‘Women want him, men want to be him’ is a strapline that has always been associated with James Bond. But, like all straplines, it encapsulates the surface persuasion of the marketing man while at its core there is an inauthenticity, a hollowness. That hasn’t stopped over 60 years of a certain type of man succumbing to the belief that James Bond is the ne plus ultra of manhood. Believing that with a tuxedo, a Martini - shaken not stirred, and an Aston Martin they too can have Pussy Galore. Indeed, if you were to arrange an ‘Icons of Cinema’ fancy dress party nearly half the men would turn up in dinner jackets confident that they were the absolute business. And they would be absolutely wrong.

The thing about James Bond is that he is basic, he is the Ikea flatpack of masculinity. He shoots, he shags, he kills. He is a destructive force as imagined by a civil servant. What James Bond does not do is electrify, he does not fever the brow or race the pulse. All of that is in contrast to Frank-N-Furter or, more specifically, Tim Curry playing the role. This was a man so hot that if they plugged him into the National Grid the government would have achieved Net Zero decades ago.

I don’t know Ms Emily Edwards but, like nearly 10,000 other people on Threads, I am in complete agreement with her. A striking feature of the commentary on Tim Curry’s death has been the huge number of people who experienced an awakening watching this film. In that sense we are all Brad and Janet when we see Frank/Tim strut out of that lift.

There are two things I particularly love about the sexiest entrance in cinema history. Half way through the number he takes a literal water break and throws a cup of water at the camera/us, cooling down the audience before it self-combusts. But the best bit about the entrance is the exit. He doesn’t hang around for the applause or to see his impact on the newcomers. He is not performing for others he is performing for himself. There’s a showbusiness saying, always leave them wanting more, Frank/Tim leaves Brad & Janet/Us wanting everything.

In our dismal age of looksmaxxing and gigachads I want to point to Frank/Tim and tell my sons that is what a real man looks like and if they weren’t 9, 7 and 2 I would. When the time is right, I will. Fortunately, the time is always right to learn that if you want a life fully lived, don’t dream it, be it.

In a week in which something truly wondrous happened, but also something truly tragic, life reminds us once again that while wonders never cease so too do tragedies.

I don’t know how the eclipse was for you but, in common with many I suspect, it managed to creep up on me unawares. I had arranged no viewing party, procured no special glasses and even neglected to pack my colander when I left for work on Wednesday morning.

When it finally did arrive I was in the midst of a bicycle journey, a perilous thing to do given the reported spike in road traffic accidents that are supposed to be a hallmark of eclipses. And certainly the confused squawking of the birds proved some distraction but the slight dimming of the light proved no real danger.

Not being an astronomer or a physicist in truth I was not terribly interested in trying to look at the sun, ironically something people only do when it’s hidden. What was much more interesting to me as I pedalled across North London was watching people trying to look at the sun.

Obviously Parliament Hill and other high points attracted large crowds but the people I saw were, like me, unprepared. They were crammed on street corners where the sun appeared (or disappeared) between buildings. This loitering with intent was strangely moving. Totally normal streets becoming the scene of an impromptu, joint human experience of wondering.

It is easy to understand why many people in history have revered the sun as a god. It has every essential quality of godhead. It gives life. It takes it away. You can’t look directly at it. And one day it will mean the end of the world. And the way we’re going that day may come a lot sooner than the sun intended.

Being English my meteorological deity is the rain and, as an Aquarian, the last few weeks of drought and wildfires in Britain have been truly terrifying. In the past eclipses were seen as portents of doom and there is a certain poetic irony, if the sun is warning us of our impending heat death, that it did so by being concealed.

The thing about the eclipse was that you had to experience it, watching it on a screen in no way captured its wonder and strangeness. And experiencing that wonder and strangeness with other human beings brought a rare moment of communion that had nothing to do with sex, class, race, nationality, age, ability or any of the myriad ways in which we manage to forget we share this planet as one. Where the eclipse absolutely could not be experienced was on a device.

Younger millennials and Gen Z won’t know this but August used to be known as Silly Season for newspapers because there was nothing to report, with politicians and almost everyone else on holiday. Escaping pigs would become major national news stories. The Internet and social media now means there is never a quiet moment in the news cycle and, as Jason Arday’s truly bleak and needless death has shown, Silly Season would more aptly be called Savage Season now.

When you’re trying to get a glimpse of an eclipse it may be that the person standing next to you will lend you their glasses or their colander. When you’re scrolling nobody is standing next to you but everyone is shouting at you. And only those that shout loudest get heard. So online voices counselling caution or urging restraint get obliterated by a tsunami of scorn, outrage and fury.

Before the Internet the eclipse would have been a story for weeks but the drought would have been a story for months and it would have been a story that required the most urgent political attention and action. Instead we watch on our screens houses consumed by wildfire in Stourbridge and a man’s life consumed by wildfire online with the same anaesthetised inability to realise the harm we are doing to ourselves and those around us.

The world’s salvation clearly lies in real life collective action, it’s ruination in digital life collective distraction.

If you ever see a child engage, unprompted, in a kind or generous act, obviously commend that child. But much, much more importantly take the time to report what you witnessed to the child’s parents. That is because there is literally nothing more nourishing to a parent’s sense of worth as a caregiver than receiving an outsider’s affirmation that their child made of the right stuff. If you are a stranger to the parents that commendation is worth more than an Oscar. A stranger’s praise is the Olympic gold medal of parenting.

The other reason why it is essential that you inform the parents is that they are guaranteed to relate what you said to their child. And communicating that kind of praise is a moment of fairy godmothering or godfathering in any parent/child relationship.

Sure, it’s wonderful when your kid scores the winning goal in an under 10s football tournament, or gets the lead in the school play. But this is all very public stuff and contingent on your kid having a particular talent unpossessed by all. Being a good human is something that is accessible to us all, which isn’t to say it’s always easy or doesn’t have to be modelled, taught and learned.

Every parent will be well acquainted with the sullen looks they receive when scolding a child. This will all too often be accompanied with words of defiance or defensiveness. What is interesting is watching how a child responds when they are praised for a noble or selfless act. What I have found is that quite often the child won’t say or do anything at all. It can even seem that perhaps they haven’t heard you. But you’ve been heard alright. In fact, those words will sink deeper in your child than any bollocking they’re given for the state of their bedroom.

The reason why they don’t say anything is because that is communication from heart to heart and that is communicating without words. When a child hears and feels their parent’s pride I often imagine their response being like those Ready Brek adverts from the 1980s when the children would light up. Those kinds of conversations with your children are so valuable because it makes them realise that their good actions do not go unnoticed or unremarked upon.

Obviously, there will be times when being a good child costs them little or nothing in terms of their time and standing in the playground. But there will be other times, standing up for a bullied child, which will require genuine courage and potential risk to themselves in standing against the crowd. It will be in those moments, hopefully, that those heart to hearts will have armed them with moral conviction and fortitude.

Watching some of the grotesque flattery being lavished on him by his weak willed toadies at a recent Trump Cabinet meeting was a dismal reminder of how contagious bad faith and bad actions can be. But the truth is good actions and actors can be just as galvanising, even if they are usually much quieter about it. During my Paternity Leave I spent a lot of time in a local cafe with Hardy Boy 3. There is a grandmother regular there who seems to be the soul of the place. She knew the name of every dog that came in, she knew the names and ages of all of the Hardy Boys and asked after them without fail. She took a kindly and concentrated interest in every customer she spoke to, which was most of them.

She is the kind of person who will do what she can to chase away your cares and to celebrate your achievements, however modest. I would find even being in her presence amounted to a corrective of attitude and outlook. And this kind of goodness is not without rigour. I remember another chatty regular sharing rather stale conjecture about someone we all knew. This was met with a smile but a very firm: I won’t hear this, I never engage in gossip. As an absolutely incorrigible gossip this to me was self-discipline of the highest order.

These people exist, if you don’t know them, find them. Surround your children with them and, if you ever get the chance, for goodness’ sake vote for them.

