Society

My favourite quote of the season comes from Tracy Rogers, a marine ecologist who sometime today will be winched from the research vessel the Akademik Shokalskiy and rescued by helicopter.  ‘I love it when the ice wins and we don’t,’ she says. ‘It reminds you that as humans we don’t control everything and that the natural world is the winner here.’ The unintended irony is delicious. If the winner of the fiasco which has been developing in the Antarctic over the past two weeks is the natural world there is little disguising who the losers are, even if, as I suspect, Tracy Rogers can’t quite see it. She and her fellow

So there was no great rush of arrivals from Romania and Bulgaria on day one – nor was there ever likely to be. The numbers will build steadily as they did from Poland in 2004. How many is another question. The key difference with Poland is that other countries, notably Germany, France, The Netherlands and Austria will be opening their labour markets at the same time; other members have already done so. The other major difference is that about a million, mainly Romanians, have already gone to Spain and a similar number to Italy. In Spain unemployment is now about 25% and youth unemployment is just over 50%; the same

Tristram Hunt, Shadow Education Secretary, is an intelligent and articulate individual but like everyone in politics, has the handicap of having to square his views with the record and policies of his own party. His interesting interview with the Fabian Review is a case in point. He attributes some of the education failures of white boys — the new educational underclass — in British schools to the influx of large numbers of East European immigrants in areas like Kent and East Anglia. His remedy for the problem is benign, namely, to educate indigenous youth to the standards needed by employers, so as to outflank the competition, and to focus on

In the 2 December 1995 edition, Digby Anderson bemoans a Britain in which people just cannot postpone any pleasure: not crisps, not carols. Christmas was and still is regarded as a time of feasting. Traditionally, however, the feasting started on 25 December and went on to 2 February, the feast of Candlemas. Now, the feasters just about last till after lunch on Boxing Day. When offered the most modest pre-dinner drinks on that evening, they haul up the white flag and holler, ‘Nuff.’ Christmas Day used to be the start of carol singing, Christmas carols that is; it was Advent carols that were sung before the 25th. Now the only

Soothe your post-Christmas dinner indigestion with these readers’ charms, dug out from the spell-book that is the 24th December 1954 edition. The usual prize of £5 was offered for a charm against the pains of indigestion after Christmas dinner, in not more than eight lines of English verse: the charm to be pronounced while taking the prescribed dose of bismuth, bicarb., or other normal remedy. Nearly ninety competitors were prepared to reinforce their doses of magnesia, bismuth, bicarb. and alka-seltzer with a rhyming charm; but, although among the big and little guns there were (as Sir John Squire said in a Masefield parody) `some interesting ones,’ I was rather disappointed

Her Maj on top form – and highlighting the benefits of the ‘family’ of the Commonwealth. A reminder that, if Britain does leave the EU, it has a far more strategically-placed global network to fall back on.

Every Christmas, The Spectator runs a short story but for the first time this year we’re having it read — and by the author. We’re delighted that Susan Hill, whose many books include The Woman In Black and The Mist in the Mirror, has agreed to read her new story, The Boy on the Hillside, which we are releasing as a special podcast. If you can wire up your computer or telephone to the sofa, it’s the perfect way to spend some time on Christmas Eve. listen to ‘Susan Hill reads ‘The Boy on the Hillside’’ on Audioboo