Not unless you think Crocs, an anorak and a cowboy shirt is a good look

I am angry. Fashion angry! There is a policy in my workplace that I feel is reverse discrimination. Although all staff are asked to dress smartly, only men are asked to wear a collar. I have smart jumpers and T-shirts that I feel would be suitable, but the company disagrees. The office womenfolk on the other hand can wear what they like, and I see everything from Topshop floral dresses to H&M vest tops to knock-off Chanel suits. Why can this fashion liberty not be extended to the less fair sex?

Name withheld by editorial decision

Now, before we deal with the anger – fashion anger – I think we have to deal with the interesting story behind this letter. For this is not just any letter, readers – it's not even just an M&S letter – it's a letter from a rival news- paper. That's right; such was this correspondent's sense of anger with his employer, or desire to self-sabotage, that he sent it from his work email address, with his name, address and job title affixed to the bottom.

Well, this column was astounded (and impressed – we don't have that job title thingy attached to our emails). And a little flummoxed: who would have expected our female rivals at this very downmarket rag to have the nous to wear Chanel-style suits, knock-off or not? H&M vests sound about right, Topshop floral dresses – sure, at a push. But the legacy of Coco? Living on in cough, cough? Golly. Even more unfathomable is the idea of a newspaper with a male dress code, but that might be because, in my office, a hint of polish on a brown shoe is seen not so much as pushing the boat out as requisitioning the whole fleet.

Anyway, after much gleeful gazing upon the hard kernel of power now lying in my hand, which could (possibly) allow me to bring down a rival paper and (more likely) get a correspondent into mortal trouble at work, my inner Sesame Street muppet reared its head and said: "Hey! Don't print his name. Be nice! And always share your toys!"

So anyway, thoughtfully anonymised correspondent, to your query. As much as it does not behove me to defend a rival paper's policy, I must confess that I agree with it. Give a man an inch in the fashion stakes and he will take a mile, some Crocs, an ugly, brightly coloured messenger bag, and probably an anorak, too. Men need strictly controlled perimeters in which to dress. Women don't. This is not (entirely) men's fault, but a result of men's high-street options being so dire that they are apt to go astray and rock up at work one day in a cowboy shirt because Topman told them it was a good idea.

So in this instance, oh rebellious journalist colleague, I must counsel you to break your career-long habit of questioning authority, gritting your teeth against the winds of established wisdom, and just kowtow to the man, dude. In this instance, he knows best.

Oh, you don't like your fashion choices being dictated by others for the sake of propriety? You feel that the other sex get an easier ride? Resent being the patronised sex? Anonymous correspondent, welcome to life as a woman. Who would have expected such a gender-bender experimentation and open-minded busting of cultural conventions from cough, cough, cough.

I have recently noticed that a large percentage of male cyclists have adopted baggy, just-below-the-knee shorts with black woollen leggings beneath. You must know people. Please, please pull strings.

Neil, by email

I do know people, Neil, but I don't know if any of these people have the necessary power to rectify the international blight that is bicycle-wear. I move in very humble circles.

Now, this is turning out to be a very conformist week for this column because, after defending a rival paper's fashion policy, I'm now going to defend this cycling look and, believe you me, I have about as much empathy with cyclists as I do with far inferior so-called rivals. Nonetheless, let's consider what the alternative would be to this, admittedly, upsetting doubled-up trouser look, Neil. On the one hand, just the shorts: it could get a little breezy for some parts of the anatomy, if you catch my drift. On the other, just the leggings: a bit too much "and here's the shape of what I have to offer", if you catch this second drift.

So really, it is a question of welcoming rare modesty from the cycling community, Neil, and this week, wearing a conformist cap (I'm thinking a bit of Maoist chic here), I welcome the conservatism.

• Post your questions to Hadley Freeman, Ask Hadley, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Email ask.hadley@guardian.co.uk

Lazy but you want to be liked? Then you'll find yourself paying the Nice Tax, just like we did

We came out of Colchester station at 10.30 on a Monday night. There she was, babbling into her phone, a wild-eyed, mini-skirted girl in her 20s, with a woollen tartan cap. The next time we saw her, a minute later, she was rushing up to us in the station car park, telling us how relieved she was to see a man with a woman, as she'd just approached a man on his own and he'd immediately "been sexual". My sexlessness aside, though, what did she want? The answer, of course, was that she wanted to tell us a story.

She told us she had to go to Kelvedon – two stops from Colchester – but didn't have enough money for the journey. She was, she assured us, "not a scallywag". We could come with her to the booking office, where they'd confirm she'd asked for a ticket. All she needed was "two or three quid".

By coincidence, I'd spent the earlier part of the day with an independent radio producer, working on 300-word story outlines to pitch to BBC radio, to persuade them to fund me to write scripts. I could see little difference between me and the girl in the tartan cap; except that my wife and I had two or three quid and I'm not sure that BBC radio does.

