Family

Saturday

Frank Young

Tory Bosses should realise the public back the family. Why won’t they?

We are likely to hear a lot about ‘social reform’ at Conservative Party Conference. This Frankenstein’s brother of social justice will be bandied around as party bosses try to define the government by something other than Brexit. Whilst we can expect the Prime Minister to super charge her socially reforming credentials one issue we’re unlikely to hear much about is the role of families play in these plans. What was once ‘the party of the family’ now struggles to even mention the word. On Tuesday Spectator Editor Fraser Nelson will chair a conference bun fight on this issue and ask a panel including Iain Duncan Smith and Cristina Odone why

Friday

Frank Young

The Conservative Party needs to be the party of family once again

Earlier this week, academics at Oxford and Cambridge were likely to be cock-a-hoop that their universities top international leagues tables taking both gold and silver spots. Britain leads the world when it comes to getting top places in international league tables of higher education. As a country, we sell TV shows across the globe and are cultural leaders pushing our soft cultural power; the Premier League is the most watched football league in the world; the City of London is the money capital of the world. Unfortunately, there are things we are less good at. In another league table published recently, Britain sits pretty much rock bottom when it comes to

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

The sinister power of family courts

It’s right that some children are taken into care. One case in point is that of Ayeeshia-Jayne Smith, the toddler who was stamped to death by her violent young mother in 2014. She was known to social services for all of her short life, from the point when her pregnant mother was found living in a garage, but she was never removed. This week, a serious case review found that social workers ‘missed the danger signs’. Danger signs. A nebulous phrase with numerous interpretations. In tragic cases like this one, the danger signs are ignored, possibly because it is tempting for social workers to avoid dealing with the most aggressive

Thursday

James Mcnamara

A clash of loyalties

If someone was to lob the name Antigone about, many of us would smile and nod while trying to remember if this is the one about the guy who shagged his mum or the parent who offed their kids. (Bit of both.) For those whose Sophocles is hazy, let me summarise. After a civil war in Thebes that sees two brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices, dead, the new king Creon rules that Eteocles is to be buried with honour, while Polyneices will be left outside the city gates to rot. Their sisters, Ismene and Antigone, have different views. Ismene — concerned that their social position is a bit shaky, given a

Thursday

Alex Clark

The man who disappeared

Walking out of one’s own life — unpredictably, perhaps even without premeditation and certainly without anything approaching a plan — is a common staple of fantasy, and therefore fiction. But why, when we spend so much of the rest of the time fretting about losing what we have and hatching plans to safeguard it? In this short, powerful novel, the Swiss writer Peter Stamm, suggests some oblique but compelling possibilities. Thomas and Astrid have returned from a holiday with their two children and begun the ordinary business of resettling: unpacking, laundry, a last glass of wine in the garden. As Astrid tends to the house, Thomas walks down the path

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 3 August 2017

Q. I’m shortly to host a very large family gathering. Everyone will be related to the same ancestor, so we will have at least one subject to talk about — but then what? We will be a disparate group, hailing from different places, professions, generations and walks of life, and with nothing much in common apart from our lineage. Most of us will not have met before. I am worried that the conversation will run dry as we cannot bang on about our ancestor for three full days. —Name and address withheld A. I note you live within driving distance of Bishop Auckland, so during August you can give your

Thursday

Taki

High Life | 27 July 2017

Greece   I am surfing along the Cycladic islands on Puritan, a 125ft classic that was launched in 1929 by John Alden and has remained among the most beautiful sailing boats ever. Everything on board is original, including the MoMC, my two grandchildren and my son. I boarded her at Porto Heli, where the granddaughter of Aleko Goulandris was married last week in a two-night bash I shall not soon forget. It was a mixture of young and old, Marietta Chandris being in her very early thirties, the groom the same age. I was among the oldest people there, a repeat performance that is getting me down sooner rather than

