Jemima Lewis

Jemima Lewis: It's up to us to tame our little barbarians

The fact that I have just had one doesn't change a thing: children, I tell you, are the devil's work. They lure you in with their gummy smiles, flatter you with squeaks of joy, wrap themselves around the tenderest parts of your psyche and squeeze and squeeze until the critical faculties pop right out of your skull. How else to explain the apparent amazement that greeted the news this week that Britain's children don't always play nicely?

Recently by Jemima Lewis

Jemima Lewis: Be your own English tutor – keep a diary

Saturday, 3 November 2007

The Reverend Robert Shields might seem an unlikely role model for British schoolchildren, but – as they say in call centres – bear with me. Shields, a former pastor from Washington state, who died last week at the age of 89, was a little on the eccentric side. For a quarter of a century, he devoted his life to writing his diary – every five minutes. He documented everything, from his bowel movements to the precise contents of his junk mail. At night, he would wake every two hours in order to record his dreams.

Jemima Lewis: Why can't the British be more like the Poles?

Saturday, 27 October 2007

It is perhaps for the best that Aleksander Kucharski has gone back to his native Poland, since he can't have made himself very popular in Newcastle. The 16-year-old schoolboy moved to England two years ago with his parents, who are both doctors, and – excited at the prospect of an old-fashioned English education – enrolled at St Thomas More's, a Roman Catholic state school which boasts one of the best academic records in the country.

Jemima Lewis: Is a lonely life inevitable when I have my baby?

Saturday, 20 October 2007

Perhaps I should just stop reading these surveys. Being pregnant is alarming enough in itself (88 per cent of expectant mothers are plagued by secret anxieties: Journal of Clinical Endocrinology, May 2007), especially when you're of a certain age (70 per cent of thirty-something women feel stressed all the time: Top Santé magazine, September 2007). But now it transpires that much, much worse is to come.

Jemima Lewis: I've seen the future in my grandmother's plight

Saturday, 13 October 2007

It used to be a source of great pride to me that my grandmother was not like other old folk. Long after my friends' grandparents had succumbed to dementia, disability or death – or simply slid into beige-clad invisibility – the Lewis family matriarch remained, in body and spirit, uncannily young.

Jemima Lewis: Our pets reflect our lingering love of the wild

Saturday, 6 October 2007

A word of warning: it really isn't practical to live with a raccoon. Back in the 1930s, when exotic pets were all the rage, the author Cyril Connolly tried it. A friend who had been travelling in South America brought him back a coatimundi – a form of tree-dwelling raccoon with a probing, upturned nose, sharp teeth and a hopelessly undomesticated personality.

Jemima Lewis: It is our own fault we are sad and stressed

Saturday, 29 September 2007

The other night I woke up sobbing. This doesn't often happen, and when it does it's usually because I have had a satisfyingly mawkish dream about mourners thronging to my funeral. On this occasion, however, something quite new and unwelcome disturbed my slumbers: my to-do list.

Jemima Lewis: Why are spinsters singled out like this?

Saturday, 8 September 2007

It will come as no surprise to the beleaguered singleton to discover that – as well as being continually scrutinised, pitied and feared – he or she is also being ripped off. Everything is more expensive when you are tout seul, from housing to gym membership to travel.

Jemima Lewis: Political principles and pregnancy rarely mix

Saturday, 25 August 2007

I wouldn't exactly call myself a good socialist, but there are one or two leftish articles of faith to which I cling. Chief among these is an ardent belief in the provision of free healthcare for all.

Jemima Lewis: The best inheritance is not a monetary one

Saturday, 18 August 2007

You might not want them on your village green, but you've got to say this for Irish travellers: they know how to deal with the problem of inheritance. When a traveller dies, all his worldly possessions are tidied into his caravan - and the whole lot is torched.

Jemima Lewis: Pictures of innocence, destroyed by paranoia

Saturday, 11 August 2007

A legacy of my Catholic upbringing is that all church services - even christenings, weddings and funerals - are liable to set me writhing with teenage ennui. But at the christening of a friend's daughter last weekend, I heard something that made me sit to attention in my pew.

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