Life
The Famous Five off on an adventure: how kids’ summers should be. BBC
How I miss the summer holidays of old
For many parents today, says Allison Pearson in The Telegraph, the six-week summer holiday is a dread-filling, costly carousel of childcare, clubs and annual leave. For many children, it’s a month-and-a-half spent indoors, scrolling away. It didn’t used to be this way. When I was a child, on the very first day of the summer holidays my sister and I would be turfed out by our mother and told to entertain ourselves. On patches of scrubby land in rural south Wales we practised handstands and headstands endlessly. We hit tennis balls against the garage door, foraged lime-green caterpillars from the bushes, and rode our hand-me-down bikes to the woods where we’d create dams in the stream and swing across the water on a branch. The only rule was that we mustn’t play on the building site – “so we did”.
Most afternoons an ice cream van parked up on the street, playing a tinkly version of Greensleeves, and offering Fab lollies, Zooms and 99s. We took carrots to feed the horses in the spooky, overgrown graveyard, and we threw stones at the windows of a witch-like woman’s house. We took pop bottles back to the shop, where you could claim coins and buy Fruit Salad chews, and, “unbelievably”, we were allowed to borrow a baby from a neighbour and take him for a walk. Mum barely knew where we were, relying on a network of “aunties” – Joan, Barbara, Daphne – to keep an eye out, and there was just one instruction: “Be back in time for tea – or else.” Which, miraculously given none of us had a watch, we always were. It was six weeks of glorious freedom. “What did we do? Nothing. Everything.”
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Property
THE OLD PUB This one-bedroom flat in Finsbury, central London is a converted Victorian pub, The Langton Arms, which poured its last pint in 1989, says The Guardian. The old public rooms now form a single open-plan living space, wrapped on two sides by the corner frontage’s tall glazing, with exposed brick piers, timber floors and exceptionally high ceilings. The pub’s original Charrington signboard still hangs on the wall. The kitchen and dining area follow on, with white metro tiles and dark stone worktops. Downstairs, the bedroom sits behind a sheer curtain, with a bathroom on the same floor. Old Street station is under a ten-minute walk. £500,000. Click on the image to view the listing.
Comment
Ava Gardner writing a letter in 1944. Clarence Sinclair Bull/John Kobal Foundation/Getty
Only writing makes us really think
I have a plea, says Bret Stephens in The New York Times. “Never let AI do your writing for you.” Don’t use it for school essays, work briefs, letters to your in-laws or emails to your colleagues. Don’t let it organise your writing notes, or suggest an opening sentence. Don’t ask it to write a first draft and pretend that editing the result somehow makes it your own work. “It doesn’t.” This isn’t to avoid being unethical, or to help you become a better writer than AI. Pretty soon, “if not already”, that won’t be possible, “just as you can’t outrun a car or outplay a chess app”. No, the problem with using AI for writing is that it’s “mentally enfeebling”.
Writing compels thought in a way that silent contemplation or talking rarely does. It makes us subject our thinking to “the effort of articulation, the rigour of grammar”, which forces us to be clear, logical and accurate. The simple truth is that “the considered word matters”. How would a bride feel if they learned that their father’s wedding toast had been written by ChatGPT? Many would argue there’s a big difference between a wedding speech and boring office memos. “But the intellectual muscle that’s exercised in everyday writing is the same one used for the writing that matters.” And those muscles are more important than people think. What happens when voters lack the patience to absorb arguments longer than a tweet? Or when they cannot argue at all because they’ve never honed the skills for clear thinking? So please, the next time you’re thinking of using AI to write, don’t. Consider it “an act of resistance against an ever-dumber world”.
Love etc
Enough of this public shaming
A TikToker recently posted a video of a couple kissing in New York’s Central Park (pictured), says Faith Hill in The Atlantic. Internet sleuths quickly tracked them down as colleagues at a top Manhattan law firm, one of whom was married. The video blew up. “Nice of you to teach them a lesson!” commented one. Another posted a close-up of the woman’s face, mocking her appearance. The saga unfolded almost exactly a year after a similar public takedown of the cheating duo at a Coldplay concert, which resulted in the woman involved, Kristin Cabot, receiving some 60 death threats.
Public shaming of this sort is obviously terrible for those involved. But it’s also “corrosive” to society. The last thing young people need right now is another reason to shy away from love – Gen Zs are in the thick of a “season of unsexiness” as it is. Romance is, of course, “messy and a little embarrassing”. Flirting and dating invites rejection. Sex can be awkward. Falling in love? “That’s actually just humiliating.” But we still do it, because it’s worth it. The difference today is that all the “flailing around and looking stupid” it takes to get there can be permanently documented, or worse, splashed all over the internet, making young people “unwilling to be imperfect”. As Cabot of the Coldplay incident said, she’d had a few drinks, danced and acted inappropriately. But that doesn’t warrant being “threatened to be killed”. She’s right. In our frigid times, more people should have a few drinks and act, if not inappropriately, then at least a little chaotically. It’d be nice to see more “unabashed yearning”.
The Knowledge Crossword
Life
Avalon/Getty
“If ignorance is bliss, he’s one of the happiest boys around”
When Jimmy Mulgrew was touring working men’s clubs in the north of England in the early 1970s, says The Times, the Ulster-born comic wore a dinner jacket and told “clever” jokes. This schtick didn’t go down well, and he was often treated to a “bombardment of beer cans and food”. But after a “lightbulb moment” he created a new persona: a downtrodden simpleton called Jimmy Cricket, who had wellies with L and R painted on them – but worn on the wrong feet – and a hat that looked like an upside-down chamber pot. The material would today be dismissed as cringey dad jokes. “This old woman came up and said, ‘Could you see me across the road?’ I said, ‘Hang on, I’ll run across and have a look.’” But audiences lapped it up, each one-liner followed by his trademark line: “And there’s more!”
Mulgrew, who has died aged 80, was the son of an undertaker whose hearse doubled up as a taxi: “He had to sort of rearrange things to fit the passengers in.” He left school at 16 – “If ignorance is bliss,” one teacher said of him, “he’s one of the happiest boys around” – and did odd jobs before going into comedy. He unleashed Jimmy Cricket on an “unsuspecting nation” in 1980 when he made the semi-finals of a TV talent contest, and went on to have his own show on ITV. His humour was always clean, with children able to watch his shows alongside their grandparents, and it never changed: family members report that he was cracking jokes with NHS staff right to the end. “If you can’t spell Armageddon, don’t worry,” went one favourite. “It’s not the end of the world.”
Quoted
“Everything has been said before; but since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”
André Gide
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