Family

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

In praise of doctors’ handwriting

My baby and I excel at blood tests. He (tiny, jaundiced) stretches out naked under the hospital’s hot cot-lamps like a Saint-Tropez lothario. The nurse rubs his foot to bring blood to his veins, and I lean over the cot to feed the greedy midget, who squawks just once as he’s stabbed. I watch the drops bulge and drip and I puzzle over the NHS and its mysteries. Why do nurses collect baby blood in glass straws with an opening no wider than a pin? It’s like an impossible task set by a whimsical tyrant. Even more surreal is the way the NHS handles patient records. Because the midget and

Allan Massie

Clumber spaniels

For the first time in more than 30 years we have no Clumber spaniel. We have had five: Henry, Judith, Laurie, Persephone and Wattie. The last of them, Wattie the gentlest and sweetest of dogs, died a few months ago. We feel bereft. Clumbers are special: beautiful, affectionate, wilful, sometimes difficult, never dull. They take their name from Clumber Park in Nottinghamshire, once the seat of the Dukes of Newcastle. Different in appearance from other English spaniels — heavier, low-slung, with large sagacious heads — their origin is uncertain. According to one story, they came from France, being a gift from a French friend, the Duc de Noailles, to his

Tuesday

Ross Clark

The TUC’s claim that childless men get a raw deal is nonsense

There is, of course, no crime more dreadful in modern society than discrimination. And how dreadful that new forms of it are being uncovered every day. The latest foul piece of bigotry, it turns out, is employers favouring male employees with kids. According to the study by the IPPR, and commissioned by the TUC, today, fathers in full-time employment earn a ’21 per cent wage bonus’ compared with male employees who don’t have children. With women, apparently, it is the other way round, with mothers earning 11 per cent less than female employees without children. The research is based on a sample of 17,000 people born in a single week

Thursday

Claudia Massie

The delights of Hieronymus Bosch

If you hope to inspire an appreciation of Renaissance art in your children, look to Hieronymus Bosch. Ideally, your children will not be sensitive types, nor prone to nightmares, but if they can handle a little, or indeed quite a lot, of fantasy, Bosch will blow their tiny minds. My four-year-old lad, Luca, definitely not a delicate chap, was deeply impressed by ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ when I showed him reproductions. He remains unmoved by Leonardo and bored rigid by Giotto, but Bosch snared him. I should hunt down a full-size poster and hang it in his room. I read somewhere that Leonardo DiCaprio snoozed beneath one as a

Mark Mason

The game of the name

You have to pity the Welsh woman who was last week prevented by the Court of Appeal from naming her daughter ‘Cyanide’. An unusual choice, admittedly. And the mother’s defence — Cyanide is a ‘lovely, pretty name’ because it was the drug Hitler used to kill himself ‘and I consider that this was a good thing’ — didn’t help. But given some of the names being foisted on kids these days, Cyanide almost seems sensible. Naming your child was once simple: you picked from the same handful of options everyone else used. But modern parents want exclusivity. And so boys are called Rollo, Emilio, Rafferty and Grey. Their sisters answer

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Illegitimate

‘The Archbishop of Canterbury has discovered he is the illegitimate son of Sir Winston Churchill’s last private secretary,’ Charles Moore told us last weekend. As a bonus in this Trollopean tale we learnt that, by Church of England canon law, ‘men born illegitimately were for centuries barred from becoming archbishops’, or indeed bishops. The affair also reminded me of Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters, in which Bernard Clark writes to the Earl of Clincham on behalf of Mr Salteena: ‘The bearer of this letter is an old friend of mine not quite the right side of the blanket as they say in fact he is the son of a first-rate butcher but

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 31 March 2016

Area of doubt Hillary Clinton has said that if she is elected she will open files on the US military facility in Nevada known as Area 51. Some rumours which will almost certainly not be confirmed: — According to a physicist who claims to have worked there, nine captured alien spacecraft have been examined there. Another says that a small band of aliens works there. They are 5ft high, wear dungarees and came from a planet called Quintumnia, 45 years’ travel time away. — Scientists there are working on a 6,000mph plane called Aurora, a prototype of which has already been flown. — Workers are suing the USAF after their

