexi-schooling advice, says: ‘A recent study found up to a third of children said they were happier learning at home [in the pandemic].

‘More people are questioning the existing model of education and realising it doesn’t necessarily work for every child.’

Teacher Kate Unwin, 38, from Warrington in Cheshire, flexi-schools her son Sam, 11, one day a week, and says the extra time she and husband Ben get to spend with him is invaluable. They already home-school their eldest son Tom, 13, full time, after he failed to get a place at his secondary school of choice. After seeing how it helped him, they wanted to give the same opportunities to his younger brother.

‘Sam loves school and learning — he has a lovely group of friends and he’s very sociable,’ says Kate.

‘But we choose to flexi-school him so that one day a week he is able to have experiences that wouldn’t be available to him at his Roman Catholic Primary school.

‘The world is changing; adults are realising they can have more flexibility in their lives, but we’re not affording that to children.

‘I work three days a week teaching, and Ben is a photographer, so he only takes jobs on certain days.

‘We have designed our lives around it. Sam uses Wednesdays to pursue his passion for bouldering [a sport similar to rock climbing], which helps him push himself mentally as well as physically.

‘That aspect of physical development gives him confidence to achieve elsewhere.

‘Everything has potential for learning. This week, Sam will spend the day with my dad, who is wonderful at DIY. Sam has designed a ramp for his pet lizard’s tank, which they will build together. In the old days, children learned from the people around them, and I think we’ve lost that. I know the life experiences he’s getting with us will help him grow into a well-rounded man.’

Rachel Gourley says it’s not just pupils who are benefiting from the increase in flexi-schooling, but schools, too.

‘I get a lot of other headteachers coming to look around our school now,’ she explains. ‘I’m happy to say that lots have decided to introduce it at their own schools after seeing how well it works.

‘I believe strongly that children are individuals, and the school system we have at the moment doesn’t allow all children to flourish.

‘I was really proud that in a recent survey, 100 per cent of our children said they felt safe here. If a little bit of extra time at home helps children be happy in school the rest of the time, it is worth it.’

Of course, plenty of headteachers draw the line at letting pupils spend two days a week out of the classroom. Most secondary schools consider it to be too disruptive.

Finding the Flex’s Sarah Sudea explains: ‘It’s quite common for us to find headteachers worried about not being inclusive; not everybody’s parents are able to offer flexi-schooling, and it seems unfair for some children to have that advantage and not others.

‘However, if some pupils are learning at home on certain days, it gives the rest of the children the advantage of a smaller class.

‘We also find that allowing some youngsters to spend more time at home can increase their overall attendance, as school can feel more manageable.’ Kate MacDonald, a single parent from Gloucester, feels so strongly about the benefits of flexi-schooling that she is taking her children out of school without the head’s agreement.

Her two children, aged nine and seven, are being marked as absent one day a week, and Kate has been warned she could be taken to court and even sent to prison.

While under UK law it is permissible to remove your child completely from school and take personal responsibility for their learning, there is no similar rule for flexi-schooling.

Kate said: ‘I work in education, running forest school sessions, and it seemed ridiculous that I was giving other people’s children the well-rounded education I felt was important, but not my own.

‘Last year, my husband and I split, and it had a huge impact on our two children.

‘I decided they needed more time with me, but I didn’t want to pull them out of mainstream education entirely. I firmly believe it is very important.

‘They are settled, their teachers are all wonderful, and I don’t want to disrupt them. But school curriculums are so rigid and formal, and I believe there’s more they need to learn about.

‘Despite the headteacher initially sounding supportive, she eventually told me the school governors wouldn’t allow it.

‘I was absolutely devastated. I felt so strongly about it that I decided to remove them from school on Fridays anyway.

‘The children have really flourished. They’re sleeping better, their general mood is better and they love going into school the rest of the week.

‘But because their absence is unauthorised, I face fines of £120, £60 for each child, for each day they are absent from school.

‘I’m currently in talks with the school to see how we can move forward.

‘It’s ridiculous that at another school, what I am doing would be perfectly legal. The whole education system needs a huge shake-up.’

With the Government desperate to get more children back into school full-time, this seems unlikely to happen any time soon.

On the surface, Pandora Morris, 35, has everything. She’s pretty, blonde, well-connected and has a posh London address – the type of woman you might see on the pages of society magazine Tatler.

But there is a sadness about her cornflower blue eyes which reflect a less golden story. Pandora, a lawyer by profession and scion of a large London banking dynasty, has spent decades battling obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), which developed into a severe exercise addiction and eating disorder in her early teens.

It has been more than three years since her last ‘relapse’, and though wary of describing herself as ‘cured’, Pandora is now in a very different place to her condition before lockdown, when her heart rate fell to 31 and doctors told her that if she didn’t stop exercising eight hours a day and eat more than 700 calories, she would probably die.

When we meet, Pandora has just come from the studio where she is recording the second series of Hurt To Healing, the podcast she launched in October 2022, in which she interviews experts and those who have struggled with mental health issues.

Pandora certainly knows her subject. Her desperate parents spent the price of a small house on treatments — none of which, including seven months in an eating disorder clinic in South Africa, seemed to work long term.

At one point, she even considered trying electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which sends an electric current through the brain, intentionally triggering a brief seizure with the aim of altering the brain’s chemistry and reversing symptoms.

She tells of some of the staggeringly expensive ‘recovery experts’ that she and her parents have consulted, like the one who charged hundreds of pounds an hour and insisted she trailed a banana on a piece of string round the shops in London to deal with her issues around food.

‘Later, my mother found her throwing up in the loo,’ sighs Pandora, as the pair of us sit talking at the kitchen table of her parents’ sprawling penthouse in West London. ‘But, then, a lot of these so-called experts have only recently got out of rehab themselves.

‘The irony is that my parents forked out all this money over the years when the NHS have some of the best doctors in the world working on OCD and eating disorders. The problem is that their work is so grossly underfunded it can’t be effectively rolled out.’

In the end, it was a six-month course of intensive exposure therapy at an institute in LA that enabled Pandora properly to confront her obsessive thoughts and gradually reduce her compulsion to exercise.

However, she also puts her recovery down to a medically assisted trip on magic mushrooms in Ibiza.

Yes, you read that correctly: magic mushrooms — even though Pandora rarely drinks alcohol and had never taken an illegal drug in her life. But more of this later.

Characterised by recurring thoughts and repetitive behaviours you cannot control, such as checking doors or hand-washing, OCD is an often-ingrained condition that can take months or even years to change.

It affects between 1 and 1.5 million people in the UK, and is defined by the World Health Organisation as the fifth most debilitating health issue in women between the ages of 15 and 44 in terms of lost income and decreased quality of life.

As a little girl, Pandora was a chronic people-pleaser, she says, desperate for approval from her glamorous, high-achieving parents and plagued by self-imposed rituals to alleviate her constant feelings of anxiety, such as repeatedly looking under her bed and checking the doors in the house were locked.

‘I had this phobia about the number six,’ she tells me. ‘In my eight-year-old head, I must have associated it with the devil.

‘I started skipping page six in reading assignments, getting maths sums wrong because of having to avoid writing it down, and eventually not being able to walk past houses with numbers which were a multiple of it.

‘Then there was the terror I developed of my Dad’s new car. I just couldn’t get in it. It got so bad that I couldn’t bear the sound of it pulling up outside.’

