Society

Saturday

Neil Tennant

Winter in Poland

Wrocław in Poland was Breslau in Germany until 1945. We’ve travelled here to record the orchestral parts of the music we’ve written for a ballet, The Most Incredible Thing, which opens at Sadler’s Wells in March. It takes me several days to work out how to pronounce the Polish name of the city. Some foreigners call it ‘Vratslav’ but apparently the correct pronunciation is ‘Vrotswaff’ (I think). Actually no one seems to mind. We’re recording in the old Große Saal des Polnischen Rundfunks built in Breslau in the Nazi era as a concert hall for radio broadcasts. A team from Berlin has set up hard-drive recording equipment and the English

The Spectator

Christmas Survey: What will happen in 2011?

Some notable friends of ‘The Spectator’ share their hopes, fears and predictions for the year ahead Dame Eileen Atkins I hope we start getting education right. Michael Gove is correct when he says we should go back to an emphasis on five basic subjects: English, maths, geography, history and a foreign language. These should not be purely the province of the naturally academic. I grew up on a council estate. It was not expected that anyone from my area would go to university. My honorary degree was one of my proudest moments. There is no use making education easy and then celebrating success if young people leave school unable to

Joan Collins

Christmas on stage

Thanksgiving is always a huge deal in the US and this year was no different, except for the fact that the media were full of dire warnings about the inconveniences travellers would face at the airports due to the new regulations imposed by the Transportation Security Administration in the US, and the new body-scanning techniques and the euphemistically named ‘pat-down’, which is not so much a pat-down as a feel-up. Thanksgiving is always a huge deal in the US and this year was no different, except for the fact that the media were full of dire warnings about the inconveniences travellers would face at the airports due to the new

Bruce Anderson

Confession of an atheist

As soon as I moved beyond childhood pieties, I became a bigoted atheist. Like Richard Dawkins, I found it personally offensive that anyone could be so naive and stupid as to worship God. Over the years, that has softened. Although I cannot believe, I no longer think it absurd to do so. One has to respect Christopher Hitchens: no one has been so atheistically defiant in the face of death since Don Giovanni on his way to hell. Even so, the stridency of Messrs Dawkins and Hitchens reminds me of my own jeering adolescence. It is worth remembering that a substantial majority of the cleverest people who ever lived have

Paul Johnson

The plum pudding trick

Which was the best Christmas party ever? Perhaps it took place on Boxing Day, Tuesday 26 December 1843, at the home of Nina Macready, wife of the famous actor. It was her birthday, but her husband was away on tour, and to cheer herself up she decided to give a children’s party, but invited a lot of grown-ups too. One of them was Jane Carlyle. Her grumpy husband, battling with his book on Cromwell, refused to go. She was feeling dyspeptic, having been obliged, for the first time, to stuff a turkey. Feeling horrible on the morning of Boxing Day, Jane was about to send an apology when a note

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business | 18 December 2010

From elections to ash clouds, 2010 was a year that taught us to expect the unexpected This was a year of predictable trends and unpredictable events. It was predictable that the UK would limp out of recession behind France, Germany and the US, and a reasonable bet both that we would avoid a double dip and that we would not avoid a burst of inflation. Observation of past cycles made it easy to predict that banks would return to profit while brutalising their customers and showing no remorse. Many economists had foreseen a crisis of the euro since the day it was dreamed up, because they did not believe a

Julian Barnes

Christmas Short Story: Carcassonne

In the summer of 1839, a man puts a telescope to his eye and inspects the Brazilian coastal town of Laguna. He is a foreign guerrilla leader whose recent success has brought the surrender of the imperial fleet. The liberator is on board its captured flagship, a seven-gun topsail schooner called the Itaparica, now at anchor in the lagoon from which the town gets its name. The telescope offers a view of a hilly quarter known as the Barra, containing a few simple but picturesque buildings. Outside one of them sits a woman. At the sight of her, the man, as he later put it, ‘forthwith gave orders for the

