Society

Thursday

Taki

Six decades and two chat-up lines

 Gstaad In this freewheeling Swiss village of the 1950s, the unconventional was the norm and monumental drinking commonplace, but the manners of the players were always impeccable. Yes, there were ladies of lower-class parentage and with a dubious past, but they covered it up with a grand manner and an affected aristocratic confidence they had learned through experience. That’s how things were back then. The slags that pass as celebrities today would not have lasted a minute. Some might think it snobby, but it was nothing of the kind. One just had to act in a certain manner and that is all. Everyone knew where everyone else came from, so

Toby Young Toby Young

The self-delusion that makes people go to festivals – me included

I wouldn’t describe myself as a veteran of the summer festival circuit, but I’ve been to enough to have a theory about them. Or, rather, discuss someone else’s — in this case that of Matthew Taylor, head of the RSA. For those readers who’ve never been to a festival, I will begin with a short primer. They usually take place in a muddy field over a long weekend, often in the grounds of a stately home or similar, and cost upwards of £200 to attend. There is nearly always an adjoining campsite, where many of the festival-goers stay for the duration, although the sanitary arrangements are poor. The festivals usually feature

Jeremy Clarke

What I learned working in the lunatic asylum

In 1984 I was 27. Since leaving school I had done unskilled manual labour, when I could get any. Then l worked as a nursing assistant and then a trainee nurse in an 840-bed psychiatric hospital at Goodmayes in Essex, formerly the West Ham Lunatic Asylum. It was like a walled town. I ate, slept and socialised in there and became institutionalised and a bit mad, I believe. In ordinary life, among relatively sane people, one becomes fairly confident about the parameters of so-called normal human behaviour. They are narrow parameters, and all the time getting narrower, I think. But if you live in a large mental hospital, these parameters

Melissa Kite

Press five to report a funny man on your doorstep with strange tales of dog torture

Strangely enough, I was in the middle of writing an article about the tactics used by the RSPCA when another animal charity knocked on my door. A young man holding a clipboard was standing on the doorstep, grinning enthusiastically: ‘Hello! I’m from Battersea Dogs Home.’ ‘Hello,’ I said, ‘I’m a bit busy.’ Exposing animal welfare charities for preying on innocent people. I didn’t say that last bit out loud. ‘I just need to tell you,’ he said, ‘that we’ve got a big fundraising drive because a lot of dogs are being abandoned at the moment. And…’, he paused for dramatic effect, ‘…a lot of them have been tortured.’ ‘Tortured?’ I

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Show me the tactful way to pay for a lift

Q. My neighbour is really lovely and always helps me chainsaw trees. He used to be the herdsman at the farm but was laid off last summer when they sold the herd, so now he is unemployed. Friends from London often borrow my cottage when I am away and I am sure my neighbour would welcome £10 a time to collect them from the station. He is now being paid a small monthly amount to keep the garden in order for the new owners of the Big House but I don’t want to seem grand or patronising by asking if he would be interested in regular taxi work as well.

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Rhubarb has the loveliest, craziest dining room I have ever seen

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival: the city is full of glassy-eyed narcissists eating haggis pizza off flyers that say Michael Gove: Prick. I saw the Grim Reaper in the Pleasance Courtyard, of all places. Even Death likes an audience these days, has a media strategy, an agent, a gimmick. But this is not a review of comics — mating habits and most likely mental illnesses or ‘conditions’, plus hats — disguised as a review of the food that comics eat. All comics are mad. You know this. They live on self-hatred and Smarties, when they can afford them. Instead, I go to Rhubarb. Rhubarb is the sister restaurant to the Witchery

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 21 August 2014

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, writing of the Islamic State in northern Iraq, said: ‘If we do not act to stem the onslaught of this exceptionally dangerous terrorist movement, it will only grow stronger until it can target us on the streets of Britain.’ Anyone waving an Islamic State flag in Britain would be arrested, he said. He invoked Britain’s ‘military prowess’ but later said: ‘We are not going to be putting boots on the ground.’ British C-130 transport planes were used to drop aid; Tornados were used for surveillance in addition to a Rivet Joint surveillance aircraft; and Chinook helicopters remained on standby. A raider who attacked a jeweller’s in Oxford

Alexander Chancellor

The Italians are disgusted with our holidaymakers

As the holidays draw to a close, Italian newspapers have been reporting with perplexity and distaste on the outlandish behaviour of foreign tourists in Italy, by which they mean young people from northern European countries. One report told of a couple making love in broad daylight on a bridge over the Grand Canal in Venice, the Ponte degli Scalzi (which, as a commentator pointed out, means ‘Bridge of the Barefooted’, not ‘Bridge of the Bare-bottomed’). Other reports talked of people sunbathing naked in public places or picnicking in large groups under the colonnades in St Mark’s Square. Venice suffered most from these excesses, but nowhere was immune. Florence and Rome

Dot Wordsworth

What’s humanitarian about a humanitarian crisis?

