Lebanese cuisine, renowned for its diverse array of mezze, vegetarian dishes and grilled meats, is generally characterised by subtle seasoning. However, in the south of Lebanon a bold spice mixture called kammouneh stands out from this mild palette. A heady combination of cumin seeds, whole cloves, chilli flakes, black pepper kernels, juniper berries, dried mint, and rose petals, it results in a complex, punchy aromatic profile with earthy and floral notes. Despite its rich composition, kammouneh‘s use is limited to just three regional specialities: a lamb tartare, a potato pâté and a tomato-based dish.

No matter where we’re from or how rich our local food culture might be, the foods we eat have a way of anchoring themselves to our memories and emotions. A whiff of a familiar dish can whisk us back in an instant, while certain flavours might spark recollections of cherished moments or far-off places. This connection to food transcends cultural lines; it’s a shared human experience that bridges generations and grounds our sense of home. Even as our tastes evolve and global cuisines mingle freely, we often find ourselves drawn to the comforting flavours of our past, painting vivid pictures of people and places dear to us.

For me, kammouneh is  a tangible link to my Lebanese roots. Its distinctive aroma and flavour connects me to two generations of grandmothers. I can almost see my late maternal grandmother, whom I never had the chance to meet, making kibbeh nayyeh (lamb tartare), a scene painted vividly by my mother’s fond recollections. Then there’s the paternal grandmother I knew until I was in my teens, who always brought some with her when she came to visit. I remember her as she sat at the blatah, the slab of marble on which you pound the meat with a mallet as you add the spice mix. Both grandmothers will have learned this speciality from their own mothers, going back who knows how many generations. 

In recent months, with the south of Lebanon embroiled in war, my grandparents’ town has stood mostly deserted. Its people, including my relatives, have been displaced and don’t know when – or if – they’ll ever go back. I have a jar of kammouneh that I am reluctant to touch as I wonder if it’s the last batch I’ll ever get. The place and the people it is linked to hang in the balance as others decide their fate.

In the grand narrative of wars, the intimate, human stories often go untold. The public rarely hear about the grandmother who can no longer tend her garden, the local spice blender forced to abandon their craft, or the farmers now having to rely on others to survive because the land has been bombed with phosphorus, leaving the entire ecosystem in peril.

Yet it’s these individuals – the ones who cherish their homes, their families, their traditions and their daily rituals – who bear the brunt of war’s chaos. Ironically, these are often the very people who least want conflict and whose deepest wish is simply to live in peace. 

Their voices are frequently drowned out by propaganda and political commentators, the news reducing them to labels such as “victims” or “refugees”. In the end, it’s not just a spice blend at risk of being lost, but an entire way of life, rich with history, human connections and inherited wisdom. These are the real stakes, measured not in territories gained or resources controlled, but in family recipes left unshared, in communities scattered, in cultural threads frayed and in families who might never again gather around a favourite meal in the place they call home.

Will no one spare a thought for the childless cat men? For all the outrage over JD Vance’s imbecilic 2021 remarks about the “childless cat ladies” who run the US (uttered with Kamala Harris clearly in his sightlines) no one’s mentioned the obvious – there are many more childless men around. The best stats I could find were from the Associated Press for US Father’s Day 2019, stating just under a quarter of American men aged 40-50 were childless compared to just under 16 per cent of women. A big proportion of both sexes were childless by intention and this is an ever-increasing trend. The imbalance between the numbers of fathers and mothers seems to be replicated globally, indicating that some wealthy and self-indulgent blokes are fathering more than their share – Boris Johnson and Elon Musk, for starters.  

I’ve long noted that more of my male pals than female ones have opted out of parenthood and quite a few of them own splendid cats. In several cases I suspect the main reason is that they never want to stop being a child (and therefore the centre of attention) themselves. When I met my husband he was the devoted owner of two Burmese-cross cats and one of his former girlfriends warned me I might find myself below them in the household pecking order. They were followed by a succession of ginger Maine Coon toms, while our two sons (after ten years together), came as something of an afterthought. In fact, I’m fairly sure my husband would never have ventured into fatherhood if I hadn’t suddenly decided that, like climbing Scafell Pike, it might be worth a go.