Speaking professionally, I'd say the girl's pitch was pretty damn good. The early mention of the sexual predator drew us in and made us feel for her. The reference to the booking office was a reassuring detail. The assertion that she wasn't a "scallywag" showed empathy – at that very moment, we were wondering if she was a scallywag.

Was she telling the truth, though? Some might say her pitch was too artful to be believed. A truly desperate person wouldn't have been so polished. Then again, we weren't the first people to whom she'd pitched. (There was definitely the sexual man, and possibly others before him.) You can't blame her for getting good with practice.

As I reached for my wallet for the three quid, though, her pitch changed. She no longer needed three. Actually, she said, she needed five or six. Did this outburst of greed make her entire story unbelievable? No. Greed, as any banker will tell you, is not necessarily the mark of a liar. Her greed didn't mean she wasn't going to Kelvedon. It was just that, now we were giving her some money, how about some extra towards some chips, say, or a cab ride home from Kelvedon station?

Three quid now seemed a bargain, given that what she really wanted was six, but my wife said we'd give her two. She could get the remainder from someone else. What a woman. (My wife, that is.) If the story was a con, we'd wasted only two quid. And if the story was true, we'd allowed someone else to join us in donating to a good cause. We'd started a charity bandwagon that would take this girl all the way to Kelvedon.

Later, as we drove off, I looked through the window of the booking office. She wasn't there. Maybe she was raising the rest of her fare. Maybe she was already on the platform. I doubted it. Anger and self-loathing had kicked in. Never mind that we were talking about only two quid. Forget the "only". We'd given her two hard-earned, shiny pound coins so she could buy drugs. (It's always drugs, isn't it?)

Why had we been so nice? I'll tell you. Nice guys finish last and pay up first for the same two reasons: they want to be liked and they're lazy. All we had to do was accompany her to that booking office, as she herself had (bluffingly?) suggested, pay what it took to get her that ticket, walk with her to the barrier and watch her go through it, safe in the knowledge that no dealer gives you drugs in exchange for a Colchester-Kelvedon train ticket. Instead, we paid our two quid – our Nice Tax – and saved ourselves the bother. Who wants to spend their life thinking and acting like a detective, with 24-hour suspicion and mistrust coursing through their veins? Far better to pay up, lazily, without question. I only hope that BBC radio feels the same.

Jon Canter is a novelist and scriptwriter

Last year was supposed to have been the end of the super-thin supermodel. So why were the collarbones and hollow necks back on the catwalk again at this year's shows?

In 2009, as the leaves turned orange, and autumn met winter, it seemed as though a new trend was taking hold in fashion. After year upon year of emaciated young women stalking the catwalks, a new breed was in the spotlight. These weren't the fetishised fat women we'd occasionally seen before – they didn't resemble Beth Ditto, naked, on the cover of Love magazine, her rolls of flesh beautiful, but much more bountiful, than any average woman's. They didn't signal the industry replacing one extreme body shape with another. Instead, they were that unlikely sight, a vision that made people double take. They were women with healthy, normal bodies.

Hayley Morley, a size 12, took to the catwalk for knitwear designer Mark Fast. Lizzie Miller, a size 14, caused a furore when pictured naked with a roll of stomach flesh in US Glamour magazine. And then there was the size 16 supermodel, Crystal Renn, who published her autobiography Hungry, and appeared in Vogue, Glamour and V magazine's Size Issue. Renn said that a new kind of model was emerging, "lush and sparkly with nary a jutting collarbone in sight".

Then came the latest round of autumn/winter ready-to-wear shows, which ended in Paris last week. Jutting collarbones weren't just easy to spot; they were almost ubiquitous. There were the hollowed-out necks striped with taut, rope-like tendons, straining to keep balloon-like heads aloft on childlike shoulders. There were the tiny upper arms, fragile and snappable as a bird wing stripped of feathers. And, perhaps most notably, there were the women's thighs, space gaping between them, often even slimmer at their upper reaches than at the stark, bony knees. In some cases, it was hard to fathom how the women could walk. There were a couple of shows – Louis Vuitton and Prada – where healthier bodies were on display. But they were the exceptions; and anyway they weren't a political statement, they were simply an aesthetic choice. Miucca Prada did put healthy women into that Prada show, but at her other show – her Miu Miu show – some of the models were skeletal.

Even designer from whom you might expect more, such as Stella McCartney – famous for designing trousers that real women can actually wear – put models on the catwalk who looked far too thin for comfort.

No one seems to have said a thing. After years of arguments about the extreme thinness of fashion models, after horror at the 2006 deaths of Luisel Ramos (who had fasted for several days), and Ana Carolina Reston (who died from an infection related to anorexia), after the editor of British Vogue, Alexandra Shulman, voiced her worries last year about models with "jutting bones and no breasts or hips", the debate seems to have gone eerily silent.