I used to think that next to undertaking and a few other occupations that have existed since time immemorial that the future would always be secure for the Criminal Bar. But the speed with which many of my fellow barristers have rushed to the robotic embrace of AI suggests that I may have been foolhardy in predicting an eternal future for human pleading in court.

Andy Burnham the new broom at No 10 South & North has seen the writing is on the wall for the professions with his blue collar call to arms: ‘From today Britain will value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap’. And who’s to say he’s wrong to recalibrate secondary education towards body work now that machines are making mincemeat of mind work.

Whether you think we’re standing at the breaking dawn of the sunlit uplands of free time and leisure while data centres take the strain or a bottomless abyss of unemployment there is no doubt that discerning what education is for in 2026 is a more complicated question than ever it was.

Except I don’t believe that. I believe that education is for what it has always been for: a preparation for life. And life is most definitely not a synonym for work and the people who believe that it is reveal themselves to be entirely uneducated. Of course we have to make a living, of course we need to find dignity and purpose in labour and of course someone or something has to get us ready for it. But if we are not ready for life we are not ready for work or certainly not any work of any worth or meaning.

The dismal obsession with league tables and with grades bespeaks a person that sees schools as sausage factories. Someone that cares about attainment measured in the most reductive and basic way. A well drilled student can leave school with a clutch of A grades and yet have learned nothing about the purpose of learning which, to my mind at least, is a constant quest to understand oneself better and the world around one and then putting that understanding to good use.

It’s sometimes said that schools do a pretty hopeless job of preparing children for real life. No classes in mortgage applications, no teaching of tyre changing on the hard shoulder of the M6 in the rain, no knitting. I am aware, of course, that PSHE education exists but it seems remarkable to me that almost all secondary schools will have some kind of careers department or offering but nothing offered in relation to the most important decision a young person will make in their life. And that is who they choose to spend it with.

I’m not suggesting here that schools get into matchmaking or arranged marriages but which of your teachers warned you that who you select as your life or long term partner would have a bigger impact on the trajectory of your life, your contentment and happiness than any job or occupation ever would. And isn’t that true and how did you learn that lesson? Perhaps modelled by blissfully happy parents or perhaps learned the hard way by bitter experience.

Get into accountancy when what your heart truly desired was aviation or settle for sales when your skills should have taken you to surgery then you can jump the tracks and close the door on a wrong decision. But have a baby with the wrong person and that is a life sentence. Or worse, squander your best years with a Mr Maybe and watch that baby get washed away with the bath water when he walks out the door.

Did school get you ready to identify and avoid the time wasters? Did school teach you that until you know yourself you can’t begin to know someone else, let alone hope to make a happy life with them? Perhaps this is making the ‘Personal’ of PSHE far too personal. Maybe schools should be concerned only with matters of the mind and not matters of the heart. After all what are Taylor Swift and Love Island for if it’s not to give adolescents a comprehensive grounding in healthy, functioning relationships ready to last a lifetime (ahem).

Those emotional deserts the Public Schools have always cherished Juvenal’s aphorism Mens sana in corpore sano. A healthy mind in a healthy body. But if you leave school with an uneducated heart how can you possibly be ready to navigate relationships and all they entail?

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It is a source of profound shame that in 2026 serious criminal cases come before the courts in which many years have elapsed between allegation and charge and then many more years between not guilty plea and trial.

Ordinarily judges and lawyers involved in the criminal justice process refer to historic sex cases as being those in which a complainant has taken many years, sometimes decades, to make an official police complaint. Often a result of the huge difficulty attendant upon vocalising trauma to agents of the state.

However, the system is now so beleaguered and overwhelmed that a complaint of rape made today, moments after a sexual encounter might, depending on the circumstances, not be charged until next year and then not tried until 2028 or later.

The turning of the wheels of justice is now so slow that even our steam powered Victorian predecessors would be staggered at how long it takes to achieve the resolution of a criminal trial on indictment in modern Britain. Well within my lifetime as a practising barrister I can recall it being exceptional for a bail trial to be listed more than a year after a not guilty plea is entered, now it is remarkable if a slot is found within less than a year.

The unhappy irony is that this sclerotic seizing up of the system is occurring just as the transmission of information, audio and media footage becomes ever more instantaneous and far-reaching. We are used, in so many aspects of our lives, to having information at our fingertips and on demand. The gatekeeping of information seems an affront and an attack on our freedom (and desire) to know and know now.

A source of tension arises from the fact that a large part of the criminal justice process, certainly in this country, is about enforcing and upholding that gatekeeping. Every constituent participant in the process is privy to information which is not shared and in many circumstances must not be shared with other parts. Legal arguments happen in courts every day about what information a jury should or should not properly be provided. In a trial you’re all in the same room but you’re not telling the same story and you’re not accessing the same information. This includes the privacy of a jury’s deliberations, which is sacrosanct.

There are important reasons for that gatekeeping. Legal professional privilege safeguards fair trial rights and ensures the state is not permitted to listen in to communications between defendant and lawyer. Legal argument about the admissibility of evidence ensures that juries hear what is probative and not what is merely prejudicial. If juries were entitled to access all information held by the police then there would be no need for judges. But not all information is of equal value and not all information is safe, which is why we have rules against hearsay evidence, for example.

Unfortunately, the need for this is often poorly communicated and poorly understood. It is also a situation in which the ill-intentioned can seek to capitalise on the perceived withholding of information as being indicative of an agenda. We are in the midst of a ferment of online speculation about the circumstances of Ann Widdecombe’s death. Speculation is Kryptonite to a fair trial process and judges rightly emphasise as much in their directions to juries.

There is a sense that some feel an entitlement to real time police updates in relation to murder investigations. Not only is this completely unrealistic but it fails to perceive why there might be important investigative reasons why information is not made public. In some respects a murder investigation is extremely basic:

1. Have the police identified the right suspect?

2. Have the police identified what happened?

3. Have the policy identified why it happened?

Providing the answers to those ‘basic’ questions, with evidence and not rank speculation is often anything but straightforward and actively undermined by making public that which is time sensitive or unresolved.

In simple terms police investigations take time and the police have to be afforded a proper amount of time to undertake investigations without it being claimed that their ‘failure’ to provide a scrolling newsfeed is somehow indicative of bad faith or deep state interference.

That is not to say that when there is no prospect of an investigation being harmed or a fair trial compromised that the police should not share all such information as they properly and safely can.

Where the gatekeeping of information does become a major problem is in making available and known the outcomes of the criminal justice process. Broadcasts from court are vanishingly rare and court reporters are becoming a highly endangered species. Many serious cases of obvious public interest are never reported upon and sometimes cases are reported that are of relatively minor public significance.

A recent example of a very unhappy gap between the resolution of criminal proceedings and accurate reporting is the Fordingbridge rape case. Although all Crown Court proceedings are audio recorded there is no automatic entitlement to access to those recordings and even then access is granted by a judge with an eye watering fee applied to transcription costs. Transcription which then takes some time.

As any Substack user will know audio narration of a post is available immediately upon publication. The same is true with AI enabled transcription, obviously that does not mean that court transcripts would not require checking and where required redaction but the system has to make allowance for modern requirements, realities and expectations.

Similarly, it is not reasonable to expect judges in every single case to reduce their sentencing remarks to writing but no media outlet and ultimately no social media user can dispute what appears in written sentencing remarks in black and white. They may not agree with what appears but that is not the same thing. The gap in time between the pronouncement of sentence and the (limited) dissemination of a court transcript creates a vacuum and it’s not just nature that abhors a vacuum it’s also truth and accuracy.

Ultimately it is incumbent upon the public, politicians, police, the media, and those charged with administering the criminal justice process to be realistic about what information necessarily takes time and must be kept private and what can and should be properly disseminated without delay.

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When I was 17 I wanted to study Philosophy at university or, more accurately, my mother wanted me to. It seemed, therefore, a good idea to run the school philosophy club. The other boy who ran it with me was legitimately interested in philosophy and he legitimately understood it as well. I remember the meetings being absolutely terrifying because at the end of them I would have to stand up and give a vote of thanks to the guest speaker which involved saying something witty or profound about whatever amazingly abstruse things they had just said and which I almost never understood. The other boy had no difficulty with this, although on one occasion his vote of thanks was so sophisticated that at its end he had to remind the audience to applaud.

