Programming Note
I’m away to the Isle of Jura for the next week and so this is likely to have some impact on posting frequency here. The Paps, meanwhile, are calling…
Society
Sunday
Saturday
Food: Drowning in mustard
The St Pancras Renaissance London Hotel, by Marriott, is 14 syllables long, which is too many. The best hotels have two syllables or at most three, but I can’t spend my life looking for two-syllable hotels with restaurants to review because I would go mad and so would you. Even so, the glorious red building, which looks like the backside of Christchurch after a dust storm, is at last restored and it has fine dining by Marcus Wareing in a restaurant called The Gilbert Scott. In we go to the vast curved room, which is at the front of the hotel, with views of the Euston Road, which, as ever,
Onycha
To be told that onycha is made of opercula is not always helpful. ‘Take unto thee sweete spices, Stacte, and Onicha, and Galbanum,’ says the Bible (Exodus, xxx 34). The words are poetic, as referring to something oriental that we don’t know from everyday life. Perhaps that is why Edith Sitwell used onycha towards the end of her poem ‘Long Steel Grass’: ‘she/ Heard our voices thin and shrill/ As the steely grasses’ thrill,/ Or the sound of the onycha/ When the phoca has the pica.’ Not much assistance, as far as sense goes, can be expected there, since a phoca is a kind of seal, and the pica is
Dear Mary: your problems solved | 29 October 2011
Q. I was caught out last week during dinner. The guest on my left was droning on at length and I had tuned in to a more interesting conversation down the other end of the table when to my horror he suddenly said, ‘Sorry… I lost my train of thought. What was I talking about?’ Mary, although I had an ‘interested’ expression on my face, I had stopped listening long before. Can you advise so that I am fully prepared should a similar situation arise? —Name and address withheld A. You should reply with great enthusiasm, ‘I’ve no idea what you were saying because I’ve been staring at your face
Status Anxiety | 29 October 2011
I’ve finally arrived. No, I’m not talking about being in Who’s Who or going on Desert Island Discs. I’m talking about a stalker. Okay, ‘stalker’ is a slight exaggeration. The woman in question hasn’t actually started going through my bins. She’s more of a cyber-stalker. For the past week or so, she’s sent me a message on Twitter roughly once an hour and, oh boy, are they abusive. I’m a ‘racist’, apparently, not to mention a ‘meeja tart’, a ‘half-rate novelist’ and ‘a joke’. And that’s just the stuff I can repeat in public. The extraordinary thing is, she writes for the Guardian and the New Statesman. The whole saga
The turf: Crime and punishment
Two weeks ago I was in Quebec lecturing on, among other things, politicians and drink. The best moment in my research was encountering a Canadian blogger who declared, ‘We’ve had more abstainers than drunks in our Prime Minister’s office. The country has been reasonably well run, but Jeez, it’s been dull.’ It certainly hasn’t been a dull fortnight in racing as controversy has raged about the new rules on use of the whip. From Canadian waters, noting that jockeys such as Frankie Dettori and Tony McCoy had backed the reforms, I welcomed them too. I still back reform. Racing needs public approval and bigger crowds and the public response to
Real life | 29 October 2011
Don’t even ask me how fast I had to go to get to the speed awareness course on time. The rush-hour dash was made even worse by the fact that the letter from ‘the UK’s leading provider of occupational road risk management, driver assessment and training for corporate organisations and speed awareness’ warned me that if I was not there at 4.45 p.m. precisely I would be vaporised in a process called ‘renewal’. Actually, it didn’t say that it said something about three points on my licence. Same difference. I screeched into Guildford yelling, ‘Come on, get out of the way, I’ve got a speeding course to get to,’ as
Low life | 29 October 2011
A big mouth, fewer taste buds and a wider gullet than normal means I’m a fast eater. If golloping your dinner was an Olympic event, I’d be knighted by now. Last week I equalled my personal best with a plate of roast pork, apple sauce, roast spuds, mashed swede and runner beans. We were four of us gathered round the table: me, Stanford, my new brother-in-law, and our two old mums, both in their eighties. Stanford and I had spent the morning bleaching and filling in the cracks of an outside wall, prior to whitewashing it. When I looked up from my plate, having polished mine off, I saw that
High life | 29 October 2011
Fort Worth, Texas To the best state in the Union for the annual John Randolph Club meeting of true conservatives, hip, hip. No posturing peacocks spouting gibberish learned at university diversity courses here, but witty, juicy, intelligent criticisms of today’s cultural sewer, and the part liberals and the enemies of Christendom have played in destroying our society. ‘I disagree with everything you have been saying and doing, you atheists, liberals, diversity freaks and multiculturalists, and I will fight to the death against your right to say it and do it,’ was the common thread which united us few, us happy few, us drunken few by the time the three-day conference
Letters | 29 October 2011
• God save the Queen Sir: Robert Hardman (‘The Queen’s manifesto’, 22 October) is right to say that we should respect the Queen for more than longevity and never putting a foot wrong. One of her great strengths is that she is so willing to take advice from those placed (or elected) to give it. There are times when she has been known to ask ‘What should the Queen do?’, much as a parent has to ask what line to take towards a child. The Queen has invariably agreed to do as bidden by her government, for example in entertaining figures like President Ceausescu of Romania in 1978. He
Ancient and modern: Mothers of Rome
The Great Debate about whether people of the same sex should be allowed to ‘marry’ would have bewildered the Romans, and not because they had any hang-ups about that style of sexual behaviour either. For legal purposes, Romans defined the familia (‘household’) as Roman citizens, joined in lawful marriage, producing legitimate children and with some property to transmit by inheritance. But as the Latin matrimonium (our ‘matrimony’) makes clear, the main point about marriage is that it is all about the mater, ‘mother’. The family gives its daughter into matrimonium, the husband leads, receives and keeps his wife in matrimonio. The Latin for ‘wife’, uxor (cf. our ‘uxorious’), seems to
