Family

On the window ledge of my sister Carmel’s bedroom there’s a tray of cards inscribed with the months of the year, days of the week and numbers from 1 to 31. If you can be bothered to adjust the display every morning, you’ll have what’s called a ‘perpetual calendar’. I need to remember that I already have drawers full of Thompson memorabilia Sunday 3 October 2021 was the day Carmel’s calendar stopped being perpetual. That morning she woke up with a fever so alarming that her next-door neighbour called an ambulance. Before it arrived, Carmel changed the calendar; then she kissed goodbye to Otto, her Norfolk terrier, walked downstairs and

Boss pay Julia Hoggett, chief executive of the London Stock Exchange, complained that FTSE 100 bosses aren’t paid enough, and suggested that the gap between UK bosses and US bosses needs to be closed if the London market is to prosper. How much are FTSE 100 bosses paid? – The median earnings in 2021 for a FTSE 100 boss was £3.41m and the mean £4.26m. Three were paid less than £1m, 57 between £1m and £4m, 35 between £4m and £10m and three more than £10m. Two changed jobs during the year and so aren’t included in the figures – But the best-paid FTSE chief executive wasn’t even in the

The Australian morning TV host called me darlin’. We’d never met, but she opened with: ‘Good to have you on, darlin’. Be with you in a moment.’ Then the picture went black. When the live show returned to my Zoom screen, I was just another viewer, watching the three hosts seated on a couch half a world away chatting about the charity walk one of them had done over the weekend and the toll this had taken on his feet, which led – in a surprise twist – to a brief discussion of the strange internet hunger for images of feet. Somehow, the fetish conversation segued into a video montage

‘Hello, my current occupation is police officer,’ says Dex in a thick Danish accent. ‘It seems very adventurous and exciting to do, and to make a difference for the people I meet out in the world.’ Dex is just over 13 stone, around six feet tall, has very fair skin and blue eyes. His favourite animal is the dog. Dex is also a Danish sperm donor, and I’m listening to the beginning of an 11-minute voice-recording on his profile. On the website of the European Sperm Bank, which bills itself as ‘Europe’s leading sperm bank’ and is based in Copenhagen, there are hundreds of profiles like Dex’s available to British

Hungary is something of a bête noire in the international community. Viktor Orban and his government have had much-deserved condemnation over their treatment of certain minority groups, as well as undermining judicial independence and what many see as an attack on the freedom of the media.  But Orban’s administration has been getting something right, and it would be a shame if the country’s pariah status means its greatest achievement goes overlooked. Hungary has become a marriage super-power. According to the Marriage Foundation, which rightly promotes legal matrimony as the bedrock of a healthy society, Hungary’s marriage rate has exploded over the last decade, rising by 92 per cent. The country

One year ago I walked into an operating theatre, dressed in a tiny surgical nightie. Over the next three hours, through various keyhole incisions in my belly, my left kidney was cut from its pillow of protective suet and extracted from below the belt line. The kidney was rinsed through, put on ice and boxed up. It was then zoomed by car from my Bristol hospital to Birmingham, where a surgical team was waiting with a prepped male patient. Over the next few hours, the kidney was plumbed into the groin of a man whose name I still don’t know. He was in his forties and extremely ill. That evening

I’m currently on holiday in Iceland. I say ‘holiday’, but I’m with my three teenage sons so it’s more like being a supply teacher on a school trip. The scenery looks like a series of illustrations in a geography textbook – volcano, tectonic plate, glacier – but so far the boys aren’t impressed. ‘Every day is the same,’ said 17-year-old Ludo. ‘We wake up, drive somewhere, go on a walk, take pictures of a waterfall or a lava field, then walk back again.’ This produced murmurs of agreement. I told them they’d enjoy the sightseeing more if they looked up from their phones occasionally, but I don’t think this cut

In the grim locked-down winter of 2021, I drove three hours to Wales where I sat in an isolated cottage and wrestled with a memoir I could not figure out how to write. While I was there, my mother sent me a link to a two-page personal essay she’d published in a tiny but venerable magazine called the Literary Review of Canada. It was entitled ‘This Story is Mine’. After a preamble about feminism and #MeToo, she cuts to the chase: ‘In June 1964, a few weeks before my thirteenth birthday I was raped by a man old enough to be my father.’ My mother then went on to tell

The Duchess of Cambridge has been out and about hosting roundtables with very important people, discussing what can be done to support the nation’s pre-school children. Royal aides tell us she consulted ‘the sector’ to find out what should be done about the children who turn up for the first day of school barely able to speak or hold a pencil. What ‘the sector’ inevitably wants is more funding.  Kate Middleton has become the first royal to set up a think-tank, the Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood. This week she summoned ministers, civil servants and academics to discuss the findings of a poll: it seems most Britons want a