The party was buzzing, the confidence was surging and Kenneth Stewart was riding the Trump train. “He’s masculine,” explained Stewart, an African American man from Chicago. “He brings a lot of energy. He talks about things that we can understand. He talks about building. He talks about the auto industry. He talks about a lot of stuff that people in the Rust Belt care about.”

Stewart was a guest at Donald Trump’s election watch event in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Tuesday night and celebrated his victory over Democratic vice-president Kamala Harris. The result said much about gender, race and the new media landscape. It also represented a populist backlash against America’s perceived elites.

In the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, millions felt a distrust of authorities that ordered them to wear masks, close schools and go into lockdown. They felt frustrated by post-pandemic inflation that pushed up the prices of groceries and petrol. They felt they would never be able to buy a house, that the American dream was slipping away. They were looking for someone to blame – and for a champion who could fix it.

They believed they found him in Trump and, despite his two impeachments and 34 criminal convictions, returned him to power. He made gains among nearly every demographic group. In part he was riding a wave of anti-incumbency fervour that has swept through major democracies, battering the left and the right in the aftershocks of the pandemic.

That will provide little comfort to Democrats, who raised a billion dollars yet lost the national popular vote. They have come to be seen as the party of the highly educated who earn more than $100,000 a year and live in big cities such as New York and Washington. They are perceived as out of tune with people who work with their hands and shower after work instead of before.

Stewart said on Tuesday night: “The other side, they’re only talking about feelings. They’re talking about Trump’s bad. But come to me with tangibles. A lot of Black men just want tangibles. We just want jobs. We want to see what our fathers had. We want to see what our grandfathers had, especially in the Rust Belt.”

America is a nation of cavernous inequality with few safety nets. The last populist convulsion came 15 years ago after the Great Recession. On the left it spawned Occupy Wall Street, a response to economic inequality, corporate greed and the influence of money in politics. On the right it gave rise to the Tea Party, fuelled by rage against elites, distrust in government and racial hostility to President Barack Obama.

The Democratic and Republican parties each absorbed these movements into their political DNA. They manifested in the 2016 presidential election when the harmful effects of globalisation, trade and deindustrialisation took centre age. Leftwing senator Bernie Sanders drew huge crowds in Democratic primary but lost, while non-politician Trump drew huge crowds in the Republican primary and won.

The pandemic, and subsequent inflation, provided another trigger moment. Trump, a Manhattan billionaire, tapped into anti-establishment sentiment and bad economic vibes to style himself as an unlikely hero of the working class. He promised sweeping tariffs on foreign goods and the protection of manufacturing jobs inside the US.

The pitch was infused with race-baiting, scapegoating and xenophobia: Trump claimed that undocumented migrants were draining resources, causing crime and destroying communities. His demagoguery extended to an entirely fictitious claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pet cats and dogs.

The former president painted Democrats as an elite out of touch with the affordability and cost of living crises facing those further down the economic ladder. Harris proposed a federal ban on price-gouging but it was too little too late. She did not help her cause during their debate by citing investment bank Goldman Sachs’ support for her financial plans as a reason to vote for her.

Claire McCaskill, a former Democratic senator for Missouri, told MSNBC that Trump “knew our country better than we did”. She recalled: “I grew up in a party where we were for the underdog. We were for the little guy. We are now the elite. We are no longer seen as the party for the little guy.

“He was seen as the party for the little guy. He was seen as the ultimate disrupter and yes, the edges were very rough but in everyone’s own minds they sanded them down to the point of acceptability and, as it turns out, there’s a lot of craving in America for fear and anger – driven by lies.”

America’s political class divide has been growing for years. In the 2016 election Trump won 2,584 counties nationwide while Hillary Clinton carried only 472. But Clinton’s counties accounted for nearly two-thirds of America’s economic output, the Brookings Institution thinktank found.

The split finds expression in the way people dress, the TV shows they watch and the ways they interact (or don’t). In 2016 Trump won 76% of counties that contained a Cracker Barrel, a restaurant offering southern homestyle cooking on interstate highways, and just 22% of counties with Whole Foods, an organic national supermarket chain. The Cook Report noted that the 54% gap compared with a 19% difference in the 1992 election.

On the eve of the 2024 election Trump held a campaign rally in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where some supporters wore miners’ helmets. Among the speakers was rightwing media personality Megyn Kelly, who told the crowd that Trump will look out for “our forgotten boys and our forgotten men, guys like you, guys like these guys who’ve got the calluses on their hands, who work for a living, the beards and the tats, maybe have a beer after work, and don’t want to be judged by people like Oprah and Beyoncé, who will never have to face the consequences of her disastrous economic policies. These guys will. He gets it. President Trump gets it. He will not look at our boys like they are second-class citizens.”

An exit poll on Tuesday showed Trump winning voters whose household incomes are between $30,000 and $100,000. His sense of grievance struck a chord with people who feel left behind and sneered at as “deplorables” or “garbage” by Democratic leaders, journalists and Hollywood celebrities.

Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman and Tea Party activist who campaigned for Harris, says by phone: “The perception is that these people are elites. That’s what these folks have told me for the last five years. Many of them acknowledge Trump’s an asshole but they say, look, the Democrats are looking down on me. I heard that all the time.”

Walsh always believed that the election would be about Trump’s demagoguery and its appeal to working class Americans. “It’s been crystal clear for the last four, five, six years, certainly ever since Covid, regular everyday people have been concerned about immigration, a broken border, crime on the streets and the price of bread and the price of butter.

“They’re pissed off and angry about that stuff and Democrats have ignored it, especially the issue of immigration. Biden and Harris made it worse when they came in. Trump feeds these people bullshit like they’re eating cats and dogs but we have way too many migrants in America. It’s created real problems and Democrats have decided to ignore it. It bit them in the ass.”

Democrats are now engaged in long and painful soul-searching. Sanders argued in a scathing statement a party that had forsaken the working class should not be surprised to “find that the working class has abandoned them”. He added: “First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well.”

That prompted an angry rebuke from Democratic National Committee chairman Jaime Harrison, who dismissed Sanders’s thesis as “straight up BS” and posted a long list of Joe Biden’s achievements for low income families. “Biden was the most pro-worker president of my lifetime,” he wrote.

