Society

Real life | 30 October 2010

Only one thing is worse than noisy neighbours and that is neighbours who are almost noisy. Loud music and uproarious parties are covered by the law. Someone walking about all night in the room over your head is not. I have been unlucky in this arena. The owner of the flat above me moved to Australia a couple of years ago and since then her property has been rented out to a succession of what I suppose the letting agent tells her are young professionals — students in their early 20s who attend the viewing claiming they are two City workers, then cram in as many friends as possible to

Low life | 30 October 2010

I’ve two convictions for drink-driving and I might have had a third a couple of years ago when I hit a bus. Fortunately, I was injured and taken unconscious to hospital so there was no opportunity for me to blow in the bag. The rule back then was that a person had to be awake enough to give his or consent to having a sample of blood removed for analysis at the police laboratory. This rule has since been changed, I believe, and a police doctor can help himself to a syringe of blood from your inert, unconscious body. I must have been out for several hours because when I

High life | 30 October 2010

Throughout his life my friend Porfirio Rubirosa made about $5 to 10 million out of women, and he married three of the richest in the world. Flor de Oro Trujillo, only daughter of the Dominican strongman; Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress; and Barbara Hutton, the original poor little rich girl. Rubi spent the money he earned in the bedroom on the good things in life, mostly other women, strings of polo ponies, and two very nice houses in France. He died in the early hours of 6 July 1965, when he hit a tree driving home from a nightclub in his Ferrari. We had been celebrating a polo victory together

Toby Young

Status Anxiety: Teen Streets

It was around midnight last Friday night that I first became aware something was going on in the street outside my house. I could hear shouting and screaming, but it was the noise of over-exuberant teenagers rather than an escalating argument. I pressed my face up against the patterned glass panel by my front door and, sure enough, I could make out about a dozen teens horsing around on the other side of the road. Most of them were clutching bottles of beer. Like most middle-aged men in this situation, I was torn between a certain amount of sympathy and wanting to call the police. I’m not such an old

The unofficial parliamentary sketch writer of the year award

For the second year running, my politics class at City University has voted for Ann Treneman as the best parliamentary sketch writer (Quentin Letts won in 2008). I like to have an early session on the parliamentary sketch writer’s art. This is especially useful for foreign students, to whom the concept of the sketch is alien. Indeed, one of my students this year got quite angry. “I just don’t understand this,” she said. “It’s not funny, it’s not clever. I don’t like it.” She could be forgiven for being mystified by Simon Hoggart’s sketch on Transport Questions this week, which was based on children’s classic, The Railway Children, “with twinkle-eyed stationmaster

Housing benefit reform is a Good Thing

Dressed with his effortless prose, Matthew Parris has a point (£) that proves why he is the leading commentator of the last two decades. Housing benefit reform is his subject and he urges his readers reject the legends that have accrued around the issue – not Boris, not Polly Toynbee, not shrill councils, not rapacious landlords and definitely not the government. No one, he says, has the numbers but there are several certainties: ‘The outcomes may not prove nearly as brutal as this week’s predictions. What (as I asked above) can we know? We know that comparisons with Paris are ludicrous. All of our big cities are speckled with very

Dear mary

Q. I was staying recently with a very old girlfriend and her mother at her mother’s house in the country in England and was given my old girlfriend’s bedroom for the weekend on the upper attic floor. I suspect that the room had not been used for a long time. The house is not centrally heated and is rather musty. I came away from a wonderful weekend very badly bitten by bedbugs and the bites are still causing me discomfort three weeks later. What should I do? Should I tell her so she can throw away the old mattress and fumigate the room and prevent any other guests from suffering

Roger Alton

Spectator Sport: Spare us the 2018 World Cup!

Andy Anson and Simon Greenberg are two splendid, clubbable chaps. Their current gig is running England’s bid to host the 2018 World Cup, and forgive me for sounding disloyal but I hope these two delightful fellows find themselves disappointed when Fifa votes on the 2018 and 2022 bids in early December. Andy Anson and Simon Greenberg are two splendid, clubbable chaps. Their current gig is running England’s bid to host the 2018 World Cup, and forgive me for sounding disloyal but I hope these two delightful fellows find themselves disappointed when Fifa votes on the 2018 and 2022 bids in early December. Because one thing England certainly doesn’t need is

Competition: Mr Jingle

In Competition No. 2670 you were invited to catapult Mr Jingle into the 21st century and have him deliver an anecdote. Alfred Jingle, the lean, green-coated stranger, makes his first appearance in Chapter Two of The Pickwick Papers and immediately steals the show with his ‘lengthened string of …broken sentences, delivered with extraordinary volubility…’ You captured him at his exhilarating and life-enhancing best, having him expound on, among much else, the joys of modern travel, the political and economic landscape, and the hell of out-of-town superstores (‘exhausted — very’.) As one competitor wrote: ‘Hoorah for Mr Jingle! Does any other character come zinging so instantly off the page?’ John O’Byrne,

Playing with fire

In a couple of weeks’ time, David Cameron and George Osborne will arrive in China and witness at first hand an economic boom that is shaking the world. The British duo will doubtless receive a polite and outwardly respectful reception. But, as I discovered on a visit to Shanghai last week, Chinese diplomats and academics have noted the deep cuts in British spending — and they are drawing the obvious conclusions about the relative fortunes of the two nations. As one of my colleagues in China put it to me, ‘Nobody spots blood in the water faster than the Chinese.’ The contrast between the boom in China and the gloom

Who do you Trust?

