Mary Wakefield

I meant to get the bus, but by the time I arrived at the stop at 5 p.m. last Tuesday, I was running late. I was relieved to see a Tic Tac of orange light floating towards me through the evening. The taxi stopped, I climbed in and said: ‘Just north of Angel please.’ Then: ‘I’m afraid I only have £25 so we’ll probably have to stop at a cashpoint.’ The driver had a flat cap, and in the paler oblong of the rearview mirror, I could see he was wearing sunglasses. I didn’t think to think this strange even though it was dark. ‘Oh don’t worry. I’ll take you for £25,’ said the driver. ‘One of my girlfriends lives up there.

On Tower Hill, by the east wall of Beauchamp Tower where Robert Dudley was imprisoned for a year, a raven called Merlin hides behind a yucca plant. I know she’s there because the Ravenmaster told me. He knows she’s there because Merlin (a female) and he are bonded and they keep tabs on each other throughout the day. As he walks across Tower Green, he whistles to her, and in reply, from the shadows, comes a low, metallic, caw. Ravens pair up for life, for the most part, and Merlin, who dislikes the other ravens, has chosen Chris, the Tower of London’s Yeoman Warder Ravenmaster, as her mate. As he draws near, a beak protrudes slowly from behind the yucca.

Do you remember Alan Kurdi, the poor, drowned three-year-old whose photograph provoked a wave of sympathy for migrants almost exactly a year ago? Social media lit up with outrage — something must be done! — as millions shared the picture back and forth. A Facebook share is a pretty easy way of caring, but even so it was uplifting: we in the West mind about all children, not just our own. Our fellow feeling extends to fellows worldwide. So where then is the great Facebook uprising over the news that there’s been not a single successful prosecution in this country for female genital mutilation (FGM) though it’s been illegal since 1985?

Monday morning: one hand trapped beneath the fat and guzzling midget, with the other I idly opened the gates of hell — meaning I downloaded the game Pokémon Go. Pokémon Go is an ‘augmented reality’ game. It requires you to trot about in the real world, staring at your smartphone so as to find and ‘collect’ coloured goblins from different locations. Perhaps that doesn’t sound terribly exciting, but it’s the most successful phone game there’s ever been. On the day I played, more than 75 million people had already downloaded it, and when I first opened it I too became obsessed. A day later, however, I suspect it of being semi-diabolical and portending some terrible but perhaps unavoidable future. This is the way it works.

I’ve noticed for some time now that thin people, genuinely slim ones, have a secret loathing of fatties. Kindly though they may otherwise be, the sight of rolls and overhangs, jowls and bulges, makes them angry. One extremely thin woman I know finds it hard, she told me, even to have fat friends. Another shivers with horror if she catches some poor podge in the act of wolfing a treat. It’s not an aesthetic affront, she says, so much as a moral one. Where’s their willpower, where’s their grit? It’s hard to argue with a censorious thinny. We all know, these days, that there’s no excuse for being a lardarse. Faulty glands, slow metabolism — all tripe. The brutal truth is that if you’re fat it’s because you eat too much.

Who’d have thought that one of Obama’s last great battles would be over toilets? Last week he issued a strict warning to schools saying that transgender pupils must be allowed to use whichever loo they choose. Girls or boys who feel they’re trapped in the wrong body have, in some states, been required to widdle according to their biological sex. No more, said the President. No child left behind in the wrong restroom. This was an arrow aimed straight at the heart of the conservative South. Back in March, North Carolina passed a law requiring people in schools and government buildings to use the loo matching the sex recorded on their birth certificate. ‘Bigotry!’ cried central government, ‘A violation of the Civil Rights Act!

When my unborn baby was a five-month-old fetus, twisting about in the internal dark, he was given a death sentence by a man I shall call Anton. We’d gone, my husband and I, for a 20-week scan at our local hospital. Anton was our designated sonographer; we arrived in his room bright-eyed and anxious, as even elderly first-time parents are. We looked to Anton for reassurance, but Anton looked only at his assistant, a sulky 19-year-old sexpot from Romania. The sexpot tried seven times to dig into the vein in my right arm, then began on the left. ‘Don’t worry, good practice, try again,’ said Anton to her, kindly. ‘No, don’t worry at all!’ said I, pathetically.

Here's a new low for Oxfam, or rather a different, sneakier low. Three times in recent months I've been telephoned by well-spoken young men claiming to be from Oxfam who all begin by saying: 'I'm just calling to thank you for your past donations, and tell you exactly how much money all the books and clothes you've donated to Oxfam have raised for us. Would you like to know?' Here I hang up. What utter cobblers. I can't remember donating clothes to Oxfam shops and anyway how would they know about, let alone value and add up any one specific person's donations? William Shawcross, head of the charity commission has, rightly, torn Oxfam (and others) off a strip for 'hounding' potential donors with endless unsolicited calls and harassing passers by.

Sometimes I sit my nieces down and treat them to tales of dating in the dark ages, before iPhones arrived to save teenkind. Poor nieces. Though they scuff their Uggs on the carpet and stare longingly at the door, I carry on. When I was your age, I say, we had no access to boys. Those of us at mixed schools had a few limp options, and the rest relied on miracles: a hottie met by chance on holiday; a friend’s brother’s friend. There was no social media, no looking someone up, so unless you bagged your hottie sharpish he vanished. Boys surfaced like rare sea-mammals for single sightings before sinking back into the fathomless unknown. No googling! Can you believe it, nieces? They can’t. They’re the Snapchat generation, born as the century turned.

When I was 21, I lived with a cult for a year. It was a commune really, a tight-knit group of Christians, but I’ll call it a cult because it was in Texas and for special occasions we all wore white. There were other cult markers, too: we had a charismatic leader; the younger kids were home-schooled; and, to my great excitement, one (now ex) member wrote a book after she left: I Can’t Hear God Anymore: Life in a Dallas Cult. That I ended up there is a testament to the dangers of showing off. All those endless questions after finals, all those inquiring adults: ‘And what are you going to do now? What’s your plan?’ Well, I had no plan.

When I was 21, I lived with a cult for a year. It was a commune really, a tight-knit group of Christians, but I’ll call it a cult because it was in Texas and for special occasions we all wore white. There were other cult markers, too: we had a charismatic leader; the younger kids were home-schooled; and, to my great excitement, one (now ex) member wrote a book after she left: I Can’t Hear God Anymore: Life in a Dallas Cult. That I ended up there is a testament to the dangers of showing off. All those endless questions after finals, all those inquiring adults: ‘And what are you going to do now? What’s your plan?’ Well, I had no plan.