The "semi-living worry doll" by Oron Catts and Lonat Zurr

Remember that creepy chap in the black hat who used to make art out of dead bodies? He’s now looking rather passé. At the end of January, the Science Gallery in Dublin is opening the doors on Visceral, an exhibition of “bio-art” that makes art out of living organisms, such as home-grown chunks of human tissue.

“H. G. Wells thought that a living being is raw material, something that may be shaped and altered,” says Oron Catts, the curator of the exhibition. “Our group of artists, SymbioticA, explores this idea. We make people feel uncomfortable, and that is part of the point. We test the boundary where art becomes emotionally unacceptable.”

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Sara Shilo

Israel’s latest literary sensation was something of a late starter. Until 1999 she was a puppeteer in northern Israel and would have laughed at the notion of writing a novel. After all, she had never read one before. “I suffer from ADHD,” Sara Shilo explains when we meet in London. “As a child, I didn’t have enough concentration to read.”

Eleven years ago, however, when she was 40, she decided to give books a second chance. The first novel she picked up was Be My Knife, a dense exploration of obsessive love by the pre-eminent Israeli novelist David Grossman. Shilo was deeply affected. “The book awakened something profound inside me,” she says. “Suddenly I saw the world through someone else’s eyes. Nothing could be the same again.”

This encounter with fiction threw her into an existential crisis. The very next day she put her life on hold, stopped work and cancelled all social engagements. Without knowing why, she wrote a long letter to Grossman, explaining how his book had moved her.

“From the very first words of her letter, I could tell that Sara Shilo was special,” Grossman tells me from his home in Jerusalem. “She was not only describing reality with her writing. She was generating reality. There was something in the way she juxtaposed words, the rhythm of her sentences. It had a tangible, primal beauty.”

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The. Sales. Ouch.

Now that VAT has increased to 20 per cent, you’re probably checking price tags a little more carefully before parting with your hard-earned cash. The problem is that shops are fighting back. According to Philip Graves, author of Consumer.ology, a study of the psychology of shopping, retailers are using their knowledge of the human mind to turn the VAT increase to their advantage.

“Thousands of people are being manipulated into actually spending more,” he says. “Many shops are claiming that they are not increasing VAT, and that is encouraging people to spend. But there is more to this than meets the eye.”

Behind the price tag, Graves explains, lie a variety of psychological tricks. For example, research has shown that people are more inclined to buy an item when it has a “charm price” of .99 on the tag. The VAT increase, however, would demand strange prices such as £32.20, which are not attractive to the consumer. So the shops are taking a two-pronged approach. “On the one hand they are keeping some items at the original charm price, and highlighting the fact that the VAT is staying the same,” Graves explains. “With other items, however, they are raising the price even higher than the VAT increase demands, from £34.99 to £39.99, for example. Amazingly, people will buy something for £39.99 more readily than £32.20. So overall, the shops come out on top.”

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I have blindfolded my grandmother. She is bent double in the garden, fumbling in the grass for satsumas. In my left hand is a thimble; in my right is a pair of socks. Family members are looking on and cheering.

The game comes courtesy of Parlour Games For The Modern Family, a new book out this week. Written by two Australian mums, Myfanwy Jones and Spiri Tsintziras, who have “four children and 20 nephews and nieces” between them, it seeks to prise us away from the internet and reintroduce the delights of collective silliness.

Read the full article on the Times website (subject to paywall restriction)

What's the ancient Greek for f***?

It is all rather improbable. In 2003, Annabel Lyon, a quiet 32-year-old piano teacher from Ottowa — she’s written two collections of short stories and a children’s book, but still thinks of herself as a piano teacher — starts to write a novel. It is set in Ancient Greece, portrays the coming of age of Alexander the Great, and is narrated by Aristotle. Yes, Aristotle. Not a stylised, “marble statue” Aristotle (as Lyon puts it); a base, flesh-and-bile Aristotle who is preoccupied with cunnilingus, dismemberment and buggery. Who, for example, compares his wit to excrement (“My wit was as dry as mouse droppings,” and “dry little droppings of wit”). Who drinks his own “warm piss”. Who talks in Americanisms and lavishes his narrative with profanities such as “ass-f***er”, “ball-breaking” and “piece of shit”.

Seven-and-a-half years later, The Golden Mean is complete. After a string of horrified rejection letters from publishers, Lyon — who by now is 39 — finds a Canadian publisher willing to take a punt. Months later, when The Golden Mean hits the shelves, it becomes a No 1 bestseller in Canada. The critics love it, hailing Lyon as the heiress to the legendary national treasure Alice Munro (who was shortlisted for the coveted Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize in 2009. Annabel Lyon won).

