Arabella Byrne is the co-author of In The Blood: On Mothers, Daughters and Addiction.
27 min listen
On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Nick Boles says that Ukraine must stand as a fortress of European freedom; James Ball reviews If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: The Case Against Superintelligent AI, by Eliezer Yudowsky and Nate Sores; Andrew Rosenheim examines the treasure trove of John Le Carre’s papers at the Bodleian; Arabella Byrne
Call me disgusting, but I like rubbish, and I like it best from a skip. I am also in good company. In his 1967 poem, ‘The Bin Men Go on Strike’, Raymond Queneau riffs on the fantasy of bins stuffed with works of art, the ‘Mona Lisa’ lying askew by the spent toothpaste tube, or
Why the hell not? I thought to myself as a friend invited me for a game of padel at her Oxfordshire members’ club, the grotesquely baroque Estelle Manor. As a self-confessed tennis head, I thought this might have the same feel of the restrained geometry and simmering tension of the tennis court that I have spent a lifetime admiring. I imagined a game
Please, make it stop. No sooner had I dug out my Barbour for the wet and windy winter months than I saw another of the brand’s distressing collaborations, this time with fashion designer Sir Paul Smith. Sir Paul, luvvie fashion grandee and founder of the eponymous line that began as a Nottingham-based shirt outfit in
As coats go, it was very nice. A dark blue cashmere Loro Piana number that reeked of quiet luxury. But for a man who once identified as a communist, it was laughable. It was 2016 and I was standing in the atrium of the newly remodelled Design Museum on Kensington High Street. As assistant to
I realised that the whole thing had become absurd when I was squeezed in by a female vicar for photos around the font of an Anglican church. There we were, all six godparents grinning back at the camera as the baby was held aloft (screaming) by its proud parents. But out of the six godparents
‘Always keep a-hold of nurse/ For fear of finding something worse,’ warned Hilaire Belloc in his poem ‘Jim’, about a little boy who ran away and got eaten by a lion. These days, Jim would be lucky to have a nanny at all given their exorbitant cost. Recent figures released by the nanny payroll provider
Don’t women have a bum deal? Not only do we have to bear children and make our way on the harsh plains where second-wave feminism and rampant neoliberal professionalism meet, but apparently now we must also perform ‘emotional labour’ for our husbands. Sorry: husbands and partners. This emotional labour has been christened ‘mankeeping’, the latest feminist buzzword. Dreamed up by Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a psychologist at Stanford, it describes the heavy lifting that women in heterosexual relationships do to keep
Best laid plans, eh? There have been a series of miscalculations when it comes Labour’s plans to charge VAT on private schools. First there was the pupil exodus from schools and the inability to recruit enough teachers to the state sector. Now private school accounts now reveal that parents have prepaid vast sums of money to
‘Before you ask, Mummy, the answer is no.’ While this could be any number of conversations that I have with my seven-year-old daughter, this one has a particular tang. It is the thrice-annual bargaining round that I do in the run-up to any school holiday in which I try to get her to go to a kids’ camp. An executive at Goldman
It was when I saw two other women wearing the same red-and-white-striped Boden swimming costume as me that I realised what I had become. Twenty years ago, I wouldn’t have been seen dead on a beach in Salcombe in a Boden swimming costume. I would have been topless on a riverbank in Provence, smoking a
Strangely, it was the Sunday Telegraph, not the red tops, that in 2002 coined the acronym Wags after staff in a Dubai hotel used it to describe the wives and girlfriends of England football players. Little did they know that the term would have the traction that it still does nearly 25 years later. Of
How do you solve a problem like modern fatherhood? According to Jonathan Reynolds, Secretary of State for Business and Trade, paternity leave is how. As he launched his new review looking into maternity, paternity, shared parental leave and financial support offered to new parents this week, Reynolds stated that he wanted it to become as
Many were the jibes when Boris Johnson announced that he was ‘thrilled’ to be back on the tennis court in 2021 as lockdown restrictions eased. ‘Bloody posho poncing about on a tennis court’ or ‘how typical’ were probably some of them. Sir Keir, naturally, made sure that he was photographed on a football pitch on
Bankruptcy, as Ernest Hemingway famously said, comes ‘gradually, then suddenly’. For Britain’s private schools floundering in the wake of the VAT rise on fees imposed in January this year, the gradual decline is well underway. Not only have an estimated 11,000 pupils left private schools so far in an unprecedented – and poorly forecast by
45 min listen
This week: war and peace Despite initial concerns, the ‘Complete and Total CEASEFIRE’ – according to Donald Trump – appears to be holding. Tom Gross writes this week’s cover piece and argues that a weakened Iran offers hope for the whole Middle East. But how? He joined the podcast to discuss further, alongside Gregg Carlstrom,
For me, it was the sideboard that did it. Originally the centrepiece of my grandmother’s dining room, upon her death it was passed on to my mother, who kept it grudgingly in her cottage even though you couldn’t get to the kitchen without banging your hip against its bow front. At some stage it was
Today, I go to Ascot. The last time I darkened the turf of the Royal Enclosure was in 2017, when I was heavily pregnant with my first daughter. In the photograph of my husband and me that day, I resemble a whale with a plate attached to its head, while my husband looks as if
28 min listen
On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Arabella Byrne on the social minefield of private swimming pools (1:13); Sean Thomas says that not knowing where you are is one of the joys of travel (5:34); reviewing Helen Carr’s Sceptred Isle: A New History of the 14th Century, Mathew Lyons looks at the reality of a vivid
50 min listen
End of the rainbow: Pride’s fall What ‘started half a century ago as an afternoon’s little march for lesbians and gay men’, argues Gareth Roberts, became ‘a jamboree not only of boring homosexuality’ but ‘anything else that its purveyors consider unconventional’. Yet now Reform-led councils are taking down Pride flags, Pride events are being cancelled
