Freddy Gray

‘What did you do in the coronavirus crisis, dad?’ ‘Well son, I’m glad you ask. I helped make a very important video, entitled ‘You Clap for Me Now’. It used a technique we call passive-aggression to make people realise what horrible racists they had been towards immigrants. The video was really a poem, set to

According to psychologists, denial is a common defence mechanism. We humans reject truths which we find too uncomfortable to bear. When reality becomes too painful, we refuse to acknowledge it. The more evidence mounts against us, the more we insist that everything is ok. I fear I might be doing precisely that in reaction to

Our daughter Clementine, 5, has just decided what she wants to be when she grows up. ‘A cleaner …. and a mother,’ she says, in that order. Her mother, my wife Taffeta, winces at Clemmie’s ambition. Middle-class rules dictate that we should try to knock such traditional notions out of little girls’ brains. It’s not