Throughout the day, we’ll be posting audio highlights from the 2013 Autumn statement — including speeches from George Osborne and Ed Balls. George Osborne’s statement to the House of Commons: listen to ‘George Osborne’s Autumn Statement’ on Audioboo
It’s become a given: we are all stalkers now. Thanks to Google, Twitter, Facebook and the fact that absolutely nobody seems to have the faintest idea about privacy settings, it is easier to keep track of people on the other side of the world than ever it was to snoop on a village neighbour from behind the safety of a lace curtain. But a strange and sinister new phenomenon has begun to emerge. Call it secondary stalking. Even the stalkers are being stalked now. This was brought home to me the other night when I was having dinner with one of my closest friends, who I will call Andrew (gay,
A good wine, as I say in my book Life’s Too Short To Drink Bad Wine (now in a new, revised, nifty-looking edition) is a wine you like drinking. Which sounds obvious, but isn’t; a lot of people seem to suspect that there are objectively ‘good’ wines, and if they haven’t been inducted into that mystery, it demonstrates their ignorance. In fact, if you truly enjoy a £3.99 bottle, you’ll save a lot of money. But it can’t make you oblivious to the delights of something finer. Take the Beaujolais in this offer. You might drink a Beaujolais Nouveau (now in some of our more outdated bars) and take pleasure
Claret has a commercial advantage over Burgundy. Thanks to the grandes lignes of châteaux and vintages, you know where you are. A mature and well-kept claret from a good year is unlikely to disappoint. That is why new wine drinkers, seeking certainty, are drawn to Bordeaux. Burgundy is much more complicated. Like the railway lines of the southern region, it is a cat’s cradle of cuvées, domaines and growers. For the natives, there can be advantages. Old Alphonse has half an acre next to Vosne-Romanée. Instead of putting the grapes in with his Bourgogne rouge, he bottles them separately for family and friends. Lucky them. In 1981, covering the French
You probably have no idea how much of yourself you have given away on the internet, or how much it’s worth. Never mind Big Brother, the all-seeing state; the real menace online is the Little Brothers — the companies who suck up your personal data, repackage it, then sell it to the highest bidder. The Little Brothers are answerable to no one, and they are every-where. What may seem innocuous, even worthless information — shopping, musical preferences, holiday destinations — is seized on by the digital scavengers who sift through cyberspace looking for information they can sell: a mobile phone number, a private email address. The more respectable data-accumulating companies
In Competition 2826 you were invited to submit nonsense verse on a wintry theme. The line between sense and nonsense is a blurred one; certainly Carroll’s crazy world has a bonkers internal logic all of its own. But perhaps the best way into nonsense is to put the quest for sense aside for once and simply surrender yourself to the whimsical, the topsy-turvy and the fantastical. The winners below take £25 each. The bonus fiver is Brian Allgar’s. ’Twas winter, and the gringeing goves Did quave and quemble on the ice, The cameroon howled like a loon And nibbled frozen lice. ‘The miliband is close at hand!’ He sneezed
It was about a week ago, at 8 p.m., when our blackout happened. In the 1980s people would have headed for the bedroom or out to loot the local off-licence. In 2013, however, our first reaction was to check the battery health of our mobile phones. This relationship between sex, crime and consumer electronics may be important. The recorded fall in sexual activity among those aged 16 to 44 in the recent National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles was widely attributed to the ‘growth in social media’ and to our new habit of taking smartphones and tablets to bed. Plausible as this sounds, I don’t think the survey proves
Question: what do you call several dozen pop-up shops, all freshly popped up together at the one time of year when they might actually be useful? Answer: a Christmas market. Once upon a time Christmas markets, like many English Christmas traditions, were something we borrowed from Germany but did a little less well. And if you enjoy Glühwein and sugared pretzels, there are plenty of those ones still around, often run by borrowed Germans. (I have fond memories of the one in Old Market Square, Nottingham, and there’s a nice London specimen on the South Bank by the Royal Festival Hall.) If you’re in search of imaginative gifts, however, there’s
When I was a child — in the days before it became illegal under Schedule 5 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act (1981) and Schedule 2 of the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations (2010) — I was an unlicensed handler of great crested newts. I loved them for the same reasons, I imagine, Ken Livingstone does: the gorgeous contrast between their rough, matt black bodies and their flame-orange and black-speckled bellies; the way they float in mid-pond as if in suspended animation; watching them develop from their larval stage into efts and then adults; Beatrix Potter’s Sir Isaac Newton… But this was back in the near vanished age when
What happened to the cheese-eating surrender monkeys? Just over a decade ago, the French, having refused to join the allied adventure in Iraq, were the butt of every hawkish joke. (Remember ‘Freedom fries’? Oh how we laughed.) Now, as America and Britain are beating a retreat from the world stage, France has turned into the West’s most reliable interventionist. Its President, the disaster-prone François Hollande, rattles his sabre at any despot or war criminal who dares to stand in the way of liberté, egalité, or fraternité. American neoconservatives — the War Party in Washington — have turned Francophile as a result. ‘Vive la France!’ tweeted Senator John McCain, America’s most
