Society

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Competition: This be the reverse

In Competition No. 2730 you were invited to supply a refutation in verse of Philip Larkin’s assertion ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’. ‘This Be The Verse’ may not be Larkin’s finest poem but it is certainly his best-known and most oft-quoted (he himself wryly commented that he fully expected to hear it recited by a thousand Girl Guides before he died). The challenge generated a large and generally impressive postbag. Commendations to Frank Osen, Adrian Fry, Robert Schechter and John Whitworth. Star of the show is Alan Millard, who pockets the extra fiver. His fellow winners, printed below, are rewarded with £25 each. You lying toad! Your

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man: Class system

1) Imagine you have the choice of living in two worlds. In World A you have a five-bedroom house and everyone you know has a six-bedroom house. In World B you have a four-bedroom house and all your friends have three-bedroom houses. Which world would you prefer? 2) You can live in World C, where you get five weeks’ holiday a year and your friends get six. Or you can choose World D where you get four weeks’ holiday a year and everyone else gets three. Which do you choose? ••• Most people, when asked these questions, chose worlds B and C. In other words, with property (at least above

Nicholas Farrell

Ship of fools

Ah, those Italians. Let’s just blame the bloody Eyeties for the catastrophe of the Costa Concordia and have done with it, shall we? That way we don’t have to think too much about the perils of floating citadels in general. There was something peculiarly Italian about this disaster. The night his ship went down Francesco Schettino, the 52-year-old captain, was in the bar with a striking blonde on his arm who was not his wife. He stayed glued to her side until the moment the ship struck the submerged rock — which it only did because he had changed course to get in nice and close (he says 300 metres, the

Angela Huth

What colour is Wednesday?

If you are one of that small band of people who happen to see days of the week, months of the year, even single numbers and letters in colour, you are considered either very peculiar or very lucky. It also means you are a synaesthete. I am one of them. Synaesthesia is a rare condition: few people have heard of it. To put it simply, synaesthesia is a psychological and neurological state concerning the visual and auditory areas of the brain. For those who have never known a yellow Friday, or a red July, it’s hard to understand how this curious phenomenon works. Most people have five senses: sight, touch,

Bruce Anderson

Drink: Stars by any other name

Eheu fugaces. It is 1989 and I am off to Paris for the Sunday Telegraph, to cover the Sommet de l’Arche. Intended to commemorate the French Revolution’s bicentenary, it was a characteristic Gallic blend of grand projet, grandiloquence and frippery. The late Frank Johnson makes a suggestion. I ought to talk to Serge July, the editor of Libération, who is very close to Mitterrand; and here is a number for someone who will have M. July’s coordinates. Already halfway out of the door, not fully concentrating, I thought I was writing down July’s number. I phoned it on landing, and asked for Serge July. ‘Do you mean Georges Joly?’ Perhaps

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Bearded maniacs deserve justice, too

I’d like, this week, to draw your attention to the United Kingdom’s unjust treatment of some bearded maniacs. I realise, in writing this, that bearded maniacs may not be near the top of your list of stuff to worry about at the moment, or perhaps ever. Indeed it may even be the case that you think the world is an unjust place per se and that you would be very happy if its most egregious injustices were directed largely towards bearded maniacs, rather than the rest of us. In which case what follows may annoy you, for which apologies. Bearded Maniac No. 1 (BM1) is the ‘radical Muslim cleric’ Abu

Camilla Long

A yacht? Wouldn’t the Queen prefer a really nice soap?

Gove, a man so unsuited to the satanic machinations of high office that he looks like a permanently startled guppy, made a really strange boo this week by suggesting a collection of rich monarchists buy the Queen a £60 million yacht for her diamond Jubilee. Really? A yacht? Men just can’t buy presents, can they? Quite aside from the fact that a floating shagpad with a 12-person crew, a Jacuzzi, an indoor gym, and four on-board jetskis is the last thing anyone should spaff cash on right now, why did Gove think she actually wanted a yacht? That she wouldn’t prefer a really nice soap, or a charming footstool? A

Paul Johnson

The age of achievement

Doctors say it’s all downhill from 45. History suggests otherwise A study in the British Medical Journal suggests that our brains begin to deteriorate from the age of 45. Examining the vocabulary, comprehension and memories of 7,000 45- to 70-year-olds, the researchers found a 3.6 per cent decline in the second half of their forties. This will come as a surprise to students of history. Men and women have achieved positions of power at all stages of life, but it is remarkable how many have lived in obscurity until their forties and gone on to do remarkable things. A good example was Oliver Cromwell, who only stepped into the public

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Web of tyrants

The internet can promote freedom and democracy – it’s a shame it also facilitates mob rule and witch-hunts Even those who are wary of the utopianism the net has generated tend to take it for granted that the new communications technologies have saved us from the need to worry about censorship. Sceptics fear that the web provides us with too much information, not too little. Enthusiasts see a future of unlimited free speech when all the old arguments about libel, official secrecy and blasphemy become redundant. To see how far the consensus spreads look at Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?, a new collection of the views of

Teresa Dracefrancis

Unfinished business | 21 January 2012

The phrase ‘community drummers’ strikes fear into me. When I read it in the programme notes for Survivor, Antony Gormley’s collaboration with Hofesh Shechter, premièred at the Barbican, I paused a beat. The elder cerebral artist paired with the young passionate choreographer: so what exactly is this? In the ladies afterwards I heard the disparaging phrase ‘GCSE work’. Was it music? Was it theatre-making? Was it even dance? There is no narrative to speak of, but a series of sketches using 139 drummers, a band of string players, guitarists, a cameraman and six dancers, among others. A figure shelters in a bathtub. Cannonballs drop from a height on to the

