Culture

As a new school term starts, this often spells an expensive shopping list for parents. School uniforms that no longer fit, new schoolbooks and lunchboxes; research shows that the average parent spends £170 on each of their children at the start of a new school year. But although much of that spending can’t be avoided – after all, you can hardly send your child back to school with shoes that don’t fit – there is another area of the back-to-school routine where we might be missing a financial trick. Why? Well because the average child has £302 worth of gadgets in their school rucksack.

AN Wilson's charming, 1840s terraced house sits on the brow of a hill, overlooking Camden Market in north London. Walking through the market recently, he was much taken with a particular stall. 'There was a T-shirt for sale in the market, saying, 'Too stupid to understand science? Why not try religion?'' he says, laughing, 'I like that. The people who think they’ve demolished religion by these scientific discussions think they’re in the same category. The questions posed by religion are very different from the questions posed by science.' Wilson has just walked into a classic religion/science row with his new biography of Charles Darwin. The book certainly doesn't pull its punches. The first line declares, 'Darwin was wrong.

Football is theatre, that much has always been obvious; but it’s also business. And though the rules of the game haven’t changed much on-field since 16th century Etonians codified the random kicking of an inflated pigskin, off the field the game has been in constant evolution. This summer has demonstrated, once again, that football is as much about ritual performances of capitalist peacocking as it is about twenty-two men going head to head. As the transfer window creaks closed today, it is worth reflecting on an historic summer. Neymar’s £200m transfer from Barcelona to Paris Saint-Germain more than doubled the world transfer record and created a domino of wildly inflated transfers – including 20-year-old Ousmane Dembele’s £135.

As happens every bank holiday, the roads were chock-a-block this weekend with people on the move – many of them heading off to weddings at opposite ends of the country. It can sometimes feel as though weddings cost a fortune; and that’s just going to them, not even having one of your own. Perhaps the reason it feels like they cost an awful lot, though, is because they do tend to be quite expensive for wedding guests. Of course, it’s lovely to be invited to a wedding, and perhaps even the engagements drinks and hen or stag do as well. But the price does tend to hit your wallet quite hard. Recent research shows that in total, Brits spend more than £87 million a year attending weddings.

I just thought you ought to see this article, in case you hadn’t already. Granted, it’s from a journalist who has been demonstrably wrong on almost everything he’s written since the Iraq War (He liked the war. He thought the war was great. He said it would all work out nicely). But even so, this is a stretch too far. Because one Imam is opposed to enforced marriages, and some other Muslims might be quite courteous from time to time, that means Islam is not antithetical to western values? How does the chap exist within this delusion. When will the oxygen run out?

It’s a story we’ve become used to hearing in recent years. How millennials are the sensible generation. They’ve turned their backs on alcohol and going out every single night. They smoke less than other age groups, and have fewer sexual partners. And here’s another string to add to their bow – it turns out that they are also keen to invest in their retirement, even now, when that could be fifty years away. Research released today by Royal London show that auto-enrolment in workplace pensions schemes hasn’t put off those aged 24-35 from saving for retirement. 71% of those questioned said that they decided not to opt out of their workplace pension scheme, while 8% of those questioned did initially choose to opt out but then changed their minds.

Retiring to a warmer, more exotic, country is something that many of us dream of doing – and sooner, rather than later. One in ten people over the age of fifty are currently considering retiring abroad, with the main reasons being a better lifestyle, a cheaper way of life and of course, better weather than the UK. Who can blame us for wanting to enjoy some sunshine in our old age? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most popular retirement destination for Brits is still Spain, with other locations closer to home – France, Portugal, Italy and South East Europe – following close behind in the popularity stakes. But growing old abroad can quickly turn from a dream into a nightmare if you don’t plan properly.

As a tot growing up in a provincial proletarian Communist household in the 1960s, I’d been led to believe that socialism was colour-blind. But when I moved to That London in the 1970s, I quickly became aware that the non-working-class Left operated what was best described as Paint-Chart Politics – the further from white, the more likely you were to be right. This began in a small way, with reggae bands who believed stuff about women that would have had them condemned as fascist Neanderthals had they been white playing under the Rock Against Racism flag; in recent years, it has seen the Left support similar Islamist stone-agers just because they're the right (Left) side of beige.

It’s official: people who talk about the problem of Pakistani men abusing white working-class girls have no place in polite society. Raise so much as a peep of concern about Muslim grooming gangs and you’ll be expelled from the realm of the decent. You’ll be shushed, exiled, encouraged to clean out your polluted mind. That has been the experience of Sarah Champion, Labour MP for Rotherham, who quit as shadow equalities minister this week over her Sun article on the gang of largely Muslim men in Newcastle who last week were found guilty of 100 offences, including rape against women and girls. Published last Thursday, Champion’s article said: ‘Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls.

Stereotypes die hard. Consider the summer game, for instance. It is axiomatic to complain that cricket is a desperately conservative game, run by fuddy-duddies, inimitably hostile to reform or change or modernity.  If anything the pad is on the other leg; there are times when cricket’s rush to attract new audiences leaves one suspecting that the game’s presiding officers think the sport’s current audience is part of the problem. If you like things the way they are and have been you’re an obstacle to progress. Sometimes, at least in darker moments, you think cricket’s administrators are so caught up in and obsessed with the need to attract new fans they’d happily jettison the game’s existing admirers if that was the price of success.

With the Retail Price Index figures released yesterday, commuters are up in arms at the news that rail prices are set to rise by up to 3.6% as of January. It’s not all fares that will be affected; only those that are regulated by the government – and the price increase won’t happen until the government agrees to it being implemented. But around 45% of fares in England, Scotland and Wales are regulated, including certain off-peak and standard return tickets, and most season tickets in the South East and London regions. A 3.6% increase might not sound huge if you only get the train once or twice a month. But the people that it will really affect is commuters.