All posts tagged: lived

My rookie era: I lived off the land for a week – by day five I was naked, my clothes dangling over the campfire | Australian lifestyle

My rookie era: I lived off the land for a week – by day five I was naked, my clothes dangling over the campfire | Australian lifestyle

Published by Sam Flores

At 15 I proved the maxim: “Hire a teen while they still know everything.” That summer of 1971, I judged the world and concluded that civilisation was meh, and surely doomed. So with the zeal of the truly clueless I resolved to try living off the land, and left behind my comfortable family home and smirking parents. Equipped for an epic, I’d packed a tent, canteen, billy, sleeping bag, cord, emergency rations (two carrots, bag of soup mix, creamed rice) and a bushcraft pamphlet protecting a Women’s Weekly cutting of Princess Caroline of Monaco. I’d convinced fellow members in our class geek club, Peter and David, of the venture’s virtue, and together we chugged along now-vanished tracks through Victoria’s central highlands to Molesworth station, then ascended 460 metres over the summit of nearby Mount Concord to the nirvana I’d spotted on a survey map: a grassy flat beside the seductively named Chrystal Creek. ‘There are moments in life when hubris resets your ego.’: Andrew Herrick in 1971 Day two we spent staggering around in agony, …

British Gas sent me a £571 bill for a flat I’ve never owned or lived in | Consumer affairs

British Gas sent me a £571 bill for a flat I’ve never owned or lived in | Consumer affairs

Published by Sam Flores

British Gas opened an account in my name for an address that I have never occupied, and sent me a £571 bill. It declined to open a complaint because I “refused” to provide a tenancy agreement or mortgage statement which, since I’ve long since paid off my mortgage, I don’t have. It is now threatening me with a debt collection agency. IW, Northampton Your house is supplied by Octopus and you have no connection with the flat along the road that British Gas has conjured you into. British Gas’s stance was that if you can’t prove you don’t live there, then you surely do. It ignored the bank statements you sent as evidence, and it never thought to question the competence of the tracing agent it uses to locate debtors. Because your address is similar to the indebted flat, the tracing agents plumped for you when there was no response to bills sent to the supply address. British Gas only investigated when I got involved. It has now belatedly apologised and removed you from its …

Raphael Died Before 40. His Met Retrospective Asks:What if He’d Lived?

Raphael Died Before 40. His Met Retrospective Asks:What if He’d Lived?

Published by Jenni Sidey

Imagine I asked you to name the famous Italian Renaissance artist who angered his patron by repeatedly missing deadlines because he was busy studying perspective. You’d probably answer Leonardo da Vinci. Other artists could be dilatory, but no other artist is as famous for putting his research before his painting. It’s practically Leonardo’s signature.  Yet, in this case, you’d be mistaken. The artist in question is somebody unexpected—somebody set to receive a major retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this spring, his first in the United States. His reputation holds him as the most enterprising, diligent, and proficient painter of the period: the short-lived Raphael of Urbino (1483–1520). Since Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550/68), Raphael has been considered the model of reliable efficiency, embodying the adage, “If you need something done quickly, find a busy person.” Despite dying young, in his late 30s, Raphael produced numerous drawings, paintings, and buildings. Study is not something legend tends to associate with him. Easily absorbing style after style, Raphael deployed them at will like a …

The abandoned village with beautiful new homes where no-one has ever lived | UK | News

The abandoned village with beautiful new homes where no-one has ever lived | UK | News

Published by Sam Flores

These village homes were newly-built not so long ago but have been left empty for years (Image: Jon Lawrence) It is nestled among green fields and could at first glance pass for a quaint little hamlet of white-fronted homes with red and grey-tiled roofs. There’s a street or two and even something that looks like it could be a little school or community hall. But look closer and there’s something a little unsettling about the scene. Stare as long as you like and you won’t see a single person. No lights will illuminate the windows when it gets dark and there won’t be a sound beyond the wind and steady rain that are common in these parts.  There are no paved roads leading either to or from this ghost community. Eerily still, it feels less like a village and more like a film set abandoned mid-scene. Despite being built only a decade or so ago and visited by King Charles when he was Prince of Wales, no-one has ever lived here. But there was a …

Only surviving victim of ‘Suffolk Strangler’ Steve Wright says others may have lived if police had taken her seriously | UK News

Only surviving victim of ‘Suffolk Strangler’ Steve Wright says others may have lived if police had taken her seriously | UK News

Published by Sam Flores

The only surviving victim of “Suffolk Strangler” Steve Wright has told how if police had taken her story seriously, the other women he went on to murder may still be alive today. The serial killer attempted to kidnap Emily Doherty in the Suffolk town of Felixstowe in 1999. Wright went on to murder five women in the Ipswich area in 2006 and on Monday pleaded guilty to murdering 17-year-old Victoria Hall, also in 1999, as well as trying to abduct Emily. Image: Clockwise from top left: Tania Nicol, Gemma Adams, Anneli Alderton, Paula Clennell, Annette Nicholls, Victoria Hall. Pics: Suffolk Police/PA In her first ever interview with the media, Emily told Sky News how, while she was on a night out, she had to flee from him repeatedly until someone came to her aid. But when police were called, they treated her like “a silly little girl”, and failed to follow it up with a full investigation even after Victoria Hall’s body was later found. “It’s devastating what happened to everyone else, absolutely devastating,” Emily …

