Billy McMorris

2 weeks ago | thespectator.com | Billy McMorris |Arabella Byrne |Kate Weinberg |Lara Prendergast

Alexandria, VirginiaBack in February, the first grader sustained a scrape that left a tiny red dot on her leg. She requested a soft cast and a medevac chopper. She settled for a dollar-store bandage. She shouldn’t have: it turns out she was quietly bleeding to death from the inside. She would have continued to deteriorate had we not been alarmed by a toilet clog the week after she fell. The Band-Aid was invented in 1920 by one Earle Dickson, a New Jersey cotton buyer with a clumsy wife.

2 months ago | thespectator.com | Catriona Olding |Mary Wakefield |Bridget Phetasy |Billy McMorris

My eldest daughter and her family are moving from a three-bedroom Art Deco semi with a garden and garage on the edge of a housing scheme to a top-floor tenement apartment in a trendy family orientated area of Glasgow. They’re having to increase their mortgage to do so but think that the benefits to their overall quality of life will be worth it, and if they move to my son-in-law’s native Como for a while, the apartment will be easy to rent out.

Jan 24, 2025 | thespectator.com | Billy McMorris |Cressida Bonas |Bill Kauffman |Toby Young

Grandma McMorris seldom curses, so when she said, “never let a son of a bitch know he’s a son of a bitch,” I knew she was quoting her father, Pop Pop. My grandfather oozed apothegms, nuggets of wisdom that are now only found on refrigerator magnets, motivational posters and throw pillows: the Silent Generation’s forerunner to the meme. Mom was giving me work advice.

Jan 18, 2025 | thespectator.com | Kara Kennedy |Bridget Phetasy |Billy McMorris |Susan Hill

At around five weeks into my pregnancy my phone found out about it, and from that point on I was subjected to a barrage of social media content about how much children suck. The first was a video by a woman with the username @childfreemillennial, who filmed herself walking through the children’s clothing aisle at a supermarket. She paused, turned to the camera and gagged. I was so shocked at the sheer nastiness and so hormonal that I cried.

Jan 17, 2025 | thespectator.com | Toby Young |Freddy Gray |Billy McMorris |Bill Kauffman

The first week of Dry January was relatively easy. Not falling asleep in front of the television was a pleasant change, as was waking up in the morning with a clear head. I started to remember things I usually forget, such as where I’d left my keys, and began to work through my “to do” list, getting round to jobs I’d been putting off for months. It wasn’t that my willpower increased. It was that making myself perform tedious administrative tasks took less effort. My inner clerk woke up.