The Golden Mean is out in the UK this month. On the day that I am to interview Lyon, an e-mail slips into my inbox from none other than the Booker prizewinner Hilary Mantel. It is full of praise for The Golden Mean, calling it a “quietly ambitious and beautifully achieved novel” that is “one of the most convincing historical novels I have ever read”.

Lyon no longer thinks of herself as a piano teacher. “Oh, I haven’t taught music in a while now,” she tells me from her reassuringly messy novelist’s study. “I’ve moved on a bit. But it’s quite the exaggeration to compare me to Alice Munro. I’m a mouse in the elephant’s shadow.”

Come to think of it, Lyon is a little mouse-like. Hers is one of those faces that alternates between seriousness and — when she smiles — unalloyed delight. “I’m a somewhat obsessive person,” she tells me. “When I was younger I was consumed by playing the piano, then I transferred all that passion to long-distance running. After that, my writing took over.” The common denominator here is solitude. “I could never have been a violinist,” she says, “I wouldn’t have wanted to play with other people. Things like running suit me. Running and writing.”

It is striking that such a modest person would choose an audacious idea like this for her debut novel. Was she not daunted? “What drove me was my passion for Aristotle,” she says. “I knew that to write about Aristotle, Plato and Alexander would be viewed as egotistical. But if it makes people more interested in Greek philosophy, it’s worth it.”

For all Lyon’s enthusiasm for Aristotle’s work — she majored in philosophy at the Simon Fraser University in British Columbia — she knew that if her novel was to be a success, she would need to put the man at the centre. “Aristotle’s philosophy pervades the novel, but it’s not obtrusive,” she says. “For example, I wrote it adhering to the principles of his Poetics.” Such as in the battle scene, where the action takes place off stage? “Exactly,” Lyon says drily. “You’re not the first person to notice that.”

So we have Aristotle the human, in all his pissing, shitting, scratching glory, who at one point strangles a chameleon (“I open the top of the cage, reach in with both hands, and grasp the leathery throat”).

“People have been shocked,” Lyon says. “One woman took the book back to the shop when she encountered the word c***. But that was how people were in Ancient Greece. It was a brutal life, a warrior culture. They didn’t say drat or bloody hell. They said things like bineo.”

Bineo?

“Ancient Greek for f***.”

Ah.

There is a lot of sex in the novel. Particularly homosexual sex, about which Lyon — a heterosexual woman — writes with particular élan. “To me love is love, and sex is sex,” she says casually. “The gender doesn’t make much difference. It wasn’t a big deal for me.”

The content is complemented by a prose style that is — as the jacket blurb puts it — “sensual and muscular”. These two epithets may be horribly overused, but are perfectly apposite here. “The rain falls in black cords,” writes Lyon in the voice of Aristotle, “lashing my animals, my men, and my wife, Pythias, who last night lay with her legs spread while I took notes on the mouth of her sex, who weeps silent tears of exhaustion now, on this tenth day of our journey.” This is sinewy stuff, sharpened by a dedication to economy. “My prose was influenced by my father,” Lyon says. “He was a journalist and loves Hemingway. When I was small, he wasn’t teaching me hockey. He was showing me how to write like The Old Man and the Sea.”

Lyon’s use of modern language enhances our absorption in the period. “I realised that using too much authentic terminology — using chiton instead of dress, for example — would distance the reader,” Lyon says. “Modern language can, paradoxically enough, be more transparent.” It is for this reason that she never mentions Aristotle’s name. “I didn’t want to remind people of his mythological significance,” says Lyon. “I wanted to avoid the barrier of his reputation.”

For the most part, her approach is effective. Occasionally she oversteps the mark — such as when Philippos II of Macedon says “may you f***ing the f*** get on with it” — but on the whole, the evocation is surprisingly successful.

“It was clear to me that Alexander suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder,” Lyon tells me. “His regular headaches, bouts of rage and heavy drinking are well documented. He was essentially a child soldier.” As for Aristotle, well, he was bipolar. “To me, it is obvious,” Lyon says. “His obsession with the golden mean between two extremes sounds like someone who has suffered these extremes and is looking for a way out.”

Although historians may pall at such speculation, it adds depth to Lyon’s characters. Alexander and Aristotle’s neuroses are counterpointed beautifully at the Battle of Chaeronea. Aristotle begins to mutilate a corpse out of a manic thirst for anatomical knowledge. Later, Alexander dismembers the same body in an episode of post-traumatic febrility. (Aristotle never went to Chaeronea, by the way; this is a rare instance of Lyon’s manipulation of the facts.) All this amounts to a cornucopia of vivid impressions of the ancient world. Upon finishing the novel, I was struck by a feeling of emptiness, loathe to close the door on Lyon’s time machine. But luckily, she’s working on a sequel — and this time she will resurrect the voice of Aristotle’s daughter.

The UK: a nation of indecision?

