Society

‘Let’s play a game. Yohji or Burkini?’ a friend and fellow fashion writer in Paris lazily suggested. We were sitting by Paris Plage, on deckchairs on the edge of the river Seine. Tourists, families, screaming infants and the usual Paris bobos, clad, this year, in impeccably chic austerity, with hardly a square centimetre of skin revealed, all mingle. Our conclusion was that it’s hard to tell the difference between conceptual designer Yohji Yamamoto’s latest outfits and the modest styles worn for religious reasons. The burkini, designed in 2003 in Australia but barely known in France until recently, could also easily be worn by both fashion divas or the devout. Yet it has now become a subject of

Unseemly as the public blood-letting between stand-up comic Joshua Howie and his apparently less-than-absolutely-fabulous mother Lynne Franks undoubtedly is, it nonetheless sheds light on a powerful tension at the heart of many of the nation’s families. Because whatever you think about self-proclaimed ‘Golden parent’ Howie’s motivation for decrying his ‘awful parent’ mother (not very much if you ask me, but he does have a radio show to promote), a critical point remains at stake. Were Baby Boomers bad, selfish parents, as he claims, and are their successors better? One thing everyone can agree on is that over the last forty years the position of children in society has changed dramatically. Four decades

It is fair to say that I am never one to take the Polly Toynbee approach to things – or indeed, that of this magazine’s cover article this week – that in the sunlit uplands of secular liberalism, Things Have Never Been Better. But some news strikes me with greater force than most as being proof that we’ve arrived at the end of the world as we knew it. So it was when I found out today that the tradition of families eating a Sunday roast dinner – well, if not antique, it has been around for a century or so – is in freefall. There have been fifteen million fewer