Society

Thursday

1 Jan 2015

Fieldfare

2192: Never again

Eight unclued lights are of a kind; as is, fancifully, the ninth. Across 6 Hurry up to fill space with one big cup (6) 12 Ape, given exercise to open fish, discarded skin (10, two words) 13 I agree Spain is rarely pleasant (5) 15 Unable to move furniture? Sure (10) 16 Witter about horse (7) 20 Regrets advancing second scheme (4) 22 Café undecided about installing organ (7, two words) 24 Swearing mildly at work on mushroom (7) 26 Stung in clear light (7) 31 A canine booted from the council (7) 34 Assisted once to fly round Luxembourg (4) 36 Hot during fine concert, turning to relieving drug

Fieldfare

To 2190: Petra

‘ROCK OF AGES CLEFT FOR ME’ (1D/19) is a work by AUGUSTUS TOPLADY (18/13). ELIZABETH WINDSOR (4A/26) and MICHELLE OBAMA (12/34A) were each suggested by TOPLADY. Title: associated hymn tune. First prize Peter and Jeannie Chamberlain, Rushden, Northants Runners-up M. Purdie, Cupar, Fife; Mrs Rhiannon Hales, Ilfracombe, Devon

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Taking stock

From ‘The War and the New Year‘, The Spectator, 2 January 1915: THOUGH the corning of the New Year makes, and could make, no difference at the front, it does present a convenient opportunity for taking stock of the military situation. The year 1915 finds the Allies and their enemies in a condition approaching stalemate. Neither side has won, neither side has lost, and neither side is able to make a new move with the pieces actually on the Board. Of course, no analogies of this kind are perfect ; but, roughly speaking, the sacrifices which the Allies in the western theatre of the war would have to make in

Freddy Gray

How the NHS silenced a whistleblowing doctor

Almost two years ago, a cancer surgeon named Joseph Meirion Thomas decided that he could no longer keep quiet about what he regarded as a major abuse of the NHS. The Francis inquiry into the scandal at Stafford Hospital had just published its report, reminding doctors of their ‘duty of candour’. Thomas interpreted that to mean that health professionals ‘should feel supported and protected should they ever need to speak out.’ In that spirit, he wrote in The Spectator about ‘health tourism’ — foreign nationals using NHS services to which they are not entitled, placing an already overburdened system under yet more strain. His article caught the attention of Jeremy

Aidan Hartley

If you want a real safari, head to Botswana

As a boy camping with my father on safaris deep in the African bush, there were no tents involved; we just slept by the fire like cowboys in the open under the constellations. Supper was sweet tea and biltong and we used a tin bucket for a shower. When it rained we simply moved underneath our parked Land Rover. One morning we woke to find tracks circling us, where a big lion had come close enough to blow on our toes as we slept. That old Africa rubbed off on me and I still like safaris to be the real thing — under canvas, by the campfire, gin, tall tales, fresh

Tim Stanley

Return of the fairy-hunters

If like me you get all your news from the Cornish Guardian, you may have spotted an article announcing that the Fairy Investigation Society is conducting a survey. They’re seeking information from anyone who has seen any pixies, elves or sprites — all on a strictly anonymous basis. I rang the man behind the research and he told me that in just three months, he’s had over 400 replies. An example: ‘I was walking down a field in Scotland when I noticed a winged being leaning up against the side of a sycamore tree. He was as tall as the trunk, maybe 15 feet.’ You might laugh it off, but

James Walton

BBC1’s Esio Trot: like Fawlty Towers played at quarter speed

As a New Year’s Day treat for all the family, Esio Trot (BBC1) seemed to be taking no chances. It was based on a book by Roald Dahl, had a script by Richard Curtis and his Vicar of Dibley co-writer Paul Mayhew-Archer, and starred Judi Dench and Dustin Hoffman. So. The appeal of the original story to Richard Curtis isn’t difficult to fathom. Not only is it one of Dahl’s late works with, according to his biographer Jeremy Treglown, ‘a new kindly tone’, but it also features a male protagonist who’s both lovelorn and tongue-tied. From the balcony of his London flat, Mr Hoppy (Hoffman) could gaze down on the