In case you hadn’t noticed, a much-hyped single called Choices is released this week. Written by the mildly irritating English-Swedish pop outfit The Hoosiers, it is a record-breaking 43 minutes long. As if one gimmick wasn’t enough, the band invited fans to write some of the verses and appear in the music video. But even though Choices is a pygmy of a tune compared with the iconic songs of previous eras such as All You Need Is Love, Purple Haze and Smells Like Teen Spirit, The Hoosiers’ new single might one day rank among them as the song of this generation.

The reason? It’s the lyrics, stupid. “Stop giving me choices. Stop giving me choices,” whines Irwin Sparkes, the elfin lead singer. “I’m the victim of this day and age, I’ve forgotten how to feel, I’ve forgotten how to change.”

According to Harriet Bradley, professor of sociology at the University of Bristol, this is an apt summary of the way things are. This week she published the results of a ten-month project looking at how people in the UK deal with choice. The report, State of Confusion, presents the results of a study of 6,000 people from across the UK. The conclusion is resounding: Britain is a “nation crippled by too much choice”.

The findings are many and varied. Women are more confused than men. More than half of us feel that life is more confusing than it was ten years ago. The Welsh are the most unhappy and confused people in the UK (they’re even bewildered by the term “smart casual”). The average large supermarket contains about 10,000 products from which to choose; 42 per cent of the UK population lies awake at night agonising over dilemmas and 47 per cent admit that “even little decisions can be hard to make”.

“We carried out a national survey, followed by some intensive work with focus groups,” Bradley says. “The outcome was not a surprise in itself, but I was amazed at the scale and extent of the problem. We seem to live in a wonderful world of options, but it can actually be quite frightening and scary.”

According to Bradley’s report, shifts in society over the past few decades — the end of jobs for life, the rise of a consumerist, celebrity culture, the technological revolution, multiculturalism — have led to a state of “liquid living” in which people are in a constant state of flux. Citing the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who has lived in Britain since 1971, she claims we have been thrown into a “hotbed of uncertainties”. As the American psychologist Barry Schwartz put it, we’re living in a “tyranny of choice”. One participant in the study, Lynn Carpenter, a 52-year-old massage therapist, lamented: “We don’t need five million shampoos. Just a couple would be enough.”

“Although on the positive side individual freedom has increased,” says Bradley, “the pressure to make choices and take responsibility for one’s fortune can lead to great anxiety and stress for many people.” A third of the people she studied described themselves as “very indecisive”, and the same proportion revised decisions they had already made, thus reawakening the source of heartache.

Bradley has even coined a new term to describe the very worst offenders: Indeciders. These are people who “suffer high levels of confusion” and display a fundamental “inability to be decisive”. In some cases, this can lead to depression. The professor estimates that this term may be applied to 47 per cent of Britons.

Val, one of the older participants in the study and a suspected Indecider, describes the condition vividly. “It’s impossible for me to make a decision,” she says. “If I see something in pink and think I’m going to get that, then if you were to say you’ve got it in blue, I wouldn’t know what to do. It drives me crazy.”

Dr Peter Collett, a social psychologist and author of The Book of Tells: How to Read People’s Minds from their Actions, recognises the increased confusion of recent decades. “It has become so severe that psychologists have recently upgraded it to a fully fledged emotion,” he says. Collett has devised some basic guidelines that can be used “whether your state of confusion is emotionally overwhelming or just a frustrating grumble”. In a nutshell, his advice is to worry less, and become better informed about the things that you find confusing.

Sheena Iyengar, professor of social psychology at Columbia Business School and the author of The Art of Choosing, is an authority on choice. She is best known for her jam experiment, widely acknowledged as one of the most important social science studies of the past two decades. The study found that people bought ten times less jam when presented with 24 varieties than when their choice was limited to six. The equation is simple. The wider the choice, the harder it is to make decisions. Yet while Iyengar acknowledges the damaging effects of an overload of choice, she also recognises its importance. “Choice can be a burden but without it our life loses meaning,” she says.

“Choice is the only tool we have that enables us to go from who we are today to who we are tomorrow.”

But Bradley is not suggesting that all choice is bad. To a large extent, it depends on the sort of person we are. “The psychologist Herbert Simon identified two approaches to making choices,” she says. “First there are the Maximisers, who put tremendous energy into researching the options. These people find it difficult to settle and often suffer from regret. The second group, the Satisfiscers, are happy with good enough. Although more influenced by habit and routine, Satisfiscers suffer less from an overload of choice.”

This report was conceived by the insurance website confused.com as a PR initiative, and was never intended to make a political point. Even so, the implications for David Cameron’s Big Society are obvious. “Frankly, the Big Society will just add to the confusion,” Bradley says. “Cameron is talking about giving important choices about schools and hospitals and local democracy to the citizens. But given that people are already struggling with their individual choices, they are never going to take responsibility for the big decisions. Adding to the average person’s burden of choice would be disastrous.”

