Society

I manage a small, not-for-profit care home in Norfolk. We have tea rounds, hymn singing, hand-holding and staff who know every resident by name and often even their grandchildren’s names. But we also have empty offices: those once occupied by our deputy manager, care manager (the job I now do) and general manager, all of whom chose early retirement within the past two years. They are not alone. According to the charity Skills for Care, the adult social care sector has 131,000 vacancies – the highest on record. Turnover for care-home staff hovers around 25 per cent, and growing numbers of managers are leaving due to burnout. This is the

‘Proscription’ appears to be the current word of the month. But what does it mean? The Latin scribo means ‘I write’ and generates a root in script-. Since the Latin prefix pro carried the idea of ‘bringing something into the open’, the noun proscriptio meant ‘a written notice announcing a sale’. In the 1st century BC, a culture of corruption, bribery and political violence in a fight for power led by wealthy dynasts with private armies at their back resulted in civil wars and the complete collapse of Rome’s traditional institutions. One feature of this collapse was to be particularly significant. In 88 bc the current strong man Lucius Cornelius

Few things in life are more French than a dispute animée about holidays. While the Spanish enjoy an easy relationship with mañana and the Italians savour il dolce far niente (sweet idleness), the French will incite a riot over any threat to their leisure time faster than you can say faire une pause. It’s therefore little surprise to witness the ardourof government officials in condemning childfree resorts, a rare but growing feature of French holidaymaking. Saint-Delis in Normandy is but one hotel offering an ‘ever more exclusive and peaceful experience’ with ‘absolute relaxation’ for only €334 a night. Much of this comes downstream of intellectual attempts to paint child-rearing as a

There are certain names of puddings that, if whispered to an Englishman of a certain age, will bring back near-Proustian reveries about their childhood. Rhubarb crumble. Bakewell tart. Sticky toffee pudding. The most naughty-sounding of them all, spotted dick. These, and many more, are often dismissed with the sobriquet ‘nursery food’, but in fact only the most well-heeled of dessert-munchers would ever have enjoyed such fare in their nursery. In fact, they were mostly likely to have been encountered at various fee-paying institutions, firstly as a staple of the boarding school lunch or supper. They then would have kept popping up in different guises throughout life, whether served at Oxbridge

The governance of Oxford University is plumbing new depths – and this doesn’t mean dons or deans, but the university’s 2,000-strong central bureaucracy based in Wellington Square. Everyone thinks of Oxford in terms of colleges but there is a whole other layer of university administration that has been steadily encroaching on the parts of the university which are responsible for teaching and research – the colleges and the academic faculties and departments. The latest grim example of the trend is a new consultation document from the bureaucrats called the Strategic Plan 2025-2030. The draft copy I have seen runs to a dozen pages and at the moment is only available