Every woman needs a bit of glamour in her life. These Amazon bestsellers may be retro and glam, but do they work as good as they look? Let’s find out.
First up is a classic, Cornsilk Satin Loose Powder 
Next is Max Factor False Lash Effect Mascara in Black
L’Oreal Elnett UV Filter Hairspray
What do you think? Are you a fan of any of the above?
After our recent marriage my new husband and I spent a wonderful bank holiday weekend at Langshott Manor which we booked via http://secretescapes.com. It was a truly wonderful 16th-century Elizabethan manor house in Surrey. We got a good rate and it included breakfast and a five-course tasting menu.
This is what http://secretescapes.com said:
A 16th-century Elizabethan manor house, complete with red brick walls, casement windows and an ancient moat, Langshott Manor is a real boutique gem. Set within three acres of secret garden near Horley in the heart of sleepy Surrey, you’re just an hour’s drive from the Big Smoke. Slip on your Hunter wellies and get ready for a decidedly stylish country retreat.
The refurbished Mulberry Restaurant is full of nooks and crannies to hide away in. Packed with original features, it has a cosy fireplace and views out across the pristine gardens. The menu is both refined and hearty, with plenty of home-grown produce and local ingredients.
Good to know
Please note that check-in is at 4pm ad check-out is at 11am.
The restaurant’s dress code is smart-casual, which excludes trainers, sportswear and ripped denim.
We like
- The quirky original features in this grand 16th century Elizabethan manor house
- The re-invented Mulberry Restaurant where you can have fabulous gourmet dishes and afternoon tea
- Walking through the grounds to discover the ancient moat and beyond, tranquil countryside
We were very impressed with the food, the service and our room. The grounds were beautiful and relaxing. Ducks played in a pond and even came right up to the restaurant. They were completely adorable. Our room had a four poster bed, a hall and a beautiful bathroom. The food truly is first-class, as good as anything in the best restaurants in London.
We had a wonderful time. Upon checking out we noticed the service charges were quite a lot but, to be fair, the service is impeccable. The papers are not free and will be added to your bill. The nearest train station is Horley. You could take a taxi to the manor house and it won’t cost much. It is also possible to walk as long as you have a good sense of direction or GPS on your phone.
My husband and I have become quite obsessed with http://secretescapes.com since we booked out mini moon and are already working on our next trip.
Anyone who watched The Great British Menu couldn’t have failed to notice that fish course winner Emily Watkins kept apologising. For everything, really. So when the lights in the restaurant of The Kingham Plough dipped and danced a little it should have been no surprise to see Emily appear and apologise; they were new – the bulbs were too bright – she wanted to get them right.
When you own a pub restaurant, wanting everything to be perfect is no bad thing.
The Kingham Plough is a part of a Cotswold stone terrace about 15 minutes’ drive from Stow on the Wold and it’s probably only a little fanciful to say that the warmth of the sun on the stone extends inside the building as well. The young staff are friendly and helpful, and while interior designers have clearly been at work the look and feel of a village pub has been retained. The walls are decorated with local art (for sale) and the carefully mismatched furniture oozes rural chic. Not to mention comfort.
We ate in the restaurant although a full range of bar snacks (including deliciously retro pints of prawns and just plain delicious homemade pork pies) are available. Much has been made in other reviews of the sous vide cooking technique Watkins prefers, but to be honest, if we hadn’t been told, we wouldn’t have noticed. And anyway, I’m a great believer in letting the food speak for itself.
My starter was a rabbit sausage, resting on an oblong of pea puree and sharing the plate with a most attractive salad which tasted crisp, fresh and as good as it looked. My husband opted for the sea trout tartare which was served in a tower topped with an egg yolk. Before breaking the yolk he burrowed out a little from the bottom of the stack for me and that was lovely too.
We had wanted a wine which would take us through all three courses and here the young staff did let the Kingham Plough down slightly by recommending a bottle which really wasn’t appropriate, simply because it was popular. So we fell back on our own knowledge (time to fess up that my husband has certificates in this sort of thing and does spend some of his business life in the wine trade) and chose a more than acceptable bottle of Beaune which didn’t break the bank.
Although I am not a vegetarian (clearly, given the way I devoured the rabbit sausage) I decided on a beetroot soufflé with local goat cheese for my main course. I love beetroot and I love goat cheese and I certainly wasn’t disappointed by the soft and fluffy soufflé which perfectly combined them. Meanwhile my better half went for the pork wellington; a tender nugget of meat encased in homemade ‘hodge podge’ aka black pudding and the thinnest of thin sheets of pastry. I am told it was fantastic. But I didn’t get to try.