Of course, Cameron’s office denies this. “We think that people are able to make the choices that really matter,” a Downing Street spokesman says. “That’s why the Government’s priority is to give power to ordinary people so that decisions can be made at the local level.” In the light of Bradley’s research, this doesn’t seem particularly realistic.

Maybe The Hoosiers should change their name to The Indeciders? Or maybe they shouldn’t? Stop giving me choices, indeed. Stop giving me choices.

* * *

The ten most confusing areas

1 Bankers’ bonuses

2 Policies of political parties

3 Global warming

4 Pensions, share prices and interest rates

5 The term smart casual

6 Job interviews

7 Fuel bills

8 Twitter and predictive text

9 The TV drama Lost

10 Flat-pack furniture

*

How to get to grips with confusion

Investigate – Familiarise yourself with a subject so that you’ll find it less confusing.

Prioritise – Distinguish between those things where you don’t mind being confused and those where you’d prefer to have clarity.

Anticipate – Spend time working out how things could go wrong and how you could deal with it.

Don’t fret – Make sure that you worry only in a special “worry location” and only during “worry time” — never, for example, when you’re in bed, trying to get to sleep.

Share – Talk your confusion through with someone else. Voicing your opinion will clarify your thinking.

Expertise – The best way to eliminate confusion is to consult an expert.

Marcus du Sautoy: a national treasure?

Question: what’s a million times five? No, it’s not a trick. The answer is the amount of dollars you could win if you solved all five mathematical conundrums in The Num8er My5teries, a new book by the iconic popular mathematician Marcus du Sautoy. The book is based on a competition set up in 2000 by an American businessman called Landon Clay. Five puzzles, $1 million each.

It could be you.

Or at least that was true until last March, when the reclusive Russian maths genius Grigoriy Perelman solved one of the conundrums — known as the “Poincaré conjecture” — in resounding fashion. “Last week there was a glitzy award ceremony to present the first million dollars to Perelman,” du Sautoy tells me, his voice brimming with customary enthusiasm. “But he didn’t turn up.”

Didn’t turn up? “Mathematicians are rather quirky. We don’t tend to be interested in money,” du Sautoy says. “It’s the glory of eternity that motivates us.” In the eyes of du Sautoy and his colleagues, the Russian has achieved something that has no earthly price. “Personally,” he says candidly, “I’d pay a million dollars to solve one of these problems. It’s a small price to pay to become immortal.”

In The Num8er My5teries, these problems are presented with the flair and vim that has made du Sautoy into something of a national treasure. “I build up to each conundrum with some unexpected questions,” he tells me. “Why did Beckham choose the 23 shirt? Why do cicadas love the number 17? And how can you win the lottery?” (This final question, I suspect, may appeal to gold diggers who see the book as an investment.) “What’s more,” the mathematician continues, “I’ve made the problems into games like Minesweeper and Su Doku. It’s wide open for everyone.”

I am almost inclined to have a crack myself. But then I recall that my last experience with mathematics was at GCSE, 16 years ago (I got a C). If so many extraordinary mathematical brains have tried and failed, what chance could I possibly have?

“Every chance,” du Sautoy says. And I think he means it. “Non-mathematicians sometimes approach things from a whole new angle. The next winner might well be a reader of my book, who became inspired while sitting on the loo.” He notices my sudden amplification of interest. “Though of course,” he reminds me, “if you’re doing it for the money, you’ll never be a real mathematician.”

"Devise a strategy for dealing with trouble ahead."

Hello, Jake, how are you?”

“OK.”

“How was your day at school?”

“OK.”

“Have you got much homework?”

“Yup.”

“What is it?”

“Oh, stuff.”

“Darling, is everything OK? You’re very quiet.”

“Yup.”

“Can you at least look at me when I’m talking to you? I’m asking if you’re OK.”

“I just told you, I’m fine. Stop going on at me.”

“I don’t think checking you’re OK is going on at you. I am your mother, you know.”

“OK, OK, I’m fine, everything’s OK, please can you give me some peace?”

“How dare you . . .”

Before you ask, this is not a memoir from my adolescence. It is an extract from Divas & Door Slammers: the secrets to having a better behaved teenager, a new book by the behavioural expert and inner-city headmaster Charlie Taylor. This dialogue is part of a case study, illustrating how easy it is for parents to alienate their teenagers.

“Teenagers have an inbuilt capacity to annoy their parents,” says the author when we meet at a café in Notting Hill, West London. “The sight of a pair of low-slung trousers, or a great spotty oaf slouched across the sofa, is enough to make any parent’s blood boil.” But, according to Taylor, teenagers can’t always help it. “Their brains are developing at a tremendous rate,” he says. “There is a huge amount of activity flaring in different directions. Neurones are sparking all over the place, making them go haywire.”