The school had many clubs which it called, rather pompously, Societies and the boys who ran them were called, even more pompously, Keepers. There were societies for almost every imaginable subject and, not surprisingly, the one which invited actors was the most popular. I vividly recall an address by Richard E. Grant who came to speak to the boys a decade after his cult role in Withnail & I. He entered the long, wood-panelled and bust-lined room used for debating to be met by scenes of almost Messianic devotion. The cheering lasted so long I genuinely thought he might scarper in the face of such deranged adolescent hero worship. Fortunately for us he did not and instead gave a witty and charming account of his life and the role of a lifetime.

Overjoyed though I was to see Withnail in the flesh hearing him speak made me all the more admiring of the man who had created the mordant marvel. I could not have predicted that a few years later I would be hosting that man, Bruce Robinson, while running another society. That society was the Beaufort Society, the Lady Margaret Hall literary society. Fortunately literature was something that I did know about and actually liked. Even more fortunately I was running it with one the most efficient and capable women in the university who must have sent literally hundreds of letters of invitation. This resulted in a very eclectic smorgasbord of guest speakers that included Louis de Bernières, still basking in the glow of his mega hit Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, and Santa Montefiore, the romance writer.

If, lamentably, you are not familiar with Bruce Robinson the highlights for me are his appearance as Benvolio in Zeffirelli’s Romeo & Juliet. He wrote the Oscar nominated screenplay for the magnificent and chilling 1984 film, The Killing Fields, about the Cambodian genocide. He also wrote a dangerously funny sort of memoir The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman. But it is for Withnail that he will be forever loved, the embodiment of late 20th century English decline, all shambolic panache and acid conceit.

I was very, very excited to be playing host to such a hero. One of the college’s smartest rooms, the Old Library, had been given over to the meeting which was so full students were perching on window sills. The plan, as with all our guest speakers, was a talk at 7 pm for about an hour and then my fellow President and I (nobody is more pompous about nomenclature than a university student with a tiny bit of responsibility) were going to take Bruce out for dinner. I had booked Le Petit Blanc as North Oxford’s then best restaurant. We were also putting him up for the night in one of the college guest rooms. Basically, insofar as undergraduate students are able, we were pushing the boat right out.

In setting up the room I positioned a small table between the two chairs Bruce and I would be sitting on and opened a good bottle of red. This was the first misstep in an evening of calamitous stumbles. When Bruce entered the room to wild applause I was moving to pour him a glass when he quickly stopped me and said he’d been off the sauce for a long time. A bottle of water was quickly found. Then, somewhat to my surprise, he asked if he could have an ashtray. I very publicly had to apologise that as we were in a library that he absolutely could not. This hiccough navigated Bruce launched into one of the most entertaining monologues I’ve ever heard in my life.

There seemed to be no limit to his powers of storytelling and store of anecdotes. After some time passed I glanced at my watch and realised with considerable consternation that nearly an hour and a half had elapsed and Bruce was showing no signs of flagging. The idea of stopping him seemed appalling; like cutting off Michelangelo mid-brushstroke. However, eventually, my hand was forced as I noticed the door to the library had opened and standing there looking furious was one of the porters seconds away from making throat-slitting gestures at me.

Hesitantly I got to my feet to try and staunch the Niagara Falls of entertainment still cascading next to me. Bruce looked at me quizzically and said: ‘Everything alright?’ To this day I still cringe that I didn’t just say that, sadly, we had to call it a night. What I instead said was: ‘I thought perhaps you might like a fag?’ He looked even more confused and, to my absolute horror, said: ‘You want to fuck?’ For what seemed like an eternity I pondered whether to demur might seem impolite before gabbling some inadequate words of appreciation instead.

I could little have apprehended that things were about to get a lot worse. It was now about 9 pm. I had booked dinner for 4 at 8.15. The problem was an extra 4 Bruce mega fans had attached themselves, limpet-like, to our group. We set off for Le Petit Blanc arriving about 9.30 pm. I apologised to the maître d' that we were a little late and slightly greater in number than I had anticipated. He looked contemptuously at me said last orders was at 9 pm and he had long ago given away the table.

I turned to Bruce and asked him if he was a fan of curry, to my immense relief he was. So it was that we turned up mob handed at Jamal’s, the designated Indian restaurant for all college rugby and boat club curry nights. Dinner was not an entire success as the most fanatical of the fans insisted on sitting next to Bruce whereupon he fell into almost catatonic starstruck silence. At the end of dinner I asked Bruce if there was anything else he would like. He said he would like an affogato. Jamal’s made a mean vindaloo but I suspected this was going to be a stretch. I summoned the waiter who looked uncomprehendingly at me, I tried to explain, he replied: ‘We have mango kulfi and we have pistachio kulfi’.

I told Bruce I had a solution. We quit Jamal’s for G&Ds the legendary Oxford ice cream parlour. There was a long queue but they knew exactly what Bruce was after. He generously indicated that the ice cream was on him but did not stipulate how many ice creams and I had the uncomfortable feeling he ended up stumping up for about half the shop.

Eventually it was time to escort Bruce to his guest room and I bade him goodnight with apologies for the various cock-ups that had beset the evening. I informed him ruefully that I would be getting up at the crack of dawn to attend to my weekly essay crisis. And indeed it was 5 am when my alarm went off, I dragged myself down to the computer room to conjure some sort of essay out of some sort of reading. After about an hour the fire alarm went off, bleary eyed students started staggering from rooms all down the corridor. Suddenly, Bruce’s door was flung open and he burst out asking me what on earth was going on.

I escorted him outside until the all clear was given and asked if he wanted to go back to bed. He said he would just get the early train and asked if I could summon a cab. I went into the Porters’ Lodge and requested that they kindly ring for one. I thanked Bruce as well as I could after such a broken night’s sleep and returned to my essay. When I emerged an hour or so later for my tutorial I stuck my head in the Lodge and asked if all had been well with the cab for the guest. The day porter said no cab had turned up and the night porter, who had just knocked off, took the man to the station himself.

It was the first and only time in my life I have had to write a thank you letter that was also an apology letter.

I came downstairs for breakfast today to this cheerful message from the Hardy boys, which I’m attributing to their maternal Germanic heritage and not as a commentary on my decorum and personal habits. But in anticipation of the day when I will become an old fart offering them unsolicited and unwanted advice I thought, in honour of Fathers’ Day, that I would offer them Ten Top Tips or Max’s Maxims, as I call them.

1. Live in the light

But for heaven’s sake make it candlelight. Electric light is useful for all sorts of things but making you and those you love beautiful is not one of them. There is a reason why the fire emoji is a flame and not a lightbulb. Candles caress, electricity exposes. You will meet big light people in your life, these are not your people. You can never have too many candles (or flowers for that matter). That is something my father taught me and although he never taught me how to change a wheel, put up a shed or catch a fish he taught me that beauty matters. It is possibly the only thing that matters if you believe that Keats got it right:

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

2. There is nothing fanciful about fancy dress

You are the sons of two cultures. One that cherishes fancy dress and one that despises it. While I admire the Germans and their efficiency in almost all respects their distaste for fancy dress is an Achilles Heel. Many of the world’s ills are caused by people taking themselves too seriously and when this becomes a national mindset unhappiness is the outcome. It’s often wise to be serious about the slight and light about the serious. If you do not receive sufficient fancy dress invitations then you must offer them. Be the fancy dress you want to see in the world.

3. Dance

Dance and learn to dance. When I was about 17 I went to a wedding in Scotland and, like many weddings in Scotland, after dinner there was reeling. All the Scots in the room knew how to do this and I did not. There are few things in life more frustrating than seeing other people having fun that is denied to you because you do not know how to join them. This is why swimming is such an essential life skill. I enlisted my friend and your godmother Katharine to teach me to reel and many trampled feet later I was good enough to teach people myself. Dancing is fun and dancing is life and the fear and embarrassment that deters many boys and men from learning it reflects, in some measure, a fear of life itself. Before you are accomplished you can at least be enthusiastic and, if you turn out to be that way inclined, it’s worth remembering that many women admire few things more than an accomplished dancer. Which brings me onto this.

