Society

Washington DC: My elegant and sociable mother-in-law received an email this week warning that, should she wander on to her balcony to smoke on Monday, somebody might shoot her. The Secret Service is eager that nothing should go awry when our president is inaugurated for his second term. The inaugural parade route stretches a dozen city blocks along Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol, where the president gets sworn in, to the White House. The route is lined with office buildings and museums. There are few apartments with a view of the street, and my mother-in-law lives in one of them. When my father-in-law was alive, they’d throw a big party on

Kingsley Amis was never a fan of the Arts Council. Writing in this magazine almost 30 years ago, he described it as a ‘detestable and destructive body’ whose grants and bursaries ‘in effect pay producers, painters, writers and such in advance’. This, he wrote, ‘is a straight invitation to them to sod the public, whose ticket money they are no longer obliged to attract, and to seek the more immediate approval of their colleagues and friends instead.’ Thus state funding ends up strangling the very culture it purports to foster, leaving the country poorer artistically as well as financially. A valedictory speech delivered this week by Liz Forgan, the outgoing

Equine dining Horsemeat was found in hamburgers sold by Tesco, among others. Why did eating horses become a taboo? — In the 8th century Pope Gregory III instructed St Boniface, missionary to Germany, to forbid the eating of horseflesh to those he converted to Christianity. — There has been no tradition of eating horsemeat in Britain, where ‘I could eat a horse’ is as an expression of desperate hunger. — Horsemeat has a slightly sweet taste, like a cross between beef and venison. — Abattoirs have become the principal means of disposal of unwanted horses in Ireland. They are also subject to seizure by local authorities, which sent 589 horses