Society

Thursday

Cosmo Landesman

Should I grow old gracefully – or disgracefully?

Now that I’m about to turn 70, I’m wondering: shall I grow old gracefully, or disgracefully? Everyone I know, young and old, tells me that I must go disgracefully (and that’s how they plan to go, or so they say). It seems that growing old gracefully has gone out of style – especially for women – but maybe it’s time for a revival? After a life of doing right and responsible things, you can now let your hair down – if you have any left What’s the difference between the two? Growing older gracefully is about letting go of the pleasures of youth – sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll or

Melissa Kite

My B&B’s first celebrity guest

The TV talent show star was due to arrive at 5 p.m., and would be checking into our house long before we were ready to open it as a B&B. I said yes to the lady in the village who organises events, and she told me to expect this singer who is very popular in Ireland, and his band, who would be performing at the local folk festival. Kids, babies, female friends holding babies. I leaned to my friend: ‘They can’t all be staying at mine, can they?’ I spent weeks trying to make our partially renovated Georgian house look acceptable, and then the builder boyfriend had to go to

Aidan Hartley

Life lessons from a 2,000-year-old plant

Iona, Angola East of the gulps of cormorants along the Skeleton Coast by the Ilha da Baia dos Tigres, Atlantic mists are rolling in across the Angolan desert. A red, alien sun dips towards the horizon and I’m crouching down on the sand, with my face close to the oldest living thing on our planet. If the oldest living thing in the world dies, that’s not a cheery message for the rest of the planet Some say the Welwitschia mirabilis plant, which can grow for 2,000 years, looks like an octopus, with its green leaves spreading like tentacles in a circle. In Afrikaans it’s apparently known as the ‘tweeblaarkanniedood’ –

Flora Watkins

It may be too late to save trail hunting

There’s a grumble, often repeated among country folk, that ‘hunting people got hunting banned’. What they mean (I think) is that a combination of complacency, arrogance and the failure to get the public onside is what did for hunting. It’s not really fair: arguably, without the disaster of the Iraq war, Tony Blair may not have felt he needed to chuck a piece of legislation at his backbenchers, like a juicy bone to a pack of hungry hounds. The hunting ban never was about animal welfare, but class hatred, Dennis Skinner declaring that the bill was ‘for the miners’. The ban, Blair later admitted, was ‘one of the domestic legislative

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 28 September 2024

One of the greatest areas of misunderstanding is doubling. Is it penalty? Is it take out? Is it negative? Recently I heard about a pair who were playing exclusion blackwood (or at least one of them was) and ended up playing 5♣ (undoubled) in a 0-0 fit. True story.  You need trumps to double a game (unless they have obviously screwed up) but it will usually cost a trick. Doubling a slam is a different story. North expected a bit more from a second-in-hand vulnerable 4♥ opening and jumped to slam. West figured she probably had a trump trick in addition to her Ace, so gave it ‘the message’, but

Toby Young Toby Young

Why play the Saudi anthem before an all-British boxing match?

For only the second time in my life, I went to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia last weekend. At least, it felt like I was in Saudi. I’m talking about the Anthony Joshua-Daniel Dubois fight at Wembley Stadium. Billed as the British version of George Foreman vs Joe Frazier, it was bankrolled by the Saudis and might as well have been taking place in Riyadh. The Master of Ceremonies was not Michael Buffer, then American ring announcer – although he was there and did say ‘Let’s get ready to rumble!’ – but His Excellency Turki Alalshikh, chairman of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority. His moustachioed face, framed by a headdress,

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Whatever happened to Lionel Shriver?

For many readers, my absence from these pages may have gone unnoticed. Those few who’ve detected my disappearance might have idly concocted theories: maybe Shriver crossed a line in her opposition to uncontrolled illegal immigration such that she finally got the sack. The explanation is more quotidian. Six years ago, I was diagnosed with the unwieldy sounding spondylolisthesis: a vertebra in my lower spine had moved out of alignment, squeezing the nerves to my right hip and leg. I’d been managing, but the situation was degenerative. By this summer, I could barely complete a 15-minute walk, and – the limit – I could not play tennis. Already in NYC, International

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Mad Men theory of drunk decision-making

In electing this government, we seem to have picked the worst of both worlds: higher taxation combined with austerity in the public finances. The one bonus I had hoped to see from a left-wing regime was a healthily indulgent approach to spending. Instead we get a Chancellor of the Exchequer who is a former Bank of England economist. Voting Labour and getting a neo-liberal Chancellor is like going on a Club 18-30 holiday and bringing your parents along. It defeats the purpose of the exercise. Our education and political systems select for the ability to win arguments far more than for the ability to solve problems In 2012 the Nobel

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: I received a ‘save the date’ – but no formal invitation

Q. Fewer people carry cash. The traditional pourboire is at risk. I am bored with lending money to our otherwise lovely house guests. Would it be unmentionably vulgar to install simple swipe card machines in the spare bedrooms? Please advise, I would be grateful. – N.C., Stanton St Bernard, Wilts A. Swipe machines are not the answer. There are two categories of likely offenders here. One: people under a certain age are often unaware of the custom of tip-leaving. They need to be told. Two: guests who are aware but never carry cash, then suffer from post-hospitality remorse when they forget to pick some up and have to leave without

Bruce Anderson

Nick Elliott and a life worth drinking to

The English language has immense resources, but the odd weakness. What, for instance, is the translation for ‘Auld lang syne’? We were discussing that profound topic while telling stories about absent friends, recalling the occasional bottle and thinking about Britain. Nick Elliott’s response to grim news was to open a bottle of Mouton Rothschild ’82 A fascinating fellow called Tim Spicer, who commanded a battalion of the Scots Guards, has written a book about an even more remarkable chap called Biffy Dunderdale. Biffy was the sort of man who helped to win our nation’s wars, including the (first) Cold War. In these pages a couple of weeks ago, Charles Moore

