Can a woman who can’t lead herself lead a nation?

It’s one of the oldest questions in politics and leadership: does moral integrity matter? Should we judge public figures by their private lives, or only by the outcomes of their public actions?

If a man or woman leads a country out of war, rescues an economy, or inspires a generation, should it concern us that they live a private life of chaos — sex, drugs, and rock and roll behind the curtain? Would Churchill’s whisky, Kennedy’s women, or today’s presidents’ indiscretions cancel out their public legacy?

Or is moral character inseparable from public trust — a person who cannot lead their own life or family surely cannot lead a nation with consistency, compassion, or restraint?

The convenient split

We like to split our heroes into compartments: the “private sinner” and the “public saviour.” It’s a comforting division. It allows us to admire brilliance while ignoring hypocrisy. But the two lives often bleed into one another.

A politician who cheats on his spouse might also cheat the public purse. A bishop who silences victims to protect the Church’s “reputation” might also protect power over truth. The capacity to lie at home often mirrors the capacity to lie in office.

Yet we’re also inconsistent in how we apply moral judgment. We forgive King Charles for betraying Diana — perhaps because his failings feel very human, almost Shakespearean. We condemn Prince Andrew, perhaps because his moral failures are no longer deniable. We elected a U.S. president with a criminal record, while deriding other nations for their corruption. And Boris Johnson — a man who fathered children by multiple women and lied with theatrical ease — remains, for some, a symbol of British optimism and charm.

Why? Because we admire confidence and results more than truthfulness. We are addicted to charisma, even when it’s dishonest.

The hypocrisy trap

Double standards abound. Politicians who campaign for “family values” are caught in affairs. Leaders who condemn crime are found embezzling taxes or funnelling money through offshore accounts. Religious figures who preach humility dress in gold and cover up abuse.

We seem to accept a quiet hypocrisy as part of public life. Perhaps we believe everyone is flawed. Perhaps we have grown cynical. Or perhaps, deep down, we know that to hold others accountable would mean holding ourselves accountable too.

But what about results?

The counterargument is simple: results matter. If a morally ambiguous leader ends a war, rebuilds an economy, or brings stability, should we care what happens in their bedroom? Isn’t the private life a private matter?

Yet the danger lies in normalising duplicity. If we say integrity is optional, we lose the right to expect honesty at all. The same man who cheats his wife may one day cheat his country — and we will have taught him that it doesn’t matter.

The measure of leadership

True leadership begins with self-leadership. A person who cannot govern their own impulses, desires, and relationships will eventually govern others with the same inconsistency. Integrity is not about moral perfection — it’s about coherence. When private truth aligns with public duty, trust becomes possible.

A man who cannot lead himself, or his family, may command authority, but he does not inspire it. Without inner discipline, power becomes performance.

The uncomfortable truth

Perhaps the question is not whether moral integrity matters — but why we keep pretending it doesn’t.

We can tolerate imperfection. We can forgive mistakes. But when deceit becomes normalised, leadership turns hollow. A man or woman who cannot tell the truth in private cannot be trusted to tell it in public.

And that, surely, is where the line must still be drawn.

Faith and doubt

The Bible defines faith in strikingly absolute terms:

“Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”
— Hebrews 11:1

For years, I lived inside that definition. To believe in God, in the death and resurrection of Jesus, in heaven and hell, was not to speculate but to be certain. I remember how real that certainty felt — as if the ground beneath me could not possibly give way.

Looking back, I can still see why conviction is so attractive. It simplifies life. It gives you direction. There’s something reassuring about being guided by a strong sense of rightness, rather than drifting on vague, half-formed notions. For a time, I admired that in myself and in others — the courage to stand firm, to be sure.

But certainty has a darker side. It divides the world into believers and non-believers, insiders and outsiders. I’ve seen how quickly that division hardens into judgment, superiority, even hostility. History is full of examples where religious certainty did not just separate communities but helped justify oppression and war. That recognition has been painful for me, because I once participated in the same mindset.

