35 h. ago Want to go to a UK university? Don’t ask me to help you write your personal statement | Zoe Williams

How do you impress admissions tutors? Apparently not by waffling on about babysitting experience, or a love of crochetIt’s university entrance season, and so begin the trials of the personal statement, which now takes the form of three questions: “Why do you want to study this course or subject?; How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare for this course or subject?; What else have you done to prepare outside education, and why are these experiences useful?” – 4,000 characters for the Ucas form, in which every 17- and 18-year-old has to express their uniqueness, while at the same time answering the same generic questions. I can’t help my own kids with this because they’re Stemmy (as in science and maths-oriented). their scope of interests is expressed in formulae, and if I ever have the audacity to ask them to translate it back into words, they shake their heads and go, “You’re never going to understand electron configuration”, in the exact tone of voice you’d us...

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8 d. ago Nigel Farage has 1.3m followers on TikTok. Does this mean gen Z likes him? | Zoe Williams

He is the most popular UK politician on one of the world’s most popular social media sites. Working out what that means is actually surprisingly difficultThere’s a famous clip that still does the rounds on social media, which is weird, because it’s Russia Today, hardly regular viewing, it happened in 2017, a fairly long time ago, and it was on the show Sam Delaney’s News Thing, which was never appointment viewing. In it, Nigel Farage is ceremonially knighted by a girl of about seven, who then says: “My mummy says you hate foreigners.” Delaney cuts in, “No no no, little girl”, and Nige falls about laughing, because good old Nigel, he’s always game for a laugh.Pause on whether or not Farage hates foreigners; the reason I can do an impression of the little girl is that every teenager I know is pitch perfect on all three parts – the girl, Delaney, Farage. Whenever people say, “Is it bad that Nigel Farage is the only politician my kids have heard of? Should I worry?”, I try in vain to th...

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8 d. ago Prince Andrew, Jeffrey Epstein and the scandal that won’t go away – podcast

Zoe Williams describes the scandals that have engulfed Andrew, leading to him giving up his titlesOn Friday evening, Buckingham Palace released a statement from Prince Andrew. ‘I have decided, as I always have, to put my duty to my family and country first,’ it read. ‘I will therefore no longer use my title or the honours which have been conferred upon me.’It seemed that Prince Andrew was voluntarily giving up his titles such as the Duke of York, the Knight of the Garter, or calling himself the Earl of Inverness – but perhaps his hand had been forced by the palace, or by his older brother King Charles. Continue reading...

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9 d. ago What do we learn from Epstein and Andrew? There’s a level of power at which right and wrong no longer exist | Zoe Williams

Prince Andrew has finally decided to give up his titles – but we have known the shape of the allegations against him for years. Why was there a collective decision to look away?On the eve of the publication of Virginia Giuffre’s book Nobody’s Girl, released six months after her death from despair, Buckingham Palace is apparently braced for fresh revelations. Many MPs are calling for a change in the law, to give King Charles or a parliamentary committee the power to remove royal titles, with Rachael Maskell, the Labour MP for York Central, pleading with parliament to take seriously this opportunity to “address the wrongs of history and to ensure that the voices of victims and survivors are really heard and acted upon”. A source at the palace told the BBC they expected “more days of pain ahead”.Getting ahead of these “days of pain”, Prince Andrew – he continues to hold the title he was born with – announced last Friday that he was relinquishing his use of “Duke of York” and “KG”, knig...

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1 week ago My mum died this year. And the glut of apples from her tree has brought with it a new kind of grief | Zoe Williams

Every year, I refused the crates of fruit she tried to palm off on me each autumn. Now I wish I’d taken themMy mother was the most horrible cook, unbelievably bad at it. Her umbrella crime was the lack of self-knowledge – far from being bad, she thought she was brilliant – but underneath that, a set of discrete misapprehensions, any one of which would have been enough to make you not want to eat at her house. She’d never take a recipe literally; each ingredient could be swapped with something else of a similar colour, or a similar size, or not similar at all. She loved to throw in a rogue element. As I write this, I’m flicking through her magazine cuttings, and she’s made a note above an aubergine and potato casserole that says: “Good, but needs something else. Lime?”She thought everything, sweet and savoury, could be lifted by a dried apricot. She was extremely experimental but eschewed basic principles, such as parboiling, or meat being roasted for a specific amount of time, relat...

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2 w. ago Zoe Ball shares Prince William’s moving letter to her mum before she died

The Radio 2 host said the royal reached out while her mother Julia was seriously ill and again after her passing

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3 w. ago Zoe Ball reveals how Prince William helped get her process the death of her mother

Former BBC Radio 2 DJ Zoe Ball has revealed the 'beautiful' gesture Prince William made after the death of her mum Julia last year

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3 w. ago Zoe Ball opens up on Prince William's 'beautiful' gesture to her dying mum

BBC Radio 2 DJ Zoe Ball has revealed that Prince William sent her a touching letter to share with her dying mum, who was in the hospital battling pancreatic cancer

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3 w. ago Zoe Ball reveals Prince William's incredibly touching gesture to her dying mum

The Prince of Wales took time away from his own family's health issues to write a touching note to Zoë Ball's mother, Julia Peckham, as she struggled with pancreatic cancer

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3 w. ago My periods were so extreme I tried to take my own life multiple times

Kim Cormack, 36, appeared on the sofa alongside Dr Zoe Williams, 45, to talk to Cat Deeley, 48, and Ben Shephard, 50, about her premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) diagnosis.

