Mary Wakefield

At the tail end of the summer holiday, my son and I had a shouting match in King’s Cross station. For more than three hours on the train south from Durham, he’d been staring at a single question on a comprehension paper. The text began with a description of a road running through the moonlit countryside, and question three asked: ‘Why does the author compare the road to a grey silk ribbon?’ Between Durham and Peterborough, I had repeated that question, with increasingly psychopathic calm. ‘So darling, why does the author compare the road to a ribbon?

No one looking back on the last fortnight could say that Middlesbrough didn’t make the most of its time in the spotlight. I’ve been in the north-east these past few weeks and opening the local papers has been like a diabolical advent calendar: a new horror for every day. On Saturday 22 August we discovered that five Middlesbrough boys, aged 17 to 23, with 22 convictions between them, had raced the wrong way down the A66 and smashed into a police car, killing themselves and the two poor officers too. On the Sunday we learnt that the speeding boys had been chasing another car, a Volvo, which, in the early hours of Saturday had reversed repeatedly into the front of one of the boys’ houses.

On Tuesday, a court in Dallas, Texas will convene to decide the fate of a small baby called Gabriel or Rumi, depending on who you believe his mother is. Gabriel-Rumi is at present a sort of Schrödinger’s baby, suspended between possible futures and suspended also, poor sod, between life and death: born with heart disease, headed now for surgery. Gabriel-Rumi’s short life has so far been the subject of a media frenzy, for reasons I’ll explain, but should he later look back and be appalled at all the fuss, I’d like him to know what a service he’s already done the world.

In the centre of Durham last week, at the far end of the old indoor market, my son and I hit pay dirt. Down past the fishmonger and the cleaning supplies, past the dead-eyed teens suffering through their summer jobs, right against the market’s back wall: Jim’s Vintage Toys. Die-cast Dinkys, Napoleonic soldiers with tufted hats, stormtroopers, old-school Ferraris. Within 20 seconds my ten-year-old had a car in each sticky hand and had dropped, sniper-style to the floor into that universal boy play-position almost never seen in girls: bum up, shoulders twisted, cheek flat to the floor. Another few seconds and he was unreachable, sunk deep into an imaginary race.

I’m not sure why I started following the photographer Alastair Hilton on X. He’s right-ish politically, so perhaps the algorithm just blew him my way. But through the rising tide of online bilge, I still seek out and enjoy Hilton’s posts, mostly because he talks about pubs and posts pictures of cold pints on hot days. Hilton has a narrowboat on the Thames in Chiswick and seems to half live in the bars along the river, so he was extremely cross about a recent proposal to remove the tables and chairs from the riverside, especially from his local pub, the Bell and Crown.

The Rt Revd Martyn Snow, the handsome and up-to-date Bishop of Leicester, has decided that it’s OK, even admirable, for clergy to use AI to write their sermons. Bishop Snow was on the radio over the weekend, proud to share with listeners that in his diocese of Leicester, they’ve even had an AI expert come to give pointers to the priests. No more painful head-scratching on a Saturday afternoon for the lucky clerics of Leicester. ChatGPT will sort it. Just plug in a Bible verse and a few well-crafted prompts, and you’re off to the cricket, or to Pride, whichever way you swing. It’s one of those many times I wish Michael Wharton was still alive and writing.

On Petersfield station, southbound side, there’s a huge billboard advertising a tropical holiday with a photo of a beautiful couple joyfully splashing each other in the water. I walked past it, stopped, walked back and stared. ‘Adults-only holiday,’ read the billboard. ‘Entirely child-free.’ But this wasn’t ‘adults only’ in the 20th-century sense: getting frisky with strangers after a pink gin and an all-you-can-eat buffet. What was being sold was a holiday guaranteed to contain not a squeak of any disgusting child, and the whole tone of the advert was one of joyful relief: At last! Just what we’ve all always wanted, but never dared to admit!

It’s been more than a week since Sean Egan, a manager at Morrisons in Aldridge, announced that he’d been sacked just for doing his job – for stopping a thief nicking booze – and national outrage over the whole affair is still running high. Sean is on morning TV as I write, donations to pay for his appeal rising steadily. In part, the fuss is a measure of sympathy. Sean worked at Morrisons for 29 years and was liked by the people of Aldridge. He was sacked, the supermarket says, because it has a ‘deter, don’t detain’ policy – though what it thinks could possibly have deterred this thief, given his long list of previous convictions, is anyone’s guess. But the feeling for Sean isn’t just a swell of support for one man; it’s also a symptom of wider frustration.

