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As a boy at school in the 1950s I once had to speak in a debate on “A woman’s place is in the home”. My own mother had been a housewife all her married life and my five siblings and I enjoyed the fact that she was always there for when we came home from school or from whatever we had been doing. Perhaps because of that I had been nominated by the teacher to speak in favour of the motion. Nevertheless, I felt uncomfortable with the idea. I had been struck by a quote from Ge

So, Sadiq Khan is now a knight of the realm. Could anyone please tell me quite what Sir Sadiq has done to earn this knighthood? He is the first mayor of London* to have been so honoured, yet, under his watch, our capital city seems not so much to have flourished as to have become a rather diminished version of its former self. Crime has risen, homelessness has increased, and in common with so many other British cities mainstream business, retail in particular...

... to buy a fat pig, Home again, home again, jiggety jig” is one of the more ancient English nursery rhymes, dating at least from the time of Elizabeth I. Unlike many of those old songs it does not have a hidden meaning – unless our readers know otherwise – such as “Ring-a-ring of roses” which is about the 1665 plague year; we sneeze and all fall down because we are dead!

YouGov’s latest Multilevel Regressive Post-stratification (MRP) poll of the likely result should there be a general election in the UK now is bad news for both of the country’s main political parties....

“I’m off to Bulgaria.” So said Nick, the man who had helped boost our Sky broadband download speed at our house in Bath from a piffling 3 to 5 Mbps to a hardly less piffling 12 Mbps (compared to a download speed of 37 Mbps in our house in deepest rural France). Nick had come because we had decided to try again to up the speed by contracting with a provider who could give us full-fibre connection. Again? Yes, we had signed up with True Speed, a Bath-based full-fibre broadband