‘Our first priority,’ David Cameron said this week, ‘has of course been to deal with the acute humanitarian crisis in Iraq.’ One knows what he means, but isn’t humanitarian an odd way of putting it? If it had been a vegetarian crisis or a disestablishmentarian crisis, it would be one either caused or suffered by people who professed either of those schools of thought. Humanitarians used to be people who followed the teachings of Pierre Leroux (1797–1871), who believed in the spontaneous perfectibility of the human race. He’d soaked up the ideas of Saint-Simon and squeezed them out over Auguste Comte and George Sand. The dogma-free religion of humanity was

Robin Oakley

Some horses go better for a woman

Mrs Oakley returned from her latest book club with an uplifting story. The Mother Superior of an Irish convent was 95 and failing. On her deathbed she asked for a drink and a nun went for fresh milk. Espying the bottle of John Jameson occasionally used by the visiting Father O’Shaughnessy for refreshment, Sister Agnes poured a generous measure into the cup of milk. As the Mother Superior drank, one of the nuns asked her what piece of advice she would leave them with for their lives ahead. Suddenly sitting bolt-upright in bed, the old lady declared, ‘Whatever you do, don’t get rid of that cow!’ That sums up how

A.N. Wilson

A.N. Wilson’s diary: The book that made me a writer – and the pushchair that made me an old git

Like many inward-looking children, I always doodled stories and poems. Knowing one wanted to be a writer is a different matter altogether. That moment came when I read Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria. I was sitting in the Temple Reading Room at Rugby. The final paragraph, in which Strachey imagined the dying Victoria at Osborne House, sinking out of consciousness as the scenes of her past life flitted through her brain, struck me as one of the best pieces of writing I had ever encountered. Fifty years on, an unworthy successor, I am about to publish my own life of Victoria. Mine is not hagiography but, like Strachey, and like almost

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 21 August 2014

It’s August — that time of year again — and I am in France, as usual, on my annual holiday. Hot sun, delicious food and drink, yet still the bitter shadow of envy casting its pall. I am missing Brighton and the two-week congress that everyone I know is playing. Many congratulations to my teammate, Tom Townsend, who won the Brighton Pairs, playing with Mark Teltscher. Tom’s immense experience helped him work out the best way to make East go wrong on this hand: 1♣ was prepared, and West’s choice of lead was the passive ♠5. Clearly, the defence have missed their best lead of a Club but the question

Doc

2176: ,

The unclued lights (one hyphened, one of two words), individually or as four pairs, are of a kind.   Across   4    Small thief accepting a lead album for cuttings (9) 10    Photographer’s kit cases with 40 systems (10) 11    Composer from Harlem, composed (6) 12    Unscrupulous member of the French Academy drops tenor (7) 14    Speeds new shipment NHS omitted (5) 15    Separate old coil (5) 16    A chore cooking vegetable (6) 22    He certainly puts his foot down (8) 23    Most haggard marine removed from unclued pair, maybe (7) 27    No organ here — now that’s a drama,

Doc

to 2173: Men of note

The unclued lights are COMPOSERS whose surnames start with the letter C.   First prize C.R. Haigh, Hassocks, West Sussex Runners-up Kenneth Robb, Linlithgow, West Lothian; Dr R.L.H. Barnard, Emsworth, Hampshire

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Housebuilding is up: is that good news?

Good news on housing: this government is building more homes. New figures from the Communities and Local Government department show housing starts in the second quarter of 2014 increased by 18 per cent on the same quarter a year earlier and now stand at 36,230. Housing starts are the best picture we can get of how healthy housebuilding is right now. Completions, which naturally reflect an earlier situation but can also be affected by sudden changes in the economy that leave homes half-built (as in Ireland’s ghost estates) are also up by 7 per cent on the same quarter last year and up by 6 per cent from the previous

Dr Nick Summerton

How self-testing can help beat cervical cancer

Self-testing is now available to any individual wishing to rule out conditions such as diabetes, pregnancy and bowel cancer. Traditionally, however, screening for cervical cancer has required women to attend a GP surgery in order to have a small sample of cells scraped from the surface of their cervix by a doctor or a nurse. The sample is then sent to a laboratory to assess the cervical cells for any abnormalities (cytology testing) and/or to test for human papilloma virus (HPV) DNA.  Some types of HPV may cause cervical abnormalities that can subsequently go on to develop into cervical cancer. Several studies over the past decade have also demonstrated the superiority of HPV DNA testing over cytology. Around 20 per cent of women do not

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: The death of Pope Pius X

From The Spectator, 22 August 1914: Pope Pius X. died at twenty minutes past one on Thursday morning. In a moment of lucidity, just before his death, his Holiness is reported to have said: “Now I begin to think the end is approaching. The Almighty in His in- exhaustible goodness wishes to spare me the horrors which Europe is undergoing.” It is stated that since the outbreak of the war the Pope showed very deep feeling, and again and again repeated “Poor children !”—alluding to the soldiers killed in action. The Pope was a man of great personal charm of character as well as of great goodness of heart, but

John Osullivan

Looking beyond black and white in Ferguson

The ongoing Ferguson crisis in America is really two stories rather than one. The first story is the straightforward mystery of what happened when Darren Wilson (‘the white cop’) killed Michael Brown (‘the black youth’). The second story, much loved by the British and American media, is ‘America’s Racial Divide’. The two stories are related, of course, but not in quite the way that links them in most reporting and commentary. The first story is treated as another episode in the second’s larger ‘narrative’, which is that white America is murderously hostile to its black minority. Few people express this view as openly as the film-maker Spike Lee, who declared