As ever, we were lured by the cheese; a selection from nine local cheeses – or all of them to share for £19. This really was a no-brainer and they came spread out along a wooden board with generous piles of homemade oatcakes, hazelnut fruit bread, celery and apple jelly. There was a modicum of confusion over which cheese was which – the blushing waitress told us Emily had prepared the board and they were always in the right order – she just wasn’t sure what the order was. But it didn’t matter. They were all quirky and original and it was the highlight of our meal taking our time over them and finishing off the Beaune.
The highlight of the meal; but not the highlight of our stay. We had booked a room for the night (clean, cosy, quiet and comfortable) which meant we were having breakfast. I am not a huge fan of the full English – give me a skinny latte and something chocolaty any day – but this time I was tempted. And besides, I hadn’t got my hands on any of the hodge podge pudding the night before.
As it happened, for me the black pudding was not the star of the show. Mainly because it had a great deal of competition. Homemade baked beans, for a start – made with real tomatoes, wonderfully seasoned. Thick, crispy bacon and mushrooms which tasted as though they had been picked from the fields just hours before. Proper leaf tea. And, best of all, a little skillet of drop scones (scotch pancakes, if you prefer), warm from the grill, just begging to be drizzled with honey.
Whether it was in revenge for the pork wellington, or just pure gluttony, I scoffed the lot.
Find out more about The Kingham Plough at www.thekinghamplough.co.uk
With a rainbow of macaron’s elegantly displayed in the restaurant window, Yauatcha immediately catches your eye and invites you in to sample the patisserie-come- Chinese dishes.
We were led downstairs to the basement by a lady in red, where we were pleasantly surprised by the buzz of diners, faces lit by the centre-piece of the room – the horizontal fish tank running the length of the bar.
We were greeted by numerous servers and told that as part of Yauatcha’s 10th anniversary in Soho, we would be served secret off-menu items which would only be disclosed once the dishes came to our table.
The first dishes arrived in steaming bamboo baskets; a trilogy of dumplings and a prawn and bean curd cheung fun saddled our table too.
The wild fungus and pomegranate dumpling was squidgy and earthy and the fruit seed added a pleasant drop of sweetness to the palette.
Not being a huge fan of lychee, nonetheless, the flakes of the scallop puff oozed with freshness as the dry texture of pastry was drenched with the juices of the tropical grape-like fruit.
Unusually green, the seared spicy lamb and fig was the last dumpling to pass my lips. The meaty flavour of lamb was subtly mixed with the sweeter fig flavour, creating a unique explosion of flavours.
But the real moment of heaven was with the prawn and bean curd cheung fun drizzled in soy sauce.
A firm favourite with Yauatcha diners, it’s easy to see why. Encased in a soft pasta-like shell (the bean curd), it protectively lined the plump, slightly salty prawns and contrasted with the crispy fragments separating the different textures.
For mains, we shared the Kung pao chicken with cashew nut and stir fry rib eye beef in black bean sauce.
The beef sauce gently pricked our throats with spice as we edged closer to the bottom of the plate. The peppers were crispy and charred with a smoky flavour and the chicken was tender with hints of garlic and onion.
For dessert, my partner opted for the cheesecake with lemon, blueberry and graham cracker which was impressively stacked and burst with zesty tangs of citrus.
I plumped for the apricot chocolate, jaconde sponge, curd, chocolate cremaux and chiboust. Again it was impeccably presented and the sweet chocolate and apricot was interspersed with spoonfuls of refreshing sour sorbet.
We spent a pleasant evening at Yauatcha, part of the Hakkasan group which includes HKK in Shoreditch, and I loved the unique way dishes were served. The waiting staff are composed of commis in black uniform and serving staff in white.
The commis carry the dishes to the table and the serving staff quickly appear by their side ready to present each plate with a complete description to the diner. To me, this seemed like an eloquent game of chess; each time black edged towards the target, the white pawn would quickly follow suit.
My only niggle is the seating; after a few hours sitting on the uber-funky but backless sofa, I did feel like I needed a bit more support, but overall, a fantastic experience.
Next time we’ll be nipping in for macarons and a cocktail, turning the Chinese dining experience into a modern European affair in Soho.
15-17 Broadwick Street, London, W1F 0DL. Email reservations@yauatcha.com
Some wine just has something special about it and this is obvious straight away. I am not talking about the packaging of the Steitz Weisser Burgunder Trocken Achat 2012 and the Steitz Spätburgunder 2011 although that is also sleek and beautiful. The bottles are long and thin: very classy. No, the actual contents are special.
Let’s start with the Steitz Spätburgunder 2011. It got the Decanter Silver Award 2014. It is pricey at £22 but is it worth the price? This is otherwise known as a Pinot Noir, it is high quality and it is concentrated and has spicy notes of cherry, wild raspberry, cardamom, cinnamon and violet. It has a full and smokey flavour. It has been barrel aged for 26 months which also gives it a delicious vanilla flavour. It is a very good wine indeed. Worth the price.