4. Consent is not enough

You have, in some respects, the misfortune to be growing up in the age of the ‘Manosphere’, Red pills and the unutterably ghastly Tate and his toe rag tribe. As I will simply not countenance you seeking advice or instruction from that direction, what I will do is offer a simple suggestion. Consent is, obviously, the sine qua non of any sexual interaction you ever intend or engage in. But consent is the lowest of low bars. Make yearning your yardstick and ardour your aim and you will not disappoint or be disappointed.

5. Gratitude is an attitude

Good manners cost nothing and there are no better manners than taking notice of what others are doing in the world, for it, and for you. If you appreciate someone tell them. In a time when most people can’t be bothered to send thanks by WhatsApp if you put pen to paper you will prove you come from the Premier League.

6. Sie müssen Deutsch sprechen

Another misfortune of yours is to be growing up in one of the most monoglot countries in the world. But the antidote to this is your mother and the immense cultural heritage she brings to the table. You can grow up with roast beef and Schweinshaxe, you just need to know what that is and how to say it. When you speak a second language, or more, and live in another country you will see your country and your people as others see them. This is something, tragically, that many English people are either incapable or unwilling to do and it is the enemy of empathy and the inhibition of insight. Schiller, Strauss, Beethoven and Bach are all waiting for you and you can feel Fremdschämen for all those that are missing out.

7. Make an excuse or take responsibility

For every action you take in your life you can make an excuse or you can take responsibility. And it’s your choice. That is freedom. If you’re anything like me you will make many excuses but I hope you will take some responsibility too.

8. Polish your shoes

I think possibly one of the most asinine adages that children are taught is never to judge a book by its cover. The entire publishing industry relies on people doing just that. You ever been to a bookshop? What do they put in the window? Book covers. Everyone does it. The important point is that judging a book by its cover provides only the first impression. And boy(s) do they count. Assuming you’re not wearing Crocs (never wear Crocs) your shoes should be clean and well polished. If they’re immaculately polished you will be thought immaculate, or a Guards officer off-duty, and there are worse things to be mistaken for. Appearances matter because people can’t judge your character until they know you and until they know you they will judge your appearance.

9. Balance your PIES

On the topic of appearance. Fitness, health and wellbeing is about having your body ready for everything life has to offer not sacrificing everything life has to offer for your body. If you care about beauty, see 1 above, you will understand that form and function have to be in equilibrium. Look after your body, your physical self, and it will look after you. If you read books, think, write and debate you will nourish and cultivate your intellectual life. When you take responsibility, care for others but crucially care for yourself too you will flourish and be in harmony emotionally. But above all, and easiest to overlook in the tech and tumult of the 21st century, is sustaining your spiritual life. Ignore your essence, your connection to the earth and what lies beyond and however outwardly successful, however learned, however rippling your muscles become there will be an inside decay and emptiness that may one day consume you.

10. Decry AI

The clue is in the name. It’s artificial. You know another word for artificial - fake. AI is the opposite of taking responsibility, it is abdication to the machine. It is the nemesis of the spirit. It is surrender to the screen which any street corner in any city will show is becoming a literal barrier between people and the world around them. There is no experience you will ever have online better than real life and there is no story or song made by the machine better than anything you could write because what you write is you.

Your mother will tell you that some of these maxims are more honoured by me in the breach than the observance but it’s the inviolable prerogative of parenthood to preach what you don’t always practise.

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In Henry IV Part 1 Prince Hal immerses his youthful self in the London tavern scene intending to earn approval when he fulfils his princely destiny. That play was written 430 years ago and it is perhaps a testament to the staying power of the monarchy that the schooling of a young prince should even be considered newsworthy in 2026. And yet the media has deemed the (inevitable) selection of Eton for Prince George as something worth devoting column inches and comment to.

I say inevitable selection of Eton because despite the roster of schools visited by his parents and speculation about other candidates I have long been certain that would be the choice. There are some obvious and less obvious reasons why that would be so.

1. Geography - although Eton is a full boarding school it is literally a 10 minute walk to Windsor Castle which in George’s case will put him closer to his parents than many children at London day schools.

2. Security - Eton has a fully fledged security staff already in place and CCTV cameras galore both from William and Harry’s time there but also reflecting the ongoing risk status of the school.

3. History - despite being nearly 600 years old Eton has never educated a British monarch. Indeed before the King went to Gordonstoun British monarchs did not go to schools at all. However, partly due to its proximity to Windsor and partly due to its royal foundation Eton has always been extremely close to the monarchy. Its Provost (essentially a chief executive) is appointed by the monarch to live in the school and act as their representative. It was founded by a king, Henry VI in 1440, Prince Hal’s vastly less successful and uncelebrated son. Its main celebration day is the Fourth of June (in a typically English way never celebrated on 4 June), the birthday of George III, who was a frequent visitor. And so partial was his granddaughter Queen Victoria to the school that there is a brass plaque over her designated seat in the chapel announcing that it is reserved for Victoria Regina.

4. Privacy - this is likely to be one of the chief concerns of George’s parents. In some respects Eton is not an intuitive choice in this regard. It is a huge school with 1,300 pupils and its campus is a town in which the public are free to come and go. It is not a self-enclosed castle 600 miles from London in the Scottish highlands. Instead it will be the privacy offered by the pupils that will have been a potential clincher for Eton. Prince William’s experience of the school is likely to have weighed very heavily in the balance on this. Here I can claim some insight as for three years I was his contemporary at the school. And what I can say of that time is that most if not all Etonians would rather have drunk cod liver oil than acknowledge there was anything different about him. As it happens he wasn’t even the only prince at the school at the time with the now sadly deceased Prince Nirajan of Nepal being my direct contemporary. I obviously can’t speak for him but it would not surprise me if his five years at Eton were when William felt most ‘normal’ which says much about how abnormal his family is and how abnormal the school is. If the current cohort is anything like mine George should be entirely safe from his peers selling or publishing photographs of him online.

So that’s what Eton has to recommend it. But what are the drawbacks.

1. No girls. It has been reported that a particular concern about a co-educational school would be George falling prey to trophy hunting girls and the attendant publicity. Whether there is anything in that what is definitely the case is that his sister will have to go somewhere else. It also means that for five formative years George will be surrounded by a wholly male peer group at a point in time when single sex education for boys in Britain is becoming more and more unusual. The often cited benefit of schooling boys together is that girls are a ‘distraction’. That is a characterisation that doesn’t feel especially comfortable in 2026.

2. Snobbery. Just as it is said that there are some families in England that consider the Windsors to be arrivistes so too are some Etonians capable of breathtaking snobbery. It is possible that this tendency has been entirely expunged from the modern school but it is a cultural legacy that would stand no young prince in good stead.

3. Relatability. With extras, Eton costs £65,000 per year. This is well on the way to being double the average UK salary. This is definitely not Prince Hal getting on a level with his future subjects. But when your destiny even includes the concept of future subjects what is the realistic purpose of trying to have a ‘normal’ education. It is the defining feature of a monarch that they are separate and in that sense the only surprising thing is that a crown prince should attend a school at all.

4. Emotional repression. Despite Eton’s proximity to Windsor crossing the bridge over the Thames feels more than just passing from one side of a river to another. Boarding schools are sometimes facetiously referred to as being the best training for a prison stretch and there are a few Old Etonians that can attest to the truth of that. There is something about surrendering to the ethos of institution that necessitates emotional repression and if there is one thing Eton does supremely well that is ethos.

Time will tell whether the right choice was made. There are, of course, many people for whom this topic is a matter of supreme indifference and if you are one of them then I hope you will forgive me for sharing my thoughts on the matter.