Visitors to Thomas Hardy’s birthplace in Dorset, a small thatched cottage built by Hardy’s great-grandfather, used to be met by a bare house and a guide book. Now they are greeted by a fire in the grate and a curator at the parlour table, dispensing tea and cakes and chatting about the author’s childhood. Those irritated at such intrusion can walk through the house and enjoy the garden undisturbed. Most are entranced. When I arrived at the National Trust as chairman two years ago, I received two clear messages. One was to relieve its 330 houses open to the public from the ‘dead hand’ of the Trust’s house style, and

Tanya Gold

Only prigs wear mini-skirts

Uncle Norman likes to talk about the year the mini-skirt was born. (The name has been changed to protect him.) It was 1965 and he was a law student living in Chelsea. And when the skirt arrived, he took a year off university, and spent it on the No. 22 bus on the King’s Road, following women up the stairs. At this point in the anecdote Uncle Norman usually closes his eyes. I mention Uncle Norman’s contribution to social history because mini-skirts are in the news again, this time in Italy, which I always thought was a place where men liked women. But if this was ever true, and it

Hugo Rifkind

I must have had a reason to march against tuition fees. But I don’t know what it was

The first time I saw my name in print, in almost its own right, was in late 1997, after a person who was a friend, but isn’t one any more, called up Londoners’ Diary and told a young journalist who would later become a friend, but wasn’t one at the time, that I’d helped to organise a Cambridge student demonstration against tuition fees. The first time I saw my name in print, in almost its own right, was in late 1997, after a person who was a friend, but isn’t one any more, called up Londoners’ Diary and told a young journalist who would later become a friend, but wasn’t

James Delingpole

Life’s too short to be nice to lefties

Now I know why so many people hate me. It came to me in a flash during dinner with a group of bright, articulate, well-balanced sixth-formers from Roedean girls’ school. I was banging on in my rabid right-wing way about the importance of free markets and the shortcomings of feminism and suchlike when I happened accidentally to vouchsafe that the proudest achievement of my life had been teaching my children to read. And it was as if, all of a sudden, I’d waved a magic wand and sprinkled myself in fairy dust. The mood softened. You could almost see the thought bubbles above the girls’ heads, saying: ‘Aaah!’ and ‘Gosh

American Notebook | 30 October 2010

To New York, for a benefit gala at Cipriani 42nd Street for the Norman Mailer Centre and Writers Colony. We are there as a team to present British GQ’s first student writing award to a 65-year-old mother of two: Helen Madden, who presented the children’s TV show Romper Room in the early 1970s and still looks about 40. She wrote the winning story, ‘Rod, Roy and Jerry Lee’, while doing a creative writing MA at Queen’s University in Belfast, and its hearty nature appealed to almost everyone on the panel of judges. Tina Brown, Jann Wenner, and the super-cool Gay Talese were all in evidence, along with Taki, Michael Wolff,

The pecking order

Every now and again you read about ‘Empty Nest Syndrome’ — a curious affliction suffered by parents who are sad that their children have left home. It sounds like heaven to me. My wife and I should be, well, free as a bird now that all our little ones have fled to university and beyond. Those arduous parent evenings, competitive end-of-term picnics and final warnings from the bursar are already a distant memory. We can come and go as we please, spending weekends learning to grow asparagus. Except that we can’t. Because of Nero. Nero is a parrot who lives with us and who will still be squawking a decade

Work? Nice if you can get it

I am not unemployed due to laziness. I have ambitions. I would like to be successful. I would like to have a beautiful, grounded wife, children, and earn a good crust. My grandfather, who died before I was born, was in the Navy during the second world war. In his field he was an important person who gained respect. I would like to gain respect too and to achieve my goals, but I find it very difficult because I have Asperger’s Syndrome, a condition on the autistic spectrum that produces impaired social skills, obsessions, high anxiety and, certainly in my case, extreme emotion and passion. I very much want to

Martin Vander Weyer

Funding: Local heroes

I was acting and directing at Helmsley Arts Centre last week, in a little piece of ‘café theatre’ performed in the bar to an audience of only 50. But it was a sell-out every night and, I hope, a light-hearted distraction for the citizens of my Yorkshire town from all that gloomy talk about cuts, more cuts — and who deserves to be cut most. I was acting and directing at Helmsley Arts Centre last week, in a little piece of ‘café theatre’ performed in the bar to an audience of only 50. But it was a sell-out every night and, I hope, a light-hearted distraction for the citizens of