Enjoy with: lamb, duck and guinea fowl.
Next up is the Steitz Weisser Burgunder Trocken Achat 2012. Otherwise known as a Pinot Blanc, full or aromas of roasted almonds, quince, pear and vanilla. This is a truly wonderful wine. Cheaper then the Steitz Spätburgunder 2011 at £15 but still as good. It won the Decanter Commended Award 2014. A well deserved win.
Enjoy with: cheese, asparagus and seafood. Serve at 10°C.
Will they make Frost Magazine’s Wine Awards? You will have to wait to find out.
Here’s a mind meld question for you. How can you give people the taste of a game without them paying the full price or giving them a game so small it’s a demo. By making it a DLC which is also a standalone game of course. That’s the case for First Light, in which you play as Abigail “Fetch” Walker, a character you met in ‘inFamous: Second Son’ on the PS4. Being an extension of a standalone title means that you don’t have to own the full game to enjoy this and what’s more, Sony Computer Entertainment have priced this right (around a tenner on PSN and soon to be £15 on physical retail mid-September) and packed in just enough of a game to prolong the interest of players of ‘Second Son’ as well as draw in new attention from those who perhaps weren’t too impressed by inFamous’ and were holding out for other titles that would really push their consoles.
To be honest it’s a win-win for players. The PS4 lacks original titles and the summer break is traditionally a hiatus for games releases, therefore, games players are under-nourished right now and can expect to be until the likes of Destiny, Alien and other big titles hit the shelves towards the Christmas holiday season. Equally, Sony owes it to the players who forked out on their console and are also gambling that this will draw players to back to their title inFamous: Second Son. It’s a gamble that pays off.
Set two years prior to the events of Second Son, First Light follows Abigail “Fetch” Walker a homeless, ex-heroin addict and her brother Brent through a story of deceit, revenge and all out destruction. When we first meet them Brent wants to do one last robbery so they can afford a better new life. The pair has been sleeping rough; Fetch keeping her powers hidden so as not to attract attention from the authorities. From there it doesn’t take long for things to go pear-shaped in a big way and it takes no time at all before you are unleashing your neon abilities all over the shop, running at super speed, collecting power-ups and taking down enemies with bolts of electricity.
First Light may seem limiting to some because Fetch only has a single power, whereas in infamous: Second Son Delsin ended up with a handful. However, where using Delsin you didn’t always get a chance to appreciate and embrace his powers because the game forced you to switch between them, Fetch identifies by her neon abilities, so you have to learn the different skills and learn them well. This plays into both the story and the combat.
As is accustomed to ‘sandbox’ games there are a small handful of optional activities. Fetch can blast graffiti onto marked walls, though she does so in glowing neon lines. There are races against glowing balls of light called Lumens. There are also drive-by shootings and civilian hostage situations to manage. All which help you to earn Skill Points, which are then traded to evolve Fetch’s neon powers further.
The writing and voice acting are, for the most part well executed. Abigail is a highly likable heroine so whilst you don’t have those critical moral choices as in Infamous: Second Son and there are no light and dark abilities to gain you still want to gain more powers and see her story through. There are also some harrowing elements of the storyline such as monitoring CCTV in order to take down a sex trafficking ring (you see the women followed and then kidnapped) and moments where Abigail talks about her addiction (Abigail is at best in her teens).
It’s hard to make any real criticisms of this game because this is, after all, just DLC presented as a standalone game. In comparison to Second Son it’s inherited all of its strengths for example the beautiful city, the amazing lighting, the fun combat, the feeling of being a superhero. However these are contrasted against it weaknesses, the fact that it is never really populated and you never feel a part of this world.
That said, the price tag and the content make this a worthy purchase; it easily ranks above most other standalone games on PSN within its price range and there is enough there in terms of online leader-boards and side missions to keep coming back if even for a short while.
8 / 10
Infamous: First Light is out now on PSN and available on Retail Edition from mid-september
My hair frequently looks like a frizz bomb. Depending on the weather it ranges from tangled to full-out frizzy nightmare. Finding out about Argan oil has been something of a lifesaver. It truly is a wonder ingredient so I was happy to review NHP Nutri Argan Beautifying Elixir. An intensive, multi-tasking, haircare product. 
This wonder product can be used everyday and it really does work on my hair. It soothe out the dryness and leaves it looking amazing. You only have to use a few drops so even though it cost £16.80 for 100ml it is still completely worth it. It strengthens hair, leaves it less tangled and protects the hair from free radicals, heat and environmental factors. I can give it the thumbs up, and so can my hair.