When war is in the air, young men traditionally sign up – and they traditionally sign up, disproportionately, from the north-east of England, where I grew up. The country must be prepared for war, says Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, head of our armed forces. But what use is all this puffed-up talk of a battle-ready Britain if we have no soldiers? In the north-east, the supply of soldiers has slowed not just to a trickle but to a drip. Sunderland, for instance, home to nearly11,000 veterans, sent just ten men into the army last year. A reporter called Fred Scul-thorp went to Sunderland for Dispatch magazine last month, to work out what had happened to the north-east’s fighting spirit, but all Fred found was apathy: why sign up when you can sign on?

It’s the end of Lent as I write this and I’ve almost entirely failed to give up X, which is what I said I’d do. The webpage just seems to materialise in front of me, and I find I’ve been slapping little hearts on Peter Hitchens’s posts for 20 minutes before I realise what I’m up to. Then that deceitful little mental voice pipes up, the internal chatbot which specialises in justifying bad behaviour: ‘Keep scrolling! How else will you know what’s happening in the world?’ Yesterday, as I found myself ogling X again, the little voice really scraped the bottom of the barrel: ‘Now that you’re here,’ it told me, ‘you really may as well get stuck in. Have a long session, go on. It’ll still only count as one Lent infraction.

On the way back home down Mile End Road, I stopped for a cup of tea in a nice-looking café. It was vast, once I’d stepped inside, extending out into a sort of gazebo – but empty. On display under glass, a good four metres of immaculate cakes: red velvet cake, baklava cheesecake, dipped doughnuts, Dubai chocolate cronuts. ‘Fast now, Iftar after,’ said a sign on the counter. It was the fourth week of Ramadan in Stepney Green, Tower Hamlets; the sun was low in the sky and the whole place seemed to be waiting for the fast to end. As I sat there with my tea, a woman of about my age entered and began to chat to the tidy young man at the counter. She was sick of life in London, she said, sick of this country. ‘You can’t even get a healthy lunch in Tesco.’ What, no carrots?

About a decade ago, the people I dreaded meeting most at parties were the ed tech evangelists – men and women who lit up with zealous excitement about bringing screens into schools. If only every schoolchild had a laptop, they thought, then humanity could flourish, nurtured by the great river of the internet and by an exciting stream of educational apps. It was as if a school laptop was a Mary Poppins bag out of which whatever they most wanted was sure to appear. For the ed tech utopians of the right, what they dreamt of was a great stream of savvy little Einsteins, liberated from turgid teachers. For those on the left, it was about equal access, fairness, ‘pupil-centred learning’.

On the fourth floor of Selfridges, in London, is the children’s toy department. Most of the vast space is given over to soft toys – mounds of synthetic fur, thousands of little beady eyes – and when I visited last Saturday afternoon the customers were almost all adults. I spent two hours there, standing by a tower of little Paddington bears, watching the shoppers in the queue for the till, and it was eye-opening. Almost no one was buying for a child. I saw two Chinese women with white toy lambs, a 17-year-old boy with a dragon, what looked like drug dealers queuing for Pokémon cards, and a genuinely troubling number of sad-looking women in their mid-twenties clutching long-eared toy bunnies made by a company called Jellycat.

This week it became clear that almost none of the adults whose job it is to teach students the truth are much inclined to do it. Even the doziest vice-chancellor must by now have twigged that gender ideology is dangerous bunk and that it lures in the most vulnerable – yet still they can’t bring themselves to speak out. This goes not just for academics, but for politicians in the education business too. For anyone minded to understand how poisonous the atmosphere in universities is, the story of poor Professor David Gordon is horribly instructive. His ordeal began more than a year ago when he invited another professor, Alice Sullivan, to give a talk to his students at the University of Bristol.

For many years now we have all been agonising over the fertility crisis. Why aren’t the kids having kids? It’s become a sort of parlour game, the swapping of the various theories. Is it the cost of living? Micro-plastics? Eco-anxiety? Tight underwear, I heard the other day, and snorted with scorn even as I tipped my son’s stretch-cotton pants into the bin. But now another, rather more fundamental explanation for the baby shortage has emerged. It’s not just that younger generations aren’t having babies – it turns out they aren’t really having sex at all. The Atlantic was first to properly examine this trend among young Americans, in a terrific piece which gave a name to the phenomenon: The Great Sex Recession.