Society

Thursday

8 May 2014

My love for Sharon was like a mental illness

As Sharon stooped to pour boiling water from the kettle into two mugs, I studied her back and wondered what, if anything, remained in me of the love I once had for her. Was there a residue somewhere? Or a stain? I pictured her back as it had been a dozen years earlier, tanned by the Sardinian sun and bisected by the thin turquoise strap of her bikini top. My love for Sharon was more in the nature of a terrible mental illness than anything nourishing, and when it was at its height, we went away for a week to Santa Teresa Gallura, a quiet seaside town at the northern

Melissa Kite

Herbal remedies for horses? I’m half tempted to try them myself…

You know you’ve been irreversibly sucked into the ninth circle of horse-owning hell when you find yourself perusing an equine supplement catalogue. If you ask me, these tomes should have a disclaimer on the front saying, ‘Abandon all hope, ye pony-lovers who enter here.’ The equine supplement industry is a vast money-burning pit into which you shall surely fall unless you hold fast and stolidly remain the sort of owner who says ‘stuff and nonsense’ whenever anyone tries to tell you that horses have complementary medicinal needs. I used to be extremely stolid. I once overheard a horse-owner in a stable yard telling a fellow livery: ‘My boy is loving

Alexander Chancellor

Would the urine of an eight-year-old protect my chickens?

I was predicting in a recent column that the arrival of spring would be bad news for my poultry, and so it has turned out: two ducks, a fat, waddling Silver Appleyard called Doris and a graceful, elegant little call duck called Marina (the loyal partner of a still-surviving drake called Boris), have disappeared, almost certainly victims of a marauding fox in search of food for its new cubs. For a while I thought that the missing ducks might be sitting on eggs somewhere, but the belated discovery of a pile of feathers put an end to this hope. Now I am waiting gloomily for the fox to strike again,

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 8 May 2014

The more I watch top-class players bid their hands, the more I abide by the philosophy: points, schmoints! Obviously, we all evaluate our hands to a certain extent — indeed, a large extent — according to how many points we hold. From our very earliest days as players we are taught this rule of thumb: that we and our partners need a combined holding of 25 points for game and at least 30 for slam. But many of the social players I know are completely in thrall to this way of evaluating their hands: they base all their decisions about whether to enter the auction, or raise their partner, or

Dot Wordsworth

What the French now mean when they say ‘bugger’

The French for tête-à-tête is one-to-one now, according to a new survey of English invaders by Alexandre des Isnards. Actually, only half of the 400 neologisms that M. Isnards has collected for his Dictionnaire du Nouveau Français (Allary Editions) are English, though that’s a high enough level. It seems to me that French and English people are in common cause here, for it is in business-speak that the English neologisms most easily put down their nasty little suckers — an unweeded garden in both languages. Bullet-points now seem as desirable to French business people as to English. Verbs are spawned simply by sticking –er on the end of English words:

Charles Moore

It’s time for Muslim agitators to stop suing and start debating

Not long after the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich last summer, I wrote a piece in the Daily Telegraph criticising the concentration on the alleged backlash against Muslims. In particular, I attacked an organisation called Tell Mamma, run by Fiyaz Mughal, for appearing to suggest that the unpleasant EDL was as monstrous as al-Qa’eda. Later in the piece, I wrote that, when you publish on such matters, you are all too often ‘subject to “lawfare” — a blizzard of solicitors’ letters claiming damages for usually imagined libels’. So it proved. Along came a solicitor’s letter from the firm of Farooq Bajwa, saying that I had described Mr Mughal as

Toby Young

I love everything about supporting QPR — except watching them play

I find it hard to pinpoint the exact moment when my support for Queen’s Park Rangers crossed over into full-blown fandom. I’ve lived in Shepherd’s Bush since 1991, and at one stage owned a house that overlooked their stadium. When dinner guests asked me whether I was bothered by the noise, I used to joke that it only got really loud when QPR scored — so, no, it was like living next door to the British Library. I didn’t go to my first match until after my daughter Sasha was born in 2003 and back then Caroline was convinced I’d only developed an interest in the local club to escape

The Spectator

When judges go to jail

Judges in jail Barrister and part-time judge Constance Briscoe was jailed for 16 months for perverting the course of justice in charges related to the Chris Huhne affair. She is far from the first judge to end up behind bars. — In 2009 Marcus Einfield, a former judge at Australia’s federal court, was given three years for lying over a speeding offence: he said he had lent his car to a friend who in fact had been killed in a car accident three years earlier. — Just last week Kazakh judge Kuplash Otemisova was jailed for four-and-a-half years for ‘making a wrong court ruling’, by releasing a Russian businessman who

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 8 May 2014

Home AstraZeneca’s board rejected an increased takeover bid of £63 billion by Pfizer. Commenting on the bid in Parliament, Vince Cable, the Lib Dem Business Secretary, said: ‘We see the future of the UK as a knowledge economy, not as a tax haven.’ A second strike by RMT union members on the London Underground was suspended after talks. Jeremy Paxman is to leave Newsnight next month after 25 years. Jeremy Clarkson was given a warning by the BBC for mumbling the counting-out rhyme, ‘Eeny, meeny, miney, mo. Catch a nigger by his toe’, in footage never broadcast. Harriet Harman, the deputy Labour leader, tweeted: ‘Anybody who uses the N-word in

