Society

Thursday

11 Aug 2016

Dear Mary | 11 August 2016

Q. I live in Balham but work in Mayfair. Twice recently I have had to take whole days off work to wait in for deliveries of online purchases that could only be scheduled for ‘some time between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.’ My son says this is the hidden price I must pay for shopping at low-cost outlets. I have a cleaner but she doesn’t work a 12-hour day. What do other people do? —J.F., London SW12 A. Other people have had the sense to make friends with retired neighbours. Many of these long for the chance to get away from their partners and sit quietly reading in a neighbour’s

Raymond Keene

no. 421

White to play. This position is from Steinitz–Chigorin, World Championship (Game 4), Havana 1892. How did White finish off? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 16 August or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Qxc8+ Last week’s winner Feliks Kwiatkowski, Haywards Heath, West Sussex

Pabulum

2273: Numbers

Clockwise round the perimeter from 3 run the titles of three items (1, 6, 3, 1, 4, 2, 1, 4, 1, 4, 3, 4, 5, 6, 3, 4) from the same source, the title of which is epitomised by the four unclued lights. Ignore two apostrophes. Across 8 Slowly cycling with a bouquet? (5) 9 Party hit the roof in court (6, hyphened) 10 Man feels relaxed and gets angry no more (8) 12 Poet’s precious metalon the other side of Scotland (4) 14 How airlock puzzled tireless toiler (10) 15 Silkworms stupidsort uses (8) 20 Dish with oomph is round cuddling that man (7) 21 Small group of cells

Fraser Nelson

Sales of The Spectator: 2016 H1

The UK magazine industry publishes its circulation figures today, and there is good news for The Spectator: the highest sales ever in our long and illustrious 188-year history. Our web traffic has hit an all time high: we broke 4m monthly unique users during the referendum campaign, which is quite something for a ‘paywalled’ publication. But traffic comes and goes. What matters is whether the new readers like what they see and, when they encounter the paywall, decide to join us. They are now doing so in record numbers. As a result our subscriptions are soaring. Our print sales figure now stands at 56,632 for the first half of this

David Gelber

The first favela

Where are you going?’ demanded the boy on the wall. A walkie-talkie clipped to his denim shorts crackled, but there was no sign of a weapon. ‘The English Cemetery,’ I answered. He slid down. ‘You need to go back that way. Take the road on the right.’ The street in question was a dustbowl where diggers flattened the ground for the tramlines that should have arrived in time for the Olympics. But no, he insisted, there was no way of reaching the cemetery through the favela. There are favelas and there are favelas, and the mesh of houses, shacks and alleys that extends across Morro da -Providência, above the English

James Delingpole

Christopher Biggins and the fall of civilisation

Suppose you’d invited me round to dinner to celebrate my engagement to your daughter, which do you think would be more offensive? If a) I got violently drunk, threatened all the male guests, abused the women doing the catering, shoved my tongue in my hostess’s ear, hurled a bottle through the window, felt up all the bridesmaids under the table, then retreated to the jacuzzi to shag your daughter’s best friend? Or b) if I made a mildly tasteless quip about the Holocaust? There’s only one correct answer and it is, of course, b). We know this thanks to the latest series of Celebrity Big Brother, whose makers have peremptorily

Pabulum

to 2270: Hard

Seven unclued lights were names of VERSE-MEN (22) minus one letter: VI(R)GIL (1A), BRO(O)KE (15A), BRID(G)ES (16), DON(N)E (9), S(P)ENDER (21),(W)HITMAN (30) and PO(U)ND (34D). Title: Hard(y). First prize Mrs C. Turner, Highgate, London Runners-up F. J. Bentley, Tiverton, Devon; Alexander Caldin, Salford, Oxfordshire

Laura Whitcombe

Nuisance neighbours sink UK house prices by £17,000

How I long for a detached house with a drive – and, more importantly, no neighbours. My current abode is a three-bed semi with no off-street parking. It’s a free parking street but before you think I’m boasting, it’s also close to three primary schools, has a corner shop and most of the residents seem to be building loft extensions. Taken together, it adds up to pretty painful parking. It gets even worse when one of the tank-driving neighbours is home as he frequently takes up two spaces, which is particularly vexing when I’ve got a boot full of heavy groceries and there are no spaces near the house. Then

Helen Nugent

Housing market, insurance hikes, pension woes and debt problems

The UK housing market ran out of steam after the Brexit vote, but could take off again over the next 12 months, according to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. A Rics survey showed house price rises slowed significantly in the three months to the end of July. The surveyors said new buyer enquiries, home sales and new instructions all fell over the period. The number reporting price increases dropped to its lowest in three years. They outnumbered those seeing price falls by 5 per cent, compared to 15 per cent in June. And the survey found prices had fallen outright in London, East Anglia, the North of England and the West Midlands. Insurance Insurers

Tom Goodenough

The Spectator podcast: The memory gap. Is technology taking over our minds?