Research shows that one of Trump’s most effective ads was focused on keeping boys out of girls’ sports with the the tag line “Kamala Harris is for they/them. Donald Trump is for you”. New York congressman Ritchie Torres condemned what he sees as smug political correctness on the left, insisting that Trump had “no greater friend” than activists alienating voters with “absurdities like ‘Defund the Police’ … or ‘Latinx.’”

Trump had always performed strongly among white men without a college degree. But this time he won the votes of one fifth of Black men and nearly half of Latino men. He also made inroads among young voters.

Bill Galston, a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, observes: “We are witnessing the slow eclipse of race in favour of class. The question that I posed publicly in the week before the election was: would Donald Trump be able to continue the movement of the Republican party towards a multi-ethnic working class? And, if he did, not only would he win but he would be transforming the axis of American politics.

“The answer to that question is clearly yes, he has succeeded in moving the Republican party further down that road. What that means is that the contrast between the Republican party and the Democratic party, particularly on cultural issues, will continue to widen unless the Democrats start paying attention to the message they’re receiving but, until very recently, were not hearing.”

The Democratic left rallied around Harris and projected unity in the fight against Trump but to no avail. It might be harder to pull together such a coalition next time. While Trump’s rightwing populism has thrived over the past decade, some regret how leftwing populism has stalled.

Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of the progressive group Our Revolution, says: “At the end of the day there was a fundamental failure by the Harris campaign to acknowledge people’s economic pain. They focused on issues of democracy and reproductive rights versus adopting Bernie Sanders-style populism, which I would argue showed where the energy was within the Democratic party in 2016 and 2020.”

He adds: “It’s unfortunate because we need a populist economic left that is willing to challenge corporate power and articulate that wealthy corporations are suppressing wages. They’re sacrificing Americans in the name of corporate greed – everything from climate to our educational systems to our healthcare system. I feel like she held up Trump as a villain, but a villain who was a threat to democracy, not a villain who represented corporate oligarchic rule.”

It has been a remarkable year for meteorological mayhem with intense heatwaves and storms of extreme intensity battering many parts of our planet. Last month these culminated in the devastating floods that struck eastern Spain and killed hundreds.

Ahead of this week’s Cop29 summit, scientists believe disasters like these are becoming more frequent because major changes in our climate are occurring as emissions from the burning of fossil fuel continue to rise.

As a result, they have forecast that 2024 will probably have been the warmest on record, with global average temperatures expected to end up more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. Nor is this rise likely to plateau in the near future.

There is clearly much to discuss at Cop29 – here are ten of the biggest issues that will be on the minds of delegates this week.

Breaking records

Global carbon emissions are continuing to increase. Last year they reached a staggering 40.6bn tonnes, a record that is expected to be broken by the end of 2024. Atmospheric carbon levels are now more than 50% higher than they were in pre-industrial days. Hence that 1.5C rise. Unfortunately the world’s response to this disturbing worsening of atmospheric affairs has been painfully slow.

The heat is on

At last year’s Cop28 summit in Dubai it was agreed to “transition away” from fossil fuels. Remarkably, this was the first time an international commitment to tackle, explicitly, the root cause of our climate crisis had been agreed. In other words, it has taken three decades of negotiations to get to the state where this fairly weak commitment could be accepted globally, even though it falls far short of the full-blooded phasing out of fossil fuels for which many countries and most activists have been pressing. The arrival of Donald Trump is unlikely to help their cause.

America

Trump’s victory in the US presidential election last week casts a particularly bleak shadow over the already gloomy preparations that are being made for this week’s Cop29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan. European Commision president Ursula von der Leyen and French President Emmanuel Macron are among those not expected to attend and there is fear that the breakthroughs hoped for will not happen..

The ‘big hoax’

Into this arena strides Donald Trump, a man who has described climate change as “a big hoax”, and is expected to repeat the decision – made during his last presidency – to withdraw the US from the landmark Paris agreement when he takes office. “There is just the faintest ray of hope now that the world will limit global warming to 1.5C, but Donald Trump may extinguish it,” said Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

Boiling point

In contrast to the views of Trump, the UN secretary general António Guterres has been particularly outspoken in his warnings about the dangers that our planet now faces in the run-up to Cop29, talking of humanity committing “collective suicide” and accusing fossil fuel companies of having “humanity by the throat”. The era of global warming has ended, he has argued and “the era of global boiling has arrived.”

Tipping over

Alarm over Earth’s climate is based, in part, on researchers’ warning that the 1.5C rise in global temperatures – which the climate negotiators had hoped to avoid – is likely to be breached over multiple years by the end of the decade, while many other climate researchers fear that holding the heat down below a 2C rise is likely to prove impossible as well.

In such a scenario, major tipping points are likely to be passed. These will include the destabilisation of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, the abrupt thawing of the world’s permafrost regions, the collapse of the North Atlantic Ocean Circulation, and the massive die-off of tropical coral reefs. Widespread flooding will ensue and temperatures will continue to rise, while deadly droughts and storms will increase in frequency. Hundreds of millions of people – mostly those in developing nations – will find their homelands no longer habitable.

Follow the money

Trying to prepare for the climatic misery that threatens to engulf the world will form the main thrust of Cop29. A new finance goal to help developing nations create green energy systems and to help them adapt to a warming world is high on the agenda over the next fortnight’s negotiations.

The sums of money involved are eye-watering. Most estimates suggest that developing countries will need an additional $500bn to $1 trillion per year in climate finance from international sources. That’s at least five times as much as the $100bn commitment that is currently in place.

Much of this money would come from companies and private investors as well as the multilateral development banks and would be spent on protecting threatened landscapes, creating energy sources suitable for developing countries, adapting infrastructure to be more resilient to a changing climate, and paying for the damage that a nation has suffered from global warming that has been triggered by emissions generated by developed countries.

Gaslight

It remains to be seen how far these plans will progress at Baku over the next two weeks. Hopes of breakthroughs – already at a low level – have been further depressed by the disclosure that a senior official in Azerbaijan’s Cop29 team, Elnur Soltanov, was filmed discussing “investment opportunities” in the country’s state oil and gas company with a man posing as a potential investor. “We have a lot of gas fields that are to be developed,” he says. These remarks have gone down badly with many delegates.

