Rebecca Stott reflects on the colours of Midsummer as she attempts to find a paint for the hall in her new home, With an array of paint charts laid out on her kitchen table, she looks to Darwin, Joseph Conrad and the former paint guru of Lewes for inspiration. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

The trend for expensive age-defying treatments is 'an insult to youth itself' says Zoe Strimpel, as she argues against treating youth as a commodity that can be bought.After admiring the seemingly ageless beauty of 41-year-old singing superstar Beyoncé at her recent stadium show in London, Zoe reflects on her own experience of getting older - and the people desperate to avoid it. She hones in on 45-year-old American tech mogul, Bryan Johnson, who is attempting to transform his body into that of a teenager in a highly scientific quest for youth. His mission is to regain the body of an 18-year-old - albeit with the help of 30 doctors and experts, extreme diets (exactly 1,977 vegan calories a day), gruelling workouts and an array of medical procedures.While an extreme case, Zoe reflects on how the possibilities of looking and feeling younger are intensifying with each new development in cosmetic technology or the science of diets. She argues that however distasteful we might find such projects, what is more unsettling 'is the thieving, plundering nature of this quest - the insult to youth itself - as if it is nothing but a product to be had at any time, rather than a transient stage of life, whose splendour is in that very transience.'Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Helena Warwick-Cross Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

John Connell reveals how his love for a pristine lawn gave way to letting the grass grow wild. A leaflet urging the adoption of 'No Mow May' led him to set aside his urge to 'rip and tear and snip' to let nature take its course, above all for the sake of wild bees. 'My lawn is long now, but the green desert is no more. In exchange for neatness there are wildflowers and weeds growing side by side in a riot of colour.'Producer: Sheila Cook Sound Engineer: Peter Bosher Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith Production Co-ordinator: Helena Warwick-Cross

Howard Jacobson deplores the recent vandalising of Eric Gill's sculpture at BBC Broadcasting House as a failure to understand the meaning of art. 'Art, we go on protesting, is not the artist, but some will always believe that whatever is fashioned by evil hands must itself be evil,' he writes. 'If art and the artist were not distinct, the word art itself would have no meaning. For it denotes manufacture and artifice... not simple equation or reflection.' Producer: Sheila Cook Sound Engineer: Peter Bosher Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith Production Co-ordinator: Helena Warwick-Cross

Tom Shakespeare bemoans the fashion for being asked to rate everything we buy or do. "The theory is that this drives up quality for everyone, because we won't tolerate terrible products or services - but have they really improved since these ratings became so commonplace?" Producer: Sheila Cook Sound Engineer: Peter Bosher Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith Production Co-ordinator: Helena Warwick-Cross

When the world's first state pension was introduced in Prussia in 1889, the qualifying age was 70 and the average life expectancy was 40. Half a century later, in 1935, many countries lowered the retirement age to 65, but still barely half the population lived long enough to claim it. Now, it's clearly a very different story. With the help of PD James, Sarah Dunant looks at how the UK can tackle the demographic nightmare it currently faces - an ageing population but falling birth rates. Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Helena Warwick-Cross Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Rebecca Stott ponders the nature of dust, as Spring sunshine sharpens the sight of it gathering in the old house she is restoring. She reflects on the social history of Spring cleaning as traditionally women's work, and sees in the complex substance and symbolism of dust a reflection of our own mortality. "We don't come to dust alone, we come to dust together and in history. And the dust we make as we move slowly through life into old age, mingles with the historic dust that the much loved houses we pass through and its previous occupants have made through time - in my case the dust of horsehair and deathwatch beetles and lead and lime." Producer: Sheila Cook Sound Engineer: Peter Bosher Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith Production Co-ordinator: Helena Warwick-Cross

The coronation in 1953, which heralded a new Elizabethan age, was accompanied by that most famous of mountaineering exploits - the conquering of Mount Everest. 'This weekend,' writes Sara Wheeler, 'we are not, perhaps regrettably, expecting celebratory rocket-runners from Mars announcing touchdown on the red planet.' But, Sara suggests, the new Carolean age should be about collective effort rather than focussed on individual achievement.Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

The philosopher Michel de Certeau characterised space as ‘the practice of place’,Will Self argues that, in order to appreciate the places we inhabit, we have to indulge in 'that most unfashionable and unproductive of things: abide". 'To be in a place', he writes, 'is not to be distracted by the possibility of other places, but absorbed by the particularity of the one you're in.' Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound: Peter Bosher Production coordinator: Helena Warwick-Cross Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith

Living in New York during lockdown, Adam Gopnik spent his time enjoying the escapism of foreign TV shows - like the BBC's W1A and 2012.While these shows were unapologetically British, chock-full of alien cultural references to Frankie Howerd and Dad's Army, Adam says these shows helped him appreciate the universal language of satire.'I'd say we enjoy satire more when we don't know the things being satirized' he writes, 'and so cannot protest their portrayal'.He says we 'depend on the satirist for all our information, both for the ground and for the graffiti he scrawls upon it.' Producer: Sheila Cook Sound Engineer: Peter Bosher Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith Production Co-ordinator: Helena Warwick-Cross