Society

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I avoid my neighbours on holiday?

Q. We have some neighbours who we don’t mind at all – they are perfectly nice, just not part of our friendship group. We have heard they are heading to Majorca, to the same town where we have a holiday home, and will be there at the same time as us. We are now dreading running into this couple out there as it will be difficult not to invite them to our house. It seems very unfriendly but we don’t want to see them in Majorca any more than we do in England. Help! – P.T., Dorset A. Initiate preemptive contact with the neighbours. Convey you have heard they are

Aidan Hartley

My hopes for Africa

Lake Malawi As we speed southwards along the potholed road near Lake Malawi’s shores, I tell my colleague Helen that overpopulation in Africa is just a myth. On either side of the road is an unbroken procession of women carrying firewood on their heads, of barefoot children, of poor men on bicycles, avenues of huts, suicidal goats, blighted crops and dusty lands rising towards distant, once–forested hills. Malawi had four million people at independence from Britain in 1964 and today it’s five times that number. It may look like a land that has eaten itself – but it’s going to be all right, I say. Africa is getting richer, healthier,

Bruce Anderson

The treasures of sherry

We were talking Spain and drinking Spanish. The UK and Spain are very different societies, but we did find points of comparison. As a very broad generalisation, Spaniards can be divided into three political groupings. There is a Europhile elite who take their political identity from a projected European future, and almost none from their nation’s past. To them, Spanish history is largely a record of backwardness, poverty, oppression and conflict. The EU is a means of ensuring that this past can be left in the past. British wine-lovers should not talk too loudly about the treasures of sherry The two much larger groups cannot forget the past, and especially

Janet de Botton

Bridge

What is the most advantageous attribute for a great Bridge player? Is it maths, or memory? I like the answer Sweden’s Peter Fredin gives: ‘Imagination.’ We’re not talking about the kind that lets you imagine you’re the best player in the world, but rather the ability to see how things look to the opponents. Peter has been gifted with a lot of imagination (both kinds actually!) Here’s a hand he showed me from a Pairs event at the Swedish Bridge Festival, while making a poor effort to keep a straight face. Note that the first act of deception started in the bidding; instead of describing his hand to his partner

Dot Wordsworth

When did monkeypox become ‘mpox’?

Writing about monkeypox in The Spectator in May 2022, Douglas Murray repeated a formula he had put forward in 2020, explaining ‘the problem with us humans as a species’: ‘Someone always shags a monkey.’ Now an outbreak of new, improved monkeypox is upon us, and the first thought has been to avoid stigmatising monkeys. It has been renamed mpox. The Oxford English Dictionary, a vasty hoard where words can lie undisturbed for more than a century, was quick to comment: ‘Mpox was originally named monkeypox because it was first seen in laboratory monkeys. It was later identified in rodents and other small mammals, various wild primates, and humans. After a

Luke McShane

Marathon

Earlier this month, at the Kingston Invitational, Peter Lalic won a game against 12-year-old Billy Fellowes in 272 moves. Published in full, it would take up most of this article and resemble a cryptographic message more than a game of chess. But it earns a place in the record books as the longest over-the-board game in history, eclipsing the game Nikolic-Arsovic, Belgrade 1989, which was agreed drawn after 269 moves. Billy Fellowes-Peter Lalic Kingston Invitational, August 2024 The first diagram, at move 18, sets the scene. With more space to manoeuvre, Black holds a clear strategical advantage. The snag is that both of the natural pawn breaks which open up

Luke McShane

No. 816

White to play. Caruana-Firouzja, Sinquefield Cup, 2024. Caruana exchanged rooks, but soon ran out of checks and resigned before the b2 pawn could promote. Which move would have secured a draw here? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 2 September. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address. Last week’s solution 1 Qh8+! Then 1…Kd6 2 Qf8+ or 1…Kf4 2 Qh2+ Ke3 3 Qg1+ or 1…f6 2 Qh2+ Kd4 3 Qg1+ Last week’s winner Henry Beecham, Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire

Victoria Lane

Spectator Competition: Environ-mental

In Competition 3364 you were invited to submit a piece of psychogeography exploring a mundane journey. A cartoon in the Guardian recently defined psychogeography as ‘walking around criticising gentrification’ – though it can be down on decline too. One rule of thumb is that if you can imagine Will Self saying it, it’s probably right. You rose magnificently and pretentiously to the challenge and if there were space and £25s enough, I could haveincluded three times the number of winners. If Huddersfield is the world, then B&M Bargains, trading at the great crossroads, is its Istanbul. And just as memories of Constantinople and of Byzantium haunt that extraordinary city, so

Fire

2669: Partners in crime

Four pairs of unclued lights are all similarly linked.                 Across 5               Mark sample of class essays (6) 9               I’m beginning to like hot chap’s twinkling of an eye (10) 14            Beginning of oxidisation on iron container? (3) 17            One who chooses mixed ramen (5) 18            Of sound mind, regularly returns wearing gold ring (5) 20            Followers regret taking European money (7) 22            Half of Earth’s journey round Sun used for retaining heat … (7) 24            … is lacking energy in orbit (7) 25            Direct lines to the centre of Leningrad I installed (5) 26            Biting cold and dry outside (5) 28            Frank doffs cap to old money (7) 31            Shooting

Joan Collins

Do I have too many friends?

