Happy Friday! Something to read while you’re waiting for the weekend…

1) Boris Johnson is a bad mayor. I’ve never been on the ‘the dangleway’, to be honest, I don’t often venture into East London. I thought it was a stupid idea but it’s a stupid idea that’s losing £50,000 a week. I thought the Tories and Boris in particular was against public funding paying for everything.

What is especially telling about the dangleway and its ignominious failure is that southeast London has long been in need of real infrastructure and investment. DLR and Overground extensions have made up some ground, but mostly southeast Londoners rely (like the rest of the country, but unlike those north of the river) on a massively unreliable and slow train network. River crossings are especially tricky. Among the first things cancelled by Johnson on coming to office were the Thames Gateway bridge, a DLR extension to Dagenham and a cross-river tram. Such things were evidently utopian – by now, the big infrastructural idea, depressingly supported by Labour councils, is an extension of the Blackwall Tunnel.

2) Machines that do too much. 

The modern washing machine has a dozen or more cycles that no one has ever used. The “baby cycle”, for example, aimed, presumably, at parents too lazy to wash their babies in the bath. Or, quoting now from a variety of machines, the “duvet”, “sports”, “bed and bath”, “reduced creases”, “allergy” and “freshen up” cycles. As in “I’m just going to hop in the washing machine and freshen up.” (Yes, I realise it freshens up clothes, not people, but still I bet no one has ever used it non-ironically.)

3) Women in the Catholic Church. I don’t think it’s enough anymore to say ‘not in my name’. The attitudes to women and to priesthood with the RC Church need to be fundamentally challenged and changed.

But of this I am certain: if the Catholic church is going to pick itself up it needs to make some very big changes indeed. Trust the laity, share the power, open the pathways, make the mechanics transparent; and that’s just for starters. Oh yes: and read the gospels too. Was this the church Christ wanted? If not, let’s get back to that rock, and see whether we can build something much, much better.

4) Why toddlers having tantrums is to be expected. For the record, I have no problem with the tantrums, I have a problem with the tantrums changing adult behaviour. Kids are learning all the time, if you give in every time they throw a wobbly, what they will learn is that they get what they want every time they throw a wobbly. You stick it out, stay with them and stop them from hurting themselves and when it’s over, it’s done, they still don’t get to play with the shiny knife but you don’t get to go on about it. Small children don’t need to be nagged, save that for when they’re teenagers! It’s not easy but it is simple.

It’s no coincidence that kids start having tantrums around the time that parents start enforcing rules. When you say no, sweetie, you can’t have that butcher knife, your 20-month-old has no idea that you are depriving her of this awesomely shiny contraption for her own safety. “Since it’s the parent, whom they rely on for everything, who is taking it away, it’s perceived as a withdrawal of love, essentially,” says Alicia Lieberman, a professor of Infant Mental Health at the University of California-San Francisco and author of The Emotional Life of the Toddler. “They don’t know your reasoning. They just know that something they were getting great pleasure from, all of a sudden, you are taking away.” The pain that this causes, Lieberman says, is similar to what we might feel if our spouse betrays or cheats on us.

5) John Green on writing and teenagers. The Fault in Our Stars was an amazing book and worth a read, even if you’re not a teenager.

Earlier this month, the Daily Mail took it upon itself to publish a rather scathing critique on the so-called ‘sick-lit’ genre. They claimed that books about teen terminal illness, death and bereavement are becoming a worryingly popular phenomenon, and that youngsters are too undeveloped to deal with issues such as cancer. I asked John what he thought of it and he had this to say:

“The thing that bothered me about it… was that it was a bit condescending to teenagers. I’m tired of adults telling teenagers that they aren’t smart, that they can’t read critically, that they aren’t thoughtful, and I feel like that article made those arguments.”