Family

Monday

Alec Marsh

The purgatory of soft play

Are you familiar with the child-focused phenomenon generally known as soft play? Often located in the windowless recesses of garden centres with an innocent-sounding name like ‘Snakes and Ladders’, these are compounds dedicated to the frenetic, ergonomic joy of children – assault courses for mites, with slides, chutes, ball baths and various dangling hazards all swathed in gaudy soft foam-wrapped plastic. On paper, soft play sounds like fun: what could be more enjoyable than watching your tiny ones zipping gleefully down slides in an ultra-safe environment, one where there’s even compulsory armbands for accompanying adults and locked doors to keep out perverts? What’s more, it’s an environment where your little

Mark Piggott

Spare a thought for ‘Generation Sandwich’

Sunday was fairly typical. The police picked up Mum, 73, wandering in distress near Halifax bus station, cold, disorientated and lost. Son, 15, was walking with a friend in north London when two older boys stopped them and demanded to know if they were dealing drugs before scrolling through their phones to check. Daughter, 18 was determined to go see her boyfriend despite feeling ill and Dad, 77, sat in a pub on the Yorkshire Moors nursing a pint of ale and a failing heart. While all this was going on, I was mopping floors, cleaning dishes, hanging out washing, and trying to write a book. When Son, 15 arrived

Monday

Dave Seminara

Will child-free flights take off?

At first glance, I wasn’t sure if an email I got recently about ‘adults-only flights’ was a joke. I’m a parent of two teenage boys who has observed with dismay the growing intolerance for children in the public square in recent years. But I’d never heard anything like this. So I reviewed the study of 1,000 adults conducted by PhotoAID, and while I don’t know how scientific it was given that it was carried out by a company that sells passport and visa photos, the results are striking. Eight in ten survey respondents said they want adult-only flights, and 64 per cent said they’re willing to pay a premium of 10 to

Tuesday

Stephen Arnell

10 films about brothers at war

Sibling rivalry is nothing new, as the Old Testament’s story of Cain and Abel attests. Back in 1966, director John Huston cast hellraiser Richard Harris as fratricidal bad boy Cain in The Bible: In the Beginning. Years later, Ray Winstone played Cain’s even naughtier descendent Tubal-Cain in Darren Aronofsky’s decidedly odd Noah (2014). 2009 also saw the tale of Cain and Abel recounted more jocularly in Year One (2009), with David Cross and Paul Rudd as the feuding brothers. Of course, the Biblical duo’s argument was settled in a more lethal way than Harry and William’s ‘dog bowl brawl’. Moving to the 17th century, rivalry between identical royal twins was

Wednesday

Josie Cox

The hyper-competitive world of New York parenting

I stumbled upon it in one of the darkest corners of the internet: a Facebook parenting group. The mother’s intentions were pure, I tried to tell myself. But I couldn’t help feeling exasperated – and even a bit saddened – by her post: ‘I’m desperately looking for a Rubik’s cube tutor for my son,’ read the message. ‘He’s four.’ It was June 2020. The world was in the horrendous early throes of Covid-19. Governments were struggling to contain the virus. Researchers were working around the clock to churn out a vaccine. Millions had already lost their jobs and their health. Millions more would lose their lives in due course. And

Thursday

Robert Gore-Langton

Why I donated a kidney to a stranger

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

Thursday

Toby Young

My Icelandic holiday with Kevin and Perry

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

Thursday

Leah McLaren

Where does a mother’s history end and a daughter’s begin?

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

Sunday

Frank Young

Parenting matters. It’s about time we were brave enough to say so

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

Thursday

Matthew Parris

The close friend I never really knew

I have just read an extraordinary new book. It’s by a close and old pal whom I’d count as one of my best friends. He was my lodger in London for ten years. His book is autobiographical. And I now realise I never knew him at all. In Don’t Ask Me About My Dad, Tom Mitchelson charts a life story that is entirely strange to me, and shocking. And yet the weird thing is that I know many of the people in it – or thought I did. His late father, Austin, who helped launch the Sunday Sport, I met and thought a likeable if flaky chap, and good company.

Thursday

Toby Young

The tragedy of being a QPR fan

Normal families spend the Easter holidays by the seaside or in the Mediterranean. But not the Youngs. My three boys and I took advantage of the two-week break to criss-cross the country following Queens Park Rangers, going to Sheffield, Preston and Huddersfield. We lost 1-0 to Sheffield and 2-1 to Preston, but managed to draw 2-2 with Huddersfield, which made it a good day out by QPR’s recent standards. I’ve always enjoyed going to the occasional away game, but this season my sons and I have tried to go to as many as possible to compensate for the closure of football grounds during the pandemic. Our original plan was to

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Elegy in a country churchyard

‘I love this old watering can,’ said my sister, sprinkling the miniature rose. ‘Though I do worry about soaking Mum. How far down is she? Do you remember?’ I said I thought about five foot. The country churchyard is sheltered by hedges and trees and the graves are decently spaced. On Mothering Sunday mown grass was scattered across the gravel path and graves and a chill sea mist billowed like smoke off the sea. Two months before Covid struck, I’d thrown my handful of soil in after her. This was my first visit since that day. The earth was still broken and heaped but now there was a grey headstone

Dot Wordsworth

When did brothers and sisters become ‘siblings’?