Another month, so it seems, another super-head rolls. Not that many would have noticed the latest. Greg Wallace’s resignation as executive head teacher of five schools in the east London borough of Hackney was drowned out by the hubbub surrounding the Revd Paul Flowers. Yet the departure of Wallace — much lamented by pupils and their parents, according to tributes in the local newspaper — deserves a closer look. For Wallace was not just any top teacher. As one of the Education Secretary’s so-called ‘Magnificent Seven’, he was a living, breathing advertisement for super-headship — the idea that particularly dynamic and gifted members of the teaching profession can be airlifted out of their
Twenty of us are gathered in the management suite of a shopping centre to learn about benchmarking grotto deliverables, exceeding customer expectations and, inevitably, Elf-and-Safety. Most are tiny teenage girls; they will be the elves. I gravitate to the only other middle-aged man. ‘Santa?’ he asks, nodding in the direction of my stomach. I nod back towards his. It’s 1 November. It couldn’t have been any earlier, as some of the elves have been engaged as scary monsters until Hallowe’en. Not all of them — department store ghouls don’t drive sales quite like Father Christmas — although my fellow Santa had been a Cannibal Killer at a farm shop. He’s
A very useful feature in the Daily Telegraph informs me of the best 20 towns in Britain ‘for Christmas’. Number one on the list is the Cotswold village of Chipping Campden, to which we must surely all decamp immediately. People moan all the time that despite the profusion of new technology and our comparative affluence these days, we’re not actually much happier. But they forget to factor in things like the Daily Telegraph’s list of the best places to live in if you really like Christmas. Think how useful that would have been to the parents of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Instead of journeying by donkey to the
Scottish people, known to be a bit touchy on occasion, sometimes wonder if that customary attitude of jocular condescension displayed towards their country by, in particular, the nearest neighbours, does not disguise something like envy. Jealousy would be forgivable: as a brand, Scotland has all the trimmings: the scenery is fabulous in what Alex Salmond likes to call ‘the undisputed home of golf’, the beef and raspberries first-rate, the knitwear coveted around the globe. And as for delightful cultural inessentials, what other country of comparable or of any size can boast such a collection of instantly recognisable and authentic national signifiers? The Royal Mile hawkers do their best to turn
At the back of every drinks tray or cabinet there are always some stray bottles. Some deserve to be lonely, others just end up that way. But it is occasionally worth sifting the wheat — or at least grain — from the chaff. Here is a guide for doing so. Vermouth Only keep your bottle if you make your own martinis. If you drink them as they should be drunk you will need so little that only a martini alcoholic could ever reach the bottom of the bottle. You won’t need to buy two in a lifetime. So keep it, but on no account ever drink it on its own.
The winner of the first ever Michael Heath award for cartooning is Len Hawkins. One of his drawings appears below. He receives an original drawing by Michael Heath, a bottle of Spectator gin, a year-long contract with The Spectator and a pair of handmade shoes from John Lobb, who kindly sponsored the competition.
I’ve just received my latest energy bill and it appears that I’ve been living this last year in a draughty manor house rather than a three–bedroom ex-council flat. This winter, I’m going to have to choose between a warm flat and decent-quality booze. Of course it’s going to be the booze; I’ll just have to wear a woolly hat and fingerless gloves whilst drinking. At times like this, I thank God for the ingenuity of the British. Other cold countries have drinks to combat the winter — the Russians have vodka, the Swedes have schnapps and the Mongolians have fermented yak’s milk. These are drinks to achieve oblivion rather than
G and T, the favoured cure for gyppy tummy in Himalayan hill-stations, bubbled home from the Raj to the English suburbs to become the aperitif of choice in Betjemanic golf clubs and panelled bars from Altrincham to Carshalton. There is a particular pleasure in being in a London pub at the end of an office day, and hearing the clink of ice in glass, as barmaids ask ‘Do you want lemon in that?’ and office workers, happy that the tedium of toil is done, say, ‘Yes, and make those doubles.’ Larkin wrote about the pleasure of making G and T, but it was never my drink. Gin, for me as
When I’m gathered, as my granny used to say, I’d like to be remembered as the man who reintroduced the imperial pint of champagne. I’m not an ambitious creature, by and large. But we all want to leave our mark upon this world somehow, and that’s where I’ve set my sights. I’ve been trying for over 30 years, and sadly I’m no closer to winning this particular battle. But, as my old granny also said, pointing to a picture of Robert the Bruce and the spider, ‘If at first you don’t succeed…’ The imperial pint makes for a perfect-sized bottle. You get four proper-sized glasses from it — as opposed to
Many of us, I get the feeling, don’t go and see as many films as we used to, or want to. Instead we spend all our time complaining that we don’t have enough time to watch films any more. Speaking purely as a hard-working freelance, I also miss all those old black-and-white movies BBC2 used to show in the afternoon, to fill in the yawning hours between lunch and teatime. You would see things you hadn’t seen before, you would see things you had seen a million times before, and you would doze happily through all of them, while characters walked around wearing hats and talking and talking and talking
