Books & arts – 23 March 2016
Society
Wednesday
To 2250: Knavish
The unclued lights can be preceded by JACK. First prize Margaret Lusk, Preston, Lancs Runners-up P.D.H. Riddell, London SE23; Derek Willan, Gosport, Hants
Poisonous pensions: why we will work until we drop
No-one in their right mind would have willingly created the monster that is now the country’s current pension system. It has become the financial Hydra of modern day Britain. Bizarrely, it is deterring most of us from saving for retirement because we are intimidated by its many heads of poisonous anti-saving rules. Governments past and present – red, blue and in-between – are primarily to blame for turning what should be a saver’s friend into a foe. Greedy pension providers with their rapacious charges haven’t helped either. Politicians have meddled furiously, justifying it on the grounds that pension savers enjoy generous – and costly – tax privileges. In doing so, they
Tracey Emin has married a rock – but did the stone give consent?
It’s a tough world out there for singletons in the digital age. Although dating apps like Tinder mean it’s never been easier to look for love, many find that any such romance is fleeting and miss the days of proper courtship. So, perhaps that’s why some women are now thinking outside the box. The artist Tracey Emin has announced that she has finally taken the plunge and got hitched. However, rather than a lucky man or woman, Emin has found love with a… rock. Yes, Emin has married an inanimate object after the pair met in France. For the ceremony, Emin wore her father’s white funeral shroud. While the ancient stone is thought
Money digest: today’s need-to-know financial news | 23 March 2016
After years in the doldrums, the reinvigorated housing market continues apace. With a stamp duty stampede attributed to rising prices in London, the south east and the east of England, the boom shows no signs of petering out. According to the Office for National Statistics, house prices nationally rose by 7.9 per cent in the year to January. That lifts the average price of a home to £292,000, although surveys from estate agents have suggested that the real figure could be even higher. Houseowners in England are reaping the biggest rewards, the figures suggest. Prices rose by 8.6 per cent in England in the year to the end of January, the ONS said,
Seuss talk
In Competition No. 2940 you were invited to supply Dr Seuss’s take on the US presidential race. Given his taste for taking down bullies, tyrants and hypocrites, it seems unlikely that Theodor Geisel would have been a fan of the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, who, as might be expected, loomed large in your submissions. It was a tall order to ape Seuss’s imaginative, subversive genius but you produced a lively and varied entry. Commendations to Mae Scanlan, Frank Upton, Brian Allgar and Alan Millard. Those printed below take £25; Chris O’Carroll pockets £30. McTrumpeter trumpets, ‘I’m born to be Prez! I say the things no other candidate sez! I’m
On the trail of a Holy Grail
It was a scene evoking the first movement of the Pastoral Symphony. The evening sunshine was caressing the verdant woods at the top of a hill. It was only a low hill; there seemed nothing especial about this sweet rural scene. But just below the woods, the upper slopes contain some of the most valuable agricultural land in the world, producing magnificent wine. We were looking up from Gevrey-Chambertin towards the domain of the grands crus. Not everything was as joyous in recent years, Dijon has expanded. France, with the same population, is two and a half times as large as the UK, so land is cheap. There is nothing
Directions your phone can’t give you
In many ways a satnav is a miraculous device. A network of US military satellites more than 10,000 miles above the surface of the Earth, each broadcasting a signal with little more power than a 100-watt light bulb, allows a device in your satnav or mobile phone to triangulate your location on the ground to within seven yards or so. The system is so finely tuned that the clocks aboard the satellites must be calibrated to run 38 microseconds a day slower than Earth time to correct for the effects of general and special relativity. This allows your phone to know your location and, after factoring in real-time traffic information,
St Petersburg
Looking across the wide Neva from Vasilyevsky Island, the Palace Embankment shimmers in the river, suspended between water and sky. Raised on a marsh by violence and sheer force of will, there are few cities more impossible, and more beautiful, than St Petersburg. It’s worth going for the view alone, and you should — now, while the rouble is weak. Thrown up in only 50 years in the 1700s, St Petersburg is a vast stage-set upon which imperial society played at being European. Nowadays, you too can choose your role. Would-be Romanovs can take a box at the Mariinksy and spend one day at the Hermitage, and the next day out
Carry on Don
One of these days I will probably see a production of Don Giovanni set in a research station in the Antarctic. English Touring Opera, ambitious and valiant, haven’t gone that far yet. But Lloyd Wood’s new staging, part of an ETO threesome now hopping round the country, still makes the eyebrows shoot up. This time the Don and his girl bevy are scuttling round the Viennese sewers, circa 1900. Well, that’s what the programme booklet tells us; though if it hadn’t been for Elvira’s Wiener Werkstätte dress, the hint of a Klimt mosaic and a tiddly horn gramophone, you might just accept Anna Fleischle’s grim designs as a fair solution
The price of a cathedral
We’ve all done it: been overcome by a sudden sense of hard-upness at the moment when the collection plate comes round at the end of a cathedral service. We fumble in our pockets, feel a £1 coin and a £10 note, and decide that the £1 coin will do. This is a cathedral, for goodness sake, not a parish church: they must be rich, with all those gold-coloured vestments and choristers in ruffs. But if we want our cathedrals to be alive and singing psalms in 20 years’ time, this misconception about cathedrals must change. Indeed, the sub-dean of Coventry is openly clamping down. At the end of organ recitals, he
Why we need migrants
This is perhaps not the best moment in history to extol migrants from the developing world or Eastern Europe, but the fact remains that without them my life, and I suspect the life of many other people in the West, would be much poorer and more constricted than it is. A migrant is not just a migrant, of course. Indeed, to speak of migrants in general is to deny them agency or even characteristics of their own, to assume that they are just units and that their fate depends only on how the receiving country receives them and not at all on their own motives, efforts or attributes, including their
Flying start
From ‘Common-sense and the command of the air’, The Spectator, 25 March 1916: The Air Service will be the great fighting Service, the Service which will seal the fate of nations. We say this, not because the Air Service is a novelty, but because of a plain, undeniable physical fact — the universality of the air… No nation can ever be excluded from the air. Therefore in the last resort the right to live freely and independently will be won and secured by nations in the air.
