Mary Wakefield

Complaining about ‘toxic parents’ has been a viral hit on TikTok with videos on the topic racking up several billion views. Only one of those views is mine and there won’t be another because it was like peering through a window into a cross between a padded cell and a charnel house. In video after

The first LNER train I booked on Sunday from Durham to London was cancelled due to ‘action short of a strike’. I hadn’t heard the phrase before, but I instantly admired it. It’s so impressively confusing. With a strike, you know whose side you’re on. You can look up the salary of a train driver,

Back in the late 1990s, when I lived in Dallas, Texas, I became fascinated by television evangelists. They were hucksters to a man, offering healing or ‘financial blessings’ in exchange for donations – usually a very specific sum that the Lord had revealed to them. ‘Sow a $73 seed into my ministry, and you will

I have a plan for my old age. Now that we all might live for a century or so, feeling redundant and bemused, it’s important to prepare and I have. In my eighties I will be a destroyer of drones. All drones will fall within my remit but my speciality will be hobby drones, the

If we rule out the notion that people have ‘gendered souls’ at odds with their biological sex – and we do, absolutely, rule that out – then there still has to be some explanation for the unstoppable rise in the numbers of young people who call themselves trans. A survey of secondary school teachers in

There’s never been an older generation that didn’t complain about the younger one. Parents tut and fuss over errant youth. That’s the way of it. But in the end the kids come around. Swingers grow into Karens. The wild child pays his bills. But kids these days… they do seem different. It’s not just that

On the smooth marble concourse by the exit doors at Heathrow Airport I met my first cleaning robot. It was purple, made by a company called Mitie and about waist-height – the size and shape of a park bin. It ran on wheels, dragging a grubby mop behind it, and it was polite. As my

I was having tea with my neighbour in her second-floor flat when a man, a stranger, appeared in the room. This is quite a regular occurrence at Alice’s. She’s deaf and she can’t really walk so any number of agency staff have access to her front-door key. They materialise wearing gloves and usually a face

I am actively contributing to the decline of the West and to the collapse of our civilisation. I realised this last week when I found myself standing behind a metal turnstile in the French Alps watching my smallish son, on the other side of the turnstile, step into a bubble lift going up the mountain

After years of blissful indifference, finally I’m scared of AI. I’ve been complacent, slept soundly beside my husband as he stares and mutters, sleepless with anxiety about robots. But now I’m frightened too. What happened was this. The sound of a person you love goes straight to your heart. You respond instinctively and emotionally A

It was announced last week that another gender has been added to the list: nominalgender. Most news sites reported this in the sort of proud way a zoo might announce the birth of an exciting animal, a baby Komodo dragon maybe – as if the gender had somehow hatched and was waiting to be adopted.

I have a puzzle for the Metropolitan police – a mystery that only they can solve. Why, if the Met is so short-staffed, do they hang around in groups? Why do officers clump? Why are some crimes completely ignored, but at other minor incidents the Met appear en masse? In London side streets I come across

When the mist lifts and we can see clearly the carnage caused by the trans madness, and we blink and wonder what in God’s name we did to our kids, I hope we recognise the true heroes of the saga. By this I don’t mean the Jordan Peterson types or even J.K. Rowling, so much

If I could make a new year’s resolution for everyone in the English–speaking world, it would be that we all agree never to use the phrase ‘making memories’ again, or to think about life in terms of making memories, let alone post a photo with the hashtag #makingmemories. All of a sudden, all across the