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If you did not know Richard I am sorry for you. If you did know him I am sorrier for you. And if you loved him I am sorriest of all. Although there was something of Falstaff about him I think if I had to describe him to a newcomer I’d ask them to imagine Lord Flashheart but with a First Class law degree. There was not a room he entered that was not improved for having him in it. And now, far too soon, there is no room with him in it.

There are moments in life when linear time progressing around you becomes completely disconnected from your emotional experience of time. Suddenly you’re flung backwards into childhood by a smell, a song or a taste. Or you’re thrown forwards into an old age not yet reached by an illness, fatigue or concern. What is less common is when it’s a person that makes time feel like looking the wrong way down a telescope so that something near seems very far away.

That person, for me, was Richard Wormald KC and the effect was most powerfully felt on the one occasion I was against him in court. He was making an application at Oxford Crown Court. That was my university city and attending court there has always accentuated the passage of time between carefree student days and the burden of responsibilities that weigh on those in practice at the Criminal Bar.

Sharing a court with Richard was such a time bending experience because 15 years previously he had been my pupil master (as they were then called) during a 3rd Six at 3 Raymond Buildings. And 30 years previously he had been my history master when I was 12 years old. Surveying him in court I felt my childhood, youth and middle age collapsing like a concertina. My angst about the hearing had nothing to do with a tricky matter of costs law. Every barrister quietly dreads the day they come up against their pupil master. And Richard was a quite exceptional pupil master, in every sense of the word.

But before that, I have to tell you about the time Richard lost a whole school in a manner worthy of Roald Dahl at his best. Although he seemed to us an entirely grown up person Richard had in fact only just left university and he was, by some distance, one of the most junior teachers at the school. Summer Sundays at a country prep school have a way of seeming quite a lot longer than 24 hours. After chapel, letter writing and lunch there was a whole afternoon to fill with no organised sport or activities. On this particular Sunday the Headmaster had gone out for lunch and so too had most of the teaching staff.

Richard had been left in charge, of the whole school. He decided that the best way to keep the students out of mischief would be to play a game. The game was Foxes and Hounds. This is not a complicated game, it’s Hide and Seek with a rural twist. 3 or 4 children were selected as foxes and were given instructions by Richard to run off. Those were the extent of the instructions. The rest of the school were the hounds. They were given instructions to run after the foxes. Those were the extent of the instructions.

Some hours later the Headmaster returned from his lunch and found Richard; he observed that the school seemed very quiet. Richard explained that the pupils were playing Foxes and Hounds. The Headmaster, not unreasonably, asked when the game was due to finish. Richard smiled. He was next asked where had been designated out of bounds. Richard continued to smile. This was not a school with a wall or a fence. There was a lawn, then some cricket pitches, then a field, many fields in fact, and also a forest. Within minutes the entire teaching staff was instructed to take to their cars and retrieve the school, wherever they could be found. I’m pleased to report, for Richard’s sake, that all children were accounted for before supper time.

I could not have foreseen after that memorable escapade that I would benefit from Richard’s tutelage once again. Having myself been a pupil supervisor for well over a decade I am well versed in the expectations and obligations that weigh upon those entrusted with helping fledgling barristers to their feet. The chief expectation is that you protect your pupil, at all costs, from scrapes and, in particular, getting into them.

It would be fair to say that for Richard avoiding scrapes was, as a concept, anathema. Learning your way with some pupil supervisors might be described as a baptism of fire, with Richard it was also first communion, confirmation and marriage too. I remember being sent by him to make a rather poorly founded application to break a fixture before a particularly punctilious Resident Judge. My submissions were entertained for a few moments before I was asked simply if trial counsel was available for the trial. Simply, I admitted that he was not. The dressing down that followed was only mitigated by an acknowledgement that no doubt some senior member of chambers had sent me along to make the application.

In fairness to Richard he would never ask a pupil to do something he would not do himself and the fact that he did ask a pupil to do something was a vote of confidence in their ability to do it. Albeit that particular fixture remained resolutely unmoved.

Many barristers like to believe that the power of their oratory is what carried the day in court, overlooking that it is almost always the evidence that does that. Richard was one of the very few advocates for whom sheer force of personality could turn the tide. But unlike some silver tongued blaggers Richard was in reality an extremely capable lawyer and tactician. The combination of charm and legal acumen was time and again forensically devastating.

Richard did not merely inspire devotion in those that knew and worked with him but he radiated a belief that life was an adventure and that we were made for adventuring. Cruel fate dictates that it’s an adventure that must continue without him but wherever there is mischief or fun there will be Wormald.

If I was not a Londoner born and bred I might find my countrymen and women seeking to liken it to Mogadishu in 1993 rather tiresome. As it is I benignly assume this sentiment emanates from people whose lives are so parochial that getting on a plane is an event so significant it requires a month’s planning or it is being expressed in rank bad faith with the most malign of political agendas. Either way these are not my people. Londoners are my people whether they’ve been here a century or 10 minutes.

London has its problems, it always did and it always will. But having lived here 46 years I don’t look at its 2026 manifestation and think this is the worst it’s ever been. The 1980s and 1990s London of my childhood was still a place of bomb sites, both legacies of the Luftwaffe but also, intermittently, thanks to the Irish Republican Army. Large swathes of the city felt overlooked and inert. It was, in many places, a shabby and grotty place and quietly I have long preferred that London to the noisy self-regard of ‘Cool Britannia’ that was to come.

I’ve often felt that at Christmas you find out who the ‘real’ Londoners are as the majority of the city decants back to its actual home whether that is Guildford, Girona or Guadeloupe. Likewise I keep a pretty careful weather eye on how people respond to this ‘down on London’ theme that seems to be taking root. Are you a fair weather Londoner or one who will look the city in its face and revel in its beauty while acknowledging its blemishes? I’m particularly quick to notice when this supposed slide into the abyss is deemed to be the sole responsibility of Sadiq Khan. I hold no candle for Khan and incline to the view that he’s had his go but like any proper Londoner I’m well aware that this invented office he occupies holds, in reality, negligible sway over the 9 million people that call this city home.

I took the Hardy Boys to the brand, spanking new V&A East today which enjoys panoramic views of the Olympic Stadium now home to West Ham Football Club. I’ve been to a few Olympic cities in my life and it’s important to say that London really got it right. Not just with the Olympics themselves which proved to be the most magnificent rejoinder to the curmudgeons and the naysayers but in their legacy. Stratford is now a place of green trees and blue waters, bridges, parks and playgrounds. Culture has come there and strikingly it is not the culture of the Britain that was but the Britain that is and London has always been a place that is about the is. When your history is as gigantic and sprawling as London’s you don’t freeze in aspic you evolve, you grow, you fold in the new and you embrace it too.

If you don’t like London you can leave: all the more for the rest of us.

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Winchester College’s motto is “Manners makyth man” but, with all due respect to those courteous Wykehamists, I suggest that it is instead marriage which makes a man. Dullards sometimes claim that marriage is defunct and that it is no more than a meaningless piece of paper.

In fact marriage is both the most momentous and the bravest thing a man can undertake. It is all in on the green baize table, it is betting the house, sometimes quite literally. It is a leap of faith, a public declaration and it is the planting of a seed.

Of course you don’t need that piece of paper to embark on a committed relationship and I don’t doubt that there are unwed men in heartfelt unions that would put their wed brethren to shame. But it’s precisely because you don’t need it that acquiring it is so symbolically significant.

Whether you wed in The Little Vegas Chapel witnessed only by your Uber driver or in Westminster Abbey watched on by millions when you get married there is a date in the diary that will forever be your wedding day. Sure, you can mark your beginnings in some other way, the day you matched on Tinder, a first snog outside Tottenham Court Road Underground Station, the day you signed the mortgage but let’s be honest there’s not much ceremony about any of that.

Marriage, as nobody needs reminding, is a commitment and a wedding is announcing to the world, or 120 of your nearest and dearest, that you are ready, willing and able to make that commitment. However it is not just a commitment it is an anchoring too and a determination that you will not be scattered by the winds or any passing fancy.

