Children
A noble tradition of benign neglect
I spent last weekend at Port Eliot in Cornwall. This is supposed to be a literary and music festival and…
The NHS ‘wellbeing’ monkey deserves to die
My young daughter has a furry beaver — lifelike in all but its eyes, which to me seem cold and dead.…
How the Suzuki method changed my life
Do you ever wonder, as your little darling balks at doing her violin or piano practice again, what all the…
Making myselfherd
I find it hard to pinpoint the exact moment when my support for Queen’s Park Rangers crossed over into full-blown…
An initiation into anxiety
Before I had children I don’t think I appreciated what anxiety was. I’d been anxious at various points in my…
How the Delingpoles triumphed over the Vikings
Have you managed to book tickets to the Viking exhibition at the British Museum yet? If you haven’t, my advice…
The wrong kind of granny
When I told a friend that my nine-year-old son was staying with his grandparents for the whole week of the…
Children with a severe case of the excuses
There is a beautiful symmetry to all things, I think, and probably related somehow to the concept of karma. Only…
You shouldn’t lose your children for disagreeing with Boris Johnson
Do your children have a bleak and nihilistic view of the world? It’s hard to tell, really, when they spend…
Agitprop for toddlers
The oddly strident politics of CBeebies
Always keep a-hold of Nurse…
Soon after moving to London at the age of 20, Nina Stibbe wrote to her sister Vic saying, ‘Being a…
Give me a child…
Mike Shaw on what (and what not) to do when taking children to the theatre
Family matters
The first sign that something was wrong with Ludo was when he complained of a tummy ache. This was after…
Plato on Today
A woman is invited to join the Today programme, and the chatteratae are immediately a-twitter on the subject of female…
The contented little prince
On raising a royal baby
Old friends and new
A few years ago, I got the shock of my life when a girl I was sitting next to at…
