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In February, I made a booking with Cottages.com for July. A month later, the company said that the reservation was cancelled because of remedial work on the property. I offered to defer the booking, but was told the works would last the entire season because of insurance issues. I could find an alternative property, or …

Britain’s biggest retailers recorded the sharpest growth in sales since 2018 as consumer confidence was boosted by the easing of lockdown in England and Wales, and progress with the Covid-19 vaccination programme. For the first time in 2021, sales volumes were viewed as good for the time of year, according to the latest monthly snapshot …

My kettle’s broken. It still boils water, but it doesn’t switch off – just boils on, converting the kitchen to a sauna, wastefully, expensively. Put another way, the Polly component still functions well, but Sukey’s lost it. Time to bin it, splash out on a new one. Or maybe not … Could it be repaired? …

I recently discovered that for the last seven years I have been paying for an unused antivirus subscription to Norton. I took it out as a student with my university email address. However, this ceased to work when I left in 2013. In spite of the fact that the annual renewal emails would have bounced …

Name: The shroom boom. Age: Ancient rock art in Castilla-La Mancha in Spain suggests that Psilocybe hispanica, one of the mushrooms that contains the psychoactive compound psilocybin, was taken in religious ceremonies as long as 6,000 years ago. Oh, I thought it was a current boom, pass notes being a newsworthy column and everything. There’s …