Doubt, by contrast, has never started wars. It doesn’t silence art or suppress science. If anything, doubt has opened doors — for creativity, for discovery, for dialogue. In my own life, doubt has forced me to pause, to ask questions I once thought dangerous. Strangely enough, it has made me more compassionate. To give someone the benefit of the doubt, even in ordinary relationships, is to allow space for understanding rather than condemnation. On a larger scale, when whole cultures are willing to live with doubt, it creates the possibility of cooperation instead of conflict.

For me, the shift from certainty to doubt has not been easy. It feels like stepping off firm ground into open air. But it also feels more honest. Faith, I now see, is not always confidence; it can just as easily be the refusal to face uncomfortable truths. Doubt, far from being weakness, has become — for me — a condition of dignity, the beginning of humility, the chance to meet others without the armour of superiority.

Voltaire once wrote:

“Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer.”
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

Perhaps he was right. But if we are honest with ourselves, we may also need to invent doubt — not as a threat to our humanity, but as its safeguard.

False Fundamentalism: Erasmus v. Luther

Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam

Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536) is often regarded as the pioneer of historical-biblical criticism — a discipline that continues to polarise attitudes to the Bible today.

A highly gifted academic, a Catholic priest, and in many ways one of the first genuine citizens of Europe, Erasmus was also the illegitimate son of a priest. Both his parents died of the plague when he was a teenager. These hardships helped shape his lifelong belief in synergism (salvation is a work of both God and human co-operation), in contrast to the monergism (salvation is a work of God alone) preached by Luther and many Protestants since the Reformation.

Erasmus the Humanist

Erasmus was a pacifist who wanted Christianity to be lived out in daily practice. He feared that Luther’s belligerence would fracture the church — which is exactly what happened. Yet Erasmus was also a product of his time: a humanist who sought to move faith away from lofty scholastic debates and root it once again in the lives of ordinary people.

That concern drove him to produce accurate translations of the Bible from authentic manuscripts, placing them into the hands of ordinary believers.

The Problem of the Vulgate

For centuries the church relied on the Vulgate, a 4th-century Latin translation. When Erasmus compared it with manuscripts in Greek and Hebrew, he found countless errors — mistranslations, omissions, outright mistakes.

This raises uncomfortable questions for fundamentalists:

If the Bible is the infallible Word of God, why did God permit flawed versions for the first 1,500 years of church history?
If Christians are meant to base their lives on Scripture, what did they do during the early centuries when no agreed New Testament even existed — and when its canon was decided by human choices?
What if more accurate manuscripts were discovered tomorrow? Would faith collapse?
Why did God wait until the 18th century for scholars to unearth more reliable manuscripts, leaving believers with errant texts for nearly 1,700 years?

Pragmatists vs. Fundamentalists

These questions split Christians into two camps. Erasmus and his heirs take the pragmatic view: human errors in transmission do not negate the central message of Jesus.

Fundamentalists, by contrast, insist that every word of Scripture is directly inspired, perfectly preserved, and must be correctly interpreted in “synergy with the Spirit.” They claim a monopoly on truth while conveniently overlooking the centuries of textual mistakes God apparently permitted.

Seeds of Criticism

Erasmus thus planted the seeds of modern historical-biblical criticism. If the text contains human flaws, then textual criticism is necessary. From there follow source, form, and literary criticism.

To many fundamentalists, these methods are “tools of the devil.” But the devil himself is a mythical construct — a figure invented by those in power to keep ordinary people in fear and obedience. What fundamentalists really fear is the erosion of their authority over naïve believers.

Erasmus Ahead of His Time

Erasmus held on to his synergistic convictions, alienating many theologians of his day. In hindsight, he was far ahead of his time.

And the core question remains: Which kind of Christian most resembles Jesus?

The one who lives daily in gratitude, prayer, and service, applying the main tenets of Scripture with humility?
Or the one who thunders fundamentalist slogans while ignoring beggars, railing against minorities, and collaborating in the destruction of the planet?

