Our middle-class commune (joint bank accounts, noisy sex and all)

In her new book, Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times , Oldfield talks about long having had “a hunch” that the notion of the nuclear family is “a weird building material for a society”. She doesn’t think it’s “sufficiently load-bearing for the weight placed on it, leaving lots of other options lying around, unloved”. And, she writes... See more

A couple of hours later I leave with a pot of lemon balm for my garden stuffed into a plastic bag — one of the house rules is that no guest goes without something to take home. Oldfield is setting up to work on her podcast before preparing for house night. Her advice is to “resist the ties that pull us apart” and it seems like wise counsel. “There ... See more