Society

There’s no shortage of parents who failed to think through their kids’ names before signing the birth certificate. The kid in the year above at school called Poppy Field; the elderly neighbour called Stan Still. As a child, I spent a lot of time laughing with friends at those misfortunate enough to end up with a dodgy name. I never expected to end up with one myself. For years, I was perfectly happy being called Alexa. Granted, no one had really heard of it before. Apart from my name never being spelt correctly at Starbucks, I was rarely troubled by it. Then, in 2014, Amazon had the wonderful idea to bounce

It would be fair to say that Piers Morgan was one of the top cheerleaders for caution during our initial response to coronavirus. Since March he has consistently urged his Good Morning Britain viewers and social media followers to restrict their daily activities to help fight the virus. On Sunday he tweeted in support of cancelling Christmas in order to deal with the growing number of new cases.  However Piers may be surprised to learn that he is not preaching to the converted. A Twitter poll by GMB probably didn’t produce the result he was looking for when over 70 per cent rejected the idea of a second national lockdown: Will Piers start addressing his audience

‘My water bottle has leaked in my bag!’ The 11-year-old girl was distraught. It was her first week at secondary school. Her neatly titled exercise books – hitherto in pristine condition – were dripping wet; was she in trouble? What would become of her? That happened in my wife’s class. She is also a teacher and has seen most things in her career. Flooded bags are a regular mishap. Usually, upset children are easily calmed when their teacher takes charge to put things right. But September 2020 has been a very different experience in schools. Socially distanced from the class, Stephanie was unable to offer any more than verbal instructions to

Back in May I wrote about a study by La Jolla Institute for Immunology, which raised the possibility that exposure to coronaviruses which cause the common cold could offer some degree of immunity to Covid-19. Scientists involved in the research had discovered a reaction to Sars-CoV-2 – the virus which causes Covid-19 – in the T cells of people who had not been infected with the virus, but at the time they weren’t sure whether it was a strong enough reaction to offer any effective immunity. Since then, however, more and more evidence has emerged of T cell immune responses against Sars-CoV-2 which have been provoked by exposure to other

How many people before Covid-19 had heard the term ‘social distancing’, still less knew that this topic has been intensively researched since the 1950s? The biomedical world contains the specialists in understanding what is happening at the point where a virus enters (or leaves) your body, but the space between people is studied by other natural, physical, and social scientists. A continuing problem with scientific advice to government during the pandemic has been the narrow base of recruitment to official channels. These are dominated by biomedical scientists – many of whom are indeed world leaders in their own fields. Other relevant sources of knowledge are, though, either filtered through a

Nobody loves a bossy, busy-body. A curtain-twitching nosey-parker or that most despised creature of the popular imagination and the playground: the snitch. Once such people were the comic baddies found in Ealing Comedies and sitcoms like Dad’s Army. But the spread of Covid-19 and the accompanying lockdown rules that began in March gave them a new visibility and voice. In April this year, police claimed that they received 194,000 calls from ‘lockdown snitches’. We’re living, one paper declared back then, in ‘The Golden Age Of The Snitch’. And now to help the government enforce its controversial ‘Rule of Six’, a new army of nationwide snitches will be coming to a

Cancel culture has come for Belfast’s finest son. Ulster singer-songwriter Van Morrison, consociationally worshipped god of Norn Irn dad rock, is under fire for a trio of new, anti-lockdown songs. One particularly on-the-nose number is No More Lockdown, which contains the lyrics: ‘No more lockdown No more government overreachNo more fascist bullies Disturbing our peace.No more taking of our freedom And our God-given rights Pretending it’s for our safety When it’s really to enslave.’ Sure, it’s no ‘Standing in the sunlight laughing/ Hiding behind a rainbow’s wall/ Slipping and sliding/ All along the waterfall’, but in the present climate the consequences of releasing a dodgy song aren’t limited to landing

Cancel culture has hit the world of tennis – again. Top British player Andy Murray has reignited a torturous debate about Australian tennis legend Margaret Court, and the court named in her honour at Melbourne Park, home of the Australian Open. The now 78-year-old Court, you see, is not just one of the greatest tennis players ever (she won more grand slams than anyone else), she is also now a hardline Christian minister who has made various anti-gay comments, and even had some warm words for Apartheid South Africa back in the day. Andy Murray, talking to Pride Life magazine this week, once again lent support to the years-long campaign

Matt Hancock has announced a £100 billion spending programme for mass population testing — his so-called ‘moonshot’ initiative, that would see 10 million tests delivered a day. Does this mean we need rocket boosters under the testing programme, fuelled by vast reserves of taxpayer cash? Thankfully, there could be a simpler and more pragmatic approach that not only saves money but would prevent a lot of harm. There are currently two main problems. The first is a poor definition of what constitutes a case of coronavirus. The second is a testing strategy designed for the wrong point in the pandemic. The government advisory group SAGE estimates that the standard tests used