The Clintons made Trump
New York ‘Does this mean we have to vote for Hillary?’ asked my wife. It was early morning 16 March, and the queen consort of the Democratic party had seemingly sewn up the presidential nomination — a coronation promised years ago by her king but thus far denied by unruly subjects. As I scanned the headline in the New York Times, ‘Clinton and Trump Pile up the Delegates’, I felt sick at heart. The Times has functioned throughout the campaign as court gazette for the Clintons, but there was no denying the basic accuracy of the story. Rebounding from Bernie Sanders’s stunning upset a week earlier in the Michigan
Feedback frenzy
I used to enjoy ‘giving feedback’ in the glory years when nobody wanted it. Now, upon completing a routine transaction, the customer is bombarded with breathless demands for response. The neurotic corporate catchphrase is ‘How was it for you?’ The world is now in feedback frenzy. Companies endlessly prod us for our views so they can brandish positive statistics at each other — or sack somebody. A new app, called Impraise, even invites workers to evaluate their own colleagues anonymously. You could spend your whole day just rating every interaction as something between poor and excellent. From Uber drivers to call-centre workers, everybody’s chasing a tick of recorded acclaim. I
What will I do with my second chance at life? Play more video games, for a start
Does a near-death experience make you a better person? This is something I’ve been thinking about on and off since my pulmonary embolism. Initially, it hadn’t occurred to me that a PE was a big deal. But the research that I’ve done since suggests that these things aren’t unserious. My seen-it-all ex-army GP, for example, was properly impressed. As too have been the various people I know whose friends and relatives have died of them, one a 23-year-old girl who succumbed after breaking her ankle while walking on the moors. So yes, as my fellow ‘survivors’ keep telling me, I should be grateful for my lucky escape — and perhaps
Oh, what a lovely Waugh!
Fifty years have passed since the death of my father, Evelyn Waugh. His remains, together with those of his wife Laura and daughter Margaret, are buried within a ha-ha which is now collapsing into the churchyard of St Peter and Paul, Combe Florey. My nephew, Alexander, and I hope that these graves could be incorporated in the churchyard as only a dilapidated wall separates them. But our efforts have been frustrated by bureaucratic obtuseness. I wonder if the creakiness of the bureaucratic process has been created by the undeserved popular perception of my father as a monster. The portrait is based on his own diaries and my late brother Auberon’s
The scan said my baby wouldn’t live. It was wrong
When my unborn baby was a five-month-old fetus, twisting about in the internal dark, he was given a death sentence by a man I shall call Anton. We’d gone, my husband and I, for a 20-week scan at our local hospital. Anton was our designated sonographer; we arrived in his room bright-eyed and anxious, as even elderly first-time parents are. We looked to Anton for reassurance, but Anton looked only at his assistant, a sulky 19-year-old sexpot from Romania. The sexpot tried seven times to dig into the vein in my right arm, then began on the left. ‘Don’t worry, good practice, try again,’ said Anton to her, kindly. ‘No,
Wild life | 23 March 2016
Laikipia ‘Awayoo,’ was how our head stockman Apurra said ‘how are you?’ in his texts from Pokot country, where I had sent him on a mission to search for thin tribal steers for us to buy. Now that we have plenty of pasture, we are looking for large-framed beasts that we can fatten and sell to the butchers. ‘Boss, Awayoo,’ Apurra’s message asks, with news that he has gathered a good mob of steers that are now being trekked to the farm. When we first completed the electric fence, which now extends 15 kilometres around the entire ranch perimeter, I thought that was largely the end of the game for
Tuesday
A terrorist attack has happened in Europe. Let the standard response begin…
Well at least we all know the form by now. This morning Islamist suicide-bombers struck one of the few European capitals they haven’t previously hit in a mass-casualty terrorist attack. The standard response now goes as follows. First the body parts of innocent people are flung across airport check-ins or underground trains. Briefly there is some shock. On social media the sentimentalists await the arrival of this atrocity’s cutesy hashtag or motif and hope it will tide them over until the piano man arrives at the scene of the attack to sing ‘Imagine there’s no countries’. Meantime someone will hopefully have said something which a lot of people can condemn
