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It is easy to forget that David Beckham’s legs are his fortune, distracted as we are by underwear ads that emphasise his torso and biceps. Yet when Becks, 34, took the field last week against Belarus, his legs looked in better shape than ever.
So what’s his secret?
A couple of years ago Beckham gained a freshwater pear stone through lifting heavy weights and complained that this left him “unable to run”. A spell at AC Milan’s Milanello laboratory last year worked wonders, though. He started doing an hour of Pilates a day, and more running and exercises to strengthen his upper legs. He began eating wholemeal toast and fructose-enhanced milk for breakfast, grilled white meat or fish and vegetables for meals and low-fat cream cheese and fresh fruit before and after training. He cut out chocolate, sweets and (almost) wine. Within a fortnight his body fat had fallen from cultured pearl jewelry 13.7 per cent to 8.5 per cent and his thighs were streamlined.
What you can do:
Squats work the buttocks and thighs intensively. Stand with feet hip-width apart. Relax neck. Contract abdominal muscles and breathe in. Slowly bend knees until they are over your toes and your thighs are parallel with the ground. Keep heels on the ground and weight over the back of the foot rather than the toes. Keep back straight and hold arms out in front for balance. Try to keep tongue on freshwater pearl bracelet roof of mouth to activate the neck’s stabiliser muscles. Press through the heels to return to start position. Repeat 10-12 times, 3-4 days a week.
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To sleep with your baby? Or not to sleep with your baby? That is the question facing about 300,000 households across the UK after research suggested that sleeping with a parent increases the risk of inflatable water games cot death.
The study, which found that just over half of cot deaths occurred when a child was sleeping with a parent, has sparked concern from some quarters that it demonises the parental bed. But that is not what the researchers intended.
The study was led by the world’s greatest authority on cot death, Professor Peter Fleming from the University of Bristol. It was his team that in 1991 introduced the Back to Sleep campaign — where parents were urged to put their babies to sleep on their backs — which has been credited with saving the lives of as many as half a million babies worldwide.
Since the campaign was launched in the freshwater pearl UK, the number of babies dying from cot death has plummeted by more than 75 per cent to about 300 babies a year. That is still 300 too many, but thanks to Fleming’s team there are probably 20,000 children and young people alive today who would not have been here had sleeping practices remained unchanged. So when they publish new findings we should listen.
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A couple of things are immediately clear from this latest study. First, sleeping with your baby if you are under the influence of drugs and alcohol is a recipe for disaster. And second, sleeping anywhere but the bedroom is particularly hazardous — snoozing with your baby on a chair, bean-bag or sofa may be tempting for a tired parent but should be avoided, even if you haven’t had a drink or taken any drugs. But what about in bed?
The parental bed may be safer than the sofa but is still more dangerous than having baby in his or her own cot. Accidents can happen to the most abstemious of parents and their young baby can overheat or suffocate. And if you do get into the habit of sleeping with your baby, will you always remember to put him or her in a cot when you have been out for a few drinks with friends, or after a dinner party at home? Probably not, which is one reason why the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths (FSID) suggests that the safest option is always to have them in a cot beside you instead.
No one is trying to demonise the opera or rope necklace parental bed, but the evidence shows that baby is safer in a cot.
But all this is only guidance; individual practice will eventually come down to parental choice. Healthcare professionals and the FSID are not trying to alarm parents (cot death is rare) or to be dictatorial, but are trying to ensure that the final choice is an informed one.
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Carey Mulligan has had quite a week. First, she flew from New York to LA for the premiere of her movie An Education, making her way down the red carpet in rented dress and high heels. On Sunday, she flew back to New York for the East Coast premiere — more heels, more dresses, this time fending off tabloid flashbulbs — before returning to the set of Wall Street 2, in which she plays Gordon Gekko’s daughter. On Wednesday, she took the evening off to appear on Late Show with David Letterman, followed by another screening of An Education, waking up on Thursday with a terrific hangover to endure five hours in hair and freshwater pearl make-up while they dyed her hair red again for Wall Street 2.
