The Joy of Six 1428

"Away from the headlines, families in poverty are preoccupied with the very hard work of getting by on low-incomes. Their daily realities are routinely distressing and dehumanising: trying to decide whether to prioritise one child’s need for new school shoes over their brother’s coat which no longer fits. Or leaving an older child to look after their younger sister while they nip to the food bank; not wanting their children to experience the indignity and shame they feel on crossing the church hall’s doors." Ruth Patrick calls on the government to bin the two-child benefit cap.

Richard Kemp reminds us of something important: You can like, work with and respect a person whose political beliefs differ from yours.

Elizabeth Spiers misses the early years of blogging: "If you wanted people to read your blog, you had to make it compelling enough that they would visit it, directly, because they wanted to. And if they wanted to respond to you, they had to do it on their own blog, and link back. The effect of this was that there were few equivalents of the worst aspects of social media that broke through. If someone wanted to troll you, they’d have to do it on their own site and hope you took the bait because otherwise no one would see it."

"A linguistic panic has swept America in recent months, corrupting our youth, annoying our teachers and leaving countless adults hopelessly confused. The question that has sparked the uproar: what, exactly, does it mean when an otherwise upstanding young person blurts out the phrase 'six-seven'?" Matthew Cantor is down with the kids.

"In England, the Cotswolds and Wessex supported an organicist version of Englishness in the interwar period, defined by its 'Westernness' against a ‘south-east metropolitan zone’, and Cornwall has also been understood as a place of difference which, with its distinctive national identity, has made it both familiar and yet potentially threatening to English unity." Gareth Roddy discusses the hold that the Western has on the imagination of all four nations of the British Isles.

Ian Richardson visits the National Railway Museum in York.