Columns

For many years now we have all been agonizing over the fertility crisis. Why aren’t the kids having kids? It’s become a sort of parlor game, the swapping of the various theories. Is it the cost of living? Microplastics? Eco-anxiety? Tight underwear, I heard the other day, and snorted with scorn even as I tipped

I grew up in the 1980s but in many ways it was more like the 1880s. We lived with my grandmother on the Northumbrian coast and the routine of our days echoed the routines of her youth, perhaps her mother’s and grandmother’s, too. We were like an elephant family in an African game park, following