Arabella Byrne is the co-author of In The Blood, On Mothers, Daughters and Addiction published by HarperCollins.
Have you ever looked after a child that doesn’t nap from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m.? I have. Just to be clear, I’m talking about a 14-hour day with no relief whatsoever from grannies, nannies or DHs, the ghastly acronym that Mumsnet uses for fathers to signify ‘darling husband’. Next question: have you ever looked
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This week: sectarian persecution returns Paul Wood, Colin Freeman and Father Benedict Kiely write in the magazine this week about the religious persecution that minorities are facing across the world from Syria to the Congo. In Syria, there have been reports of massacres with hundreds of civilians from the Alawite Muslim minority targeted, in part
Do you Boom Boom? Or are you just Booming? Can Boomers Boom Boom or is it just for Zoomers? Can you Boom Doom? Hear me out: I’m getting to grips with the new vibe shift. In December, Sean Monahan, an American trend analyst, announced the arrival of the ‘Boom Boom’ aesthetic, which he described as
Love or loathe Danny Dyer, hard-man hooligan of Football Factory, EastEnders bod and breakout Rivals star, but he does talk sense. The kind of straight-up, geezer sense you can only get down the pub, a locale to which he is no stranger. In the promotional press for his latest film, Marching Powder, Dyer, when pressed
A third of van drivers under the age of 35 are privately educated – and nearly half hold foundation or university degrees, according to research published by Mercedes-Benz vans. These numbers not only suggest that the end is nigh for ‘White Van Man’, the apocryphal working-class, white-collar ‘tradie’, they also ask us to reconsider the
It’s half-term and instead of the Baftas and Anmer Hall in Norfolk, the Prince and Princess of Wales have decamped en famille to Mustique. Old pictures of Kate and Wills walking along the Caribbean seafront hand in hand and a young Prince George in a green polo shirt are accompanied by newspaper commentary detailing how Kate deserves a rest in what is thought to be her favourite place. So far,
It’s 4 a.m. and my German shorthaired pointer, Percy, is lying on top of me. This isn’t a giant infraction on his part. Percy and I have long shared a bed. We start the early evening as we always do – me reading and he beside me at my invitation, the light on his side
The signet ring is back. Perhaps, like King Charles, who has worn his since the 1970s, you think it never went away, but I can confirm that it did – sometime around the time of the New Labour government, when being seen as a raging toff was bad for business. Now, thanks in part to
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This week: why don’t we know how many people are in Britain? How many people live in the UK? It’s a straightforward question, yet the answer eludes some of the nation’s brightest statistical minds, writes Sam Bidwell for the cover this week. Whenever official figures are tested against real-world data, the population is almost always
M y husband earns more than me. A lot more. I am, of course, extremely fortunate to be in such a position and am extremely grateful, especially when a large bill arrives on the doormat. So what, I hear you say. And you’re right – this is hardly a newsflash. According to the Office for
Partridges, purveyor of ‘nice things for the larder’ to the well-heeled, will close the doors of its Chelsea shop for the last time next month. After 53 years of serving SW3 delights such as ox tongue, macadamia nuts and glace cherries, the shop, run by the Shepherd family and in possession of a royal warrant,
Eleanor Roosevelt said that the role of the First Lady was not a job but rather a circumstance. For Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, it is even more oblique. She is neither the former First Lady – since Canada does not endow the prime ministerial spouse with ‘première dame’ status – nor is she wife to Justin
The new year is almost upon us, and it’s time to dust off the taffeta dress and tartan sash and sally forth to the annual reel. No doubt you will have received a lovely stiffy in the post some months ago. Reeling, known to neophytes and the non-U as Scottish country dancing, is, I believe,
This week, in honour of its 70th anniversary, the Feathers Association released photos of youths aged 14 to 16 at its annual Christmas charity ball. Among them, a young David Cameron is pictured poutingly draped around Laura Stanley. The Queen’s son, Tom Parker Bowles, stands with his black tie askew, laughing at the camera with
At a recent drinks party in Oxfordshire, I counted five men wearing Nehru waistcoats. Not one of these men looked like he was paying homage to the garment’s namesakes, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Not one looked as if they were genuinely taken with Indian fashion nor remotely bothered that they were wearing the same
Time was, a Barbour meant one thing: the classic Beaufort model that stank of wax, wet dog, and had pockets stuffed with cartridges from a shoot. Naturally, the late Queen Elizabeth modelled it best, standing at Balmoral in hers with her trademark neckerchief. There is an apocryphal tale that, like all die-hard Barbour devotees, the
Ten years ago, I decided that I should stop smoking. Before this decision, I had never given it a second thought. ‘Want to step outside for another? Yes please.’ Who cared about the wind blowing in from the Urals as we huddled around a lighter? Not I. Had I been ready to quit now, a
Way back in the noughties, Charles Moore observed that the Conservatives could learn a lot from the Boden story. ‘An individualistic, non-hierarchical, girly, aspirational, southern, 40 per cent internet-based, middle-class business, laid back but hard-headed. Yet, at the same time, it is quite traditional […] the way of life he is promoting is instinctively conservative’,
To my enormous pride, my six-year-old daughter is an excellent reader. In Reception, she raced through the colour-coded chart of Biff & Chip books with ease and wound up bored. So bored that she took to jumping off trees with increasing exuberance each playtime. She needed to be stretched, the school decided, with only a
At long last, the day has come. After nearly two months of summer holidays, institutions beckon their children back for another school year. The television will resume its status as a post-school treat rather than an indispensable tool to fill the dead hours between events. The kitchen will no longer resemble an all-day canteen, and