How Elizabeth Short Lived: Black Dahlia’s Untold Journey

How Elizabeth Short Lived: Black Dahlia’s Untold Journey

Published by Daniella Wilson

Author William J. Mann’s 2014 true-crime tome, Tinseltown, interrogated the unsolved killing of director William Desmond Taylor and its impact on the early film colony. Now his midcentury-set sequel, Black Dahlia, seeks to recount the life of Elizabeth Short, which has long been eclipsed by her lurid death. “The topic has been ‘done’ many times, but it hasn’t been done correctly,” insists Mann, who’s also written biographies of Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand. “There’s more to the story than trying to crack the case. I wanted to find Elizabeth Short, not the killer. I was interested in her agency, her drive, her ambition. She’d been erased. This was about restoration.” Short’s 1947 homicide achieved its lasting place in American culture both because of its savagery — her face had been slashed ear to ear and her body bisected at the waist and left in a vacant lot in L.A.’s Leimert Park — as well as the memorable moniker the press gave to the dark-haired Short. It was in reference to The Blue Dahlia, a noir …

The abandoned Welsh village visited by King Charles where no-one has ever lived

The abandoned Welsh village visited by King Charles where no-one has ever lived

Published by Sam Flores

At first glance the streets of Coed Darcy look much like any other modern housing estate. Cars line the kerbs. Curtains twitch in upstairs windows. A few are left ajar to let fresh air drift through. It feels settled, ordinary even. Few would guess that this quietly lived-in community stands on ground once dominated by oil tanks, chimneys and heavy industry. Over 20 years ago this land formed part of the BP-owned Llandarcy Oil Refinery, the UK’s first crude oil plant. Operational from 1922 until its closure in 1997, the site lay dormant for years afterwards – a vast, polluted reminder of an industrial age left behind. In the early 2000s plans were unveiled to transform it into something radically different: a new village built on the principles of sustainability and traditional design, inspired by the then-Prince Charles’ development at Poundbury in Dorset. After years of intensive land remediation – stripping away contamination, chemicals and hazards left behind by decades of refining – construction began. Coed Darcy was envisioned as a thriving community in its …

The hunt for where the last Neanderthals lived

The hunt for where the last Neanderthals lived

Published by skeptic

Neanderthals often found refuge in caves GREGOIRE CIRADE/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every month. It’s early January and south-west Britain is painfully cold. Not that cold, obviously: my friends in Canada and Scandinavia are laughing at my pitiful attempts to deal with near-freezing conditions. But it’s cold enough that I need to wrap up warmly or the chill seeps into my bones. Which brings me to the Neanderthals, our long-extinct cousins, who we have tended to imagine living in frigid environments. A lot of our imagery of the Neanderthals is decidedly Siberian: frozen tundra, driving winds, woolly mammoths plodding through the snow. They have often been described as cold-adapted hominins. Now, if you’ve been paying close attention to New Scientist over the past couple of months, you might remember a hint that that isn’t quite right. In November, we published a story called “Neanderthals’ hefty noses weren’t well adapted to cold climates”. In it, Chris …

Forgotten Star Dorothy Stratten Almost Lived the Hollywood Fairy Tale. It Ended as a Horror Story.

Forgotten Star Dorothy Stratten Almost Lived the Hollywood Fairy Tale. It Ended as a Horror Story.

Published by Sam Flores

So, to repeat: Nobody in his right mind would call Bogdanovich a pimp. Except, also to repeat: He made movies. Was, in fact, a director of movies, and inherent in that word—director—is power, authority, control. When a director cast his female lead, wasn’t he choosing a woman he believed conformed or could be coaxed into conforming to his dream? That was the dynamic between Bogdanovich and Shepherd—Pygmalion and Galatea. David Newman recalled going to visit Bogdanovich, encountering Shepherd: “She came out of the bedroom, sat on Peter’s lap. Peter goes, ‘Hi, honey,’ nuzzling, [as] I sat there…. She said, ‘I’m going off to UCLA to see—’ She opened the schedule. ‘…There’s an Allan Dwan at three o’clock, and at five-thirty, should I stay and see that Frank Borzage?’… He’d go out of the room, and she’d roll her eyes, and go, ‘He just wants me to know everything about the movies.’… She was being tutored to be a Peter Bogdanovich girlfriend.” When Bogdanovich got together with Dorothy in early 1980, he’d hit the skids. There’d …

Tell us: have you lived in temporary accommodation in the UK with children? | Housing

Tell us: have you lived in temporary accommodation in the UK with children? | Housing

Published by Sam Flores

More than 172,000 children were living in temporary accommodation in England at the end of June, according to the latest quarterly official figures from October. That represented an 8.2% rise on the same period last year. There are now more than 130,000 households households living in temporary accommodation in England, the figures showed. Matt Downie, chief executive of Crisis, said: “Tragically we have now become totally accustomed to seeing record levels of children growing up in temporary accommodation. We are talking about children with no space to play, no place to do homework, no safe, stable place to call home.” We’d like to find out more about the situation across the UK. Are you a parent who’s living with children in temporary accommodation – or has in the last couple of years? We want to hear from you. How long has it lasted, and what’s been the impact on your family? Have you been moved far away from your children’s school or relatives? Has there been any impact on education or your child’s wellbeing and …