Mary Wakefield

In the school chapel every morning, bored and tired, I’d rest my forehead on the back of the chair in front and try to doze. The chapel chairs were dignified and sturdy, each with its own wooden box for hymn books and a flat top, carved with the name of a generous old girl. As

Just as Francis Maude was revealing his exciting plans for grand reform of the civil service, I received a message from a friend who once worked in Whitehall. In the subject field: ‘What fresh hell is this?’ Underneath, a screenshot of an email she’d just been sent by a civil servant. There was the name

Generation Z were the first to grow up attached to smartphones. They spent their adolescence bathed in screen-light and now they’re depressed and anxious. Should we have seen it coming? Until very recently my parent friends were in determined denial. Z is the best generation that has ever lived, they said, free from prejudice and

Life doesn’t always work out perfectly. You can make the wrong decisions. You can leave things too late. I wish, though I’m not distraught about it, that I’d had another child, maybe two even, and given my small son siblings. The tacit assumption was always that children are an obstacle to the noble process of

During the few hot days we had in June, I came across my first tub of dog ice-cream nestled among the Häagen-Dazs in my local supermarket. Scoop’s vanilla: ‘Tubs that get tails wagging.’ My first thought was that it was a joke, or perhaps for people who identify as dogs. So I looked it up as I

I have an idea for the Mary Rose museum in Portsmouth. My idea is for a Mary Rose Ultimate Experience – a funfair ride which replicates the experience of those 500 young boys and men as they sank with the great Tudor warship. There’ll be no need for expensive visuals because it would have been

Complaining about ‘toxic parents’ has been a viral hit on TikTok with videos on the topic racking up several billion views. Only one of those views is mine and there won’t be another because it was like peering through a window into a cross between a padded cell and a charnel house. In video after

The first LNER train I booked on Sunday from Durham to London was cancelled due to ‘action short of a strike’. I hadn’t heard the phrase before, but I instantly admired it. It’s so impressively confusing. With a strike, you know whose side you’re on. You can look up the salary of a train driver,

Back in the late 1990s, when I lived in Dallas, Texas, I became fascinated by television evangelists. They were hucksters to a man, offering healing or ‘financial blessings’ in exchange for donations – usually a very specific sum that the Lord had revealed to them. ‘Sow a $73 seed into my ministry, and you will

I have a plan for my old age. Now that we all might live for a century or so, feeling redundant and bemused, it’s important to prepare and I have. In my eighties I will be a destroyer of drones. All drones will fall within my remit but my speciality will be hobby drones, the

If we rule out the notion that people have ‘gendered souls’ at odds with their biological sex – and we do, absolutely, rule that out – then there still has to be some explanation for the unstoppable rise in the numbers of young people who call themselves trans. A survey of secondary school teachers in

There’s never been an older generation that didn’t complain about the younger one. Parents tut and fuss over errant youth. That’s the way of it. But in the end the kids come around. Swingers grow into Karens. The wild child pays his bills. But kids these days… they do seem different. It’s not just that

On the smooth marble concourse by the exit doors at Heathrow Airport I met my first cleaning robot. It was purple, made by a company called Mitie and about waist-height – the size and shape of a park bin. It ran on wheels, dragging a grubby mop behind it, and it was polite. As my