Which vision reflects the heart of Jesus more closely: Erasmus’ synergism, where humans freely cooperate with God to make the world better, or Luther’s monergism, where salvation is a matter of predestined grace and the rest are damned from birth?

After all, in Matthew 19, Jesus gave the rich young man a choice.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Labour’s lost its Lesson Plan

So, the latest UK budget no longer talks about reviving grammar schools or rolling out new academies. Instead, the focus has shifted to funding school repairs and rebuilding. Labour has increased spending, but only by a very modest 1.6% real-terms rise per pupil—a tiny amount when compared with vast sums directed toward war and weapons. Large investments are being channelled into special educational needs (SEND), which is badly needed, but it means that mainstream schools are seeing relatively little benefit.

Personally—and speaking as a teacher—I remain in favour of a selective secondary education system, provided that it has safeguards. Late developers should be able to transfer schools, and children from disadvantaged areas must have genuine access to these opportunities. Without such mechanisms, selection only entrenches privilege.

There are, however, two issues that I find absurd about how Britain continues to “reform” its education system. First, there is still no sign of a politician with a passionate, forward-looking vision for schooling that genuinely prepares young people for the unstoppable forces of technology and globalisation. Such a vision might involve dismantling the outdated timetable of narrow subject blocks, and instead encouraging flexible, interdisciplinary learning. Secondly, the entire system has been treated for decades as a political football, demoralising teachers and disrupting the lives of millions of children.

As usual, the Conservative Party blames Labour for whatever blocks their proposals, while conveniently forgetting that it was the Conservatives themselves who abolished grammar schools and introduced comprehensive education in the first place.

Yet the politicisation of education is only the tip of the iceberg. The deeper problem is that nearly all politicians’ children attend private schools, misleadingly known as “public schools.” I hate to sound cynical, but perhaps this issue is ignored because:
a) the label “public school” disguises their exclusivity, and
b) so many of the country’s most successful journalists also attended them, and are thus either blind to the inequity or complicit in maintaining it.

Even now, the majority of Oxbridge students come from private schools, and they go on to fill senior positions in politics (David Cameron, Theresa May, Tony Blair), the civil service, journalism, law, medicine, diplomacy, and business. For as long as this pipeline exists, why would politicians truly care about the state system?

Nowhere else in Europe is the link between private schooling and elite opportunity so entrenched. Education in the UK remains less about nurturing knowledge, skills, or culture, and more about handing out socially constructed keys to financial security.

A quick comparison with other European countries—where politicians’ children generally attend state schools—confirms the point.

Marx was right: capitalism sustains itself by maintaining an alienated underclass. The British education system is one of the most efficient tools for ensuring exactly that.

The mirror we all hold

“For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”
— 1 Corinthians 13:12

In the Bible’s finest chapter on love, we find the core of what all human beings seek: to know the truth and to be loved unconditionally. Some are forced to abandon the search by war, famine, or disaster. Others numb it with money, power, routine, or religion. But painters, composers, writers, and prisoners ache until the search is done. Life may be a poor player strutting its hour upon the stage, yet it remains a miraculous gift. In my own search, this is what I have learned:

Our reality is socially constructed. It is not simply out there, an objective truth. It is shaped through interaction, language, and shared meaning. What we take as natural or real is the result of human processes. We create culture, institutions, and practices until they appear objective, unquestionable. Society is a human product, and humans are also a product of society.

So, God is not dead; she was never alive. Human beings are distinguished by language, and only with language could we invent the search for truth and love and confront our fear of death. We created narratives to explain, console, and control — each shaped by its ethnicity. When those narratives masquerade as religion, they breed arrogance and division, and evil flourishes in the shadows they cast.

In postmodern times, these grand stories have been dismantled, leaving behind fragments of wisdom, still priceless, still relevant. With their collapse comes the dissolution of absolute truth, the perfect mirror. We are left with fractured mirrors that blur and distort. We will never see face to face. We will never fully know.

