If you’re not on TikTok, you’re missing out on more than just footage of a bat yawning (over 22 million likes, it’s super cute!). The platform is packed with content about mental health, from signs of disorders and ways of coping, to general solidarity about the anxieties and challenges we all face.
Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. It’s a sentiment Vermont feels in its bones, in its sinews. What you think you know about the eastern suburb – Neighbours, it’s really just Neighbours – isn’t actually something Vermont can claim. For it is Vermont South that’s home to the long-running soap, and it has busloads of British backpackers flocking to Pin Oak Court to prove it.
My partner works in a popular organic grocery store in Melbourne, where shopping baskets are filled with fermented foods, nutty rye breads, Bircher muesli and pungent cheeses. But this food wasn’t always seen to be appealing or as accessible in Australia.
Standing in my uncle’s bathroom in Switzerland, a skylight beaming the harsh alpine sun onto the mirror, I found my first grey hair. I was sixteen, and put the appearance of this surprise follicle down to the stress that came with being halfway through my final years of school. I yanked it out, accidentally taking with it several brown strands.
In 1980 in America’s Bible Belt, a toddler named James Luke had tumours all over his body. An IV insertion caused a linear scar on his neck, while a tumour behind his left eye blinded him and another behind his right ear was biopsied. Twelve years later, James’ mother Kathy had given birth to two healthy children and was welcoming another son. As well as being born blind in his left eye, with a cyst behind his right ear, her newborn son had a linear birthmark on his neck.