This means that if a cycle of bad behaviour is to end, it must be the parents who end it. “Your teenager is not going to change unless you change,” says Taylor. “If you do what you have always done, you will get what you always get.”

So what, in Jake’s case, should his mother have done differently? “Jake was sulky because he knew that his mother’s greeting had strings attached,” says Taylor. “Her real agenda was to hassle him about his homework. She should have waited until they had at least one reasonable conversation in the bank.”

Taylor is one of a dying breed of eccentric British headmasters, with crystalline manners, a posh voice and the air of a dishevelled diplomat. He has faded Biro on the back of one hand and looks perpetually tired. Yet, at the same time, he is brimming with joie de vivre.

He grew up in Notting Hill, in a family with a rich tradition of pedagogy (his “famously fierce” grandmother was the head of a prep school in Eastbourne). He went to Eton, then undertook a four-year teaching degree before starting work at a comprehensive. Before long he developed a fascination — and affinity — with badly behaved children. He has worked with them ever since.

“I used to be badly behaved myself,” he tells me, a flicker of old mischief in his eye. “Once, my friends and I tied up a teacher with a skipping rope. We were sent home and my mother was very cross. But all I could say was: ‘But Mum, it was brilliant!’” He pauses for a moment. “Maybe you shouldn’t put that in,” he says. Another pause. “Oh, what the hell. It was a long time ago.”

Taylor’s school in West London aims to get children with behavioural, emotional and social difficulties back into mainstream education. Since he took over the place has been transformed, and it is now the darling of Ofsted inspectors. “Don’t get me wrong — the job is dangerous,” he admits. “Many of my staff have been put in hospital by pupils.” He winces. “But we have a very high success rate. It’s incredibly rewarding.”

A key part of Taylor’s approach is the “positive touch policy”. “Being restrained is very similar to being hugged,” he says. “When I first arrived, I saw children attacking teachers just to get restrained, because they received no physical affection at home. So I told all the teachers that hugging was part of their job. They worried that it was illegal but emphatically it is not. It made a massive difference.”

His pupils also give each other ten minutes of massage every day. “There was a lot of resistance to the idea at first,” says Taylor, “but it’s so moving to see a scary hoody tenderly massaging another pupil. A lot of teenagers would behave much better if they received positive touch from their parents.”

So what led Taylor to write this book? “I realised that being a teenager in 2010 is much more complicated than it was in the past,” he says. “Mobile phones and social networking mean that children can have access to the entire globe in the secrecy of their bedroom. Marriage breakdowns are increasing and teenagers are bombarded constantly with images of sex and glamour. In addition, schools have been set very narrow curriculum targets. This means that teachers do anything to meet those targets, at the expense of everything else.”

All this, according to Taylor, has a detrimental effect on teenage behaviour. “Some parents are terrified of their children,” he says, “because they don’t know how to control them.”

In his book, he describes a father who “immediately gets butterflies in his stomach” when presented with a photograph of his 14-year-old son, and a mother whose pulse leaps from 80 to 100 just by “imagining her son for a few minutes”.

Taylor, who had already written a book about getting toddlers to behave, felt compelled to act. “Parents need these skills,” he says. “Deep down, teenagers want to be disciplined. They are not really happy running wild. That’s why I wrote this book.”

The central premise of Divas & Door Slammers is that teenagers should be treated more as children than as adults. Like a boy whose voice is breaking — Taylor’s metaphor, not mine — the teenager may sometimes seem very grown up but at other times will lapse into a childish squeak.

“Teenagers are trying to distance themselves from their parents and establish their identity,” he says, “but despite their ‘cool’ exterior they are children at heart. They still need their parents to be there for them, to give them cuddles and support.”

One of the best ways to improve a teenager’s behaviour is to use what Taylor calls a “6 to 1 strategy”. This means that every piece of criticism is balanced by six pieces of praise.

“When a toddler is potty training, parents instinctively pile on the praise. They try not to focus on the accidents, however unpleasant they may be,” says Taylor. “But as the child grows up, the praise tails off and parents can become quite critical. So, when dealing with your teenager, think of potty training.”

But that is only one side of the story. “You also need to have very clear boundaries,” says Taylor, “and enforce them with rewards and punishments. The best incentive is money. Teenagers are interested in little else.”

Isn’t that rather like paying children to be good? “That’s not the idea,” says Taylor. “You must target only one specific piece of bad behaviour at a time, and have a time limit — say, a month — after which you end the deal. If a child is living in a permanent system of incentives and deterrents, that can be very damaging.”

Parents must also take special care not to get into what Taylor calls “reptile mode” — a state of stress that prevents people from thinking straight. “Biologically speaking,” he explains, “stress diverts blood away from the rational brain and towards the areas responsible for ‘fight or flight’. You start making exaggerated accusations or wild threats. At that point, confrontation is inevitable.”

