Spare us the macho culture which says therapy is just for snowflakes

Therapy is over-privileged snowflakery, says a reader of this column responding to an item in which I said I had a therapist. Some of the best candidates for therapy, I fear, are shutdown lockjaws who deem it “navel gazing”. Precisely the sort who might patrol Twitter machine-gunning strangers.

Anyway, they’ll be gratified to hear that therapy can indeed be tough — for those reliving trauma it requires courage. It’s also widely recognised as an essential adjunct of mental health treatment. For others forced to recalibrate assumptions, passed down generations, or confront unrecognised patterns of behaviour, it’s hard work. It can also be a preventative step in what might otherwise be a straight path to a breakdown. All round, then, it’s helpful to air the benefits.

But I mention this as part of a wider point: there seems to be a gaping hole in talk about mental health. Where are the business leaders and ministers addressing their own experiences? The City, with its super-stress, scant-sleep, hard-drinking habits, is silent on this despite statistics showing that the incidence of depression, bi-polar, breakdowns and suicide is as prevalent as anywhere else in society. Similarly, Westminster, with its dark corridors and locked doors, actually and metaphorically.

Writers, artists and musicians will talk with energy about overcoming issues; soldiers about PTSD. Hearing Alastair Campbell say he battled depression while working in No 10, and worked through it, is powerful to other sufferers.

Captains of industry speak eloquently about dyslexia, why not on mental health? Is it taboo? Does the macho “masters of the universe” culture prevail? Do bosses of public companies fear shareholders will lose confidence if they admit having wrestled demons? Therapy is not a bad place to start. As for politicians, there are plenty who’d appear more human if they opened up.

Education’s class ceiling stays intact

It’s right to berate Oxford University for not taking enough black students, but I am struck that the ethnic minorities graduates I know often went to independent schools. They are, well, posh.

The figures released yesterday — which showed more than a quarter of colleges failed to admit a single black student between 2015-17 — say little about their backgrounds. I suspect the full picture is worse if you take out the privately educated.

It is crucial to tackle diversity. But are we still ignoring the elephant: our education system creates class-bound privilege? And class is the glass ceiling that never shatters.

Dad, Pop, Pa... what do you call yours?

Why does Prince Harry call his father Pa? He threw a smiling “Thank you, Pa” after the Prince of Wales walked Meghan Markle down the aisle. From Harry, this fusty Victorian nursery diminutive — a family tradition: Charles calls the Duke of Edinburgh “Pa” — sounds like slang.

Ten years from now, perhaps it will be everywhere. “Papa” made a comeback among Brooklyn’s hipsters who found “Dad” too mainstream, according to a Guardian report not long ago, and “Pop” (as my father called my grandfather) sounds oddly modern.

Meanwhile, in the swings and roundabouts of word usage, “supper” has fallen from favour. Only five per cent of the country use it, a YouGov poll found on Tuesday, while the rest are divided between “tea” and “dinner”.

Poor old “supper”. I imagine it withered and died after the curse of over-use during that hot summer of 2013 when all politics was thought to be conducted in Chipping Norton kitchens.

Electric dream still lost on cab drivers

I hailed one of London’s 40 new electric cabs last night, brought in under plans to reduce emissions before 2020. They look like inflated black Minis, have an expanse of glass roof and are noiselessly floaty and futuristic.

For the entire 10-minute journey our driver, Najib, exalted his £70,000 investment, which he’s had for a month, while we purred and stroked the seats in appreciation.

Unfortunately, Najib says uptake of the zero-emissions vehicles has not been as great as expected because of drivers’ fears for their industry. How I long for a less polluted London.