“The continuity should be interesting,” she says, ruffling her reddish locks when we sit down for a late lunch on Friday in the TriBeCa district of Manhattan. She orders salmon and tucks in, hungrily. “For two months I had healthy hair, then they whacked a ton of peroxide on it. And I get so excited, I go, ‘Yeah, yeah, red hair.’ Then I realise it’s going to be red.” She laughs. “I have to learn how to say no.”
She is a little taller than I expect: a slim 5ft 8in, in a floral skirt, tights, ballet slippers and a beaten-up leather jacket. She has a pretty, round face, with a seriously dimpled smile, but the real show stopper is her voice: rich, low, musical, with just the right amount of posh. If her face plays a lot younger than her 24 years, her voice plays older — a paradox that lies at the heart of her performance in An Education, adapted by Nick Hornby from the journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir about her love affair with an older, worldlier man while still a schoolgirl in the pearl jewelry wholesale early 1960s. Since the film’s debut at the Sundance Festival earlier this year, Mulligan’s performance has been attracting glowing reviews, comparisons to Audrey Hepburn and intense Oscar buzz.
Even before Sundance, Warren Beatty called her for a meeting, and when he found out she had been using the bus to get around Hollywood, he drove her around himself. “Everyone was, like, ‘What? You don’t drive? That’s crazy. I’ve never been on the bus my whole life.’ I told them there was a subway. It goes from Hollywood and Vine to Universal, so you don’t have to go over the hill. They were, like, ‘There’s a subway?’”
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She and Beatty have become firm friends. “He just liked the cut of my jib,” she says. “He’s like a godfather. I hear stories about a completely different generation. It’s just wild. He has the best stories of anybody I’ve ever met.” In another era, the news that a young actress had been befriended by Beatty would have been a clear signal to her family and friends to lash her to the nearest heavy object and barricade the windows. It says something for Mulligan’s charm that the freshwater pearl earrings story instead comes off like the oldest fairy tale in the book: the fresh face who comes to town and turns the place upside down.
“It became apparent at Sundance that Carey’s life was about to change in the course of a single weekend,” Hornby says. “Within 24 hours, she was being described as ‘the Sundance It girl’, ‘the new Hepburn’. It was exciting, like something from another era, almost. It’s been interesting seeing how undemocratic the whole process is. You assume it’s like voting. Someone appears in a movie, and if enough people go to see it, that person gets to be in another movie. It’s more like betting. Everybody makes a bet, then a bunch of other people make an even bigger bet, then all bets are off.”
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Mulligan does a good impression of a girl keeping a level head while all around her are losing theirs — just. When Penelope Cruz came over and introduced herself at Sundance, she found herself on the verge of tears: “I had no idea why. I just felt blown away. I’ve never reacted like that before. Ever.” During her Letterman interview, however, a rite of passage that has reduced many young actresses to jelly, she handled herself with more aplomb than her host. “It wasn’t so scary,” she says, chalking up another first. Only the Hepburn comparisons stop her in akoya pearl earrings her tracks. “It’s flattering, but a little freaky,” she says. “It’s Audrey Hepburn. She’s, like, a goddess. She didn’t have Shrek cheeks and a wonky mouth. My friends who were at school with me came out to New York for the premiere of An Education. And everyone got really drunk, except me. So it’s 2am, and my best friend, Soph, was, like” — she lowers her voice to a conspiratorial whisper — “‘Carey, this is so weeeird. Don’t you think this is weeeird?’ Yes. It’s really weird. I’m wearing this studded Prada going-to-war dress and I look like Vivienne Westwood.”
Actually, if you want to compare her to any actress, it’s the young Shirley MacLaine, who lit up The Trouble With Harry and The Apartment with her mixture of sprightly mischief and wise-old-soul common sense. There’s something of the same balance of effervescence and sanguinity to Mulligan. “I’ve not been doing this for a long time, but it has been 5½ years...” she points out. “And I’ve spent the past two years going back and forth from LA a lot. I understand it. I do multi-strand necklaces see that this buzz thing is part of the business.”