But how do you avoid it? “The key is to plan your strategies in advance,” says Taylor. In his book, he compares confronting a teenager to going into battle. “If you have a clear idea of your objectives and strategies for dealing with behavioural hotspots,” he says, “that will stop you seeing red and help to keep your reptile mode at bay. Eventually, like a well-trained soldier, it will become second nature.”

This sounds all well and good. But here is the litmus test: what about his children?

“Impeccably behaved,” he chuckles. “Obviously.” I look doubtful. “Seriously,” he says, “they are naughty but just the right amount. That’s what I mean by impeccable. It is the repetitive patterns of bad behaviour that you have to worry about. If they were all little angels I’d be very concerned indeed.”

As we make our way out of the café, Taylor is collared by a frazzled-looking woman on the next table. She has overheard our conversation and wants the name of his book so that she can buy it. “Poor woman,” says Taylor, after writing down the details for her. “I hope my book solves her problems.”

"We did it our way"

We were sitting on the sofa, surrounded by glossy wedding bumph, when my fiancée Isobel had a moment of clarity. “These people are thieves,” she said, tossing aside a brochure for Blenheim Palace advertising two wedding packages – a no-frills option for £16,400 and a standard for £23,900. “We don’t have that kind of money. Let’s set ourselves the challenge of having a lovely wedding for less than £5,000.”

I smiled encouragingly. It was late at night. Within a few hours, I thought, she would recognise this idea for the tomfoolery it was.

The next morning, however, Isobel was fired up. “I’ll do the catering myself,” she said over breakfast. “It will be a really characterful wedding.” I pulled out the Blenheim Palace brochure from my pocket. “But what about the magnificent setting?” I said, mournfully. “What about the after-dinner Belgian pralines?” She regarded me steadily. “We can do it,” she said.

According to the consumer watchdog Which?, the average cost of a wedding in the UK is around £17,000. Moreover, a recent report suggests that couples are being exploited when they tie the knot. “Hotels, florists and hairdressers are being really unfair,” says Lisa Barber, deputy editor of Which? Magazine. “They charge 25 per cent more for weddings than they do for other similar events.”

So how can you avoid being the victims of wedding mark-up? For us, it began with the venue. Isobel was determined to find an affordable alternative to Blenheim. I was sceptical. “We just need to think outside the box,” she said, “and find a venue which isn’t normally used for weddings.”

We began a tour of church halls in Winchester. These tended to be dusty, dilapidated affairs, more suited to WI coffee mornings than wedding breakfasts. I held on to the Blenheim brochure and searched the internet for 0 per cent interest credit cards.

Then we found it. Tucked away in the heart of Winchester was a desanctified, 17^th-century Roman Catholic chapel called Milner’s Hall. It had vaulted ceilings, stained glass windows and a large balcony; a bit rough around the edges, perhaps, but it had character. It could seat up to 130 – the exact size of our wedding party – and it only cost £20 per hour. We booked it. Total cost: £200.There was no going back.

Next we had to decide where to hold the wedding itself (a non-religious ceremony). This was harder, as the venue would need to have a wedding licence. The fee at extravagant venues such as Blenheim was between £2,000 and £5,000; our local register office, on the other hand, was affordable but overwhelmingly bland, and smelled of eucalyptus floor cleaner. For a while, we were stumped.

Then inspiration struck. In the UK, non-mainstream religious ceremonies are not legally binding. For this reason, Jewish people (for example) back up their big, traditional ceremony with a low-key affair at a registry office, usually either before or immediately after the main wedding, which is regarded as nothing more than a formality. What was stopping us doing the same?

We decided to hold the wedding ceremony in my grandparents’ beautiful garden, just five minutes’ walk from Milner Hall. My uncle agreed to conduct the ceremony, which we wrote ourselves. The setting would be idyllic (and the flowers were there already). We arranged a basic ceremony at the register office the following day. Total cost: only £43.50 for the register office.

It was time to send out invitations. After some discussion, we designed them ourselves and emailed them. Not only did this save money, but it was kind to the environment. We asked a relative to take photographs, which she agreed to do for free.

In the following weeks we purchased our outfits. Isobel bought her dress on eBay. It took her a few attempts to get it right, but as dud dresses could be sold on, it didn’t matter. Eventually she got hold of a beautiful ex-display wedding dress for £90.

For my part, I found that nobody will notice if you wear a cheap suit, provided it fits properly. Most suits are designed for men with paunches and look terrible on those who have not yet had the opportunity to develop one, so I went for “slim fit,” at Moss Bros and it was fine. My suit, waistcoat and tie came to a total of £180 (more than the bride’s apparel).

