Family

Area of doubt Hillary Clinton has said that if she is elected she will open files on the US military facility in Nevada known as Area 51. Some rumours which will almost certainly not be confirmed: — According to a physicist who claims to have worked there, nine captured alien spacecraft have been examined there. Another says that a small band of aliens works there. They are 5ft high, wear dungarees and came from a planet called Quintumnia, 45 years’ travel time away. — Scientists there are working on a 6,000mph plane called Aurora, a prototype of which has already been flown. — Workers are suing the USAF after their

According to figures obtained by BBC Breakfast last week, more than 500 people were arrested in England and Wales in 2014–15 for leaving children unattended. In the majority of cases, the children concerned were aged ten or under, but some parents got into trouble for leaving their 15-year-olds home alone. It’s hard not to conclude that the police are being a bit heavy-handed, trying to take on responsibility for something that properly belongs to parents. As regular readers will know, Caroline and I have four children aged 12 and under and we don’t see eye to eye about this. Her level of anxiety about the various disasters that might befall

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thespectatorpodcast-politicalcorrectness-budget2016andraves/media.mp3″ title=”The Spectator Podcast: Is PC a good thing?”] Listen [/audioplayer]Here’s another stock joke for your collection: Pembroke College, Cambridge, has cancelled a fancy dress party themed on Around the World in Eighty Days to ‘avoid the potential for offence’. One college has objected to the serving of sushi as ‘cultural appropriation’; another cancelled yoga lessons for the same reason. There is an inevitable backlash to this kind of puritanism — to ‘political correctness gone mad’. And it’s true: prissily expressed PC attitudes do often look silly. The problem is that, broadly speaking, they’re also right. I know this with immense certainty. Without the prevailing wind of political correctness

Have you seen Spectre, the latest Bond film? If not, the opening sequence is terrific. Lots of action and excitement. The whole film is full of stunts and thrills. But after watching it, I realised there was something missing: joy, or joie de vivre. Daniel Craig plays Bond like an android who has spent too much time muscle-building instead of having a good time. Contrast Spectre with From Russia With Love, one of the early Bond films. The first scene in which we see Sean Connery as Bond, he is humorous and amorous as he snogs a beautiful woman in a punt moored at the side of a river. He

Ever since my teens I’ve hated Christmas, but last year something happened which made me change my mind. On 20th December, my teenage son was struck down by bacterial meningitis. No rash, no stiff neck. He’d been off school the day before but we all thought it was just a nasty cold. By the evening he seemed to be on the mend. He wolfed down a huge supper and sat up on the sofa, watching TV, tormenting his little sister. In the small hours he started throwing up. He became incoherent, then unresponsive. By the time the ambulance arrived he was like a statue. By the morning he was in

For the Spectator’s Christmas survey, we asked for some favourite seasonal rituals – and what to avoid at Christmas. Helen Lederer I enjoy the annual eating of chocolate money on Christmas Eve — it has been bought to be stuffed in the toe of each stocking — and then having to do a search of all the sweet shops for replacements, by which time everyone has sold out of chocolate coins. Sometimes two trips are required if the second lot also gets eaten before the stocking is handed over. Playing a board game that has not been road-tested is always a bad idea. My worst one was a charity-shop purchase for wine snobs, which

William Brown had the right idea about Christmas lists. Under the heading ‘Things I Want for Christmas’, he requests: a bicycle, a gramophone, a pony, a snake, a monkey, a bugal, a trumpit, a red Injun uniform, a lot of sweets, a lot of books. The Christmas list, as William so ably demonstrates, is a rare opportunity to be shamelessly greedy. I don’t hold with the Tiny Tim business of ‘God Bless Us Every One’. God Shower Us With Goodies, I say. When my brother and I were young we were fascinated by ‘Santa Baby’, that hymn to consumerism performed first by Eartha Kitt and later by every popette from Kylie

After ten days away, I spent last Friday at home alone, catching up on washing, shopping for cat food, answering emails. Quotidian stuff. An early dinner with one of my sons, and I was in bed at a decent hour. Checking Twitter, I began to realise that a grim spectacle was unfolding in Paris. Soon enough, on-the-ground reportage was joined by rumour, inaccuracy and blatant misinformation. That’s the problem with ‘rolling news’ — and Twitter has become part of that industry. On the TV, the reports were more measured but far less immediate, with repetitious footage of police cars and emergency workers. Twitter was the more immersive and pulsating place