So why are we all so silent about the dwindling numbers of dads worldwide, while enabling mockery of women (about whose choices and ovaries and partners we have no idea, because it’s rightly very private stuff)? This is especially true of western countries struggling to maintain population rates sufficient to look after their elderly. No one vilifies childless male leaders or claims they’re out of touch with supposed “real” issues facing families. Even though the UK’s most famously child-free leader, Ted Heath, seemed out of touch with all women – especially Margaret Thatcher – and most men too, apart from Beethoven. 

I can’t help feeling it’s unfair that there’s not a universal descriptor for men who choose not to push prams. In the UK it could be “childless Fido friends” since everyone knows that a British male’s first love is his dog. US citizens can suggest their own labels, but I favour barren Louisiana chaps being termed “childless crocodile gents”. And once everyone acknowledges how ludicrous it is to evaluate any adult by an act of contraceptive-free sex, perhaps we’ll give up the name-calling for good.

Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen may have been the formative influences on book-loving women of my generation, but as we moved to our late teens and early twenties it was Edna O’Brien we revered. Her clear-sightedness about female desire and men’s shortcomings, not to mention her wit, helped us transition from girls to women, from romanticism to blessed carnality – and the eternal problem of how not to be damned for it. I may not have been raised as an Irish Catholic, but I went to a school established for daughters of missionaries where the evangelical Methodist headmistress told girls off for being “painted Jezebels” and when a classmate fell pregnant, aged fifteen, she was spirited away. To this day I don’t know what happened to her and the child, and I feel terrible that it was felt to be so shameful as to be swathed in silence in 1983. 

O’Brien wasn’t on the school curriculum, instead we looked at the fate of poor sacrificial Tess of the d’Urbervilles, whose rape leads inexorably to her fall from grace, revenge and subsequent execution. There were so many better lessons in the pages of O’Brien’s classic coming-of-age novel, The Country Girls – survival and belief in the future being the most important. I was also in awe of the fact that a woman had written a book thought to be so wicked that it was banned in Ireland, where copies were burnt by priests. And when you looked at photographic portraits of this supremely talented and sexy woman – no wonder Robert Mitchum was one of the many who fell for her. While Jane Eyre had left my young self with the vague impression that plain, virtuous, self-effacing governesses were the women to emulate, O’Brien suggested you might reap more delight and experience – and only equal sorrow – as a Jezebel. I have never regretted the lesson.

If a week is a long time in politics, July 2024 has shown a month is an out-and-out age. Labour’s landslide UK election victory was just three weeks ago, but since then the US has witnessed the attempted assassination of Donald Trump and the humbling of Joe Biden, who was forced to make way for Kamala Harris in the presidential race. Not content with the kudos of hosting the Olympics, France has also experienced political turmoil, with the far-left pushing the far-right into third place in their election run-off. It’s little wonder we barely noticed when China’s Third Plenum laid the groundwork for Xi Jinping to become President-for-Life (sorry – take up an “unprecedented fourth term”), or Nicolás Maduro notched up a third six-year stint at the helm of Venezuela, despite claims of widespread fraud.

You’d think we’d be glued to our screens waiting for the next political drama, but when Rachel Reeves – the UK’s first female chancellor, no less – announced on Monday that she was scrapping the social care cap and curbing winter fuel payments while giving junior doctors a 22 per cent pay rise, most of us yawned and went back to watching Tom Daley fish another Olympic medal out of the pool, during a knitting break. Perhaps it’s just the mercury finally pushing past 25 two days in a row – hurrah! –  that makes it hard for us to worry about the two million pensioners Age UK says will suffer as a result of the winter fuel relief now being means-tested. Or was it just the anaesthetising sigh of relief by ex-Conservative voters at the sight of a Labour minister keeping their pledge to be more Tory than the Tories?