I was beginning to get into the spirit. Through a friend, I was introduced to a jeweller who would deal directly with customers at wholesale prices. He sold me two 18 carat rings for £700, a saving of around £400. Cheaper rings were available, but Isobel and I felt that it was best not to compromise on something that would last a lifetime.

Then came the difficult part: the dinner. We roped in a Hungarian au pair and three of her friends to serve, persuaded them to wear black and white, and paid them £600 for the day. We bought the wine and soft drinks from a local wholesaler, opting for the cheaper prosecco rather than champagne, as few people can easily tell the difference. This came to £750 with free glass hire. Our local brewery sold us a keg of Hampshire ale for £105, which we intended to tap and set up during the dance. The cutlery was hired for £300 from a local, family-run business called Crocks, and we managed to procure sufficient white tablecloths through Freecycle, for which we were charged nothing. Finally, at a car boot sale we bought 130 dinner plates, of all shapes, sizes and vintages, which had the twin advantages of providing colour and creating conversation pieces (especially the Charles and Diana wedding plate). The plates cost us just £10.

Our food strategy was to keep it simple and buy locally direct from the producers, which was also good for the environment. The only exception was the salmon and potato salad, which we bought through Waitrose Catering for £700. So we sourced strawberries and salad from a farm in Surrey (they also threw in some fresh flowers), local cheeses from a dairy, and bread and a mountain of delicious cupcakes from a bakery. This all came to around £450. For £100 we hired a refrigerated van in which all the food could be stored overnight.

Finally, we found a delightful man called Matt Benecci, who owns an ice cream tricycle. For £300 he came to Winchester and set up outside the hall, so that after the dinner our guests could leave the hall and eat delicious ice cream while the Hungarian staff set the hall up for the barn dance.

Yes, the barn dance. Not long after we sent out the wedding invitations, I was drinking at the best-known pub in Winchester, the Black Boy, where a folk band called Made Behind the Bar were playing. They were great, and the idea of a barn dance suggested itself. Barn dances are far simpler to set up than discos, and have the advantage of being a great leveller, since everyone looks equally silly. I hired the band, who played during the ceremony as well, at a cost of £650.

The total wedding cost was £5173.50. OK, so we overshot by a small amount. To our relief, the day went smoothly, and all our fears of glitches and omissions in planning proved unfounded.

There is an old Jewish joke about a man who wanted a completely unique wedding, so decided to have one in the desert. On the wedding day he sees a dustcloud in the distance and asks a local man what it is. “That?” replies the man. “That’s the Cohen’s wedding.”

It’s safe to say that not only was our wedding affordable and eco-friendly, it was also one of a kind. I – and the guests – will remember it forever.

'Just having things ‘normalised’ can be a relief'

With some difficulty, I manoeuvre my extra-long double buggy — dubbed “the gondola” — into a room cluttered with plastic toys. The psychotherapist gets up from her beanbag to help me to fold it up. I introduce her to Isaac and Imogen, my seven-month-old twins, and then put them down on the mat. The babies, blissfully unaware of the therapist’s eyes, proceed to give the toys a good gumming.

I am at the Oxford Parent Infant Project (Oxpip), a charity that offers psychotherapy to parents and children under the age of 2 that was founded by the eminent child psychotherapist Sue Gerhardt, whose new book, The Selfish Society, comes out this month. In her first book, Why Love Matters, she argued that love was essential to brain development. It was a runaway success, selling more than 15,000 copies in its first year.

The Selfish Society, however, is more controversial. Drawing on a pick-and-mix of everything from politics to macroeconomics, Gerhardt mounts a furious attack on capitalism. She blames it for “eroding our social bonds”, creating an “impoverished emotional culture”, where “looking out for No 1” is the norm and parenting is undervalued.

This leads to her most inflammatory point: putting children in a nursery before their second birthday is profoundly damaging to their mental health. Our capitalist Government, she argues, is so keen to get mothers back to the business of wealth-generation that the cheap solution — nursery — is promoted, although it makes children vulnerable to “personality disorders” later in life.

At Oxpip, however, there is no sign of such contentious views. The therapist, Joanna Tucker, is careful not to condemn nurseries. “Mothers face a range of difficult choices,” she says. “We’re not here to pass judgment on their decisions.” But doesn’t she share Gerhardt’s anti-nursery ideals? There is a pause. “Tell me about any difficulties you have had with parenthood,” she suggests.

Having twins and a toddler, I tell her, although wonderfully fulfilling, has involved a level of stress that no man should have to deal with. When all three are crying, it’s impossible. Even if both parents are on duty, one child is still left over. At such times I panic and feel desperate to be out of earshot.

“That’s quite normal,” says Tucker. “Babies’ cries are biologically designed to make their parents feel uncomfortable.” I’m surprised at how reassured I feel. “You clearly have a strong bond with your twins,” she continues. “I can observe how you’re letting them play, but at the same time are attentive to each of their needs. A great deal of anxiety is produced when you worry that your experiences are not normal. Just having things ‘normalised’ can be a relief.”

