Society

Thursday

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Golf’s $10 million nobodies

Golf has reached the eye-watering end of the season in the United States. By Sunday night, one man in a baseball cap will walk off the 18th green in Atlanta $10 million richer. This week is the final event in the FedEx Cup play-offs, a four-week season-within-a-season on the American Tour in which a total of $67 million is up for grabs for the top 125 players. Not a bad reward for a sunny afternoon trying to put a white ball in a hole in fewer strokes than everyone else. Being a golfer is one of the few jobs where the less work you do the richer you become. As

Carola Binney Carola Binney

Haunted by Facebook, students can’t now reinvent themselves at university

My mum had a friend at university who had been called ‘Pudding’ at school. They’d sometimes be walking down the street, and someone who had known the now-svelte adult as a chubby 13-year-old would say ‘Hello, Pudding’. As I get ready to start at university myself in October, it’s in the knowledge that my schoolgirl self will be even harder to escape. Reinventing yourself at the end of sixth form was once a time-honoured rite of passage, hindered only by a few easily avoided old acquaintances. In Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder frees himself from the self-consciously serious circle of his school days with relative ease: ‘At Sebastian’s approach these grey

Marcus Berkmann

My 50 weddings

A couple of weekends ago, I went to my 50th wedding. Everyone I have mentioned this to has pulled a rather strange face, as though to say, ‘You count the weddings you go to? What unhinged variety of cross-eyed lunatic does that?’ But like so much of lasting value in life, this began with a conversation in a pub. Back in 1997, I was moaning to my old friend Terence about how many weddings I was having to go to. People I knew simply wouldn’t stop getting married. So how many in all? asked Terence. I don’t know, said I. It could, and probably should, have ended there. But the

Lucy Vickery

Winner: “Psychopaths of Glory — Unlocking the Bastard Within

In Competition 2815 you were invited to contribute to the booming genre of self-help by proposing a new title guaranteed to storm the bestseller lists and providing a blurb for it. There was lots of good stuff, though some promising ideas failed to deliver in the execution. I was intrigued by Josh Ekroy’s invitation to get in touch with my inner duct tape, and Bill Greenwell’s The Etiquette of Misery: How to Turn Grieving into Gold would surely put a spring in the step of the ranks of Melancholics Anonymous. Commendations go to Brian Murdoch and Mike Morrison. The prizewinners, printed below, earn £30 each. This week’s king of the

Gunnar Beck

Merkel will win – because my fellow Germans dare not speak of national self interest

When Germany goes to the polls this weekend the question is not ‘Who will win?’ but ‘With whom will Chancellor Merkel govern?’ There may be another CDU-FDP coalition; there may be another Grand Coalition with the Social Democrats. But there is no doubt who will emerge triumphant. All this may baffle Brits: Angela Merkel has spent years sending German taxpayers’ money to bail out various spendthrift European countries and has seemed more concerned about being a good European than a good German. And she’ll be rewarded with another four years in power, reaffirming her role as the most formidable political leader in Europe. How has she managed it? A large

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Bet on Royal Mail, not Twitter

Royal Mail delivers to 29 million UK addresses; last year it generated £9 billion of revenues, of which £324 million remained as profit before tax; and it is likely to be valued at £3 billion in its privatisation share sale, indicating a price-earnings ratio modestly below ten. Twitter — the microblogging phenomenon beloved of self-admiring celebs, but now so ubiquitous as a mode of communication that it is compulsory for British ambassadors abroad — has 200 million users and is expected to generate revenues of just £365 million this year, maybe twice that next year. Twitter says it’s profitable but has so far kept its accounts private, and is nevertheless

Michael Crick

I exposed the ‘Plebgate’ stitch-up last year. So why are the police still investigating?