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: Doors of perception

Unlike most of the old rockers he writes about, the esteemed US critic Greil Marcus is becoming more prolific as he enters his twilight years. An eccentric monograph on Van Morrison was swiftly followed last autumn by a luxuriant collection of his writings on Bob Dylan, and now arrives The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years (Faber  £14.99). Marcus doesn’t just inhabit the more rarefied and cerebral wing of rock criticism: he pretty much defined it. Unlike most rock hacks he is not particularly interested in the musicians and their often tarnished legends. No, he listens and listens to the music, listens some more, thinks about it

Thursday

Jonathan Jones

Newt’s good week might come to an early end

video platform video management video solutions video player It had been a pretty good week for Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign. He put in a strong performance in Monday night’s debate, he got a near-endorsement from Sarah Palin (she said ‘If I had a vote in South Carolina, in order to keep this thing going, I’d vote for Newt.’), a poll yesterday put him just 3 points behind Romney nationally, and one today shows him taking the lead in South Carolina. And he can expect to pick up a good number of Rick Perry’s few remaining supporters, with the Texas Governor dropping out today and endorsing Gingrich. Meanwhile, things haven’t been going

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

What’s wrong with ‘Avoid the Ghetto’?

Now here’s some good news to cheer you all up. Microsoft has applied for a patent for a Smartphone ‘app’ (I hate that word) called ‘Avoid the Ghetto’. Basically it just tells you the places to stay away from if you’re in an unfamiliar city. You can imagine the areas it tells you stay from. And so, by logical process, you can imagine the sorts of people who are demanding it never be made, be burned on a pyre and its inventors arrested etc. Yes, the NAACP was first out of the blocks, describing the device as ‘stereotyping’ and ‘discriminatory’. But the app, so far as I can gather, does

Peter Hoskin

Lansley’s health problems return

Another day, another exercise in obstructionism from the unions. Only this time it’s not Ed Miliband that they’re complaining about. It’s Andrew Lansley and the government’s health reforms. The Royal College of Nursing and the Royal College of Midwives have said that the entire Health Bill should be dropped. They have shifted, as they put it rather dramatically, to ‘outright opposition’. Which must be annoying for Lansley, given how he took time to ‘pause, listen and engage’ last summer, and adjusted his Bill accordingly. That whole process was meant to anaethetise this sort of disagreement, but the tensions clearly persist and could indeed get worse from here. It’s telling that

Wednesday

Jonathan Jones

Why the government shouldn’t be confident that employment’s rising

No two ways about it: today’s employment figures are difficult for the coalition. The unemployment figure’s up for the seventh month in a row, and now stands at 2.68 million — the highest since 1994. And the unemployment rate — up to 8.4 per cent — is at its highest since 1995. It doesn’t look like getting better anytime soon, either: unemployment’s predicted to carry on rising at least until the end of the year, possibly matching the three million peak of the early ‘90s. In its defence, the government claims that employment is rising too. Today’s figure of 29.1 million in employment is about 150,000 higher than it was

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The John Wilkes Society is Reborn

John Wilkes was radical and wrong; his latter-day equivalents are merely stupid and wrong. To buttress this notion, I submit the cases* of Simon Heffer and Melanie Phillips. We are talking, as you know, about the Scottish Question upon which these Daily Mail columnists have recently seen fit to pontificate. As we shall see, if these are the people teaching Scotland to Middle England then the plain yeomen of England should demand better from their newspaper. It is one thing to peddle nonsense – everyone must do what they can to earn a living – quite another to sell an argument that contradicts itself. Yet hark at this from Mr

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Rethinking High-Speed Rail

Previously, I’ve supported the government’s plans for High-Speed Rail, even though the “business case” for them has always struck me as being pretty weak*. On reflection, I’m not sure I was right. The case for HSR in Britain is weaker than I allowed. Not because HSR is undesirable (I still think it could be useful) but because reducing train times between London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds is, though useful, not enough to justify spending £33bn on the project. Or, to put it another way, I suspect it really is a misallocation of resources since this money might more usefully be spent alleviating congestion in the south-east of England while also

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Drug War Madness: Canadian edition

Most of the time the most lunatic examples of Drug War mania, at least in the English-speaking world, come from the United States. but not always! Today’s villains are Canadian. Chris Snowdon has the details of the murderous contempt police in British Columbia have for their citizens. It seems there is a batch of contaminated Ecstasy on sale in western Canada. Five people have been killed. The police know what colour of pills are likely to have caused these deaths and they know what stamps are on the pills. So what are they doing? Nothing at all. Police in British Columbia are reluctant to tell the public what unique, colourful

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Inflation at 4.2 per cent is nothing to cheer

Are today’s inflation figures cause for celebration? The Consumer Price Index rose a mere 4.2 per cent in the year to December, down from 4.8 per cent in November. So, yes, a sharp drop — but only a statistical boffin could describe this as good news. Sure, a similar drop can be expected when the VAT rise drops out of the comparison figures next month. But the prices confronting British shoppers are still rising at twice the supposed inflation target, and will keep rising above this target for months to come. The following graph shows the trajectory we can expect for CPI and RPI over the next few years: The