Melanie McDonagh

Melanie McDonagh

Melanie McDonagh is an Irish journalist working in London.

Monday

Melanie McDonagh

Why don’t all these disaffected Brits convert to Christianity instead?

From our UK edition

So, it seems that Lauren Booth, sister-in-law to Tony Blair, isn’t so much a slightly tiresome attention seeker as bang on trend. By converting to Islam, as she very publicly did last year, she’s put a face to the growing numbers of white Britons who have become Muslims, a group that last week was estimated at 100,000. Her scapegrace father, Tony Booth, unhelpfully suggested that because her mother was Jewish, the conversion didn’t really count, but it would be hard to make that argument stick. Actually, when I say 100,000, that’s just the figure that an organisation, Faith Matters, put on the trend last week. It follows a separate report by the US-based Pew Forum, which said that there are, in fact, 2.

Friday

Melanie McDonagh

The complex parentage of Elton John’s baby

From our UK edition

The birth of Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish John gave that of Christ a run for its money in the broadcast news over Christmas. In Ireland, where I was, the newsreader declared that the singer Elton John and his partner, David Furnish, had had their first child. Hang on, I thought. Not so. Some woman, and possibly two – bear with me – has had a baby with one of them. And as it turned out, the birth mother was a client of the Center for Surrogate Parenting based in Encino, California, which has been providing surrogacy arrangements for gay would-be parents since 1989. Elton John and David Furnish will, I’d have thought, make affectionate, not to say, doting, parents.

Saturday

Melanie McDonagh

Scents and nonsense

From our UK edition

Christmas is coming, so that means presents. And for lots of us, that means scent. Some of the hopeful donors will be the sort to wander helplessly around a fragrance department, bewildered by choice until they seize, in desperation, on the stuff that looks nicely packaged. That was the route whereby my father once bought my mother some pleasing aftershave. Others will know exactly what they’re after: the scent their womenfolk have always liked, the perfume their own mothers used to wear. Which is dandy: some of the most beautiful and original perfumes have been with us for decades, a century even. But it’s an illusion to think that what we’re buying is the same scent as Coco Chanel et al used to wear. What we’ve got now is a 21st-century version of the originals.

Saturday

Melanie McDonagh

Bad sex awards

From our UK edition

Every year, every month, there are more of them, the Women of the Year awards when female journalists are invited to join other women for a celebration of our sex at some London hotel. The other week it was the Harper’s Bazaar magazine’s Women of the Year awards, followed closely by the Cosmopolitan magazine’s Ultimate Women of the Year awards, not forgetting the Bounty Celebrity Mum of the Year award (which Samantha Cameron just narrowly missed). Then there’s the Veuve Clicquot Women in Business Awards, the Glamour magazine awards (this year’s winner: Cheryl Cole), the Asian Women of Achievement Awards and the Barclays Women of the Year — won, I need hardly say, by Annie Lennox.

Saturday

Melanie McDonagh

Who’s the daddy?

From our UK edition

It’s a wise child, they say, that knows its own father. Nowadays, however, wisdom is hardly required; DNA tests can do the job with scientific certainty. For the entire course of human history, men have nursed profound, troubling doubts about the fundamental question of whether or not they were fathers to their own children; women, by contrast, usually enjoyed a reasonable level of certainty about the matter. Now, a cotton-wool swab with a bit of saliva, plus a small fee, less than £200, can settle the matter. At a stroke, the one thing that women had going for them has been taken away, the one respect in which they had the last laugh over their husbands and lovers.

Saturday

Melanie McDonagh

Find yourself in Thurso

From our UK edition

You don’t need to go abroad to eat, pray or love The Kensington branch of the upmarket travel company Kuoni has a poster on the window bearing the cryptic legend: Eat, Pray, Love. It’s intelligible probably only to women passers-by and for them, it means one thing: the film of the book by Elizabeth Gilbert, starring Julia Roberts. The story involves Julia/Elizabeth taking a year out of her life — funded, though the film doesn’t make this clear, by a generous advance from her publisher — in order to discover food in Italy, God in India and love in Bali.

Friday

Melanie McDonagh

Diary – 13 August 2004

From our UK edition

The Pope is going to Lourdes at the weekend. But he has made it clear in advance that he is not going for a cure, even though he has Parkinson’s disease and for several years now has looked as if he might die at any moment. Rather, he is going to the world’s most famous Marian shrine ‘to praise God for his gifts’ (God’s, that is, not his own). So that’s that. It must be said that Lourdes is one of the very few places on earth where the Pope is likely to blend in. I’ve been only once, a couple of years ago, and I’ve never been anywhere that more closely resembled Hogsmeade. You know, that village in Harry Potter where every troll, witch, warlock and giant could mingle at will? I’m not being rude.