The Joy of Six 1214

Chris Grey on the right's desire to recover a past that never was: "This is also almost invariably what lies behind contemporary demands to 'get my country back', with Allison Pearson writing that “our nation is being abducted by aliens” (though also, inadvertently, demonstrating the endless recurrence of these claims by opening her article with a mournful lament for England written by Philip Larkin in 1946)."

Using the government's new definition of extremism, argues Nafeez Ahmed, Michael Gove is an extremist.

"'If you ask young people, would you like a job where you won’t see daylight in the winter, digging underground, and you might get killed - they would laugh at you. When our generation goes, people won’t even know what a lump of coal is.' But the former pit villages that continue to play cricket carry the history of industry around not only in their names, but in their heritage." Tanya Aldred on the links between cricket and coal mining and how well they have survived the 1984-5 strike.

Catherine Bennett says that, in the name of anti-elitism, Arts Council England has declared war on opera and excellence.

Fortesa Latifi lays bare the terrible price of having your childhood turned into content: "Being the child of an influencer, Vanessa tells me, was the equivalent of having a full-time job - and then some. She remembers late nights in which the family recorded and rerecorded videos until her mother considered them perfect and days when creating content for the blog stretched into her homeschooling time."

"I was the second eldest, with an older sister and three younger brothers. I shared with my brothers until I was 15, sleeping in bunk beds, after which I slept in the front room for a couple of years. There was a communal yard for the 48 flats to share, and we would play ball games and cycle. I also had my first ciggy in the cellars there. I was a pupil at Haberdasher's Askes grammar school, but between the ages of 3 and 16 I spent about four years at Queen Mary's Hospital, in Carshalton Breeches, as I had caught polio in the 1950s epidemic." A glimpse of the young Steve Harley - born Stephen Nice - from Transpontine.