Melanie McDonagh

This being the time of year for it, you’re probably thinking what form your New Year New You will take. You know — the reinvention that we’re all encouraged to go in for from 1 January. Well, I have a corker. It’s huge. It is nothing less than the programme created by Donald Trump’s spiritual mentor, and look where that got him. Before reading this formula for success, I did wonder how it was that Mr Trump got as far as the presidency; now the only wonder is that it took him this long. The self-help book I have in mind is written by Mr Trump’s favourite pastor, Norman Vincent Peale: his well-known work The Power of Positive Thinking. Like so many self-help books, the key is in the title: you could save yourself nine quid by just taking it to heart.

You’d never think the country’s short of foster parents, would you, though we’re 9,000-odd short at the last count.  I wouldn’t qualify myself, even if I were solvent. Because if you open your trap in the presence of a social worker to say that a child is best off with a father and a mother, viz, probably the view of most actual parents, you can kiss goodbye to your chances of looking after a child unless it’s one you have given birth to.

My late father was a pottery maker, and very good at it. Question is, if a Northern Protestant had come to his studio to request that he produce a teaset decorated with the legend: 'Taigs Out of Ulster!' or 'Kick the Pope!' perhaps with decoration to match, would my daddy have been obliged to oblige him on the basis that he was offering to make ceramics for all comers, regardless of their religious persuasion? Would the production of Protestant ceramics have been part of his offer to the teaset-buying community? Or could he have declined on the basis that this was offensive to his beliefs as a non-practising Roman Catholic?

Forget killer clowns. Halloween was once a very different affair from the Americanised gorefest it is now. In its-original Irish form, as when I was growing up, it was an opportunity for children to dress up in their parents’ clothes, wear a mask and a hat and go begging from door to door for nuts, apples or money for bobbing — viz, sticking your head in a basin of water to dive after coins and apples. There was barmbrack — a sort of yeasted fruitbread you ate on the night — which contained a ring to predict who would be the next to marry (that dates it) and, in old-fashioned houses, a matchstick to predict poverty. It was quite a big thing, but over in a day or two.

Lord Shinkwin’s Abortion (Disability Equality) Bill has its second reading in the Lord next Friday. I hadn’t heard of it either, and the campaign behind it, 'We’re All Equal', had passed me by, until a friend with an interest in disability issues told me about it. The gist is that it would remove the following bits of the 1967 Abortion Act – section 1 (1) (d) and section 5 (2)(d). Which means what? Why, that the most egregious piece of discrimination in law against disabled people would be done away with, viz, that there’s one cutoff point for normal foetuses to be aborted, none at all for disabled ones. Right now, abortion is legal in Britain until 24 weeks’ gestation. Unless the foetus is disabled.

You can, I maintain, get the Brits to agree to almost any biomedical advance – I use the word in its neutral sense – no matter how repellent, on the basis that it helps sick kiddies or the infertile. So we now have a situation whereby you can actually create human embryos for the purpose of experimentation – thereby instrumentalising the human being in unprecedented fashion. We have also allowed for the creation of three-parent embryos (on the odd basis that mitochondrial DNA is somehow unimportant). And if we don’t have cross-species zygotes yet, it’s only because the process has proved scientifically unfruitful, rather than because David Cameron didn’t give his backing to it.

There’s a good reason and a bad reason why David Cameron hasn’t added his mite to the argument about the reintroduction of grammars, which his Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, sounded off about yesterday. The good reason is that it would be the worst of form for the former Tory PM to diss his successor, even if he disagrees with her. The bad reason is that he’s got a dog in this fight; his son Elwen. You remember all the fuss about the rumour that little Elwen might be going to a feeder prep to St Paul’s, the private school? The Camerons invoked media privacy to see off discussion of that topic. Well, if true, and I haven’t checked since, it gives Mr Cameron a very particular take on the matter of academic selection.

Mother Theresa has been canonised today; cue for contained rapture on the part of her Missionaries of Charity and supporters in Rome and a rather different kind of satisfaction on the part of her critics, who now have a useful opportunity to air their objections to her work and cult. It’s hard to think of two groups not so much at odds but at cross purposes. The BBC news reports on the canonisation by the excellent Caroline Wyatt rehearse some of the more familiar criticisms: her hospices lack the best medical equipment and good hygiene; moreover, she took money from dictators. And according to representatives of Hindu nationalist groups, she also unhelpfully projected an image of Calcutta (to use the old designation) as being poverty-ridden and somewhere people die on the streets.

It is fair to say that I am never one to take the Polly Toynbee approach to things - or indeed, that of this magazine’s cover article this week - that in the sunlit uplands of secular liberalism, Things Have Never Been Better. But some news strikes me with greater force than most as being proof that we’ve arrived at the end of the world as we knew it. So it was when I found out today that the tradition of families eating a Sunday roast dinner – well, if not antique, it has been around for a century or so – is in freefall. There have been fifteen million fewer roast dinners – or lunch, if you prefer – in the last year, while the number of weekday and Saturday roasts has gone up. So what, you may say.