Culture

'Since you’re here...we have a small favour to ask’. These words may ring a bell for you – or just sound the spam alarm, coming as they do at the end of any Guardian online piece. For times are hard in Graunville: in recent years, the Guardian has lost tens of millions annually and, as a result, the paper has got out the begging bowl. Now its editor, Katharine Viner, has announced the latest cost-cutting ruse: lopping the paper down – from January next year – to a tabloid format. This is a great shame. Viner claims that the shrinkage would preserve ‘the same amount of journalism’ and went on to justify the change by saying: The role of a newspaper in people’s lives is changing all the time.

In August 1988, after weeks of practice, I created the perfect Mr Whippy ice cream. I was 14 and I had a Saturday job in a cafe. When the sun shone I’d get to lean out of the serving hatch, chat to passers-by and sell ice creams. Rarely have strawberry sauce and sugar sprinkles been so lovingly applied to such gravity-defying cornets. Go to your local cafe this Saturday and the chances are you won’t be served by an over-enthusiastic 14 year-old. Figures released to the BBC this week, under the Freedom of Information Act, show the number of teenagers with part-time jobs has declined markedly in recent years. Businesses wanting to employ children under the age of 16 need to apply for a local authority work permit.

Almost every day a new email pops into my inbox from the website ‘change.org’. One day they’ll be asking me to sign a petition to free Nazanin Ratcliffe, the next to lower the age for bowel cancer screening. Once you sign one, the requests keep coming. But the other day, one in particular caught my attention. Novelist and former SAS sergeant Andy McNab had started a petition entreating the Defence Animal Centre (the home of the Ministry of Defence’s canine training squadron) to save the lives of three former service dogs. The three dogs – Kevin, Dazz and Driver – were all due to be put down this week, a decision that had the nation up in arms. Over 370,000 people signed McNab’s petition.

England, Belgium, Tunisia, Panama: it doesn’t make an acronym as alluring as the ‘England Algeria Slovenia Yanks’ headline The Sun ran at this stage in 2009, but English football fans will have breathed a sigh of relief after being placed in a group we might call BTEC - Belgium Tunisia England Canal folk (Panama) - because it certainly wasn’t the hardest option out there. A cautious optimism must now seep into the England set-up. Encouraging draws against Germany and Brazil proved that this generation are more dour and pragmatic than the extravagant ensemble that preceded them.

It’s a summer of change for the House of Windsor — out with the old, in with the young. The Duke of Edinburgh has just announced that he is standing down. The Queen carries on, but she’s 91, and now the younger members of the royal family are expected to step up. For an institution that supposedly represents stability, a period of transition inevitably brings dangers. How will Princes William and Harry and the photogenic Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge cope? The early signs are not altogether promising. Nobody these days expects the royal family to heed Walter Bagehot’s famous warning that they should not ‘let in daylight upon magic’; that is, preserve the dignity of the monarchy by shrouding themselves in mystery.

Last Saturday, the high-street chain Paperchase ran a promotion in the Daily Mail offering two free rolls of wrapping paper. Nothing objectionable about that, you might think, even if the design was migraine-inducingly awful. I have lost count of the number of times I have been dragged into this ghastly emporium by my daughter on a weekend in pursuit of some overpriced piece of tat. Not recommended if you are nursing a hangover. Later that day, the left-wing lobby group Stop Funding Hate launched a fusillade against Paperchase on Twitter for having the temerity to advertise in Britain’s second-best-selling daily newspaper. ‘Is a Daily Mail promotion what customers want to see from @FromPaperchase?’ it asked.

Let’s take a moment to celebrate Lena Dunham. OK, so she stinks as an actress and her brand of self-indulgent, pity-me feminism leaves me cold. But credit where it’s due: she’s now managed to unite America’s culture-warring and politically divided population. Surely a Nobel Peace Prize nomination can’t be far behind. Loathing for Lena has gained such momentum it has spawned its own insult. It’s the worst insult that could possibly be levelled against a white, bourgeois but self-berating, feminist-identifying and politically ‘woke’ woman: ‘hipster racism’. For those struggling to keep up (aren’t we all nowadays?

Stepford students have been busy in recent years picking off targets from the past to vent their fury at. Cecil Rhodes in Oxford and Edward Colston in Bristol are the most high-profile victims of this attempt to wipe parts of posterity from the face of university campuses. Now, there is a new target: William Gladstone, the only man to have served as Britain’s Prime Minister on four separate occasions. Students at the University of Liverpool are demanding that Gladstone’s name is removed from a hall of residence. His crime?

There has been an equivocal reaction, wouldn’t you say, to the Church of England’s pronouncement that little boys should be allowed to wear tiaras and high heels at school, while issuing a helpful form to encourage teachers to report transgender bullying; the new rules, it says, are designed to 'challenge homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying'; (the second is new to me). Stonewall – which has changed its remit quite a bit from the old days when it campaigned just for gay rights – has welcomed the move. But as you’d expect, Christian evangelicals have taken a more dusty view. It’s hardly new for the CofE, though.

It’s interesting that everyone is making such a fuss about this ‘dangerous wild lynx’ that has escaped from a Welsh animal park. Various reports have described it as ‘fearsome’ warning that it ‘could eat pets’ and be ‘aggressive if cornered’. The park itself ­­– Borth Wild Animal Kingdom in Ceredigion – says that: ‘There have never been any recorded attacks of a lynx on a human, but they are a wild animal… and will attack if cornered or trapped. If you spot her, please don't approach her.’ Animals escape from zoos and wildlife parks all the time. Another lynx, ‘Flaviu’, escaped last summer in similar circumstances from a park in Dartmoor.