Stepping stone

There remains some prospect of success at Baku, however. “We should look at the meeting in Baku as a stepping stone for Cop30 in Brazil,” said Lord Stern, chairman of the Grantham Research Institute. “Successful Cop meetings often come in pairs and hopefully this will be an example,” he said last week. “I would be cautious about specific agreements and outcomes but I am hoping we can get at least some framework for climate finance which could be finalised ​a​t Cop30.”

Next year, at Belém on the Amazon, countries must arrive with fresh national plans – known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs) – enforcing more stringent cuts to greenhouse gas emissions than they have yet promised. These must be in line with the globally accepted aim of limiting global temperature rises. A strong agreement in Baku on finance for developing countries would encourage higher ambitions.

Running out of time

The problem is that the world is running out of time, a point stressed by Johan Rockström, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “With Trump’s win, we now face, at best, a repeat of his last term’s climate inaction – a four-year pause we simply can’t afford in this critical decade.”

However, a more optimistic take on the situation was provided by Stern. “I was in Marrakech for the Cop22 summit in 2016 when the news came in that Trump had won the election,” he told the Observer. “We knew what that meant, but it was remarkable how strong was the resolve among delegates that we keep going. And we will keep going this time as well.

“His presidency will make life more difficult but we are not going to give up. That would be the worst possible option.”

Gabriel Kay really understands his target audience. As a student of industrial and product design at De Montfort University, he focused on the kettle.

“Everyone can relate to a kettle, right?” says the 22-year-old graduate. “It’s easy to understand and associated with comfort. It’s a friendly introduction to design.”

The vital difference between Kay’s kettle and the one in your kitchen is that his design – the flamboyantly named Osiris – is repairable. Its removable electronics can be replaced by anyone with a screwdriver.

“Obviously I wouldn’t advise anyone to go digging into typical electrical products due to safety standards and warranties,” says Kay, “but I believe anybody is capable of carrying out maintenance and understanding how their products work. Osiris separates the potentially hazardous components, turning the process into something more like changing the dust bag in your vacuum than repairing an item.”

If you think this sounds like an excellent idea, you are not alone. Osiris has won awards from De Montfort University and the graduate showcase New Designers.

Kay has also been brought on to the Green Grads programme. This platform was founded in 2021 by design editor Barbara Chandler as a way of promoting new UK graduates “with ideas to heal the planet”. Their designs appear in exhibitions and at events – including an upcoming show at Yorkton Workshops, London, next weekend, which will feature Kay’s kettle alongside a shoe that can be adapted for different terrains designed by Lewis Broughton, a new biocomposite made from rice straw, invented by Yohaan Kukreja and Ankita Khanna, and Conor McArthur’s seaweed “leather”.

Chandler says: “Our graduates tackle issues from new biomaterials to energy reduction. But repair – and its bedfellow durability – are vital strategies for cutting waste, infinitely better than recycling. According to the EU, 80% of consumers would like repairable goods. But repairs need to be easy and reassuring. Gabriel’s kettle focuses on that. You never see any scary internal electrics. Materials are robust; it looks good and works well.”

E-waste – discarded electrical goods – is becoming an urgent problem. According to the UN’s fourth Global E-waste Monitor (GEM), the generation of electronic waste is now rising five times faster than recycling efforts. The report also predicted a drop in collection and recycling from 22.3% in 2022 to 20% by 2030 due to the rapid growth of e-waste.

Despite this, many products are designed so that they cannot be repaired. Efforts to mend broken electrical goods can void the warranty. Right to repair legislation in the UK was introduced in 2021 but it’s described as “manifestly inadequate” by Chandler. In 2020 the UK was the world’s second largest producer of e-waste per capita according to GEM. E-waste is often dumped in countries in the global south – Ghana is home to one of the world’s largest e-waste dumps.

The Osiris kettle is named after the Egyptian god of death, rebirth and resurrection, and Kay hopes his product will live up to its title.

He says: “Consciousness is everything. Understanding how long your products should last against the years of use they get is key. Awareness of our effect on waste and using products to their full lifespan can help us mitigate our effect on this crisis.”

The Osiris has not yet found investment, though it may be just a matter of time. There is growing interest in repairable electrical goods, and increasing numbers of successful green startups such as the smartphone maker Fairphone – which became profitable in 2020 – and Suri, which reached sales of more than £10m with its repairable, recyclable toothbrush in 2023.

Kay says: “I think in the future, as regulations make right to repair a standard practice, there could be a perfect market for a product like this.”

It’s a year and a half since Jody last spoke to her mother, and the conversation ended badly. Though their relationship was always fractious, with long spells of not speaking, Jody had been feeling anxious about some big changes in her life and was craving comfort. Listening to some old voicemails from her mother made her nostalgic enough to pick up the phone. But the call quickly degenerated.

“My mom has a proclivity for expressing her emotions in really extreme, volatile ways. She lashes out and insults people,” says Jody, who is 29 and in the process of moving overseas. Her mother has suffered long-term mental health problems, she says, and sees herself as a victim conspired against by others: Jody learned young that if she didn’t beg for forgiveness when her mother started hurling accusations, she would be frozen out. But not this time. “When it finally clicked that my mom weaponised her own emotions to manipulate mine, I stopped feeling a reflex to defend myself.” She hung up, blocked her mother’s number, and decided they would never speak again.

Though Jody is sure she made the right decision, living with it hasn’t been easy. “I still miss her, and wish I could have those moments other people have with their moms. I can’t remember what she smells like or how it felt to hug her.” But she can’t live, she says, with being continually tested, as if she were an employee permanently on probation. “What she didn’t seem to take into account is that, just like any other fed-up employee, I can quit.”

The kind of broken relationship Jody describes is almost certainly more common than you might think. In Britain, research by the charity Stand Alone suggests around one in five families may be affected by estrangement – defined as a relationship in which communication has stopped. In the US (where Jody currently lives), a study by researchers at Ohio State University found 6% of respondents were estranged from a mother and a startling 26% from a father.

