Society

Thursday

12 Mar 2015

Dear Mary: When is it all right not to bring something to a dinner party?

Q. A wonderful and generous woman invites me, on a regular basis, to dinner parties at her house. What is an appropriate gift for an impoverished artist to take along on such occasions? I am always told by her that I shouldn’t have brought anything but my rigid British upbringing is telling me otherwise. — T. R., Florence A. As a rule grandees have present fatigue. They already have wall-high supplies of scented candles and chocolates and find flowers irritating due to the nuisance of having to find a vase. They are not ungrateful for the ‘thought’ but for practical reasons, they prefer guests to walk in empty-handed. Having to

Dumpynose

2202: Problem XI

Seven unclued lights (one hyphened) are 23: 7A + 17 + 40 + 5 + 6 + 31 = 36. Ignore one accent. Elsewhere, ignore an apostrophe and two accents. Across 1 Half per cent off haircut (11, two words) 11 Girl crafty in conversation (6) 13 Lunatic ran through crazy Swiss town (7) 15 Stop charging about part of church (5) 16 Scots ask gentleman about Peru (5) 18 Friendly earl cuddled priest’s daughter (5) 20 Yarn one from Paisley spins in recurring patterns (6) 21 Sack or Martini? (5) 22 Electronic system tap-dancer contrived ejects CD (7) 27 Ship’s position, say, eagle flying takes on board

Dumpynose

To 2199: TV Comedy

The unclued lights can be arranged to give: ‘I decided to sell my Hoover … well, it was just collecting dust’ (by) Tim Vine. This was voted best one-liner at the 2014 Edinburgh Fringe. First prize D. Morris, Birchington, Kent Runners-up Elizabeth Feinberg, Rancho Mirage, California; M. Day, London N6

Alex Krasodomski

The ‘Darknet’ is dangerous. It’s also deeply democratic

The ‘Darknet’ is in the spotlight. Over the past few months, stories of paedophile rings, drug empires and terrorist organisations have set pulses racing as investigative journalists have begun dipping their toes into the network. Cue stories such as: ‘Five scary things ANYONE can buy in the Darknet’s illegal markets‘. Now, the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology have released a briefing. The note, entitled ‘The Darknet and Online Anonymity’, centres on Tor. Tor is an easy-to-use web browser that makes tracking a user’s online activities much more difficult. It is designed to prevent government agencies and big corporations learning your location, your identity and your browsing habits. As well as

Ed West

The abolition of anti-discrimination laws would prove how tolerant Britain had become

My mum once told me about a man she knew who’d come from a poor background and had no luck finding a job. He’d applied for over 400 positions but never got a response, but then he made one change to his CV and the next job he landed straight away. What did he do? He used a friend’s address, a friend who lived in a neighbouring postcode. The point of her story was that perseverance and lateral thinking will win out in the end, but what I took from it was that employers tend to choose people on arbitrary grounds. Postcodes are just one way in which employers use

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: the death of childhood and has Hillary gone too far?

Have we lost the age of innocence forever? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Melanie Phillips and Sarah Green discuss this week’s Spectator cover feature on consequences of dropping the age of consent. By teaching sex education at a younger age, are we simply encouraging children to have more sex? Is it too late to regain the age of innocence? And would compulsory sex education in all schools help or create more problems? James Forsyth and John Bew also look at why foreign matters aren’t featuring more in the election campaign. Why are the party leaders mostly ignoring Britain’s relationship with the rest of the world? Although defence is occasionally getting

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Uniform behaviour

From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 13 March 1915: We are glad to note that officers in uniform have been forbidden to visit night clubs in London. The gambling night clubs have ruined several young officers, and the dancing clubs are almost quite as undesirable in these times. But why does the order apply only to officers in uniform? Surely, if discipline requires that officers should keep away from these places, they ought to be forbidden to go whether in uniform or in ordinary clothes.

Keith Budge

Are the sciences and the arts a false dichotomy?

In late 2014, the Secretary of State for Education declared that the days when arts and humanities subjects could be relied on as useful were behind us, and that STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) were the way to go. For all of her subsequent backpedaling on this point, it remains pretty clear that arts and humanities are considered soft and irrelevant by this government. STEM subjects are vital, of course, and I welcome the Prime Minister’s recent announcement of a government push on maths, science and technology in schools, and a new national college for digital skills and coding. Nonetheless, I remain concerned about this instinct to promote

Martin Vander Weyer

Won’t someone please unleash the challenger banks?

In my Yorkshire town of Helmsley the NatWest branch, originally an outpost of Beckett & Co of Leeds, has closed down — collateral damage of its crippled parent RBS’s continuing struggle for viability. Our branch of the Australian-owned Yorkshire Bank, descendant of the West Riding Penny Savings institution, became an antique shop some time ago. HSBC, formerly Midland, is now a hairdressing salon. When they arrived a century ago, all three were ‘challenger banks’ of their day. But now they have gone, no challengers have ridden in to replace them — unless we count Handelsbanken, the progressively old-fashioned Swedish retail bank that has a thriving franchise down the road at

Rory Sutherland

How to make Ukip supporters love green policies

Few people know this, but hidden within the FedEx logo, between the E and the x, there is a small white arrow, pointing to the right. I feel slightly guilty sharing this with you, since from now until your death you will find it impossible not to notice this device. It is something which once glimpsed cannot be unseen. Perception can be irreversible: when you first see that famous blue/black or white/gold dress it may be fairly arbitrary whether you see it one way or the other, but you cannot unlearn your first impression. The brain resolves the ambiguity by making a snap assumption about the light in which it

