I fear London is dying, says Tanya Gold in The Daily Telegraph. People yell at you, homes are hideously expensive and “people prefer to have a breadstick delivered by lorry” than visit the ailing high street, further choking the capital’s heaving roads. On Sunday, Wembley was swamped by fans drinking for 10 hours before the Euro 2020 final, but summer violence is a citywide tradition. “Politicians faced with riots pray for rain.” Yet the rain is “monstrous”, as we’ve “covered our gardens for parking spaces” and dug basements into the ground “like the dwarves of Moria”. The waters rose over South Hampstead and Raynes Park on Monday, which never used to happen. It felt like “the story of Noah in concrete”. A city needs to be porous to survive, and London isn’t. There is a sense that things “are slipping out of control”.
Meet the middle-age, middle-class trolls
This week, the Instagram influencer Em Sheldon revealed internet trolls aren’t usually “murky people sitting in filthy basements”, but middle-aged women with families and good jobs. As someone “bang on” this demographic, I can see why, says Esther Walker in the I newspaper. Being a middle-aged woman can be “horrible”: your “bouncy skin and dewy eyes” are deserting you, and the things you once daydreamed you would do will clearly never happen. “The temptation to visit this pain on someone else is extremely real.” But when you find yourself “twisted up in knots” about a kitchen that is newer and tidier than your own, don’t cross the line into abuse. I have a new rule on Instagram: “If someone’s post or story makes me feel bad even for one second, I mute the account. It works.”