If she can isolate what specific incident triggered her into a full-on exercise addiction it was probably the trainers her mother bought her at the age of 13.

‘I’d seen her and my dad getting up on Saturday morning for a run, and always thought how grown up and cool that looked. And when I tried it myself, in my new trainers, I felt this wave of euphoria.’

Vigorous exercise soon became a non-negotiable ritual with which to ‘cancel out’ her constant anxiety and fear of anything new.

‘I remember being in Rymans, having just been given my first debit card at the age of around 13. As the assistant put it through the till, I forced myself to get down on the floor and do 20 push-ups.

‘There were times when, going to a friend’s house for the first time, I’d get caught in a spare room doing my push-ups.’

Soon she found herself getting up in the middle of the night and sneaking out of the house in order to run.

‘At one time, after a friend of my mum’s spotted me, my mum tried locking me in her dressing room.’ What had begun as OCD behaviour morphed into an exercise addiction, where Pandora used workout rituals to force some order and control over her life.

From there, she placed the same restrictive controls over everything she ate — and eventually spiralled into an all-encompassing mental health crisis.

She started whittling down the foods she allowed herself to eat, limiting it to fat-free yoghurt, dry cereal and sweet potato. Soon, her weight plummeted enough for the doctor at her private girls’ school to insist on weekly weigh-ins.

Somehow Pandora managed to pass her GCSEs with flying colours, but the following year, while studying for A-levels, she nearly died of hypothermia when, on a family holiday, she sneaked out to go swimming in below-freezing temperatures.

Again, she somehow kept up the pretence of being well enough to attend university and law school, and got a placement at a leading real estate law firm in London.

‘I’m a classic perfectionist and I’m brilliant at keeping up appearances, pretending, for instance, that I had a doctor’s appointment when really I just had to go running.’

It was in March 2020, after yet another exercise-induced stress fracture and a plea from her employers that she take a leave of absence, that she endured her last serious relapse.

Pandora shows me a picture of herself on her phone, taken at this time, and she looks, quite frankly, like an old woman, her skin stretched tightly over her cheekbones.

On the advice of a friend who had recently made a full recovery from anorexia, she contacted a psychiatrist in the U.S. who put her in touch with the Westwood Institute in California, renowned for its hardcore intensive exposure therapy for eating disorders.

Here, her therapist, Eda Gorbis, a leading authority on the treatment of OCD, had her walking through Walmart in a fat suit, studying herself in a room of distorting mirrors, and superimposing pictures of her head onto photographs of morbidly obese women.

All this was to demonstrate that Pandora’s true body shape was very different to the image in her head, and that being larger did not result in the catastrophic consequences that she imagined.

‘It’s odd how nostalgic I feel about that period,’ she says, her eyes suddenly pricking with tears. ‘I loved that I had my mother all to myself while there. In a sense, I think that was what I wanted all along — my mother’s undivided attention.’

It was while she was out there that Pandora began researching the effects of psilocybin, a naturally occurring psychedelic compound found in 200 kinds of fungi, on severe depression, OCD and eating disorders.

According to Dr Francisco Moreno, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Arizona and a world authority on OCD, medically administered psilocybin has a similar effect on our brains as serotonin, the so-called feel-good neurotransmitter.

It may be particularly effective for OCD, he believes, because it can alleviate the doubt and rumination which underpins so much of the disease’s obsessive, ritualistic behaviour.

Because psychedelics are not yet legal in this country unless administered as part of a medical trial, Pandora had to go abroad to take them.

Accompanied by a medical doctor friend who had undergone the experience many times before, she met a shaman, a kindly-looking woman in her 60s, who gave them both a 2.5 gram dose of ‘Golden Teacher’ mushrooms in a piece of chocolate.

After blindfolding them, the shaman started singing and playing guitar. The whole process cost a little more than £500.

For the first 45 minutes, Pandora felt nothing and was convinced it wasn’t going to work. The shaman then gave her some more mushroom-laced chocolate (the equivalent of a further 1.5 grams) and proceeded to blow the smoke from a mixture of medicinal herbs — ‘that felt like wasabi’ — up each of her nostrils.

The ‘rapee’, as the smoke is called, immediately took effect.

‘Every nerve ending in my body was on fire, and I was transported back to the boarding school I was sent to when I was eight, and feeling the exact same yawning loneliness I’d felt then.

‘One by one, all these other traumatic memories came up — and they were so vivid it was as though I was actually there.’

Was she terrified?

‘No, because it wasn’t exactly tripping; I was just feeling very, very intensely in a way that I had never done before. I cried and I cried, which I hardly ever let myself do. I laughed, too.

‘I also experienced this overwhelming sense of compassion for the people in my life. And whenever the OCD default button popped on, because I wasn’t totally out of it, the shaman held me in her arms and I felt this terrific sense of peace and safety. It was like ‘Ah! So this is what Pandora is like without OCD!’

In the year since her experience with magic mushrooms, Pandora has slowly been on the up. Though there are still ‘sticky’ moments — when the OCD wants her to run until she collapses, or when someone she hasn’t seen for a while says ‘Oh, you’re looking well’, which, as all women know, is code for ‘You’ve gained weight’. But unlike before, when that remark might have made her go into a tailspin for six months, now it may last only a few days.

Pandora’s weight (‘though above what I want it to be’) is now stable, she limits exercise to a less punishing daily regime, and she has regular therapy sessions on Zoom. At last, three months ago, she got her period for the third time since she was 15 — more than 20 years ago.

Although she believes her experience with psychedelics helped loosen the hold OCD had over her, to anyone thinking of doing the same, she stresses the importance of speaking to a professional first, and then making absolutely sure that you are in the hands of an experienced shaman.

And, of course, to remember that taking them is still illegal in this country. ‘I know of people buying it online and then doing it alone with a pair of headphones, and that is so dangerous,’ she cautions.

• The podcast Hurt To Healing, with Pandora Morris, is available at hurttohealing.co.uk

Evil mother Sian Hedges can be seen lying in police footage that she had not touched her murdered son Alfie as she was jailed with her boyfriend for life today.

Hedges can be seen clutching a bottle of Coca Cola in the back of a police car as an officer questions her on her son’s injuries. 

Hedges responds: ‘What do you mean?’ before declaring ‘you’re joking’.

The appalling mother can then be seen lying through crocodile tears as she says: ‘I haven’t done anything to him’.

Hedges and her former lover have been jailed for life today for the ‘wicked and torturous’ murder of the defenceless toddler.

She and her ex Jack Benham ruthlessly slaughtered 18-month-old Alfie Phillips during a ‘frenzied’ onslaught in their caravan home in Kent in 2020 – less than two months after the murderous duo met. 

Alfie suffered more than 70 injuries to his tiny body when he was beaten to death and smothered by the evil pair during lockdown. 

Fuelled by cocaine, whisky and cannabis until the early hours of the morning, Hedges, 27, and Benham, 35, carried out a night of ‘violent discipline’ after calling Alfie ‘whingey and upset’. 

The toddler died with a ‘myriad of bruises’, broken ribs, arms and leg, and also had traces of cocaine and alcohol in his system, after the barbaric attack which took place in Benham’s caravan in Hernhill, near Faversham, Kent.

Today, a judge jailed the evil duo for life, with Hedges set to spent 19 years behind bars and Benham to serve 23 years.  