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Diary – 31 March 2016

I’d like this to have been one of those Spectator diaries that gives the ordinary reader a glimpse into the sort of party to which they’ll never be invited. Unfortunately, I’m never invited to those parties either; and even had I got the last-minute invitation to scoff Creme Eggs at Henry Kissinger’s Easter shindig, I’d have had to turn it down. My six-year-old daughter fooshed most gruesomely on Friday, and I was hanging out at the Whittington Hospital instead. Foosh is a medical acronym for the sort of injury you get when you Fall Onto Outstretched Hand. It’s common with drunks; and, as in this case, keen amateur acrobats with

William Cook

Confessions of a Saga lout

It’s chucking-out time at my local pub, and the high street is full of idiots. They’ve all had a lot to drink, but they’re in no hurry to go home. They’re looking for a party, somewhere loud and lairy to go on to. They’d settle for more booze, but some speed or skunk would be even better. It’s a scene I’ve seen a thousand times, but lately something’s changed: these tearaways aren’t teenagers — they’re in their fifties and sixties. Meet the Saga louts, those feckless folk who refuse to grow up even as they approach old age. Saga louts are a pain, and I should know because I’m one

Wednesday

Toby Young

Why I’d like to be a more dangerous dad

According to figures obtained by BBC Breakfast last week, more than 500 people were arrested in England and Wales in 2014–15 for leaving children unattended. In the majority of cases, the children concerned were aged ten or under, but some parents got into trouble for leaving their 15-year-olds home alone. It’s hard not to conclude that the police are being a bit heavy-handed, trying to take on responsibility for something that properly belongs to parents. As regular readers will know, Caroline and I have four children aged 12 and under and we don’t see eye to eye about this. Her level of anxiety about the various disasters that might befall

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 23 March 2016

Q. I was interested in the advice given to the niece who owed £30 (12 March). A more direct option, which I have had to use in the past, is: ‘Have you forgotten about the £50 I loaned you?’ The response I received was, ‘I thought it was £30?’ To which I replied: ‘Oh. You hadn’t forgotten then.’ — V.S., Watford, Herts A. Many thanks for this forthright variant on the earlier solution. Q. I have from time to time had various discussions with my wife over the sleeping arrangements of my children with their girlfriends and boyfriends when they come home. Needless to say we disagree. I am rather

Septimus Waugh

Oh, what a lovely Waugh!

Fifty years have passed since the death of my father, Evelyn Waugh. His remains, together with those of his wife Laura and daughter Margaret, are buried within a ha-ha which is now collapsing into the churchyard of St Peter and Paul, Combe Florey. My nephew, Alexander, and I hope that these graves could be incorporated in the churchyard as only a dilapidated wall separates them. But our efforts have been frustrated by bureaucratic obtuseness. I wonder if the creakiness of the bureaucratic process has been created by the undeserved popular perception of my father as a monster. The portrait is based on his own diaries and my late brother Auberon’s

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

The scan said my baby wouldn’t live. It was wrong

When my unborn baby was a five-month-old fetus, twisting about in the internal dark, he was given a death sentence by a man I shall call Anton. We’d gone, my husband and I, for a 20-week scan at our local hospital. Anton was our designated sonographer; we arrived in his room bright-eyed and anxious, as even elderly first-time parents are. We looked to Anton for reassurance, but Anton looked only at his assistant, a sulky 19-year-old sexpot from Romania. The sexpot tried seven times to dig into the vein in my right arm, then began on the left. ‘Don’t worry, good practice, try again,’ said Anton to her, kindly. ‘No,

