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Diary

Miranda Sawyer

Wednesday, 21st November 2007

Not to be poncy, but the cast’s overly significant gesturing made me think of the art of Catherine Sullivan. A video artist who uses clichéd acting tics to explore roles in society, she has work in A Foundation’s Greenland Street show in Liverpool at the moment. And super-fine it is too: scary, mesmerising, complicated. I saw it after the private view for the Turner Prize show, a few weeks ago. Brian Griffiths’s grand, shabby sculptures are on display there too: all far more theatrical than anything I saw at Desperately Seeking Susan.

After a few desperate post-Susan cocktails, I’m not on top form when I take my two-year-old to his regular Wednesday morning Monkey Music and Tumble Tots sessions. Monkey Music is a sweet, knit-your-own-yogurt type of class, where mums and littl’uns sit on the floor to clap and shake maracas in time to nursery rhymes. As usual, my son refuses to sit down, and runs away from me to stand right in front of the teacher, blocking everyone else’s view. He stares at her with adoration. He thinks she’s a really brilliant telly. Tumble Tots, an activity class, is more his type of up-tempo thing, though he keeps trying to jump the queue to be first down the slide. I spend half the class telling him off. Still, my efforts at teaching him patience and self-discipline seem to be working. Afterwards, when I ask him how he enjoyed himself, he immediately says: ‘Wait. Turn.’ ‘That’s right! Well done!’ I say, in that positive mother voice that makes me want to gargle with super-strength arsenic. Then he frowns and informs, ‘Mummy. Cross.’ Oh yes. Our little mother-son sessions are going so well.

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A child of our time

From the economic and psychological bedlam of the global downturn has emerged a particularly dangerous false dichotomy: namely, that there is somehow a choice for ministers over the next few years between economic reconstruction and the repair of Britain’s broken society, and that the government (whether Labour or Conservative) must prioritise the former at the expense of the latter.

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Politics

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

‘A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.’ So said Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Fed, in a speech about how to ward off the ‘extremely small’ chance of deflation, which he delivered in 2002.