Hedges met her former soldier lover Benham in September 2020 at a mutual friends house where the pair would buy drugs. She was still dating Alfie’s father, Sam Phillips, at the time. 

Evil Hedges would get high with her new lover in drug binges. But she would return to Mr Phillips, adding: ‘It was like he held me under a spell.’

In a victim impact statement read in court, a heartbroken Mr Phillips said: ‘After the trial we still feel we deserve answers. I will never know the truth about what happened to my son.

‘I never got to hear him say his first proper words, I never got to have a conversation with him, I was robbed of the opportunity to see him grow up.’

Reacting to the sentencing, a heartbroken Mr Phillips said his son’s killers had ‘finally got what they deserved’.

‘The outcome could’ve been better – but we have got the justice in our hearts,’ he told reporters. ‘Justice has been been done. We can finally move on.’

Sam’s fiancée Sarah Merritt added: ‘They thought they were going to get away with it but they didn’t.’

Jurors took nearly ten hours to convict the pair following a nine-week trial at Maidstone Crown Court last year. 

During the trial, Alfie was described as ‘good as gold’ and ‘lively’ by his father who said there was ‘never a dull moment’ with him and that he was always playing and laughing. 

The court heard Benham admit he and Hedges were drug addicts who would regularly take drugs around her son.

They began their relationship in September 2020 after meeting at a mutual friend’s house where they would buy drugs.

On the night before Alfie died, Benham said Hedges went to buy drugs from their friend and repay her £400 debt, and also get mixers and drinks for their evening together in the caravan.

The former Army man said the pair were drinking, chatting and watching YouTube videos that evening as ‘normal’.

They claimed they shared a bed with little Alfie overnight and woke at 11.30am to find him unresponsive.

But the prosecution said this was the time Alfie must have been violently assaulted.

Prosecutor Jennifer Knight KC said: ‘It was all a lie, the truth is you and Sian were both present and involved in that assault, you and Sian both killed Alfie.’

The toddler was discovered blue and floppy on the morning of November 28 2020, and paramedics said it was ‘immediately apparent’ to them that Alfie had been dead for some time.

Jurors heard that Benham’s mother tried to perform CPR on him after Benham came out of the caravan, where he lived in his parents’ garden, carrying Alfie.

Joan Benham recalled her son pleading: ‘Mum, do something, he’s not breathing, mum do something.’

Harrowing footage reveals the moment murderous mother Hedges was first questioned by cops after being arrested for the savage attack on her son.   

Sat in the back of a police car, clutching a bottle of Coke, and in disbelief as an officer explains that some of Alfie’s injuries can’t be accounted for, to which Hedges brashly replies: ‘What do you mean?’ 

The officer explains that bruising to the toddler’s eye, a deformation to one of his wrists and a potentially old fracture on one of his arms that came up in an X-ray would require further explanation. 

As the officer officially announces his arrest of Hedges, she is stunned, and pleads: ‘I haven’t done anything to him’.

The footage also shows the arrest of Benham, who the officer recognises as being ’emotional’, as he places him under arrest for the neglect of a child, while the 35-year-old wearing a tracksuit sits in the back of the police car. 

Benham can be heard becoming agitated, shocked that the officer is arresting him, and throws his girlfriend under the bus, as he says: ‘No, you can’t arrest me. What about Sian?’

The court also heard about other injuries Alfie had sustained in the months before his death, and explanations for them, such as a cut under Alfie’s eye from playing with keys, and his fingers being caught in the dog gate in Benham’s parents’ home.

In text messages sent in the weeks before his death, Benham said that as a ‘joke’ Hedges should bite the little boy hard, after she messaged: ‘Little shit bit my arm this morning, f****** hurt.’

During the trial the court heard Benham’s caravan was untidy and there was no cot or essential items needed to care for a young child.

Blood was also found on Alfie’s sleepsuit and bedding, which was later confirmed through DNA analysis to be his own.

Today at Maidstone Crown Court, prosecution counsel, Jennifer Knight KC, described the attack as ‘aggressive discipline which became a furious assault’.

She said Alfie had gone through a ‘long period of physical suffering’ prior to his death, at the hands of two people in the ‘ultimate position of trust.’

Ms Knight read a victim impact statement to the court, written by Alfie’s father Sam Phillips.

It said: ‘When my son Alfie was born on May 26, 2019, our lives changed forever. I loved him immediately.

‘When he was little he was the sweetest little baby. Alfie was growing into a great toddler – he was into everything.

‘He would climb everything. We certainly had our hands full but he made us smile.’

The statement continued: ‘I loved him. He was my little boy. Alfie’s smile would light up any room.

‘As a family we have so many happy memories of how cheeky he would be.’

Mr Phillips said he finds these memories ‘really hard’ to think about following Alfie’s death.

He continued: ‘Words cannot describe the devastation Alfie’s death had on us as a family.

‘My world stopped and it was never ever going to be the same again.’

Mr Phillips said his son’s death had had a huge impact on his mental health and sent him ‘over the edge’.

He described how he has struggled to sleep since and has turned to alcohol to help him ‘drown out the unbearable’.

He continued: ‘The fact that I was not there to stop it and to protect my son, haunts me.’

The victim impact statement explained how Mr Phillips was unable to see Alfie in hospital because Hedges had told police he was not involved in his life.

He added: ‘I was not even able to see him in the hospital after he died. It was too late.

‘Sian’s heartless lies stopped me from being able to say goodbye.’

Mr Phillips concluded: ‘I never got to hear him say his first words. I never got to have a conversation with him. I was robbed.

‘We have not had closure and even after the trial we feel we haven’t had answers.

‘I will never know the truth about what happened to my son.

‘Every day for the rest of my life, I will be thinking about this over and over.’

Alfie’s paternal step-grandfather Mark Demain, also gave a victim impact statement, which was read to the court by Ms Knight.

He said: ‘When Alfie was born on May 26, 2019, he blew us all away. It’s hard to describe the love we had for him but it was instant and unconditional.

‘We felt like our best friend had arrived on the day he was born. Our lives seemed to have become perfect.’

He continued: ‘We yearned to see him everyday and then that day came – the day he was killed – and he was gone. He was taken from us at just 18-months-old.

‘We have never experienced pain like this and never thought we would. I would describe it like the light in our souls has gone out.’

Mr Demain said he and Marie, Alfie’s grandmother, will ‘never be the same again’.

He concluded: ‘Our best friend, our grandson, was so cruelly taken from us that day. Every day we are hurting.

‘Our shining light that shone so bright will always be in our hearts.

‘If only we could tell Alfie how much we miss him and how much we love him.’

Sentencing the pair, Mr Justice Cavanagh said: ‘The injuries suffered by Alfie that night were so numerous and so serious that the medical experts were not able to say which of them had been the immediate cause of Alfie’s death.

‘It is absolutely clear, however, that the cumulative effects of these vicious and brutal assaults resulted in his death.

‘It must have taken some considerable time to inflict these injuries on Alfie, and the pain and fear that he must have suffered is almost unimaginable.

‘As I have said you were the only two people in the caravan with Alfie on the night of 27 November 2020, and you have both continually lied about what happened.

‘However, it is clear that you had planned to spend the night taking drugs and drinking.’

He continued: ‘It is a great tragedy that Alfie did not have the chance to grow up and enjoy a full and happy life.