Yet one certainty remains: we are constellations of atoms, stardust reassembled by chance and time, hurtling around our sun on a rock at 67,000 mph. DNA coils like ancient runes in every cell, issuing silent instructions: become, live, persist. From this choreography comes breath, thought, memory: a mother’s laughter, longing for distant places, a lover’s hand in the dark. We invent gods and heroes, build cathedrals and poems, grieve, and love. All this from fragile molecules wrapped in skin. Just chemistry. An echo of evolution. And yet: is it not a miracle that matter dreams at all?

As animals without God, we are capable of both the sublime and the grotesque, like a spider whose web can dazzle, yet devour. Both poles dwell in every heart. When misaligned in childhood, they consume more than they weave. Our destruction harms others as much as ourselves. Only when such misalignment is brought into the light, described and objectified, can disaster be averted. There is no cure, but it can be managed.

And yes, we need others. The fool thinks he can do it alone, with drugs or double lives. But we are social creatures, destined to create and to destroy together. We are the same story, written in different ink, linked like islands beneath the ocean. We need one another to hold up the mirrors in which we might glimpse truth — and love.

Love is the fiction we live and die for. Our need for sex and closeness becomes sonnet and story, until the invention feels more real than the words that birthed it. Yet in that fiction, light is found. And only in that light do the mirrors reflect enough to end our search.

The arts are our vehicle for this search. Education is archaic. It is preserved that way by an oligarchy masquerading as democracy to secure the success of its offspring. Were curricula ever to be revised, the arts must not be replaced by AI or science, but contextualised by them. Only then might humanity move toward security and enlightenment, instead of decline and crime.

I’d be very interested in your comments.

Beyond Schadenfreude: Britain After the Wind

Past: How We Talked Ourselves Into a Corner

We never really argued Europe on first principles—peace, prosperity, human rights, freedom of movement, shared standards. We argued on slogans. We outsourced the national imagination to tabloids and demagogues, and then acted surprised when magical thinking produced real-world bills. By the time the dust settled, “sovereignty” had become a vibe, not a plan.

Present: The Pragmatism Trap

Today’s politics feels relentlessly utilitarian: manage the spreadsheet, massage the headline, survive the next 24-hour cycle. Vision is treated as a risk factor. Meanwhile, the structural problems keep stacking up:

Debt at 60-year highs. Public sector net debt sits around 96% of GDP, a level last seen in the early 1960s.
A health service running hot. NHS elective waiting lists hover at 7.36 million despite record treatment volumes.
Inflation cooled, but prices didn’t. CPI is down to 3.8% (from an 11.1% peak in 2022), but households are still living with the permanent shift in costs.
Housing approvals at record lows. The pipeline is shrinking, even as the government talks up 1.5 million new homes.
The politics of optics. “Small boats” dominate the agenda, while coherent policies on growth, migration and industry are sacrificed to tabloid storms.

This is what happens when governments treat governing like crisis PR: you chase the loudest gust of wind. The result is performative toughness—hotel bans, punitive rhetoric—while the fundamentals (growth, productivity, health, housing, skills) remain under-powered.

Future: A Grown-Up Programme for Renewal

We don’t need new messiahs; we need competent, credentialed reformers with an ethic. A country can’t live forever on services, inflated rates and an isolationist shrug.

1. Industrial base fit for AI.
Ten-year strategy on AI, clean energy, advanced materials, with support for both “frontier” research and everyday adoption by small firms.

2. Education and skills as national infrastructure.
Support teacher retention, technical education pipelines, lifelong learning accounts, apprenticeships with genuine ladders into growth clusters.

3. Health and care joined up.
Integrate NHS and social-care budgets, expand surgical hubs, measure success by reduced emergency admissions.

4. Housing built where people need it.
Make the 1.5m homes target binding, with planning reform and public-interest land value capture.

5. Europe, soberly.
Step back in functionally: science programmes, youth mobility, security cooperation, sector agreements—trust rebuilt by substance, not symbols.

