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Amazon’s Alexa has been trained to offer better advice on periods. Alexa can now answer a series of detailed questions on periods by using information from the Freedom4Girls charity, whose guides have been informed by British teenagers, alongside existing content on the NHS website. Questions it can answer include “Alexa, what is period pain?”, “Alexa, can periods affect my mental health?”, “Alexa, how do you use period pads?” and “Alexa, what is a typical age to start your period?” Other questions for which Alexa has answers include “Alexa, what are reusable period products?”, “Alexa, where can I get free period products?” and “Alexa, are reusable period products cheaper?” Amazon worked with the period poverty charity Freedom4Girls to develop the new experience. Tina Leslie, founder of Freedom4Girls, said: “It’s so important that teenagers and parents alike can communicate with each other properly about periods, which is why we’re happy to be working with Amazon’s Alexa to ensure the correct resources are readily available to more families around the country. “The new features will be useful for anyone – whether you’re embarking on your first menstrual cycle, or if you’re helping someone you know prepare for their experience.” Dennis Stansbury, UK country manager for Alexa, said: “Alexa can now act as a tool to help families navigate challenging conversations around menstruation. “The hope is that having useful and relevant information available on Alexa via voice will encourage an open environment for these discussions.” Censuswide polled 1,007 UK parents with teenagers for new research to support the launch. Almost two-thirds (65%) of those surveyed said having easier access to quality information around periods would make them more comfortable having these types of conversations within their family. While 80% believed having open conversations reduces embarrassment and stigma, some 37% admitted they are too embarrassed at the moment to have open conversations about periods. A further 30% said they struggle to talk about them because they are worried about saying the wrong thing.

Jonnie Irwin has revealed that he felt like he was living a lie before he was honest with the world about his terminal cancer diagnosis. The Escape to the Country presenter, 49, said in November that he “doesn’t know how long” he has left to live, after first being diagnosed with lung cancer in August 2020. Irwin, who also fronted the Channel 4 property programme A Place In The Sun, kept his cancer a secret among close friends and family for two years, before deciding to share the news in November 2022 when his cancer spread to his brain. In a new podcast launched on Wednesday (24 May) titled OneChat, by life insurance company AIG Life, Irwin has revealed that he hated hiding his condition from the world. "The day I came out and told the world I had terminal cancer is the day I started living again, I started being Jonnie Irwin again and I actually feel alive,” Irwin said. The presenter explained that he kept his terminal diagnosis a secret out of fear he would lose work. “The only reason I kept it a secret is because I’ve got to feed my babies, I’ve got pay the bills because when you’ve got cancer, people write you off,” he said in the podcast. Irwin and his wife Jessica have three children; three-year-old son Rex and two-year-old twins Rafa and Cormac. “I had to keep on providing for my family. I was living with such a dark cloud above me... anyone outside of my tight-knit [circle] didn’t know.” This “dark cloud” meant Irwin would hide from photographs and selfies with fans as his appearance started changing after chemotherapy. He said that telling the world was a “massive weight” off of his shoulders. “One of the things that really inspired me to go public was because I will leave a little footprint on this planet because of a TV career but I want to leave a positive footprint but I think I can educate people into living their lives better, then I’ve got something my boys can be proud of.” In March, Irwin gave a health update, telling The Sun: “I’m weak now, fragile and my memory is terrible… but I’m still here.” Read More Couple with 37-year age gap who met when he was 15 have hopes dashed Elle Fanning wows fans with daring cut-out dress at Cannes: ‘My nips could never’ ‘I spent too much money on your wedding’: Musician calls out married friend for flirting with other women