Doc

2161: Appellation contrôlée

The unclued lights (one doubly hyphened) share a medical similarity. (Despite appearances there are no rude words in the puzzle!) Across 3 Revolutionary clock setting? (12, two words) 11 Vessels from fleet in the States (4) 12 When a name is misrepresented? (7) 16 Caught bird, reportedly, on rock (5) 18 Oarsman’s swimming style (6) 20 33’s code-words (5) 22 Some disc analysis? (4) 23 They’re up-beat as he leaves vehicles (5) 25 Singer I left let out gleeful laugh (7) 26 Could be wrong about report on Roe (11, three words) 30 Unidentified male in loo

The Spectator

Books and arts – 8 May 2014

Doc

to 2158: Late bloomers

The unclued lights are the surnames of people (nine of whom were botanists) who gave their names to flowers. First prize Angus Ross, Old Portsmouth, Hants Runners-up John Harcourt, Maidstone, Kent; Janet Fletcher, Johnstone, Renfrewshire

Alex Massie

Today in #middleclassproblems: worrying how your lamb was killed

It doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t. At least not very much. The notion, apparently scandalous, that the Great British food market is being contaminated – sorry, infiltrated – by meat slaughtered according to traditional religious practices is the most #MiddleClassProblem of the year. I mean, you know it’s serious when Waitrose is in the dock. Waitrose! Now I can see that there is a case for requiring meat slaughtered without the animal being stunned to be labelled as such. But, as Melanie McDonagh concedes, the proportion of livestock slaughtered in this fashion is tiny. Perhaps 10% of sheep but only 3% of cattle and 4% of poultry. A reasonable person

Melanie McDonagh

It’s not acceptable to pass off halal food without telling us

It matters; it really does, if meat from animals conscious when killed is being passed off on us by stealth by supermarkets, schools and restaurants. It wouldn’t be just an imposition on the squeamish but a large-scale taking of liberties by the big food retailers which would affect most carnivores in Britain who shop in supermarkets and eat in chain restaurants, viz, the majority of us. The Mail reported today that the default option for many retailers is to sell meat that has been ritually slaughtered according to Islamic requirements. And ritual slaughter can mean not stunning the animal before killing it. What we need to know is:

James Forsyth

George Osborne’s Waterloo

Hougoumont should be a place known to every Briton. It was the site of one of the finest feats of arms in the history of the British military. If this farmhouse had fallen to Bonaparte’s forces during the battle of Waterloo, Napoleon’s 100 days would have become a French 100 years. But history has not been kind to Hougoumont. It stopped been a farm at the end of the last century and souvenir hunters are simply stripping the place. The excellent Project Hougoumont stepped in to try to preserve the site. They found an ally in George Osborne, who first visited Hougoumont in 2012 and was shocked by what he saw.

Jo Beecham

Till death do I part

For my sister, who always shows me so much love and keeps my fridge filled with food. Recurrence: October 2012 The very sweet 12-year old looking registrar explains somewhat nervously that the CT scan repeated from six weeks earlier shows the cancer is moving aggressively and ominously towards my internal organs and that I need more chemo immediately. ‘What if I don’t want more chemo……?’. ‘Ermm, mmm’! ‘How long have I got, with or without more chemo?’ ‘Ermm, mmm, I don’t know, ermm, I have to ask the consultant and get back to you’. ‘No offence, and you seem very nice and everything,’ I say ‘but shouldn’t you be able

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: the gilded generation, one year countdown to the election and rise of the bores

Is it fair to describe today’s youth as the ‘gilded generation’? On this week’s View from 22 podcast, James Delingpole discusses this week’s Spectator cover feature with The Economist’s Daniel Knowles. With rising house prices, increasing levels of debts and a highly competitive jobs market, is the notion that the young have never had it so good a myth? Were things better for young people in the 1970s? And will today’s young generation witness a fall in living standards, compared to their elders? James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman also look forward to the general election, which is exactly one year today. At this stage, who is looking most likely to ‘win’, whether it is another coalition or being the

James Delingpole

The gilded generation – why the young have never had it so good

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_8_May_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”James Delingpole and Daniel Knowles discuss the gilded generation” startat=42] Listen [/audioplayer]No one likes being told they’ve never had it so good. When Lord Young of Graffham tried it three years ago, he was quickly forced out of his job as David Cameron’s enterprise adviser. And rightly so, you might think, for it was an affront both to the evidence before our eyes and to our most basic human instinct: that the past was golden and ahead of us lies only misery, penury, falling standards, overcrowding and the on-going destruction of our once green and pleasant land. This was the (hugely popular) theme of Danny Boyle’s London Olympics opening

Bruce Anderson

A military funeral for a heroic vintage

Alas, the ’63 ports are beginning to fade. I came to that conclusion the last time I tasted a Warre’s, and the other night I was at the drinking of a Graham’s, an exemplar of that magnificent year. It was still delicious, and from the summit of a mountain there is a long descent. But the journey had begun. The passing of a great vintage deserves a grand obsequy: tolling bells, slow marches, a gun-carriage. How appropriate, therefore, that our host was not only a Grenadier but perhaps the most famous member of that illustrious regiment in recent decades. There are so many stories about Valentine Cecil, and most of them

George Morgan-Grenville

The Himalayas

As the aircraft descends into the high altitude military airport at Leh, the first glimpse of the Himalayan Kingdom of Ladakh is nothing short of awe-inspiring. Situated on an 11,500ft high desert plateau, and sometimes known as ‘Little Tibet’, Ladakh has remained immune from the Chinese and Kashmiri territorial conflict. It maintains one of the most intact Tantric Buddhist societies left on earth. A journey through this stunning kingdom should be on every serious traveller’s list and it is now possible to stay in a series of fully staffed private houses dotted across the Indus valley. Ladakh reached the pinnacle of its power in the mid-17th century under King Sengge