It's not clear why. Perhaps it's that the existence of a few healthier women has acted as a diversion, has convinced the outside world that the industry is changing. Or perhaps it's just that we're tired of talking about it. After all, emaciated women have been a fixture in fashion for at least 15 years now, since the amazonian supermodels of the late 80s and early 90s – Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington – made way for heroin chic and hollowed-out eyes, for an ideal of womanhood that has become thinner and thinner and thinner.

But it does seem important to point out that this is still going on, that the images of women that are multiplying around us look not just unhealthy, but in some cases horrifying. It's not that every woman on the catwalk has to be a certain size, not that they all need to be weighed at the door to the venue, but it would be a big leap forward if catwalk photographs didn't seem bound, instantly, for a pro-anorexia website. Surely that's not too much to ask?

Instead of a blanket hike on VAT, a targeted tax on fizzy drinks could raise money and save lives

The idea is alive and living in New York state. Sugary canned drinks ruin your teeth and make you fat. Therefore, like everything else that palpably hurts health, they should attract extra taxation: say one penny per ounce, around 20% more on a 75-cent can of sweet soda. Of course the notion isn't universally popular. Fox News is against, as it is against almost every policy supported by Barack Obama. But at least nobody can sing the "pain" song too easily. You can't talk pain over a swig of Pepsi. One reason, perhaps, why Alistair Darling should get interested.

Is VAT going up to 20% under whoever rules the Treasury next? It's a solid, sullen bet. Yet why use this tax as a blanket impost, unrefined, oblivious to health or environmental imperatives, when a little fine tuning shows the way?

We know "food of a kind used for human consumption" is zero-rated – but we also know that too much human consumption leads to an early grave. We acknowledge that in the rising price of beer and cigarettes, yet there the logic of cost and constraint runs out. You can wade through the minutiae of the VAT rules for hours without ever encountering an argument a doctor might salute.

The inspectors standard-rate crisps, fizzy drinks, ice cream. But tortilla chips, milk shakes, frozen yogurt (if it melts) escape scot-free. A bottle of mineral water rakes in 17.5%; a jar of prunes in armagnac takes nothing on top.

Maybe, at first sight, a taxing obsession with chocolate in every shape or form has keeping fit somewhere in its rationale. Expect standard rate on "biscuits wholly or partly covered in chocolate or some product similar in taste or appearance" – except "chocolate chip biscuits where the chips are either included in the dough or pressed into the surface before baking".

In fact, though, health takes a back seat the moment you find that spreading caramel all over shortbread attracts no charge, that chocolate chips to sprinkle on cakes come duty free (unlike chocolate buttons), that Bourbon biscuits with chocolate cream in the middle pass no-taxation muster. Health really isn't an issue in any of this introverted detail.

When I wander down to a supermarket and pick up a lunchtime chicken sandwich shot through with salt and saturated fats, the VAT man looks the other way. When I reach into the chiller cabinet and pull out a pizza or a packet of burgers, then the needs of "human consumption" have the last word. Frozen mousses, toffee apples, prawn crackers ... welcome to the club. But don't confuse standard-rated ice cream wafers with zero-rated communion wafers, or you'll end up in the mire.

Any bureaucratic list built up over decades is open to ridicule, perhaps. But the disconnect between public policy and current concern right along the VAT chain is painfully clear. (And not just on the edible side either: Britain's reluctance to put a "tax on knowledge" – ie books, newspapers and magazines – means that all those lads mags and porn specials escape tax; under cover, presumably, of what Richard Desmond might call a "tax on carnal knowledge".)

But let's not worry about no VAT on bingo club memberships and houseboat moorings, for the moment. There will always be another budget to clear up the peripheries. Let's stay with Mayor Bloomberg of New York, talking soda taxes in a city where nearly 40% of school-age children are overweight, with "diabetes, heart disease, asthma and depression" lying in wait. Let's save many more lives than any new drink-driving purge. Let's send hundreds of millions more to our Treasury in the best of all possible causes – one where personal gain trumps minimal pain.

For, as those self-same VAT regulations conclude: "Burial or cremation of dead people – exempt."

I've found friendships among mothers to be uniquely intimate and non-judgmental – unlike how it's presented in the media

I've never had an easy time making close friends. I'm fairly outgoing, but also a writer, so naturally a bit bookish and sceptical. I covet private time, often go out to dinner alone, and spend lots of days talking mostly to myself. I didn't think becoming a mother would necessarily improve this. When my first daughter was born, I actually dreaded the thought of being forced to mingle with other mothers. I was certain my future was full of awkward small talk and competitive nonsense, but on this, my fifth Mother's Day as a mum, I can honestly say there are few people as important to me as my mum friends.

