Family

The end of the year seems a good time to think about lasts. Not many of us ever do. Firsts are always landmarks: the first time you taste alcohol, drive a car, have sex. Then the first time your child talks, walks, goes to school. All are noted at the time, stored away in the mental file marked ‘life events’. But when do we ever notice, much less remember, a last? We’re doing them a disservice — in many cases they’re even more poignant than the firsts. One problem, of course, is that we often don’t know it’s a last at the time. You’ll register your last day in a

Imagine that you became pregnant. Imagine that you were entirely dependent upon your husband. Imagine that you became the victim of domestic violence during that pregnancy, and your husband began demanding that you did not give birth to a baby girl. Facing strong social pressure, coercion, or violence to end a pregnancy because you are carrying a girl, is a reality for a disturbing number of women in Britain, according to women’s advocacy organisation Jeena International, which helps women escape domestic violence. To begin tackling this issue, a large group of MPs led by Fiona Bruce have proposed the Abortion (Sex Selection) Bill. This is a short and simple piece

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_2_Oct_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Luke Coppen and Cristina Odone join Freddy Gray to discuss divorced Catholics.” startat=1053] Listen [/audioplayer] The Church’s extraordinary Synod on the family hasn’t gone down terribly well with secular pundits. It’s been billed as a failure on the BBC, which declared that gay Catholic groups are ‘disappointed’ with the inability of the Synod to make progress towards acknowledging gay relationships. Other groups are similarly disappointed by the Synod’s refusal to admit divorced and remarried people to communion. As Damian Thompson observes, Pope Francis probably has no-one but himself to blame, in that he allowed so much of the pre-Synod discussion to focus on these contentious areas. All the

The successful transplantation of a uterus represents the last major surgical goal in the field of reproductive gynaecology. This feat has recently been achieved by a team at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. The 36-year-old patient was born with a condition called Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) Syndrome. The condition occurs in one out of every 4,000 babies, and presents as the absence of a uterus and sometimes a vagina. The absence of a kidney may also be a feature of this condition. MRKH Syndrome usually manifests in late puberty. Because these women appear outwardly normal, the absence of a vagina or uterus will only be suspected after examination, and subsequently confirmed

Finally, just in the last few years I’d say, we’ve all begun to accept the role of nature in the great nature/nurture debate. Though we’ve squirmed and baulked, we mostly now do accept that genes inform (to a greater or lesser extent) not just our height and eye-colour, but our personalities: our intelligence, our disposition. We’re more like our parents than we are like strangers — and what, after all, was so very controversial about that? So now we’re at peace with our genes, here’s another mental challenge, a curious discovery by geneticists that’s even more at odds with our intuition. This one concerns what we’ve come to think of

The Disney Café is a gaudy hell on the fourth floor of Harrods, Knightsbridge. It is adjacent to the Harrods Disney Store, and also the Harrods Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique, in which females between the ages of three and 12 can, for fees ranging from £100 to £1,000, be transformed into the tiny, glittering monsters called Disney princesses. They look like the late Queen Mother, but miniaturised. They glide — or are carried, if very small — from boutique to café in hooped plastic gowns in poisonous pink; combustible cloud-dresses, made for arson. Their hair is tight with curls and hairspray, and topped with the essential tiara. They look obliviously class-obsessed

Rextail is a restaurant for billionaire children, such as Richie Rich. Its owner, Arcady Novikov, has already opened a restaurant for billionaire men and their spindly billionaire wives — the bonkers fusion Asian/Italian barn Novikov, which travels with its own angry cloud of cigar smoke and identity crisis; so a restaurant for children is the next logical step in the redevelopment of London as a playpen for plutocratic families or cults. Children are sophisticated these days, especially if they fly first class or tumble around private aeroplanes; most of the clientele at the Disney Café by Harrods (note the terrible ‘by’, a pretentious substitution for ‘in’, which I suspect has

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_11_Sept_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson, Tom Holland and Leah McLaren discuss how we can still save the Union” startat=50] Listen [/audioplayer]As I write this, I am sitting outside a weinhaus in Kaub, a half-timbered town on the wooded slopes of the middle Rhine. If you don’t know the place, I recommend a visit: the scenery is lovely, the hiking is fine, and the Riesling is great (they have to handpick the grapes, like peasants in a Brueghel painting, because the river-ine vineyards are too steep for machines). But there is another reason to make the agreeable journey to Kaub: it’s a brilliant place to contemplate the mysteries of nationalism and national

No household that contains a 13-year-old boy is eternally tranquil. There had been a bit of temperament that evening, an outright refusal to go to bed, hard words for his mother and his father, and trickiest of all, an attitude that seemed to deny not only our parenthood but our humanity. Then the dam broke, and that was better but more exhausting. Still, at last he was in bed and at peace and the world was easy again. So I poured drinks for us both and raised my glass: ‘Dawkins was right,’ I said. And my wife laughed and agreed. Thank God for jokes, eh? What would life be without