Would a £35,000 holiday help you live longer or just leave you bankrupt? A surprising number of people are paying to find out

Name: Longevity vacations.

Age: New, but I’ll be older, hopefully.

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I’ve never found it easier to make friends, get ready for a big night or take a good selfie. Thank you, male pattern baldness!

This may come as a shock to you, especially if you’ve spent the past few years using my byline photo as a reference, but I am bald now. Completely, permanently, irreversibly bald. So bald that my children have taken to calling me Egg. So bald that the first thing strangers notice about me is my scalp, rather than my excessively sour personality. So bald that, if I stand under just the right sort of overhead light with just the right level of perspiration, I in effect transform into a sort of sentient disco ball.

I am telling you this upfront because baldness has endowed me with a renewed sense of defensive self-deprecation. If you meet me and I don’t attempt to get ahead of the curve by drawing attention to my lack of hair with a bad joke, know that something has gone terribly wrong. I am so determined to inform everyone that I am bald, despite the wealth of visual evidence already at hand, that I have just written a book about going bald. It is called Bald. It has an egg on the front.

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A five-day mindful adventure on the Knoydart peninsula – one of the last great wildernesses in the UK – offers the chance to fully unwind and leap into the unknown

It’s a relief to lay my rucksack down, plunge hot feet into the cool stream and pause to revel in the fairytale surrounds. Foxgloves stand tall against a cornflower-blue sky, ferns look almost luminous, the water glints in the early summer sunshine. A patch of moss-covered ancient forest provides shade, a cuckoo calls in the distance, mountains layer on the horizon.

I’m in Knoydart in the Highlands of western Scotland, one of the last great wildernesses in the UK, on a hiking and wild camping adventure. No roads cross the 22,000-hectare (55,000-acres) peninsula, a rugged place where a trio of Munros soar skyward, sandwiched between sea lochs Nevis and Hourn (poetically translated as heaven and hell). Over five days our group of eight will explore this land on foot, carrying our sustenance and shelter on our backs, led by two guides from The Living Project, Josh and Emily.

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From simple lifestyle changes to choosing the right bedding and gadgets that can help

Dr Nicola Cann, a sleep consultant and psychologist, says sleeping is a natural process “that our bodies are primed for”, so there is a lot you can do to improve it without spending anything.

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New research reveals that listing your grievances on a piece of paper, then throwing them away may make you less angry. So I gave it a try …

A lifetime enveloped in a benign, insulating cloud of oestrogen left me ill-prepared to be this nakedly, shockingly angry as it ebbs away in perimenopause. It is occasionally exhilarating, but mainly awful, being furious about so many things: the government, contradictory dental advice, inaction on climate breakdown, whatever cat keeps defecating at my back door. I exist at an exhausting, irrational rolling simmer that periodically comes to a head with me inappropriately venting, realising I’m being unreasonable, shamefacedly having a word with myself, then getting cross again.

Help may be at hand, however, according to research from Japan , which suggests that writing your grievances on paper then throwing it away may make you less angry. Study participants were deliberately angered by researchers criticising their work and adding gratuitous insulting comments. Participants then wrote down how they felt and either threw the paper away, shredded it or kept it. The ones who disposed of the paper “completely eliminated their anger”.

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We need protein to build muscle, produce hormones, regulate mood and appetite, and strengthen bones. But how much, and what kind, should you eat every day?

Eating protein is non-negotiable. Like carbs and fats, it’s a macronutrient that bodies need in relatively large, regular doses (compared with micronutrients such as vitamins and minerals). But our protein needs change throughout life, according to age, sex, activity levels and more. In fact our requirements can be highly individual and hence easily misjudged, especially when, says the dietitian Linia Patel, “There are conflicting messages around how much protein we should be eating.” On the one hand, the National Diet and Nutrition Survey shows that we exceed our daily protein recommendations, which scientists say could shorten our lives. On the other hand, says Patel: “What I see in my own clinical practice is that around 80% of my clients are not eating quite enough.” The booming protein industry, with its bars, pouches and shakes, would have us believe the more is always the merrier. So how much protein should we be eating?

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It’s the internal voice whose strict, unbending standards can make us miserable. But tuning in to it can change everything

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When I first became her patient, I heard everything my therapist said as a criticism. Almost every word that came out of her mouth, I received as a telling off, a character assassination or a low mark. I thought to myself: “I’m paying this woman to help me and all she’s doing is criticising me! How rude!”

Here’s a made-up example that has a lot of truth in it: if I lost my mobile phone and described my feelings of panic, she might respond with something along the lines of: “You crazy woman, can you not be more robust? How can you be overwhelmed by something like losing your phone? Can you not be more chill? More resilient? Thank God my other patients are not this basic.”

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More and more of us are suffering with health anxiety. Why is it on the rise, what can be done about it?

The rhythms of this ritual are deeply ingrained. Lean forward, closer to the mirror, bracing hips against the sink. Old bruises accepting the hard angles. One hand to pull my shirt away from my left collarbone. The other to poke and prod the shadow I saw there.

It’s very bright in the deserted bathroom at work. The overhead strip lighting bounces off the walls, the tiled floor, the gleaming white of the sink and toilet. In the mirror, the room behind me is blanched out of sight. All that is in focus is my own pale face and pinpricked pupils. Blotchy redness is rising out of my collar and climbing up my throat. Turning my head slightly, I avoid catching my own eye in the reflection.

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A city of welly-wearers, Birmingham has more allotments than any other UK local authority – some of its keen plotholders tell us why

On Dads Lane, where several Birmingham suburbs meet, there is a gap in the houses, no wider than a driveway. If you didn’t know what was hiding in there, you would walk straight past. It is a brisk, bright Sunday in late March, and behind the gate, a narrow road stretches out into a busy haven of growth and greenery. The city centre is less than four miles away, but it might as well be on the moon. After a long, wet winter, the sun is out, people are digging, mowing and cutting, and everyone has something to say about the badgers.

“Men’s piss!” I’m having coffee in the pavilion with John Beynon, a warm, 71-year-old Welshman, who has been chair of the allotments since last summer (“I’m not a president! That makes me think I’m a Trumpian!”), and secretary Bryan Foster, 60, who opens his jacket to reveal a COR-BYN T-shirt, in the Run-DMC font. The allotments got national lottery funding a few years ago, and they put up this hub, which will host the monthly Sunday afternoon poetry reading later, as well as a compost toilet next door. They also paved the road and built two disability plots. Apparently, the only thing that will deter a hungry badger from nibbling the crops is men’s urine. They joke that they might start selling it in bottles at the next open day.

Emma Rabbitt, 42, and her children Patrick, 14, Lydia, 12, and Seren, 11

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