But many of Oxpip’s clients require rather more than normalisation. “Some parents need a lot of help,” says the therapist. “Often, they unconsciously re-enact issues from their own past in their relationship with their children. we call this ‘ghosts in the nursery’. If a mother has suffered from childhood anorexia, for example, she might believe that her child is greedy. We try to free children from their parent’s ghosts by helping the parents to see what’s going on.”

One of Gerhardt’s main therapeutic techniques, used extensively by Oxpip, involves the use of video. “We film a parent-child interaction and play it back. Often the parent notices immediately where they’re going wrong,” says Tucker. “I once had a client who thought her older son was very difficult. When I filmed them, the video captured her giving the boy a most awful look, as if he was something really unpleasant. When the mother saw it, she was rather horrified. She also noticed that her son was constantly trying to get close to her, but she was ignoring him. Once she realised he loved her, she was able to love him back. We got a better cycle going.”

Projects like Oxpip can clearly make a profound difference to people who are struggling with parenthood. But why has Sue Gerhardt upped the ante so dramatically in The Selfish Society? I put the question to her at her cottage in north Oxford, over coffee that she has made on her Aga.

“Society has become selfish,” she says. “Greed and materialism have completely smothered empathy and moral living. If nothing is done about it, humanity won’t survive.” Decades of experience as a child psychotherapist, as well as the study of neuroscience, has led her to believe that most social problems can be traced back to the “inadequate” state of early childhood care in Britain, with its overt preference for nursery.

“The first two years of life are when the brain’s emotional systems are being set up,” she explains. “That’s when an area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex is developing, which enables us to be aware of both our own and others’ emotions. Sensitive and responsive parenting causes a chemical called dopamine to be released in the child’s brain, which enables the child’s emotional awareness to develop.”

In a nursery, Gerhardt argues, this developmental process can be stunted. “In the 1940s,” she says, “there was a study of toddlers isolated from their parents in a tuberculosis hospital. They went through stages of adapting to their emotional deprivation — first protesting and looking for their mother, then growing despairing and listless, and finally becoming emotionally detached. In a nursery, a similar process can occur. In neurological terms, the development of the frontal cortex is being hampered, and this creates an emotional black hole. When the child grows up, he or she is likely to crave emotional substitutes — consumerism, money, or drugs. It is fertile ground for personality disorders.”

Although my own children are being looked after at home, I know many mothers who don’t want to — or can’t — leave the world of work. I can only imagine the amount of guilt they would experience on reading The Selfish Society. Isn’t Gerhardt forgetting that other factors are involved, such as the need to make money or sustain a career? “I’m not suggesting it’s all the parents’ fault,” Gerhardt explains. “The Government needs to stop promoting nurseries so aggressively. We need to introduce a two-year state-funded parenting wage, set at the level of the average income, to be claimed by either parent, or shared between them. And we need to reform employment legislation so that employers are forced to keep a mother’s job open, and to offer flexible working hours.”

All this would be expensive. But Gerhardt tells me that recent studies by the New Economics Foundation prove that greater investment in early childhood care makes economic sense. “Every pound invested early on would save £7 of social costs within ten years,” she explains. “We could slash our spending on prisons, depression-related NHS costs, social services and so on.”

Gerhardt’s theories certainly seem to be borne out by research. But I wonder if it can really be true that so much of our personalities are created by our early years? Statements such as “people who are well nurtured might be less interested in keeping up with fashion” seem oversimplified.

Oliver James, the clinical psychologist and author, broadly supports Gerhardt’s understanding of childhood development. “Care in the first year is indeed linked to a likelihood of personality disorders,” he says. “When a parent figure is unloving or frequently absent, a child does not learn to form healthy relationships. This causes a weak sense of self, which may develop into a greedy, boastful, exhibitionist, fragile or febrile personality.

“I don’t believe that children can only be cared for by their mothers — a regular childminder, for example, might be almost as good — and brain development certainly continues until the age of six and beyond. But it is indisputable that children need a consistent, loving primary carer if they are to develop a well-functioning brain. That’s why I also support the two-year parenting wage.”

The Selfish Society contains much that I find far-fetched. The relentless criticism of selfishness and capitalism seems rather over-the-top, and at times Gerhardt extends her psychotherapeutic theories too far (she asserts that “Bush ’n’ Blair” must have been mistreated as babies).

Yet, as I navigate my gondola out of Oxpip, I’m struck by the sense that hundreds of people have emerged from these doors with stronger bonds with their children, and a renewed sense of confidence in their parenting. I feel “normalised”, happier and more relaxed about my relationship with my twins. As for Isaac and Imogen, exhausted by the range of new objects they have masticated, they have fallen asleep.