My mother’s dogma: nobody’s business but her own.

Of course, my mother knew she had an absent step-son as well as her own seven. She was a conservative Catholic stay-at-home mother with prudent values and a handle on economic management that made frugality feel like luxury. Hence the annual holidays to Inverloch or Somers, with chocolate at night and new Puffin books to read on the beach by day.

The seven-children anecdote in the previous post was brought to mind by a couplet in the Weekend Australian. In what should once have been a glaring non sequitur, foreign affairs reporter Greg Sheridan wrote the following two curt but devastatingly telling sentences: Liberal Democrats deeply dislike Barrett. She is a conservative Catholic with seven children.