Melanie McDonagh

When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island he declared triumphantly that if it wasn’t a winner with boys, then he didn’t know what boys were like. And it was indeed the perfect boys’ book; pirates, a map, treasure, a boy hero, black-hearted villains and gore. Perfect. It was, therefore, with mixed feelings that I sat through the National Theatre's feminist take on Treasure Island last night. On the bright side, the set was phenomenal, a cavernous structure like a whale’s ribcage enclosing the action, with the ribs descending like some sort of swamp creature. In fact, Lizzie Clachan’s design - she had great fun with the rising central platform -  stole the show.

Please can we give Tristram Hunt a break? I’m right behind him when it comes to getting private schools to share their largesse with the state sector, and I mean, properly share. My children go to a little Catholic state school in West London just down the road from a terrifically expensive girls school, let’s call it St Peter’s. Well, over the last year, St Peter’s burnished its credentials on the social outreach front by sending in some of its sixth form girls to teach Latin. My son was in that Latin club, and I can tell you just what happened. The wretched sixth formers gave the children strawberry Haribos to bribe them to keep quiet while they got on with texting.

There was an interesting exchange last night at the annual lecture for Theos, the think tank that does God. After a speech by the economist Will Hutton which paid tribute to Catholic social teaching as a way of looking at economics, the floor was given over to the two MPs, Jon Cruddas and David Willetts. Jon Cruddas was fluent in the language of community, solidarity and fraternity, precisely, as he said, because that’s what Christianity is about, and he is of Irish Catholic stock. He observed that the fundamental principle that you should do to others what you would have them do to you was universal – it translates into every kind of moral thinking. Over to Mr Willetts for the dissident approach.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_30_Oct_2014_v4.mp3" title="Ruby Wax and Andy Puddicombe discuss mindfulness with Mary Wakefield" startat=75] Listen [/audioplayer]The chances are that by now either you or someone you know well has begun to practise ‘mindfulness’ — a form of Buddhism lite, that focuses on meditation and ‘being in the now’. In the past year or so it’s gone from being an eccentric but harmless hobby practised by contemporary hippies to a new and wildly popular pseudo--religion; a religion tailor-made for the secular West. Think how hostile an awful lot of companies are to organised religion; to any talk of ‘faith’.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_2_Oct_2014_v4.mp3" title="Luke Coppen and Cristina Odone join Freddy Gray to discuss divorced Catholics." startat=1053] Listen [/audioplayer] The Church’s extraordinary Synod on the family hasn’t gone down terribly well with secular pundits. It’s been billed as a failure on the BBC, which declared that gay Catholic groups are 'disappointed' with the inability of the Synod to make progress towards acknowledging gay relationships. Other groups are similarly disappointed by the Synod’s refusal to admit divorced and remarried people to communion.

Was the chief operating officer of Facebook, one Sheryl Sandberg, involved, do you reckon, in the company’s exciting invitation to its women employees to freeze their eggs so they can become pregnant at their convenience, preferably a little later in life? I’m not sure that this was one of the recommendations in Lean In, her inspirational advice to women wanting to get ahead in business. Get stuck in, was its motto, and sort out the children in the fullness of time on your terms. She does that herself, you know, with a Shared Earning/Shared Parenting marriage with David Goldberg. The rest of us get on with sharing both those things by dint of it being unavoidable, but we don’t give ourselves airs about it. Anyway, freezing her ova wasn’t how Ms Sandberg got ahead.

Exciting times for those of us who are fatter than we should be. The feeling of being put upon may be, at a stroke, translated into full-on discrimination status if researchers at University College London have their way. According to academics at UCL who’ve conducted research into the effects of fattist stigma, ‘shaming and blaming’ fat people is counterproductive and society needs to confront one of ‘the last socially acceptable forms of prejudice’. Their research proves that although two thirds of British adults are overweight and a third are obese, nagging and jeering at them only makes the situation worse. Tell me about it.