Society

Friday

Susannah Hickling

Nine ways to stop your child getting fat

About a third of children in the UK are overweight, increasing their risk of conditions like type 2 diabetes, heart disease and joint problems in adulthood. Here are some hints to prevent yours from piling on the pounds: 1. Be slim yourself. Easier said than done, I know. But the point here is that you’re your child’s main role model, so if you eat healthily and lead an active life, your offspring are more likely to do the same. If you eat junk, they’ll eat junk; if you slump on the couch eating chocolates, so will they. You get the picture. Plus, research has shown that babies born to overweight

Thursday

Raymond Keene

London Rapid

The exciting American grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura compensated for his somewhat lacklustre performance in the London Classic section, held at Olympia just before Christmas, with an overwhelming victory in the Rapidplay arena. The top final scores were Nakamura 9½ and Giri 8½, while those on 8 included Kramnik, Caruana, Anand and Short. By its very nature, Rapidplay chess tends to be exhilarating rather than accurate and favours those who have a buccaneering spirit and a talent for opportunism.   Nakamura-Anand: London Classic Rapidplay 2014 (see diagram 1)   First off we see Nakamura outmanoeuvring former world champion Viswanathan Anand. It is axiomatic that a bishop in the endgame, unless heavily restricted

The Spectator

Spectator letters: A GP’s cry of distress and a defence of Stephen Hawking

Dreadful treatment Sir: I worked as a GP through the Thatcher, Major, Blair, and Brown eras, apart from a spell as an A&E doctor, and never experienced such a depressing and worrying time for the NHS as now (‘Wrong diagnosis’, 10 January). There was frequently strain on the service from underfunding, but not the crisis we are now experiencing across the country, proving to me fundamental mismanagement and policy errors. When this government finally revealed its NHS ‘reforms’, which were kept quiet before the 2010 election, I was convinced the health service was under great threat, and that the electorate was being deviously misled. This crisis was predicted in the

Raymond Keene

No: 345

White to play. This position is a variation from Williams-van Wely, London Rapidplay 2014. How can White bring his kingside attack to a successful conclusion? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 20 January or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk. The winner will be the first correct answer out of a hat, and each week I am offering a prize of £20. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Qxd6 Last week’s winner Victor Strugo, Talloires, France

The Spectator

Three people to ask about free speech in Britain

Not Charlie Some cases which make Britain a pretty poor champion of free speech: — In 2005 Bristol pub landlord Leroy Trought was given an Asbo and told to remove a sign for his car park, calling it ‘the porking yard’, after complaints to police that it was ‘racially and sexually offensive’. — In 2006, Angie Sayer, landlady of the New Inn, Wedmore, Somerset, was questioned by police for using a Welsh flag in a St George’s Day darts match and inviting participants to ‘slay the dragon’. — In 2010 street-preacher Dale McAlpine was arrested, locked in a cell for seven hours and had his DNA and fingerprints taken after

Peter Jones

Ched Evans: law vs people power

‘This was the rule for men that Zeus established: whereas fish, beasts and birds eat each other, since there is no law among them, to men he gave law, which is by far the best thing’ (the Greek farmer-poet Hesiod, 7th century bc). Given the hostile reaction to the convicted rapist Ched Evans’s desire to return to his job as a footballer after serving his sentence, one wonders whether the fish, beasts and birds might not be on to something. The 4th century bc statesman and orator Demosthenes pursued Hesiod’s line of thought when he said, ‘If laws are abolished and each individual is given powers to do what he

Taki

Let’s all become Japanese for a while

This is a good time to write about a nation’s resilience in the face of calamity. I am referring to the stoic discipline with which the Japanese bore hardship and the death of 15,000 people in March 2011 following a nine-magnitude earthquake, the strongest ever known to have hit Japan. I can remember the TV coverage as if it were yesterday. Very young and very old Japanese formed a long orderly line for disaster supplies. There was no looting whatsoever as there had been in Los Angeles or in Mexico City, no weeping on camera so that the world would send more funds, just plucky resolve (gaman in Japanese) and

Jeremy Clarke

My addiction to literary pilgrimage is akin to masturbation

The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one. In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quivering in the ripples and rings sent up by sea-plants through the clear shallows. Recognise it? F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. First page. Hollywood starlet Rosemary Hoyt and her mentoring mother take ground-floor rooms at a quiet beachside Antibes hotel. Rosemary wanders out and on to the aforementioned beach, takes off her bathing robe, wades into a ‘blue as laundry water’ sea, then ‘laid her face

Melissa Kite

I dreamed that my broken mop was borne aloft unto the dustcart of Lambeth environmental services

Clearly, I am going to have to report my broken mop handle to the authorities. It has been sitting outside my house for seven weeks now and the binmen have made clear their intention never to touch it. I understand there is such a thing as bulky waste. But truly, the mop handle minus its mop head with its business end broken so it cannot be reattached to another mop head refill is not at all bulky. It’s just a broken mop handle. I put it out with my wheelie bin in the hope that common sense might prevail. Naively, idealistically, I thought the binmen, or whatever they prefer to

Alexander Chancellor

Do your patriotic duty and shoot wild boar

It’s 15 years since I first wrote an article about the threat to the nation of the wild boar; but only now, following the death of a driver in a collision with one of these fearsome beasts on the M4 in Wiltshire, is anyone taking any notice (and not very much notice at that). The government is planning to introduce the same kind of road warning signs for wild boar as those that already exist for deer, horses, toads and ducks. ‘Road safety in the context of wild boars is an emerging issue that needs to be addressed,’ says roads minister John Hayes. ‘The addition of a warning sign for

