Society

Saturday

13 Nov 2010

Letters | 13 November 2010

Vulgar debate Sir: I have to disagree with Theodore Dalrymple on his always jaundiced view of England and the English (‘Common people’, 6 November). I work in a tourist area of Sydney and find the English/British the least offensive of any of the overseas visitors. They are also the most attractive, especially the young backpackers all tanned up from days on Bondi beach. And always very polite. I travel to England twice a year and use the trains and tubes, and the ferry over to France, and am always impressed by the orderliness I encounter. Sure, I see some fat, tattooed, pierced, appallingly toothed people, but surely they are the

Alan Judd

Motoring: Wheels of fortune

New tyres this week for my 1999 Discovery. The last lot, General Grabbers, lasted 30,000 miles. Their Michelin predecessors (bought and fitted at Costco, 20 per cent off) did 37,000 miles. I doubt the new £88 Cooper Discoverers will achieve that but I’ll be disappointed if they don’t reach 30,000. New tyres this week for my 1999 Discovery. The last lot, General Grabbers, lasted 30,000 miles. Their Michelin predecessors (bought and fitted at Costco, 20 per cent off) did 37,000 miles. I doubt the new £88 Cooper Discoverers will achieve that but I’ll be disappointed if they don’t reach 30,000. I was speaking thus while admiring a neighbour’s newish Audi

Robin Oakley

The turf: No loss, no gain

Those of us who occasionally advocate the hazarding of money on horses have to live with a little scepticism, too. In fact, those of us who live with Mrs Oakley (actually, it’s only me) have to live with a lot of it. If I were to give up punting, she believes, we could live on Meursault rather than Merlot. There she is wrong. At the price you pay for Meursault these days we only drink it when I have some mad money from a decent win. But this summer Mrs Oakley was neither right nor wrong about my tipping. Our Twelve to Follow ran in 42 races between them, securing

Melissa Kite

Real life | 13 November 2010

For those of us who don’t do it, parenting is a bit of a mystery. A strange, magical, glamorous mystery that we imagine is bedevilled by all sorts of complex and exciting challenges. What a mind-blowing experience it must be to manufacture another human being and steer him into the world, we think. Which is why it was such a disappointment looking after a friend’s teenager for a week. I now realise that parenting involves only two things: persuading a child to eat and persuading a child to put on a coat. That’s it. There is nothing else involved. Which is not to say that it is a simple matter.

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 13 November 2010

I keep reading these heart-warming pieces in the quality press about sad and lonely people’s lives being utterly transformed by internet-dating websites. This person says her sex life has gone from zero to something resembling the stampede at a Harrods sale. That person says he thought his life was effectively over and has now found the person of his dreams, and their union is shortly to be blessed with issue. Anecdotal evidence, too, suggests that internet-dating sites have something for everyone. One of the chaps I go to football with, Pie and Mash Pete, is always talking about this friend of his with whom he goes fishing. Roger is nearly

Taki

High life | 13 November 2010

This is a good time to be in the Bagel. Walking briskly under changing autumn skies amid colours that still carry their summer clothes is an inspiring experience. Heaven knows I need it. Early morning means judo training — hangover or not — and on foggy days I walk through the park as if in a trance longing to reach the dojo before I’m enveloped by the yellow mist. After training, it’s as if a heavy load had been lifted from my shoulders. Literally. The heavy-duty training I’m putting in now will pay dividends next year. That’s how it goes, judo-wise, karate-wise, tennis-wise, sport-wise. It’s like nature: one has to

Toby Young

Status Anxiety: Don’t mention the movies

Flicking through George W. Bush’s memoirs, one thing that jumped out was the way in which the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom chose to occupy their time together when they first met on W’s ranch in Texas. They spent the evening watching Meet the Parents. Now you might think that’s fairly unusual. Couldn’t they have done something more useful with those few precious hours, such as discussing climate change? Some readers will conclude that this was typical of Bush and Blair, two fundamentally frivolous men. In fact, this is absolutely normal. That’s what heads of state do when they get together —

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 13 November 2010

Q. I was waiting for the London train at my local railway station the other morning when I saw a neighbour whose business is doing spectacularly well at the moment. He came up grinning and announced that he had just been shooting in Suffolk on the estate my husband’s family used to own. He said, ‘I had no idea how grand you used to be. I must say, it’s more fun going up the ladder than going down.’ I was dumbfounded and could not think of a response before the train came and he headed for first class and I for second. Mary, what could I have said? — P.W.,

The Spectator

Remember the living

Various political attempts to institute a national British day have failed, perhaps because Britain already has one. It is Armistice Day, and it is marked not by the waving of flags, or by the recitation of a national creed, but by keeping a silence in memory of those who sacrificed their lives for our country. Armistice Day, however, has always been about the living as well as the fallen. The poppies we wear are not just a commemoration of Flanders, but a sign that we support our soldiers in the battlefield today. Since the Taleban were toppled from Kabul nine years ago, 180,000 servicemen and women have fought campaigns in

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 13 November 2010

Benjamin Blayney is no celebrity, but he was responsible for what the Americans call the King James Bible, and we the Authorised Version. His work appeared in 1769, and almost the whole edition was consumed by a fire at the warehouse in Paternoster Row, London. Yet his is the Bible we know today. I know that we are about to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the Authorised Version, but Dr Blayney made thousands of changes to the text of 1611. In vocabulary he incorporated amendments from another version from 1743, for example, fourscore changed to eightieth, neesed to sneezed, and the archaic crudled to curdled. In grammar he changed, among