Can one have too many friends? I asked myself this question as we prepared yet another dinner party for ten people, at which I ate and drank far too much as usual. Forget bikini body – it’s kaftan time in Saint Tropez at the moment for me. We’ve been at our villa in the South of France for nearly three months this summer and during that time we have hosted 34 guests, who stayed anywhere between three days and two weeks. We’ve hosted two daughters, one son, in-laws and cousins, several dozen friends and one baby granddaughter, and they have kept Percy and me on our social toes. But we

The Spectator

Is this Rachel Reeves’s idea of a programme for growth?

It is certainly true that the Labour party has been more than a little devious over the tax rises that are to come. After an election campaign in which it insisted it had no plans – and no need – to increase taxes beyond a few measures such as extending VAT on school fees, mysterious holes started appearing in the public finances as soon as the party achieved office. So acute, apparently, is the lack of funds that Sir Keir Starmer felt the need to warn us this week that October’s Budget will be ‘painful’. It is an old trick, which David Cameron and George Osborne also tried to pull

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The death of free speech in Britain

In Michel Houellebecq’s satirical novel Soumission, the French elite submits to Islamic rule rather than accept a National Front government. Nine years after its publication, submission seems more imminent on this side of the English Channel. My American friends are surprised to learn there’s no equivalent to the First Amendment in Britain. They have forgotten a free press was one of the things their ancestors rebelled to establish in the US. Free speech is a much more recent thing in the UK. If it was born in the 1960s, it seems to be dying in the 2020s. If free speech in the UK was born in the 1960s, it seems

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Who will protect me?

Police are hunting a ‘hooded figure’ who sprayed ‘no whites’ on the wall of a primary school in Birmingham. The coppers presumably have racial hatred in mind, but there could be a much more innocent explanation for that which otherwise would be simply a case of vandalism – or even one of laudable graffiti art which may, one day, sell for millions of pounds to a rich idiot devoid of discernment. The school is located in the Alum Rock area of the city, a ward which consists almost entirely of ‘BAME’ people, according to a city council factsheet. So it may be that the hooded figure with the spray can

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Sir Keir’s tax warning, Russian air attacks and another prisons crisis

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, speaking in the garden of 10 Downing Street, warned that the Budget in October is ‘going to be painful’, and that ‘things will get worse before they get better’. ‘I didn’t want to means-test the winter fuel payment, but it was a choice we had to make,’ he said. ‘A garden and a building that were once used for lockdown parties are now back in your service.’ Meanwhile, it was discovered, a pass to Downing Street had been given to Lord Alli, the Labour peer and party fundraiser, who gave £10,000 to the Beckenham and Penge constituency party; the seat was won by

The Spectator

How hot is too hot to work?

Gold standard The Paralympics were instigated in 1948 and first held alongside the Olympics in Rome in 1960. But disabled athletes were competing in the Olympics long before that – notably George Eyser, a German who settled in St Louis, USA. That he had lost a leg after being run over by a train and wore a wooden prosthetic did not stop him taking up athletics and gymnastics. When the Olympics came to his city in 1904 he won three golds: in the parallel bars, long horse vault and 25ft rope climb. He won three other medals, on the pommel horse, horizontal bars and in a team event. He also

Wednesday

Jawad Iqbal

How Emma Raducanu lost her way

It is back to the drawing board for Emma Raducanu after her embarrassing first-round defeat at the US Open. Raducanu crashed out of the tournament, losing by two sets to one, to Sofia Kenin, a player ranked outside the top 50. A tearful Raducanu admitted after the match that her preparation for the tournament was wrong and that she didn’t played enough matches in the run-up to the Grand Slam. The bigger mystery is how quickly Raducanu’s tennis career is unravelling, increasingly dogged by questions and controversy. Just three years ago – after her surprise triumph in the US Open took the tennis world by storm – she was widely predicted to dominate the game

David Shipley

Starmer can’t keep blaming the Tories for the prison crisis

Britain’s prisons are full: over the August Bank Holiday weekend, there were fewer than 100 men’s prison places remaining. The number of spaces has now risen slightly but the crisis remains: our prisons are running out of space. This will have serious consequences – and it isn’t good enough for Keir Starmer to keep blaming the Tories. Keir Starmer used a speech this week to blame the Tories Magistrates have been told to stop jailing people until after 10 September when Labour’s early release scheme will take effect. Under that system, most prisoners will be released after having served 40 per cent of their sentence; on day one, around 2,000

Terry Barnes

Australia’s ‘right to switch off’ will be a disaster

For a great many, their job is their vocation. It’s not just what they do for a living, it’s a key part of defining who they are as a person. These people love what they do and, if the need is there, willingly work over and above their standard working days to ensure that a task or project is completed on time and done well. They take pride in their work and, when a client or customer is happy with the service given, they take deep satisfaction in that. They feel validated not just as workers, but as people. They live to work. Australian unions are delighted with the potential

Tuesday

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

What Carol Vorderman gets wrong about the TV industry

Carol Vorderman has given a speech to the Edinburgh Television Festival, in which she complains that the TV industry is too middle class. This is a bit like rocking up at an Elvis convention and saying that Elvis was overrated rubbish. But she still got a standing ovation. Vorderman has merely reoriented herself to where the money is – performative spluttering about the Tories ‘After 14 years of austerity and lying by the privileged political class,’ she told her adoring throng, ‘this country is in an absolute mess and the TV industry must accept part of the responsibility for that too, including the riots.’ Who knew that the TV industry was responsible for people