Dot Wordsworth

Rachel Reeves, Becky Sharp and the ‘black hole’

Becky Sharp, you’ll remember, near the beginning of Vanity Fair, throws the school gift of a Johnson’s Dictionary out of the window of the coach. She responds to Amelia Sedley’s horror by saying with a laugh: ‘Do you think Miss Pinkerton will come out and order me back to the black-hole?’ This is not the £22 billion black hole that Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, teases us with. I’m surprised she has persevered with it, especially as it employed black pejoratively. As I mentioned last year, UK Finance, a banking trade body, declared that black market should be replaced with illegal market lest it suggest racial bias. Black hole, in Becky

The Spectator

Where did ‘heckler’ come from?

What the heckler No party conference would be complete without a heckler or two, but where did the term come from? A heckle was originally a tool for combing flax or hemp, and a heckler someone who worked with such a device. The term was first applied to politics in the 1820s when the notoriously militant hecklers of Dundee would disrupt political meetings. Their efforts did not, however, ultimately save their jobs when the process of heckling was mechanised. Home truths How many people work from home (WFH)? – Last year, 16% of the workforce reported WFH exclusively, while 28% said they were on hybrid working. – In spite of

Christian Wolmar

Trams make a comeback

Earlier this month, the fortunate folk of Frankfurt were entertained by the 11th annual tram-drivers competition, with entries from 26 teams representing 20 countries across Europe. This is as crazy as it sounds, a kind of Olympiad for trams. How do trams compete, given they are not exactly flexible in terms of where they can go and cannot spin round Le Mans-type racetracks? Well, the devisers of this contest have created a series of challenges for the teams of three – two tram drivers, one male and one female, and an assistant. The obvious tests included coming to a halt within a centimetre of a stop along a 300-metre track

Rachel Johnson

The best podcasts to fall asleep to

‘Yous!’ a train cleaner in rubber gloves says as we arrive at Liverpool Lime Street. ‘What are yous doing here?’ He is grinning and holding up the political journalists and delegates dribbling from the Euston train like a leaky hose. Behind me waits Tim Shipman, the consummate chronicler of Conservative political chaos. I once sent Shippers a photograph of me sitting between my brothers Boris and Jo in a row on a cream chintz sofa at Chevening, all holding his hardback Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. It was 2017. Instead of exchanging books which we had written – as is the family Christmas custom – everyone had given

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Starmer’s sausages slip-up, Israel’s strikes on Lebanon and Amazon staff summoned back to office

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, in his speech to the Labour party conference in Liverpool, said that ‘if we take tough long-term decisions now’ Britain would much more quickly reach the ‘light at the end of this tunnel’. He was cheered when he promised to return the railways to public ownership and restore workplace rights to unions and workers. But he insisted that ‘if we want cheaper electricity, we need new pylons over ground otherwise the burden on taxpayers is too much’. He recovered from a fluff when, talking of Gaza, he called ‘for the return of the sausages – the hostages’. Sir Keir hoped to counteract recent

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Who’d be an MP now?

Sir Keir Starmer offered a sausage to fortune when he let Lord Alli bankroll half the cabinet. One’s heart does not bleed for those ministers assailed for taking his gifts in cash and kind. They have spent the last few years being mercilessly sanctimonious. But their plight does confirm that being a Member of Parliament has become an ever more disagreeable life and is therefore pursued by people ever less representative of the population. The traditional compensation for MPs’ relatively low salaries was a) some freedom to earn money elsewhere and b) respect. Both have dramatically diminished. Deference meant, for example, that few dared disturb their MP at home at

Paul Wood

Is Israel trying to drag America into a war with Iran?

The American general David Petraeus famously asked of the invasion of Iraq: ‘Tell me how this ends.’ That’s the question as Israeli bombs and missiles fall on Lebanon and the few missiles Hezbollah has sent in response are intercepted. Iran’s ‘axis of resistance’ seems paralysed with indecision. Does Benjamin Netanyahu take this as a win, the vindication of the enormous chance he took by opening a new northern front? Or, like a gambler intoxicated by success at the tables, does he press on? More airstrikes, followed by an invasion of Lebanon… and then the bombers fly on to Iran?  Some Israelis commentators are already calling this the Third Lebanon War

Wednesday

Jawad Iqbal

Why is Sadiq Khan trying to restart his fight with Donald Trump?

London mayor Sadiq Khan, whose official day job is running the capital, is in New York this week, where he has denounced Donald Trump and urged Americans to vote for Kamala Harris. Trump would set the wrong tone for the rest of the world, Khan declared. ‘What I’d say in a respectful way to Americans is: I don’t think you realise that the rest of the world is watching because we’ve got skin in the game,’ he said. Come again? Trump would set the wrong tone for the rest of the world, Khan declared Americans are choosing a leader for their country. What the world thinks about this – least of

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why are we deceiving ourselves about Britain’s obesity problem?

Is it really true that obesity rates in England have stabilised or fallen, as has been reported today – and that, according to the Obesity Health Alliance, this may be down to things like junk food being removed from supermarket checkouts and calories being provided on menus?  While obesity rates have ballooned, smoking rates have collapsed On the face of it there is one remarkable statistic in the latest figures provided by NHS England for 2022: 13 per cent of 2-15 year old boys were recorded as obese, down from a fifth in 2019 and the lowest figure since 1998. There were no figures produced for 2020 and 2021 owing