Rory Sutherland

Let’s appoint a Ministry of Scandalous Ideas

My children have a phrase called ‘fomo’ — which stands for ‘fear of missing out’. It is a constant, mildly paranoid anxiety, exacerbated by social media, that all your friends are having a much better time than you are. There is a related problem in government, I suspect, called FODM — or ‘fear of Daily Mail’. The effect of FODM is to limit the range of political discussion and opinion to a narrow range of predictable, non–controversial possibilities for fear anything more interesting might allow the media to manufacture a scandal. This is where, unexpectedly, I sympathise with Russell Brand. In fact it was from a Brand podcast that I

Bruce Anderson

When a forgotten bottle turns out to be a treasure

I had not drunk the wine for 20 years, and nearly all the information which I thought that I had remembered turned out to be wrong. It was a Californian pinot noir. I had given friends a case in the late 1980s as a wedding present and one bottle had survived by oversight, like a Japanese warrior in the jungles of Borneo. So was it a happy oversight? The wine’s history was very Californian. In the late 1970s, two friends called Williams and Selyem started buying pinot noir grapes and making wine in a garage. To begin with, this weekend hobby may not have been an entirely legal operation: cuvée

The Spectator

From the archives | 1 January 2015

From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 2 January 1915: The first German aeroplanes which have visited us since the beginning of the war appeared on Thursday and Friday of last week. On Thursday week, about eleven o’clock in the morning, an aeroplane circled over Dover and dropped a bomb, which fell in a garden and did very little damage. British aircraft started up from the ground in pursuit, but the German aeroplane disappeared in the mist over the sea, after having been visible for only a few seconds.

Andrew J.

Barack Obama: anatomy of a failure

President George W. Bush’s place in history is already guaranteed, fixed by a series of monumental blunders that no amount of revisionism will ever be able to whitewash. By comparison, historians are likely to have a hard time drawing a bead on Barack Obama. How could such an obviously gifted President, swept into office on a wave of immense expectations, have managed to accomplish so little in his attempted management of global affairs? Over the past six years ‘Yes, we can!’ has become ‘No, he hasn’t.’ What went wrong? Several answers to this question present themselves. The first and most important is that the expectations to which Obama–mania gave rise

Rod Liddle

A wonderful time was had by all at the Utter Arse of the Year awards

A glittering cast list, delicious food and spectacular entertainment — I just wish you could have been there. But tickets were at a premium for The Spectator’s prestigious Utter Arse of the Year awards ceremony held, as ever, in the council chamber at Tower Hamlets. The meal, prepared by the exciting left-wing lesbian cook Jack Monroe, consisted of her famous kale pesto pasta on a bed of shredded back copies of the Guardian. As we munched away, a troop of locally sourced Bangladeshi mime artists enacted the setting up of an east London caliphate and — to the delight of the audience — silently decapitated several infidels sitting near the stage.

Jeremy Clarke

My perfect island – and the posher one next door

The Republic of Maldives is the lowest country in the world and has the highest divorce rate. Is there correlation between altitude and fidelity, I wonder? Male, the capital, is 370 miles south-west of the southern tip of India. From the air it looks like Tower Hamlets. From Male we flew first by DHC-6 Twin Otter seaplane to the tiny coral island of Moofushi — about 20 thrilling minutes — and checked in at the Constance Moofushi island resort. I was allocated a thatched wooden bungalow (number 35) with sundeck, loungers, and wooden steps leading down directly into the warm, shallow sea. I could look down from the balcony rail

