Society

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 8 June 2017

‘Get ready for the stink,’ said Oscar as we walked up the concrete ramp to the entrance of the ape house. As we pushed through the swing door, the smell of herbal manure and the humidity were momentarily overwhelming. Once our eyes had adjusted to the darkness, we saw the usual crowd gathered in front of the reinforced glass window that separated the mountain gorillas from the human beings. We had stupidly left Oscar’s iPad on the first bus of the three it had taken us to get there, but by now our devastation had given way to depression. The sight of these mountain gorillas made the iPad seem curiously

Melissa Kite

Real life | 8 June 2017

‘I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake with my council tax,’ I said to the lady at Guildford Borough Council. ‘Right,’ she said, only just disguising a yawn and starting to tap away doing something else on her computer. I wasn’t surprised. I had just been through a series of recorded options that more than adequately summed up what Guildford Borough’s expectations of its customers were. Pretty much: ‘Press one if you’ve had a letter about a bailiff’s visit, press two if you feel you’ve got some vague, tenuous piece of information which will persuade us to let you off your council tax, only it won’t. Press three if you want

Robin Oakley

The turf | 8 June 2017

Nobody I know has ever been interviewed by an opinion pollster. Nor do I ever encounter anybody who has won one of those holidays in the Bahamas we are encouraged to enter competitions for every time we open a crisp packet or pull the tab off a soft-drink can. I used to be equally sceptical of claims that bookmakers lost between £15 million and £20 million on 28 September 1996, the day Frankie Dettori rode all seven winners on the Ascot cards. I know plenty of people who bet on horses, but none who lay out seven-horse accumulators on a single jockey’s rides. This week I am a little less

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 8 June 2017

Every time I read Andrew Robson’s bridge column and he mentions that ‘a reader from wherever’ sent him an interesting hand, I feel the putrid green god of envy enter my body and make its way slowly into my heart. Why? Why him? I ask myself. Why doesn’t some reader from ANYWHERE send me a hand? Is it because he’s a better player than me? Is it because his column is better than mine? Nah. Can’t be. Well — it happened. A reader has sent ME a hand (eat your heart out, Robbo). Well, not really a reader — more of a friend, actually — and one I wrote up

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 8 June 2017

Home Eight people were killed and 48 taken to hospital when three men, in a hire van travelling south shortly after 10 p.m. on Saturday, ran into pedestrians on London Bridge, then jumped out with knives and attacked people in pubs and restaurants around Borough Market. A policeman tackled one of the knifemen with a truncheon and was wounded. At 10.16 p.m., police firing 46 shots killed the men, who were wearing fake explosive vests with visible canisters. A bystander was wounded in the head by a police bullet. Police led people to safety and cleared a wide area. The Islamic State said it was behind the attack. Police named

Fieldfare

2313: Goldfish by Fieldfare

In ten clues the wordplay leads to the answer plus one extra letter. These letters in clue order give a name (two words) to which are questionably attributed the unclued lights (in Brewer), which make three phrases: one of six words, one of three, one of four (thematically five?).   Across 4    See me in especial trouble, not all at once (9) 10    Confused playwright about to get between the sheets (10) 11    One stranded, pot appearing empty (6) 12    ‘With band in hair’ — poem in neat Scottish (7) 14    From Lincoln, obtain produce (5) 15    Pope is to agitate, forgetting Latin (5) 16    Off course? Just like carrier!

James Innes-Smith

The doorstep

You have probably been hearing a lot about doorsteps recently. Politicians love to demonstrate how much they care about ordinary, hard-working voters by banging on about how many front doors they’ve knocked on. Standing on a doorstep, preferably in the driving rain, proves how dedicated you are to getting your message of ‘hope’ and ‘change’ across. An hour or two pounding provincial avenues, camera crew in tow, pays dividends back at the TV studio where you can then boast about how many of the electorate are on your side. Of course the reality of doorstepping is much bleaker. Politicians rarely tell you about the utter dreariness of hanging around on

Fieldfare

2310: Constitutional Amendment

Procne (37D), Tereus (23D), Scylla (19D) and Arachne (30D) were all given as anagrams, as was Ovid (42D). Daphne (1D) changed to laurel, and Niobe (7A) to stone, as in the Metamorphoses (45A).   First prize Stephen Saunders, Midford, Bath Runners-up R. Wightman, Ilkley, W. Yorks; Rafe Magrath, London SW13

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Books Podcast: William Empson’s legacy

In this week’s Books Podcast, we’re talking about William Empson, one of the most brilliant and captivatingly eccentric literary critics and poets of the twentieth century. Michael Wood, Emeritus Professor at Princeton and author of the new On Empson, joins me to discuss the strange life and mercurial thought of the man who first discerned Seven Types of Ambiguity. (Not to mention using rashers of bacon as bookmarks, travelling to Japan with nothing but a pair of tennis shoes and a lemon in his luggage, encouraging his wife’s infidelity, being sent down from Cambridge for owning condoms, and owning the strangest beard in the history of English letters…) You can listen to our conversation

Laura Whitcombe

Credit cards: don’t be fooled by long balance transfer deals

If you’re looking for a balance transfer credit card deal, don’t be fooled into thinking you’ll save the most money by plumping for the card that comes with the longest interest-free period. Such cards usually charge a fee for switching your debt and can render the deal far less cost effective. The longest interest-free balance transfer period available at the time of writing is 42 months[1], as offered by both the MBNA Platinum 42 Month Balance Transfer Credit Card Visa and nuba Transfer Credit Card MasterCard. But these cards come with transfer fees of 2.79 and 3.29 per cent respectively. On a balance of £4,000, that would cost the cardholder