While the experience is still often cloaked in secrecy and shame, it’s perhaps no longer as taboo as it was. In her recent memoir, the Labour MP Diane Abbott described her complicated feelings about being estranged from her difficult, domineering father when he died. Prince Harry’s exodus from the royal family and his wife Meghan’s estrangement from her father have been played out under glaring spotlights. And what was once a lonely, isolating experience is increasingly shared on TikTok, Reddit or in forums offering advice on how to go “no contact” (cutting ties entirely) or “low contact” (bare minimum interaction) without feeling guilty.

Though some make it look seductively easy, in essence they’re making the same case the poet Philip Larkin did half a century ago in his 1971 poem This Be The Verse: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do.” The poem bleakly advises readers to “get out as early as you can”, and not have kids themselves.

“People seem to think that hashtags on social media create estrangement,” sighs Becca Bland, who founded Stand Alone after being estranged from her own parents aged 25, and has since moved on to coach estranged families. “But in the 12 or 13 years I’ve worked on this, I’ve never met someone who hasn’t had an extremely good reason to consider it.” Apart from the loneliness and pain of leaving a family, she says, young people can pay dearly for being estranged in a world in which almost a third of British 25- to 29-year-olds still live at home and parents often co-sign student loans, guarantee a young person’s rent or contribute to a first-time buyer’s deposit. All of which may help explain why the peak age of estrangement isn’t in the rebellious teens but – as it was for Jody – during the more considered, financially stable late 20s and 30s.

Sometimes estrangement is a result of physical or sexual abuse, addiction or mental health issues on one side or the other. (It’s not just children who cut parents off: sometimes it can be the other way around.) And sometimes it reflects a seemingly irreconcilable clash of religious or ethical beliefs. “If you’re from an immigrant family that has very fixed values, and you’re growing up in a society that is much more free and liberal, there’s a huge risk factor,” says Bland, who has collaborated with the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Family Research on studying estrangement. “I’d say political beliefs, too: Brexit, or different convictions about how you want society to be.” Research shows that parental separation and remarriage is a risk factor, especially if the child dislikes a step-parent or feels pushed to take sides, and estrangement is also more common among LGBTQ+ young people. (One study for the LGBT+ charity Just Like Us found almost half of respondents were estranged from a family member.)

But sometimes things are less clearcut. Sometimes estrangement can look more like the product of a therapy-literate generation that defines abuse more broadly than their own parents may have done, and believes in putting boundaries around people who make you miserable – even if they did give birth to you.

“We’ve come a long way in terms of understanding, say with domestic violence, how you shouldn’t be in a relationship where you have no equality, love or respect,” Bland says. “It’s hard to be in a family relationship where you have no say. Society and relationships have evolved, and family is going to evolve with them.” Just as baby boomers scandalised their parents by inventing the pill or destigmatising divorce, she suggests, younger generations are reimagining family life in ways that are sometimes uncomfortable to their elders.

The idea that filial love is no longer unconditional can be very frightening for parents who genuinely believe they have done their best, only to be damned by the standards of a different era. What if they never see their beloved child again? “It’s a massive power shift, and to give parents credit, there’s no support for that,” Bland says. “What we all do is copy what we know, and so many parents have copied what their parents did.” As with any relationship breakup, estrangement can leave behind it a trail of the hurt, the bewildered and the ghosted.

“Whenever I’d read stories about estrangement, I’d think, ‘But you must have done something,’” says Caroline, a gently spoken professional woman from the north of England, over the phone. But that was before one of her own adult children stopped talking to her.

Her daughter was a challenging teenager, she says: there were lots of fights, a breakdown in her college years, and Caroline sometimes felt pushed into playing parental “bad cop” after separating from her husband. But the relationship had been happy enough for over a decade, until last year. “I kept thinking something was a bit off, but I couldn’t put a finger on it. I’d send a WhatsApp message and it didn’t get responded to, and I started to think, ‘Have I been muted?’” She wondered if she was being oversensitive. But when she gently raised it, her daughter burst into tears and said she was struggling to reconcile the mother she had now with “how horrible you were” when she was little.

Caroline was horrified and bewildered: she couldn’t understand what she was being accused of. “As parents, we all have regrets, and there are things I regret. I can think of one occasion when I lost my temper and I wish I hadn’t. But overall I think I have been a really good mum, I am confident about that.” Both mother and daughter had counselling separately. But after another stormy meeting, her daughter messaged to say she no longer wanted to engage. They still swap birthday cards, but don’t speak to or see each other. “Until recently I cried every day. It feels like a bereavement, I can’t do anything about it. I go over and over it in my head and beat myself up thinking about why. I’m devastated.”

For now, Caroline is trying to give her daughter space. It hurts that her daughter is still in touch with her father, while Caroline – having done the hard yards as a single parent – is ostracised. “I often feel with mothers it’s what we haven’t done that gets held up to us, not what we have done. We organise all the Christmases and birthdays, keep them on track at school and with homework, feed them and read to them every night … A friend said to me, ‘You are the one she feels secure and safe with, so you are the one she can act out with because you will always love her.’ I know all this logically, but it doesn’t stop it feeling terribly unfair.”

Joshua Coleman specialises in untangling mysteries like this. A white-bearded California grandfather with a soothing manner, in his private practice as a psychologist, he counsels parents desperate to win back adult children who have cut them off. It’s a feeling he knows well: in his book Rules of Estrangement he describes how, at 22, his own daughter temporarily stopped talking to him. (After he separated from her mother and remarried, he writes, she hadn’t felt like “the unambiguous priority”: though they’re now reconciled, he says it took years of patiently applying the strategies he now teaches other parents.)

Is there any such thing as an excommunicated parent who genuinely did nothing wrong? “Almost every article about estrangement that I read in the US is written by an estranged adult child and it’s easy to sympathise with – their parent was abusive, they tried for a long time, finally they had to do this, it’s better for their mental health,” he tells me, over Zoom from his San Francisco office. “And those cases exist. They’re just not the sum set of the reasons people estrange themselves.” Most parents, he thinks, are muddling through as best they can. But that doesn’t mean their best was always enough for their child.

