𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

I was about to start the journey to the Labour conference when my wife looked at the neighbourhood WhatsApp group and discovered the water had stopped running in a swathe of homes. Moments later, an email arrived from the school telling parents not to send their children to class due to a lack of H2O.

Men in high-vis jackets were hard at work along the footpath laying new internet cable. That’s great, but my neighbours really want to brush their teeth. Our gas was turned off just weeks ago because of a crumbling pipe.

This is a remarkable era when amazing technology can turn a billionaire into a trillionaire. But if basic infrastructure collapses, then citizens will feel they are in a new Dark Ages.

When I got to the conference in Liverpool, Andy Burnham declared: “Water is a symbol of what has gone wrong with Britain.” Yup. He promised to end the “ban on public ownership of water companies”, which is a very different thing to actually spending billions on bringing them back into public ownership.

Britons are tired of living in a country where sewage wrecks our lakes and beaches. Energy costs are about to rocket once again. If Mr Burnham can’t deliver real improvements before the next election, voters may flush Labour out.

One of the great perks of fatherhood is that you have an excuse to re-read CS Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. I am so excited about the upcoming film adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew that my wife brought me home a copy of Empire film magazine. Its cover is emblazoned with director Greta Gerwig’s imagining of the heroic lion Aslan.

I sent a picture of this incarnation of Aslan to a true Lewis aficionado, but he was unimpressed by what he called the lion’s “David Bowie eyes”. One is blue, and another is amber; his whiskers are multi-coloured and, yes, there is a touch of Ziggy Stardust to the king of the beasts.

The adaptation has quickly become a new flashpoint in the culture wars. Online warriors are incensed at what they see as Ms Gerwig’s traducing of a near-sacred text, best known for transforming Margot Robbie into Barbie in the globe-conquering blockbuster. It turns out she has taken direct inspiration from the life of the Space Oddity singer.

As she says in her Empire interview: “I don’t know how you went from David Jones to David Bowie unless you went to Narnia and you saw something.”

I understand the unease of fellow Lewis devotees, but I can’t wait to see what Ms Gerwig does with a story which is so rich in ideas, drama and mischief. Her 2017 film Lady Bird is one of the sharpest yet warmest explorations of adolescence, family and faith in years.

The last thing a writer as subversive as Lewis would want is a stodgy adaptation. And despite Ms Gerwig’s love of Bowie, I don’t think there’s any danger of her introducing spiders from Mars.

One of my dilemmas is when to let my primary school-aged son jump into the world of video games. At the moment, he is a voracious reader, but if he starts playing Minecraft, will he pick up a book again? I look back at the thousands of hours I played Civilisation 2 and wonder how different life might be if I had used that time to learn Russian or take up alligator wrestling.

But in a quiet village on Sunday afternoon, the lad and I discovered a wild form of entertainment which doesn’t require electricity. In a tiny museum, we played a version of pinball dating from the early years of the 20th century. There is no spring to pull back; instead, you send the metal balls on their ricocheting way by hitting them with a wooden hammer.

To say we got into it is like saying Usain Bolt was quite interested in running. I imagine that a century ago, worried dads looked at their sons going nuts over this fantastic game and asked: “How can I get him to stop whacking balls and read Plutarch?”

Party conference season reminds me of a travel hiccup on a journey to Manchester. The ticket inspector and I were rather excited by the presence of a very charming Michael Portillo in the near-empty carriage. The inspector was too polite to mention I was on the wrong train.

When we reached our final destination, I disembarked and looked at banners everywhere proclaiming Liverpool’s greatness.

“Wow,” I thought. “That’s brilliantly audacious marketing by Liverpool’s PR team to put advertisements all over Manchester’s stations.” The penny finally dropped that I’d ended up in the Beatles’ hometown. I hotfooted it eastwards and arrived at the conference just in time; I still wonder what Portillo was up to (which is probably something I have in common with Sir John Major).