Tim Dowling

6 days ago | msn.com | Tim Dowling

Microsoft Cares About Your PrivacyMicrosoft and our third-party vendors use cookies to store and access information such as unique IDs to deliver, maintain and improve our services and ads. If you agree, MSN and Microsoft Bing will personalise the content and ads that you see. You can select ‘I Accept’ to consent to these uses or click on ‘Manage preferences’ to review your options and exercise your right to object to Legitimate Interest where used.

6 days ago | theguardian.com | Tim Dowling

I am sitting in my office shed, marvelling that an email from a car hire company I last used six years ago feels entitled to employ the subject line DROP EVERYTHING.

1 week ago | theguardian.com | Tim Dowling

After an hour’s work on a hot morning I leave my office shed and return to the kitchen for a coffee. Halfway there I find the tortoise lying on his back on the path. He can’t have been there for more than an hour, as he wasn’t there when I came out. “What happened to you?” I say, setting him on his feet. But it’s pretty obvious what happened: he tried to exit the garden bed by climbing over the border of diagonally laid bricks and overbalanced.

2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Tim Dowling

A reader writes, asking how I can let my tortoise roam free in my back garden. She’d like to do the same with her adopted tortoise, but is worried it will escape. I explain that my garden is bounded by high brick walls, safely sealing the tortoise in, but that I too am consumed by fear that he will escape. He’s very good at hiding, and this always strikes me as a strategy: wait until they think you’ve already gone, and their guard will drop.

3 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Tim Dowling

As you may already know, the title of Britain’s Best Loaf 2025 was awarded to a brioche that was flavoured with lemon curd and earl grey tea. The inventor – Miyo Aoetsu, who runs a baking business from her home in Derbyshire – says the loaf was inspired by a recent Japanese trend for foods that combine the flavours of lemon and earl grey. But outside Japan, how many recipes can there be that use earl grey as an ingredient? Here are 17, just for starters.