Ysenda Maxtone Graham

‘We will have to look at how we are doing things. Will we even be doing prep?’ So spoke Eve Jardine-Young, principal of Cheltenham Ladies’ College, this summer, galvanised to speak out by the alarming increase in depression among teenagers. It was brave of her even to question the need for prep: in our age of competitive league tables, it seems heresy to suggest any kind of decrease in daily output from students. But she is right to question it, and I hope her tentative question will soon be transformed into an untentative statement: prep should not be routinely given, and it should only be given if there’s a compelling reason for doing so. This would get rid of the vast majority of prep that children are set at the moment.

How should a new mother feed her baby? You might well imagine that was up to her. While some mothers take to breast-feeding as if their bosoms have been waiting all their lives for it, others find it exhausting, excruciating and demoralising. Sacrificing every waking hour to nature’s cause, they still produce a mere soupçon of milk, not nearly enough to satisfy a ravenous baby. So isn’t it sometimes better to bottle-feed, with formula milk? Beware. To do such a thing, in our guilt-ridden, competitive age, is seen as stepping into an abyss of last resort. Never mind that your baby will stop crying at last, fall blissfully asleep: the goody-goody breast-feeding mothers in your NCT group will mentally vilify you as a slovenly baby-poisoner.

It’s not quite as bad as we feared: Sealed Air, the company in New Jersey that makes bubble-wrap, is not yet discontinuing poppable bubble-wrap. But its newly designed sibling, non-poppable bubble-wrap, surely spells the end for the real thing: it’s cheaper to ship, because it leaves the factory airless and thus can be ‘flat-packed for your convenience’. The companies who receive it will need to buy an expensive pump to fill the reams of polythene with columns of air, and that air will be beyond the popping power of human fingertips. Panic broke out among the bubble-wrap-popping millions across the globe on hearing the news of the threat to their habit earlier this month. The pastime is universally adored.

It is said that the road to hell is ‘paved with good intentions’. Well, so is the typical front garden in what used to be our green residential streets. In the last ten years, 13 per cent of the lush greenery in British front gardens has disappeared; 4.5 million of our front gardens are now entirely paved over. We used to laugh at overgrown front gardens populated with bearded garden gnomes; but those are surely preferable to grey rectangular deserts of nothingness, mere off-street parking spaces for the car. An exemplary front garden has been created for this week’s Chelsea Flower Show, demonstrating how parked cars and plants can and should live together in harmony.

‘I love my new kitchen heart of the home let’s fill it with friends happy.’ So says the thought bubble in the current ad for the estate agents Rightmove, part of their ‘Find your happy’ campaign. Don’t even get me started on the lack of punctuation — or the use of ‘happy’ as a noun. What I’m worrying about is the kitchen itself. Glimpsing Ed Miliband’s second kitchen last week, we came face to face with the drabness of today’s hyper-hygienic kitchen. Is the kitchen really ‘the heart of the home’ in Rightmove’s imaginary domestic paradise, or is it in fact one of those spotless, minimalist, metallic kitchens, all hard surfaces and sharp corners?

In recent years I’ve started putting the verb ‘to get in’ (when it refers to the action of being offered a place at a sought-after school) into capital letters: ‘To Get In’. It seems to merit capitals, so much has it become the defining verb of one’s child’s success and therefore future happiness, as perceived by the desperate parent. ‘He Got In to Eton.’ ‘She Got In to Latymer.’ Or (whispered only to one’s most trusted friends), ‘He didn’t Get In to St Paul’s.’ I suppose it’s quite amusing that being able to Get your child In to the private school of your dreams is the one prized item that the fee-paying middle classes cannot simply buy. The Getting In system is a meritocracy.

Some of the longest job descriptions belong to rural Church of England clergy. ‘So what do you do?’ ‘I’m the Rector of Aldwincle, Clopton, Pilton, Stoke Doyle, Thorpe Achurch, Titchmarsh and Wadenhoe.’ Every one of these place names evokes an ancient Pevsner-worthy church, smelling of candlewax, damp hymn books and brass polish. Though many villages no longer have a shop or a pub, most do still have a parish church used for regular services — even if only on the first and third Sunday of the month. You push open the creaky door, and last Sunday’s hymns are still up on the hymn board.

Typical mother-to-mother email, January weekday, 2015: ‘Thanks so much for helping out yesterday, Jamie had a great time with you all, thanks also for bringing his games kit home, let me know if you need me to help tomorrow… xx’ Emails and texts like this, flitting across the ether in their thousands, demonstrate the free-flowing currency of helpfulness — mother going the extra mile for mother, in her Volvo, every day — in school-run land. But have you noticed the appalling punctuation? The use of the ‘weak comma’, or ‘splice comma’, where there should be full stops? My guess is that you have, especially if you are over 45 and went to a good school: one at which you were well punctuated.

Recent text from a female friend. ‘I’m in love with Neil MacGregor.’ To which I reply, ‘But of course! Up there with the Dean of Westminster and Frank Gardner.’ The same day, walking in Kensington Gardens, another friend admits, ‘I think I’m in love with Neil MacGregor.’ We mourn the fact that MacGregor’s Wikipedia entry tells us he’s ‘listed in the Independent’s 2007 list of most influential gay people’, so the director of the British Museum is, sadly, out of reach to womankind. It’s his beautiful speaking voice that does the trick. I like the way, in his Radio 4 series Germany: Memories of a Nation, MacGregor pronounces ‘Germany’, with a sounded ‘r’.

Letter home from prep-school boy, c. 1949: ‘Dear Mummy and Daddy, last night was the school play. It was Hamlet. A lot of the parents had seen it before, but they laughed all the same.’ Guffaws from the audience at lines that are not supposed to be funny; total absence of laughter at lines that are: these are what actors and directors dread. The world of prep-school drama has come a long way since 1949. The three-hour Shakespeare tragedy marathon has generally been ditched in favour of swiftness and inclusivity. Under an hour is the preferred length, and it is not done to have lengthy black-outs while scenery is changed. Props have been simplified: one armchair is shorthand for a drawing room, one hay bale for a barn, one front door for a house.