6. Migration with adult supervision.
Break smuggling, speed up asylum decisions, create lawful routes, stop governing by hotel headlines.

Closing

Pragmatism is a virtue only when it’s anchored in principle. Otherwise, it’s drift. Britain needs leaders who can hold a compass in high wind—and citizens ready to reward them for it.

The Myth of Inerrancy

When I was part of a charismatic, Bible-believing church, I was taught — and I believed — that the Bible was the inerrant Word of God.

God the Holy Spirit, I was told, had inspired men to write down exactly what He wanted them to say. As proof, our teachers would point to 2 Timothy 3:16:

“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

Only recently did I realise that “Scripture” here refers to the Old Testament — as it does in the other fifty places the New Testament writers use the term. We were taught, largely on the shaky basis of 2 Peter 3:16, that the New Testament was also “Scripture,” and therefore equally God-breathed and inerrant. Hence, everything in our Bibles was presented as authoritative beyond question.

Life Inside the Sect

When you live inside a sect, you accept such propositions because:

you love and respect your leaders,
you fear rejection by friends,
and above all, you dread God’s wrath lest you “distort the truth to your own destruction” (2 Peter 3:16).

But once you leave that environment and begin to research the topics never addressed by preachers, the cracks appear quickly.

The Chaotic Canon

First: the New Testament canon itself.

The books and letters included were chosen during the three centuries after Jesus’ death through arguments, compromises, and confusion. To call that process “inerrant” is impossible.

If you believe instead that God guided the church flawlessly through this chaos, then the church itself becomes higher in authority than Scripture. That is precisely the Roman Catholic position — long condemned as heresy by Protestants since Luther separated the apocryphal writings.

A Flawed Text

Second: Erasmus (1466–1536) showed clearly that the church lived for over a thousand years with a New Testament full of errors and omissions.

So how can the Bible be the inerrant Word of God if millions of Christians were following the wrong Bible for centuries?

Arrogant Certainty

Third: in the sect where I spent twenty years, there prevailed an arrogant certainty that “our” interpretation was the only correct one.

Historical and cultural context was dismissed as irrelevant. The Holy Spirit, we were told, would simply provide our preachers with flawless understanding.

So, if Acts 10 describes baptism in the Spirit with tongues, miracles, and prophecy, then this must be the norm for every Christian, forever. Anyone who preached otherwise was a heretic — including the entire Baptist Church. I actually believed this.

And yet I never questioned why women in our services didn’t wear head coverings (1 Corinthians 11:6), or why they were allowed to speak and prophesy when Paul wrote that women should remain silent and it was “disgraceful” for them to speak in church (1 Corinthians 14:34–35).

Selective Literalism

The same inconsistencies plague the Old Testament.

Why do fathers no longer present disobedient sons to be stoned to death?
Why are women not excluded from worship during their periods?
Why are practising homosexuals not “annihilated” as in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah — a story which, in fact, has nothing to do with homosexuality?

This selective literalism always comes down to the same thing: an abuse of authority cloaked in divine certainty.

The Bible and Its Abusers

The Bible is an extraordinary piece of inspired literature. For many, it is genuinely a revelation of God.

But those who wield claims of inerrancy as a weapon — to bolster their arrogance, to demand obedience, to silence dissent — should be ashamed. For centuries, such misuse has caused division, pain, and even death in the name of Christ.

“When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.”
— Desmond Tutu

Room 911: A Tale of Two Holidays

This is a short story I wrote when I was 17 on holiday in Spain. I hope you enjoy it.

Room 911

A Tale of Two Holidays

‘Cabin crew, doors to manual.’

‘At last,’ sighed Paul as he unclipped his seatbelt.

The two-and-a-half-hour flight to Malaga had been an endurance test: three cramped seats in the back row next to the toilets; a turbulent climb out of Gatwick that rattled his nerves; two female pilots at the controls ; emphatically gay stewards; and, worst of all, two businessmen — Dutch, perhaps — who had spent most of the flight standing in the aisle, bellowing corporate plans in harsh, broken English.

