Society

Of all the window displays in Amsterdam this spring there was just one that stopped me in my tracks. I had come for tulips, canals, the tremendous Van Gogh and Japan exhibition, but the unexpected highlight of my trip was the sight of a dozen alpacas beaming through the glass of a shop front off the Herengracht. Nothing could have made me forget the rain like this jubilant herd. I have long had a passion for alpacas but had never seen faux ones quite so lifelike. These were made from real alpaca fur — brown, white, chocolatey caramel — and were proportionally perfect, as though a craftsman had scaled a

Why do so many women feel such a strong urge to paint? It has been troubling me for years now. There are hundreds of thousands of us up and down the country, not pros but dedicated nonetheless. We pay for classes, huddle around artists we admire; we head to the coast on holiday to try, and fail, to capture the wash of sky and sea. On weekday evenings we congregate in art schools and stare in a demented fashion at naked men and women, determined to master the human form. All around the world, there are women with watercolours locked in battle with household objects: flowers, lemons, bowls. People talk

I’m losing my patience. Not so long ago I’d happily wait ten minutes for a bus, or even whole days for the next instalment of my favourite television programme. It didn’t seem to bother me in the slightest that my holiday photos would not be seen until I’d picked them up from the chemist. I even went to the library to get information from an encyclopaedia. Life, in short, used to be a waiting game, and patience was not just a virtue but a habit. Now I wonder how I survived in a world without Google Maps, Uber or smartphones with in-built cameras. The whole direction and purpose of modern

When I was a child in the 1950s it was unheard of for someone to be killed by a dog. Dogs were rarely killed by other dogs. By the early 1990s, things were different. Dog-fighting made a comeback and the fad was for the ‘weapon’ dog, promoted via American gangsta rap. Staffordshire bull terriers were being bred in large numbers again and other fighting breeds, previously unheard of here, were brought into this country. In 1991, concerned about attacks, the government passed the Dangerous Dogs Act (DDA), which banned the American pit bull terrier as well as the lesser-known dogo Argentino, fila Brasileiro and Japanese tosa, all of fighting origins.