Reeves, both predictably and correctly, blamed the black hole in public finances left by the last government for her drastic measures, but it was difficult not to find parallels with the slashing of public services by George Osborne and David Cameron in 2010, which ushered in the so-called age of austerity. Before they become addicted to cutting costs at any cost in their bid to balance the books, Keir Starmer’s party would do well to remember how that worked out last time. The Conservatives’ years of slash-and-burn have left the UK’s basic public infrastructure in a parlous state. It’s not just the NHS: the railways are creaking, our water has been wasted and contaminated, our roads are increasingly clogged. The phrase “public housing” has become an oxymoron. And the majority of us are in a far more precarious financial situation personally than when the Tories came to power. The worst period for wage growth since the Napoleonic Wars, coupled with raging inflation, delivered a cost-of-living crunch for most of us and tipped millions into relative poverty. Even the high levels of official employment, which Rishi Sunak tried to hang his hat on, mask the reality of a low-pay, precarious-jobs economy. Worse, those statistics hide the collapse in small business workforce growth, down by more than 40 per cent since 2012. While small companies still make up 99.9 per cent of business numbers – a testament to the enduring power of hope – they now employ less than half of us. Few books made more of an impression on me last year than Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail, by Abby Innes, about the homogenisation of (mostly failed) political ideas among the UK’s political mainstream. Starmer, Reeves et al would do well to remember that earlier this month Britain voted for change, not for more of the same.

Patricia, a beautiful young fashion PR based in Manhattan, is abandoned and slut-shamed by her equally young, handsome, sexually errant husband after she confesses to infidelity. (Turns out their “open” relationship only applies to him.) Newly single, she embarks on a social whirl of drinking, dancing and one-night stands, comparing notes each morning with her friend Lucia in their airy flat-share apartment. Pat’s addiction to clothes, shopping, facials, massages and the gym continues unabated as she dedicates herself to the life of the sexually-liberated modern woman – even her nickname proclaims her equal to the men. Yet every time her estranged husband invites her out, she puts on her best dress and lipstick, hoping against hope he wants her back. 

It sounds like a blurb for the latest Millennial novel, but in fact this is a reissue of Ursula Parrott’s crisp debut from 1929, which came out to popular acclaim and wild notoriety just before the Wall Street Crash and was quickly made into a Hollywood movie called The Divorcee (1930) starring Norma Shearer. Though published anonymously, to excite public interest, the novel hurtled Parrott into the spotlight as one of the most successful female writers of the 1930s. Any parallels between the novel and her own 1926 divorce from a well-known journalist were duly noted by gossip columnists. 

Astonishingly – and depressingly – Ex-Wife‘s feminist themes of domestic violence, abortion, double standards between the sexes and the difficulty of balancing home and career remain pressing nearly a century later. But this is a terrific read, a reminder that sex wasn’t invented in the Sixties and that female protagonists in the Twenties could be sharper and wittier than many on our bookshelves in the 2020s – as much of a revelation as watching George Cukor’s 1930s Manhattan-set movie, The Women.

The wisecracks come thick and fast – “I’m a Futilitarian” deadpans Pat, who dreads becoming a “Leftover Lady” – but are barbed with underlying heartache. “Don’t think about him,” advises Lucia, “I can always tell when you are; it does horrid things to your mouth.” Everything looks better after a couple of highballs in a speakeasy, because as Lucia reasons: “We are awfully popular, and we know endless men, and we go everywhere.” The fact that these men only want to sleep with them (“So soon as they get here for dinner they begin arranging to stay for breakfast”) is depressing no matter how they try to dress it as “modern”. What’s more, it’s clear the sex isn’t satisfying and their lives are dependent on always looking good. Pat is conscious of the message she gives out when wearing a hip-hugging, backless dress, but the alternative is to pretend to a vision of purity in “a blue jersey dress with white collars and cuffs… it looks so chaste. Lord, I have been more chased than chaste.” 

Alas, Parrott died as anonymously as she began this book, in a charity ward aged 57 – after a life beset by overspending, scandal and court cases. This reprint should revive her reputation.