Society Archives

Thursday

5 Dec 2013

Winter’s tale

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

Rory Sutherland

How Grand Theft Auto prevents crime and violence

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

Peter Robins

Notes on … Christmas markets

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

James Delingpole

Delingpole: Here’s what I learnt from the extinction of the golden toad — ecologists have sold out to the religion of global warming

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

Freddy Gray

The Frogs of war

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

Mary Dejevsky

Super-heads are a super-huge mistake

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

Andrew Watts

Shalom, I’m Santa — how to be Father Christmas in diverse North London

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

Rod Liddle

Is it racist to want a high street where you can understand the shop signs?

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

J.R.H. Mcewen

The soul of a single malt

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

Douglas Murray

Cocktails: Cupboard love

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 Spectator

The 2013 Michael Heath Award for cartooning

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.

Henry Jeffreys

Seasonal drinking: Fortify yourself

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

A.N. Wilson

G without T

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

Simon Berry

Bring back the pint of champagne!

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

Marcus Berkmann

‘Here’s looking at you, kid’ — the best lines from the movies

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

Wednesday

4 Dec 2013

Alex Massie

London is different: the government will spend money there

The chart at the top of this post comes from the government’s National (sic) Infrastructure Plan 2013. (Sic because it is largely a plan for England.) You can find it on page 30. You may notice that one rather large part of England is not listed on this chart: London. Perhaps that is because the value of infrastructure spending in London comes in at a nifty £36 billion. Or, to put it another way, spending on infrastructure in London is equivalent to the total amount of infrastructure spending in every other part of England save the south-west. And the south-west’s figure is chiefly so high because of a single project:

Fraser Nelson

Brits are not idle – they’re just taxed to death

Today’s Times has a headline designed, I suspect, to make the blood boil. “Idle Britons are allowing Romanians to take jobs,” it says – paraphrasing the conclusion of Mariana Câmpeanu, Romania’s labour minister. This echoes a widespread idea repeated even by some British politicians. Especially those who argue that we need mass immigration to grow the economy because our own people won’t do the jobs. It’s true that many Brits don’t work: the number on out-of-work benefits never fell below four million during the Labour boom years and 99.9 per cent of the rise in employment during 1997-2010 can be accounted for by extra immigration. The same is also true under

Tuesday

3 Dec 2013

Isabel Hardman

Could ‘norms’ be influencing controversial fitness-to-work tests?

Every so often, when another strange case crops up of someone being declared fit as a fiddle for work who then dies a few days later, or who cannot walk, talk or feed themselves, questions are asked about how on earth the government could have got its fitness-to-work tests quite so wrong. These Work Capability Assessments run by ATOS Healthcare on behalf of the Work and Pensions department, are a cross-party mess: set up by Labour and continued by the Coalition. I’ve written before about the problems with their design and the contract between the DWP and ATOS, but another element that makes the test even messier has come to

Mary Wakefield

The drones are coming!

Amazon is testing unmanned drones to deliver goods to customers — whatever next? Well, the Spec can tell you exactly what. Last year we ran a cover story on drones, predicting that: ‘Quite soon, it will be impossible to ignore the fact that a revolution is taking place. You’ll look up one day and the skies will be full of flying robots: pilotless drones or UAVS (Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles) — all programmed to carry out different tasks. There’ll be security drones circling shops, streaming video back to base, Royal Mail drones flying parcels to and fro. Even the birds and bees may not be what they seem. The tiniest drones on

Melanie McDonagh

The forced Caesarean case proves that light must be shone on social services and the courts

It’s no joke, having a Caesarean, and I’ve had two. So the news that Essex County Council social services obliged a pregnant, mentally ill Italian woman to have her baby in this fashion – normally, you talk the thing over with a consultant – was perhaps the scariest element of the case when I first read about it. I mean, unless there was a medical emergency, that would count as assault by most people’s reckoning. But after reading more it’s hard to know which bit of the story to be most outraged about: the forcible removal of a child from the woman whose bipolar disorder is now, apparently, under control