Directly in front of him, an obese bald man had snored from take-off to landing with astonishing force.

How on earth did he not wake himself up? Paul coughed, jiggled his knees into the back of the seat, shifted noisily. Nothing worked.

Still, at least Jamie had been good.

His seven-year-old son had fallen asleep in the car on the way to Gatwick, then spent most of the flight happily playing Angry Birds on Paul’s iPad, munching Pringles, sipping J2O.

‘Got everything, Jamie?’ Maddie asked as she pulled down her coat and suitcase.
Jamie nodded, his large, chocolate-brown eyes catching triangles of white sunlight streaming through the aircraft windows.

Paul glanced at Maddie and thought back to their first encounter. Six months ago, on the Northern Line, they had been pressed together in the rush-hour crush. She had turned away shyly, her bobbed brown hair catching the carriage’s fluorescent light, her perfume — citrus with something woody beneath — cutting through the stale air.

He had noticed her avoidance, her embarrassment, and in that moment he had been struck by how long it had been since a woman had stirred anything in him. Not since the sudden death of his wife.

The awkward bump at Elephant and Castle had pushed Maddie’s slim frame briefly against his. She’d pulled away with a flustered smile, apologised, but Paul had taken it as a sign. Out of that accidental intimacy, a relationship had grown: dinners, films, music they both liked. Maddie had become a steady presence in his and Jamie’s life.

And now here they were — their first holiday as a makeshift family. A trial run at happiness.

As they shuffled down the aisle, a sudden sulphurous stench hit them. The obese man had broken wind.

‘Oh, Dad!’ Jamie whispered urgently. ‘Was that you?’

Paul grimaced and pointed towards the man, who was now speaking loudly in German to his tall, athletic son. As the man reached up for a suitcase, his bright green Adidas t-shirt rode up, exposing a vast balloon of pale stomach spilling over his belt. Jamie stared, fascinated and repelled.

They disembarked into the glass terminal, bathed in Andalusian sunlight. The sky was cloudless, the heat already rising, promising days of beach, pool, and warm evenings on the promenade.

Jamie lingered to look back at the Airbus 320. From one of its engines, he thought he saw thick black liquid dripping — oil, perhaps. Three men in overalls and the pilot stood below, pointing and gesturing in stress. To Jamie, it looked like his parents when they argued.

They collected their bags and stepped outside into the fierce sun.

‘El hotel Don Pablo, por favor,’ Paul told the taxi driver, proud of his phrasebook Spanish.

The taxi sped along shimmering tarmac, past a beer factory, down towards the tideless Mediterranean. The Don Pablo stood above the promenade, palm trees swaying between busy chiringuitos, rollerblading children weaving through strolling couples.

‘You’ll love it here, Jamie,’ Maddie said. ‘There are always lots of children. You’ll make friends.’

They checked in, took the lift to the ninth floor, and unlocked Room 911. Jamie swiped the keycard with the excitement of Christmas morning.

The smell hit Paul instantly: the nostalgic mix of stale suncream, faint bleach, warm varnished furniture — the essence of childhood holidays.

Above the bed hung a tapestry of the Last Supper.

‘Is that Jesus, Dad?’ Jamie asked.
‘Yes.’
‘And the one leaning on him — that’s Judas, right? The friend who betrayed him?’
‘Yes, son, that’s right.’

‘No,’ Maddie corrected softly. ‘That’s John, his closest friend. Judas is the one holding the bag of money.’

‘Really? Whatever,’ Paul muttered, impatient.

‘If Jesus was God, Dad, why did he have to die?’ Jamie pressed.
Paul hesitated. ‘I don’t really know.’
‘Maybe it was to show how much he loved us. Like Mum,’ Jamie said quietly.

Paul shot a glance at Maddie. Jamie, sensing he had touched a nerve, snatched up Terence, his Angry Birds toy, and bounded onto the balcony.

‘Look, Terence, the sea!’ he announced.

