Family

It was a routine antenatal appointment. I’d done it twice before and knew the format. The obstetrician runs through the risks of an elective caesarean (ELCS). We agree a date, I sign the forms, then make a plea for adequate pain relief after the surgery, which I know will be ignored. So I was blindsided by her opening gambit. ‘Why don’t we tie your tubes when we’ve got the baby out?’ she said, or something similar – I don’t recall the exact words, but I do remember the heat in my chest, the confusion and fear. ‘What?’ ‘It’s your third child, isn’t it, so why don’t we tie your tubes at the same time?’ She wouldn’t drop it, ignoring my every assertion that I did not want this done to me.

Too many books? Yes, we had too many books. That’s what our social worker told us when we were being assessed to see whether we were suitable parents to adopt a baby from China back in 1996. It seemed to us, a middle-class, well-educated couple, an extraordinary statement and so it appeared to our friends and acquaintances. But that was, and is still to some extent, the credo at work in assessing potential adoptive parents. A significant number of social workers continue to believe that a child should be matched as closely as possible with the social class and ethnic background of the adoptive parents, even if that means children being held in institutional care far longer than is good for them.

I was a twin when I was born, but this was in the days before decent scans and proper neonatal intensive care, and we were more than two months premature, so not long afterwards, my twin died. As a child, I thought nothing of it. It simply wasn’t relevant. But when I was drifting around America in my early twenties, the subject came up one day in conversation. A Texan friend asked me: ‘Do you miss your twin?’ I turned to her, meaning to laugh at the daft question, but instead, embarrassingly, I cried. And I’ve known ever since, whether I like it or not – and I really don’t, actually, because it sounds so sappy – that we form emotional ties in the womb, and that when they’re severed, we feelthe loss.

‘Don’t use our real names,’ says the teenage gypsy. ‘Other gypsies will laugh at us.’ Even in a tracksuit, the girl is crazy beautiful, and strangely remote. She is talking to me because her mother, whom I call Susan, has been ordered to remove her caravans from a council site in the West Country. If Susan, mother of five, and carer to two grandchildren, is evicted by Cornwall council, her family will be scattered to the winds. It’s a peculiarly awful fate for gypsies. They are tribal, and family is everything to them. It is the first eviction of a gypsy from a council site in this county. The site is silent and dour: rows of caravans, ugly piles of rubbish, though Susan’s part is neater than most.

Professor Jordan Peterson is a Canadian psychologist, author and commentator whose latest book, We Who Wrestle with God, is about the psychological significance of Bible stories. He speaks to The Spectator’s editor Michael Gove about supernatural relationships, the folly of net zero and what’s next for Europe. ‘A lot of the atheist argument misses the mark because the God that’s being disbelieved is never defined’ MICHAEL GOVE: In your book, you work intimately with Bible stories to bring out their meaning, their relevance and their importance. Why should anyone read the Bible? JORDAN PETERSON: The simple answer is because you have to have your story straight or you go off course badly.

Now that John Lewis has produced a Christmas ad that celebrates family, starring white people as humans, all sorts of thinkers and commentators on the right have decided that the progressive madness is nearly over. One after the other they’re popping up in print, like bunnies who’ve decided the fox has gone. ‘Whisper it, but woke is over,’ these pieces begin. Even those Tories who thought it wisest to put their pronouns in their Twitter bios have quietly deleted them.

My sister died last summer, before her time, at 58. Her death has left me shaken with sorrow and remorse: we did not always get on. The other day I accompanied her daughters and husband to scatter her ashes on the Thames at Greenwich in south London where she and I had grown up. The great muddy waterway would take Clare’s ashes out to sea eventually. People like Liz Truss live in Greenwich now, but in my time the inhabitants were Labour-voting bohemian types. Daniel Day-Lewis (a brattish schoolboy) lived down the road from us on Crooms Hill with his poet father Cecil. At Greenwich Theatre opposite, Max Wall performed his anarcho-comic piano sketches on Friday nights. Claire Tomalin was a near neighbour (as was, later, Jonathan Sumption).

On Woman’s Hour recently, Anita Rani and her guests set out to celebrate the positive sides of a woman’s midlife. Forget the crisis: your forties and fifties could instead be a time for change, a refresh. You could take up a new hobby, they said, or a new exercise regime. Or you could get a divorce! What’s alarming is that this sort of discussion isn’t unusual. I regularly spot articles in newspapers and on social media that talk about divorce as if it’s just the latest wellness trend. They usually go like this: a middle-aged woman walks out on a long marriage and insists that she’s never been happier, that she’s free, that she’s ‘starting a new chapter’ in her life. She then demands through a rictus grin that you be happy for her.

The temperature has hit 40°C in Crete, where I am writing this, and although there have been no fires, nothing is quite how it ought to be. I can’t work out whether this is a great opportunity to get a tan or, effectively, the end of the world. My 60-year-old taxi driver tells me that unfeasibly hot summers were a regular occurrence when he was young and that there’s nothing to worry about. But, he adds, he’ll be dead soon anyway so why should he care? Right or wrong, this is the paradox at the heart of the climate change debate. Older people, who could be held responsible for the destruction of the planet, don’t need to worry. And young people, who have so much more to lose, don’t really have a say. We invented plastic. They live with it.

On the window ledge of my sister Carmel’s bedroom there’s a tray of cards inscribed with the months of the year, days of the week and numbers from 1 to 31. If you can be bothered to adjust the display every morning, you’ll have what’s called a ‘perpetual calendar’. I need to remember that I already have drawers full of Thompson memorabilia Sunday 3 October 2021 was the day Carmel’s calendar stopped being perpetual. That morning she woke up with a fever so alarming that her next-door neighbour called an ambulance. Before it arrived, Carmel changed the calendar; then she kissed goodbye to Otto, her Norfolk terrier, walked downstairs and left her house for ever. The next day, another ambulance took her from the Royal Sussex Hospital to Guy’s Cancer Centre.