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Sunday

Naomi Firsht

Why shouldn’t we call children ‘naughty’?

As we approach the final countdown to the school summer holidays and I am faced with the prospect of lots more quality time with my almost-five-year-old, and absolutely no idea what I will fill the days with, it seems a good moment to evaluate my style of parenting and seek out some advice to help the family get through the summer with our sanities intact.  These days, there is a whole animal kingdom of parenting styles to choose from: could I be an elephant mother? A panda, a jellyfish? Or the better-known tiger mum – usually associated with parents pushing their children towards over-achievement. This year my son has learned

Saturday

Katie Glass

What’s wrong with taking selfies in galleries?

There is nothing more glorious than an art gallery selfie. In the same way that hearing someone mispronounce Van Gogh lets you know you’re dealing with an autodidact (the best!), so a gallery selfie suggests someone who doesn’t quite belong in that space: someone who is ignorant of the etiquette of the art world and who is enjoying themselves because of, not despite, that. Complaining about taking selfies in galleries is so obviously a class thing (not to mention an age thing). Which is why it’s so charming to see Tate Britain’s director Alex Farquharson (whose name does not make him sound like a class warrior) enthuse about encouraging visitors

Friday

Penworthy

Four bets for today and tomorrow

It is so-called ‘Super Saturday’ tomorrow with a host of great racing from Newmarket, York and Ascot. The fast ground, which follows yet another week of fine weather, has reduced the anticipated size of some of the handicap fields but there is still a host of competitive racing at the three tracks. Before I turn to tomorrow’s fare, I want to put up bets for today’s racing at York and Newmarket. I generally don’t like to back horses on their seasonal debut because their fitness cannot be guaranteed, especially when racing against rivals who have a race, or in this case several races, under their belts. However, in York’s Group

Michael Henderson

Why are so many English people pretending to be Irish?

The Irish problem has existed for centuries, though the nature of that problem is not always easy to define. It used to be political, though relations between English and Irish people on a personal level have usually been harmonious. There are still political problems, because identity – the question of to whom we owe our loyalty – shapes lives and creates communities. But now there is a different problem, and it’s one-sided. Many English people are suddenly keen to present an ersatz Irishness to the world, as a form of civic virtue, to the point of claiming citizenship. Some claim to feel ‘European’, in a vague way. Others feel that

Arabella Byrne

Why we worship the Wimbledon Wags

Strangely, it was the Sunday Telegraph, not the red tops, that in 2002 coined the acronym Wags after staff in a Dubai hotel used it to describe the wives and girlfriends of England football players. Little did they know that the term would have the traction that it still does nearly 25 years later. Of course, when most people summon core Wags to mind, they think of the glorious bitchiness of the football Wags in their 2006 Baden-Baden Euro glory – all fake tan, Ugg boots, hair and sunglasses like Barbies on speed. Sadly, they don’t make them like that anymore. These days, Wags don’t need the papers to pap

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

A memoir doesn’t always have to be true

The news that Raynor Winn’s bestselling memoir The Salt Path may not have been the whole truth has been met with a mixture of outrage, hilarity and ‘I told you so’. Many readers have smugly informed the world that Winn’s journey along the Salt Path with her husband Moth (Moth!) was so obviously a work of fiction that they saw through it months before anyone else. The fact that they have waited until now to make their dissent public suggests they, like so many others, may have been wise well after the fact. Personally, I watched the news unfold with more than usual interest, because it took me back to

Monica Porter

I fear for New York

As a kid growing up in the Bronx and afterwards in the suburbs to the north, I loved New York. To me it was like the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz – vast, glittering and full of promise. It was where my family settled after escaping the nightmare of communist dictatorship, in the aftermath of the crushed 1956 Hungarian revolution. It was where we found freedom, democracy – what they used to call the American Dream. In later life, after I had left America and come to London, I made occasional return visits to New York and noted the changes wrought by time – mostly for the worse.

Davina Smyth

Being a prep school mum? I won’t miss it

My younger daughter finished prep school last week. These years are often billed as the best of one’s life. Indeed, I know the most charming 18-year-old whose pleasingly unfashionable dream is to teach at his old prep school – such were the halcyon times he enjoyed there. At my daughter’s leavers’ assembly, I shed a few tears – as did she, since she’s been exceptionally happy there since she was two years old. There hasn’t been a single day when she hasn’t wanted to go in. She’s had some inspirational teachers, and the occasionally eccentric nature of the educational offering has really suited her. (Another reason I cried was because

Tuesday

G.V. Chappell

Meet the Stepford Employees

In my first ‘proper’ job after university, selling advertising space for a well-known motoring magazine in the early 1990s, one of the few things that alleviated the utter tedium was the banter. Some of the quickfire repartee was ingenious. We were nearly all graduates, intelligent and articulate. Someone would occasionally overstep the mark, but we were civilised people and so self-regulating. We knew what was acceptable and what wasn’t. But for the most part, anything went. We didn’t need an HR function, because, in those days, were weren’t ‘resources’, so we didn’t need someone to police our behaviour. Lunch was often liquid, nearly everyone smoked in the office, and on

Nigel Jones

Why we wanted to believe The Salt Path

Like millions of others, I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Salt Path, an account of how a penniless and homeless middle-aged couple found their souls by walking the entire length of the rugged 630-mile South West Coastal Path around the Cornish peninsula. I also enjoyed watching the recent film of the book starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, as we all like feel-good stories about plucky people battling against the odds and winning. True, there were a few nagging doubts in my mind: if the supposedly mortally sick husband ‘Moth’ was really suffering from an incurable and debilitating degenerative disease, why does he appear perfectly well in the many interviews that