Dot Wordsworth

The year in words

As I was slipping a pudding into the water to boil a bellowing noise like the questing beast in Malory made me jump. But I did not drop it. ‘My word of the year,’ said my husband, blowing like a tuba-player through a rolled up copy of the Radio Times. ‘Vuvuzela. We’d never heard of it till this summer. It’s a thing and it has no other name.’ Despite the annoying nature of the thing and the imitation of it by my husband, he is right. It is strange that Oxford University Press chose big society. Not only does no one know its meaning, but it is practically a proprietary

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Your problems solved

From Craig Brown Q. As I get older I find myself more and more afflicted by dindinitis, which is probably best defined as a morbid dread of dinner parties. Within ten minutes of sitting down, I find that I am tongue-tied and so too is everyone else. Short of ‘You must give me the recipe’ or ‘we much prefer Waitrose’ or ‘Next time, you should try the B1033’, I can think of nothing to say. I don’t like to appear rude, Mary, but how can I refuse all further dinner parties without giving offence? A. Bad dinner parties are like bad flights: one is enough to put you off for

Oliver Rackham

Leaves on the line

What is happening to trees in Britain? Horse chestnuts now turn brown in July. A microscopic caterpillar eats out the green insides of the leaves; only the outer skins remain. Horse chestnuts also weep dried blood from their bark, and sometimes the huge trees spectacularly die. Alders have been weeping bloody tears and dying. Newspapers warn of sudden oak death and acute oak decline. The Forestry Commission has stopped planting Corsican pine because of red-band needle blight. The problem is globalisation of pests and diseases. Diseases which for millions of years evolved to come to terms with their local hosts are introduced to other countries and find new host trees

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Spectator Sport: The prizes they’re all waiting for

It’s time for the traditional, much-coveted Spectator Sports Awards, and this year your judges have been busier than Mitchell Johnson’s tattooist as we look back over a memorable 12 months. It’s time for the traditional, much-coveted Spectator Sports Awards, and this year your judges have been busier than Mitchell Johnson’s tattooist as we look back over a memorable 12 months. This has been a year of real achievement: the resurgence of English rugby and, spectacularly, the English cricket team; the continual brilliance of sports stars such as the All Blacks’ Danny Carter and India’s Sachin Tendulkar; the calm courage of Gareth Thomas in deciding to come out; Blackpool living the

Michael Heath

Memories of wartime

I was born in London in 1935. By the summer of 1939, it was considered wise to get children out of the city before the war started. I wasn’t separated from my sobbing mother at Victoria station and put on a train holding a gas mask. Instead, my mother and I went down to Devon to stay with my grandmother, who had rented a house in the village of Torcross. In London, the war did not stop for Christmas. Toy shops before the war had sold small forts modelled on the Maginot and Siegfried lines. Now boys in the city wanted toy planes like the ones they saw flying overhead.

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

I told you so

It’s jolly nice to be proved right about everything The most important, and comforting, thing to emerge from all that Wiki-Leaks business was that, by and large, we were right. All the things we suspected, or knew either instinctively or through common sense, were proved to be correct. Prince Andrew — arrogant, rude and with the IQ of a corgi? Yep. The oil company Shell effectively runs Nigeria? Sure thing. Gulf state Arab leaders are a tad duplicitous? No kidding, bub. It is always uplifting to discover that you were right all along, and that, in secret at least, the establishment agrees with you. It may well be that by

Quentin Letts

O come all ye faithless

The Spectator understands the work pressure on vicars at this time of year. We know it is tempting simply to read out the diocesan Christmastide message. So here, for all clerks in holy orders, we offer this cut-out-and-preach sermon for use at carol services: May I speak in the Name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost — though for many of you it might as well be in the name of the heathen god Thor. Interesting chap, Thor. Red-headed. Liked to hurl bolts of lightning and cause mayhem. A Norse Simon Heffer. I come not in peace. I will not wring my hands and speak to you in the

Lucy Vickery

Competition: Bah! Humbug!

