Features

In his youth in the early 2000s, Emil Lundin became obsessed with the idea of recording the world’s ‘most evil album’. The lanky, long-haired Swede formed a black metal band and set to work. He faced an immediate obstacle. In making history’s most nefarious musical creation, he could hardly use Swedish, with its sing-song tones. English was also out of the question: he didn’t want to sound like Abba. That left Latin, the native tongue of the occult and, it is said, of demons. In a quest for suitably devilish lyrics, he pored over arcane texts. That led him to Latin editions of Sayings of the Desert Fathers – bad-ass early Christian monks – and St Augustine’s Confessions.

The British science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, proposed a ‘law of science’ in 1968: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Clarke’s proposition had a quality of rightness, of stating the obvious with sparkling clarity, that propelled it into dictionaries of quotations. The timing was perfect: Concorde would soon be flying over rock festivals packed with hippies obsessed with ‘magick’. Naturally Clarke’s readers understood the difference between aerodynamics and sky gods.

In King James VI of Scotland’s Daemonologie, written in 1597, he vigorously encourages witch-hunting and, in particular, the tossing of witches into the sea. Only the innocent would sink. As a way of identifying witches, it was clear and presumably efficient. These days, we have no such clarity. But witches walk among us. I’m not talking about women in black pointy hats, but something far scarier: the middle-class witch. In the past, she might have been called a depressive, a spinster or a divorcée. Now, she’s probably a middle-aged woman in the Home Counties with a TikTok account, a litany of spells and deep trauma. Modern witchcraft has always invited confusing cliches. Blame L. Frank Baum.

As a foster carer and adopter, I’ve spent more mornings than I care to count coaxing my 13-year-old daughter into her uniform and then into the car. She has fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, the UK’s most underdiagnosed neuro-developmental condition, which leaves her with a brain wired for impulsivity, memory lapses and emotional storms that no local school can contain. Each day, I drive her across several counties to the only specialist placement that can meet her needs. Four hours a day, every week day. While I’m grinding through the traffic, taxpayers are footing bills that could fund whole classrooms. Councils and schools spent a record £2.26 billion on special educational needs and disabilities – ‘Send’ – transport last year.

I arrived in Paris as an au pair in 2022. I was in my early twenties and armed only with GCSE French and a suitcase that could barely fit in my chambre de bonne – nine square metres of ‘characterful’ living space under the eaves, with a window just large enough to glimpse the Eiffel Tower if I leaned out at a dangerous angle. How did I end up here? After graduating, I wanted to immerse myself in a new city and polish my French. A few years on and I am still nannying, though I have returned to London. It seems I’ve become a career nanny by accident. But I’ve come to understand more about the different styles of parenting in the UK and France than I ever thought possible – and feel sure that British parents could learn a lot from our friends across the Channel.