Melanie McDonagh

Consider this: at a time when we’re agonising about the demographic winter and the unwillingness of Gen Z to procreate, something else is going on… There were nearly 300,000 abortions in the UK in 2023, according to the latest figures published by the Department of Health. So, whatever else the problem of insufficient babies is to do with, it’s not about a fertility crisis. Nor, does it seem, is it entirely about people not having sex. It’s rather a problem of women not wanting the natural result of sexual intercourse, pregnancy. If those pregnancies had or were to go to term, that is, if the babies in question had been born, we might have something near a million extra Brits in three years.

Time was, we took lessons from brute creation. Medieval bestiaries, books of beasts, weren’t simply descriptions of animals; these compendiums of their home lives and habits, mostly derived from a text called the Physiologus of the second century, were for the edification of the reader. The upshot of the research is that we are roughly two third monogamous, which puts us way ahead of dolphins and chimps 'But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee, and the fowls of the air and they shall tell thee', said the book of Job. The lion, being brave and kingly, represented Christ. Some animals had bad characteristics to avoid, like the duplicity of the fox.

Punctuation is a gendered thing. I’ve been trying to stop myself overusing exclamation points and it’s been difficult. Exclamation points are girly because they’re a way of taking the sting out of what you say; they make any pronouncement seem more tentative, less serious. They’re the equivalent of a disarming smile, a marker that says: “No offense!” You add them to the end of a sentence to prevent anyone thinking you’re being bossy or critical. They’re an economical form of non-confrontation. Women use them far more than men. Almost 20 years ago, a study in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication found that women used nearly three-quarters of the exclamation marks in electronic messages, but it identified the tic as “markers of friendly interaction.

Time was, you didn’t look forward to going to the dentist. Even for routine stuff, your highest aspiration would be to get it over as quickly as possible with as little unpleasantness as possible. Most of the procedures seem pretty mechanical, including having the most sensitive bits of your teeth scraped with a metal thing. That was what I thought before I encountered Anti-Ageing Dentistry at the Nejati clinic in Belgravia, where the founder – it seems wrong to call Brandon Nejati a mere dentist – talks about ‘pampering’. This is where a really expensive luxury spa meets dentistry and it’s the most obvious example of how oral care is changing.

We have it on the best authority that the meek shall inherit the earth and in the meantime in the case of Sarah Mullally, Bishop of London, it’s the See of Canterbury. She is a modest, very nice woman. I like her. I’ve met her a few times and she was always pleasant, decent and unassuming. On one occasion, she told me about being patronised on account of her dyslexia, which makes it tricky for her to negotiate sermon texts. She gave the impression that she’s used to being rather looked down on, though the men who do so may now take a different approach. She’s not an intellectual and wouldn’t pretend to be. She is, as she said in her acceptance speech, a listener; the trouble may come if she goes into a different mode, acting on decisive issues.

The Pope has given his first interview, with the news agency, Crux, and the nice thing about it is there are no surprises. Pope revolted at obscene wealth and the growing gap between rich and poor? Jesus Christ wasn’t keen on the rich either.  Or, as Leo put it when he was asked about growing polarisation in society: ‘One [factor] which I think is very significant is the continuously wider gap between the income levels of the working class and the money that the wealthiest receive… Yesterday, the news that Elon Musk is going to be the first trillionaire in the world. What does that mean and what’s that about? If that is the only thing that has value anymore, then we’re in big trouble.

The education system may produce ignoramuses (my daughter finished school in June, never having been taught a thing about Napoleon, the French Revolution, Julius Caesar, the Industrial Revolution, or any basic geography), but there was solace out there for the unlearned and undereducated: they could always listen to In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg’s radio exploration of fabulously random assorted subjects with three (formerly two) specialists in the field. Bragg has announced today he is stepping down from the show, which he has hosted since it was created in 1998.

Punctuation is a gendered thing. I’ve been trying to stop myself overusing exclamation marks and it’s been difficult. Exclamation marks are girly because they’re a way of taking the sting out of what you say; they make any pronouncement seem more tentative, less serious. They’re the equivalent of a disarming smile, the marker that says: ‘No offence!’ You add them at the end of a sentence to prevent anyone thinking that you’re being bossy or critical. They’re an economical form of non-confrontation. Women use them far more than men. Almost 20 years ago, a study in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication found that women used nearly three-quarters of the exclamation marks in electronic messages, but it identified the tic as ‘markers of friendly interaction’.