When Justice Anthony Kennedy announced last week that he will retire from the US supreme court, which means Donald Trump can replace him with a more conservative judge, there was a sharp intake of breath. “Good morning, Gilead” said American women on Twitter. Ever since the TV success of The Handmaid’s Tale, Gilead – the society in Margaret Atwood’s novel where fundamentalist Christians have stripped women of all their rights – has become shorthand for the end of progress.

Is The Handmaid’s Tale prophecy or documentary? Or just another dystopian fantasy that gives hysterical women who are fine something to moan about? (Yes, I am pre-empting the “Calm down, dear” comments that this will provoke, because calming down is the last thing women need to do right now.)

Like many, I have given up on the second series. One was enough. Reality is enough. In an abstract way I am interested in finding out how Gilead was formed and where resistance to it might lie, but I cannot stomach any more torture scenes. If I want to watch terrified women, I can watch the news.

We are told we have come a long way and that we are free. We look at other parts of the world, where women are not allowed to vote, or dance, and we see ourselves as modern and liberated. But all our “freedoms” are fairly recent, from being able to get a mortgage to being protected from rape in marriage.

The narrative of progress is one that too many liberals imbibe, but it is untrue. Progress is not linear. In many of the areas to which we turn when we measure gender equality, we have not moved forward for the past 10 years – income, political engagement, education. Nearly one-fifth of women over 75 are at risk of living in poverty. Our lawmakers include people who are against abortion in all circumstances, such as Jacob Rees-Mogg. The government is propped up by the fundamentalist DUP, which is not interested in furthering women’s rights.

So, while I celebrated the achievements of the Irish abortion referendum, the global situation for women is not great. Sex trafficking, ie sex slavery, is up. All over the world – whether in Turkey, Pakistan or Iran – religious fundamentalists see women’s rights as the embodiment of secularism and women are punished for it.

When people talk about the rise of fascism, or the coming of Gilead, it is in the present tense. The snatching of children from their families; the murder of journalists; the border patrols in Maine who stop cars and ask drivers “Where were you born?”; the idea that Justice Clarence Thomas could overturn Roe v Wade and outlaw abortion in some states: these are more than warning signs.

In Atwood’s book, an environmental catastrophe causes infertility and leads to women being treated as slaves, but she also underlines the precarious nature of democracy. Can it be snatched away just as toddlers are snatched from their parents?

Look around and there is already a kind of desensitisation to what is happening, a moral relativism that never sees women’s rights as the first rights that are under attack. Up the road from me is an ultra-Orthodox Jewish Haredi school, which has been found inadequate by Ofsted because it censors books, won’t teach girls sex education and won’t mention homosexuality. This is the way all fundamentalism – Christian, Jewish, Islamic – merges: in denial of female autonomy. This is what Gilead is.

The sun is shining and some women have never have had it so good – so maybe you don’t want to think about all of this right now. I don’t blame you. But maybe you should. While you still can.

Without Eddie Mair, I have little reason to listen to Radio 4

‘His genius lies in giving others space’ ... Eddie Mair. Photograph: BBC

Oh no, not Eddie Mair? He is leaving the BBC after 30 years to go to LBC and now I will have little reason to listen to Radio 4.

I binned the smugfest that is the Today programme years ago – I like to think I was ahead of the curve – and I have never understood a single thing that has gone on in the Archers, as I have a strange form of class dyslexia; they may as well be talking Serbo-Croatian. Nor do I appreciate the hordes of leftwing “comedians” who preach to the ever-chortling converted.

But Mair, who will host his final edition of PM, the station’s flagship evening news programme, on 17 August, is a master to whom I would listen all day. You can feel the side-eye coming out of the radio. His capacity to find all but the very worst news mildly amusing is a joy, and yet when the bonhomie evaporates he is lethal. Boris Johnson is but one of many politicians he has treated with appropriate disdain.

His genius lies in giving others space, which is fearless in an age of constant interruption. He lets others talk and he listens. Many will remember the fond and moving Steve Hewlett interviews, but it is with ordinary people he shines, because he lets them shine. It is a gift, to talk to someone who is ill or grieving and to let them talk at their pace.

If it is true that he is going because he won’t take a pay cut, I find it even sadder. The idea that for women to have equal pay men must take pay cuts is completely idiotic. It is bound to set the talent against each other and it sends the message that for women to be treated equally men must suffer. This is not a policy; it is panic.

Every year, I pay my licence fee with increasing reluctance.

My daughter dropped a Clanger about kids’ TV

‘I loved the loneliness of these strange worlds’ ... The Clangers. Photograph: BBC/Coolabi Productions/Smallfilms/Peter Firmin

My daughter was clearing her room recently and threw out something I gave her many years ago. “You can’t throw this away,” I said when I saw a Clanger in the pile. It didn’t mean much to her, but to me? Well, like Bagpuss, it is Proustian, this little, pink, snout-nosed thing. Peter Firmin, who created these creatures, has died. The Clangers lived on another planet and ate green soup made by the soup dragon. They spoke only in whistles. Music grew on trees. They lived with Froglet and Glow Buzzers. I loved the loneliness of these strange worlds. Some say children’s TV was made in those days by people who had taken too much acid. Maybe so. But I say keep your CGI; this is real magic.