Mary Wakefield

A Times investigation has uncovered the terrible fact that women and possibly young girls in Haiti have been exploited by the very people paid to keep them safe: the staff of Oxfam, which sucks up £300 million a year from us in public and private money.  It’s a shock — and it’s not. Under the cover of moral superiority, out of sight and out of the media, all manner of NGOs, charities, and the saintly UN have committed some of the most disgusting crimes against the world’s most vulnerable women and children, and got away scot free. Not even the hyper-sensitive  #MeToo movement seems to give the shadow of a damn.

Last week, women working for the UN became the latest to join the #MeToo gang, and for all the eye-rolling silliness of some of #MeToo, I was pleased. The UN is in many ways a seedy closed shop. It spends zillions promoting gender equality worldwide but in practice it’s a very different story. The women of the UN described (to the Guardian) a culture of abuse (including rape) after which victims are silenced and then sidelined, often sacked. I’m delighted they spoke out, but what puzzles me is why it stopped there. On Saturday, thousands marched around New York City to draw attention to the unjust treatment of women.

On rolls the Harvey Weinstein horror show with no finale in sight. The next episode looks likely to star Uma Thurman, who’s waiting for the right moment, she says, to tell her own Harvey story. Hollywood waits for Uma and I wait for Robert De Niro, who said of Donald Trump: ‘He’s a dog, he’s a pig, a mutt.’ If groping makes you mad, Rob, why so silent about friend Harvey? Weinstein is clearly a slimeball predator. I hope the great wave of feminist outrage washes all the Harveys clean away, out of Tinseltown, out of Washington, out of Westminster. But running alongside the Weinstein drama is another trickier case — one I think the credibility of the whole #metoo movement rests on.

On rolls the Harvey Weinstein horror show with no finale in sight. The next episode looks likely to star Uma Thurman, who’s waiting for the right moment, she says, to tell her own Harvey story. Hollywood waits for Uma and I wait for Robert De Niro, who said of Donald Trump: ‘He’s a dog, he’s a pig, a mutt.’ If groping makes you mad, Rob, why so silent about friend Harvey? Weinstein is clearly a slimeball predator. I hope the great wave of feminist outrage washes all the Harveys clean away, out of Tinseltown, out of Washington, out of Westminster. But running alongside the Weinstein drama is another trickier case — one I think the credibility of the whole #metoo movement rests on.

It only dawned on me in late summer just how terrible our new benefits system, universal credit, might be both for the poor souls who depend on it and for the bedraggled Conservative party. An old friend, Terry, alerted me to the depth of the problem. Terry is 70-odd and has learning difficulties, though he’s astute in many ways and quite startlingly kind. He has a room in a shared house, but like many in precarious or temporary housing, he’s a regular on the homeless scene: part of a growing drift of men and women who move around London morning till night, from the St Martin-in-the-Fields day centre to the Hare Krishna food vans in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

It’s been nearly two weeks since Stephen Paddock committed mass murder in Las Vegas and the FBI is still casting about pitifully for clues. Why did he do it? Not even his girlfriend knows, though it’s said he claimed to have been simply ‘born bad’. Plans are afoot to put up billboards urging anyone who ever met Paddock to come forward. There’s something touching about billboards in the internet age. Perhaps because there are no answers in the offing, in place of them has swelled a great wave of outrage, not, oddly, about America’s gun laws, but about race.

The late afternoon sun fell on the anomalous pine trees of Gillett Square, London N16, and on the wooden decking below, giving it a fleeting look of lunch in the Alps. To the east, just visible at the far end of Gillett Street, the Kings-land Road ran its usual choppy course: hipsters and the homeless, Jamaicans and Turks, Vietnamese up from the Shoreditch end and the odd Haredi Jew heading north to Stamford Hill. Gillett Square is Hackney’s great regeneration project. Once a disused car park full of drunks and dealers, after 25 years of funding drives and architects, bulldozing, building and PR, it’s now Dalston’s ‘town square’.

Later this year, the Advertising Standards Authority will reveal to the world their list of rules designed to wipe out ‘gender stereotyping’ in TV ads. I’m already looking forward to it because the ASA’s first thoughts on the matter, published in July, were fascinating. An ad for baby milk which showed a girl growing up to be a ballerina was deemed quite unacceptable; KFC got flack for featuring one man teasing another for not being manly enough. Stereotypes on TV contribute to ‘unequal outcomes’ in reality, explained ASA’s chief exec. Of course no one wants boys and girls to feel forced to conform — some boys are feminine, some girls boyish — but that wasn’t the issue here.

All along Harley Street, charlatans and medical experts have set up side by side with no obvious way to tell them apart. The same wide steps lead up to the same glossy front doors, all with prestigious brass knobs. Each separate house is itself a layered stack of quacks and docs: radiology one floor above absence healing, flower therapy down the corridor from paediatric ENT. The magnificent Harley Street address confers a blessing on every dubious therapy. Perhaps it has a placebo effect all of its own. I know the street quacks well, or used to. My mother had a horror of antibiotics and would pack us off to Harley Street’s alternative therapists. I remember a mournful young Russian who was said to have treated astronauts.

Because I’d been reading about Stradivarius on the bus home, my helpful iPhone suggested a related story: the Totenberg Ames Stradivarius, stolen and ‘silent for decades’, was to be played again in concert. Idly, on the hot top deck of the 38, I read on. Roman Totenberg, the celebrated Polish-American violinist, was 70 when his beloved Strad was taken back in 1980. He’d spent the evening playing Mozart at the Longy school of music in Cambridge, Mass, and when he left his dressing room to glad-hand fans, a former student slipped in and sloped off with the fiddle. The police had their suspicions, but these were the days before CCTV and nothing could be proved — so the Totenberg Ames Strad sank into three decades of obscurity.

Sometimes, on Sundays, I visit Richard, a friend who’s 95 and lives alone. The idea originally was that I’d be doing Richard a favour, but the truth is he cheers me up far more than I do him. I visit because I like him, but as the weeks go by, I’m afraid I’ve also developed a grim curiosity about what it’s like to be in your nineties. Meals-on-wheels, crumbling knees, hernias, cannulas, the way a day dissolves into unintended naps… ‘Can’t we talk about something more cheerful?’ says Richard, as we sit knee to knee. But I’m obsessed, like a tourist taking notes on some awful country they must one day go to.

Saturday evening in Durham. My in-laws and I had just begun our usual postprandial shout about Donald Trump when my niece appeared at the door, pale and serious. ‘There’s been another terrorist attack in London,’ she said. ‘I’m scared.’ The veins of the men in my husband’s family run with a sort of event-activated coolant. No one asked what had happened or how many were dead. My father-in-law said: ‘Don’t be daft. What’s there to be scared of?’ His brother added: ‘You’re more likely to be killed by cows.’ This, though not strictly true, is less ludicrous than you might imagine. Some 90 Brits were killed by terrorist attacks in the 15 years from 2000, whereas 74 were killed by cows. The cows did the trick.

Sometimes, on Sundays, I visit Richard, a friend who’s 95 and lives alone. The idea originally was that I’d be doing Richard a favour, but the truth is he cheers me up far more than I do him. I visit because I like him, but as the weeks go by, I’m afraid I’ve also developed a grim curiosity about what it’s like to be in your nineties. Meals-on-wheels, crumbling knees, hernias, cannulas, the way a day dissolves into unintended naps… ‘Can’t we talk about something more cheerful?’ says Richard, as we sit knee to knee. But I’m obsessed, like a tourist taking notes on some awful country they must one day go to.