When one looks at Gen Z with its polycules and its thruples marriage can seem hopelessly quaint and antediluvian. But if you want kids I suggest you have a watch of the brilliant 2016 Danish film ‘The Commune’ to see that when it comes to rearing children actually sometimes it doesn’t take a village or certainly not a polyamorous one. Marriage has endured because it represents something enduring which is a foundation stone upon which a family can be built.

Bridget Jones coined the concept of smug marrieds but if you have the misfortune to listen to any of the moronic adherents of the ‘manosphere’ you’d be more likely to hear hitched men characterised as mug marrieds. Why be encumbered by a wife and kids when you can drive around in a hideous car and ‘curate’ your cigar collection all the while flaunting your sockless ankles to the world?

Every day I give thanks for my wife and children but most particularly I give thanks that I did not have to run the gauntlet of online dating to find her. The chimera of limitless choice has prompted many men to behave like toddlers in a sweet shop. And many of those men are more than old enough to know better.

The thing about sowing oats is that you’re supposed to do it in the spring and what is entirely expected in a 25 year old becomes unbecoming in a 35 year old and plain unacceptable in a 45 year old. Here the recent Bridget Jones film does provide a salutary reminder to men of a certain age that even Hugh Grant can’t get away with being a fuckboy for ever.

Of course there are powerful reasons not to make the leap. The global thermometer creeps inexorably red with the only uncertainty being whether Trump will trigger Armageddon before the last glacier comes crashing down. Property prices are no match for the salaries which are about to be swept away by an AI tsunami.

But treating any of that as an invitation to feckless rooting and rootlessness is to answer a siren call. Marriages have been made and families founded in circumstances unimaginably worse than most of us experience and can expect. There are always reasons not to but there is an unanswerable reason why you should.

Man was made to create and unless you’re a builder, an artist, a musician or a writer the chances are the only creating you will be doing is life and creating life is as close to Godhead as most men will ever get. This is something of infinitely greater value than some lurid Lamborghini or another notch on the bedpost.

As a mere witness to childbirth it strikes me there is a fundamental tension inherent in the way many births happen in 21st century Britain. Childbirth is ostensibly a natural process and therefore something that ought to be possible without medical intervention and a medical setting. Some mothers subscribe to just that view and give birth at home. But it is a bold mother that does so without the attendance of someone practised in the ways of childbirth. The vast majority of mothers give birth in hospital.

At the risk of stating the obvious hospitals are not home and being not home they are unfamiliar. When you add an unfamiliar experience to an unfamiliar place it does not require a doula, midwife or obstetrician to see that might have the makings of an uncomfortable process.

Even the fanciest hospital will never feel like home but a good hospital birth will vanquish anxieties created by unfamiliarity. Because when that does not happen the tension I referred to already becomes a literal problem. Tension is the enemy of birth but if the ‘safe place’, the hospital, is itself the cause of tension then the hospital risks becomings safe for neither the mother nor the baby.

That is the paradox of hospital birth and it is one which compassionate and skilful medical practitioners never forget. Something which they have seen perhaps 10 times just that day and maybe a 1,000 times in their career is happening to the woman in front of them for the very first time. For that woman this is not routine, this is not another day in the office, this is the most momentous physical experience of her life. And the strangeness of her surroundings functions only to emphasise how irregular an experience it is.

I’ve written before about how if you want to know what childbirth feels like you must ask a mother but if you want to know what happens in childbirth you must ask a father. As witnesses to the process, unmedicated by gas and air, Pethidine or an epidural, most fathers have a clear eyed recollection of what they saw and heard. If my experience is anything to go by most fathers are instinctively quite reticent about discussing what they witnessed. Basic privacy and confidentiality serve to remind fathers that childbirth is not their tale to tell.

But what if there could be a purpose to that witnessing? It is a tragic and unacceptable fact that in many British hospitals mothers undergo birthing experiences that fall far short of the ideal and, in the worst instances, that results in mothers returning home with avoidable injuries, without their babies or sometimes not at all. Occasionally tragedies occur in childbirth that are simply unavoidable. But too often there is a systemic cause that creates a dangerous birthing environment for mothers.

If mothers were offered, as a matter of routine, an exit survey of their birthing experience that would enable hospitals to identify patterns of concern in relation to the administering of care during childbirth. But that assumption should apply to attending fathers/witnesses as well. It is sometimes said of birth partners that their principal role in supporting a birthing mother is to advocate for them. Clearly that advocacy is most important during birth itself. However post-birth advocacy is what could most effectively serve to identify and ultimately cure systemic problems.

At the very least it would create a paper trail so that when avoidable disasters happen if concerns have been recorded by scores of previous mothers and fathers then hospitals and ultimately the government should have nowhere to hide. When birth goes well it is a happy fixed point from which a mother and family advances. When birth goes badly it can become a fixation point which can never be fully departed from, or only with great difficulty. In those circumstances contemporaneous written accounts become vital records of what actually happened and how it felt in the moment.

Obviously this would not only function as a conduit for complaints, reproaches and recrimination. Thankfully, many mothers have entirely positive experiences of childbirth and those need to be recorded and reported as well so that staff who are deserving of praise see it in black and white and hospital managers have a way of identifying which of their staff are getting it right in the words of those who matter most.

I understand that money plays a huge role in hospitals providing birthing experiences that fall short of an ideal standard and surveying every mother and father imposes an administrative burden that would require the allocation of already far too scant resources. But if this testimony is not taken and heeded cultures of complacency and regrettably even contempt breed much too easily.

In the mean time if you’re a dad who’s been present at a good or bad birth take the initiative and provide your thoughts in writing; that way you’re not just advocating for your child’s mother but the mothers of children yet to come. Mothers bear babies but you can bear witness.

Things used to be much simpler. If you were poor you had children to pull the plough and act as human hot water bottles and if you were rich you had children to guarantee dynastic succession and mollify the church and the army. And as contraception didn’t exist it didn’t really matter whether you wanted them or not. And as there was no Internet or TV there was nothing else to do with your time anyway.

Now though the mere question is enough to provoke a lifetime of existential angst. And it requires you to join a side. Childfree by choice, childfree not by choice, childed by choice and childed not by choice. That last group is a small and unfortunate demographic. I say join a side because not every joining is a choice but eventually we all fall into one of those categories. I think it’s apt that the expression ‘I’m not kidding you’ means I’m not joking because being kidded is definitely no joke.

The childfree by choice are seizing with glee upon new ‘research’ which says that having children, apparently, does not make people happy. I have put that in inverted commas because I read it in the Daily Mail (and you can too here) which is about the extent of the research I’m capable of conducting these days with three children under 10.

If you characterise having children as ruined sleep, ruined relationship, ruined career, ruined home, ruined finances and ruined freedom then, not surprisingly, having children is unlikely to make you happier. But if you perceive it as an opportunity to build a multi-generational family, to commit to a lifelong project of caring, development, teaching and learning, to feel your soul soar at your baby’s smile, exult at your child’s first goal and burst with pride at their graduation then suddenly the impact and outcome of having children looks rather more appealing.

Parenting is not for glass half empty types because if you go into it with anything less than a full tank you’ll be running on fumes before they’re even out of nappies. But my gripe with this research is rather more basic. To my mind, at least, having children to further your happiness fundamentally misses the point of parenting which is to make your peace with chaos or, more specifically, to learn acceptance that almost nothing is within our control.

That acceptance is a form of humility and nothing is more humbling than a child. Of course the child free will balk at such masochistic talk. This is Stockholm Syndrome, surely. But when your walls remain unmolested by crayons, your feet unimpeded by Lego and, most particularly, your sleep uninterrupted by nocturnal screaming then it is easy to think that maybe you’ve got life just where you want it. But we all know what pride comes before - And it’s impossible to be proud when you’re rocking a dad bod, a suit with sick on it and less than 4 hours sleep.

Before children you can kid yourself all day long that you’re in control, after children you realise the kid is in control and not just during the day either. It’s taken me 3 kids to surrender to the chaos and, let me tell you, surrender is sweet.

I saw this question recently and it really piqued my interest.