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Chicken tikka masala is a much-loved dish, but it’s only scratching the surface of delicious food cooked in a tandoor. The tandoor – a clay oven used in a lot of Indian cooking – offers a world of possibilities, and that’s something chef Maunika Gowardhan is keen to uncover. It’s not like there’s just one type of chicken tikka. From murgh malai to reshmi tikka, the options are endless – and Gowardhan, 44, had the best exposure possible growing up in Mumbai. “I grew up on really, really good street food – India is such a vibrant, diverse space. In every region you find some sort of street eat somewhere, and every corner of the country will have some sort of kebab or tikka,” she says. “Sometimes, books can have one or two of those recipes – you can’t have a whole book on just that” – and that’s what Gowardhan has set out to change in her latest cookbook, Tandoori Home Cooking. She wants people to recognise the history of the tandoor: “What really sets it apart, for me, is that it’s a cooking technique that is dated back to the Indus Valley [from 3300 BCE to 1300 BCE]. It’s something that is so historic, that has so much of a rich heritage – it’s such a vital part of how we eat, not just in the streets of India or in restaurants, but even in our own homes.” Even though most homes in India don’t have a clay oven, there are plenty of techniques to replicate that smokey flavour. “When you have a look at the way a clay oven works, essentially it’s heat that’s 360 [degrees],” Gowardhan explains. “In our domestic kitchens, the endeavour is to replicate that – conventional ovens provide heat in an encapsulated space. So they are similar, but they’re not the same.” The main difference is the coals at the bottom of a tandoor – when fat drips from any meat or anything else you put in the clay oven, it drips onto the coal and the smoke that is produced gives the food that “charred, grilled smokey flavour”, she says. But how can you get that at home? One of Gowardhan’s genius tips is making smoked butter. “You can store it in the fridge, and when you start basting your food with that smoked butter, you’re getting the charred, smokey flavour that you’re really yearning for in tandoori dishes.” Not that Gowardhan has been perfecting smoked butter from a young age. “I’m going to put my hand up here and say when I first came to England [25 years ago], I didn’t know how to cook Indian food,” Gowardhan, who now lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, confesses. She came to the UK for university, during which she was “thrilled” to be away from her parents with that “sense of freedom”. But after moving to her first house and getting a job in the city of London, Gowardhan says: “It slowly creeps up on you – when you go to an unfamiliar place, what you really miss is that familiarity.” That’s when Gowardhan started to learn how to cook Indian food, because “I craved it and yearned it all the time”, she says. She would ring her mother back in India and ask for simple recipes – daal, rice, green bean dishes. “I cooked not just for sustenance, I cooked because I missed home and I missed good food,” she reflects. Since then, Gowardhan fell in love with food and made her way into the industry, and this is her third cookbook. She now deems it her “calling”, saying: “I knew food was something that was a leveler on every aspect of my life. “When we did really well, my mother would say, ‘Can I make you something?’ If we were really upset she was like, ‘Let me cook for you’.” Gowardhan also suspects some of it comes from her grandmother, who was an “avid cook”. “My grandmother was the hostess with the mostess. In the 1950s in the city of Bombay, a lot of film stars and Bollywood film stars in India would actually come to my grandmother’s house to eat her food. To be a fly on the wall at my grandmother’s dinner parties…” Gowardhan’s grandmother passed down these recipes, and her mother’s passion for food “gave us this effervescence for cooking and eating good food”, she adds. After dedicating the past 20 or so years of her career to Indian food, there’s a major thing Gowardhan would like people to know about the cuisine. “People tend to forget it’s actually a subcontinent. Because it’s a subcontinent, you realise there is so much more, and every community has so much more to say about the food they cook. “Of course, it’s blurred boundaries as you go through every space, but I feel like every 20 or 30 kilometres you’re travelling, the food changes – because the crop changes, because the climate changes, because the soil changes. All of that makes a huge difference.” So, when people ask her to sum up Indian food, Gowardhan says: “It’s like saying, ‘What is your favourite European food?’ Impossible.” ‘Tandoori Home Cooking’ by Maunika Gowardhan (Hardie Grant, £25). Read More Banging brunch recipes worth getting out of bed for Think pink: Three ways with rhubarb to make the most of the season Love wine but can’t afford it? Here’s how to drink luxury for less Three meat-free dishes to try this National Vegetarian Week How to make TikTok’s viral whole roasted cauliflower Gordon Ramsay: ‘I’m going off the beaten track to become a better cook’

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