Thursday

Patrick Skene-Catling

Verse and worse

Molly Brodak, a fair, young Polish-American born in Michigan, is a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. Iowa: that hotbed of academic creative writing! Her poems, published in A Little Middle of the Night, are intensely private, pointillist compositions of unconnected images. Now, teaching at Emory University in Atlanta, she has written her first book of prose, which is entirely different, an intimate communication in clear language of shocking candour. Without any evident self-pity, it is as frankly accusative and confessional as an ideal patient’s revelations on a psychiatric couch. Molly analyses her family and herself, evidently achieving understanding, perhaps even forgiveness, of some excruciating emotional entanglements. She presents a

Thursday

Lewis Jones

Three for the road

One of the great challenges in life, writes Richard Ford in Between Them, ‘is to know our parents fully — assuming they survive long enough, are worth knowing and it is physically possible’. Leaving aside the question of whether we can ever know anyone fully, Ford’s knowledge of his parents, Parker and Edna, was limited. They did not survive long enough, or at least his father didn’t. Soon after Ford’s 16th birthday, his father ‘came awake in his bed on a Saturday morning and died’, aged 55, of a heart attack, as Richard administered CPR. Nor were they particularly worth knowing, whatever that means; his description of them as ‘country

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Not-so-sweet 16

I like novelists who don’t try to do everything in their novels, but just to do something well. This is what Francesca Segal achieves in The Awkward Age, published four years after her book, The Innocents, won the Costa First Novel Award. She takes six characters — widowed, middle-aged Julia, her teenage daughter Gwen, her grandparents-in-law Philip and Iris, her new American boyfriend James, and James’s teenage son Nathan — and plonks them in sturdy houses in Hampstead, sets the clock, and lets the story play out. Gwen and Nathan are now forced to share a dwelling. Like a good piece of Bach, what unfolds has an inevitability to it but

Thursday

Jude Cook

Appointment with death

It’s reassuring that of Ed Docx’s three admirably eclectic, though sometimes uneven, previous novels, Let Go My Hand most resembles the capacious, Booker long-listed Self-Help. Like that book, this is fiction with heft and moral nuance; a novel that gets its hands dirty in the soiled laundry basket of family secrets and resentments. As such, it’s his most universal, moving and resonant work to date. Appropriately for a book whose title is taken from Gloucester’s impassioned command to Edgar in King Lear, the story begins at Dover, with the narrator Lou and his 71-year-old academic father Larry (‘one of the prophets of the new literary theory’), about to embark on

Wednesday

Toby Young

Why Parcs life is not for me

Against my better judgment, I agreed to go to Center Parcs for an Easter weekend break. We chose the one in Sherwood Forest, not because of any sentimental attachment to Robin Hood, but because it was the most inexpensive. Even then, it was hardly cheap: £804 for three nights and that didn’t include breakfast. First, the good news. I was sceptical about the website’s promise of free Wi-Fi, imaging it would be similar to the ‘free Wi-Fi’ on Virgin Trains, but it actually worked. The connection speed was impressive, as good as my set-up at home, and it didn’t matter where you were in the resort, as far as I

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Eat at Joe’s

It is rare for me to write a love letter to a London restaurant, but Joe Allen, which is 40 this year, deserves it; if you have any sense you will throw off misery and go there now for hamburgers. It is not really a London restaurant, which may be why I love it, but a Manhattan restaurant (established on 46th Street in 1965 by a man called Joe Allen) that was transplanted to London in 1977; the idea of Manhattan, anyway, which is more vivid in imagination than in life. I like to imagine the cast of All About Eve in Joe Allen, talking nonsense about ‘the theatre’ as

John Burnside

The saddest show on earth

It’s the early 20th century, and two strange-looking boys, purportedly twins named Iko and Eko, are playing in a circus band in one of the many stopovers on the freak-show circuit running from Ohio to Texas. The brothers are ghostly pale, with thick white dreadlocks and red eyes — natural albinos who, when they are introduced by the sideshow huckster, are described as ‘ambassadors from Mars’ — and this makes them fairly valuable. Not as valuable as Grady the Lobster Boy, say, or Zip-the-What-Is-It?, a pinhead who had reputedly been found walking on all fours in Gambia (he was actually from New Jersey), but these ‘ambassadors from Mars’ are up

