Content warning: this post talks about child loss.

Last weekend we celebrated the start of the summer holidays by taking the kids to Center Parcs. If you’re somehow unfamiliar, this is basically middle-class Butlins: overpriced forest cabins with swimming pools, chain restaurants and woodland activities (archery, cycling and basket-weaving, probably). It’s Maddy’s favourite place, so we go fairly often.

We’d set ourselves a fairly challenging afternoon on Saturday: mini-golf with the kids, followed by ten-pin bowling, followed by a trip to a restaurant staffed partly by robots. We were outside the bowling place while the kids ran around when we bumped into another family.

Yesterday was the last day of school for my five year old son. I dropped him off that morning along with a couple of his favourite toys, which he was excited to get to take with him for his final day in Reception. My excitement was muted, though: today marks the beginning of our first encounter with the six-week school holidays. What are we going to do with a kid at home all day for the next month and a half?

We also just booked our annual family holiday for this October, hoping for a bit of sunshine in the cold and rainy arse-end of the year to cheer us up. It costs an astronomical sum of money to fly four of us to Portugal for a week, and this is while we still don’t have to pay for one of the kids.

This is topical because every other family is in the same boat if they want to leave the country this year – the age-old debate about taking kids out of school in order to save money on holidays is rearing its head once again.

I have a complicated relationship with football.

It’s the early 90s and I’m in junior school. We’ve just moved halfway across the country from Merseyside to rural Nottinghamshire and I’m something of a novelty with my Scouse-tinged accent and—crucially—lack of interest in football.

Each of the school day’s three break times is spent playing football; at least, for boys. There are one or two outsiders who are exempt from this, kids who I’ll eventually discover and become friends with, but for now, I dutifully follow everybody else from my class and we spread into a long line while the two team captains pick their squad. I’m always last to be picked unless I catch the eye of one of the captains and silently beseech him to pick me; try to will him to recall how I helped him with his spelling yesterday afternoon. Sometimes it works.

As you read this email, you’ll know the official results of the UK general election 2024. I’m typing this on the day of voting, but let’s be clear: we already know who the winner is going to be. Or, perhaps: we know who the loser is going to be.

I don’t mean that there’s any doubt that Keir “My Dad Was a Toolmaker” Starmer is going to walk into Number Ten tomorrow. My point is that it’s unclear who “wins” from this result, because it certainly isn’t the British public.

Living in the UK these past few years has felt almost hedonistic as the gradual erosion and decay of our public services has accelerated. I remember being at Glastonbury back in 2014 when heavy rain briefly shut down the Pyramid stage. Nobody was dressed properly for the storm and after a while we all stopped trying to shelter from it. One bloke took off most of his clothes and began dancing in a muddy corner and soon there were crowds of people joining him, everyone covered in mud and rain and seemingly beginning the descent into oblivion.

I’m not much of a gamer. When I started university in 2005, I took with me my recently-acquired Nintendo Gamecube, which was four years old at that point. It replaced my, er, Sega Mega Drive, which was released in the late 1980s. I like games, but I’m not much interested in keeping up with the current generation.

As a teenager, I remember our household purchasing our first “family computer”, was was not unlike the image below. It came with a CD-ROM sleeve packed full of games and educational software, including the still-classic Star Wars: Rogue Squadron flying game.

One of these CDs didn’t work in our computer, and I still remember taking it to a friend who’d been building PCs since he was in primary school. He inspected it on his own machine and confirmed it had a virus. I still remember him confidently telling me that computer viruses could spread from disc-to-disc, so the stack of bare CD-ROMs I used to carry around on a plastic spindle was putting all of my precious games at risk of contracting the virus. I hurriedly separated them all into plastic sleeves again.