‘The sentences that I am about to impose cannot possibly compensate for the loss of this child’s life.

‘There is only one sentence that the law allows me to pass for the offence of murder.

‘It is a sentence of life imprisonment.’

Reacting to the jailing, child protection charity NSPCC said: ‘The pain and suffering endured by Alfie Phillips in his short life, inflicted by those whose responsibility it was to care for him, was shocking and heart-breaking.

‘Young children are totally dependent on the adults around them, and therefore particularly vulnerable to abuse. So it is vital that all is done to ensure the youngest members of our society are well cared for, protected and given the chance to thrive.

‘It is crucial that anyone worried about a child’s safety speaks out about their concerns.’

Alfie Phillips joins a heartbreaking rollcall of children killed in lockdown after the tragic deaths of Star Hobson, Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Kaylea Titford

By SUKHMANI SETHI

Alfie Phillips, the 18-month-old toddler whose parents were today jailed for life for beating and smothering him to death, is one of a growing list of children killed in lockdown.

As millions of Britons were confined to their homes at the height of the Covid pandemic, little Alfie suffered a ‘myriad of bruises’, broken ribs, arms and legs, after a barbaric attack in his stepfather’s caravan.

Traces of cocaine and alcohol were found in Alfie’s system, as his mother, Sian Hedges, blamed the restrictions for increasing her anxiety, which compelled her to take drugs on a weekly basis. 

It follows a familiar, grim pattern of abusive parents using lockdown ‘as a cover’ to carry out their cruelty, with similar violence dished out to a host of other young victims including Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson, whose cases tugged at the heartstrings of the nation.

Experts have explained how usual safeguarding methods or chances to spot serious abuse such as schools, health workers and children’s clubs were absent or moved online during the pandemic, meaning abusers could harm children in their care with impunity. 

Alfie joins a heartbreaking rollcall of children killed in lockdown, including two-year-old Kyrell Matthews, who was left with 41 rib fractures and internal injuries by the time of his death after weeks of cruelty at the hands of his mother Phylesia Shirley and her boyfriend Kemar Brown. 

Meanwhile, the case of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, who was poisoned and tortured in what should have been a safe home, shook the nation for its sheer depravity when the six-year-old was murdered by his cruel stepmother Emma Tustin on 17 June, 2020.

She was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 29 years and the boy’s father Thomas Hughes was jailed for 21 years for manslaughter.

Similarly, Star Hobson was just 16 months old when she was murdered by her mother’s girlfriend Savannah Brockill in September 2020.

In the lead-up to her death, she had suffered months of abuse in her home in Keighley, west Yorkshire, during the coronavirus lockdown in 2020.

Elsewhere, two-year-old Lola James was tragically killed by her evil stepfather, suffering 101 injuries including brain damage similar to what is sustained in high-speed car crashes in July 17, 2020.

Then on October 10, 2020 16-year-old, Kaylea Titford, who suffered from spina bifida, was found dead at her home in Newtown, Powys, after her parents allowed her to become morbidly obese during lockdown.

In another tragic example, five-year-old Logan Mwangi was murdered by his mother, step-father and teenage step-brother on July 31, 2021.

His body, which suffered 56 ‘catastrophic’ injuries consistent with a ‘brutal and sustained assault’ was found in the River Ogmore near his home in Sarn, Bridgend county.

Alijah Thomas, five, who begged her mother Martina Madarova, 41, not to kill her as she strangled her to death at their home in Ealing, west London, on September 14, 2021 is another victim.

The court had heard from Jack Benham, Alfie’s stepfather, how he and Hedges began their relationship around September 2020 through meeting regularly at the same friend’s house where they would buy drugs. 

Tests showed the pair had used cocaine and Hedges admitted to police she had taken a £40 bag over the course of three hours after Alfie went to sleep, the prosecution said. Benham also said he smoked some cannabis, which he did regularly. 

The boy was discovered blue and floppy on the morning of November 28 2020, and paramedics said it was ‘immediately apparent’ to them that Alfie had been dead for some time.

The youngster was taken back to the caravan at 7pm and was not seen again by anyone other than Benham and Hedges until about 11.30am the following morning. It was during these hours Alfie was brutally murdered by the pair. 

He said they left him to fall asleep without being cuddled, while together they drank whisky and Coke, ‘getting drunk, but not too drunk’, with Hedges telling police they had their last drink at about 1am and then went to sleep in the same bed as Alfie.

Benham told police Alfie was ‘whingey and upset’ when he was put to bed between 7pm and 8pm on the night of Friday, November 27. 

The despicable pair denied harming Alife on the night that the toddler had his life cruelly snatched away from him, with Hedges and Benham pointing the finger at each other.

Hedges said Alfie stirred but went back to sleep with his dummy. She said he was ‘fine and normal’. She then recalled Benham waking her up saying ‘What the f***’s wrong with him? Oh my God. He’s under my leg’.

The court heard Benham, who is not Alfie’s father, said he thought he had suffocated him.

Hedges said Alfie was floppy and his lips looked blue and she had a gut feeling he was dead but denied having caused him any injury and said she had no idea how Alfie could have fractured his arms or sustained any serious injury.

But Jurors had heard about older injuries Alfie sustained in the months before his death, such as a cut under Alfie’s eye which was explained by the toddler playing with keys and his fingers being caught in the dog gate in Benham’s parents’ home. 

A skeletal survey and post-mortem examinations indicated many of the breaks to his bones would have occurred in the hours before Alfie’s death. 

In interviews, Benham told police he did not consider himself a step-father figure and rarely did anything for Alfie.

He described Alfie as a ‘mummy’s boy’ and admitted he did not like him. But during the trial he claimed he treated the toddler like ‘one of my own’.

Jurors reached a unanimous guilty verdict for the murder of little Alfie following deliberations that took nearly ten hours, that began on Tuesday afternoon.

Prosecutor Jennifer Knight KC had told jurors: ‘It is clear that he had been deliberately injured on more than one occasion, culminating in an assault perpetrated on him during the night of 27 to 28 November 2020 that led to his death.’

She added: ‘Jack Benham and Sian Hedges were in the caravan together throughout the night.

‘Had either defendant not been joining in with the assaults, that defendant who was not part of it would have stopped the attack and removed Alfie Phillips from the caravan, and from the presence of the other who was carrying out these attacks.

‘The fact that this did not happen can only be because both defendants agreed that the assaults should take place…they both agreed in meting out some sort of aggressive, violent discipline to Alfie that night which resulted in his death.’

Speaking after the verdicts were announced, Alfie’s family told of the anguish of having to endure a three-year wait for justice, with many questions still unanswered.

They said: ‘We have had to listen to the horrific details of what Sian and Jack did to Alfie, how they assaulted him again and again.

‘He suffered so much pain. In these years, we have not had the closure, and even after the trial we feel that we still deserve answers.

‘The only people with these answers are Sian and Jack but they have refused to say what happened to him.

‘Still to this day, they have refused to take responsibility.

‘They have never shown any remorse for what they did, and we will never know the truth about what happened to Alfie.

‘Alfie was so cruelly taken from us that day. Every day we are hurting. Our shining light, that shone so bright, will always be in our hearts.

‘We have such special memories of our short time with Alfie and these memories keep us going on the darkest of days.’

Alfie was described as ‘good as gold’ and ‘lively’ by his father, Sam Phillips, adding there was ‘never a dull moment’ with the toddler, who he said was always playing and laughing.