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 23 March 2017

Speaking for Scotland Sir: I wonder if it is wise of Charles Moore (Notes, 18 March) to assume — as so many do — that because they lost the independence referendum back in 2014, the Nationalists do not speak for Scotland? In the following general election Scottish voting virtually wiped out every political party north of the border, other than the SNP. Might it not be wiser to assume that the Scots had thought again? Ian Olson Aberdeen Birds, gangs and economics Sir: Simon Barnes is correct in his implication that the trapping and harvesting of small birds by criminal gangs in Cyprus is enough to make the average Briton

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 23 February 2017

Q. I’ve listened to the radio to deal with insomnia for years (Dear Mary, 18 February) and your suggestion of single earphones does not work well. They hurt your ear — when they haven’t fallen out of it. The answer is either a Roberts Radio Pillow Talk speaker (flat, sits under pillow, clearly audible through pillow) or a Sound Asleep Speaker Pillow (haven’t tried myself but has 49 good reviews on sleepypeople.com). Both cost £14.99.—F.C., Newbury. A. Thank you for sharing your findings. Q. Our 15-year-old daughter has, on paper, nothing to complain about. We both love her passionately and have only her best interests at heart. Moreover, we live

Thursday

James Delingpole

My poor Boy. He’s going to end up just like me

Boy is planning his gap year. Every few hours he rings from school to give me a progress report. ‘I’m allowing three days for Denver. Is that long enough?’ ‘We-e-ll, it’s pretty key in On the Road. Maybe five?’ ‘And I’m definitely stopping for a day in Farmington.’ ‘Where?’ ‘It’s where the Horace Walpole library is.’ ‘Oh, of course. Silly me.’ Actually, I don’t much mind where he goes so long as it’s nowhere near where I went for my gap year: Africa. I love Africa. I’ve had some of the most amazing, thrilling, dramatic experiences of my life there: climbing the Great Pyramid before dawn and seeing the graffiti

Andrew Watts

In praise of pink Lego

There aren’t many toy companies that could make headlines in the business press merely by expanding their London offices — ‘Lego blocks out Brexit concerns’ — but Lego is not like other toy companies. Last week it was named the world’s most powerful brand by the consultancy Brand Finance; this week the second Lego movie is opening in cinemas; the University of Cambridge will shortly be appointing its first Lego professor of play. For a company that, a decade ago, was losing $1 million a day, this is a remarkable reconstruction. But Lego has spent those ten years regaining ‘belief in the brick’, according to its new British chief executive, Bali

Thursday

Anne Jolis

A priest at the door

It was October 2010 the night the priest came to our door. The knock startled Tim’s dullard beagle into a howl just as Tim’s mother was serving up dinner. She and her husband had flown in from New York a few weeks earlier to care for their dying son. Tim and I had moved to London the year before. Our friends — newsroom colleagues — visited sometimes, though only with advance notice. Tim’s brain tumour had severely blunted his wit. I was prone to crying jags. As a couple, we did not inspire drop-ins. Tim’s mother told us to start eating and went to answer the knock. The beagle ricocheted

Thursday

Elisa Segrave

The Atomoxetine year

Driving my son’s snake, Todd, a 3ft python wrapped in a pillowcase, to a Brighton vet in August was child’s play compared to the rest of what had gone on that summer. My son, who is 32 and has Asperger’s syndrome, had been served with an eviction notice from his rented flat, having been on what was effectively speed for the previous eight months. Since early July, when his three young carers resigned, he had been visited by the NHS mental health crisis team twice a day. This team, with great skill, calling on him in twos, had managed to get him off what — for him, and for anyone