Below, families clustered around the pool, children splashing while parents dozed on sunbeds. Across the road stretched the beach, waves crashing harder than seemed reasonable on such a windless day.

‘Dad, why’s the sea so rough if there’s no wind?’
‘It’s the moon,’ Paul declared confidently. ‘It pulls on the sea like a magnet.’
Jamie nodded, satisfied.

Later, by the pool, they noticed the German man again — the snorer from the plane. With him sat his wiry son, a blonde woman with broad shoulders, and a pretty girl on the brink of adolescence. Jamie watched her flick her hair with unconscious poise, then turned his attention back to the pool.

The boy introduced himself. ‘I’m Lukas. We live in London. My dad is a doctor. He works in Africa sometimes.’ He grinned. ‘I’m nine. How old are you?’
‘I’m seven,’ Jamie replied eagerly, and they plunged together into the freezing water.

Over the next days, Lukas and Jamie were inseparable: pool, beach, games, laughter. Sometimes Lukas’s sister, Carla, joined them with her endless silly jokes that made Jamie laugh harder the less funny they were.

One afternoon the families shared lunch at a chiringuito. Maddie warmed to Petra, Lukas’s mother, and they talked about raising children abroad. Paul listened to Dominik — the German father — tell stories of medicine in Africa.

They were humbling tales, full of lives saved and lost. Paul felt suddenly small, his job in Shell’s London office seeming shallow by comparison. He also noticed how little Dominik ate, despite his size. Dominik explained, matter-of-factly, that a rare glandular disease made him obese regardless of diet or exercise.

Paul was chastened; his prejudices felt mean and petty in the face of the man’s quiet dignity.

As they lingered over coffee, Jamie piped up. ‘Dad, didn’t you say the moon makes the waves? But it isn’t windy…’

Dominik smiled, poured mineral water into a saucer, and tilted it until the liquid sloshed over the rim.

‘The Mediterranean is like this basin. The water slops because of the earth’s rotation. And some waves start far away, where the wind is stronger than here.’

‘Oh,’ Jamie said, disappointed but thoughtful.

The next day, Paul and Maddie decided to stay at the hotel. They were tired, and perhaps — Paul hoped — ready for some time alone.

‘Please, Dad, can I go to the beach with Lukas? It’s their last day!’ Jamie begged.

Paul hesitated, then caught Maddie’s eye. The look they shared made his decision.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘But be careful.’

Jamie hugged him tight. ‘Love you, Dad.’ Then he grabbed his towel and flip-flops and ran towards the beach, smiling all the way.

Back in Room 911, Paul and Maddie lay together, finally free of interruption. The midday sun pressed against the balcony doors, and outside the sea continued its ceaseless rhythm.

On the beach, Jamie waited by the water’s edge. Lukas wasn’t there yet. He stepped into the waves, remembering Dominik’s saucer, thinking how the sea slopped and pulled, alive with its own hidden force.

Above, Paul and Maddie surrendered to their closeness, lost in each other. Their pleasure also came in waves. Breath-taking undulations, larger and larger and louder and louder.

Seconds later came the largest and loudest wave of all, furious, foaming, final. And not unlike the one that, at that very moment, came crashing over Jamie, carrying his small body out into the indifferent sea.

Education for the future, or the preservation of privilege?

Intelligence vs. Success: Why Our Education System is Broken

What is Intelligence?

At its simplest, intelligence is not about certificates, grades, or titles. True intelligence is the ability to understand, process, and reapply information in new contexts. It is a flexible and adaptive capacity — the skill to see patterns, make connections, and act with insight in real life. Many of the most intelligent people I have ever met were not those who topped the class but those who could solve a problem in unexpected ways, or question assumptions everyone else accepted as “normal.”

Success in a Socially Constructed System

Our education system, however, rewards something quite different. It is socially constructed in such a way that success is often defined by compliance with rules and frameworks designed generations ago. More than that, it is geared towards the preservation of privilege. Children from wealthy families are more likely to thrive in a system that reflects their own cultural capital, gaining qualifications that open doors to secure and lucrative careers. By contrast, working-class children are too often measured against a yardstick that was never designed with them in mind. In effect, the system keeps the rich rich and the poor poor.

