Melanie McDonagh

As ever, the Romans got there first. Their version of Mothering Sunday or Mother’s Day was the feast of Juno Lucina, the patroness of childbirth, which happened on the first day of the year, 1 March. Roman mothers wore their hair down and their tunics loose. Their husbands and daughters gave them gifts. It was also one of the few days when slaves got time off and were, for once, waited on. Obvious parallels, then. Fast forward 1,500 years, and Mothering Sunday is a thing, but the origins aren’t entirely clear. Was it connected with the medieval custom whereby parish churches sent parishioners to their mother church or cathedral?

Well, too bad Carrie and Zac. It looks like the government is going to drop its commitment to banning imports of foie gras and fur. A combination of Jacob Rees-Mogg objecting to the foie gras ban on the grounds of consumer choice and Ben Wallace, Defence Minister, agitating for the Guards to continue to have their bearskin hats, seems to have seen that off. Issues such as these are interesting in that they combine otherwise incompatible groups and individuals in opposition. In Tory terms, the kind of people who campaign about foie gras and fur tend to be posh Tories – it was no accident that Zac Goldsmith first promised the ban – who regard animal welfare issues as part of their stewardship of the environment, which in turn derives from land ownership.

Well, we’ve been terrifically amused and amusing at the expense of Pope Francis, who this week declared at a Vatican audience that: ‘Many couples do not have children because they don’t want them, or have just one because they don’t want any more, but have two dogs, two cats… oh yes, dogs and cats take the place of children.’ It was, he said, proof of a ‘certain selfishness… it makes us laugh but it’s true. Renouncing parenthood diminishes us. It takes away our humanity.’ This was inevitably cue for British commentators to weigh up the merits of cats and dogs versus children, and for some to pronounce in favour of the cats.

If you wanted a good working example of the concept of dumbing down in practice, look no further than Ofqual, the exams regulatory board, the one that covered itself in ignominy when it oversaw the exam algorithm fiasco during lockdown. Its latest idea is to get exam boards for English to replace ‘complex’ language elements, such as idiom, sarcasm and metaphor, with simpler alternatives in some assessments to make the tests more accessible for pupils. The temptation at this point to respond with sarcasm, irony, idiom and metaphor – not at all nice ones either – is almost irresistible, but let’s not go there.

You see them everywhere in vast orange mounds: pumpkins, piles of pumpkins, large enough to be turned into a coach in Whole Foods, a bargain 65p in M&S. Halloween, in terms of retail, means orange for pumpkin and black for witches. Round our way, a pumpkin outside the front door means that the household is receptive to tots and teenagers coming round in costume looking for sweets. Pah! When I was small in Ireland, there was none of this pumpkin lark. We never saw pumpkins, except in Cinderella, where it was the exotic element of the story. Pumpkins are a visible symbol of what happened to All Hallows’ Eve, when the celebrations for the feast of ghosts and divination were taken to America with Irish emigrants… and then somehow came back again.

Molly Meacher, whose Bill to allow assisted dying gets its further reading in the Lords today, gave an interesting interview on BBC radio today – there was no other speaker to counter her arguments; an exchange of views came later in the programme. She explained that her engagement with the cause had been prompted by the lonely death of an aunt who had a terminal illness; she went on to describe the unpleasant conditions that could not be dealt with by palliative care. But then the interviewer, Martha Kearney, went on to ask about the problem that old people might be made to feel a burden.

Last week, my mobile phone stopped working. No big deal you might think. If you can get emails on your computer, and you’ve got a landline and that old-fashioned thing, post, why, you’re not cut off, are you? There are, of course, people who wilfully eschew their phones so as to be more in touch with the present moment… birds, clouds, flowers etc. And I’m hardly a junkie. I don’t do social media. I’m a grown-up, so I’m not on Snapchat. Not having a phone should have been fine. But as I discovered, I was quickly cut out of society. First off, you can’t tell the time. Obviously, when you’ve got a phone you don’t need a watch. Or a clock.

Amongst the many appalling details from the murder of Sir David Amess, one detail jumped out at me in yesterday’s reports. Father Jeffrey Woolnough, a Roman Catholic priest, arrived at the police cordon stretching across Eastwood Road North offering to administer the Last Rites to the MP, whom he knew to be a practising Catholic. But he was not allowed through.  "I was refused entry," he said later. And he added that, as a consequence, he was unable to issue the sacrament.  "I’m so very sorry that I was not allowed to minister to Sir David at the end. The police had their instructions which I have to respect and abide by." But why on earth was he refused entry?