Will Heaven

To catch a jihadi

My taxi was about 90 seconds behind the murderers who struck on London Bridge last week. My wife and I saw their victims on the road. It made no sense until we stopped and got out. Then with horror we realised what we were witnessing. As everyone has already said, the emergency services’ response was flawless. A police 4×4 screeched up behind and two officers jumped out with submachine-guns. Within minutes, we learnt afterwards, the jihadis had been shot dead — but only after they had killed eight people, and injured scores more. Hundreds of others will have been on that bridge or in Borough Market. I suspect all of

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 10 June

Heaven help us, it’s barbecue season. You know, that ghastly time of year when testosterone-fuelled hunter-gatherers push the little lady aside and fire up the rusting, bird poo-covered grate in the garden and ask the neighbours over. Never mind that these poor saps never darken the kitchen the other 11-and-a-half months of the year (and wouldn’t know what to do there if they did), nor that the little lady in question is a hugely capable Leiths-trained cook as well as a multi–tasking barrister/entrepreneur/CEO/novelist and mother of three, no doubt. I’ve never ‘got’ barbecues. The food’s either scorched or raw. I mean, isn’t it to save us from such things that

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Hacked off with the haka

Kingsley Amis said the most depressing words in the English language were ‘Shall we go straight in?’ — meaning no pre-dinner drinks. But for many of us it’s: ‘Tonight is the folklore evening.’ At any holiday resort in the world this signals a bloke with a balalaika and plump ladies in national dress giving it large with some traditional and intermin-able dance. Time to head for the bar. So let’s look at the ‘haka’, the preamble to any All Blacks rugby match, and now more or less any game on the current Lions tour. The Auckland Blues had knocked one up for their Lions game this week. It was called

Paul Wood

Big trouble in little Qatar

 Washington DC At 8:06 on Tuesday morning the Tweeter-in-Chief reached for his Android phone and told the world: ‘During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar — look!’ At 9:36 a.m. we heard from @realDonaldTrump again. ‘So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with the King and 50 countries already paying off. They said they would take a hard line on funding… extremism, and all reference was pointing to Qatar. Perhaps this will be the beginning of the end to the horror of terrorism!’ The US President was showing his support for an

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

There’s no need to tell children about terrorists

Saturday evening in Durham. My in-laws and I had just begun our usual postprandial shout about Donald Trump when my niece appeared at the door, pale and serious. ‘There’s been another terrorist attack in London,’ she said. ‘I’m scared.’ The veins of the men in my husband’s family run with a sort of event-activated coolant. No one asked what had happened or how many were dead. My father-in-law said: ‘Don’t be daft. What’s there to be scared of?’ His brother added: ‘You’re more likely to be killed by cows.’ This, though not strictly true, is less ludicrous than you might imagine. Some 90 Brits were killed by terrorist attacks in

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Let there be dark

Who’s afraid of the dark? Who now fears shadows and bumps in the night? Where do you even find any dark to be afraid of when your phone is only a pocket away? One swipe and the screen lights up blue-white like the old explorer’s match in a cave. If I wake in the night I don’t bother with the bedside lamp. A bar of light comes under the blinds. Lights from the flats opposite. Fire-escape lights from the hotel next door. The jaundice glow of London light pollution. Even staying with my parents, on the edge of a village, there’s no real darkness. There are lights from the lane,

Lucy Vickery

Health matters

In Competition No. 3001 you were invited to take inspiration from the recently published Walt Whitman’s Guide to Manly Health and Training and supply an extract from a similar guide penned by another well-known writer. While Whitman extols the benefits of stale bread and fresh air and cautions against eating between meals, Fiona Pitt-Kethley’s John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester advocates a rather less ascetic approach: ‘Swiving’s the only manly exercise/ To tone the glutes and work the inner thighs/ No bench presses, go press a wench instead./ Roll up your yoga mat and go to bed.’ In a small but distinguished entry Mike Morrison takes £30; his fellow winners are

Wednesday

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

When will the Six-Day War finally end?

This week, Israel is marking the 50th anniversary of its improbable victory over Arab assassins. Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser saw annihilation of the Jewish state as a uniting mission for his project of pan-Arab nationalism and had declared: ‘Our path to Palestine will be covered with blood.’ In June 1967, he enlisted Syria and Jordan in his plans for invasion and few thought Israel, then a meagre strip of land nine miles wide at its narrowest point, could withstand the onslaught. Herzl’s dream in the desert was about to be unwilled.  In a stroke of tactical cunning, though at the time it looked to be an act of suicide, Israel

Helen Nugent

House prices are…staying pretty much the same

Depending on which way you look at it, today’s house price data from Halifax is either good or bad news. Taken one way it paints a gloomy picture, with house price growth continuing to slow. According to the lender, in the year to May house price inflation dropped to 3.3 per cent, down from 3.8 per cent in the year to April. However, a different interpretation is more positive. The statistics also reveal that UK house prices increased for the first time in five months in May, thanks to historically low mortgage rates and a shortage of available properties. Halifax says that the average house price rose by 0.4 per