“There are separate realities in every family. A parent could credibly feel as if they did a good, conscientious job as a parent, and their child could credibly feel that their behaviour was hurtful in some way.” Typically, the adult child is trying to express something that’s important to them, even if it baffles the rejected parent.

Sometimes, he argues, estrangement can be a child’s way of disentangling themselves from an overly close relationship. “Something I see a lot of is just a need to separate from over-involved, loving parents. Parents have become much more anxious, much more invested, much more guilt-ridden, much more involved.”

Other triggers include what he suggests are clumsy therapists identifying childhood trauma where it doesn’t exist, and clashes between parents and an adult child’s partner. (In a survey of 1,600 estranged parents Coleman conducted, 70% said they only finally become estranged after their child married: be careful about criticising someone your offspring is dating, he warns.)

In his consulting room, clients often reel off long, indignant lists of everything they did for their children, from birthday parties to paying for college education. Fathers in particular tend to balk at his strategy of writing a “letter of amends” apologising to their child, he says, though mothers are often keener to do whatever it takes (interestingly, research shows men are less likely than women to end up reconciled with estranged children). “Dads will often say, ‘No, they can give me an amends letter, why should I write one? I was a good parent,’” Coleman says. But he warns them it’s usually the child who has the whip hand, as they’re the ones ultimately willing to walk out. While estrangement is increasingly seen as “the strong, assertive thing to do”, he argues, it’s also a cataclysmic event in a family that can pit sibling against sibling, cut grandchildren off from grandparents, and reverberate down generations.

There’s no hard evidence on whether estrangement is becoming more common, as opposed to being just more commonly talked about, either in the US or the UK. But Coleman’s hunch is that it’s on the rise, fuelled by polarising politics – one couple consulted him after their son announced, “If you vote for Trump in the next election, we are done” – and a growing emphasis on individual happiness over collective bonds or old-fashioned filial duty. Family relationships, he thinks, are starting to resemble romantic ones: if they’re not emotionally fulfilling, moving on is no longer inconceivable. “It’s a tectonic shift in the way we organise family relationships and a lot of parents haven’t really gotten the memo yet.”

What most confuses parents, he argues, is the way definitions of abusive behaviour have shifted since they grew up, when smacking or yelling at your kids was considered routine. “So many of the letters that parents are responding negatively to are, ‘You emotionally abused me, you traumatised me’ and that’s when parents are like, ‘What the hell are you talking about? I wish I had your childhood.’” The word “narcissist” is particularly overused, he says, to the bafflement of many parents. (Once a clinical term for pathological self-importance, it’s seeped into casual conversation to mean anyone selfish, cold, manipulative or just difficult.) “There’s been this enormous expansion over what gets labelled as pathological behaviour.” What Coleman seems to be describing isn’t just a series of conflicts between individual children and parents, but a broader clash between generations with different expectations of relationships, and often different language to describe it.

“That didn’t happen. And if it did, it wasn’t that bad. And if it was, that’s not a big deal. And if it is, it’s not my fault …” So begins The Narcissist’s Prayer by Belfast poet Dayna Craig, which holds a special resonance for the many estranged adult children plastering it across their social media feeds. The poem seems to capture their sense of being gaslit by an abusive parent but also by outsiders, asking how they can be so cruel as to cut their families off.

Lauren, from London, grew up with a mother who was absent for several years and a father she calls emotionally abusive and cruel. He didn’t hit her, she says, but he didn’t have to: the things he said were worse, calling her a whore for painting her nails, for example, or telling her to kill herself. “I never understood that ‘sticks and stones will break your bones’ thing – actually, words do hurt you.”

At 18 she left home, and tried keeping contact to a bare minimum. She would meet her father only in public places, accompanied by her partner, and communicate only by email. But it didn’t help, she says: her father railed against the loss of control, and the emails turned abusive. So she stopped speaking to him altogether, to her extended family’s outrage. In Nigerian families, she explains, aunties, uncles and cousins are closely involved, and parents and children are expected to retain an even closer bond: it was easier, she thinks, for her relatives to blame her for the relationship breaking down than to engage with what she was saying about her father’s behaviour. “It’s psychologically more comfortable to say, ‘No, that can’t be right, I would have known,’” she says. “I’d get told, ‘You’ll miss him when he’s gone’ but I’m pretty certain I won’t. People seem to require justification but I don’t feel I should have to provide it before people believe me.”

On TikTok and in estrangement forums, family and friends who try to broker reunions are sometimes bitterly labelled “flying monkeys”, after the winged flunkies who did the Wicked Witch’s bidding in The Wizard of Oz. These often well-meaning interventions are a common phenomenon, says Sarah Davies, a chartered counselling psychologist and trauma therapist, and the author of Raised by Narcissists: How to Handle Your Difficult, Toxic and Abusive Parents. But they can be distressing for adult children who have chosen no contact for very good reasons.

“I tell people to be very careful about who they share the details with in order to protect themselves from comments like, ‘But it’s your mum …’ Well, yes, that’s what makes it hard.” Friends shouldn’t rush to judge an estrangement that seems puzzling to them, she argues: if there was abuse involved, people might not want to tell everyone what happened. “You don’t fully understand what somebody has been through.”

Deciding what you are prepared to tolerate from an abusive parent is a highly individual decision that each adult child must carefully work through for themselves, Davies argues, including honestly examining their own motives for doing it: “It’s a very conscious process rather than, ‘No, I’m done.’” That said, however, she writes in the book that “if you can go no contact with an abusive parent, then do”. Is she trying to give people permission to do something that feels transgressive? “I think sometimes children of narcissists feel they need permission. When you grow up with a toxic parent, you feel guilty, you feel bad, you feel as if it’s your fault.”

Davies, who ended contact with her own parents two years ago, says Christmas, birthdays and family occasions are still tough for many of her clients: she was once unexpectedly flooded with sadness in a spa, watching mothers and daughters enjoying a day out together. Others struggle with how to respond to an ageing estranged parent who is ill or dying: should they agree to one last visit?