Melanie Phillips

The end of childhood – what we lost when we dropped the age of consent

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/the-death-of-childhood/media.mp3″ title=”Melanie Philips and Sarah Green discuss the end of childhood” startat=37] Listen [/audioplayer]In all the sound and fury about historic sex crimes against children, one crucial factor has been generally ignored. Last week, a review of the agencies dealing with the phenomenon of ‘grooming gangs’ in England said that more than 370 young girls in Oxfordshire had fallen victim to them over the past 15 years, and called for an urgent national debate into these ‘indescribably awful’ sex crimes. But the most shocking and overlooked aspect of the review was that, in Oxford, police and care workers dismissed evidence that girls as young as 11, 12 or 13

The Spectator

Officers’ off hours

Bruce Anderson

A dog to remember (and the wine he inspired)

Meeting to taste wine, we started by talking about dogs. Roy Hattersley is good on the subject, which ought to be impossible. For he is opposed to shooting, and the partnership between gun and gun-dog, the dog’s tail-wagging joy as it luxuriates in its master’s approval, is one of the highest expressions of man’s commonwealth with the animal kingdom. Well, tot sententiae. But Roy understands one point. Human life is enfiladed by tragedy and the brief span of animal life is one aspect of that. In our relationship with animals, love and loss are intertwined. There was a splendid labrador called Hector, bred in Lincolnshire by Sir Brian Wyldbore-Smith. A

Lucy Vickery

Acrostic | 12 March 2015

In Competition No. 2888 you were invited to submit a poem in the style of a well-known poet, the first letters of each line spelling out the poet’s name. I liked Jerome Betts’s follow-up to Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘The Deserted Village’ and Bill Greenwell’s Spenserian stanza in the manner of Wendy Cope — a parody within a parody. Barbara Smoker, Brian Murdoch and S.E.G. Hopkin also stood out in an impressive entry. The winners take £20. Basil Ransome-Davies earns £25. Reading poetry’s a marvel when you’re back be’ind the line Under shelter, feeling ’uman, where the whizzbangs never whine. Donne can make you feel religious when you’ve seen the worst

Rod Liddle

It’s dark days for dogs and their owners

So who is poisoning all the doggies, then? I assumed, when the first horrible reports came through from Crufts, that it was either the Russians or the Muslims. Russians seem unable to go more than a few days without feeling the need to bump somebody off. Perhaps they’d run out of businessmen to kill and thought, during this morale-sapping lacuna, it would be wise to keep their hand in by murdering a few dogs. We were told almost endlessly during Channel 4’s coverage of this year’s tournament — won this year by a small and unpleasant black thing, some sort of painfully sculpted terrier with an embittered expression on its face — that

Rizwan Hussain

Jawaab explained

It is not easy to be young, British and Muslim. Since the atrocities of 9/11 and 7/7, the media has been awash with stories of the threat of terrorism and the ‘problems’ of multiculturalism. References to Islam or being a Muslim are rarely positive and Muslims are given few opportunities to respond. Those who do can end up in the firing line, especially from commentators quick to assume the worst. Rod Liddle’s column in this magazine last week was a case in point. Liddle made a grave error when referencing the work of Jawaab (see apology in Letters). We passionately believe in a Britain where people of all religious faiths

Camilla Swift

Ten years after the ban, why are there still hunt saboteurs?

If you don’t hunt or listen to The Archers, you might be forgiven for assuming that hunt saboteurs had become obsolete. Hunting with hounds was banned ten years ago, and the law is respected: convictions for illegal hunting against registered hunts are rare. But as this year’s season draws to a close, masked saboteurs are still a regular sight. Some made headlines in January when a video emerged of a group, faces covered, beating a hunt master unconscious with iron bars. What few people seemed to ask was: why? Why on earth do the protest groups still exist when the ban they demanded came in so long ago? And when you consider the

Simon Jenkins

When Isis destroy ancient monuments, it’s not always true that ‘people are more important’

Perhaps we need censorship. The Isis vandals now destroying the greatest sites in ancient Mesopotamia have no care for history, so why do they bother? The answer is to get publicity. As with beheadings, they want to taunt us with their outrages. So why give them what they want, which is our obvious dismay? Why encourage more destruction? To read of the loss of ancient monuments is heartbreaking. When they date from the dawn of western civilisation in the Mesopotamian valley, the pain is the greater. Nimrud, Hatra and Nineveh are 6,000-year-old bedrocks of our culture. Like the smashed statues in Mosul museum, their destruction tears at the roots of

Andrew Watts

Why I’m thankful that Atos found me fit to work

I was signed off work five years ago. I had lost my job and was, unsurprisingly, feeling low; I went to see my GP, as I was having difficulty sleeping. Rather than dishing out a few sleeping pills, as I had hoped, my doctor googled the letters PHQ-9 on his computer and quickly went through the multiple-choice test for depression he found. Within a few minutes, I walked out of the surgery with a diagnosis of depression and a sick note stating that I was, in his medical judgment, unfit for work. Looking at the Patient Health Questionnaire now, one thing immediately stands out: the copyright notice. The copyright in

Olivia Glazebrook

Exciting new ways of not writing a novel

I read that Damon Runyon, in New York in the 1930s, would get up at 1 p.m. for a breakfast of ‘fruit, broiled kidneys, toast and six cups of coffee’. Then he would read all the newspapers. Then he would bathe, shave, dress and go out for a long walk which would probably include some shopping — one of his favourite activities. (‘He wanted to buy prize fighters, and racehorses, and great houses, and stacks of clothes and jewellery for his lovely [second] wife.’) In the early evening he would return to his house to change into ‘an entirely different lounge suit’ before proceeding to a restaurant for dinner with friends,