Benham, of Hernhill, Kent, and Hedges, of Yelverton, Devon, will be sentenced on December 19.

Reacting to the verdict, Kent Police’s senior investigating officer, Detective Chief Inspector Kath Way, said: ‘Today’s verdict will not bring Alfie back, but it does mean that Hedges and Benham lose their right to freedom and life as they know it.

‘Alfie should have been protected and loved by his mum, instead Hedges and Benham inflicted unimaginable suffering on him during a sustained and lengthy night of violence.’

She added that the pair refused to admit what they had done and instead subjected Alfie’s family to a trial where details of ‘horrendous abuse’ were detailed.

‘Alfie would have been four now and would have recently started school. Instead, his life was cruelly taken away by those he should have been able to trust the most.’

An NSPCC spokesman also commenting on the ‘heart-breaking’ case said the cruelty inflicted on Alfie is ‘devastating’.

They added: ‘We know that very young children are particularly vulnerable to abuse because they are completely reliant on the adults around them for care and protection.

‘It is so important that anyone who is worried about a child’s safety speaks out about their concerns. People can contact the local authority, the police or the NSPCC Helpline.’

Some of us struggle to shed the pounds we gain from our gluttony over Christmas, and I’m definitely in this camp. 

However, on top of that, I’m still striving to blitz the blubber I built up over lockdown, when I stockpiled reduced Easter eggs and made them a staple of my daily diet.

So when I hear that cryotherapy could reduce my body’s resemblance to badly mashed potato, I’m up for it!

What is cryotherapy? Well, it’s basically standing in a very cold shower cubicle (or ‘cryo chamber’) in pretty much just your underwear, while actual snowflakes flutter about and massacre your mascara, leaving you looking like Alice Cooper.

Celebs including Jennifer Aniston, Daniel Craig, Gary Barlow and Cristiano Ronaldo are all reportedly fans of cryotherapy, and it’s said to improve physical and mental health.

If you filled a top hat with the names of medical conditions, then picked one out, the odds are that cryotherapy has been said to help with it.

It’s a relatively new treatment that’s still being researched, however benefits are thought to include pain relief, muscle recovery, treatment of eczema symptoms, migraine relief, and reduced inflammation, which in itself decreases the likelihood of developing numerous conditions.

Then of course there are the weight loss benefits, and I find my interest piqued by a study claiming that cryotherapy can reduce waist size by more than 5%.

YES!

According to the New York Post, a study by Dr. Jacopo Fontana, of Italy’s Istituto Auxologico Piancavallo, has shown that having cryotherapy five times a week, over two weeks, resulted in a 5.6% decrease in waist measurement and a 20.2% drop in cholesterol, compared to a control group on the same diet and exercise regime (but no cryo), which saw a waist measurement decrease of 1.4% and a cholesterol drop of 9.4%.

Could cryotherapy be the secret to looking less like I’m smuggling a lumpy mattress under my clothes? And could it eliminate the Niagara Falls of fat spilling over my waistband?

There’s only way to find out, so I book myself in for a fortnight of cryotherapy at 111Cryo on the fourth floor of Harvey Nichols, in London’s Knightsbridge.

Arriving for my first session, I change into 111Cryo’s branded kit of sports-style bra and shorts, with matching headband, mask, gloves and puffa slippers – like a puffa jacket, but to keep my feet warm.

I spend three minutes in the cryo chamber, bopping about to East 17’s Steam which plays from frost-coated speakers. Then as the countdown clock hits zero, 111Cryo’s Isaac opens the door and points a little portable temperature gun at me.

‘We’re checking the skin temperature,’ he explains. ‘We check the stomach, arms, thighs and calves, looking for a drop in temperature of about 10C in each part of the body. The stomach stays the warmest, so it’s a fine line, getting your stomach below 17°C without the temperature of your arms and legs dropping too low. That’s why we keep an eye on the smaller extremities, because they get the coldest.’

The cryo chamber is kept at a temperature of -85C to -90C and Isaac tells me that some people scarper after the first 10-15 seconds.

I find the experience surprisingly OK and I suspect I may have built up a tolerance to the cold during long periods with no heating and no hot water in the flat I rent. Who knew that living in deeply unpleasant conditions could be the key to biohacking? Clearly I am the winner here!

On my second visit to 111Cryo I bump into celebrity chef Aldo Zilli who presides over the swish Lucarelli restaurant on Harvey Nichols’ Fifth Floor.

I have interviewed Aldo about 64 times, and when I last saw him, at the Lucarelli launch, I feared he might feed me into his meat grinder over an erroneous headline claiming he’d spent £XXK on a shopping trip.

Luckily this seems to be forgotten, and Aldo tells me he often pops downstairs for a cryo session. Hoisting up his chef’s top to flash his tummy at me, he declares: ‘How else do you think I look this good?!’

Wishing I had brushed my hair and put some lipstick on, I realise I shall have to raise my game when I visit 111Cryo because, who knows who I might bump into!

I tell the team I’ll be expecting them to line up celebs for all my appointments, and when I return the next day for my third session, I ask who they’ve got for me.

Sadly, they are disappointingly discreet about their celeb clients whose appointments they’ve probably now rescheduled well away from mine. However, I do hear a whisper that a certain world champion F1 driver (YES LEWIS HAMILTON!!!!!) has regularly frozen his bits in the exact same spot as me…

Ahead of my fourth session, I use the loo on the Fifth Floor, where they’re offering whisky samples. It takes all my will power to WALK AWAY FROM THE WHISKY, but I triumph. I’m committed to the cryo and I’m not sure how well it would mix with whisky, I tell Max, who’s manning the cryo chamber today.

Max says cryo is excellent for hangovers, and I make a note of this in my notepad for Very Important News.

Having started off with three minutes in the cryo chamber for my first two sessions, I increase this to three and a half minutes for my next three sessions.

The team checks my skin temperature each time I come out, and as my numbers are A-OK they give me the green light to go up to four minutes for my sixth session, at the start of my second week.

By my eighth session I am up to four and a half minutes in the cryo chamber and I’m actually OK with the cold, I’m just getting a bit bored watching the countdown clock and I tell the team they should replace it with a TV screen playing music videos. They thank me for this helpful feedback but unfortunately they’re unable to implement it in time for my next sessions.

Five minutes is the maximum anyone is allowed in the cryo chamber and Isaac tells me he’s been offered bribes by clients who are desperate to stay in longer. ‘It becomes an ego thing, but staying in too long is counterproductive,’ says Isaac, explaining that this can cause skin soreness and muscle fatigue.

He adds: ‘We have clients who come every day. We require a six hour gap between sessions, but with our opening hours, you can do it twice a day. Some clients come morning and evening.’

I ask Isaac if he’s surprised by the results of the study I’m hoping to replicate. A huge fan of cryo himself, Isaac has been freezing people since 2018 and sees clients’ fitness journeys first hand. 

He tells me that 111Cryo positions cryotherapy as a wellness treatment that complements a healthy lifestyle, and they don’t make any claims about cholesterol or waist measurements. However, he does confirm that cryo can result in burning an extra 500 to 800 calories in a day.

During my fortnight in the cryo chamber, I listen to the Arctic Monkeys and Taylor Swift’s Cruel Summer (it would indeed be a cruel summer at -90C, but not much worse than usual).

