Gifts for runners: the best shoes, socks and vests to buy the running enthusiast in your life

From pro athletes to parkrun enthusiasts, runners of all stripes told us what gifts they would love to unwrap

The best Mother’s Day gifts: 68 thoughtful ideas for £50 and under they’ll love

From a reading light to a gardening knife, a meditation cushion to a birthstone ring, these fun, and often useful, gifts tick every box

Dining across the divide: ‘She casts meditation as a cult. I don’t think retreats mean harm’

They bonded over studying languages and becoming teachers. Would they see eye to eye on meditating?

Covid ‘benevolence bump’ endures as acts of kindness 10% higher than before 2020

World Happiness Report finds volunteering more frequent in most regions as Finland tops chart again and Costa Rica and Mexico enter top 10

‘I’ve had seals nibble my toes!’ How sunkissed Cornwall became a 422-mile surf paradise

Surfing? It’s as Cornish as piracy and pasties. As a thrilling exhibition opens in ‘Britain’s California’, we enter a heady world of coffinboards, hotdogging Aussies – and bans dished out to gangs fighting on the beach

Martin Skirrow obituary

Microbiologist whose discoveries transformed the treatment of infectious diarrhoea and stomach ulcers

The thin-obsessed world is growing more vicious by the minute. But fat people aren’t going anywhere

It’s time to open up your big fat mouths and push back against fatphobia

Otty Original Hybrid mattress review: the best hybrid mattress you can buy – and also one of the cheapest

This ‘bed-in-a-box’ mattress gave our tester her best sleep in years and it’s hundreds of pounds cheaper than some of its rivals

Many young people find safety in the soothing world of ASMR videos – imagine if we could give them that in the real world

ASMR videos can mimic the feeling of physical touch, which a study has found is popular with young consumers. But how many intimate gestures of love, care and connection are they missing out on, asks Emma Beddington

Maternity Service by Emma Barnett review – a tour of duty in early motherhood

In this valuable, brutally honest guide, the broadcaster argues that a supposedly joyful time is often steeped in drudgery and social isolation