Just as people called Ruby probably hate Kaiser Chiefs, and the world’s Carolines must have mixed feelings about Neil Diamond, so women named Ella had a pretty torrid time of it when Rihanna set up shop at number one in 2007 with “Umbrella”. That repeated “-ella, -ella, -ella” in the indelible chorus was the secret…
In June 1983, a young Japanese man named Naruhito arrived at Merton College, Oxford, to study. Already in possession of a History degree from Gakushuin University in Tokyo, he was there to write his thesis on a very English topic: ‘A Study of Navigation and Traffic on the Upper Thames in the 18th Century’. A…
Exercise for Kelly Barton used to consist of walking circuits around the school playground, touching the wall and the fence for guidance. Born blind, she attended a special school for children with sensory impairments in Liverpool. Running was not under consideration. As an adult, she had tried the gym, and had a go at CrossFit,…
Lockdown might have been the thing that made a lot of new people take up running, but what has kept so many of them going is the concurrent rise of a new breed of running club. With London’s rowdy Run Dem Crew as the venerable blueprint, a lot of them favour the word ‘crew’ over…
The kids talk a lot these days about “canon events”: the key life moments that combine to create your personal superhero identity. You might not have been bitten by a radioactive spider but your individual highlights reel will still contain a succession of unforgettable firsts, and those come at a breathless rate around age 16:…
Announcement: on 1 March 2024, pretty much exactly 22 years since I wrote my first, I wrote my last music review for the Evening Standard. If I was a band, that would be a remarkably long career worthy of a few reissues, a box set and a greatest hits tour where I read out my…
It’s early evening in the basement of a running store in east London, and some of the fastest people in Britain have no idea what they’re doing. The room beneath the clothing company Soar’s Shoreditch shop is stuffed with around 100 lean men and women in vests proclaiming allegiance to a range of venerable clubs…
Everyone’s talking about the gnocchi. We were expecting grand views, sticky bogs and dizzying drops, but nobody saw these pillowy Italian dumplings coming, steaming from the back of event co-organiser Stef Amato’s van as Manchester gives way to moorland. It’s the first time I’ve ever had hot food in the middle of a run, and…
Frank Ruona doesn’t care what you did. Frank cares what you’re going to do now. Every Friday and every other Monday, the 77-year-old US Army veteran and former construction company manager arrives at the gates of San Quentin. He’ll be carrying a shoulder bag covered in race numbers, a large digital timing clock and the…
“You hear him before you see him,” a member of the Gabriels entourage tells me, as a resonant cackle erupts from the rear of a black van. That’ll be Jacob Lusk, the soul trio’s singer, sharp dressing focal point and one man charisma machine. Even before releasing today’s debut album, he’s been a Brit Award…