Julie Burchill

Why I detest clothes with words on

As a provincial teenage virgin with ideas so far above my station that they gave me vertigo, I frequently reflected bitterly that whoever coined the phrase ‘Schooldays are the best days of your life’ must have come to that conclusion after being involved in a serious car-crash the evening following their last day at school, probably rendering them a tetraplegic. And the little thing which summed up how thoroughly inappropriate it was was the horridness of name tags. All the wondrous beings I had it in me to be, written off by my mum’s humdrum hand in those four syllables: Julie Burchill. Then and there, I took a violent dislike to

Hugh Graham

Dallas, city of culture

When George W. Bush was outed as an artist, after a computer hacker uncovered his nude self-portraits, jaws dropped around the world. Could Cowboy George, a man whom even Kim Jong-il’s cronies dubbed a philistine, actually be a closet aesthete? This spring, at the first exhibition of his works in Dallas, he confessed: ‘There’s a Rembrandt trapped in this body.’ It shouldn’t come as such a surprise. Bush’s hometown of Dallas may be stereotyped as a cultural wasteland, synonymous with big oil, big hair and Wild West machismo, but it, too, has an artistic side the world is only now discovering. Take the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination. Rather

James Delingpole

What techies are actually doing when they fix your computer

Just before Christmas I achieved something so totally, incredibly amazing that I think it probably ranks among the greatest things I have ever done. In terms of danger, raw physical courage and menace overcome, it was at least on a par with cage-diving with great white sharks or taking on the ‘Breastapo’ the other week over that incident in Claridge’s. As far as personal satisfaction goes, it felt like getting into Oxford, teaching my children to read, bagging a Macnab and climbing Everest blindfold on the same weekend. What I did was this: there was a problem on my computer — and I fixed it. All by myself! When I

Rachel Ward

The beautiful Balkans on horseback

My husband and I decide we are up for a horse-riding adventure. We’ve done a few and have realised it’s the only way to travel: the truest way to experience an up-close and personal with a country and its people. You’re out of your comfort zone, there’s no turning back, you must abandon all control and anything can happen. There’s nothing like extreme vulnerability to induce trust and affection in your guide and his horses. But gratitude for surviving your holiday aside, it’s not hard to fall for everything the trip has to offer. We arrive in Apriltsi, a small Bulgarian town at the foot of the central Balkan Mountains,

William Cook

Cockfighting: the last, hidden link to Bali’s warlike past

Driving around Bali, the first thing I noticed was the big wicker baskets by the roadside. Inside each basket was a cockerel. I asked my friend Wayan why these birds were there. ‘They put them by the road to make them used to people,’ he told me. ‘Then they won’t be scared when it’s time for them to fight.’ ‘What do you mean, time to fight? A cockfight?’ He nodded. Cockfighting is a clandestine activity here. No one talks about it, but those baskets are everywhere. Cockfighting is an ancient Balinese tradition. The Indonesian government frowns on it, and the heavy gambling that goes with it (men can lose farms

Kate Crockett

Onsen: dive into another side of Japan

I’m hovering starkers beside a hot spring, or onsen, in a faded resort in southern Japan, while the Japanese grandmother standing naked next to me explains the form for the steaming pool I am about to enter. It’s an open-air mud hot spring, known as a doroyu and quite unusual, even in Japan, where the hyperactive geology means onsen of all kinds spring up — literally — everywhere. I love a scalding bath, so it was perhaps inevitable that I should love onsen from the moment I first dipped a toe in one many years ago, close to Mt Fuji on a day trip from Tokyo. The ritual of washing

Martin Vander Weyer

What to expect in business in 2015 (probably not the Triumph of Probity, Honour and Prudence)

You might recall a column I once wrote about a party at the Wallace Collection. It took place in late 2008, the host was the US investment bank Morgan Stanley, and I compared the assembled financiers — who saw the crisis then raging as just one more opportunity to make money out of volatility in markets that were bound to swing round again — to the circle of dancers in Poussin’s ‘Dance to the Music of Time’, which hangs in the Great Gallery there. Far-fetched perhaps, but I have a weakness for allegories. On a pre-Christmas visit to the Wallace, I found the gallery splendidly refurbished and re-hung. The ‘Dance’