-an OD of Toughts-

Why Weight Comes Back Faster After Slimming Jabs And Why Butter, Bacon, and Not Eating for a Bit Might Save You Slimming injections are the latest miracle cure. They’re discussed in hushed, reverent tones normally reserved for Italian supercars or petrol prices that don’t induce weeping. People take them, and suddenly the food stops. Biscuits lose their seductive whisper. Portions shrink. Weight drops off. For the first time in years, the bathroom scales stop behaving like a spiteful ex. Everyone says the same thing: “This is it. I’ve beaten biology.” They haven’t. Because there’s a small, deeply inconvenient question nobody asks while the trousers are getting looser: What happens when the injections stop? What Actually Happens When the Jabs Stop Serious researchers in The BMJ looked at over 30 clinical studies on GLP-1 drugs. These injections were designed for diabetes and are now masquerading as the answer to obesity. The results were stunningly consistent: You lose weight on the ja...

 I sat down to watch Wake Up Dead Man on Netflix expecting another jaunty Knives Out romp. You know the sort of thing: wealthy idiots, extravagant houses, and a murder solved by a man who sounds like a foghorn trapped in a teacup. What I got instead was a church. In winter. Full of guilt. This time Benoit Blanc has wandered into a bleak little parish where everyone looks like they’ve either committed a sin, covered one up, or are thinking about doing both before lunch. The colour palette is fifty shades of grey misery, and for a while, you wonder if Netflix has accidentally auto-played a Scandinavian crime drama. Now, let’s be clear. This is not bad. In fact, it’s very clever. Possibly too clever. Rian Johnson has decided that instead of poking fun at the rich, he’s going to poke faith, morality, hypocrisy, and the human soul. Which is bold. Admirable, even. But it also means that for the first chunk of the film, absolutely nothing explodes, and nobody makes a witty remark while ho...

There are comedies that make you laugh until your ribs creak. There are comedies that make you wish you had stayed at home and watched paint dry. Then there is Code 3. A film that strolls in pretending to be a harmless bit of fun and then quietly reaches into your chest to rearrange your emotions like a drunk electrician rewiring a house. You begin watching with the usual expectations. Flashing lights. Paramedics shouting at traffic. A rookie who looks too fresh to have ever dealt with anything more stressful than a late Amazon delivery. Rainn Wilson appears as Randy. Cynical. Tired. Running purely on caffeine and spite. You relax, thinking you know exactly what is coming. You do not. The humour starts off dry and sharp. The kind of humour you find only in people who have seen too much nonsense to be bothered with politeness. You laugh because it is funny. Then you laugh because it is uncomfortably true. Then, just when you are settling into the rhythm, the story shifts. Suddenly the f...

Some films are brilliant. Some films are popular, and you watch them so you don’t feel like the only person on Earth who missed the memo. And then there’s Rental Family, a film so wonderfully insane it makes you question not just cinema, but humanity itself. The premise is simple. You can rent a family. That’s it. Pay strangers to pretend they are your parents, siblings, maybe even your spouse. At first you think, fine, quirky comedy, harmless fun. Then you realise the horror: this is a world where people are so desperate for connection that they will literally pay actors to fake affection—and these actors are professionals. They are better at being human than almost anyone you know. Watching them smile and nod and pretend to care, you start to wonder whether actual families are a cruel joke played by evolution. Brendan Fraser stars as Phillip, a lonely American actor in Tokyo who drifts into this service like someone wandering into a forest at midnight. His life is empty, his meals ar...

 If you have ever wondered what it feels like to have your soul wrung out like an old chamois cloth that has been forgotten in the sun then Nuremberg is the film for you. It does not so much begin as it leaps straight at you like a German Shepherd that has been told you are hiding sausages in your pockets. The whole thing is a towering slab of history drama and humanity delivered with all the subtlety of an air raid siren. You settle in thinking you are about to enjoy a calm evening perhaps nibbling on something civilised and suddenly the film drags you right into one of the most important courtrooms in human history. And it is not gentle. Absolutely not. It grabs you by the lapels and practically shouts LOOK AT THIS THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED. And you do because you cannot look away. The performances are the kind that make you think this is why some actors earn more than the GDP of small nations. The moral weight of the whole thing could flatten an elephant and yet you sit there com...

  The Matcha Rival Has Arrived, And It Smells Like Someone Toasted Kyoto Straight from Japan comes a drink that smells like hazelnuts and freshly baked bread, and it wasn’t invented by a wellness influencer wearing beige linen. This thing called hojicha started life as an everyday brew for normal people. And now, somehow, it has become the latest global obsession. You can’t escape it. It’s everywhere, in pretentious cafés that insist on calling themselves laboratories, in pastries, in those frothy milk drinks people queue forty minutes for, and even in ice cream mixes. Hojicha is having a moment, and unlike matcha, which has spent the last decade colonising the Western world one green latte at a time, this toasted tea tells a completely different story. Understanding hojicha means stepping away from fashion trends and realising how a humble Japanese daily drink has accidentally become the world’s newest fetish. The Toasted Tea from Kyoto Hojicha literally means toasted tea, whi...

 The new series Can You Keep a Secret? has arrived, and I’ll admit, I approached it with the enthusiasm of a man opening a bill marked “urgent.” Charming comedy, they said. Heart-warming, they said. Which usually translates to 25 minutes of people smiling politely while absolutely nothing happens. But this time, astonishingly, something does happen, and it’s gloriously stupid in the very best way. The entire show is built around secrets. Everyone has one, no one can keep one, and the result is a beautiful parade of human incompetence. You’ve got characters sneaking around, lying through their teeth, panicking at perfectly innocent questions, and collapsing under pressure like a budget garden chair. It’s less a plot and more a controlled demolition of their dignity. And the fun part? You’ve met these people. They live on every street. They work in every office. One of them might even be the person reading this over your shoulder right now. They’re not glamorous, they’re not sleek...

 I re watched  Jaws today. The 50th Anniversary 4K restoration. Which sounds like the sort of thing only men of a certain age do, usually while muttering “they don’t make ’em like this anymore” and poking the television settings like it’s a wounded animal. And here’s the thing. They really don’t. Because Jaws , even half a century on, is still utterly terrifying. Not in a modern, CGI, “look at the pixels” sort of way. But in the much worse way. The imagination way. The shark, now rendered in pin-sharp 4K, still barely bloody works. You can practically hear it creaking. And yet it remains the most frightening monster in cinema history. Why? Because Steven Spielberg had the good sense to keep the thing off screen, let John Williams’ music do the heavy lifting, and trust the audience not to be idiots. Modern films would’ve had the shark doing backflips in the first five minutes. What really hits you on this rewatch, though, is not the shark. It’s the men. Roy Scheider’s ...

There are films that strive to be subtle, nuanced, and clever. And then there is Fackham Hall , which bursts through the door like a drunk uncle at Christmas, knocks over the sherry, insults the dog, and farts loudly in the general direction of period drama. And thank heavens for that. Fackham Hall is, quite clearly, a vicious, unapologetic parody of Downton Abbey and every single stiff-upper-lip, tea-sipping, “golly gosh the help are revolting” costume drama ever inflicted upon Sunday evenings. It does not wink. It does not nod. It kicks the genre squarely in the corset and keeps kicking until something expensive breaks. The plot—if we’re being wildly generous—is that posh people live in a very posh house, say very posh things, and behave like utter lunatics. The servants, meanwhile, are just as unhinged, which is refreshing, because normally they’re portrayed as noble, long-suffering saints. Here, they’re idiots too. Equality at last. Visually, the film looks exactly like a pre...