M People’s Moving On Up keeps me dancing, so much so I choose it twice, and Dire Straits’ Romeo And Juliet is usefully long enough to see me through an entire session without it looping back to the beginning.

The most popular music choices are apparently Frozen and Ice Ice Baby. This Vanilla Ice classic is too much of a treat to pass up, so I choose it for my 10th and final session at the end of week two.

So having done five cryo sessions a week, for two weeks, have I replicated the results of Dr. Jacopo Fontana’s study, and managed to decrease my waist size by 5% and lower my cholesterol by 20%?

Well, I have lost 2cm off my waist. This isn’t a 5% decrease, but it does mean the waist bands of my clothes feel less like they’re crushing my internal organs, so I’m pretty happy with that. I haven’t measured anywhere else, but according to the scales I have lost 3lb, and I think my thighs are rubbing less when I walk, so presumably the weight loss is fairly evenly spread.

Unfortunately it’s a different story for my cholesterol. Instead of decreasing by 20%, it has increased by 50%.

I had my ‘before’ cholesterol test at the Harley Street Health Centre, a private clinic just off Harley Street, a few days ahead of my first cryotherapy session.

My cholesterol was measured as part of the clinic’s Silver blood test package which also measures various other things including iron and a full blood count.

According to my results, which I receive the next day, my iron and everything-to-do-with-my-red-blood-cells is so low that it’s a wonder I’ve been walking around without falling over.

As these results have been normal in the past, and the only change has been a fizzling out of red meat, I decide to reintroduce red meat into my diet, in the hope of increasing my iron (and hopefully making it less likely that I’ll fall down a man hole as a result of a dizzy spell).

After my final cryo session, I return to the Harley Street Health Centre for my ‘after’ cholesterol test, and the results show that my LDL cholesterol (the bad stuff that clogs up your arteries) has increased by 50%.

Chatting through my results, Harley Street Health Centre’s Dr. Mohseyni explains that the normal range for LDL cholesterol is less than 3 mmo1/L.

In my ‘before’ blood test, my LDL cholesterol was within this normal range, at a safe 2.6 mmo1/L.

However, in my ‘after’ blood test, following 17 days of eating red meat, my LDL cholesterol has rocketed to 3.9 mmo1/L which is no longer within the normal range.

By reintroducing red meat into my diet, I’ve thrown a spanner into the works, as there’s now no way of knowing whether the cryotherapy would have reduced my cholesterol had I continued eating normally.

There’s also no way of knowing if my cholesterol would have shot up even higher if I hadn’t been having cryo.

If the opportunity arises in the future to have a second go at the study (without throwing any extra variables into the mix) then I’d interested to see what happens.

However, for now I’ll be putting the cryotherapy on ice as I give my body a break from blood tests and get everything back on an even keel with a return to my fish based diet – supplemented by iron tablets.

Women’s empowerment and representation have been buzzwords of late for brand campaigns – and yet one advertising organisation has claimed that ‘sneaky sexism’ is heavily on display in modern-day commercials.

We’ve all seen the vintage adverts from the ‘Mad Men’ days and laughed in disbelief at how sexist they were.

Inspired by 100 years of Women in Advertising and Communications Leadership (WACL), Channel 4’s recent Mad Women documentary contained such gems as breakfast cereals urging men to ‘train your wife’ and wondering ‘what her waistline will be like in 5 years time’. 

Elsewhere, housewives were apparently delighted that they could do the washing up four times a day and still have soft, ladylike hands, or got so excited at fresh-smelling carpets that they couldn’t help but sing and dance about it.

Certainly, we’ve come a long way since those days, when advertisers in the ’50s and ’60s based in Madison Avenue in Manhattan, New York City, would delight in using stereotypes to promote products.

But adland’s depiction of women hasn’t changed as much as it appears, according to WACL, a UK-based club of female leaders in advertising and communications on a mission to improve gender equality in the industry. 

Women account for over 80 per cent of all consumer purchase decisions, says the organisation, yet 91 per cent say advertisers don’t understand them and they don’t feel represented in the images they see every day.

But it’s not just a commercial issue – six out of ten women apparently believe advertising plays an important role in challenging stereotypes in society more broadly too.

In its 100th year, WACL’s 300 plus senior women in advertising and communications are determined to amplify the voices of women who want the industry to #RepresentMe better – and spoke to young girls aged 12-18 to see what they demanded from future ads.

It included bringing awareness to women’s safety, ditching outdated stereotypes and allowing females to appear in more than just ‘sweet’ or ‘sexy’ imagery.

Here, WACL’s Comms Exec lead, author of No More Menemies and Founder of The Others & Me, Lori Meakin reveals the modern-day ads guilty of ‘sneaky sexism’ and other issues… 

1. DISMISSING PERSONAL SAFETY 

Samsung Galaxy ‘Night Owls’ from 2022 

In April 2022, a Samsung advert featuring a woman jogging alone at night in London, with headphones on, was branded ‘tone deaf’ by viewers.

Critics – who claim ‘women wouldn’t feel safe doing that’ – said the one-minute ad plugging the Galaxy Watch 4, Galaxy Buds 2 and the Galaxy SS2 phone was ‘naive’ and ‘insulting’.

The commercial – called Night Owls – sees a sporty woman checking her watch at 2am, before putting in earbuds and heading out into the dark for a night-time jog in the British capital.

Lori explained: ‘The ever-present threat of sexual violence in real life means that when ads simply appear oblivious to women’s safety worries, they come in for massive criticism. 

‘Samsung discovered this after its Night Owls ad featured a woman in headphones running through the city late at night, prompting Adidas to create an ad of its own shining a light on how ridiculous it is that 92 per cent of women don’t feel safe going for a run.’

In a statement, Samsung told Femail: ‘The “Night Owls” campaign was designed with a positive message in mind: to celebrate individuality and freedom to exercise at all hours.

‘It was never our intention to be insensitive to ongoing conversations around women’s safety.

‘As a global company with a diverse workforce, we apologise for how this may have been received.’

Sainsbury’s Tu ‘Strolls after dark’ from January 2023 

In January 2023, Sainsbury’s bowed to public anger and removed from stores a dress advert that sparked furious complaints that the supermarket was ignoring women’s safety.

It had installed posters in hundreds of stores across the country for a £24 dress from its new collection with the caption: ‘For walks in the parks or strolls after dark.’

Bosses apologised and had the posters taken down after a furious backlash on social media.

Lori said: ‘Such is the level of concern that even a seemingly innocuous Sainsbury’s Tu ad ended up being removed from stores after it was heavily criticised for making light of the dangers women face when walking alone at night. 

‘Clearly, women’s concerns about personal safety are not to be underestimated by advertisers.’

2. MORE SPACE GIVEN TO MEN… EVEN IN CARTOONS 

Christmas 2023 adverts like Aldi’s, John Lewis’ and Coca-Cola’s 

Women make up just 37 per cent of the people who appear in adverts, according to BusinessDIT, while only 26 per cent of ads feature women in a lead role – and 5 per cent include only females on screen, whereas five times as many boast just men.

Lori noted that this is plain to see in this year’s Christmas adverts – including Asda’s cheerful commercial that includes Michael Bublé as their leading man, Rick Astley featuring in Sainsbury’s offering and Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney in the M&S Food ad.

