Melanie McDonagh

No city really multitasks like Paris, shorthand for romance, culture, fashion, gastronomy and the kind of street life you find on Robert Doisneau calendars. The £69 Eurostar return opens up a vista of civilised pleasures: the best cheese shops (Androuet), the loveliest perfumeries (Serge Lutens, Palais Royal), the best markets (Marché des Enfants Rouge), the prettiest dolls’ house shop (Pain d’Epices), the most engaging museum (Jacquemart-André). Armed only with Patricia Wells’s unsurpassed Food Lover’s Guide to Paris, Inès de la Fresange’s style guide, Parisian Chic, and the Penguin Map Guide or the little brown Paris version of the A-to-Z, you’re on a roll.

A friend of mine, quite a distinguished lawyer, takes the view that marriage ceased to make sense after no-fault divorces came in. What, he says sternly, is the point of a contract when there’s no sanction if you break it? Well, quite. But if no-fault divorce pretty well invalidates marriage after the event, prenups do quite a good job of undermining it beforehand. The point of marriage is that it’s meant to be a lifetime affair – the hint being in the ‘til death do us part’ bit – and the point of prenups is that they make provision for the thing ending before it even gets underway.

Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, has spent an awful lot of time since his recent interview with the Telegraph clarifying just what he meant when he said that the way welfare reforms have been implemented has left people destitute and relying on food banks. When I saw him earlier today, he wasn't exactly tetchy about the coverage so much as tired explaining what he actually wanted to get across. ‘People should take the trouble to read what I said’, he said (a familiar refrain, that, from non-politicians who deal with journalists).

You know, when the pope went on in his recent encyclical about how the family ‘is experiencing a profound cultural crisis’ he wasn't half right. His reflection that ‘the individualism of our postmodern and globalized era favours a lifestyle which … distorts family bonds’ came to mind when I got this very special Valentine's press release from a money saving website. It's offering your cheapest ever divorce for £36, so long as you apply today. I always thought, myself, that no fault divorce was a really bad idea in undermining the contractual character of marriage, but I never thought that the commodification of the end of marriage - cheapening the bond in every sense - would follow it quite so quickly.

Terry Eagleton, the Marxist literary critic, has been something of a hero of mine since the publication of his Reason, Faith and Revolution, a thoroughgoing demolition of the Richard Dawkins critique of religion – on the sound basis that Prof Dawkins didn’t know what he was talking about – and his latest, Culture and the Death of God, promises to be pretty good too.

For non-Catholics, the most luridly fascinating aspect of Catholicism is confession. Telling your inmost sins — and we know what they are — to a male cleric, eh? In a darkened booth. How medieval is that? Well, the fantasies that people who never go to confession nurse about it are about to be shored up by a new book on the subject by the Catholic author John Cornwell. It’s called The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession. On the cover is a scary-looking picture of a confessional — not somewhere you’d take the children, frankly, but right at home in a Hitchcock movie. John Cornwell is a friend, and moreover an intelligent and thoughtful man, but if ever there were a book that played to its gallery, it’s this one.

As a child, I was not a good traveller. The mere scent of a car interior – possibly the plastic seats, maybe the closed atmosphere, probably the whiff of petrol – would be enough to bring on the tell-tale flow of odd saliva that heralded a really impressive bout of vomiting. If the smell of fag smoke had been added to the mix it would have happened even sooner. So when I say that the that Labour peers’ attempt today (supporters of the amendment include Tony Blair’s old friend, Charlie Faulkner) to introduce a ban on smoking in cars with children is bossy, oppressive and expressive of the demeanour of Yvette Cooper (who has, in fact, nothing to do with it), it’s not from any childish nostalgia for passive smoking so much as a sense of unease.

There was a lovely little ultrasound picture of a foetus to illustrate the Independent’s splash today about the incidence of sex-selective abortions in Britain. According to the paper’s analysis of ONS statistics, the incidence of second daughters among immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh and possibly those from other countries such as India isn’t quite the same as in the population at large. Either immigrants from these groups are, more than the rest of us, having child after child until they have a boy or they are simply aborting second pregnancies where the foetus is a girl in order to ensure their next child is a boy: most probably, according to a statistician used by the Indie, the latter. The cull of pre-natal girls could have cost between 1,400 and 4,700 lives.

Tristram Hunt, Shadow Education Secretary, is an intelligent and articulate individual but like everyone in politics, has the handicap of having to square his views with the record and policies of his own party. His interesting interview with the Fabian Review is a case in point. He attributes some of the education failures of white boys -- the new educational underclass -- in British schools to the influx of large numbers of East European immigrants in areas like Kent and East Anglia. His remedy for the problem is benign, namely, to educate indigenous youth to the standards needed by employers, so as to outflank the competition, and to focus on vocational skills in a way that Labour didn't do in power. So far, so dandy.