That's not to say I chose them. In picking your mum friends, the pool is generally restricted to the music class-birthday party-playground scene, but this hasn't been nearly as limiting in my experience as it might seem. Through my daughters, I've met friends whom I otherwise would have never encountered, among them a teenage mum, a military mum, and even a churchgoer! (Given the bookish and sceptical, I figured "atheist" went without saying.) I met the last at a bus stop as we pretended not to notice our kids trampling some nearby daffodils. Weeks later, we had dinner together. I found out then that she didn't drink or swear, but against the odds, we still had a great time. She is now one of my best friends – caring, reliable, supportive, and whip-smart.

In this, she is similar to most of my mum friends – no matter what their current economic, professional, or personal situation is. Indeed, whether the woman sitting by the paddle-pool with me works outside the home or not, reads no or 10 books a month, or even shares the same political views as me, I've found these friendships to be uniquely intimate and non-judgmental. That is, not at all how they are presented in the media. There, almost unanimously, relationships between mothers are presented as fraught with tension and animosity.

A recent example comes from Eleanor Mills in the Sunday Times: "The abuse women hurl at one another over the choices they make is vitriolic; wars between stay-at-home mums and the working breed are toxic and available at any mums' forum you might care to visit."

New Yorker Amy Sohn's new novel (and soon to be HBO series), Prospect Park West, which was published in England last autumn, offers a similar portrait of mothers sparring over slides and swing sets.

Janet McCabe, an old friend turned mum friend, has a theory about why this is: "It keeps mothers preoccupied on what supposedly divides us instead of what unites us."

In other words, as long as issues about women's equality and choices regarding "work" and "life" can be staged as a war between mothers, then those involved in culture and politics don't actually have to figure things out. Take, for instance, a recent BBC report on a study by the Institute for Child Health that claims children of working mothers are less healthy than those with stay-at-home mothers. I'd hate to call a health organisation cynical, but why does a study of children's health have to be put in these terms? When the majority of mothers with young child work, many because they need to, why not just focus on how to make children healthier? Or if lifestyle is such an important factor, why not broaden the study and also compare the health of children with pro-active v lazy dads?

Time and again, instead of discussing the issue at hand – from children's health to maternity leave – the supposed intolerance of women takes precedence (or sells papers), and serious issues are demoted to a catfight. Mills expresses frustration that potential employers often refuse to believe some mothers might want to work full time, and argues that because they are legally prohibited from asking questions about this, women's employment opportunities are suffering. Interesting point. But instead of approaching this as a complex, legal question, with ramifications for all women, she fires a cannon not just at stay-at-home mums, but part-time working ones too! "Many women do want to work flexibly and ache to spend time pureeing carrot; some don't and are paying the price for those who do."

Choice and difference are important concepts when you're talking about women and feminism, and I would never want that to change. But motherhood is in part a collective experience. When you've been up all night with a sick child, and then have to go to work or face a day on the couch with said vomiting/whining/heading-for-a-future-on-the-stage child, who would you rather commiserate with? Your father-in-law? A member of your political party? Or any random mother? Who else knows in a glance that you're having one of those "just fallen off the earth days"? Or the frustration of forking over your entire paycheck to your babysitter? Your mum friends. As Lynn Melnick, one of my best mum friends put it: "It's kind of like having really awesome colleagues."

I think most mothers know this, and appreciate the personal benefits these relationships bring. But if the success of websites like Mumsnet, to which politicians flock, can tell us anything, it is that emphasising our similarities instead of our differences can help us in other ways too. From women's health to workplace equality to children's rights, I suspect we have a lot more in common than most in politics and the media tell us we do. Today would be a great day to begin realising that.

A monthly look at the best foodie apps

What is it? The daddy of all food apps, Jamie Oliver's £4.99 digital mini-cookbook was the single-most lucrative app on iTunes UK only weeks after its launch towards the end of last year.

Key ingredient? Jamie's anyone-can-do-this ethos. The result: 55 straightforward recipes, from chilli corn chowder to Eton mess with almonds, with step-by-step guides and 21 instructional videos – but who is so clueless they need visual aids for chopping an onion?

Frustratingly techie? Not at all. Ease of use is everything. Also, the give-it-a-shake random recipe function is fun for the indecisive.

Better than a cookbook? Yes, for relative newcomers and those unable to put knife to onion. Sure, there's no drip-feed of high-end culinary knowledge with which to delight the enthusiast. But if you're basically hopeless and in need of a "brilliant beef stroganoff", it's magic.

Download? Essential, even experts will marvel at the whole one-stop shop aspect.

Tim Atkin's top affordable wines that rival the classics

There must be some very long faces on the other side of the Channel at the moment. The French have always suspected we were a treacherous bunch, but they've just received a poke with a sharp stick to the vinous nether regions. Gallic wine sales in the UK have been tumbling for the past 20 years, but the news that France, once the largest exporter to these shores, has slipped behind Australia, the United States, Italy and now South Africa will have producers gnawing their knuckles in frustration.

