Lifestyle News - Food, Home & Trends

Hotelier John Brennan: ‘Living with cancer will affect my life expectancy but I wouldn’t lose sleep over that’

Reality television, John Brennan wryly observes, is all about the creation of fictional personae. To watch RTÉ’s At Your Service – in which he and his brother Francis give business makeovers to struggling hoteliers and B&B owners – you might think that Francis is the acerbic one and John the dry numbers man.

Interiors

Make a splash with 1970s-inspired décor

If you are a child of the 1970s, you’re likely to have spent a good chunk of your youth under a brown-fringed lampshade in a wood-panelled living room watching Knight Rider. Until the last few years, the 1970s was considered the ‘decade that style forgot’ and remained a largely reviled aesthetic when it came to interior design, with books such as Hideous Homes from the Horrible 70s stating our distaste with accompanying technicolour visual imagery.

Life

Hotelier John Brennan: ‘Living with cancer will affect my life expectancy but I wouldn’t lose sleep over that’

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Top Stories

My Favourite Room: A stunning period home in Co Waterford with plenty to inspire its artist owner Andrea Jameson

Brendan O’Connor’s Mid-Life Crisis: ‘She texted me the next day and she used the immortal words, “Will we ever get sense?” Not now, I said, it’s too late.’

‘It’s not a place for the faint-hearted’: the women calling the shots in Irish whiskey

Big and brash or delicate and subtle, prints will add personality and depth to your interiors

Taste of more: Lucinda O’Sullivan lists buzzing Belfast’s 10 hottest restaurants

Smashing Pumpkins: Rachel Allen has four gorgeous gourd recipes to tickle your tastebuds this Halloween season

Sophie White Opinion Having children is incredibly taxing physically and painful — though not in the ways you might have expected

Get your cauldrons bubbling with Susan Jane White's recipe for wickedly warming carrot, apple and lentil soup

A taste of the Orient: Donal Skehan’s homemade dumplings, roast plum pork and tropical coconut cake

Pól Ó Conghaile Opinion Protests over places like the Cobblestone and Merchant’s Arch aren’t new, but they feel newly significant

Property, homes & gardens

Diarmuid Gavin: why now is the best time to plant spring bulbs

Make a splash with 1970s-inspired décor

The bold triangle – every angle covered at €750,000 Cork eco-house with rooms on five floors and dawn till dusk sun-traps

A home for Christmas — developments that are ready to go

The €1.6m Dublin 6 redbrick and a hair-raising tale of war and woe in west Africa

An affordable townhouse in one of Dublin’s hippest neighbourhoods

Features and interviews

Coronas singer Danny O’Reilly: ‘My biggest fear? That some crazy virus appears and, in some weird, sick twist, its name has an unfortunate likeness to our band name’

Fighting fit at 40: Our man Ian Gaughran’s 50 days to rediscover his fitness

John Banville: ‘For 40 minutes I was a Nobel Prize winner’

My menopause: ‘Brain fog? Brain treacle is more like it. I slap on the HRT patch and wait for the lovely hormones to do their thing’

Grief after love at first sight: ‘The cancer didn’t matter to me, because I knew she was the one. We were so in love and we enjoyed every single day together’

Lockdown waves: ‘I was the only surfer out there — I don’t know if I’ll ever see a day like that again’

Parenting

Tanya Sweeney Opinion Claire Byrne is right — working mums can’t win the parenting tug of war

David Coleman: Empathy is the most useful skill to help children process their bottled-up feelings

School’s out: When anxiety leads to long-term absenteeism for students

‘The waiter gestured at my breastfeeding baby as though he was an unexploded bomb and told me cover up or leave’

How to cope when your partner’s parenting style is very different

Motoring

How you can save your car from costly repairs if you pump in wrong fuel

Is this new Sandero Stepway king of bargain basement?

Why do we so neglect four of the most important things on our cars?

The Aygo X: Toyota to unveil new city car crossover next month

Home & Property Newsletter

Food and drink

Gallery From Pinotage purgatory to Pinot Noir heaven

Lignum restaurant review: ‘This woodland dining room is one of the most arresting in the country. You feel as if you’re eating in a forest’

Mikey Ryan’s gastropub in Cashel rocks Lucinda O’Sullivan’s world with fine food and secrets to be discovered

Can’t get to Munich? Set yourself up for an at-home Oktoberfest with our expert’s pick of tasty German beers

Gallery Middle Eastern-style autumn feast: fall for Rachel’s terrific tagine, harissa lamb and roast aubergine recipes

Health and Wellbeing

Real Health: The Importance of Sleep

‘I should have sought help years earlier when I was having suicidal thoughts – but I was hiding from failure’

If I hadn’t lost four-and-a-half stone, I would never have found the lump and caught my breast cancer

‘MS is not the end of the world, but it can be very hard, some days my body doesn’t want to move’

Five menopause symptoms that you may not be aware of

Sanitisers: yes. Handshakes: no. Expenses... maybe. How workplaces are preparing for the office return