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Letters

Wednesday, 16th January 2008

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

At a Labour party parliamentary dinner for visiting Soviet leaders, Khrushchev and Bulganin in the 1950s, the future foreign minister George Brown wound up Mr K to such a degree that the Communist boss fumed he found it easier to talk with British Conservatives than with Labour leaders. The following day he added for good measure that if the Labour party was the face of British socialism, he’d prefer to be a Tory. The faces and ideologies may change, but it seems that Russo–Conservative affections die hard — albeit nourished by mutual agendas.

Maurice Jones

Rossendale Valley, Lancashire

The problem with choice

Sir: I agree with Charles Moore that the British are simply not healthier and better treated by the NHS than patients in neighbouring countries (The Spectator’s Notes, 12 January) but I wonder whether we all really want a choice of services.

A recent GP referral, instead of offering me an appointment (which I could have changed or cancelled if I so wished) sent me four A4 pages of instructions. They included a booking reference number, a password, warnings about legal action, a choice of four hospitals (three unknown and only one within reach), eight possible telephone contacts and several textphone and internet contacts.

The old-fashioned alternative of requesting a specific referral from one’s GP and responding to a proposed appointment seems a great deal more convenient, more economical and less confusing.

If this is ‘choice’, I should gladly forego it and save an awful lot of paper and administrative time.

Pauline Holroyd

West Winterslow, Wiltshire

The speed of time

Sir: In response to Toby Young’s search for an explanation as to why time speeds up as we get older (Status anxiety, 5 January), I have my own (non-scientific) theory. When I was 20, five years was one quarter of my life. When I will be 80, five years will be only one 16th of my life. The smaller the fraction, the faster it passes.

Barbara Day

Prague

Tudors: not very Welsh

Sir: Your correspondent Mr Williams objects to my description of Henry VIII as the ‘English Stalin’ on the grounds that the Tudor dynasty was Welsh (Letters, 5 January). It is true that its founder, Henry VII, had a Welsh grandfather. But his grandmother was Flemish and Bavarian, his mother was English and his father a mixture of English, French and Welsh. As S.B. Chrimes, author of the best life of Henry VII, writes, ‘the Welshness of Henry Tudor can be, and often is, exaggerated.’ As he married an Englishwoman his son Henry VIII was even less Welsh. He showed no interest in Wales except to suppress its institutions and incorporate it in England, a characteristic act of the English Stalin.

Paul Johnson

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Guy Liardet

February 12th, 2008 3:56pm

with regard to the Virgin Birth question and Dr Mason's letter, my 'libel' of the early church fathers was based on St Augustine of Hippo's fathering of a son on his North African concubine, his disertion and subsequent statement that it was wrong for a woman, even an elderly sister, to live under the same roof as a Servant of God. St Jerome, always a rich source of misogynistic quotes, wonders whether it is licit for a virgin to bathe at all, 'for in seeing their own bodies there is the potential for desire'. The 'Custody of the Enclosure' in the Rule of the Poor Clares is redolent of a prurient sexual repression and mistrust. The historian Howard Bloch in his chapter 'The Poetics of Virginity in 'Medieval Misogyny and the Birth of European Romantic Love' (1991)paints a sad picture of the church's deep psychosexual muddle. Paul in Galatians Ch4 is heralding the essential normalcy of God's gift of his Son - the Word made Flesh, if you like- if he had known about,believed in, needed a virgin birth to prop up Christ's divinity, he would surely have said so, loud and clear. Geza Vermes (The Changing Face of Jesus 2001)deals with the 'mistranslation' question in scholarly fashion - the meaning of the words betulah and parthenos, Jewish legal definitions of virginity which include a girl pregnant before her first menstruation (not unusual in some societies even today) who is classified as a 'virgin mother'