My answer to it is an unhesitating and unequivocal yes. I could not identify the birthday of a single one of my friends, even those of 30 years duration. I would be immensely surprised if any of them could identify mine. I don’t send them cards and gifts and they are dutiful about reciprocating in kind. My assumption is/was that this is true for many men, perhaps even most.

But then I paused for thought. Because when you assume you make an ass out of u and me. Perhaps I’m just a terrible friend. Perhaps my mates are also terrible friends. Or perhaps this is just not important to the servicing and nurturing of our friendships. When you’re a kid birthdays are a big deal. And there is something very sad about the family that can’t, won’t or doesn’t make a lot of fuss about 1-10 and at least some fuss about 11-21.

Like many children of the 80s Smartie Artie was a regular visitor to our house and it was only surprisingly recently that I realised that there many manifestations of Smartie Artie. A particularly memorable birthday was my 8th held at a West London swimming baths. Despite a number of acceptances only my best friend turned up. My parents, naturally, were pretty put out by this. I on the other hand was delighted to spend the whole afternoon with my best friend. As an aside there is nothing like a childhood no show like that to give you bullet proof self-confidence about hosting any social event in adult life.

In my teens organised parties rather dwindled with the real fuss saved for my 21st when I had three parties. A dinner at university which culminated in having to down a yard of ale, a family lunch at the Ritz and a black tie marquee dance jointly hosted at my best friend’s house, we had the invitations printed on balloons. Since then I have intermittently hosted parties for my own birthday but never has a friend suggested hosting one for me, nor I for them.

That isn’t to say that we don’t see each other, talk to each other, hike, swim and ski together or stay together. There are obviously birth dates which do require committing to memory, or at least calendars: spouses; immediate family members; godchildren (although I have to abashedly acknowledge that my wife has spared my blushes in remembering these more times than I care to confess). The remembering of birthdays may not be the most arduous task to be included within the emotional load of 21st century relationships but I know that there are many women who feel that the labours of Hercules could be more equitably delegated to Himcules.

I suppose what I would like to know is whether birthdays matter more to women than men or whether social conditioning has caused men to overlook the real pleasure that comes from having the day of your arrival into the world noted and celebrated, in the same way that men are hardly ever the recipients of flowers but are generally delighted to receive them when they do.

What do you think? Leave a comment if you like.

It is sometimes said that friends are the family you get to choose. When you have a stepparent you have a family that is chosen for you. What friends and stepfamilies have in common is a getting to know them process. What they don’t have in common is that when you first make a friend it is usually a result of an identified or recognised affinity. In modern parlance stepfamilies are sometimes referred to as blended families. However, unlike good coffee or whisky not all blends are a success. If no affinity is found or created then the blend will never work, however ardent the connection that brought the families together.

The union of all stepfamilies is a freighted matter. In a nuclear family the father’s family will have their ways and traditions and so too the mother’s. When they produce children those ways are blended to create a joint new way. With stepfamilies those new ways, sometimes already firmly entrenched, then need to be reconciled with the new ways of the stepfamily to create a new new way, if successful, or no new way if unsuccessful. All participants in a successful blended family would be well placed to lecture at the Foreign Office in diplomacy or perhaps in biology at any teaching hospital because they have learned how to make water as thick as blood and blood as thin as water.

That is a very discursive introduction to my relating that my stepfather, Umberto Allemandi, died recently and whose funeral I have just attended. Umberto, as the linguists might tell, was Italian and, as anyone versed in Italian history might correctly guess, was from Turin. He was also my introduction to Italy, a country I had not visited when he and my mother met. Umberto was a very impressive person, he founded one of Italy’s great art publishing houses and a monthly newspaper dedicated to the art world which spawned English, French, Greek, Russian and Chinese language versions. Such was the esteem in which he was held the City of Turin delegated police motorcyclists to accompany his cortege.

Of course, none of this meant anything to me when he arrived in my life when the only thing I knew about him was that he was Italian and came from Turin which, as I rapidly discovered, was not a city of English Room With a View fantasy. Indeed, the Turin of the early 1990s was still recognisably that of The Italian Job starring Sir Michael Caine, a Fiat motor city. The next significant thing I discovered about Umberto was that he spoke very little English and I spoke no Italian. Over 35 years that was to change, by the time that he died he spoke a little English and I spoke some Italian.

It is a chief regret of the long Italian chapter of my life that between us we did not manage to move to a more effective linguistic middle ground. A regret because I felt very much a greater affinity with Umberto than mere language permits and it was a shame how inadequately I could express that. When one considers the post-war story of 20^th century art that was Umberto’s story too as a chronicler, observer, commentator and communicator. That made Umberto Allemandi an extremely interesting person, he knew Dali, Warhol, Pistoletto and Giorgio De Chirico, for example.

But he was not just an interesting person he was an exacting editor and man of exceptionally high standards. Many Italians cherish the concept of La bella figura which does not connote, as English speakers might believe, good bodily shape but the whole turnout of a person. Umberto cared very considerably about dress, not in a flashy or ostentatious way, but in the sense that there was a proper way of presenting oneself to the world and an improper way. One does not have to spend much time on the average high street to see that sartorial propriety now seems as defunct a concept as emotional self-restraint and intimate discretion.

He met his first wife, a proud Catalan, when driving through Spain, as a young man, he saw a beautiful woman playing the guitar by a beach in a small fishing village called El Port de la Selva. He stopped the car, introduced himself and whatever the Catalan is for coup de foudre ensued. Ethan Hawke is but a pale imitator. Her far too early death left him caring for my stepbrother and stepsister. Until he met my mother: in the Sistine Chapel. A Tinder life his was not and he needed no digital kindling to start a conflagration.

For an Italian he had a remarkably Protestant work ethic and the fact that he was still going daily to the office at the age of 86 both reveals a man who was incapable of idleness but perhaps also unwilling or unable to relax.

The sheer quantity of time that I spent in Italy because of Umberto meant for that reason alone I became a much more European person than I otherwise would have. It is one of the greatest tragedies of England that the prevalence of English speaking has meant that being monoglot is not perceived as the massive handicap that in fact it is. I like to think that even without Umberto in my life I would not have voted for Brexit but with such a strong Italian connection it is something I could not have even contemplated doing. For some British people the Channel is an ocean, for me it is a puddle and I refuse to allow others to make it a wall.

In my gap year I lived with Umberto and volunteered with a charity helping the homeless of Turin while I tried to improve my Italian. Because this was real life it was a lot more mopping dormitories than it was Stealing Beauty or even Call Me By Your Name. But it was nonetheless an important lesson in sticking something out when outside one’s comfort zone and the sort of experience that I think is essential for all young people if the generation to come is going to acquire any resilience. Having learned as much Italian as I did I of course went on to marry a German!

Aware that he was not well my sister and I spent Christmas in Turin with the Italian family with Christmas Pudding and mince pies sitting alongside the Panettone and the Ameretti. It was a happy gathering and coming together serving as a cheering remembrance to lighten the sadness at his funeral. I long ago realised that although stepparents are not family of one’s own choosing the choice is always there to include them within your family and include yourself within theirs. When you make that choice you’ll almost certainly find that la vita è migliore. Vale Umberto.

When you’re relying on backbench rebellion to obstruct executive will you’re as likely to see success as Trump is in expecting regime change in Tehran. It’s hard to know what abstention means in the circumstances of the vote that’s just passed. ‘I disagree with my party and my government’s non-manifesto actions but not enough to be put on the naughty step’. Perhaps it means ‘I LIKE jury trial but I don’t LOVE it’. I am full of endless admiration for those of my colleagues that have been making themselves eloquently hoarse online and irl to spell out how calamitous this all is. All the more so because something precious, vital and sure I’ll be melodramatic enough to say it, sacred is about to be sacrificed for a whole ton of hideous unintended consequences none of which will be good for justice, victims, defendants, you or me.

