Melanie McDonagh

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_2_Oct_2014_v4.mp3" title="Luke Coppen and Cristina Odone join Freddy Gray to discuss divorced Catholics." startat=1053] Listen [/audioplayer] The Church’s extraordinary Synod on the family hasn’t gone down terribly well with secular pundits. It’s been billed as a failure on the BBC, which declared that gay Catholic groups are 'disappointed' with the inability of the Synod to make progress towards acknowledging gay relationships. Other groups are similarly disappointed by the Synod’s refusal to admit divorced and remarried people to communion.

Was the chief operating officer of Facebook, one Sheryl Sandberg, involved, do you reckon, in the company’s exciting invitation to its women employees to freeze their eggs so they can become pregnant at their convenience, preferably a little later in life? I’m not sure that this was one of the recommendations in Lean In, her inspirational advice to women wanting to get ahead in business. Get stuck in, was its motto, and sort out the children in the fullness of time on your terms. She does that herself, you know, with a Shared Earning/Shared Parenting marriage with David Goldberg. The rest of us get on with sharing both those things by dint of it being unavoidable, but we don’t give ourselves airs about it. Anyway, freezing her ova wasn’t how Ms Sandberg got ahead.

Exciting times for those of us who are fatter than we should be. The feeling of being put upon may be, at a stroke, translated into full-on discrimination status if researchers at University College London have their way. According to academics at UCL who’ve conducted research into the effects of fattist stigma, ‘shaming and blaming’ fat people is counterproductive and society needs to confront one of ‘the last socially acceptable forms of prejudice’. Their research proves that although two thirds of British adults are overweight and a third are obese, nagging and jeering at them only makes the situation worse. Tell me about it.

Well, what a coup for the No campaign. At least that was my first thought before I found, annoyingly, that it seems to have occurred to every Twitter user too (at least, so I’m told). Anyway, a new baby in prospect for the Cambridges and a PR stroke of genius for the Unionists – because we know, don’t we, that the entire Royal Family is squarely behind the Union and would simply hate for the monarch to have to negotiate a border the way James I et al had to. See Daily Mail, passim. Pretty English Kate, symbolically fecund, has at a stroke trumped the weekend polls. The Better Together campaign must be weeping hot tears of gratitude at this providential turn. That’s the unfair thing about the Royal Family.

Day two of the Rotherham scandal—or rather the fallout from the latest report on it—and there’s a marked, obvious change in the coverage of it from the last time the subject surfaced. It may be the sheer scale of the thing —1,400 girls, and counting—and the horror of the cruelties perpetrated on the victims, but I don’t think that anyone is now trying to evade the reality of the thing: that the perpetrators were overwhelmingly men of Pakistani Muslim background and the victims white.

It’s not often you can blame Samantha Cameron, Sandra Howard and Cheryl Cole for a social trend that blights the job prospects of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of men and women, but it’s out there. I’m talking about tattoos, which have travelled like inky climbing roses up the bare legs of countless Brits, from the bottom of society right to the top. Or from the top to the bottom, depending on your starting point. At one end of the social spectrum you have Cheryl Cole with that rose tattoo on her bottom, which she claims cost the price of a small car; at the other, you have SamCam’s little dolphin on her ankle.

Where to start with Prof Dawkins’ latest observations about religion and fundamentalism? In response to questions from an audience in Edinburgh where he was promoting his autobiography this week he observed that ‘nice’ religious people give credence to suicide bombers. It’s remarkable, really, that after a good eight years of debate and dialogue with people like Rowan Williams and Jonathan Sacks — viz, perfectly rational believers — he can still say the following: ‘...there is a sense in which the moderate, nice religious people – nice Christians, nice Muslims – make the world safe for extremists. ‘Because the moderates are so nice we all are brought up with the idea that there's something good about religious faith.

Yesterday, I had a succession of texts from one of the priests in my local parish, Mgr Nizar, who heads the Iraqi Catholic church in London, asking, with increasing urgency, what could be done for the Christians in Quaraqosh, in Ninevah, where most of Iraq’s  remaining Christians live. 'The situation is very bad,' he wrote. '200,000 Christians are displaced. All the Christian cities fallen in the hands of ISIS.' Another read: 'Our cities are empty now and the people on the street sleeping and nowhere to go.' The last time we spoke, he was agonised about the Christians displaced from Mosul, including most of his own family, under the threat of forced conversion or death by the army of the Islamic state, the one that several hundred young British Muslims have already joined.

To look on the heartwarming side, Australians have shown that they are rather more humane as a nation than the anonymous couple in the news for allegedly discarding one of the twins borne for them by a Thai surrogate six months ago. Scores of Australians have volunteered to adopt Gammy, the Down’s syndrome baby that was commissioned from Pattaramon Chanbua by an Australian couple only to be abandoned by his parents when they discovered his condition; they took  his healthy twin sister though (and the couple now deny knowledge of Gammy). The fund to pay for the baby’s medical treatment, generously funded by Australians, now stands at more than $180,000.

Last year I got my grouse at M&S. The birds, I mean. There’s a little fresh meat section in the Kensington branch round the corner from me at work, and it was dead handy to get game there when I was in money. In fact, if you want gastronomic popular elitism, grouse in supermarkets is as close as you get. Simply roasted with buttered breadcrumbs…nothing nicer, really. Tragically, the treat’s off this year.

If I were choosing a third parent for a baby, you know, I’d be inclined to choose one of the Williams sisters — the top-notch tennis players. If you want to create a baby with really classy metabolism — and metabolic function is just what the third parent provides — you may as well make it good. But what you can’t do, in creating a baby that’s able to process energy efficiently, is pretend that this is anything other than genetic modification. Yet the Department of Health, in effectively approving the three parent baby technique (actually, it’s always going to be two mothers plus one father), has redefined its categories in its proposals to allow mitochondrial DNA transfer. The proposals were published this week.