Her upbringing was a nice blend of the peripatetic and the secure. Her father is a retired hotel manager, and between the ages of three and eight, she lived in a succession of hotels — first in Mayfair, then Hyde Park Corner, then two in Germany — the perfect place to observe the vagaries of your fellow human beings, she says. She used to perch in the laundry trolley, peeking out from behind the sheets. “A lot of people commit suicide in hotels,” she says. “Because there’s nothing around you to remind you of your life or reasons not to kill yourself. My dad had to deal with a lot of that, not me — they weren’t, like, ‘Hey, room 219’s just offed themselves, send the kid.’ It all felt normal. It was weirder when we lived in a house and got real keys to let ourselves in with. I was, like, ‘Why don’t we just swipe?’”
Initially, her parents were wary of the 15-year-old Mulligan’s stated ambition to be an actress. All she had was a bunch of school plays under her belt — mostly the boys’ parts. “I would have been really against it, too,” she says. When she was 17, she secretly used three of the places on her Ucas form to apply to drama school, a ruse that lasted for six months until her mother went online: “I got busted.” She got a job in a pub and applied again, this time getting into Reading University, still finagling like mad to get acting work. When she finally did land a role — as Kitty, in Pride & Prejudice — her parents didn’t believe her. “I told them, ‘So, I’m going to freshwater loose pearl be in this film with Judi Dench’, and they thought I’d made the whole thing up.”
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Parts began to come her way — the BBC’s Bleak House, The Hypochondriac at the Almeida, ITV’s Trial & Retribution (“murdered child, thrown down the stairs, lots of blood”) and Nina in Chekhov’s The Seagull, for pearl strands which she kept a notebook, charting her character’s inner life. It was just a “security blanket” at first, to offset her lack of theatrical training — “You feel like you should have a piece of paper that says you’re allowed to do it” — but she has kept it up for every part since, including Jenny in An Education. “The thing that was most challenging to play was that kind of uber-enthusiasm, while everyone else is being cool and laid-back, and you’re going mental. I lean towards tragic dramatic characters more. I usually isolate myself, go off into corners and think terribly hard about what I’m doing. On this, I was just whizzing around. I loved it.”
It’s a lovely performance — a tossed salad of exuberance, intelligence and pluck, not words that often go together, smart people being very good at coming up with 101 reasons to be scared of something, or not to do it. For Mulligan, being scared is a sign that she is on the right track. This Oliver Stone film, for cultured freshwater pearl instance. “I understood that it would be the biggest thing I’d ever done. It meant paparazzi on set every day. I knew I’d be entering another world. Then I thought about it a bit, and went, ‘It’s Oliver Stone, it’s Wall Street, I’m not saying no.’”
She was right: the tabloids were whipped into their usual lather by her relationship with her co-star Shia LaBeouf, writing up every meal, every held hand, every tiff, as if they were lightning bolts from the Burton-Taylor boudoir. “When we were in LA, I got a little frustrated by the paparazzi following me on my own,” she says. “I told my brother, and he said, ‘Dry your eyes, there are worse things in the world.’ Which is true. I said that to Warren, and he was, like, ‘Yeah, but don’t underplay it. It’s not that pleasant, either.’ He gave me a pep talk about being known, which obviously he’s an expert on.”
In Beatty, who now reads scripts for her, and Hornby, in whose basement she has crashed a number of times, Mulligan would seem to have two of the best advisers a girl could wish for. “She’s been making all the right choices,” Hornby says, pointing to her forthcoming roles in a film version of The Seagull, a Kazuo Ishiguro adaptation, Never Let Me Go, and alongside Susan Sarandon in The Greatest. “There’s been no rush of blood to the head.” The only big change has been her decision to settle in New York.
“I love it here,” she says. “I feel more at home here than I do anywhere.” She loves the laundry and takeouts delivered right to freshwater pearl necklace her door; she loves the lingo and practises saying “jackass”, not “jahkahs”. When I later ask her how her Friday night shaped up after she left me, she tells me that she got some sushi and sake with a friend, then got “terribly nervous” and jumped in a cab up to the cinema where An Education was opening that night. She bought 20 tickets to bump up sales, then watched the first 10 minutes with her first paying audience.
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