A Lesson from Sussex

When I was researching at the University of Sussex, I interviewed working-class students about their approaches to GCSE questions. In one memorable case, a group of students deliberately wrote down the “wrong” answer to a maths problem. Why? Because the “right” answer, when calculated, contradicted the real-life cost of a can of Coca-Cola in a vending machine. Their intelligence was not lacking — on the contrary, they were thinking critically, applying lived experience, and exposing the unreality of the exam question itself. Yet, in the rigid world of assessment, such insight was penalised as failure.

Knowledge as a Social Construct

We like to imagine that subjects such as biology, history, or geography represent objective slices of truth. But these disciplines are themselves social constructs — artificial divisions of what is, in reality, a seamless experience. Even mathematics, often called “pure,” is anything but: it is shaped by human assumptions, conventions, and applications. Our schools carve up knowledge into neat compartments, while real life is profoundly cross-curricular. Consider the simple act of buying groceries: it involves mathematics, nutrition, economics, language, and even ethics. Yet no exam paper will ever measure this.

Falling Behind in the Age of AI

The problem is not only philosophical but practical. Technology has already transformed our lives, and artificial intelligence is now reshaping them even more dramatically. Our education systems, however, remain outdated relics of the industrial age, leaving students poorly prepared for the world they are about to inherit. Those without academic certificates are too often made to feel unintelligent, when in fact they may possess precisely the skills and insight the future will demand.

Towards a Radical Rethink

Something must change — and fast. We urgently need to deconstruct the oligarchical system of education and redesign it from the ground up. A modern education must:

Equip students for the realities of a technologically advanced, interconnected world.
Foster creativity and critical thinking alongside adaptability and resilience.
Sustain a love of the arts while embracing science and innovation.
Provide equal opportunities for children from all racial, social, and economic backgrounds.

True education should not preserve privilege. It should unleash intelligence in all its diverse forms — and prepare every young person to flourish in a future that belongs to them.

The Architecture of Reality

What seems eternal is often only the echo of human agreement

Most of us move through life believing that reality is simply “out there”—something fixed and solid, waiting for us to discover it. But over time, I’ve come to see that what we call “reality” is not just given to us; it is made, sustained, and passed on through people.

Think about it: the rules of marriage, the value of money, the rituals of religion or education—none of these fell from the sky. They were created by people, agreed upon, repeated, and eventually treated as if they had always been there. A piece of paper becomes “wealth.” A ceremony becomes “holy.” A set of expectations becomes “the way things are.”

The most fascinating part is that once these human creations are in place, they begin to feel objective, untouchable, almost like laws of nature. We grow up inside them, and they become the air we breathe. By the time we are adults, much of what we take as “normal” or “true” is simply what has been handed down to us.

And yet, these worlds are not neutral. Some people and institutions get to decide which knowledge counts, which voices are heard, which rules are legitimate. That is why two cultures—or even two families—can live in entirely different realities without ever noticing how constructed those realities are.

For the individual, this becomes especially challenging when the world we grew up in collides with the wider world outside. The lessons we learn at home—about trust, love, authority, or shame—are sometimes at odds with what we encounter later in school, work, or society at large. When these two realities clash, it can leave us confused, even broken inside, as if we’re expected to live two lives at once.

I’ve come to believe that the way forward begins with awareness. If we can see that these worlds are made by people, then we gain the freedom to question them. We can decide what to carry with us and what to lay down. We can stop being passive products of two conflicting realities and instead become active authors of our own lives.

At its heart, this is not just about society. It’s about self-knowledge, grace, and the courage to treat ourselves kindly as we sort through the contradictions. The more we learn to accept ourselves, the less power those clashes have to tear us apart.

In the end, we both build the world and are built by it. The challenge is to remain awake to that truth—and to choose, with as much wisdom as we can, the world we want to live in.