Diary – 29 October 2011
Last week I travelled to New York for an audition. And before you ask, I haven’t heard yet. On the flight I sat next to a retired Hollywood producer from Santa Barbara. She would have been travelling upper class but today, owing to some kind of tier point issue, she had been downgraded to premium economy. Like your entire country, I joked. She talked about the end of the American empire and the inexorable rise of the east. Welcome, I said. Let me embrace you and gather you into the club lounge of second-rate nations. Allow me to ease your sense of shame. Have a drink. We can sit here
Portrait of the week | 29 October 2011
Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, insisted on being present, along with leaders of the 10 EU countries not part of the eurozone, at a summit on the crisis surrounding the currency bloc. At an earlier summit of leaders of all 27 EU countries, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France told Mr Cameron: ‘You say you hate the euro, you didn’t want to join, and now you want to interfere in our meetings,’ according to diplomatic sources. Eighty-one Conservative MPs (the two tellers included) voted against the government on a back-bench motion endorsing the need for a referendum on EU membership. ‘There’s no — on my part — no bad blood,
The Great Repatriation Question
And the word of the weekend is ‘repatriate’. Not only do we have yet another poll showing that the British public, when asked, would prefer to tug powers back from Brussels, but there’s also this eyecatching story in the Daily Telegraph. No.10, we’re told, is pushing Whitehall departments to determine just exactly where Europe’s influence could be counteracted. There is also a backbench group of Tory MPs providing covering ideas. So why hasn’t this been happening before now, particularly given how frustrated those around David Cameron have become with the constant torrent of EU directives? Part of the answer is that the events of the past week have made all
Executive pay: don’t believe the headlines
Open yesterday’s or this morning’s papers, and you’ll find plenty of reports about the snouts of FTSE100 chief execs being in the trough again, while the rest of us suffer. Their pay is up 49 per cent, we read. Most people’s first and only response to these accounts of the Incomes Data Services’ (IDS) latest findings will be anger — and understandably so. But much of this anger and reportage is based on a mis-reading of the actual report. The BBC’s influence is huge. Its original report compared the rise in base salaries (which wasn’t 49 per cent, but a much less impressive 3.2 per cent) with a median rise
Morocco: Sugar and Spice
Is it still possible to love Moroccan cookery if you can’t stand fruit in savoury dishes? Yes, discovers Camilla Stoddart I love Morocco. Everything about it is exotic and visually pleasing — the landscape, the interiors, the souks, the carpets, the slippers — but there is a major hurdle lying between me and full Moroccophile status. This hurdle is fruit. Or more specifically fruit combined with meat. I don’t have many personal food rules but not mixing fruit with meat is one of them. And Moroccans don’t just flout this rule, they beat it to a pulp with a tenderising hammer and then scatter prunes, dates, apricots and pomegranate seeds
Marrakesh: Moroccan style
Jeremy Clarke on lust, literature and luxury at one of Churchill’s favourite hotels A retired Egyptian army officer, comfortably married, two grown-up children, is relaxing with friends by the pool at his club in the smart Maadi district of Cairo. A lifelong heterosexual, Captain Ni’mat is surprised to find his idle gaze drawn for the first time in his life towards the youthful male bodies on display around him. That night he is assailed by a powerful homoerotic dream, and the next day he finds himself casting lustful glances at his Nubian valet, Islam. During his daily massage, he asks Islam to also massage his buttocks. Islam does so, and
Your nominations: Spectator Threadneedle Parliamentarian Awards
The hands of Big Ben are approaching the designated hour, and the bells are about to toll for our Readers’ Representative Award. Only a few days remain for you to vote for your favourite parliamentarian. Dwindling time is not the same as no time, of course. New runners can emerge and overtake old favourites in an instant — and that is what has happened this week. Thanks to the brouhaha over an EU referendum, names such as David Nuttall, Douglas Carswell, Jon Cruddas and Kate Hoey have started appearing in our postbag more frequently. One reader, Edward Bartlett, says of Mr Nuttall that ‘in fighting for an In/Out referendum, he
Hour of surrender
The proposal to change Britain’s clocks has returned, this time with tacit government support. It makes no sense — except perhaps in Brussels Since the day I flew backwards across the International Date Line I have known that you should not mess around with time. On that occasion I left Siberia on Monday morning and arrived in Alaska the previous Sunday afternoon in time for lunch. This was and remains confusing, though it offers disproof of the old cliché that you cannot put the clock back. Though I have been to North Korea and Bhutan, I still count it among the most startling journeys I have ever taken. It lasted
Shelf hatred
On Newcastle University library’s horrible ‘makeover’ Though I retired early from Newcastle University in 1997, I have access to the university library as an associate member and use it fairly regularly. The staff and porters are excellent, and the classical section still serves my humble purposes well enough. But for how much longer? It was over Christmas 2007 that the culture began to change, and the library to go the way of the rest of the university. Management ‘rebranded’ it, and in January 2008 one walked in to find something called ‘YourSpace’, which offered students places where they could (i) work in comfort, (ii) work with friends, or (iii) chat.