Andrew Mitchell actually had big doubts about becoming chief whip. True, he had often spoken to friends of being ‘a whip at heart’, and how he’d loved the army-like camaraderie, discipline and intrigue of serving in the whips’ team under John Major. But his regular trips overseas as Secretary of State for International Development meant he didn’t know many of the Tory MPs elected in 2010. And he so enjoyed being Development Secretary, too, and making a visible impact in one of the few ministries not afflicted by cuts. But Mitchell’s appointment as chief whip this time last year suddenly thrust him from the margins of Westminster to the heart

Bruce Anderson

The joy of rum

Until a few years ago, I knew nothing about rum. There was the dark stuff, coveted by the pirates of Treasure Island, used by the Navy for grog on board warships and abused by Churchill in his sarcastic account of naval traditions: rum, sodomy and the lash. At least rum would be preferable to the other two. There was also white rum, usually the preserve of those too young to appreciate a decent drink, who often mixed it with Coca-Cola. Even as a child, I did not like the taste of Coke. I last drank it about 40 years ago. I was travelling by bus across Anatolia and we stopped

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle: My career as a wine writer started out so well

Ah, this all started out so well, and with such good intentions. This attempt of mine to write seriously and informatively about wine. Well, to write about wine, full stop, really. There was always going to be a problem with someone who rather likes retsina, I suppose. My chief criteria for judging wine is quantity. The many bottles of Spanish wine arrived. My wife and I sat in the courtyard, at the little iron table. I had a notebook on the table, and there was a bucket beneath the table, so that we could spit out the wine, like I’ve heard they do. It was a warm and scented summer

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

A grand tour in a glass

What a challenge. To travel across Italy in an afternoon of wines. I arrived at the soaring spaces of Lindley Hall in Victoria, where Berry Bros & Rudd had assembled 43 growers from 11 regions for its Grand Tour, Italy 2013. Master of ceremonies David Berry Green strolled among the tables tasting and gossiping, introducing old friends to new. An Englishman living in Barolo, Piedmont, David is a lean, towering figure who looks like the youthful Jeremy Irons. His passion is infectious. After chatting to him for ten minutes, I felt I’d watched a documentary about Italy. Wine, he told me, was imperial Rome’s secret weapon. The Romans conquered with

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The joy of 1995 Lagavulin

In a small cupboard at the end of my office sits a bottle of 1995 Lagavulin, distilled in a Pedro Ximénez sherry cask. Just looking at it from my desk gives me immense pleasure. I can open it and smell the cork if I need inspiration. And sometimes, after The Spectator is put to bed, I may take a sip or two. Maybe not even enough to reach the throat, just to moisten the tongue and refresh the palate. It is the most remarkable whisky I have ever owned. I’m sure that Taki, our High Life correspondent, knows his whisky. I like to think, then, that he appreciated the bottle he

Harry Eyres

Italian red wine: The start of the affair

I was taught to admire and respect, even revere, the great red wines of France: the growths of Bordeaux, the crus of Burgundy, Hermitage, Côte Rotie. No one taught me to admire Italian red wines; I simply fell in love with them. The prelude to the affair was a wine tasting hosted by the occasional group of shippers and experts called Forum Vinorum in London in 1987, masterminded by Nicholas Belfrage MW. This was a revelation — or a series of revelations. Valpolicella, at least as made by Quintarelli, did not have to be the thin insipid stuff which had given us hangovers and heartburn at student discos, but could

Henry Jeffreys

Sorry, Champagne, but cider is the original fizz

It has become a commonplace fact, beloved of pub quizzes, that an Englishman, Christopher Merret, invented Champagne. There is even an element of truth to it: Merret gave a paper to the Royal Society in 1672 outlining how to make wine fizzy. But he wasn’t the first to induce bubbles in a bottle. In the West Country, scientifically inclined gentlemen had been doing it for years — only they used cider, not wine. In the 17th century there was a wine crisis in England. Home-grown vines had been killed by prolonged cold weather — something now known as the Little Ice Age — and imports were severely curtailed because of

Aidan Hartley

Aidan Hartley: I have been shot at and bombed so why do I fear a pyramid?