Lauren, however, is resolute: the next time she sees her father will be at his funeral. Millennials are often told they’re snowflakes, she says, for objecting to behaviour that previous generations put up with. “But we’re the generation that has finally had enough of, ‘Well, it didn’t do me any harm’ and, ‘That’s how we’ve always done this.’” Her determination not to keep on repeating the cycle is such that, now in her 30s, she has decided not to have children herself.

For millennial parents, the idea that good parenting means working to “break the cycle” – as Prince Harry explained in an earnest 2021 interview alongside his then pregnant wife – instead of unwittingly making the same mistakes as their parents, is a powerful one.

“Generational trauma is such a big word for my generation – what trauma has been passed down that we want to think about not repeating. Whereas my parents’ generation did not even understand it,” Bland says. “It creates tensions where people don’t understand why they’ve been cut off.” Perhaps that is particularly true for parents who survived difficult upbringings themselves.

Nancy was hard up when she got pregnant, and as a single mother had no support from her own mother, whom she calls “a piece of work”. Even before the baby was born, she realised she might have bitten off more than she could chew. “But I knuckled down, I did my best. We were never homeless. We were never so poor that I couldn’t afford what we needed,” she tells me over the phone. And for a long time, as she tells it, they were unusually close. A single mother to an only daughter, Nancy breastfed until her baby was two and says they shared a bed for years afterwards. “We never fought. I was her world, everything was always fine between us.” She managed to put her daughter through university and gave her a lump sum afterwards. “And it went from that to, ‘I don’t want to have a relationship with you, I never want you around your grandchild.’ It just shocked me, and she never told me why.”

Nancy’s daughter is a lesbian and though she insists that wasn’t an issue for her, she sounds cooler on the subject of her daughter-in-law. “I didn’t really get on well with her but I didn’t get on poorly. I accepted her, I gave her presents.” But the arguments began, she says, when her daughter got pregnant and said she wanted some space. Accordingly, Nancy says, she backed off. But after the baby was born, she called. She says she can’t remember much about the conversation: “She was taking care of her newborn and I didn’t want to press her on anything.” But whatever was said, after that came the letter cutting her off, and she hasn’t tried to resume contact: another rejection, she says, would be too painful. More than a decade on, she has never met her grandchild and, to avoid explanations, usually says she has no children when asked.

Now in her 70s, Nancy has rewritten her will to leave her house to a local housing authority and appointed new executors. “They’ll get rid of all my stuff and scatter the ashes. I don’t know how my daughter will feel about it – if she’ll feel I’ve taken something away from her.” Nancy looked after her own mother in old age, despite their difficult relationship, she says, because she thought that was what family did. But her own daughter told her their relationship “can’t be about duty”.

As we talk, Nancy seems torn between sadness and rage. “I sometimes wonder why the anger is still so strong. My therapist would say it’s to protect me from more hurt and I want to move past it. But part of me – if she would just sit down with me at the kitchen table – would like to say, ‘What the fuck, why did you do this? What did you get out of this, that your life is so much better without me in it?’ As a parent your child is central to your life but as a child your parent is not central.”

Towards the end of our conversation, Nancy reveals that her own mother had mental health problems, and that she sometimes wonders if that had something to do with her daughter breaking ties, as if to inoculate herself against something. “Maybe she thought that I was going to become like her.”

According to the Ohio State University study, the vast majority of estranged adult children eventually resume contact with their families. But it may not always be a fairytale happy ending, with some families cycling repeatedly in and out of contact.

Pippa was in her early 40s when her tolerance for the father she describes as abusive, domineering and controlling finally snapped. “He started his usual stuff of telling me how everybody thought he was wonderful and I sat there listening and said, ‘Shall I tell you what I’ve been up to?’ I told him one thing and he just went ‘hmmm’ and carried on talking about himself.” In that moment, she decided she couldn’t see him any longer.

But the most painful aspect of cutting off her father was that it meant also losing touch with her mother – who Pippa says was damaged herself, and coercively controlled by her father – as well as her siblings and wider family, whom she didn’t see for almost a decade. “We come from a family where nobody talks about feelings, nobody talks about anything; you’re not allowed to have emotions.”

They had just begun talking again, in a reunion brokered by a relative, when her mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Pippa moved back home to nurse her, and in the last few weeks mother and daughter finally acknowledged the time they had lost. “I did say, ‘I’m sorry I left you, and I do regret having missed things.’” But she found the experience of temporarily sharing a roof with her father traumatic.

What surprised Pippa most about the estrangement, she says, is that it wasn’t the clean break she’d imagined. “You think about them every day. It’s not like they’re gone – every single day they’re on your mind, and that’s the weird thing. They’re not in your physical space but they’re still in your headspace.”

If some estrangements seem sadly inevitable, could others be avoidable? In his book, Coleman writes that, while he’s often asked if estrangement is generally justifiable, a better question is whether it’s right to cut a parent off when you know that will ruin their life. Americans’ love for individual needs and rights, he adds, “conceals how much sorrow is left in the wake”.

When I ask if he means children should take more responsibility for their parents’ happiness, he pauses. “No, not at any cost. The parent has to be able and willing to take responsibility, to show compassion, to not be defensive, to understand why the child feels that estrangement is the healthiest thing to do. They can’t just show up with their arms folded and go, ‘I’m your father, you have to accept me.’” But trying to understand why a parent does what they do – perhaps because of their own childhood, or what’s happened to them in a marriage – can sometimes be therapeutic, he argues, even if it doesn’t make them any easier to live with.

Adult children struggling to deal with a hyper-critical or undermining parent, he suggests, could try giving them a chance to change: perhaps say that their behaviour makes family get-togethers hard and ask them to stop criticising your partner, parenting, or whatever the flashpoint is. If nothing changes, then say their behaviour makes you want to see or call them less: “I like to think of it as a shot across the bows.” Parents on the receiving end of such warnings need to be humble enough to listen. “The natural reaction is to fight strongly against it. But that’s often the thing that can turn your child even further against you, because when you start blaming, defending, criticising or guilt-tripping, none of those are going to work in your favour.”

