Children

It’s an increasingly familiar scenario: grown-up children moving out of rented accommodation and back into the family home as they save for their first property. For some, the idea of coming together under one roof again conjures the return of family movie nights and getting to know your loved ones afresh. For others, it will be a case of making the best of living in a familial and financial pressure cooker.   So, what are the ground rules for parents and grown-up children thrown together again, and what are the best ways parents can accelerate the moving out date?  To live harmoniously, charity Family Lives suggests agreeing upfront that the ‘child’

Boy is planning his gap year. Every few hours he rings from school to give me a progress report. ‘I’m allowing three days for Denver. Is that long enough?’ ‘We-e-ll, it’s pretty key in On the Road. Maybe five?’ ‘And I’m definitely stopping for a day in Farmington.’ ‘Where?’ ‘It’s where the Horace Walpole library is.’ ‘Oh, of course. Silly me.’ Actually, I don’t much mind where he goes so long as it’s nowhere near where I went for my gap year: Africa. I love Africa. I’ve had some of the most amazing, thrilling, dramatic experiences of my life there: climbing the Great Pyramid before dawn and seeing the graffiti

In Oscar-nominated movie Manchester by the Sea, Casey Affleck’s character Lee Chandler is shocked to discover he’s been named in his brother’s will as the guardian of his orphaned 16-year-old nephew Patrick. The boy’s dead father didn’t discuss it beforehand, and Lee has no interest in taking on the mantle of replacement parent. This position is all the clearer for Affleck’s character when the lawyer explains that while the boy’s expenses will be covered from his brother’s estate, Lee will be required to uproot his life and relocate to discharge his guardianship duties, thus setting up the movie’s driving tension and ratcheting up Patrick’s pain. Imagining the children we love

There are plans in place to tax horses out of British life. Proposed adjustments in business rates for non–residential properties — increases of up to eight times — could make vast swaths of the horsey world unviable. Life will be tough for top-end enterprises like racing yards and stud farms; it will be the end for the many riding schools and livery yards that exist on the far edge of the possible. This is a disastrous way to carry on. The horsey life should have vast and sweeping tax exemption because it helps people to enjoy life more fully and to endure it more steadfastly. It keeps the blues away

When you write for The Spectator, it’s tempting to stick to the more cerebral issues of the day. As money editor, this can include tracking the progress of Sterling post-Brexit, ruminating on the downward trajectory of house price growth or reflecting on the merits of equity release. Some days, however, that’s the last thing you want to do – Monday mornings being a case in point. We’re only a few hours in to the working week and already I’ve been invited to breakfast with the Austrian federal minister of finance, Hans Jörg Schelling, to an obesity lecture, a hotel show, and a FinTech launch. Sometimes I wish I’d never gotten out

Another week, another spate of barmy campus bans and ‘safe space’ shenanigans by a new breed of hyper–sensitive censorious youth. At Oxford University, law students are now officially notified when the content of a lecture might upset them. In Cambridge, there were calls for an Africa-themed end-of-term dinner to be cancelled just in case it caused offence to someone somewhere. It all seems beyond parody. ‘What is wrong with these thin-skinned little emperors?’ we cry. But while we can harrumph and sneer at Generation Snowflake’s antics, we miss a crucial point: we created them. First, it is important to note that young people who cry offence are not feigning hurt