Family

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,

[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

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

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

For the Spectator’s Christmas survey, we asked for some favourite seasonal rituals – and what to avoid at Christmas. Helen Lederer I enjoy the annual eating of chocolate money on Christmas Eve — it has been bought to be stuffed in the toe of each stocking — and then having to do a search of all the sweet shops for replacements, by which time everyone has sold out of chocolate coins. Sometimes two trips are required if the second lot also gets eaten before the stocking is handed over. Playing a board game that has not been road-tested is always a bad idea. My worst one was a charity-shop purchase for wine snobs, which

William Brown had the right idea about Christmas lists. Under the heading ‘Things I Want for Christmas’, he requests: a bicycle, a gramophone, a pony, a snake, a monkey, a bugal, a trumpit, a red Injun uniform, a lot of sweets, a lot of books. The Christmas list, as William so ably demonstrates, is a rare opportunity to be shamelessly greedy. I don’t hold with the Tiny Tim business of ‘God Bless Us Every One’. God Shower Us With Goodies, I say. When my brother and I were young we were fascinated by ‘Santa Baby’, that hymn to consumerism performed first by Eartha Kitt and later by every popette from Kylie

After ten days away, I spent last Friday at home alone, catching up on washing, shopping for cat food, answering emails. Quotidian stuff. An early dinner with one of my sons, and I was in bed at a decent hour. Checking Twitter, I began to realise that a grim spectacle was unfolding in Paris. Soon enough, on-the-ground reportage was joined by rumour, inaccuracy and blatant misinformation. That’s the problem with ‘rolling news’ — and Twitter has become part of that industry. On the TV, the reports were more measured but far less immediate, with repetitious footage of police cars and emergency workers. Twitter was the more immersive and pulsating place

As a result of a ruptured appendix, I am infertile. The appendicitis was followed by gangrene and peritonitis, which permanently blocked my fallopian tubes and left me having to do IVF for a chance to have my own child. I have never felt shame about my situation but I have felt isolation and grief, both of which would be very much more bear-able if people were prepared to talk openly about in-vitro fertilisation — to dispel the taboo that still surrounds it. IVF in its various forms is incredibly common these days. More than 2.5 million babies born in the past seven years began their life in a Petri dish.

When I was pregnant, nearly everyone who’d had children asked me and my husband whether we’d booked our antenatal course with the National Childbirth Trust. Men tended to ask with a gleam of sadistic glee in their eye, and the question was almost always followed by a hurried disclaimer: ‘Ignore most of what they say, but it’s worth it for the friends.’ It seemed like an expensive and boring way to make friends: the courses are usually 17 hours long and they cost several hundred pounds. The NCT offers heavily discounted rates to people who can’t afford it, but for most of its pupils, the full fee is an accepted

In six months’ time, my son is due to attend an assessment day for a nursery. The details on the nursery’s website are deliberately sketchy — presumably to avoid parents coaching their children — but it seems to involve my son being observed while he plays and graded on the results of his burbling: it sounds very much like an interview. He is going to be two and a half. It is easy to be satirical about a child going for an interview at the age of two and a half — his PowerPoint skills are not up to it; we haven’t arranged a single internship for him; he doesn’t

Yvette Cooper treated herself to a morning off from the campaign trail last weekend. It didn’t sound very relaxing, though: she and Ed Balls, her husband, went for a dip in the chilly waters of the North Sea at Sheringham Beach. A strange fondness for cold, sharp shocks is certainly an advantage in the senior ranks of the Labour party, for whom the pain of defeat has been compounded by the spectacle of seeing tens of thousands of new supporters paying £3 to vote for the left-wing radical Jeremy Corbyn. Ms Cooper’s pitch to her party is simple: she is the only woman who can stop him. Corbyn now dominates