Thursday

Simon Barnes

In praise of PC

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thespectatorpodcast-politicalcorrectness-budget2016andraves/media.mp3″ title=”The Spectator Podcast: Is PC a good thing?”] Listen [/audioplayer]Here’s another stock joke for your collection: Pembroke College, Cambridge, has cancelled a fancy dress party themed on Around the World in Eighty Days to ‘avoid the potential for offence’. One college has objected to the serving of sushi as ‘cultural appropriation’; another cancelled yoga lessons for the same reason. There is an inevitable backlash to this kind of puritanism — to ‘political correctness gone mad’. And it’s true: prissily expressed PC attitudes do often look silly. The problem is that, broadly speaking, they’re also right. I know this with immense certainty. Without the prevailing wind of political correctness

Thursday

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 4 February 2016

Q. My husband-to-be and I both work full time. We are getting married from his family HQ and his kind mother has effectively done all the planning. She’s done it all with superb taste and efficiency so I am loath to be critical about the one thing I don’t like. She has ordered laminated name badges for all the guests, to be handed to them as they arrive at the reception, and is adamant they must be worn. She says they will help the elderly guests, but these make up only a tiny percentage: most are in their twenties or thirties. Do you agree that name badges would give an

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Fear of the baby-snatchers

Baby George was born into a happy family. His mother and father love him dearly. He lives in a cottage in a pretty village, with a six-year-old sister who adores him, and his grandmother lives nearby. His parents both have good jobs and his nursery is filled with toys. By most measures, George has had a good start in life. It was only when his mother was diagnosed with post-natal depression that George’s prospects looked bleaker. Not because his caring mother was feeling blue, but because in this, paranoid, post-Baby P era, the authorities take no chances. The slightest whiff of a mother unable to cope, and they swoop down,

Thursday

Caroline Moorehead

Laughter and tears

The Yacoubian Building, the first novel of the Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany, sold well over a million copies in 35 languages, was made into a film, and turned him overnight into one of the most listened to voices in the Arab world. What followed — Chicago, set in the city in which Al Aswany did his masters degree in dentistry, and some short stories — did not have quite the charm of his sprawling houseful of driven, troubled, passionate characters trying to survive in a country of extreme social ills. The Automobile Club of Egypt is a second Yacoubian, a saga built around an institution, rich in absurdity and

Thursday

James Bartholomew

Where’s the joy gone?

Have you seen Spectre, the latest Bond film? If not, the opening sequence is terrific. Lots of action and excitement. The whole film is full of stunts and thrills. But after watching it, I realised there was something missing: joy, or joie de vivre. Daniel Craig plays Bond like an android who has spent too much time muscle-building instead of having a good time. Contrast Spectre with From Russia With Love, one of the early Bond films. The first scene in which we see Sean Connery as Bond, he is humorous and amorous as he snogs a beautiful woman in a punt moored at the side of a river. He

Patrick Skene-Catling

Family divisions

The geological title of this unhappy memoir is an apt metaphor for fissures in the relationships between individuals of David Pryce-Jones’s extended family. Emotionally and financially competitive but interdependent, benefactors and beneficiaries, Jews and gentiles of various sexual proclivities are depicted grinding away against each other like so many incompatible tectonic plates. Pryce-Jones offers a candid expression of filial impiety for which Eton, Oxford and the Brigade of Guards surely cannot be entirely to blame, although it is true that education far from home, from an early age, has been known to piss children off, as they say. Young boys banished to boarding school may feel tormented by Oedipal yearnings

Friday

William Cook

I used to hate Christmas – until I spent it in hospital with my sick son

Ever since my teens I’ve hated Christmas, but last year something happened which made me change my mind. On 20th December, my teenage son was struck down by bacterial meningitis. No rash, no stiff neck. He’d been off school the day before but we all thought it was just a nasty cold. By the evening he seemed to be on the mend. He wolfed down a huge supper and sat up on the sofa, watching TV, tormenting his little sister. In the small hours he started throwing up. He became incoherent, then unresponsive. By the time the ambulance arrived he was like a statue. By the morning he was in