Melanie McDonagh

You know all that stuff about 'safe spaces', places on university campuses where you’re not allowed to say or do anything mean or that could possibly be construed as mean about anyone in case it hurts people’s feelings, especially if you’re a minority of some description? Well, I got the chance to try it out myself the other day. I was at a gathering in Dublin of pro-lifers – I’d been asked to be one of the speakers at their annual event – and it was all going well. There had been a nice young woman talking about hostels for single mothers. There was also a professor of law from Trinity, Dublin, who discussed the background to the Eighth Amendment, which extends equal right to life to both mothers and their unborn offspring.

Well, the Vatican isn’t the place I know a bit if the sexual orientation of the Polish priest who’s just outed himself as gay wasn’t known to everyone from the Swiss Guard to the cleaners. But still, for Mgr Krzysztof Charamsa to declare in a press conference not just that he’s homosexual but actually in a sexual relationship with his boyfriend Eduard – who looked a little less dazzlingly pleased with himself than the priest – was not just a gigantic thumbed nose to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for which he worked, but to the synod on the family which is just starting.

Gosh, she’s done well out of notoriety, has Charlotte Proudman. After emerging from entire obscurity after outing an older male barrister for inappropriate remarks about her photo on LinkedIn – I don’t need to remind you about it, do I? – this young lawyer has now come into her own as a columnist on the Guardian today. There was me, thinking she was safely in a university environment doing more sterling work on FGM. Which, obv, I’m against. I mean the practice, not Ms Proudman’s efforts to rid the world of it, which I don’t expect is going to change much.

Just a thought: what if Aylan Kurdi, the poor drowned three year old child whose picture changed Europe – we are told – when it comes to the fate of Syrian refugees, had been, say, Afghan rather than Syrian? Or Eritrean, or indeed Pakistani? Quite possible, you know. Perhaps half of the migrants coming to Europe across the Mediterranean are not actually Syrian. Many of them are now arriving in German towns, expecting, and receiving, welcome and the promise of residency but may in fact be sent packing if the Germans stick to the letter of their bending of the Dublin Agreement.

You know, when gay marriage legislation was going through parliament and Christian campaigners were warning about the possibility that those with a conscientious objection to gay marriage would find themselves at a disadvantage in public life - especially teachers - I honestly thought that it would take some time to happen. You might have some nutty secularist calling out a teacher who stubbornly refused to teach the parity of gay and straight marriage to children, but outside the Liberal Democrats, I couldn't really see persecution ahead, other than for marriage registrars who would, unfortunately, just have to lump their conscientious difficulties with marrying same-sex couples. Well, I was wrong, wrong, wrong.

The question is, says the Guardian in a report from San Francisco, whether God is actually gay, what with the gay marriage movement being on such a roll. The US Supreme Court majority ruling that marriage between same-sex couples is a constitutional right usefully coincided with a similar ruling on gay marriage in Mexico, which makes a nice change, I expect, from worrying about the narcotics-related homicide rate. In Australia, Malcolm Turnbull says it's bound to happen there. Quite a coup, this, for the social media companies like Facebook, Apple and Google who've been campaigning for just this outcome.

Question: which comes out worse from the Tim Hunt affair – the lynch mob on Twitter which brought him down, or University College London, which pulled the rug from under both him and his immunologist wife once they gathered that one of their own had said something off message? It’s a tough call, but I reckon, UCL, on the basis that it formerly had some academic and intellectual credibility whereas rationality was never the strong suit of the Twitter mob - the contemporary equivalent of the women who, in Greek myth, tore Orpheus to pieces for reason’s we’d better not go into. Tim Hunt and Mary Collins have had their say in the papers over the weekend, in The Guardian and the Mail on Sunday, and the pieces make heartbreaking reading.

Unlike Pope Francis I can’t actually remember when I consciously gave up television and I have in fact watched it occasionally in other people’s houses on various occasions. But it was probably at least as long ago as he, twenty odd years ago. When I went to university there wasn’t a television in our room and there was an awful lot going on; fun stuff, more fun than looking at a screen. And at that point I broke the habit. It’s a bit like giving up sugar in your tea for Lent: the first time is awful; by the next Lent it’s easier; by the end, it’s normal. And so, term by term, I just lost interest. And I’ve never gone back.

You know, I’m not sure the new, in-by-a-squeak Tory MP for Croydon, Gavin Barwell, has quite got it right when he says that 'London is turning into Paris', what with the rich dominating the centre and the poor pushed to the suburbs. If only. Obviously, it’s true that there’s a species of social cleansing going on in the rich boroughs but it’s more subtle than that. I went to see my favourite facialist in Belgravia this week – she’s fabulous; she comes from the East End and her granny used to make her shoplift as a child – and the view from Motcomb Street is alarming. Because so much of it is owned by the Grosvenor Estate, it’s at the mercy of ever increasing rents – I ask you, does the Duke of Westminster actually need more money?

A Telegraph journalist, Lucy Denyer, has written about how rubbish it is that people are calling their children stupid, made-up names. (Spoiler alert: I’m anti stupid made-up names.) Trouble is, while she hasn’t exactly gone the Fifi Trixibelle/Peaches route herself, she has called her son Atticus. And no, it’s not the friend of Cicero she had in mind; it’s the bloke from To Kill a Mockingbird. Difficult one, Atticus. Classical names like Titus, Marcus or Octavia do dangerously expose your child’s class background, increasing their chances of getting beaten up.

Beatrice Elizabeth Mary. Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise. Elizabeth Alexandra Mary. These are the full baptismal names of Princesses Beatrice, Princess Anne and the Queen respectively. And what use are any of them other than the first one in each case? Today the papers have worked themselves up into a state of mild hysteria over the Cambridges' choice of name for their daughter. Charlotte: fine, one for Prince Charles. But the Elizabeth and especially the Diana bit really got them going - the child's third name merited an entire front page in the Mail. Diana won't be forgotten, says her 'closest friend', Rosa Monckton. Well, fine.

Every morning on the way to work I pass a group of Polish builders waiting to start work on the new Design Museum. I know, it tells us a great deal about the availability of British youth for work in construction that every last one of them is Polish, so far as I can make out – and come to that, are the Irish nowadays too swanky to be navvies? -  but what’s interesting is how well behaved they are. They smoke heroically, but when women walk by they register their existence but don’t utter a peep. Possibly it’s because their English isn’t good enough for Wotcher, darling, but they don’t wolf whistle either, which I assume is a lingua franca. It’s not just me, I may say; it’s the same with teenage girls.