Peter Jones

Ancient and modern | 13 November 2010

It was an assumption of much ancient Greek literature that sex between the older male and the young boy was the ultimate experience — for the older male. It was an assumption of much ancient Greek literature that sex between the older male and the young boy was the ultimate experience — for the older male. But since the hunt for this nirvana was bound to end in failure, the advice was to forget it. You would just make a complete prat of yourself. Those who fell into the trap — especially elderly males yearning hopelessly after beautiful young boys — were the subject of endless mockery from friends and

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 13 November 2010

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, visited China with four Cabinet ministers and 43 business leaders. He said he hoped for ‘greater political opening’ in the country. A £750 million order for Rolls-Royce engines and a £45 million order for pigs were announced during the trip. A Special Immigration Appeals Commission upheld an appeal by Abu Hamza, who is in jail, against an attempt to remove his British citizenship. There were three nights of rioting at Moorland prison, south Yorkshire. The bishops of Fulham, Ebbsfleet and Richborough, and two retired bishops, announced that they were joining the Catholic Church as members of an ordinariate allowing the use of ‘liturgical books

Peter Hoskin

Whatever happened to Labour’s economic message?

For some weeks now, Labour have struggled to project a clear voice on the economy. You can see what they’ve been trying to do: pitch themselves as an alternative to immediate, deeper cuts, whilst also accepting the requirement to deal with the deficit. But, as I’ve said before, this all too often comes across as nervous equivocation; a kind of “on the one hand, on the other hand” stuttering that won’t persuade many observers either way. You sense that Team Miliband have tried to correct this in recent weeks, with a few punchier performances, but, even then, mistakes and deceptions have greased into their offering. Anyway, I mention this because

Peter Hoskin

The Gove reforms grow even more radical

Local authorities are already doing their utmost to block the coalition’s schools reforms, so just how will they respond to this story on the front of today’s FT? It reveals how Michael Gove is planning to sideline local authorities from the funding of all state schools – not just free schools and academies. The idea is that state schools will get cash directly from the state, without any need for the council middlemen that currently control the system. Here’s an FT graphic that captures the change: The money would be allocated to schools in proportion to the number of pupils they have, and headmasters would have much more freedom in

James Delingpole

I’d take Lord Curzon over Gandhi – and so would many Indians

In India last week I found myself thinking about Mohandas Gandhi and his famous quote when asked what he thought about western civilisation. ‘I think it would be a good idea,’ he replied. When I first heard that story — probably about the time of the Richard Attenborough biopic majoring on British colonial oppressiveness like the Amritsar massacre — I don’t doubt I reacted in the way I had been culturally programmed to do. ‘Well, that certainly put us arrogant, colonial Westerners in our place,’ my carefully indoctrinated brain almost certainly went. And it’s not as though I went through a phase in my life where I imagined the British

Tessa Keswick

Beijing Notebook | 13 November 2010

David Cameron should have enjoyed his trip this week. Autumn is a great time to be in Beijing. The sky is deep blue, the sun hot and the evenings cool. As the season progresses, the shadows thrown by the tall buildings lengthen and the north wind from Mongolia blows a little more urgently. The pollution in Beijing is much less bad than in other Chinese cities, and the new parks and landscaped gardens and flower beds are beautifully tended. Rem Koolhaas’s massive CCTV headquarters, Paul Andreu’s National Theatre ‘the Egg’, and Ai Weiwei’s Olympic Stadium add to the grandeur of this great northern capital. During the autumn holiday, half of

Matthew Lynn

Bust and boom

Iceland is recovering from its financial shock – without the aid of a bank bailout It’s been a good week for the admittedly small band of people who get excited about the decisions made by central banks. In America, the Federal Reserve embarked on a second great round of printing money. In this country, the Bank of England abandoned any idea of controlling inflation, leaving interest rates at a three-century low despite having missed its inflation target for seven months. But by far the most interesting decision was made a long way to the north, in a country which people usually only pay attention to when its banks or volcanoes

Rod Liddle

Why not make the children of the unemployed work, too?

I suppose I am past the point in life where, as Gore Vidal put it, litigation takes the place of sex. I have consulted lawyers at least 12 times so far this year, which easily exceeds the amount of times I have engaged in mutual sexual activity. Even on my birthday I rang a lawyer and did not have sex. As it happens sex was on offer, as a special treat — along with the cake with its 50 bloody candles, each one lit with malevolent glee by my wife — but I had somehow wrenched my knee out of joint and any form of movement caused excruciating pain and

Douglas Murray

Costs in space

‘Hello. Is that the European Union? This is Earth.’ It’s a conversation that could have happened at any time in recent years, but if the EU’s planned global satellite system ever actually takes off it might yet become reality. The plans for ‘Project Galileo’ were dreamt up in the late 1990s. They are intended as a rival to the Global Positioning System satellites, or GPS, used by almost all of today’s satnav devices. GPS worked well — but it was owned by the United States. This did not please Jacques Chirac, then French president, who thought a rival satnav project would make a fine grand projet. Lift-off for Galileo has

Melanie McDonagh

Bad sex awards

Every year, every month, there are more of them, the Women of the Year awards when female journalists are invited to join other women for a celebration of our sex at some London hotel. The other week it was the Harper’s Bazaar magazine’s Women of the Year awards, followed closely by the Cosmopolitan magazine’s Ultimate Women of the Year awards, not forgetting the Bounty Celebrity Mum of the Year award (which Samantha Cameron just narrowly missed). Then there’s the Veuve Clicquot Women in Business Awards, the Glamour magazine awards (this year’s winner: Cheryl Cole), the Asian Women of Achievement Awards and the Barclays Women of the Year — won, I

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