Society

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How can I make my slobbish flatmate pay for a cleaner?

Q. My godmother owns a house in a great part of London. She does not come up very often and she is very kindly allowing me to move in for a year with three university friends. I will be landlady and collect the very low rent she will charge us. It is amazingly kind of her so I am annoyed that one of my intended lodgers, who has never even met my godmother, but will benefit from her generosity just through being a friend of mine, refuses to contribute towards a cleaner. He says it will be a waste of money for us to spend, collectively, £120 a week (£30

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 16 May 2013

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, flew to Sochi, on the Black Sea, to talk with President Vladimir Putin, principally about Syria. He then flew to Washington, to support the American tour by Prince Harry and hold talks with President Barack Obama. They said that Britain and America wanted to strengthen the moderate opposition in Syria somehow. In a joint press conference, Mr Obama also said: ‘The UK’s participation in the EU is an expression of its influence.’ Mr Cameron tried to placate Tory MPs by rushing out a draft EU referendum bill, in the face of an amendment in the Queen’s Speech debate expressing regret at the absence of

Peter Jones

Football, Sir Alex Ferguson, Seneca, Classics, Ancient Rome

Sir Alex Ferguson is going to be in big trouble in retirement: how will he control or defuse his famous rages, now that they have no outlet? Ancients took a mixed view of the emotion. ‘Anger’ is the first word of Western literature — the anger of Achilles, with which Homer’s Iliad starts. Even though it results in the death of his dearest friend Patroclus, Achilles admits that there is pleasure in it, ‘sweeter than the dripping of honey’. The Stoics, regarding control of the emotions as the key to virtue, were entirely hostile to it. Seneca (4 BC–AD 65) paints a fine picture of the angry man: devoid of

Mr Magoo

2113: Recycling

Twenty 9-letter items form a circular chain in which each item recycles eight of its letters into the next one. Eight of the items are unclued entries, seven are words which must be removed from clues before they can be solved, and five are thematic items. One of the thematic items and one of the unclued entries are two-word phrases. The thematic person’s surname must replace one answer in the grid (leaving real words).   Across   1    Police officer is against re-folding this firm (6) 7    Fairly generical diminutive outside right (6) 12    Queen accepts conclusions of her heir and no mistake (5) 16    Place certainly including earth? (6)

Mr Magoo

Solution to 2110: resort

Unclued lights are anagrams of seaside resorts in southern England: Paignton (1A), Seaford (32), Margate (33), Ramsgate (40), Salcombe (7), Ryde (15), Looe (21) and Worthing (22D).   First prize Don Thompson, Bolton Runners-up A. Mulholland, Nottingham; Wilf Lewsey, East Leake, Loughborough

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Hitched

Well, the deed is done. Many thanks to those of you who sent your best wishes here or on Twitter or wherever. Very kind of you and much appreciated. It’s all still sinking in, frankly. Time passes agreeably slowly on the Hebrides and it scarcely seems only a week since we last spoke here. Time stretches without newspapers, television or the internet. Given the state of the world this may be no bad thing. Anyway, back now and normal service will resume from today.  What larks.  

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Never accept meat from strangers

Never accept meat from strangers. That seems to be the lesson of the horsemeat scandal – at least for the ex-commercial director of Freeza Meats. In September 2012, an Environment Health Officer arrived to inspect their meat stores. Discovering a large block of meat in one of their freezers, the officer decided to quarantine it. When the meat was tested for equine DNA, the meat was discovered to be 80% horse. And thus the mysterious case of the frozen horsemeat began. James Fairbairn, the commercial director at the time, appeared in front of the Efra select committee yesterday in a bid to explain things. In August, so his story goes, a

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Britain’s great university rip-off

The mis-selling of higher education is one of the least remarked-upon scandals of our time, but anyone under 40 should be familiar with the concept. You’re told, at school, that a degree will make you far better-off. Politicians even put a price on it: a degree will make you, on average, £100,000 better-off in your lifetime. But this is a fake figure, produced by mashing together law and medicine degrees with others. And when you get to university, you find the ‘tuition’ involves being asked to sit in crowded lecture theatres (or watch on a video in an overflow room) and be told to go read books. This isn’t the

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Britain’s Eurovision problem

Britain is a stickler for tradition and each May we now observe a relatively new one: we bomb in the Eurovision Song Contest. The protocol now is well-established. Our entry is chosen by a BBC bureaucrat who appears to see the whole thing as a bad joke. We send out Bonnie Tyler/Engelbert Humperdinck etc to face an army of talent from countries who have studied the art of winning and take it very seriously indeed. Electro Velvet (more on them here) can at least reassure themselves that they will not be Britain’s worst-ever entry. That honour goes to Jemini, a Liverpudlian duo who in 2003 made history by being given nul points by tout le

Lucy Vickery

Do your worst

In Competition No. 2797 you were invited to  think of the worst possible title for a poem and then write that poem.   Oh, for more space! This challenge brought in a large and excellent entry that fizzed with the spirit of McGonagall and McKittrick Ros.   I don’t have space to commend all I’d like to, but take a bow, Chris O’Carroll (‘I taste better than I smell’), Jerome Betts (‘From Verrucaria Maura to Parmelia Saxatilis’), Josh Ekroy (‘Ode on a Teenage Problem Child’), George Simmers (‘The Niceness of Jimmy Savile’), Graham King (‘I floss my nostrils daily’) and Adrian Fry (‘Your Oblong Face’). The winners take £25; W.J.

