Mary Wakefield

One evening a few weeks ago, I was pottering about alone when I became aware of a feeling of great relief, of joy almost, without quite knowing why. When you spend every waking moment with a seven-year-old, it often feels euphoric to be alone, but that wasn’t it. By mistake, I’d left my phone behind,

‘Never do drugs, you’ll be hooked instantly,’ my mother used to say, and though I nodded, I never even considered paying attention. So I don’t expect my young cousins or my godchildren or my pill-popping friends to take a blind bit of notice when I tell them the same, but I mean it: don’t do

When the American director Errol Morris saw Werner Herzog’s film Fata Morgana for the first time, he was heard to mutter: ‘I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like this.’ I didn’t know anyone was allowed to live like this. Herzog’s new memoir Every Man For Himself and God Against All is astonishing

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