It was towards dusk by the time we had given the tourist police the slip and started climbing the pyramid of Mycerinus at Giza. It was Sebastian Barry-Taylor and I and we wore white linen suits. The 4ft blocks were easy enough to scale because erosion of the limestone had in the 4,500 years since construction weathered cavities or broken off corners so that there were plenty of hand- and footholds. We climbed quickly, looking down at the fat policemen in the desert shaking their fists up at us — but we did not rush it. To slip or stumble would be very dangerous because I could see that once

Sophia Waugh

Auberon Waugh’s way with wine

The cellars at Combe Florey, the house in Somerset in which I grew up, were a place of mystery and fear. You walked down wide, shallow stone steps to a large door on which my father had stuck a postcard which read ‘I know who you are’ when, in a fit of paranoia, he decided that a neighbour was stealing his wine. Once through the door, there were more steps down until you found yourself in a large, cool, faintly musty-smelling room. Bats, furious at the disturbance, swooped around you until they sulkily returned to their lair in some dark corner. Off each wall were more cellars: in one, a

Florence King

Notes on …Vodka

James Bond’s ‘Vodka martini, shaken, not stirred’ will never be a mark of sophistication for me because vodka and I go back too far. Our association began when I was nine or ten in that brief interlude after the second world war when Russia was still ‘our noble ally’. Vodka was simply one more new thing, marketed when pizza was still called ‘pizza pie’ and the strict law pushed for years by the butter interests was dropped, permitting margarine to be sold coloured instead of white. Putting margarine ‘on the table’, once unforgiveable, quickly became common practice, but vodka’s image problems were harder to shake. The USA is a whiskey

James Delingpole James Delingpole

James Delingpole: As a Brummie, I am aggrieved with Peaky Blinders

You wait a whole lifetime for a lavishly shot, starrily cast, mega-budget gangster drama set in Birmingham to come along. Then when it does, it’s absolute rubbish. Well, I’m sorry but it is and as a Brummie — near enough: I grew up in a village called Alvechurch, just outside, and I come from a long line of Midlands industrialists — I feel particularly aggrieved by the entirely unjustified acclaim being heaped on the dismal Peaky Blinders (Thursday, BBC2). Let’s start with the accents. Some sound like a mélange of Liverpool and generic northern; others sound Irish, even when spoken by characters who aren’t supposed to be Irish. The series

Susie Dent

What’s in a Surname, by David McKie – review

In South Korea, some 20 million people share just five surnames. Every one of Denmark’s top 20 surnames ends in ‘-sen’, meaning ‘son of’, a pattern that is replicated across Scandinavia. British surnames have never favoured such neatness, and we can be grateful for that. While we may have lost such delightfully chewy names as Crackpot, Crookbones and Sweteinbede, the average city will still provide its Slys, Haythornthwaites, and McGillikuddys. David McKie’s winding and sensitive study of British surnames is based on his findings in cemeteries, registers and oral accounts across six villages called Broughton, from Hampshire to Furness. It is a structure that allows the author to linger on

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Transylvania Diary by Thomas W. Hodgkinson – diary

Ehe-Gefängnis. The word, strictly speaking (which is how one should always speak), means ‘marriage prison’, and refers to an austere cell maintained in some of the magnificent fortified Saxon churches of central Transylvania. When a local couple decided to divorce, they were first locked in this narrow room for several weeks. There was only one bed: single. There was one chair, one plate, one knife, one fork, one cup. The result was that within a few days, the couple would realise they didn’t actually need a divorce after all — not because they wanted to escape the hell of enforced proximity, but because they had fallen in love again. I’m

Wednesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Pippa Middleton writing more headlines

Pippa haters look away now. Mr Steerpike has learned that she has been included on a list of the most influential journalists in London. According to the Evening Standard’s Power 1000 (which has a section devoted to Fleet Street): ‘It says much about the state of modern journalism that Prince William’s sister-in-law is so in demand as a columnist for Vanity Fair and Waitrose Kitchen amongst others.’ Yes, and Mr S can think of another esteemed organ where Pippa regularly features… There was uproar when Pippa replaced Christopher Hitchens as a contributing editor of Vanity Fair. This list is sure to sooth those sceptics.