That doesn’t mean accepting an allegation if it’s factually wrong, he explains. “But if a child says, ‘You emotionally abused me, you neglected me’ I think it’s OK for a parent to say, ‘It’s clear I have blind spots as a parent – I wasn’t aware that you felt I was emotionally abusive to you, but I’m glad that you told me and I want to learn more.’” (Keeping the lines open may be particularly important in the rare cases when an adult child breaks contact under pressure from their violent or coercively controlling partner, who is seeking to cut them off from help: if you suspect that is what’s going on, advice from the domestic violence charity Refuge is to try to speak to them away from the abusive partner about what might be happening, avoid sounding judgmental of the relationship and signpost them to resources such as the National Domestic Abuse Helpline.)

Bland agrees it’s worth considering first whether the relationship can be improved with the help of a mediator or a counsellor, if only so that you know you tried everything you could. And if it can’t be fixed? “You have to consider the boundaries in your life – how much you can do. For some people that might be going low contact – you could see each other once a year.”

After a decade and a half apart, she finds it hard to imagine reconciling with her own parents, “unless some really big things changed”, and has found peace with that. “I don’t think the struggle is greater than having a relationship with a parent who devalues you on a daily basis,” she says slowly, pointing out that having to be independent has in some ways been empowering. When she became a homeowner, at least she knew she’d done it by herself. “I’ve got a lot of confidence, a lot of fearlessness. Nothing holds me back. And that was a product of thinking, ‘I’ve got nothing left to lose.’”

But for others it’s less clearcut. For Pippa, her father’s eventual death some years after she lost her mother left her with unexpectedly conflicting feelings. “All my childhood and all my life, there was always part of me that hoped one day I would get some evidence that my dad gave a shit. So when he died, yes, there was a lot of relief, but there was also the grief that I’m never going to get the opportunity now for him to show that. Though, of course, the conscious adult knows that was never going to happen anyway.” When I ask what she wishes more people understood about estrangement, her answer is that it’s not actually an ending; more an ongoing process of living without both your actual parent, and the parent you always wanted but now realise you can never have.

Some names have been changed.

Holy mountains are ten a penny in the “Celtic realms”, of course, but even among this plethora of landscape spirituality, Skirrid Fawr, at 1,594 feet, stands out, its great distinguishing landslip cleft clearly visible on its weather slope, gothically accentuated and strange.

I’d viewed it the previous evening, a blue peak with a rockfall on its western scarp. So I ambled towards it on a dank afternoon from the valley of the little Afon Troddi, along delightful paths enlivened now and again by statuesque bulls sporting great brass rings through their nostrils.

Soon the contours were crowding together. The way ahead lay steeply up a twisting ridge that led to the gable of the ridge, where two squat pillars of the local sandstone stood within the confines of the site of Llanfihangel – St Michael’s chapel – of which just the ground plan remains.

It’s only a little hill, close to the southernmost reach of the Black Mountain ridges, but the Skirrid is the most marvellous viewpoint. On a clear day, the eye takes in the closing channel of Severn Sea, Somerset and the Mendips beyond it. To the north-east, hill upon hill through the length of the southern march are visible: Herefordshire Beacon in the Malvern Hills, Brown Clee Hill, the Shropshire Hills, Caer Caradog prominent among them.

Gyrn Wigau – distinctive outlier of the Berwyn range – peeps down from far away to the north; to the south-west lurks the desolate expanse of Llangynidr Mountain, beneath which stretches some of the longest and most arduous cave systems in Britain, including Agen Allwedd and Eglwys Faen. On the sedgy moor above, Aneurin Bevan and his friend Archie Lush promenaded, engaging in heated discussions that led ultimately to the formation of the National Health Service.

I left the summit of Skirrid Fawr and made for Crug Hywel, or Crickhowell – a pretty little town with good pub and cafes, in one of which, this week, I had a ticket for a reading by the first and pre-eminent national poet of Wales, Gwyneth Lewis: gifted, witty and a national treasure. But that’s Wales for you. Its hills breed poets.

Country diary is on Twitter/X at @gdncountrydiary

Tony Todd, the actor who played the titular killer in classic horror film Candyman, as well as appearing in Final Destination, The Rock and Platoon, has died aged 69.

Todd died on Wednesday at home in Los Angeles after a long illness, his wife, Fatima, confirmed to the Hollywood Reporter on Friday.

Born in Washington DC in 1954, Todd had hundreds of television and movie credits to his name in a 40-year career. One of his first roles was the heroin-addicted Sergeant Warren in Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning war drama Platoon; he also appeared in 1996’s The Rock opposite Nicolas Cage, played funeral home owner William Bludworth in the Final Destination franchise, and Grange in 1994’s The Crow, with Brandon Lee.

On television Todd appeared in many popular series, including 24, Homicide: Life on the Street, The X-Files, 21 Jump Street, Night Court, MacGyver, Matlock, Law & Order, Beverly Hills 90210, Xena: Warrior Princess and Murder, She Wrote. He also played multiple roles in Star Trek, most prominently as the Klingon Kurn, brother of Worf, in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine.

He was also a prolific voice actor, playing characters in the Call of Duty and Half Life games, as well as Venom in the film Spider-Man 2 and the villain in Transformers: Rise of the Fallen.

In the 1992 film Candyman, Todd played the titular hook-handed killer, who is summoned when someone repeats his name five times before a mirror. The horror classic explored racism and social class; Todd’s character Daniel Robitaille was lynched by a white mob on the spot where a public housing project is later built, which he haunts.

In 2019 Todd told the Guardian that he was paid $1,000 extra each time he was stung by a bee in one of the film’s most famous scene. “And I got stung 23 times. Everything that’s worth making has to involve some sort of pain.”

Todd reprised his role in Jordan Peele’s 2021 Candyman reboot.

The actor used his fame for social work, in gang outreach and putting on acting seminars for underprivileged kids. Of Candyman, he said: “I’ve done 200 movies, this is the one that stays in people’s minds. It affects people of all races. I’ve used it as an introductory tool in gang-intervention work: what frightens you? What horrible things have you experienced?”

“The industry has lost a legend. We have lost a cherished friend. Rest in peace, Tony, -Your Final Destination Family,” New Line Cinema, which produced the horror franchise, wrote on Instagram.

