Culture

I’ve been in Los Angeles for the last week, and it takes a special set of occurrences for someone to return to the UK from LA and think that Britain is getting a bit weird. Yet we appear to have managed it. While I was away there was the row about Jacob Rees-Mogg expressing his adherence to the Catholic church’s views on social issues (over which he has no legislative control). Then there was a row about whether it is bigoted to see any differences between boys and girls, and whether children can or should ‘choose’ which gender they are.

We live in a society with a tendency towards liberal intolerance, in which the fury of the mob turns on anyone who dares hold a different belief to the mainstream particularly if they are from an unpopular group such as conservative Christians. But we also live in a society where some people who hold non-mainstream beliefs don’t feel they really have to think them through. Last week, I wrote about the difference between directing scorn at Jacob Rees-Mogg for holding unpopular beliefs which he is happy to justify, and directing scorn at those who hold unpopular beliefs which they aren’t prepared to debate in public, possibly because those beliefs are in fact half-baked.

We at The Spectator don’t ask for CVs when recruiting interns so we had no idea that our last one of the summer, Katherine Forster, would be a 48-year-old mum-of-three from Yorkshire. Our aptitude test is intended to draw the most promising talent from anywhere. But her writing up her story for the magazine has caused a minor sensation. She has been on the BBC three times and has been the subject of the lead Evening Standard diary story and is interviewed in p23 of today’s Sunday Times (who took the above photo). She’s an inspiring person with a simple question: why, aged 48, shouldn’t she roll the dice again? If we’re all going to work until 70, that’s plenty time to learn a new trade.

Were I to wake up one morning experiencing sudden doubts over my sexuality I don’t think I would turn to Mike Davidson, still less the Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries, which has been accused of offering a 'cure' for homosexuality, or anyone else offering gay cure therapy, gay conversion therapy or whatever else people call it. The very names hint to me of quackery, of people wasting their money on pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo. But then I am inclined to put much psychotherapy into the same category, along with all the self-help books imploring us to create a better self. But does that mean I want to ban any of them above? Not at all. If people want to pay someone to try to change aspects of their personality that is their own free choice.

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.