However bad the overall picture may be, France still dominates the world of fine wine. The stuff that sells at auction and that has collectors salivating into their silver spittoons invariably comes from Bordeaux, Burgundy, the Rhône Valley or, at a pinch, the Loire or Champagne. These blue-chip wines may only account for a tiny percentage of French sales, but they are essential for prestige and maintaining what's left of France's bedraggled image.

How good are they? In one sense, the answer is irrelevant. Many of the best French wines are bought as an investment these days, not as something to drink. Fine wine is traded across the world like stocks and shares. Even if you've never tasted the wine it isn't hard to work out that, say, Château Lafite or the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti's La Tâche will go up in price, especially from a very good vintage such as 2005. All you have to do is get hold of a few bottles…

Yet in another sense the answer does matter. For those of us who like pulling corks, as opposed to stroking portfolios, it's important to know if the best French wines are truly worth the money. If prestige is all that matters to you stop reading. But if you're interested in comparative wine quality, I'd like to share a secret with you. Unless you are drinking a truly great French wine, you can drink just as well (and more cheaply) from elsewhere. It's just that the public perception hasn't caught up with reality.

A mate of mine does regular "David versus Goliath" blind tastings, pitting (almost exclusively French) wines with worldwide reputations against supposedly lesser bottles. More often than not, the wines with the slingshots overcome the giants. His punters are frequently alarmed to realise they've spent lots of money on something that isn't as exciting as it should be; worse, they realise they could have bought more enjoyable wines at cheaper prices.

If you leave aside Champagne, which has no serious rivals at the top end, I think you can find very good alternatives to pricey red Bordeaux, Sauternes, red and white Burgundy, northern Rhône Syrah and Châteauneuf du Pape in other countries, and sometimes within France itself. However depressing it may be for the French, the rest of the world has caught up with its classic regions.

TASTE ONE OF THE FOLLOWING AGAINST A CLASSIC

1 2007 Philip Shaw No 17 Merlot/Cabernet Franc/Cabernet Sauvignon, Orange (£14.99, 14%, Oddbins). Elegant, fragrant, capsicum-scented; sourced from the cool climate region of Orange in New South Wales.

2 1990 Villa di Monte Vin Santo, Chianti Rufina (£14.99 per half, 17%, M&S). Sweet, honey, date and fig-like; a mature Tuscan sticky that lasts for minutes on the palate.

3 2008 Ata Rangi Pinot Noir, Martinborough (£37.99, stockists 020 7720 5350). Stylish, savoury, structured. Widely regarded as one of the two best Pinot Noirs in New Zealand.

4 2008 Saint Véran, Domaine Thibert Père et Fils (£12.99, 13%, Majestic). Fresh, ripe, stylishly oaked; a white Burgundy that outperforms a lot of Puligny-Montrachets.

5 2007 Tabali Reserve Syrah, Limarí Valley (£9.99, 14%, www.henningswine.co.uk). Smoky and spicy; produced in one of Chile's most exciting new coastal areas.

6 2007 Vacqueyras, Les Aubes, Domaine Santa Duc (£14.25, 15%, Berry Brothers, 0800 280 2440). Funky and peppery – a mini Châteauneuf with real class.

THE WINE BOX
Become an instant expert – this month: Champagne

Dom Pérignon didn't invent bubbles; we did. Christopher Merret presented a paper to the Royal Society about sparkling wine in December 1662, six years before Dom Perignon arrived in Champagne.

Champagne is fermented twice: once in a tank (or occasionally a barrel) and once in the bottle in which it's sold. If it weren't aged in bottle, it would be virtually undrinkable, such is its acidity.

A single bottle contains anything between 49 and 250 million bubbles and the pressure inside can reach 90 psi, so the bottles have to be made from thicker glass.

Two of Champagne's three grape varieties (Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier and Chardonnay) are black. Gentle pressing and the fact that their juice is clear explain why fizz is normally white. Blanc de Blancs Champagne is made entirely from Chardonnay; Blanc de Noirs from the two Pinots. Pink Champagne is usually made by adding a little still red wine to the blend.

We Brits drink more Champagne (roughly 30 million bottles a year) than anyone else, except the French.