‘Coca-Cola singlehandedly boosted the male numbers with its ‘The World Needs More Santas’ ad,’ claimed the author.

‘And although Boots, Vodafone, Sainsbury’s and Amazon all use leading ladies, we see numerous male celebs including Michael Bublé, Graham Norton, Rick Astley and even Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney joining Dawn French for M&S. 

‘Which brings us to hon-human characters. John Lewis’s Venus Fly Trap Snapper is sold as a ‘he’, just like Monty the Penguin, Buster the Boxer, Moz the Monster and Edgar The Dragon were.

‘And one of the most successful and popular ads of the season features Aldi’s Kevin the Carrot, who’s been a big hit for the last few years.’

Released in November, Aldi’s festive ad this year saw Kevin The Carrot tour William Conker’s Christmas factory with the likes of spoilt little sprout and greedy, gluttonous grape.

It marked Kevin’s eighth year as the budget supermarket’s festive mascot.

Narrated by acting legend Jim Broadbent in the style of a poem, the advert tells the story of Kevin’s trip to the factory alongside Grandpa Grate and four other competition winners.

But Lori said: ‘Imagine if the norm was for half of advertising’s non-human characters to be female. It’s true that you can’t be what you can’t see, and the power of ads to break down barriers for women is huge.

‘Maybe it’s no wonder we don’t see more in ads, though, as in the UK, only 12 per cent of creative directors are female, according to Creative Equals. 

‘Even if the current rate of change doubled, we wouldn’t achieve WACL’s ambition of 50 per cent women in the top job in agencies until 2045.’

3. WOMEN SEEN IN ‘CARING’ ROLES MORE

UK Government’s 2021 ‘Stay Home. Save Lives’ ad 

In 2021, the UK Government was forced to withdraw a ‘sexist’ lockdown poster following a furious backlash over its depiction of women.

The poster showed one picture of a woman reclining in a man’s arms on the sofa followed by three images of women looking after children and cleaning. 

One image illustrated a woman ironing while holding a baby, another showed a mother homeschooling her children and one depicted a woman wearing rubber gloves with her daughter sweeping the floor. 

But it sparked outrage among campaigners, who said: ”Mums’ are not the only people juggling homes, childcare and work. This attitude sucks.’

The poster was withdrawn amid increasing fury on social media. The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: ‘It has been withdrawn and removed from the campaign.

‘I will make clear that it does not reflect the Government’s view on women which is why we have withdrawn it.’

The schoolgirls WACL spoke with didn’t ‘like ads boxing women into kitchens and caring roles, as it gave boys and men ammunition to tell them that’s where they belonged,’ said Lori. 

4. TYPECAST AS PRETTY, SEXY OR SWEET

Lancome x The Louvre, ‘Beauty is a Living Art’, from 2023 and Kaia Gerber for Daisy, Marc Jacobs

The schoolgirls WACL chatted to apparently said they’d love if adverts didn’t objectify women and adopt a ‘really narrow view of what looking good means’.

Lori added: ‘Too often ads play the old shame game, suggesting that women should be thin, young, classically beautiful, with perfect hair, no body hair; and they should perform for the male gaze. 

‘Like Lancome x The Louvre, which features impossibly beautiful young women including Zendaya, wafting around like living works of art.

‘Female characters in ads are four times more likely to be shown in revealing clothing than men, and twice as likely to be visually or verbally objectified, with a quarter of all ads that feature women presenting them in a sexualised way.

‘Meanwhile, in perfume ads, for instance, middle aged men can be rugged and drive the action, while women can be sexy or sweet, but not much else.’

She notes Johnny Depp for Dior Sauvage and Brad Pitt for Chanel no 5, compared to Whitney Peake for Chanel Coco Mademoiselle and Kaia Gerber for Daisy, Marc Jacobs.

Sourdough has become a ubiquitous item on menus in the UK, often served as as starter or alongside the main.

But 2024 could see the demise of popular millennial bread choice as chefs opt for ancient grains like teff flour and spelt instead.

The bread, which uses a fermented flour and water mixture instead of yeast, has become massively popular in the last ten years – with thousands of Brits attempting to make it during the Covid-19 lockdowns.

But according to new research from restaurant booking site Resy, ancient grains are set to take over.

Researchers spoke to some of the UK’s leading chefs including  Jeremy Lee of Quo Vadis, Antonio Gonzalez of Barrafina and ertac Dirik, of Mangal, who shared their insights.

They also believe Italian cheese burratta is set to leave menus in favour of roast chicken,  mushrooms and British seafood.

Ivan Tisdall-Downes, a forager and former head chef of Native at Browns, told the Times: ‘After the continued buzz of sourdough after lockdown I think people are starting to learn that there’s a time and a place for it. 

‘It doesn’t make a good bacon sandwich and if the holes are too big, your jam and butter can fall through.’ 

‘It is exciting to know that we can still consume the same grains as the ancient Egyptians or Aztecs. This is a fresher product than the mutated grains you would see in your supermarket sourdough, with an unusually long shelf life.’

 Modern wheat was created has only been around for about 100 years. It’s was made by cross breeding varieties to produce a fast-growing crop that was better at resisting pests and needed less processing to  make flour.

In contrast, ancient grains haven’t been changed in more than 1000 years.

However, some chefs have warned against ‘ancient grains’ getting swept up as a marketing ploy.

Speaking to FEMAIL, Ian Ganson, the new Head Chef at the Thames Lid said: ‘To think that sourdough is losing popularity to breads made with ancient grains is really surprising! 

‘Rather than two sides of the artisan bread scale, one would think they are ideal bed fellows. If sourdough baking represents a return to more natural, flavourful breads then use of ancient grains can only be a step in the right direction for sourdough enthusiasts. 

‘I guess the problem is when ‘ancient grains’ are added to modern, commercial breads as a marketing ploy. The hope is that research in to ancient grains may lead to increased biodiversity and ultimately increased food security. It would be a shame to lose sight of that amidst this popularity contest.’

While fermented breads like sourdough are great for gut health, ancient grains also come with a bevvy of benefits.

Teff flour, an east African superfood which is used to make Ethopian bread injera, is popular among gluten-free diners. It also is high in fibre and has a low glycemic index compared to other grains, meaning blood sugar spikes are less likely.

Clare Smyth, who runs the Three Michelin-starred Core by Clare Smyth, uses spelt, which was first cultivated around 5000BC. In her book, she says it is ‘delicious’ and ‘incredibly good for you’.

Anomarel Ogen, Executive Head Baker, Bertinet Bakery added that  a lot of sourdough on shelves is ‘sourfaux’.

‘The taste of bread is the culmination of two things: potential and actualisation. The potential is the grain and the actualisation is the method. If we’re talking about the ‘potential’, it’s true some (not all) ancient grains have more complex tastes than modern ones, but this topic is a lot more nuanced,’ she said. 

‘It’s not just about the grains you’re using, it’s about how you’re using them – the ‘actualisation’. If you took ancient grains and didn’t ferment them properly, then you compared them to a wholegrain sourdough loaf made with modern wheat, which has been fermented properly, the latter would taste infinitely better.

‘Our team at Bertinet Bakery places close attention to the dough fermentation, temperatures and acidity – fully fermenting our loaves which creates a perfectly balanced flavour and texture. 

