Flora Watkins

Even if you haven’t seen Adolescence, currently the most-watched show on Netflix, you’ll doubtless be aware – or think you’re aware – of its central themes: knife crime, social media, the manosphere and its pernicious influence on teenage boys. In other words, ‘the Andrew Tate shite’, as the show’s (female) detective sergeant sighs at one point.  Critics have gushed that this is ‘TV perfection’ (Times, Guardian) and a landmark series ‘so powerful it could save lives’ (Guardian again). Each of the four one-hour episodes is apparently shot in one take, which is the sort of thing that thrills male critics but for ordinary viewers can, at times, feel self-indulgent and contrived.

You first start to notice them in that desultory way you become aware of the floating specks across your vision that signify a migraine is on the way. Perhaps you saw a woman in Waitrose wearing a black one and wondered why she was sporting a giant version of the Umbro football manager’s coat from the 1990s. Then someone pointed out the hot pink camo combo on the sidelines at an under-12s rugby tournament and, looking across the pitches, you realised just how ubiquitous they have become. By the time you spot my own hate-favourite – the Dryrobe Advance Abstract, a limited edition now out of stock which looks like the old Channel 4 test card – you may be experiencing full-on throbbing temples.

It wasn’t until I locked eyes with a Premiership rugby player as I got out of my car at 8 a.m. that I realised I might need to up my game for drop-offs at the children’s new school. I would need to start wearing eye make-up, for starters. I should also give a little more thought to an outfit than picking up yesterday’s T-shirt and cut-off jeans from the bedroom floor – although ‘outfit’ is one of those words that makes me wince, like ‘gift’ or a ‘pop’ of colour. Still, ‘outfits’ are what a certain type of woman around here goes in for. Among a sort of country-prep-miles-from-anywhere subset, you will find mothers trying their best to fit into what the Times has identified as the ‘Ganni Mum’ tribe.

Of all the aspects of dating that make me grateful I came off the market when I did – ghosting, choking, sober socialising, facial hair like Brahms’s beard – it’s the spread of large-scale visible tattoos that makes me feel like I got the last chopper out of ’Nam. Neck tattoos and sleeves were once either indicators of prison gang allegiances or the preserve of thrash metal bands and their fans. Although perhaps the most heavily inked man in rock is Travis Barker, drummer of pop-punk crossover tarts Blink-182. His whole head is tattooed, as is Kerry King’s of Slayer, who also has ‘God Hates Us All’ down his left arm. Among Phil Anselmo of Pantera’s extensive body art is a portrait of himself as a demon with his now ex-wife riding an extending tongue.

Unless your Wi-Fi has been down this week, you’ll be aware that David Beckham has got his kit off again. He’s back in his underwear for a ‘steamy’ (Daily Mail) ‘full frontal’ (Daily Mail again, though it really isn’t – and I had to watch it, dispassionately I stress, three times for the purposes of this article in order to be sure) campaign for Hugo Boss which, in that hackneyed and usually inaccurate phrase, ‘broke the internet’. Did you have problems putting your Ocado order through? Me neither.

At this time of year, switching on the radio to hear the twinkling harp at the start of ‘The First Nowell’ from Hely-Hutchinson’s Carol Symphony has a profound Proustian effect on an entire generation. It takes us back to our childhood living rooms in 1984, sitting cross-legged in front of a boxy TV with a 14-inch screen, bewitched by the most exciting, terrifying and Christmassy programme we had ever seen. Part of the nostalgia comes from knowing that this wonderful series would probably never be made now As a bookish child who lived largely in my head, I thought the BBC had made The Box of Delights especially for me. So, it seems, did an awful lot of other people.

Mark Darcy’s Christmas jumper has come a long way since it repelled the heroine of Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) at her mother’s annual New Year’s Day turkey curry buffet. The green turtleneck, festooned with a red-nosed reindeer, sold for £5,670 at auction in November. Colin Firth has protested that he’s been ‘unfairly blamed for subsequent surges in Christmas sweater sales’. He might have a point. Arguably, Sarah Lund’s snowflake sweater in the 2007 Danish TV series The Killing did more to elevate the garment to high fashion. Because nothing quite marks the birth of God like a Nordic noir police procedural.

‘The wines were too various: it was neither the quality nor the quantity that was at fault. It was the mixture.’ This is the meet-cute at the beginning of Brideshead Revisited. Lord Sebastian Flyte chunders through the window into the ground floor quarters of Charles Ryder. Seduced by these smart shenanigans, Charles proceeds to dump his dull middle-class muckers in order to ‘drown in honey’ (also champagne, Catholicism and plover’s eggs) with Sebastian and his rich Oxford set. By the time I arrived at university at the turn of the century, debauchery had long been democratised.

It’s the season to do the rounds of senior schools and my 10-year-old son and I have been jostling through the crowds to glimpse science labs and drama workshops for the past month. Open days for the top state schools have been heaving. At a state boarding school rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted (boarding fees aren’t subject to VAT), the head apologised for lengthy queues to register, get coffee, join a tour. Another 200 people had turned up in addition to the 600 booked in. Among them, I spotted several families whose children are currently at local prep schools. Labour starts charging VAT on school fees from January. But an estimated 10,000 children have already been taken out of independent schools, mine among them.

It’s Wednesday, which means my evening is booked up for Slow Horses. The usual protracted regime of children’s tea-bath-bed will be compressed into about 10 minutes (packet of crisps, cursory going-over with a wet wipe, withholding of bedtime story on thoroughly spurious grounds) before my husband and I leap onto the sofa like The Simpsons in the opening credits with a bottle of Malbec and a Charlie Bigham’s curry to watch the new episode on Apple TV+. (Gen Z readers: at the risk of lowering the birth rate even further, this is what fun looks like in your forties after three kids.

The look on the face of A&E staff was one of horror and disbelief. ‘He’s playing contact rugby – at eight?’ I nodded, my son Gus’s left arm hanging uselessly by his side, his face white and pinched with pain. Later, after we emerged from the X-ray and plaster rooms with a diagnosis of a micro-fracture to the elbow, one of the nurses from reception caught up with us. She was so concerned that she’d gone on to the RFU website, which confirmed that contact is indeed legal from Year 4. (Although the spear tackle that Gus’s friend had executed definitely isn’t.) ‘Striking a child outside of sport is abuse, but striking a child in sport is socially acceptable’ Our sons’ prep school, like many others, switches from tag to contact rugby at the start of Year 4.