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3 w. ago I’m ready to join the brave new world of women who are leaving their family at home – and holidaying alone | Zoe Williams

Women are ditching their families to seek adventures on their own terms. What took us so long?A couple of weeks ago, I got an email about a press trip I would never countenance. It was long haul and it was about fitness, so it would have involved a lot of exercise and early nights. Even if I enjoyed those things, I wouldn’t have been desperate to spend a week with other people who enjoyed them. But even as I was hitting delete, I started to wonder what that would actually be like: being somewhere different, without anyone to please except myself, without anything to do except exactly what I wanted. Plainly, it would be amazing. So I said “yes” and it turned out they meant the other Zoe Williams, the one who is a doctor and used to be a Gladiator, and is incredibly fit already, and yes, in retrospect, that should have been obvious all along.So, without meaning to and without going anywhere, I’ve arrived in the fastest-growing travel demographic: the female solo traveller, aged 45 to ...

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3 w. ago Enjoying the implosion of the Tories? That’s understandable – but completely wrong | Zoe Williams

The world’s most successful democratic party is in a death spiral of its own making – leaving no bulwark between the moderate and truly far rightThere have been times in living memory that Conservative leaders have sounded almost sensible on the surface – and times where they have sounded animal crackers, yet were still adored by their party. This is not either of those times. Kemi Badenoch left the crowd unmoved when she addressed her conference, even as she threw out the red meat of migrant-baiting she thought they wanted. It’s not so much that they’d all woken up with a renewed sense of humanity; more that they didn’t believe she’d ever be in a position to deliver it. It was, in effect, fake vegan meat. Tories hate that. One senior Conservative apparently called it a “New Orleans funeral”: noisy, energetic, but still a goodbye.What next for the group with a decent case to make for itself as the most historically successful democratic party in the world? Some are having another sq...

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4 w. ago The joy of Traitors is in rooting for real people. Does anyone care about celebrities in that way? | Zoe Williams

Having famous contestants is a betrayal of all that’s great about the show – and a misunderstanding of what makes humans tickIf you have never seen Traitors, you will be sick to death of people telling you to watch Traitors: everybody loves it, no one can ever explain why. They describe the premise and it’s a load of people lying to one another. Contestants perform challenges – such as the challenge of running faster than most of them would like – and then they lie. They are often presented with the dilemma of whether to lie or not, but there is very little suspense, because they always choose lying. That is, of course, if they have anything to lie about; the ones who don’t just operate in a perpetual fog of misdirected trust and reptile-brained paranoia. It sounds like the kind of thing you wouldn’t have to watch twice, but that is so far from true you could easily find yourself scouring the world for the connoisseur’s Traitors (Traitors Australia, season two).Theoretically then, C...

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4 w. ago The joy of The Traitors is in rooting for real people. Does anyone care about celebrities in that way? | Zoe Williams

Having famous contestants is a betrayal of all that’s great about the show – and a misunderstanding of what makes humans tickIf you have never seen The Traitors, you will be sick to death of people telling you to watch The Traitors: everybody loves it, no one can ever explain why. They describe the premise and it’s a load of people lying to one another. Contestants perform challenges – such as the challenge of running faster than most of them would like – and then they lie. They are often presented with the dilemma of whether to lie or not, but there is very little suspense, because they always choose lying. That is, of course, if they have anything to lie about; the ones who don’t just operate in a perpetual fog of misdirected trust and reptile-brained paranoia. It sounds like the kind of thing you wouldn’t have to watch twice, but that is so far from true you could easily find yourself scouring the world for the connoisseur’s The Traitors (The Traitors Australia, season two).Theor...

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4 w. ago A school field trip to see neoliberalism in action? Count me in | Zoe Williams

It wasn’t quite what I was expecting from my daughter’s A-level geography class, but I had plenty of ideasIf you happen to have children of an age to willingly study geography, you’ll know that it’s the topic with all the best field trips. They’re constantly going somewhere. That place is rarely cool to begin with, and they zone in on the least cool thing about it, so if they go to the seaside, they’re there to measure groynes rather than taste-test ice-creams; and if they go to a shopping centre, it’s to ask local residents what they think of urban regeneration, not to look round the shops. But they seem really into it, so who am I to cavil?Therefore, while only somewhat listening to a conversation about an A-level module on globalisation – which is split into categories, one of which is shipping containers, like a parody of school being boring, and another is neoliberalism – I got it into my head that my daughter had to go on a field trip to see some neoliberalism in action. Conti...

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last month My son is turning 18 – and I am inexplicably sad | Zoe Williams

He is now an adult, so I have no right to dictate the state of his hair or his choice of diet. But I hadn’t expected this to be such an emotional wrenchNot counting the many thousands of words I spent complaining about being pregnant, I wrote my first column about my son, T, 18 years ago today, when he was three hours old. Someone said, “Is there some kind of union you could join? Because I’m sure you’re entitled to at least one whole day of maternity leave,” and I was baffled. As far as I was concerned, they should have held the front page – this wasn’t work, this was a dispatch from the frontline of a brave new world.Anyway, some time passed, and T could suddenly talk, and then some further time passed, and he was his own person, out there in the world, and then I blinked, and he was as tall as a tree. People always say to you, “Treasure this time, it goes by in a flash,” right at the moment you have an armful of toddler, puree in your hair and a mouth full of wet wipes because yo...

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