‘The issue is there are a lot of products on the market that haven’t had this level of attention. If sourdough is seen as losing its taste, it’s not because of modern wheat – it’s first and foremost the fact that the method has been industrialised by a lot of companies and those products are given limited fermentation. 

‘This isn’t proper sourdough, it’s sourfaux. These companies are muddying the public’s perception of what authentic sourdough is, often combined with ambiguous labelling, additives, preservatives and yeast (none of which we use as real sourdough is just water, salt and flour).

‘I’d also add that wholegrain flour has more complex flavours than white. Let’s take spelt, for example, which can be wholegrain or white. White spelt doesn’t have more taste than normal white flour.

‘All this is not to say ancient grains, heritage wheats and alternative cereals are not great! For nutrition, soil health and flavour – they are, and we use their diversity in our breads, it’s just that real sourdough is much more than what flours you use.’

‘The grain was used to feed the friars and abbots of nearby monasteries, not to mention the surrounding villagers and workers who tilled the land. It was one of Britain’s first cash crops, enabling the growth and spread of towns and markets. It helped, in some part, to build the country we know today.’ 

While it’s low in fat, it also contains essential omega 6 and omega 3 fatty acids. 

Spelt too  is high in fibre and micronutrients like like iron and zinc.

Jeremy Lee, Chef Proprietor, Quo Vadis, added that climate change will continue to affect menus.     

‘First and foremost these changes are going to have the largest impact on menus and menu writing,’ he explained.

‘We saw an abundance of red tomatoes and summer staples in the October heatwave after releasing our Autumn menu.’

‘The lines between the four seasons will continue to blur and become more fluid as time goes by.

As a result, I expect we’ll see daily menus become more prominent across the capital – they just need astute chefs and astute managers to create them!’

Despite the results, sourdough is still immensely popular for now with more than six million photos of it shared on Instagram.

A couple who weighed nearly 40 between them has lost half their body weight after ditching unhealthy junk food for home cooking.

Grandparents Jo Beveridge, 50, and John Durkin, 52, from Burnley, Lancashire, ate takeaway and delicious meals during the lockdown because ‘it was everything they looked forward to’.

But after John tipped the scales at 21st 8lbs while Jo reached 17st 6lbs, the pair decided to make a change.

And after losing 17th between them, the couple has now been crowned ‘couple of the year’ by Slimming World.

“If I’m honest with myself, I haven’t been happy with my weight since the birth of our first son, Alex,” said account manager Jo.

She dropped five dress sizes after losing 6st 6lbs.

“When Liam arrived a few years later, it became even more difficult to find time to eat healthy,” she continued.

“I would try to lose weight before a big event or holiday, but it would be a quick fix and I always ended up right back where I started once I started eating ‘normal’ again.”

The grandmother added that lockdown meant taking solace in food because she and John couldn’t see their family – leading to the development of some “quite unhealthy habits.”

They joined Slimming World in September 2021 after getting fed up with how they looked and felt.

The grocery store meal deals for lunch and high-calorie beer and wine with take-out meals went out.

Instead, they now prepare fresh salads for lunch and enjoy ready-to-eat, lower-calorie prepared foods.

And when they drink, they now have liquor with a low-calorie mixer and alternate alcohol with low-calorie soft drinks.

Jo also said their pre-lockdown weekends often consisted of ‘a trip to the pub with a takeaway after – so the couple were worried they ‘wouldn’t be able to enjoy that aspect of their lives’ anymore.

“But with a few simple trades, we realized we didn’t have to miss a thing,” she added.

Our daughter-in-law Jodie had joined Slimming World prior to her wedding in 2019 and she looked absolutely amazing on the day.

“She raved about all the delicious food she could eat and how supportive the group was, so we decided to try it ourselves.”

The pair also embarked on a new fitness routine, including regular running, and John managed to complete a marathon earlier this year.

The warehouse manager has cut his weight in half by losing 10th 11 pounds.

“I really got the running bug when the weight started to come off,” he revealed.

“It felt so much easier and my recovery time was much faster.

“The eating plan is no-nonsense, common sense eating — a world away from the crash diets we’ve done in the past.”

He admits the experience has changed the way they think about food.

“We now plan our meals and eat three balanced meals a day, which helps us stay on track,” explains John.

“We also often cook in batches, so if we don’t feel like cooking or don’t have time, there’s usually something in the freezer.

‘The group coaching was also great. I was a little nervous at the thought of taking part and wasn’t sure what to expect.

“I was afraid I’d be the only man or be judged as the tallest in the room. Yet it wasn’t like that at all.

“After a few weeks, we really started to understand who we were as weight-lossers. Once we figured that out, everything fell into place.’

A woman has shared how she makes $135,000 a year by dressing up as a clown at children’s birthday parties.

Self-proclaimed “clown mom” Regina Martinez, of Austin, Texas, makes a living by charging $300 for a “Birthday Boost” package — an hour of puppet shows and balloons made especially for preschoolers.

Even more remarkable is the mother’s flexible lifestyle, working an average of only two days a week, including a 12-hour Saturday.

The 35-year-old says what started as a sideline has turned into her family’s main income, and in 2022 her husband quit his job to pursue his own dreams.

She said Business Insider: ‘I like the creative freedom I have. I can go out in the morning, put on a puppet show and get paid well for it, and spend the rest of the day with my kids.”

The budding entrepreneur says her rapid success has come as a shock.

After launching the company full-time in 2021, she didn’t expect it to take off in a big way.

Still, she soon realized that fellow moms were more than willing to spend money for “stupid entertainment” at their children’s parties.

That same year, she experienced rapid growth, with inquiries rising to about 20 to 30 each weekend.

However, Regina’s burgeoning achievements have not gotten in the way of family life as she has complete control over her schedule.

The puppeteer says she maintains strict boundaries at work, attending only a handful of weekday events and staying home on Sundays.

The overnight mom success has been more than 10 years in the making.

In 2010, while looking for extra income, Regina came across an ad for face painters.

The ad agency suggested she become a character so she could increase her earning potential.

Fortunately, her best friend, a clown at the time, was on hand to help the newcomer, and in 2011, Regina landed her first job as a clown.

She said, “My best friend, who was a clown, suggested I call myself Sparkles. I went to children’s parties as Sparkles, a fairytale princess, but I realized I didn’t really look like a princess, so I decided to become a clown instead. In 2011 I started calling myself Silly Sparkles’.

Sparkles the clown offered a full package of balloons, face painting and magic.

But she adds that a listening ear and attention to feedback from little ones have been critical to her success.

The kids seemed more enchanted by her glittering costume than her clown makeup.

As time passed, Regina was directly wanted for gigs and no longer needed the agency.

And after becoming a mother for the first time in 2012, the creativity and flexibility of the job was the perfect way to finance her family.

She then launched her own website, took professional photos and officially launched her clowning business, charging $125 an hour.

Unfortunately, the Covid pandemic in 2020 caused things to slow down for Regina, but quick thinking led her to think of other ways to make money.

After some research, she found that her services were especially appealing to mothers of preschool-aged children.

So she ditched the face painting and focused entirely on children’s parties, performing puppet and balloon shows while dressed as a clown.

She also doubled her rate, charging $300 for an hour of special brand fun.

Her success is a far cry from the graphic design degree she earned in college in 2010, a route she abandoned after the Great Recession in 2009.

Still, the entertainer is pleased with her career trajectory, adding that she enjoys being her own boss and having the freedom to dictate what comes next.