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Global warning

Theodore Dalrymple

Wednesday, 2nd January 2008

A friend of mine, a very busy man who knew that I had retired and had little to do except meet deadlines, asked me recently to help him find a flat for rent in a distant part of the country.

It was part of the convenience of modern life that information about agents in the area should have been immediately accessible to me at the touch of a few keys on a keyboard. Shortly thereafter, however, a rather less pleasant aspect of modernity made itself manifest: most of the agents charged their callers for calling them.

No doubt some will applaud this as evidence of the entrepreneurial spirit that has seized the whole nation. But it seems to me that this misses something about the modern British spirit. At first, I could not quite put my finger on what it was that it missed, and then it came to me in a flash of inspiration, in the shape of a single word that is not much heard nowadays, perhaps because it is too near the bone: spiv.

It is not easy to define spivvery but, like kitsch, it is not difficult to recognise. One definition I found of a spiv is ‘a person without employment who makes money by various dubious schemes, goes about smartly dressed and having a good time’.

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Austin Barry

January 4th, 2008 5:09pm

Is Mr Brown a spiv? No, I don't think so. You need some flair to be a spiv and McBroon is completely lacking in chutzpah. His ghastly chum Peter Hain is though almost the perfect spiv.

Davyd Bowen

January 9th, 2008 4:22am

We once viewed quite a bit of British television programming in Canada. Your description of a spiv brought to mind the character that "Minder" minded. Unfortunately the name of the character and that of the actor who portrayed him has, well, slipped my mind.

Roger Cooper

January 12th, 2008 8:06am

Regarding relative height, I believe it's all 'in the eye of the beholder'. Being 6'2" myself I only consider a man tall if he's at least 6'4", while one of 5'8" is 'a bit on the short side', and so on. I judge women by other factors than height.