Smartphone ownership is predicted to hit 2.5 billion by 2019 and 60 per cent of internet traffic now comes through our mobile devices. But does the world becoming more reliant on handheld gadgets to guide us in day-to-day life come at a price? In her cover piece this week, Lara Prendergast claims that we are outsourcing our brains to the internet and that technology is taking over our minds. On this week’s Spectator podcast, Lara is joined by Isabel Hardman, Charlotte Jee, Editor of Techworld, and Professor Martin Conway, head of psychology at City University. On the podcast, Lara tells Isabel: ‘I do think it’s having an effect on me

Mark Palmer

In defence of dinner parties

In or out? Almost two months on and I’m afraid the great debate shows no sign of abating, certainly not in our divided household. And while we’ve had several referendums over the matter, the result is always a stalemate. The only upside is that this argument has nothing to do with Brussels. It’s far more rudimentary. The battle in Palmer Towers is whether we eat in or out when wanting to see friends. My wife Joanna — who, as it happens, was for In over the country’s EU membership — is a firm outer, while I, who voted Out on 23 June, am a determined inner. As with the EU

Lucy Vickery

Summertime

In Competition No. 2960 you were invited to submit a poem on the theme of summer in which the last two words of each line rhyme. It was only after the entries started coming in that I realised that my sloppy wording meant that the brief was open to interpretation. In most submissions, the last two words in a line rhymed with one another, which is what I had intended, but a few of you supplied poems in which the last two words in a line rhymed with the last two in the line below. Either approach was admissible, and variety made the comp all the more pleasurable to judge.

Rory Sutherland

When more data makes you more wrong

In a one-day international against Australia last year, Ben Stokes was dismissed for ‘obstructing the field’, a rule rarely invoked in-cricket. The bowler had thrown the ball towards the wicket (and hence near Stokes’s head) in an attempt to run him out. Stokes raised his hand and deflected the ball. After some discussion between the two on-field umpires, and a referral to the third umpire, Stokes was given out. What was most interesting was the difference in the conclusions people reached depending on whether they watched the replay in real time or in slow motion (you can find both on YouTube). Seen at speed, his raising of his hand looked

Bruce Anderson

Character study

Will Lyons, a delightful companion, is not only a friend of mine. He has one of the finest palates in these islands, and has already been immortalised by Alexander McCall Smith in the 44 Scotland Street series. Those books feature another character, an appalling man called Bruce Anderson, who in no way resembles this columnist. For one thing, he is less than half my age. He also spends much of his time breaking girls’ hearts throughout the New Town. Chance would be a fine thing. Anyway, Sandy McCall Smith’s fictional Bruce Anderson decides at one stage that he might like to become a wine merchant, so consults the real Will Lyons,

Simon Barnes

Olympic Notebook

How strange it is to be watching the Olympic Games on television. No wonder people have such rum ideas of what the whole thing is about. This is the first time I’ve watched the Games on telly since 1984; the next seven times I was in the city of choice, working for a newspaper. My first Games was Seoul in 1988 and it was there I became a sporting Galileo. I realised that Great Britain was not, after all, the centre of the Olympic universe, around which everything else revolved. No, we were just one satellite among 200 or so. Perhaps I should have been excommunicated. The man from Mars

Lara Prendergast

Heads in the cloud

The Spectator podcast: Listen to Isabel Hardman, Lara Prendergast, Charlotte Jee, Editor of Techworld, and Professor Martin Conway, head of psychology at City University discuss the memory gap. Ask me what I had for lunch yesterday and I couldn’t tell you. Names disappear as swiftly as smoke. Birthdays, capital cities, phone numbers — the types of facts that used to come so readily — are no longer forthcoming. I’m 26, yet I feel I have the memory of a 70-year-old. My brain is a port through which details pass, but don’t stay. I’m not alone. Many young people feel our memories have been shot to pieces. It’s the embarrassing secret of my

Christopher Caldwell

Trump holds the aces

Last week, the New York Times ran the page one headline ‘Pence Supports Ryan, Showing GOP Turmoil.’ There was turmoil in the Republican party because Mike Pence, its vice-presidential nominee, had endorsed the candidacy of Paul Ryan, its most powerful congressman. One wonders what the Times would have called it had the two men actually disagreed about something. The Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump had waited days before endorsing Ryan, a signal that he had not forgotten Ryan’s slowness to back him in the spring. And the whole press is now in a frenzy of negative reporting about the Trump campaign. These have been ‘weeks of self-inflicted controversies and plummeting

Mark Mason

Straight talking | 11 August 2016

Thirty years ago this week, Queen performed what would turn out to be their last gig, at Knebworth. Their penultimate concert, at Wembley, was shown on Channel 4. I recorded it, and became obsessed. Time after time I watched-Freddie Mercury prance on to the stage sporting a moustache you could have swept a factory floor with. I watched him simulate the act of self-love with his famous sawn-off mic stand. I watched him preen, pout and posture, shaking his backside at the crowd, reappearing at the end dressed as the Queen. The previous year I’d watched him at Live Aid wearing a skimpy white vest and a leather armband studded

Martin Vander Weyer

Why not use RBS as an experiment in narrowing the top-to-bottom pay gap?

Theresa May sent a strong message to the corporate world when she criticised the ‘irrational, unhealthy and growing gap’ between the pay of top executives and average workers. Yet what should be a vigorous debate on this topic — about the balance between fairness and the right incentives for optimum performance — never quite takes off. More evidence came to hand this week from the ‘independent non-party’ High Pay Centre: it reports that average pay for a FTSE 100 chief executive last year was £5.5 million, up by 10 per cent on 2014 and a third since 2010, and that the ratio between chiefs’ average total pay and that of

Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 13 August

A tasty selection this week courtesy of FromVineyardsDirect.com, the masters at snuffling out tucked-away treasures for bargain prices. FVD’s founders, Esme Johnstone and David Campbell, have impeccable contacts and seem to know everyone who matters in the regions that matter. As a result, they nab tiny parcels of this and that from both well-established and up-and-coming producers and we, dear reader, are the-beneficiaries. First, the 2015 Esterházy Estoras Grüner Veltliner (1) from Burgenland in Austria. I once spent a lot of time in Austria and have always loved its signature grape. When in the right hands, as here, GV somehow manages to combine the lusciousness of Pinot Gris, the bouquet of