Vice-president Kamala Harris’s running mate Tim Walz says the 2024 US election outcome is ‘hard to understand’. The governor of Minnesota vowed to ‘keep fighting’ Donald Trump’s ‘hateful agenda’. Walz appeared to choke up during the speech in his home state. Harris and Walz lost by a landslide to the Republicans in the election on 5 November

Thousands of short-tailed shearwaters are washing up dead on Australian east coast beaches and researchers are uncertain of the cause and scale of these seabird “wrecks”.

Each spring about 20m shearwaters, also called yula or muttonbirds, fly 15,000km back to southern Australia from the northern hemisphere. Since late October, dead shearwaters have been turning up on beaches in south-east Queensland, followed by similar reports in New South Wales and Victoria in recent weeks.

Dr Lauren Roman, who researches shearwaters at University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, said understanding how many birds had died, and whether it was a normal or mass mortality event was “tricky”.

In large numbers, these mortality events are called seabird wrecks, she said.

Shearwater wrecks are known to occur during their annual migration, she said, but smartphones and social media had raised people’s awareness.

“There’s a perception that the mortality events are increasing, but it’s very hard to tell whether that’s actually the case, or just a function of increased awareness.

“If they’re right out in the middle of the Tasman Sea, hundreds of kilometres offshore, and there’s a big mortality event, we’re not going to see that.”

Even a small portion of the population that died closer to the coast could result in tens or hundreds washing up on beaches.

“Whether or not there’s actually more mortalities than there were in the past, is very difficult to quantify,” she said.

Adrift Lab researcher, Jennifer Lavers, estimated the number of adult seabirds “washed up, dying on beaches” was in the “hundreds or thousands” this year, based on early analysis of citizen scientist reports.

The mass mortality events were unusual for seabirds with long lifespans, and did not “make sense from an evolutionary perspective”, she said.

The birds that were washing up were emaciated, Lavers said, which indicated the animals were struggling to find enough food.

Roman said there was a significant mass mortality event in 2013 where millions of seabirds perished. Recent reports weren’t on that same scale.

The 2013 event was thought to be associated with an abnormal heat event in the north Pacific Ocean called “the blob”.

“We know that caused a cascade of seabird mortalities in the northern hemisphere as well, and the early stages of that event coincided with when shearwaters were also up there before they started their migration,” Roman said.

Dr Eric Woehler, who has researched seabirds for more than four decades, said shearwater wrecks often occurred in autumn when the youngsters made their first flight north, and occasionally in spring when the adults birds returned. The timing, duration and numbers of birds seen in mortality events varied year to year, he said.

“We believe that these birds, particularly, didn’t have enough food and basically started on their migration with insufficient body reserves,” he said.

Shearwaters live to be more than 40 years old, so the loss of adults probably had a greater impact on the overall population due to the loss of breeding effort, Woehler said. The seabirds only laid one egg per breeding pair, raising one chick each year.

Tasmania and islands in the Bass Strait were a stronghold for the species.

Authorities were also on alert for the highly pathogenic and transmissible H5N1 flu strain, but it hadn’t yet been detected in Australia, or in the shearwaters found on local beaches.

Roman said researchers were working hard to disentangle the factors and implications of wreck events.

These events could be heartbreaking to witness, she said, but people shouldn’t be alarmed just yet. “If you find one or two dead ones, I wouldn’t worry too much about it, because that’s natural this time of year.”

Beachgoers should avoid touching dead birds or letting their pets interact with them.

People could contact wildlife carers if they saw live birds that appeared to be in trouble, and could report larger numbers of dead seabirds to their state’s marine animal stranding hotline.

Joe Biden’s slowness in exiting the 2024 presidential election cost the Democrats dearly, the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi said, days after Kamala Harris was beaten by Donald Trump.

“We live with what happened,” Pelosi said.

Pelosi was speaking to The Interview, a New York Times podcast, in a conversation the newspaper said would be published Saturday in full.

“Had the president gotten out sooner,” Pelosi remarked, “there may have been other candidates in the race. The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary.

“And as I say, Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in that and been stronger going forward. But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen. We live with what happened. And because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time. If it had been much earlier, it would have been different.”

As Democrats engaged in bitter blame games over Harris’s defeat and a second presidency for Trump, who senior Democrats from Harris down freely called a “fascist”, Pelosi’s words landed like an explosive shell.

The Times said Pelosi “went to great lengths to defend the Biden administration’s legislative accomplishments, most of which took place during his first two years, when she was the House speaker”.

Republicans took the House in 2022. Pelosi, now 84, was re-elected this week to a 20th two-year term.

Biden was 78 when elected in 2020 and is now just short of 82. He long rejected doubts about his continued capacity for office, but they exploded into the open after a calamitous first debate against Trump, 78, in June.

On 21 July, the president took the historic decision to step aside as the Democratic nominee. Within minutes, he endorsed Harris to replace him.

Pelosi reportedly played a key role in persuading Biden to stand aside. But she has not sought to soothe his feelings. In August, she told the New Yorker she had “never been that impressed with his political operation”.

Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

She said: “They won the White House. Bravo. But my concern was: this ain’t happening, and we have to make a decision for this to happen. The president has to make the decision for that to happen.”

Biden is widely reported to be furious with the former speaker. This week, reports have said the president and his senior staffers are furious with Barack Obama, under whom Biden served as vice-president but who also helped push Biden to drop out of the re-election race.

According to the Times, Pelosi also rejected comments from Bernie Sanders in which the independent senator from Vermont said Trump won because Democrats “abandoned working-class people” – remarks the chair of the Democratic National Committee, Jaime Harrison, called “straight-up BS”.

“Bernie Sanders has not won,” Pelosi said. “With all due respect, and I have a great deal of respect for him, for what he stands for, but I don’t respect him saying that the Democratic party has abandoned the working-class families.”

According to Pelosi, cultural issues pushed American votes to Trump.

“Guns, God and gays – that’s the way they say it,” she said. “Guns, that’s an issue. Gays, that’s an issue. And now they’re making the trans issue such an important issue in their priorities, and in certain communities, what they call God, what we call a woman’s right to choose” regarding abortion and other reproductive care.