Mary Wakefield

Scientists at the Oregon Health and Science University have created the beginnings of a baby using not human eggs, but skin cells. My reaction upon reading this news was to try to fold it up and tuck it away deep in some mental crevasse where I’d be sure never to see it again, because the implications are just too grim; the potential for suffering too much to bear. What the lab has done is devise a way to persuade human skin cells to behave like sex cells (eggs and sperm) and to divide using not only mitosis, which replicates all 46 chromosomes, but meiosis, which results in just 23. Once they’ve discarded half their chromosomes, the skin cells can then be fertilised with sperm, just as if they were human eggs.

Those of us trapped in Mayor Sadiq Khan’s low traffic neighbourhood scheme are now obedient, resigned. We expect a car journey of under a mile to take 40 minutes. We don’t hope for anything more. On Sunday, around five o’clock, my son and I stuck fast in Dalston Lane, but as we settled down to wait in a mist of carbon monoxide, there was a commotion up ahead. Down the wrong side of the road, horn blaring, lights flashing, came a Mercedes G-wagon, matt black with that handy snorkel up the side, the favourite ride of north London’s gangsters. It was interesting how calm everyone was about it, how unsurprised. A souped-up tank of a car coming at us head-on, and no one shouted or beeped.

‘Good news for patriots,’ said one of our most celebrated national newspapers this week: ‘Your numbers are likely to swell.’ This was on the editorial page, where the opinions of the paper are laid out, and it referred to a poll conducted by ‘More in Common’ which had found, to everyone’s surprise, that British teenagers are pretty patriotic. About half of all 16- and 17-year-olds feel proud of their country, it found, which is more than their parents. It was an interesting poll for anyone considering the rise of Reform and how that might interact with the incoming slew of teenage voters. Interesting too for those of us in liberal London, trying to keep the flickering pilot light of patriotism alive in our children’s tiny, K-pop-infested minds. (What’s K-pop?

I’ve seen signs of life in the Conservative party – unlikely I know, but true. I had thought it a dead thing, dripping its life-blood slowly into Reform. But ten days ago I saw on YouTube a speech that a Tory MP gave in the House of Commons and… I don’t know. I felt hope. The MP was Danny Kruger, member for East Wiltshire, and as it happens he’s a friend of mine. I’ll say straight away then that this is absolutely not an attempt to promote him as next leader, though the post-Kemi era does seem to be approaching fast. For one thing, Kruger is a middle-aged white Etonian, cursed by association with the last two Etonian PMs. For another, from what I’ve seen of it, high office acts like high altitude on humans. The rarified air gets to them in the end.

Every week brings a new revelation about the Zizians: the craziest, saddest cult in recent American history. Eight deaths have been linked to them so far, including 80-year-old Curtis Lind, stabbed with a samurai sword, US border patrol agent David Maland, shot by the roadside in Vermont, and the elderly parents of another member, shot dead at home in Pennsylvania. What’s gripping the American press is that the young Zizians seem to have been such nice kids once. The leader of the cult, Jack Amadeus LaSota, has a degree in computer science from Alaska University and a father who still teaches there. Another Zizian, Daniel Blank, was a straight-A student, fluent in three languages, whose bewildered father said he was a model son. The Zizian murder trial is set to begin in October.

It’s disorienting but satisfying that Labour now accepts that Asian grooming gangs exist. Some of my left-identified friends are even beginning to share the outrage – over Qari Abdul Rauf, for instance, one of the nastiest of the Rochdale rapists, who still lives in Rochdale a decade after the first steps to deport him were taken. Rauf simply ripped up his Pakistani passport and couldn’t then be shifted. He’s cost the taxpayer nearly £300,000 in legal fees, but still has enough dosh to throw regular house parties and, it was reported this week, to start building a second home back in Pakistan. Pimping out children pays. It’s nice that the left and right share the impotent anger.

A new book by an American writer, Christine Rosen, details the way in which we are losing touch with the real world: the one we evolved in, as opposed to the virtual one. All the scrolling and texting means we’re forgetting the look and feel of life unmediated by screens. The book is called The Extinction of Experience, and if we get more anxious year by year, then it’s not just wars or the cost of living, Rosen suggests, but because we’re grieving for the real world, whether we know it or not. I definitely know it. I’m Gen X, so I grew up without the internet, yet like other members of my generation now find myself caught in the smartphone itrap, dependent and resentful.

I know an astonishing 89-year-old who climbs mountains, uses a chainsaw and has the muscular, vice-like grip of a gym-built thirtysomething. He refuses pills and painkillers and considers it vital to embrace life’s most horrifying experiences. Last week the astonishing 89-year-old tore his Achilles tendon (leaping into a moving car), was driven to A&E and referred for an ultrasound. On the way to the scanning room, helped along by a male nurse, he put his injured leg down by mistake and yelled: ‘FUCK!’ At this, the nurse turned on his heel and walked off, saying: ‘I don’t have to put up with this.

I’ll bet most women under 50 in relationships with men have found themselves wondering when on earth the man is going to get round to asking them a question. The man gets home. We ask about his meetings, his lunch, his colleagues, showing empathy and imaginative curiosity. Then we wait in vain for our turn. That sounds too passive. ‘Waiting in vain’ doesn’t begin to summon the way mild pique turns first to incredulity, then actual rage and despair at the man’s apparent lack of interest. ‘Tears are pooling on your collarbones again,’ my husband used to observe quite regularly on date nights in our courting days. ‘Is it because I should be asking a question?’ I soon learned not to say yes.

Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, has a new book out, a slim, thoughtful introduction to Christianity. But that’s not quite why I went to Cardiff to visit him. I went because, although I admire the superstar culture warriors of the right, there’s something Williams is witness to which they lack. Like many readers, I think Rowan Williams pretty loopy on most subjects – Brexit, Islam, immigration, the dreaded trans debate – but Rod Liddle always says that Rowan is a holy man, and Rod is right. We sit opposite each other drinking tea in his book-lined living room. The 104th Archbishop of Canterbury is looking amiable but confused. ‘The Spectator has been fairly ripe on some of my views in the past,’ he says.

My friend Rose likes a drink. She lives on the same street as another friend in Camden and three or four times a year, when the weather warms up, she stands on her doorstep, smashed, and yells at the world. I don’t blame her. Rose has been through the mill. She’s a slight woman and she’s suffered at the hands of predatory men all her life. Perhaps the occasional shouting irritates the neighbours, but it’s only the same monologue most of them paid through the nose to hear Mark Rylance deliver on stage in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem: ‘I, Rooster John Byron, hereby place a curse/ Upon the Kennet and Avon Council,/ May they wander the land for ever…’ During those few deceitful warm days in early March, Rose had one of her doorstep rants.

I don’t like cats. I don’t like their reptilian stealth, or the way their heads are set low and poke out from their bodies. I don’t like the constant showing off of their puckered bums, or their disregard for the normal rules of mammal eye contact. There are nearly 13 million cats in Britain – one in three of us owns them. There are roughly 74 million in the United States and until recently I found it inexplicable. Why would anyone choose to love and nurture a psycho that dismembers songbirds, often torturing them first in a casual, playful way? I’ve enjoyed in the past writing about the idiocy of ethical vegetarians who own cats.