"Champagne makes you feel like it's Sunday and better days are around the corner" (Marlene Dietrich)

Two of the best:

Skinted: Waitrose Blanc de Blancs Champagne (£21.99, 12.5%)

Minted: 1998 Taittinger Comtes de Champagne (£100, 12%, Majestic) TA

Rick Bayless is one of the best chefs in America and cooks Barack Obama's favourite Mexican food. Here is his recipe for mole – moh-lay – which took him decades to perfect

Red Mole – the king of Mexican sauces

275g (5 medium) tomatillos, husked and rinsed

70g sesame seeds

140ml rich-tasting pork lard or vegetable oil, plus a little more if necessary

175g (about 12 medium) dried mulato chillies, stemmed, seeded and torn into large flat pieces

75g (about 6 medium) dried ancho chillies, stemmed, seeded and torn into large flat pieces

75g (about 10 medium) dried pasilla chillies, stemmed, seeded and torn into large flat pieces

8 garlic cloves, peeled

110g unskinned almonds

110g raisins

1 tsp cinnamon, preferably freshly ground Mexican canela

half a tsp black pepper, preferably freshly ground

half a tsp anise, preferably freshly ground

quarter of a tsp cloves, preferably freshly ground

2 slices firm white bread, darkly toasted and broken into several pieces

50g Mexican chocolate, roughly chopped

1.2 litres chicken broth

salt

20-25g sugar

DIRECTIONS

This is a slightly simpler recipe than the black mole.

On a rimmed baking sheet, roast the tomatillos 10cm below a very hot grill until splotchy black and thoroughly soft, about 5 minutes per side. Scrape into a large bowl. In a dry skillet over medium heat, toast the sesame seeds, stirring nearly constantly, until golden, about 5 minutes. Scrape half of them in with the tomatillos. Reserve the remainder for sprinkling on the chicken.

Brown other mole ingredients. Turn on the fan or open a kitchen door or window. In a very large soup pot (I typically use a 11.5 litre stainless-steel stock pot or a medium-large Mexican earthenware cazuela), heat the lard or oil over medium. When quite hot, fry the chillies, three or four pieces at a time, flipping them nearly constantly with tongs until their interior side has changed to a lighter colour, about 20 or 30 seconds total frying time. Don't toast them so darkly that they begin to smoke – that would make the mole bitter. As they're done, remove them to a large bowl, being careful to drain as much fat as possible back into the pot. Cover the toasted chillies with hot tap water and allow to rehydrate 30 minutes, stirring frequently to ensure even soaking.

Remove any stray seeds left in the fat. With the pot still over medium heat, fry the garlic and almonds, stirring regularly, until browned (the garlic should be soft), about 5 minutes. With a slotted spoon, remove to the tomatillo bowl, draining as much fat as possible back into the pot.

Add the raisins to the hot pot. Stir for 20 or 30 seconds, until they've puffed and browned slightly. Scoop them out, draining as much fat as possible back into the pot, and add to the tomatillos. Set the pan aside off the heat.

To the tomatillo mixture, add the cinnamon, black pepper, anise, cloves, bread and chocolate. Add 480ml water and stir to combine.

Blend, strain, cook. Into a large measuring cup, tip off the chillies' soaking liquid. Taste the liquid: if it's not bitter, discard all but 1.4 litres of the liquid. (if you're short, add water to make up the shortfall). If bitter, pour it out and measure 1.4 litres of water. Scoop half of the chillies into a blender jar, pour in half of the soaking liquid (or water) and blend to a smooth purée. Press through a medium-mesh sieve into a large bowl; discard the bits of skin and seeds that don't pass through the sieve. Repeat with the remaining chillies.

Return the soup pot or cazuela to medium heat. When quite hot, pour in the chilli purée – it should sizzle sharply and, if the pan is sufficiently hot, the mixture should never stop boiling. Stir every couple of minutes until the chilli purée has darkened and reduced to the consistency of tomato paste, about a half hour. (I find it useful to cover the pot with an inexpensive spatter screen to catch any spattering chilli.)

In two batches, blend the tomatillo mixture as smoothly as possible (you may need an extra 120ml water to keep everything moving through the blades), then strain it in to the large bowl that contained the chillies. When the chilli paste has reduced, add the tomatillo mixture to the pot and cook, stirring every few minutes until considerably darker and thicker, 15 to 20 minutes. (Again, a spatter screen saves a lot of cleaning up.)

Simmer. Add the broth to the pot and briskly simmer the mixture over medium to medium-low heat for about 2 hours for all the flavours to come together and mellow. If the mole has thickened beyond the consistency of a cream soup, stir in a little water. Taste and season with salt (usually about 4 teaspoons) and the sugar.

You can cool, cover and refrigerate the mole until you're ready to use it.

NB: the ingredients can be found at mexgrocer.co.uk or casamexico.co.uk

It has long been said that travel "broadens the mind". Now new evidence proves that jumping on a plane will not only make you smarter, but more open-minded and creative

It's 4.15 in the morning and my alarm clock has just stolen away a lovely dream. My eyes are open but my pupils are still closed, so all I see is gauzy darkness. For a brief moment, I manage to convince myself that my wakefulness is a mistake, and that I can safely go back to sleep. But then I roll over and see my zippered suitcase. I let out a sleepy groan: I'm going to the airport.