Trying to parse the ideology and the dogma seems an exercise in absolute futility. How do you reconcile a manifesto commitment to purge the House of Lords of the last remaining hereditary peers, an intolerable stain on a modern democracy apparently (and btw Buck House there goes the last line of defence), with insistent ministerial assertions that doing justice now demands a withdrawal of the people from the process? The short answer is you can’t. These are ideologically inconsistent actions.

Jury defenders now have to hope that the rest of the legislative process will present enough obstacles to impede the progress of this bill before it receives royal assent. The irony being that if the monarch in whose name justice is done ever wanted to make a real stand for democracy there will be no better time to invoke the royal veto. I’m not holding my breath. And if this fiasco really is foisted on us it may be in due course I won’t be holding my brief either.

The time may very soon be coming when it will be for the independent, referral Bar to decide if it has the energy, wherewithal and spirit to mount a Devlin’s Last Stand against this desecration.

19th November. That’s International Men’s Day and it’s been marked since 1999. Although I’m not so sure how much we should be celebrating International Men these days. 19th November may not be a Red Letter Day for you, it isn’t for me, but it’s worth remarking upon because as sure as eggs is eggs every 8th March, on International Women’s Day, there will be a chuntering chorus of disaffected blokes whinging about why women get a day and they don’t.

The truth is, until very recently, every single day was International Men’s Day and frankly only an incorrigible churl could cut up rough about a day being set aside to celebrate the achievements and advancement of women and to decry the inequalities, violence and oppression so many still experience.

Where I think there is a gap in the calendar is for Domestic Men’s Day and I don’t mean domestic as in a flight from Southend to Newquay. If we’re going to celebrate women rightfully taking the reins in the international corridors of power we should be celebrating men taking the toddler reins in the corridors at home too.

In fact, it could be a day when every man stays home for 24 hours and women could have, for one day at least, a glimpse of what most workplaces were like for most men until well into the 20th century. If Domestic Men’s Day sounds bit pedestrian it could be called Men Having It All Day in celebration of men fulfilling their familial and caring obligations as well as their careers.

Men like Scott and Hillary were celebrated for going to the ends of the earth but where is the celebration, in art, literature or popular culture of the men that seek fully to embody hearth and home? Those that require care, whether young or old, require care givers and until this truly become man’s work there will always be something hollow about IWD.

HMP Frankland, where Huntley was incarcerated, has the tabloid moniker ‘The Monster Mansion’. It holds some of England’s most notorious criminals and, as the events of recent demonstrate, it does not hold them well. The fact that nobody will mourn Huntley’s killing does not mean that it is a killing that should have happened.

The prisoner responsible for attacking Huntley is no Robin Hood and the celebrity he will now enjoy in prison will be matched only by the difficulty attendant upon investigating and prosecuting him. It is tempting to feel when the wicked slaughter the wicked that no harm is done and justice, however roughly, has been served. Huntley’s murders diminished him but his murder diminishes a system of justice that does not and should not have as its aim killers killing killers. There is something seriously wrong with a prison where that is permitted to happen and something seriously wrong with a justice system that administers a prison like that.

There is a risk, with the renewed revulsion at Huntley’s crimes, that there will be little or no impetus to scrutinise how this happened. In truth, it’s obvious how it happened, money and not enough of it to run a prison properly and safely. When prisoners are allowed to kill each other it doesn’t require much imagination to see how much that increases the risk that the next target will be a jailer or other member of staff.

It would be rank presumption to guess what might be the feelings of Holly and Jessica’s loved ones that the man who brought horror and tragedy to their doors is no more. If we had the death penalty (and speaking for myself I am glad we do not) that day would have come decades ago. As it is they are having to endure the reopening of wounds inflicted 24 years ago. When murderers are sentenced to serve decades, or even a lifetime, they are supposed to disappear utterly from view. When they are killed like this it’s their name in the headlines, with the killer callously indifferent to what effect that must have on the bereaved.

I love it but then I am the son of a man who once commissioned a costumier to make him a hat in the form of St Paul’s Cathedral so he could go to a party dressed as Sir Christopher Wren. Suffice it to say when it comes to fancy dress I’ve got the bases covered, from bumblebees to beaus.

Most children (I realise not all) love a bit of dressing up. It seems to me the main problem with World Book Day is that unlike, for example, Christmas Day its date is entirely unmemorable. This means despite the best endeavours of schools with their App notifications, their emails and the class WhatsApp groups for many parents the dreaded realisation that WBD is upon them comes the night before in the midst of bathtime, bedtime and the rest. For the real unfortunates the penny only drops at breakfast on the day itself and then all hope is lost really.

On one level I get the detractors. WBD demands the 3 things parents hate most: Time, Faff and Money. Obviously you can spend money and reduce the time and to some extent the faff but bought costumes are cheating in the eyes of many and introduce yet more stuff into the home at the expense of the planet. Made costumes are obviously faff and their adequacy and originality brings its own judgement.

The more intellectually insecure parents obviously worry about what message their child’s costume transmits about their reading tastes. My 9yo and 6yo Hardy Boys, extremely unsportingly, refused point blank to go as ‘The Hardy Boys’. Instead we had a Dogman and one of a squadron of Harry Potters. The 6yo’s favourite character is in fact Voldemort but we figured that removing his nose might be received unfavourably by Social Services. On the topic of Harry Potter obviously you can send your 8yo as a madeleine as an act of Proustian whimsy but nobody will get it and those that do will rightly think you insufferable.

I like to imagine if WBD had existed for centuries we would have had pouring out of schools 17th century Don Quixotes, Pilgrims and Pepyses (he hadn’t been cancelled then), 18th century Gullivers, Crusoes, and Molls, 19th century Darcys, Dorians and Rochesters. Of course if you’re really against the concept there are plenty of characters that might give most schools pause for thought about the whole idea but you won’t find me sending my kids to school dressed as Patrick Bateman.

Two posts in a row on Reform’s ‘policy’ suggestions may be more than many can bear but it is just not possible to allow this by Danny Kruger MP (Conservative turncoat) to pass without comment:

“Marriage traditionally was the means by which sexual relations between men and women were regulated, and I think we are suffering from having a totally unregulated sexual economy,” he said.

“I’m not interested in your love life, or anything about your personal life – that is your business. But I am interested in the framework in which you make your decisions, and I’d like the framework to be more pro-social. If you want – most people do want – to settle down with one person to have children, we should make that easier.”

If you really want you can read the whole interview here: Politics Home

I think even a child learns pretty quickly that what politicians say and what politicians mean are two different things but it is very difficult with this pronouncement to react with anything but a sucked lemon face and a ‘You what mate?’

A TOTALLY UNREGULATED SEXUAL ECONOMY - what on earth does that mean? If I’m going to venture a guess it means that there are a lot of people having sex of a sort that Danny doesn’t like.

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If you don’t know who Danny is he’s a Hollywood casting director’s idea of a Tory MP; if we had Fox News here he could have been presenting it. He’s also Prue Leith’s son. And, as Bake Off fans will appreciate, she knows her cakes which makes it all the more mystifying why this one seems half baked. Danny is a man of faith although not of the ‘love is love’ variety but of the ‘regulated sexual economy’ type.

If I’m interpreting his views correctly he is attributing the plummeting birth rate to the existence of Tinder and the availability and acceptability of unwed sexual intercourse. The fact there is literally a whole childbearing cohort of the population called ‘Generation Rent’ doesn’t seem to feature in his analysis.

The basic fact is that for many people the massive lifetime commitment of having a child is contingent on their assessment of their economic circumstances. The more precarious those are due to housing, employment and income the less inclined people are to take the plunge. Forcing people up the aisle and forcing them to remain imprisoned in miserable marriages will do nothing to change that reality.

And if we’re on the topic of why the economic outlook is so hideous for those under 45 Danny might want to ask his mate and boss Nigel where all those Brexit benefits are. 2026 Britain is an unquestionably worse and more expensive place to birth and raise a child than 2016 Britain and there is one basic reason why. The question is whether 2036 Britain is going to be even worse.

Personally I find his whole analysis as rebarbative as it is regressive but if you want your ‘sexual economy’ to be regulated by Danny you know where to put your X.