Based on organic, certified natural oils of Argan and Macadamia, Beautifying Elixir provides extraordinary smoothness, softness and shine. A precious fluid based on a unique blend of fine oils rich in essential fatty acids and natural anti-oxidisers it is instantly absorbed by the hair.
A few drops revitalise the most problem hair, nourishing it from roots to ends with a lightweight, non-greasy feel.
Free from alcohol, parabens, PEG-PPG, mineral oils and artificial colourants it is enriched with anti-ageing Beta-carotene which helps to restore the energy supply to the hair fibre.
A complete hair wellness treatment, Beautifying Elixir:
Four ways to use…
Pre-shampoo – apply from root to tip and then massage well to deeply moisturise the scalp and hair. Leave for 10 minutes before shampooing (ideally with NHP Nutri Argan Hair Bath). The hair fibre is immediately replenished and loos revitalised.
Before styling – distribute evenly onto towel blotted hair. Helps to reduce drying time, facilitates styling and contols frizz. Hair is smooth, soft and protected.
Finishing Touch – apply a few drops to dry hair. Imparts an extreme shine and protects the hair fibre from daily external aggressors, prolonging colour life. Leaves the hair silky and manageable.
Intensive salon style treatment – mix with 5ml of NHP Nutri Argan Hair Mask, leave on the hair to absorb for at least ten minutes before rinsing.
NHP – Natural Haircare Program – was developed for professional salon use to care for dry, colour treated or brittle hair in need of superior nourishment to restore the internal balance and to condition the external structure of the hair shaft. Inspired by nature, the NHP Nutri Argan nourishing range is rich in a blend of certified organic Argan Oil and Macadamia Oil to replenish moisture in the hair from the roots to the tips to help regain softness, elasticity and shine. The scalp and hair are also protected thanks to the exclusion of potentially irritating or aggressive synthetic ingredients such as SLES, DEA, parabens, paraffin and colourants. NHP is also kind to the environment as all packaging is 100% recyclable and products are created using renewable and ecological sources of energy.
NHP is available from Giannasso Hair & Beauty Covent Garden, selected hair salons nationwide and online at www.beautybyzara.com. £16.80 for 100ml.
The Girls From Corona Del Mar immediately hooks you. Brilliantly written, it draws you into a nostalgic haze. It is a brutally honest and sometimes uncomfortable read about the friendship between two women. This books takes a long, hard look at female friendship and reveals how little we can know someone, how life gets in the way and how fate can deal hands that are unfair and unbalanced. It reminds us that life is brutal and hard, but also beautiful and kind. The story is narrated by Mia as she describes her friendship with Lorrie Ann.
Rufi Thorpe’s true talent is how believable the book is, even with the twists and turns, the slights of fate. She has a beautiful way of writing that is almost poetic. But the book is also haunting and brutal. The story may be of friendship but it is a particularly broken one. It is easy to be best friends when you are a teenager, but life gets in the way later, as does judgement and life choices. It is a friendship of guilt, love and jealousy. Mia defines her entire identity against Lorrie Ann, referring to her as her ‘opposite twin’. She always thought she was the bad one, Lorrie Ann the good one. It is love, but it is messy.
The book can give a brutal look at being a woman. Abortion and the regret of having one plays heavily, childbirth is grisly and awful- actually stomach churning. It charts friendship through different countries, reversal of fortunes and personal faults. It is a wonderful book that stayed with me, if even occasionally for a haunting and brutal story. The Girls From Corona Del Mar is haunting, beautiful and hard to put down.
“Why did Lorrie Ann look graceful in beat-up Keds and shorts a bit too small for her? Why was it charming when she snorted from laughing too hard? Yes, we were jealous of her, and yet we did not hate her. She was never so much as teased by us, we roaming and bratty girls of Corona del Mar, thieves of corn nuts and orange soda, abusers of lip gloss and foul language.”
An astonishing debut about friendships made in youth, The Girls from Corona del Mar is a fiercely beautiful novel about how these bonds, challenged by loss, illness, parenthood, and distance, either break or endure.
Mia and Lorrie Ann are lifelong friends: hard-hearted Mia and untouchably beautiful, kind Lorrie Ann. While Mia struggles with a mother who drinks, a pregnancy at fifteen, and younger brothers she loves but can’t quite be good to, Lorrie Ann is luminous, surrounded by her close-knit family, immune to the mistakes that mar her best friend’s life. Then a sudden loss catapults Lorrie Ann into tragedy: things fall apart, and then fall further—and there is nothing Mia can do to help. And as good, brave, fair Lorrie Ann stops being so good, Mia begins to question just who this woman is, and what that question means about them both.
A staggeringly honest, deeply felt novel of family, motherhood, loyalty, and the myth of the perfect friendship, The Girls from Corona del Mar asks just how well we know those we love, what we owe our children, and who we are without our friends.
The Girls from Corona del Mar is available here. 