“Only girls like unicorns”, my five-year-old son Ted told me confidently as we walked to the park. He elaborated, explaining the gendered “rules” he had already become aware of in his nine months of full-time school. He’d presumably forgotten about the unicorn bell decorating his bike, which he’d specifically asked for at the end of last year.

Like a good progressive parent, I challenged him: “what if I said only people with brown hair like Paw Patrol? Would that make sense?” I tried, which of course shifted things into a discussion about the likes and dislikes of his school friend who has ginger hair. Once again, I regretted embarking on an intellectual debate with a child.

Where does this stuff creep in? We don’t teach him to isolate his interests based on his gender, and presumably neither do his teachers. “Kids will be kids”, you could say, and yes, school-age children exist on clearly-demarcated lines around things like age and gender. At this point I think it’s better to just question his assumptions and leave it at that: trying to force his opinion proves nothing.

I’ve only ever stood in one election in my life, and I didn’t win.

It’s 2007 and I’ve just joined the student newspaper at university. A guy I vaguely know from lectures already works on the paper, and he’s standing for the position of Editor in the upcoming student union elections. I’m a lonely second-year student who’s feeling distant from his housemates, and decide to respond to the call-out for campaign support. I show up at the pub one night to help my friend with his marketing strategy.

I learned a lot: it turns out that students don’t really go for gonzo-inspired posters (Hunter S. Thompson, Che Guevara and Andy Warhol were perhaps cooler touchpoints in the 1960s than the early 2000s), and I also discovered that I was living in blissful ignorance of campus politics until this point. “I’ve got the J-Soc vote”, my candidate friend assured me, and I had to discreetly ask around until I realised this meant the Jewish society, whose bloc vote was as fiercely contested as that of PSG – the Palestinian Solidarity Group.

Every eleven years, the sun’s magnetic field reverses itself, in a process called the solar cycle. The north pole becomes the south pole as the star at the centre of our galaxy completes the biggest flip-reverse it since Blazin’ Squad.

Don’t be confused: this isn’t some kind of astrophysical Freaky Friday where everything’s upside-down for a day. But it does mean that when the sun is at the peak of its cycle, there are more eruptions and sun spots on its surface, which (as all attentive readers of NASA’s educational webpages for children will know) can increase the likelihood of auroras back home on Earth.

In pursuit of the northern lights

The aurora: it’s perhaps the second most-pursued photographic opportunity on the planet, just behind “pretending to push the Leaning Tower of Pisa upright” (or “Leonardo DiCaprio with a woman his own age”). And your humble author has failed—not once, but twice—at photographing this event. In two separate countries, no less.

As I’m sure all my subscribers are keenly aware, this year’s Met Gala happened on Monday. All the world’s press and photographers turned out to breathlessly cover the great and good from the worlds of fashion, stage and screen. As I’ve written before, I’m not entirely qualified to opine on the various outfits, “looks” and other clothes-related news being made that night, but one thing did strike me.

I follow a former school acquaintance on Instagram and she—a dedicated follower of fashion—posted a breakdown of her thoughts on various celebs’ outfits and styles for the Met Gala. I swiped through half a dozen of her stories without interest, and then was slightly gobsmacked to see her immediately follow this set of fashion critiques with one of those reposted pleas for humanitarian assistance for mutilated babies in Gaza. How could someone just seamlessly swerve from frothy, frivolous rubbish like fashion directly into the crisis in Palestine?

I almost fired off a ranty post on Bluesky (RIP Twitter) about how things like the Met Gala should be ignored and irrelevant in times like these, before I caught myself. I remembered that the day before the Met Gala, this year’s Giro d’Italia began.

I’m writing this later than usual – apologies to those of you expecting their weekly hit of Man Feelings on Friday. It’s been a busy week!

Changes: turn and face the strange

Lots has changed in our household: my partner Maddy went back to work this week after a year of maternity leave. Our daughter Robin, eleven months old yesterday, started nursery this week too.

This meant adjusting all our routines: we now have to get two kids to two different places at two different times every morning. Previously we were able to get away with being casual about this when only one kid needed to go somewhere (and it was to his school a few hundred metres from our house), but we had to assemble spreadsheets, pre-plan outfits and wake up an hour earlier than usual to make the new regime work out.