The Spectator's Notes

18 October 2008

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

h. I am grateful to the Bishop of London for drawing my attention to a text from Psalm 106. When the children of Israel in the desert worshipped the Golden Calf, God ‘gave them their desire: and sent leanness withal into their soul’.

Is there any good reason why the nation should ‘save’ Titian’s ‘Diana and Actaeon’ (and, later, ‘Diana and Callisto’)? The history of buying and selling works of art is just as much part of the flow of civilisation as is the production of art in the first place. The owner is the present Duke of Sutherland. The Dukes of Sutherland got their great paintings through their family connection with the last Duke of Bridgewater, who got them from the break-up of the Orléans Collection at the time of the French Revolution, which got them... If the nation is now getting poorer, perhaps it is time for them to be gone. P.S. Which is ‘the nation’ in this context? The Titians are in Edinburgh. ‘They’re Scotland’s Titians!’ is another cry you don’t hear, now that money is asked for.

TV Licensing (cont’d). The BBC is not, I discover, unique in hounding non-viewers. In Germany, Friedrich Schiller, the author of Ode to Joy, who died in 1805, recently received a demand from the German television licensing authority, GEZ. It was sent to a primary school in Weigsdorf-Koeblitz which bears his name. After the first demand, the school’s head wrote to GEZ to explain that Mr Schiller was ‘no longer in a position to listen to the radio or watch television’ (actually, he never was), but the reminders flowed unchecked.

How one’s heart sinks at the news that the Women’s Institute has issued a video about how to have better sex. ‘We’re not all 85 and knitting,’ says Janice Langley, maker of the video. Mrs Langley is 66, and is shown holding up a French maid’s outfit and looking ridiculous. This column has argued before that there is nothing wrong with ‘jam and Jerusalem’. The nation does not have enough of either, and oldish women who want to know what to do with a French maid’s uniform can surely go elsewhere. I admit that I am not a woman, but I long for a Women’s Institute that is not embarrassed not to talk about sex. I recommend that disaffected members of the Women’s Institute come and join our wonderful sex-free Rectory Society (admin@rectorysociety.org.uk).