Roger Alton Roger Alton

On the retirement of Sir Alex Ferguson, and on cricket’s new boy wonder, Joe Root

The tear-flecked coverage and forests of newsprint devoted to the departure of Sir Alex Ferguson have made the resignation of Pope Benedict and the appointment of his successor look as big a deal as trying to find an ink monitor. And rightly so: Suralex is not just one of the most significant figures in world football, but in also in all of British public life. Besides his jaw-dropping success, he was just about the only top-flight manager to really bring on young English players. We’ll see what David Moyes does: so far he’s brought on several Scottish players, which doesn’t seem to have gone that well for Scotland’s woeful national

Aidan Hartley

Wild life: Leopard on a hot tin roof

A leopard has been on the rampage night after night. We know her because she often lurks in the woods behind the farmstead, between the beehives and the old long-drop hut. Very occasionally, at dusk, she’s spotted lying on the hot tin roof of the big water tank on the hill above the woods — but for weeks around midnight she’s been prowling up to the goats’ boma. She leaps over high thorns and razor wire and dry-stone walls, struts along the top of the enclosure and then pounces. Livestock erupt in panic, the night watchmen shake themselves from their deep slumber and roar and rush about. The she leopard,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Passion Play; The Match Box

How fashions change. Peter Nichols’s adultery drama, Passion Play, will seem tame and rather conventional to modern audiences. It was written in 1981 at a time when the rites and idioms of therapy hadn’t penetrated every level of our culture. Back then the candid scrutiny of one’s emotions, supervised by a ruminating analyst, was a thrilling and sophisticated novelty available only to high-earning fashion junkies. Today’s self-elevators choose different proofs of social altitude. They drink Bhutanese champagne, they purchase dachas in Moldova, or they holiday on the Great Barrier Reef in the family bathyscaphe. Nichols sets his drama in a swish London suburb where James, an ageing art dealer, is

Andrew Green

Arm Syria’s rebels? That would be pouring petrol on a fire

Syria is sliding rapidly into chaos.  The supply of weapons to the opposition could only make matters worse, yet the Prime Minister seems to be -contemplating it. We have misjudged the situation from the start. From the early days of the crisis, two years ago, we rode to the rescue with our rhetoric. We were all for the forces of democracy and for the downfall of a ruthless dictator. Syria was another green shoot of the Arab Spring. A Syrian National Council was to be formed, on the pattern of the Libyan version, to be the vehicle for our democratic ambitions. We were to be, in that agonising cliché, ‘on the

Steerpike Steerpike

Steerpike: Begging with the archbishop, dining with rebels, and playing Shakespeare

Begging bowls are out at Canterbury cathedral. Anglicanism’s principal shrine is in danger of toppling over if its custodians can’t raise an emergency fund of £17.8 million needed to shore up the nave, two wobbly towers and Christchurch Gate. A bid for £10.2 million to save the cathedral from the forces of gravity has just been rejected by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Canons may even shut the cathedral to worshippers while they finalise a last-ditch scheme to cadge the dough from US philanthropists. Failing that, they could try flogging the old ruin to the Emir of Qatar. He seems to own everything else these days.   Chris Grayling, affectionately known as ‘Uncle

Jane Kelly

It’s time to admit it: the NHS is unable to look after our elderly

I decided to become a hospital visitor last year, after being a patient and finding myself in something more like a factory than an old-fashioned ward. A terror of infection in 2011 (there were 2,053 deaths involving Clostridium difficile) has ended the cosy world of side tables covered in flowers and cards. Concerns about data protection have put paid to WRVS ladies pushing trolleys, and vicars walking around offering solace. There aren’t even many nurses about, and even if there were, you wouldn’t want to bother them for tea and a chat. It’s OK if you have family or friends nearby, but if you don’t, being a patient in today’s

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Why is there such guff in the online comments below my articles?

What’s to be done about the online comments sections in daily newspapers? These (for those estimable Spectator readers who have yet to succumb to tablets, iPhones and computer screens) are the spaces that the online versions of newspapers and magazines provide beneath the articles they publish, for readers to offer (or ‘post’) thoughts of their own. Typically there is no limit to the number of responses that can be made, and a generous limit to the length of each response. Contributors may make multiple incursions onto the site, and answer or comment on each other’s posts. Quite often a kind of conversation gets going. Contributors’ email addresses are available to

Clarissa Tan

What Michael Gove should know about going to school in Singapore

I like to tease my friend Wei about being a tiger mother. She once told me of an incident where her daughter Shu was making an artwork for a friend as a birthday present. Shu doodled for a few minutes, then showed her mother a sketch of a funny face. ‘I told her to knuckle down, spend more time, and come back with a far better drawing,’ said Wei. ‘It just wasn’t good enough.’ I said that was a bit harsh on her eight-year-old, especially since it was not schoolwork but part of Shu’s leisure time. Wei snorted. ‘It was a gift for her best mate, yet she hadn’t put