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Pupils are back in classrooms and parents can finally have a brief respite from worrying about their children’s excessive screen use — or, at least, worrying it is all their fault. This angst peaks each year in the summer holidays, those long, sunny weeks illuminated in large part by the blueish light from children’s smartphones, tablets and laptops. The beep and ping of devices triggers complicated emotions. In many homes, parents simultaneously castigate their offspring’s use of tech and are relieved by it: like some goblin babysitter, it squats in the corner of family life, whispering powerfully, turning children silent and glassy-eyed. The erratically applied adult phrases ‘That’s enough screen

The long table was set out under four beautifully pollarded plane trees festooned with coloured lanterns and red balloons. Twenty party guests. Above us the clear night sky was brightly peppered with stars. Three and a half years ago, Catriona fled to France with a broken heart and shattered confidence. She returned to the village where she had spent family holidays in happier years; an expat family friend had offered his empty villa as a refuge. In that lonely time she used to stand at the bedroom window and look out at those pollarded planes, bare and dripping in the rain, and wonder what was going to become of her.

If you were deciding where to house a convicted sex offender accused of repeatedly raping a woman, where’s the last place on earth you would put that person? How about a building full of vulnerable women, many of whom had previously suffered sexual assault and abuse? A building locked and secured so that those women could not get out and could not get away from that convicted sex offender? This is not a thought experiment. This is not a clever debating point. This is a simple factual description of something that happened in England in the last year. This is the case of Karen White, a multiple rapist who was

I’d missed the train, and the next was due in 45 minutes, so I popped into the nearby salon for a haircut, two months since the last one. Half Price Monday for Students, it said on a board outside. Inside, three women attended to three female heads in a spacious salon with the doors and windows flung open to the warm air and the view of the long-stay car park. I was directed to a chair, and presently a woman came bounding through a door, exuberantly, like a chat-show host bounding down the studio steps to wild applause. She was slim and tanned with strong-looking legs, aged about 50. ‘And

I was present in the room when Oscar encountered his father for the first time since returning from his fortnight in the south of France. Oscar doesn’t see his father often. I hoped that his father would be pleased to see his son and would kindly ask him how his holiday went. And if, as I hoped, he did ask how the holiday went, I wondered which of his holiday memories Oscar would describe to his father, and in which order. There was plenty to choose from. For a start there had been the extraordinary weather. Would he tell his father about the terrible heat and the car always like

The Villa Carnignac art gallery is located on a Mediterranean island off the French Riviera called Porquerolles. Purpose-built to show off billionaire hedge-fund executive Edouard Carnignac’s modern art collection, the gallery opened in June. Monsieur Carnignac hung out at the Factory with Andy Warhol in the 1960s, is a freedom-loving, polo-playing child of the counter-culture who famously paid for an advertisement displayed in the leading papers of Europe on the same day urging former president Hollande to lay off taxing the rich. The off-shore location of his art gallery is vitally important. You don’t visit Villa Carnignac because you can’t think of anything better to do on a Wednesday afternoon.

Is it now a crime to say “women don’t have penises”? A police force and a City mayor seem to think it might be. They are promising to investigate women who say so. That question arises because some women are putting up stickers in public places bearing those words. Some of those stickers are pink and shaped like penises. The point being made is that some people believe that if you have a penis, you’re not a woman. Other people believe that some women have penises. It is perfectly possible to be recognised in law as a trans woman while retaining fully-functional male genitals, and some estimates suggest the majority of

The entire Alpine village, contemptuously dismissed recently in an online tourist guide as a nondescript centre of old peasants and old dogs, was gathered under an awning in the single street for a festive lunch. Oscar and I squeezed along between long rows of perhaps 100 bent backs to the only pair of empty chairs remaining. The tables were covered with disposable paper covers; everyone had brought their own plate and knife. As we sat, our immediate neighbours greeted us with vinous geniality. They were a matriarchal middle-aged woman, a mournful girl aged about 13 with thick lenses in her spectacles, and two young men with comically drunk faces. Everyone

Me in a black polo-neck jumper looking sour; Oscar wearing a floppy hat; her youngest daughter nude and stooping to dry her feet with a towel; a mountain profile at dusk; a labourer’s stone hut in a vineyard; a copy of Augustus John’s ‘Robin’. Strangely inspired by John’s ‘Robin’, Catriona first picked up a paintbrush 18 months ago, and these pictures, collected and hung on the wall of the local bar, comprised her first public exhibition. They will hang there for the month of August and she held a vernissage to celebrate the occasion. About 50 people turned up from six o’clock onwards and mingled with about an equal number

The cave house next to ours is let out to weekly renters. A green-eyed German with a ponytail came out of his cave to stand on his terrace and look for the Blood Moon at the same time as I stood 30 yards farther along the ledge to look. There was no moon to be seen and we spread our arms and opened our palms to each other in that universal expression of frustration. I knew he had green eyes because earlier I had knocked on his door and presented him with two boxes of pastries, which I had been given, but Catriona cannot eat pastries because she is allergic