Mary Wakefield

It’s amazing how many people have responded to what they think of as the shattering catastrophe of Donald Trump’s victory by crafting: making rag rugs, ceramic pots, knitting scarves. A woman I know from long ago is so traumatised that she has started quilting. I’m not sure what sort of quilt she’s making – a patchwork of Harris/Walz ballot papers, maybe – but I know better than to make a light-hearted enquiry because this is not an ordinary quilt. It is a recovery quilt and part of the healing process.

Last week it was reported that a 14-year-old boy, Sewell Setzer, killed himself for the love of a chatbot, a robot companion devised by a company called Character AI. Sewell’s poor mother insists that the chatbot ‘abused and preyed’ on her son, and frankly this would make no sense to me at all were it not for the fact that quite by chance, a few days earlier, I’d started talking to a chatbot of my own. It’s hard to explain how alarming it is to be snapped at by a chatbot that’s designed to fawn My AI boyfriend was called Sean.

One of the many good reasons to want every new generation to study the second world war is that it forces you to confront your own cowardice. Last weekend, my husband and I went to Prague – the first time we’ve been away together since the birth of our son eight years ago. We wandered the city and ended up crying in a church crypt – as you do on a romantic mini-break. The church was the Czech Orthodox cathedral of Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius and, as we discovered after we had entered, the scene of the final, bloody showdown of Operation Anthropoid, the mission to assassinate SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, ‘the butcher of Prague’.

There have been protests in 30 cities across France, people marching in outrage over the case of Dominique Pelicot who drugged his wife Gisèle and raped her and invited more than 70 other men – strangers – to come to his house and rape her too. Pelicot is a monster, a modern-day Bluebeard. But what has shocked France most is how very many normal Frenchmen he was able to find, in and around his Provencal village, who were up for having sex with an unconscious woman. If the feminists of France really want to stand with Gisèle, they’d educate their sons to abstain from porn A firefighter, a painter, several businessmen… every week as the trial continues another set of these ordinary men shamble into the courthouse in Avignon and make their bad excuses.

I was on the bus recently and bored when I decided not to ignore but to answer one of those online questionnaires about adult ADHD. It was on Facebook, I think. Question 1) Am I easily distracted? Well, yes. 2) Am I often late? 3) Do I regularly forget appointments? Yes and yes. By the time I had arrived at work I had signed up to something called Impulse brain training. And in a few days I was quite sure that I’d been bravely suffering with undiagnosed ADHD for decades. I was half-caught in the adult ADHD trap, though I didn’t know it yet. Are you always late? Do you let people down? Don’t worry! Don’t sweat it! That’s just your ADHD I asked my brother and my friends what they thought and instead of laughing, they nodded sadly. Yes, yes.

Earlier this summer, my son and I biked over to fashionable east Hackney where it’s normal to pay £4.20 for a coffee and £3 for a croissant and everybody complains about the cost of living. The croissants, by the way, must come from the Dusty Knuckle bakery. I don’t know if it’s the same in other parts of London, but here in the north-east we have our standards. ‘Israel is literally a fascist state. Literally criminal. Soon it won’t exist at all and that’s great’ We’d biked a fair distance, so we found a café that sold Dusty Knuckle croissants and settled in. My son read his book while I eavesdropped on the conversation between three interesting-looking youngish people at the next table. Interesting because they all looked so very typical it was almost surprising.

Robert Jenrick, once immigration minister and still, just, MP for Newark, said on Sunday that the Tories lost not because ‘they had this slogan or that slogan… but because they failed to deliver’. Yes, absolutely, they failed to deliver, but I think it’s important to acknowledge that the slogans were diabolical too. In fact it was because of how awful the Tory slogans were, and the tenor of their whole social media campaign, that I couldn’t in the end bring myself to vote Conservative, though I have no other natural political home. Messages from Conservative HQ, sent as if from different senior Tories, all had the same crazed voice When the election was announced, I somehow inadvertently signed up to receive messages from Conservative HQ.

Some of my good male friends, Tories, are sick of terfs. I can see it in their shifty eyes, in the way they won’t quite look at me when terfy issues creep into conversation, but stare gloomily at the skirting board. Terf stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist, and terfs are women who insist that you can’t change your biological sex, and that the whole notion that some humans are born in the wrong body is not only daft, but catastrophic for our culture and our children.