Mary Wakefield

The first editor I worked for was Charles Moore and, like many of his old and ageing former staff, I still think of him as the boss. We’re like sleeper agents, the remaining skeleton crew of the old Daily Telegraph, ready to rise up at any moment and defend the right to hunt with hounds. I’m programmed to obey, so when Lord Moore recommended, in this magazine a few years ago, a series of out-of-print Ladybird history books for children written by a man called Lawrence du Garde Peach, I instantly bought the lot for my son: L. du Garde Peach on Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Kings Alfred, Richard and Henry VIII. From Ramses II through to Queen Victoria, the fiercest humans are portrayed as giant babies Now I owe Lord Moore more than ever. Without L. du G.

I know straight away, from the look on my friend Alice’s face, whether it’s a ‘bad carer’ day. Five years ago Alice had a fall and she can’t now do stairs, so she lives just on the second floor of her maisonette in north London. When I drop round, the carer is usually in the kitchen and Alice in her bedroom/sitting room next door. If it’s a bad carer day, she’ll look towards the kitchen, do a thumbs-down sign, purse her lips and shake her head, then she’ll wriggle her shoulders – hoity toity – to indicate that she feels bossed about. Alice is entirely dependent on the care company the council employs, and appeasement is all she has I suppose infirm 88-year-olds often need to be bossed about in a way.

Who could have foreseen that half a century after the sexual revolution we’d be facing its exact opposite: an asexual revolution? There’s a crisis of fertility across the West, with birth-rates and sperm counts in free fall. But this isn’t only about microplastics, oestrogen in the water or tight underpants. It’s also that the children of the West are choosing to have less sex – even no sex. A growing proportion actually identify as asexual, and rather than wait to see if the absence of lust is just a reasonable, youthful response to all the porn around in schools, they announce their asexuality solemnly to their friends and family.

I’ve been reading a book by the American journalist Abigail Shrier – Bad Therapy – which describes just how demented our obsession has become with unbuttoning the stiff upper lip. Nearly 40 per cent of American children have received treatment from a mental health professional, she says. Going by the number of kids I know who are on the waiting list here, we’d be approaching that proportion too if the NHS was functional. The desires of children came second to the desires of adults, and whingeing was frowned on What the book makes painfully clear is that all this 21st-century medicalising of normal emotion, the endless therapy, is worse than useless. How can it be working, if so many adolescents in the Anglosphere describe themselves as anxious or depressed?

When I first saw the Ministry of Defence building splattered in blood-red paint, I assumed that it had only just happened. There were no police or protestors about but the damage was so extensive and so shocking, I felt sure it was recent. No decent government would put up with that for long. I was east-bound in a car at the time and as we drove past I craned out of the window for a last look. The Whitehall clean-up crew would arrive soon, I assumed, and I gawped because I wouldn’t see it again. I cannot for the life of me understand why it’s all right to leave the MoD looking like an abattoir But I did. The next day, there it still was, and the day after that, and the one following. I’ve been back every day since just to check.

Somehow, I’ve lost the ‘Light Phone’ that I bought to replace the dumb phone that I hoped would break my addiction to the iPhone. The Light Phone is the latest bit of hipster kit, designed to mimic a smartphone but without the distracting internet connection. I don’t know if it works or not because, as I say, I’ve lost it – and I’m despairing but not surprised. It’s been three-and-a-half years since I first thought I’d try to escape the iPhone’s clutches, and over that time it’s outwitted me easily and consistently. A crop of articles have appeared recently by journalists who have made the leap and freed themselves from smartphones. I represent another, less admirable demographic. What I can offer you is not a view from the other side, but a cautionary tale.

There are a fair few trans women – men who want to be seen as ladies – who long to breastfeed real babies, and some who actually give it a good go. A few years ago this would have seemed unthinkably surreal, but I’m afraid this is the new reality and you’ll just have to get used to it. A man who wants to breastfeed first takes hormones to grow breast tissue. Then he uses a technique adapted from something called the Newman-Goldfarb protocol, which was designed to help adoptive mothers breastfeed: he takes hormones and a hefty dose of an anti-nausea medication called domperidone and then begins an intense breast-pumping routine after which, if he’s lucky, he produces something a bit like milk.

One evening a few weeks ago, I was pottering about alone when I became aware of a feeling of great relief, of joy almost, without quite knowing why. When you spend every waking moment with a seven-year-old, it often feels euphoric to be alone, but that wasn’t it. By mistake, I’d left my phone behind, but that wasn’t quite it either. It wasn’t that I couldn’t be contacted, I realised, so much as that I couldn’t be tracked. My iPhone, with its inbuilt GPS, was at home logging only its own dismal existence. The ‘Find My Friends’ function, which, at my family’s request I keep switched on, was defunct. I was unfindable. It was joyous.

‘Never do drugs, you’ll be hooked instantly,’ my mother used to say, and though I nodded, I never even considered paying attention. So I don’t expect my young cousins or my godchildren or my pill-popping friends to take a blind bit of notice when I tell them the same, but I mean it: don’t do drugs. It’s not worth it. Not any more. One of the reasons not to do drugs back in the day was: ‘You never know what you’re taking.’ The trouble now is not so much that you don’t know, but that you do. The way things are going, pretty soon most street drugs will be made of the same synthetic Chinese-made poison, and it’s lethal. Look online at the videos of zombie-addicts in San Francisco twitching and lolling in the streets, and look at the stats.

When the American director Errol Morris saw Werner Herzog’s film Fata Morgana for the first time, he was heard to mutter: ‘I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like this.’ I didn’t know anyone was allowed to live like this. Herzog’s new memoir Every Man For Himself and God Against All is astonishing and – whether you know his films or not – potentially life-changing, at least for me. I made a list as I went along of all the situations in which Herzog has nearly died: in a crevasse on K2; under the hooves of a bull in Guanajuato, Mexico; in a giant wave in Peru; shortly after his own birth, when an Allied bomb hit his home in Munich.

In the school chapel every morning, bored and tired, I’d rest my forehead on the back of the chair in front and try to doze. The chapel chairs were dignified and sturdy, each with its own wooden box for hymn books and a flat top, carved with the name of a generous old girl. As morning chapel progressed, that name would slowly etch itself into my forehead so that sometimes even at lunchtime I still had the name of a past and more perfect pupil stamped backwards above my eyebrows. This is very much how I feel now about the Church of England. When you’re brought up in an institution, however soporific, it leaves its mark on you. I converted to Catholicism nearly two decades ago but I’m still imprinted with the C of E.