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Someone told me their extraordinary life story, but I tuned the whole thing out

Q. After a recent dinner I found myself on a two-seater sofa enjoying the restful company of a woman who seemed happy to do all the talking while I just nodded and pretended to be listening. I regret my insincerity, not least because of what happened later, but I was slightly drunk. I came to my senses, however, when my wife wanted to leave. It was just in time to hear this woman saying, with a portentous look on her face, that she had never told anyone else what she had just told me. She said that now, having talked about it for the first time, she realised that the whole

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 15 January 2015

This may sound odd, given its male-only membership, but the Portland is one of my favourite bridge clubs. I’m one of many women who are invited there regularly (in fact, I can claim to be the first woman to have played at its new premises in London’s St James’s Square), and we’re always welcomed with tremendous friendliness — not to mention gourmet dinners and far too much wine. I was last there in December for the club’s inaugural auction pairs, the brainchild of its new chairman Chris Kemp. My partner was Patrick Lawrence and I loved every minute — despite being duffed up by the eventual winners, the brilliant Scottish

Owen Matthews

Panic, profiteering and a mysterious girl in a Mini: notes from Moscow

 Moscow Here we go again. The rouble slides, then tumbles, and slides again. For those of us who remember the crash of August 1998, the drill is familiar. For Muscovites, the old instincts have surfaced from the 1990s like a sausagey burp. Shoppers besieged Ikea, Auchan and other mega-markets, desperate to spend rapidly devaluing roubles. Cynical expatriates such as myself did much the same with our newly inflated hard currency. I cleared my local posh wine shop of a thousand bucks’ worth of Burgundy, now half-price in dollar terms. A correspondent colleague raided the Moscow Apple store to the tune of two iPhones and a pair of laptops before they

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 15 January 2015

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that he wanted to change the law so that there would be no ‘means of communication’ which ‘we cannot read’, in order to thwart terrorists. Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, said this meant ‘scooping up vast amounts of information on millions of people — children, grandparents and elderly people who do nothing more offensive than visiting gardening centre websites’. Andrew Parker, the director general of MI5, said that 20 terrorist plots against the West had links to Syria in the past 14 months. Steven Emerson, an American commentator, apologised for saying on Fox News that in Britain ‘there are actual cities like

Dot Wordsworth

The changing meaning of ‘prolific’, from Orwell to the Premier League

I read somewhere recently of a Soho artist who was a ‘prolific drinker’. The meaning is clear, but hasn’t the word been taken for a walk too far from the neatly hedged semantic field where it was bred? Prolific is hardly ever used in the literal sense of ‘producing many offspring’. I had thought it was most often employed metaphorically of authors, but then my husband surprised me by saying something both true and relevant: that prolific is most often paired with goalscorer. He’s right. It is used dozens of times a week in the sports pages. ‘Adam Rooney,’ the Times notes, ‘is undoubtedly the most prolific of Aberdeen’s strikers.’

Doc

2194: Joe Green

The unclued lights (one of three words and two of two words), individually or as a pair, are of a kind.   Across   5    Bit of tiffin is hardly perfect (6) 12    Fail to see active service (5) 13    Waistcoat cloth that’s not in ablutions (8) 16    Beer mug in set cracked (5) 17    Mourns for old sheriffs (7) 18    Additionally suggest Tory memo (7) 20    Civic dignitary, a lord, with topless Berliner, say (8) 26    Extra portion of lamb? Yes! (3) 27    Tailless bird – dead duck in the Loire (6) 29    Aussie expert involved with 8 for

Doc

Christmas crossword: the solution

First prize Roly Harris, London N1   Runners-up Michael Collins, Petts Wood, Kent; Clare Reynolds, London SE24; Tony Mouzer, Shard End, Birmingham   Additional runners-up G.E. Bell, Hexham, Northumberland; Hugh Dales, Dysart, Fife; J. Caldwell, Winster, Windermere; Jenny Staveley, Kingsdown, Bristol; H.V. Machin, Gateford, Nottinghamshire; Lorraine James, Llanwrda, Dyfed

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Dear David and Barack, Britain and America didn’t defeat the Nazis alone

It’s easily done, I know, when you’re trying to convey the beauty of a two-way relationship, to remember that others may have been involved in the events that brought you closer. But when it’s the Second World War, these little lapses of memory are less forgivable. In a moving article in The Times today (£), with a joint byline and double byline picture (same colour ties! Purple), David Cameron and Barack Obama describe the events of modern times in which the special relationship really mattered. ‘Together we defeated the Nazis’, they begin brightly (or, to be fair, whichever bloke from the Foreign Office/State Department cobbled this together). Fine. The US

Tarek S Arab

Obesity a disability? Only lawyers will benefit from the ECJ’s farcical classification

Real disability is humbling for those who have to live with it and those who care for the disabled. A true disability — degenerative neurological disease, for instance — involves the equivalent of a daily war to live in the way that most of us take for granted. We shouldn’t mock the truly disabled by misusing the word. Yet the European Court of Justice has classified obesity as a disability, meaning that we are all now expected to view those who, in the majority of cases, attained morbidly-obese status by determined and unrelentless bad-lifestyle choices as deserving of our understanding and admiration as those who battle real disability everyday. The interesting