Melanie McDonagh

Of all the frankly riveting stuff in the Daily Mail’s serial of what it calls 'The Unknown Queen' -- nicely timed for the Queen’s 90th birthday -- is there anything less surprising than the revelation she was/is opposed to gay marriage? Is the head of the Church of England a Christian? Well, it seems so. ‘There is,' say Richard Kay (a friend of the late Princess Diana) and Geoffrey Levy, 'one area of social policy where Her Majesty holds more traditional views…same sex marriage.' Talking about the issue in the home of a close friend around the time the legislation was being passed by Parliament, the Queen is said to have expressed her frustration and unease.

A friend of mine, another journalist, is getting terrifically worked up about the Department for Education’s persecution of exclamation marks. He’s busy writing a defence of free punctuation and because he’s a better stylist than the people laying down the law on this one, this will sting. Apparently, exam bureaucrats told teachers and moderators at a briefing run by the Standards Testing Agency last month that the use of an 'exclamation sentence' must start with either a 'how' or 'what' and must be a full sentence – including a verb. So, 'What a delightful home yours is!' is fine; 'Awesome!' is not. Naturally, there’s going to be a backlash.

Among the treats the mothers of Britain can look forward to on Mothering Sunday there are some rum offerings. A company called Nosh Detox is offering a hamper including something called a Nux Vom drink, and the Guardian has helpfully drawn up a list of mother-related films you only take your mother to if you want to terminate the relationship. Meanwhile, the profile of the mother as depicted in the gift sections of M&S and Waitrose is that of a woman with a penchant for anything pink, who loves imported roses and has a thing about prosecco. Her day is made if you take her out to tea. I quite like prosecco, I suppose, but my own tastes run to burgundy, daffodils, Hotel Chocolat supermilk and handmade cards. My own mother is grateful for anything.

Can you think of anyone who isn’t actually better in work than out of it? My mother took early retirement – I mean, early for Ireland where the retirement age was 65 for both men and women (and given that women live longer than men, how did the iniquitous disparity, whereby women live longer than men but retire earlier, last this long?) -- and I can date her decline as a person from that point. She loved her work as a secretary. I can think of men who retired from the paper I work for as soon as it was commensurate with their having a final salary pension, but it didn’t make them happier. For most of us, work is tantamount to an answer to the question: who are you?

It reflects rather well on Richard Dawkins that he still hasn’t joined his followers – the religious connotations of the word are intentional – in objecting to the Church of England tweet on Friday about praying for his recovery from a stroke. https://twitter.com/c_of_e/status/698249409663000577 Presumably the CofE did so on the basis of Christ’s exhortation to 'Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you', as well as genuine affection for the old boy. But of course the kindly post got the inevitable response from more than 1,000 outraged Dawkinsites: 'Sarcastic or ignorant?' one asked.

Further proof that social media is fundamentally evil comes by way of Facebook's Motherhood Challenge. It has been doing the rounds for about a week, and asks women to contribute by posting a series of photos that make them 'happy to be a mother'. They are then encouraged to 'tag' people they think are 'great mothers', so they can then post their own pictures. Duly, the exercise has been criticised by other Facebook users as smug, as well as insensitive to women with fertility problems. It’s only a matter of time before this incisive comment moves on to the issue of why fathers too aren’t outing themselves as happy, proud parents.

This evening, if you have time and are around central London, there is an interesting lecture at the British Academy by the admirable sociologist of religion, Linda Woodhead, whose book with Andrew Brown on the CofE, The Church We Left Behind, is as depressing as it is largely to the point. The title is 'Why No Religion is the New Religion', and that is pretty much the size of it: the default identity of Brits is no longer reflexively CofE, but not-religious. (Actually, I am a Catholic of sectarian bent but I would personally hesitate to describe myself as religious, on the basis it is a bit of a self-regarding sort of identity, something you call other, smug, obsessive people you do not really approve of.

Pastor James McConnell is back in business as an Evangelical preacher having been found not guilty on a couple of slightly obscure charges (improper use of a public electronic communications network and causing a grossly offensive message to be sent by means of a public electronic communications network). But the gist of the thing was that in the course of a sermon at the Whitewell Metropolitan Tabernacle in Belfast, he described Islam as 'Satanic', and was duly hauled up before a magistrates’ court. Unusually for Northern Ireland these days, the judge Liam McNally simply observed that the heat of his rhetoric had caused him to 'lose the run of himself' but that 'It is not the task of the criminal law to censor offensive utterances.' O si sic omnes.

We can all agree, I think, that the notion of a Sports Personality of the Year is something of an oxymoron. By and large sports people don't really score on personality; there's usually a tradeoff between being committed and being interesting; see Andy Murray. So the BBC title of that name has nothing really to do with personality; it's more about profile and performance. That's plainly not true though of the aptly named Tyson Fury, the 18 stone boxing champion who came out of nowhere to become world heavyweight champion and who has personality in spades. He's got a fabulous backstory too - the son of Irish travellers (interestingly his mother was a Belfast Prod) who came from a characteristically enormous family and who left school at 11.

It’s not that often you get the low business of journalism put into its proper social and spiritual context but that’s what happened courtesy of the Oxford Dominicans on Saturday. Its conference on 'Truth-telling and the Media' – yep, that well known oxymoron – included a contribution by the Goethe expert, Nicholas Boyle. Not a sausage about any current issues relating to the press, thank God. Just a context to put it all in. And that context is that journalists turn the big society into the small society in the way we write; we make the individual reader feel they can relate to the big stuff.

Well, the nice thing is that Je Suis Parisienne is a bit more chic than Je Suis Charlie when it comes to Making a Stand slogans, though in my case there is the qualifier - if only. There’s something enormously poignant about mass murder in a city  where the arts of elegance are esteemed so highly. It makes the blood and terror and indignity so much more incongruous, though the city has, of course, seen revolution and terror before. We can of course waste our breath talking about the need to take the fight to the terrorists, and I’m all for that. (On the ill wind principle, this should make Theresa May’s efforts to get the surveillance bill through parliament a complete breeze.

Even yew trees are at it. It seems the ancient Fortingall Yew in Perthshire, which everyone had assumed to be male, is bearing berries and is therefore, at least in part, female. Dr Max Coleman of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, observed: ‘The rest of the tree was clearly male. One small branch in the outer part of the crown has switched and now behaves as female.’ Which makes this not just the oldest but the most socially progressive tree in Britain, the Caitlyn Jenner of topiary. Or perhaps it was just one transgressive branch making a bid for attention, having been trapped in the wrong trunk all this time. You can’t go far this year without encountering someone in the process of transitioning between genders or who has already arrived at their gender of choice.