I never cared much for the word sibling, though I hardly knew why. The reason must be that it was introduced by a scientist, Karl Pearson, who in 1900 wrote of the ‘inconvenience of our language having preserved no word for either member of a pair of offspring of either or both sexes from the same parent’. So he reintroduced ‘a good Anglo-Saxon word’, and it stuck. It’s not quite that simple, for cultural anthropologists had, a decade earlier, adopted sib for a kindred group, apparently from the parallel German word Sippe. My aversion to sibling was merely its artificiality. We never used to use it in speech, but would

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I stop my husband spying on me?

Q. My husband has developed an irksome habit whenever he goes abroad without me. We have cameras outside the house which are programmed to alert him by iPhone when anyone comes or goes. As soon as I go into the garden I receive WhatsApp messages commenting on my activities, such as ‘I’m not sure you watered the garden for long enough’ and ‘You forgot to bolt the shed door’. Mary, I find this ‘spying’ annoying – what should I do? — J.F., London SW12 A. An internet connection is required to allow security camera footage to be accessed remotely. Therefore, when you wish to enjoy some privacy in your own

Thursday

Toby Young

What really happened when my wife left me in charge

I’m currently standing at the top of Brownie Point Mountain, having spent the past two weeks looking after our three sons while Caroline has been sunning herself in Barbados. I’ve been cooking, cleaning, washing – you name it. As if that weren’t heroic enough, I spent the previous week with our 18-year-old daughter in Mexico City helping her find a flat and a job. In other words, I’ve had no help from Caroline for three straight weeks. I feel so virtuous, I’m almost tempted to throw myself off said mountain. A place in heaven would be guaranteed. I daresay some women reading this will be thinking: ‘Why should you get

Tuesday

James Innes-Smith

Fatherhood is a risk men aren’t willing to take

Recent reports that half of women in England and Wales are now childless by their 30th birthday reveal a worrying new attitude amongst Gen Z. Parenthood, to the younger generation, is the enemy of unfettered frivolity. Young women, we are told, would rather live for the moment than plan for the future. ‘Being present’ has become the mantra of the ‘mindful’ generation who see autonomy as the ultimate expression of a life well lived. But how complicit are men in this myopic ‘me-only’ utopia we have created for ourselves? Are women actively rejecting the sort of men who would like to settle down or have the sort of men who once

Thursday

Frances Wilson

Howard Jacobson superbly captures the terrible cost of becoming a writer

Howard Jacobson, who turns 80 this year, published his first novel aged 40. Since then he has produced roughly a book every two years, including The Finkler Question, which won the Man Booker in 2010. Given that he was put on Earth to write, why the wait? This is the subject of Mother’s Boy, a tale of self-persecution in the form of a monologue which includes interjections from the ghosts of his parents and one chapter, recording a period in his twenties that he drifted through in a dream state, printed in a font resembling handwriting. ‘How’s the novel coming along?’ his father would routinely ask after Jacobson graduated from

Wednesday

Aidan Hartley

Why a church in Jerusalem is the model for all family-owned holiday homes

Malindi, the Indian Ocean When I lived in Jerusalem a long time ago, I often visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where the Catholics, the Greeks, the Syrians and Armenians had their separate territories within the sacred complex of Christ’s Calvary, tomb and Resurrection. (The Ethiopian priests were all unfairly banished to the roof.) Every year, one of the denominations would say: ‘The ceiling is blackened by candle smoke — we should clean it.’ And all the other denominations would say: ‘Noooo — this is a terrible idea. It should not be done.’ The next year, another of the denominations would also say: ‘The ceiling is blackened by smoke,

Thursday

Laurie Graham

The difficult decisions that come with downsizing

I’m perched on the bed reading an old Mothering Sunday card. It’s just one item in a box of miscellanea that I must sort and prune and I really can’t afford the time to linger. That box contains a fraction of what I have to deal with before I move house and I need to crack on. But I am sweating the small stuff. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. One of the legacies of lockdown has been a longing for more space. Across the UK, families with children are falling over themselves to find bigger places. It’s a downsizers’ market right now for those of us who feel

Thursday

Matthew Parris

The conflict at the heart of the migrant question

A friend, a Cambridge professor, passing my old college last week, was startled to encounter a young lady standing outside shouting something and carrying a placard exhorting Mathew [sic] Parris to [expletive deleted] off. He wondered if I knew what this was all about. I don’t, but suppose it relates to my Times column arguing (about asylum seekers) that we do not have an equal obligation to all, but rather concentric circles of obligation at the centre of which we stand, the first circle being to self and family, the next to close friends, neighbours and community, then to nation and, finally, to all mankind. The conclusion to this argument