The taxi is late. There should be an adjective (a synonym of sober, only worse) to describe the state of mind that comes from waiting in the orange glare of a streetlight before drinking a cup of coffee. And then the taxi gets lost. And then I get nervous, because my flight leaves in an hour. And then we're here, and I'm hurtled into the harsh incandescence of Terminal B, running with a suitcase so I can wait in a long security line. My belt buckle sets off the metal detector, my 120ml stick of deodorant is confiscated, and my left sock has a gaping hole.

And then I get to the gate. By now you can probably guess the punchline of this very banal story: my flight has been cancelled. I will be stuck in this terminal for the next 218 minutes, my only consolation a cup of caffeine and a McGriddle sandwich. And then I will miss my connecting flight and wait, in a different city, with the same menu, for another plane. And then, 14 hours later, I'll be there.

Why do we travel? It's not the flying I mind – I will always be awed by the physics that gets a fat metal bird into the upper troposphere. The rest of the journey, however, can feel like a tedious lesson in the ills of modernity, from the pre-dawn X-ray screening to the sad airport malls peddling crappy souvenirs. It's globalisation in a nutshell, and it sucks.

And yet here we are, herded in ever greater numbers on to planes that stay the same size. Sometimes we travel because we have to. Because in this digital age there is still something important about the analogue handshake. Or eating Mum's turkey at Christmas.

But most travel isn't non-negotiable. (In 2008 only 30% of trips over 50 miles were made for business.) Instead we travel because we want to, because the annoyances of the airport are outweighed by the visceral thrill of being someplace new. Because work is stressful and our blood pressure is too high and we need a vacation. Because home is boring. Because the flights were on sale. Because New York is New York.

Travel, in other words, is a basic human desire. We're a migratory species, even if our migrations are powered by jet fuel and Chicken McNuggets. But here's my question: is this collective urge to travel – to put some distance between ourselves and everything we know – still a worthwhile compulsion? Or is it like the taste for saturated fat: one of those instincts we should have left behind in the Pleistocene epoch? Because if travel is just about fun, then I think the new security measures at airports have killed it.

THE GOOD NEWS, at least for those of you reading this while stuck on a tarmac, is that pleasure is not the only consolation of travel. In fact, several new science papers suggest that getting away – and it doesn't even matter where you're going – is an essential habit of effective thinking. It's not about a holiday, or relaxation, or sipping daiquiris on an unspoilt tropical beach: it's about the tedious act itself, putting some miles between home and wherever you happen to spend the night.

Let's begin with the most literal aspect of travel, which is that it's a verb of movement. Thanks to modern engine technology, we can now move through space at an inhuman speed. The average walker moves at 3mph, which is 200 times slower than the cruising speed of a Boeing 737. There's something inherently useful about such speedy movement, which allows us to switch our physical locations with surreal ease. For the first time in human history, we can outrun the sun and segue from one climate to another in a single day.

The reason such travels are mentally useful involves a quirk of cognition, in which problems that feel "close" – and the closeness can be physical, temporal or even emotional – get contemplated in a more concrete manner. As a result, when we think about things that are nearby, our thoughts are constricted, bound by a more limited set of associations. While this habit can be helpful – it allows us to focus on the facts at hand – it also inhibits our imagination. Consider a field of corn. When you're standing in the middle of the field, surrounded by the tall cellulose stalks and fraying husks, the air smelling faintly of fertiliser and popcorn, your mind is automatically drawn to thoughts that revolve around the primary meaning of corn, which is that it's a plant, a cereal, a staple of farming.

But now imagine that same field of corn from a different perspective. Instead of standing on a farm, you're now in the midst of a crowded city street, dense with taxis and pedestrians. (And yet, for some peculiar reason, you're still thinking about corn.) The plant will no longer just be a plant: instead, your vast neural network will pump out all sorts of associations. You'll think about glucose-fructose syrup, obesity and Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food; ethanol made from corn stalks, popcorn at the cinema and creamy polenta simmering on a wood stove in Emilia Romagna. The noun is now a web of tangents, a loom of remote connections.

What does this have to do with travel? When we escape from the place we spend most of our time, the mind is suddenly made aware of all those errant ideas we'd suppressed. We start thinking about obscure possibilities – corn can fuel cars – that never would have occurred to us if we'd stayed back on the farm. Furthermore, this more relaxed sort of cognition comes with practical advantages, especially when we're trying to solve difficult problems.

Look, for instance, at a recent experiment led by the psychologist Lile Jia at Indiana University. He randomly divided a few dozen undergrads into two groups, both of which were asked to list as many different modes of transportation as possible. (This is known as a creative generation task.) One group of students was told that the task was developed by Indiana University students studying abroad in Greece (the distant condition), while the other group was told that the task was developed by Indiana students studying in Indiana (the near condition). At first glance, it's hard to believe that such a slight and seemingly irrelevant difference would alter the performance of the subjects. Why would it matter where the task was conceived?

