Generation wars
Sir: Viva Carol Sarler (‘Battle of the generations’, 31 March)! I don’t think I’ve ever read anything as ridiculous as Daniel Knowles’s babblings, which merit a strong riposte. It is galling to read a 24-year-old simplistically categorise all of we ‘baby-boomers’ (I was born in 1946) as the people responsible for today’s economic woes. Yes, a minuscule number of my generation are indeed responsible for much of the greed and selfishness which manifested itself in banking and government, but I am tired of the lame drivel which lays wholesale blame for our troubles at the doors of everyone in their middle sixties.
Mr Knowles needs to be reminded that millions of my generation made enormous sacrifices (in a good many instances placing their lives on the line in places such as the Falklands) as we grew up, and thus find it somewhat arrogant for a chap with so little experience of life to decree we should ‘pay up’ when we have been paying more than our share throughout our working lives.
We enjoy luxuries which our parents did not have, but to get them we went through childhood, teens and young adulthood with much less by way of comfort and security than our offspring and the likes of Mr Knowles now take for granted. His generation should stop bleating and passing the buck, and expend its talents and energy on filling life’s potholes rather than whining.
Anthony J. Burnet
East Lothian
Sir: As a 16-year-old GCSE student, I found Carol Sarler’s claim that currently ‘not a newsagent in sight can find a teenager prepared… to deliver papers’ utterly ignorant. I conduct a paper round myself. Her belief that ‘two solid hours’ homework every night’ is some archaic concept confined only to her school days is also severely mistaken. I do this in order to gain a university place, for which I will have to pay £9,000 annually, whereas she would have had hers free. I wish she had at least defended her argument with credible and factual evidence, rather than employing foolish stereotypes.
Ewan Day-Collins
London SW18
Sir: Both your contributors fail to recognise that very few of today’s pensioners are baby-boomers. The eldest baby-boomers reached 65 last year and have barely started to register in the statistics for pensioners. As a war baby myself, I have frequently referred to my coevals as the fortunate generation. The loudest complaints against the removal of the age-related tax allowances come from what my late mother used to refer to as the most selfish generation of all, people born between about 1932 and 1939. As children during the war they were treated with almost godlike reverence, and as teenagers and young adults they were the first, and possibly the last, generation to believe that the welfare state would provide cradle-to-grave care at taxpayers’ expense.
Antony Dew
London SW13
Open Access
Sir: A writer is always happy to have his copy improved by an editor, but some glitches were unfortunately introduced into my article on schools (‘The scholarship society’, 31 March). It ought to have made clear that my proposed Open Access scheme would see over 30,000 pupils attending leading independent day schools based on merit, who could not otherwise afford to attend. A corrected version can be read at new.spectator.co.uk/lampl.
Sir Peter Lampl
By email
A lot of bottle
Sir: Toby Young (Status Anxiety, 31 March) asks a good etiquette question: at what age does it become infra dig to get drunk in public? The limiting issue is not necessarily age, I would suggest, but a sense of one’s social standing. If, for instance, one were to set up a free school, pose as a champion of learning in a sea of leftie ignoramuses, and write lots of concomitant articles about the importance of teaching kids, it might be a bad idea to then get smashed with Nigel Farage at a literary jolly. But maybe I’m a prig.
Francis Church
Berkshire
The ugly truth
Sir: William Boyd (Diary, 31 March) calls Cologne ‘an ugly city’ and blames this on the 90 per cent destruction wrought on it by bombing. However, its negative image long precedes this. In 1828 Coleridge dedicated his less than flattering ‘Cologne’ to this place of ‘rags, and hags, and hideous wenches’ where he ‘counted two and seventy stenches/ All well defined, and several stinks!’
Sean McGlynn
Bradford on Avon
Best of breed
Sir: Ian Thomson states (‘Rover dose’, 17 March) that Lord Byron built a tomb for his pet labrador. This remarkable dog was a newfoundland, Boatswain (1803–1808), who unfortunately died of rabies. The poet wiped away the foam from the poor creature’s mouth himself and wrote to one of his friends: ‘He expired in a state of madness… after suffering much, yet retaining all the gentleness of his nature to the last, never attempting to do the least injury to any one.’ His portrait, as well as his tomb, is at Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire.
Margaret J. Howell,
Richmond, British Columbia
Twee’s company
Sir: I’m sorry that Charles Moore won’t be continuing his campaign against ‘Radio Twee’ (Notes, 31 March). Perhaps the following could serve as epitaph: Clemency Burton-Hill (again, I’m afraid) on Saturday morning, just after the weather forecast had indicated an end to the recent heatwave: ‘Well, it couldn’t last for ever, could it? And neither could poor old Schubert!’
Tim Hudson
Chichester
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