Lucy Vickery resents this week’s competition In Competition No. 2677 you were invited to submit a poem in dispraise of Christmas. The challenge awakened your inner Scrooge, eliciting a heartfelt chorus of disapproval of all things yule-related. Stoking the anti-Christmas spirit was the prospect of dry, tasteless turkey, grasping, ungrateful children, needle-shedding trees and the torture of office parties — among much else. Commendations to W.J. Webster, Chris O’Carroll and Shirley Curran. The winners, printed below, get £25 apiece and the festive bonus fiver is Bill Greenwell’s. Happy Christmas! Turkey gizzard, and a blizzard Blasting through the bright arcade (Cliff and Slade and Mud and Wizzard, The usual claptrap, loudly

Justin Marozzi

Can this man defeat al-Qa’eda?

Amr Khaled’s TV preaching has made him Islam’s answer to Billy Graham – and he’s mounting a direct attack on the terror camps of Yemen Aden, Yemen There’s a new weapon in the war on terror, ladies and gentlemen. Never mind drones and spies, surgical strikes and covert ops, they’re old hat. There’s a time and a place for them, of course, and we must thank our spooks and soldiers for helping to keep us safe, for foiling plots and knocking off the odd wayward beardie in distant deserts and freezing mountain passes. But that’s not really draining the swamp. For those of us who would prefer not to live

Francis Stephen

Prison Notebook

Christmas Day is quiet in the prison. There’s a tree in the chapel, and a few bits of tinsel on the wings, but the air is not celebratory — it’s subdued. The men eat their processed turkey alone, or in pairs, in their cells, while images of happier Christmases flicker tauntingly from their TVs. There are countless people in the outside world who spend a lonely Christmas, too, of course; but on Christmas Day in the prison in which I work as a chaplain, there will be 700 lonely men under one roof. On the first Sunday of Advent, I give a sermon on the significance of the Advent candles:

The Spectator

Portrait of the year

January Britain crept out of recession, with 0.1 per cent growth in the previous three months. Full-body scanners were to be introduced at British airports after a man tried to blow up a plane with explosives hidden in his underpants. Snow swept the land with the temperature falling to minus 22.3°C. An earthquake killed tens of thousands in Haiti and perhaps 1.5 million were made homeless. Mehmet Ali Agca, who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981, was released from prison in Turkey. Ali Hassan al-Majid, ‘Chemical Ali’, was hanged in Iraq. A British citizen was executed in China for smuggling 9lb of heroin. China said it had become the

Aidan Hartley

Wild life | 18 December 2010

Laikipia A Christmas gift of perfume smelling of chocolate caused my wife Claire to burst into tears. ‘I have never received such a lazy present!’ she wailed. ‘Hang on,’ I reasoned, ‘it’s popular in Japan. That’s what the girl at the shop said.’ Claire growled, ‘Maybe among schoolgirls!’ Claire is wonderful at Christmas. She begins buying and secretly hoarding presents in July. Every gift is thoughtfully chosen, beautifully wrapped. I am hopeless at giving in return. One year, she nearly brained me with Le Creuset cookware. Kinky lingerie bombed. Neither a Garmin eTrex GPS tracker nor war history books (read only once) did the trick. I can tell this story

Friday

Peter Hoskin

From the archives: Ratzinger’s vision

A propos of nothing – except perhaps the religious time of year – here’s The Spectator‘s report on one Cardinal Ratzinger setting out his “cautious and conservative” vision for Catholicism at the Extraordinary Synod of 1985: Ratzinger’s synod, The Spectator, Vera Buchanan, 7 December 1985
 Rome – Well, the Extraordinary Synod is nearly over – it has been a well planned, well executed flop. Thus it was conceived and thus it has borne fruit – bland, musty fruit. In Rome no one expected anything else. While foreign presses tried to titillate the public with dramatic tales of clocks being turned back, rivers of modernism dammed, the spirit of Vatican II