Nevertheless, Jia found a striking difference between the two groups: when students were told that the task was imported from Greece, they came up with significantly more transportation possibilities. They didn't just list buses, trains and planes; they cited horses, triremes, spaceships, bicycles and even Segway scooters. Because the source of the problem was far away, the subjects felt less constrained by their local transport options; they didn't just think about getting around in Indiana – they thought about getting around all over the world and even in deep space.

In a second study, Jia found that people were much better at solving a series of insight puzzles when told that the puzzles came all the way from California and not from down the hall. These subjects considered a far wider range of alternatives, which made them more likely to solve the challenging brain teasers. There is something intellectually liberating about distance.

The problem is that most of our problems are local – people in Indiana are worried about Indiana, not the eastern Mediterranean or California. This leaves two options: 1) find a clever way to trick ourselves into believing that our nearby dilemma is actually distant, or 2) go someplace far away and then think about our troubles back home. Given the limits of self-deception – we can't even tickle ourselves properly – travel seems like the more practical possibility.

Of course it's not enough simply to get on a plane: if we want to experience the creative benefits of travel, then we have to rethink its raison d'être. Most people escape to Paris so they don't have to think about those troubles they left behind. But here's the ironic twist: our mind is most likely to solve our stubbornest problems while we are sitting in a swank Left Bank cafe. So instead of contemplating that buttery croissant, we should be mulling over those domestic riddles we just can't solve.

The larger lesson is that our thoughts are shackled by the familiar. The brain is a neural tangle of near-infinite possibility, which means that it spends a lot of time and energy choosing what not to notice. As a result, creativity is traded away for efficiency; we think in literal prose, not symbolist poetry. A bit of distance, however, helps loosen the chains of cognition, making it easier to see something new in the old; the mundane is grasped from a slightly more abstract perspective. As TS Eliot wrote in the Four Quartets: "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

But distance isn't the only psychological perk of travel. Earlier this year researchers at Insead, a business school in France, and at the Kellogg School of Management in Chicago reported that students who had lived abroad were 20% more likely to solve a computer simulation of a classic psychological task known as the Duncker candle problem than students who had never lived outside their birth country.

The Duncker problem has a simple premise: a subject is given a cardboard box containing a few drawing pins, a book of matches and a waxy candle. They are told to determine how to attach the candle to a piece of corkboard on a wall so that it can burn properly and no wax drips on to the floor. Nearly 90% of people pursue the same two strategies, even though neither strategy can succeed. They elect to pin the candle directly to the board, which would cause the candle wax to shatter. Or they say they'd melt the candle with the matches so that it sticks to the board. But the wax wouldn't hold; the candle would fall to the floor. At this point most people surrender. They assume that the puzzle is impossible, that it's a stupid experiment and a waste of time. Only a slim minority of subjects – often fewer than 25% – come up with the solution, which involves attaching the candle to the cardboard box with wax and then pinning the cardboard box to the corkboard. Unless people have an insight about the box – that it can do more than hold drawing pins – they'll waste candle after candle. They'll repeat their failures while they're waiting for a breakthrough. This is known as the bias of "functional fixedness", since we're typically terrible at coming up with new functions for old things. That's why we're so surprised to learn that an oven can be turned into a small closet or that an apple can be used as a bong.

What does this have to do with living abroad? According to the researchers, the experience of another culture endows us with a valuable open-mindedness, making it easier to realise that a single thing can have multiple meanings. Consider the act of leaving food on the plate: in China this is often seen as a compliment, a signal that the host has provided enough to eat. But in America the same act is a subtle insult, an indication that the food wasn't good enough to finish.

Such cultural contrasts mean that seasoned travellers are alive to ambiguity, more willing to realise that there are different (and equally valid) ways of interpreting the world. This in turn allows them to expand the circumference of their "cognitive inputs", as they refuse to settle for their first answers and initial guesses. After all, maybe they carry candles in drawing-pin boxes in China. Maybe there's a better way to attach a candle to a wall.

OF COURSE THIS mental flexibility doesn't come from mere distance. It's not enough to just change time zones or to schlep across the world only to eat Le Big Mac instead of a quarter pounder with cheese. Instead this increased creativity appears to be a side-effect of difference: we need to change cultures, to experience the disorienting diversity of human traditions. The same details that make foreign travel so confusing – Do I tip the waiter? Where is this train taking me? – turn out to have a lasting impact, making us more creative because we're less insular. We're reminded of all that we don't know, which is nearly everything; we're surprised by the constant stream of surprises. Even in this globalised age, slouching toward similarity, we can still marvel at all the earthly things that weren't included in the Lonely Planet guidebook and that certainly don't exist back home.

So let's not pretend that travel is always fun. We don't spend 10 hours lost in the Louvre because we like it, and the view from the top of Machu Picchu probably doesn't make up for the hassle of lost luggage. (More often than not, I need a holiday after my holiday.) We travel because we need to, because distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our mind has been changed, and that changes everything.