Reader's Digest UK August 2022

WELCOME, DEAR READER, to the August edition of Reader’s Digest. Whether you’re spending the last month of summer travelling to faraway places or just basking in the sun in your back garden, we hope to keep you company with our usual dose of laughter, games and inspiration. In this issue, you’ll find a comforting interview with the legendary Maureen Lipman on p20, an incisive piece on eating disorders in older people on p36, and a colourful feature on the greatest cheese destinations around the world on p88—among many others. You, the readers, are at the heart of everything we do, so we would like to take a moment to thank you for the overwhelming response we received to our recent subscriber survey. As ever, your feedback is invaluable when it comes…

We pay £50 for Letter of the Month and £30 for all others LETTER OF THE MONTH Over 23.7 billion methane-rich cowpats, weighing a staggering total of 43.4 million tonnes, are deposited around the world every day. And cows aren’t the only culprits. Animal agriculture is accountable for producing the equivalent of 7.1 gigatonnes of CO2 per year, or 14.5 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. So, your article “The Seaweed Solution” certainly gave me a lot to think about. Feeding cows seaweed, it is claimed in your article, will help to cut down on the emissions that are ruining our planet. I welcome any changes in farming animal diets that will help the planet. But I am a vegan and so I continue to despair about the bovine farming industry. One particularly cruel…

TIME FOR A new suit. I’d foolishly believed I was well-equipped on this front already, because, somewhere in my closet, I’d retained a shiny Brooks Brothers jobbie (weddings), a morning suit and top hat (Ascot), a Prince of Wales checked affair (job interviews), and a sober M&S two-piece (funerals). There’s even a dinner jacket, for accompanying Dad to Black Tie events at his car club. Yet my father died in 2016. Which tells you all you need to know about the frequency of my suit-wearing. Look, I like to be comfortable. Left to my own devices, I’d strut about year-round in slouchy shorts, XXL graphic tees and Birkenstocks, looking for all the world like a Texan tourist at a beach buffet. Even in the "smart-casual" world of media work, this style…

ACTRESS MAUREEN LIPMAN has been a permanent fixture on stage and screen ever since she graduated from drama school in her early twenties. Whether in serious films like Polanski’s The Pianist, in TV sitcoms like Agony (as the suffocating Jewish mother, Beattie), in the long-running British Telecom TV ads and currently as the monstrous Evelyn Plummer in Coronation Street, no one can doubt her ubiquity. Now, at 76, she’s taking on one of her most challenging roles ever. Playwright Martin Sherman wrote Rose at the end of the 1990s with Maureen Lipman in mind. “But I was then in my early fifties,” she says, “too young for the role.” In the event, it was played by the late Olympia Dukakis at the National and then by Janet Suzman in Chichester. “But when…

I GREW UP IN TWICKENHAM and I remember the moment when I realised the power of music for the first time. There used to be a fairground in the 1950s that would come to the rugby stadium and I have such a vivid memory of going there and being so thrilled by the lights, the noise and the rides. What made it spectacular to me, though, was hearing a song called “Rock And Roll Waltz” by a singer called Kay Starr being blasted out over these primitive speakers. It all felt so dangerous and loud and intoxicating to me. PARIS IS A PLACE THAT WILL ALWAYS BE DEAR TO ME. I feel very lucky that I went there when I was about 14 in the late 1950s to stay with a…

CAROLINE DRUMMOND-SMITH’S eating disorder began at age 16 when she went to boarding school. She hated being there. “I felt so out of control, but the one thing I could control was what I ate,” recalls the 55-year-old health and wellness coach from near Frome in Somerset. “I focused on sport and decided not to eat.” Over the next 35 years her anorexia reared its head every time she found herself in a situation she struggled with, like a broken relationship or a skiing accident that meant she couldn’t exercise. Terrified of piling on the calories, she would restrict her eating when she got to a certain weight. “I had a lot of rules around food,” she explains. “I would eat certain foods at certain times. I could only have carbs,…