Society

Saturday

Bryan Forbes

Diary – 16 February 2008

This week I have been prey to a prolonged bout of insomnia induced, I suspect, by the fact that I stay up to watch the BBC’s Ten O’Clock News followed by Newsnight and, invariably, one or the other contains an item which so disturbs me that my brain continues churning into the small hours. Despair at the way the country now seems to be heading lies just below the surface of our everyday lives like the herpes simplex virus, ready to erupt at any given moment. For insomniacs it is always 3 o’clock in the morning, as Scott Fitzgerald put it at his most manic, and I finally resort to

Melissa Kite

Delaying tactics

Why can’t anyone agree to the smallest thing any more without asking you to put it in an email? I rang a friend and asked him to have lunch with me this week and he said, ‘Can you put that in an email?’ Well, I told him, I suppose I could put it in an email but the email would only say, ‘Will you have lunch with me?’ Yeah, he said, that will do. Turns out he was suffering from aide- memoire syndrome, the need to see something in writing. The urge had apparently overwhelmed him to the point where it had become impossible to enter into any form of

Jeremy Clarke

Flying circles

Thinkers living in the nearest market town are anxious about something called ‘Peak Oil’. Last week they held a public meeting on the subject: To Fly Or Not To Fly? The venue was a centuries-old meeting room beautifully decorated in the Tudor style, with an elaborate moulded plaster ceiling and monumental stone fireplace. About 30 people turned up. It wasn’t particularly cold outside but, to judge by the layers of fleece and fibre, and the number of hats, scarves and gloves being tugged off as they made their entrance via a heavy velvet curtain, many were as concerned about the temperature of themselves as they were about that of the

Taki

Western folly

Gstaad ‘Let me put it in, just a little bit’ was known as the second biggest lie after ‘the cheque is in the mail’ and it comes to mind when the Archbishop of Canterbury asks for just a little bit of sharia law. Enough said. People far more qualified than me have already commented on the man’s folly, but it is par for the course. We in the West seem to be bent on committing suicide. Sarkozy asks for more mosques in France, some moron wants to sack cops in Britain in order to save money, there’s a brouhaha about the bugging of a radical Muslim MP visiting a suspected

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 16 February 2008

Entering my name in the visitors’ book at the British Embassy in Paris last week, I saw, a couple of lines above, the signature ‘Tony Blair’. The ex-leader is in France a lot just now. Tony is very fond of President Nicolas Sarkozy, and vice versa. Tony is making it increasingly clear that he would like to be the new ‘President of Europe’, and Sarko is urging his candidacy. Mr Blair is admired by many in France, and the style of the new President owes a good deal to the man who invented New Labour. Sarkozy came in promising ‘La rupture’ — the break with the stuffy and sclerotic politics

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 16 February 2008

Monday Do I have to do everything around here? Silly Suzie from Dave’s office is too frightened to ask Lord A to move a load of packing boxes he’s left outside his office so she’s ordered me to do it. I’m to tell him he can’t leave them in the corridor any longer as everyone is tripping over them. Why me? Suzie says he likes me. I find that hard to believe but here goes . . . No joy. Lord A’s people say I’m to tell Dave’s people that His Lordship has no intention of telling him when or even whether he intends to move the packing boxes inside

The Spectator

Letters | 16 February 2008

Pause for tort Sir: Reading Sir David Tang’s diary last week, in which he recounts the story of me ‘Googling’ him on a train, made me reflect on how recollections of events can differ between honest witnesses. My own diary for that day read as follows: ‘Am sitting on the train trying to work when a businessman in a tweed jacket arrives with a substantial retinue. This man is clearly important. He sits opposite me and discusses the day’s pheasant shooting with his companions. It sounds extraordinarily productive (unless you are a pheasant). I gather that he has slept in Lord Lambton’s bed (minus Lord Lambton, it becomes clear). His

Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 16 February 2008

Where is the next generation of Toby Youngs? It’s my turn to dismiss their drivel In 1988, Weidenfeld and Nicolson published a book called The Oxford Myth. Edited by Rachel Johnson and containing essays by a variety of precocious undergraduates, it was the worst reviewed book of the year. ‘A singularly worthless volume,’ wrote Niall Ferguson in the Times. ‘Routine and uninspired,’ said William Boyd in the Sunday Telegraph. As the author of the first essay — on the subject of Class — I was singled out for criticism by almost everyone. Andrew Davies, the celebrated adaptor of literary classics for television, said it made him want to puke. At

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 16 February 2008

Q. I am currently living, with two others, in a ‘high end’ house in an elegant garden square in Chelsea. We are all friends of, and pay rent in some form to, our absentee landlord, an old-school landowner and pig breeder who, when not charming the birds from the trees, is generally blasting the life out of them at his stately pile in north Norfolk. He is used to commanding retainers and, when in London, these feudal tendencies remain at the fore. Over the years the triffid-like growth of the buddleia tree in the garden had rendered the masonry perilous and poised to crash down on the minimalist plate-glass extension

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 16 February 2008

In my husband’s coat pocket when I took it to the cleaner’s I found a piece of paper that he had brought home from the dentist’s. It contained remarks about the word merry, for his dentist is a well-read man of letters. I should have written about this before Christmas, but it was still hidden in the pocket. ‘Merry is a spectrum word,’ the notes say. ‘At one end is the old northern meaning of “strong” or “brave”; at the other end is the southern meaning of “jolly”, “happy”.’ The northern meaning he says is in the dialect dictionary. I can’t find it in this sense in Joseph Wright’s Dialect

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Meme time!

Blimey. James Poulos has been kind enough to nominate this blog for inclusion in some pantheon of excellence. It’s my duty, apparently, to continue the chain letter of blog love by nominating further reading you might enjoy. That being so, feast yourself upon these:Mr Eugenides: Vituperative spluttering from an enraged Scottish Tory perspective. Opera Chic: Smart and sassy take on operatic shenanigans. Especially in Italy. Mgoblog: Everything you need to know about Michigan football. And lots that you didn’t know you needed to know. French Politics: Exactly what it says on the tin – Art Goldhammer’s invaluable primer. Better than what you read in the (English-language) newspapers. Toby Harnden: The

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Sunny side up

Imagine a world in which there was a constant supply of cheap and renewable energy and the world was no longer reliant on oil. Well such a situation may soon be at hand. The Guardian reports on a meeting of futurologists in Boston yesterday where the prospects of being able to harness the sun’s energy was one of the main points of discussion. Considering that the sun covers the earth with “more energy each hour than the planet’s population consumes in a year” once you have worked out how to tap that resource you have solved the problem; as Ray Kurzweil, a futurist, told the meeting, “We only need to

Rani Singh

Water, politicised

Geo TV is running an evening show in Urdu called “The Great Debate” in which the representatives of the major parties are each given three-minute slots to air their views on an election subject, after which they are each interrogated by a Geo chair before going through to two, more detailed, rounds. Experts are in the audience to challenge the speakers. On Friday 15th February the issue was water. A recent report in the News has some alarming figures, and one study from two years ago estimated that only 20 per cent of the population have access to a clean, safe supply.  Water shortages, the building of dams, and who

Simon Hoggart

January Wine Club | 16 February 2008

I love Stone, Vine & Sun of Winchester. They keep winning awards for best independent wine merchant; they have a knack for finding delicious wines at excellent prices from places you haven’t heard about yet but very soon will. I love Stone, Vine & Sun of Winchester. They keep winning awards for best independent wine merchant; they have a knack for finding delicious wines at excellent prices from places you haven’t heard about yet but very soon will. They’ve always been terrific on unknown France, but they’ve branched out into the New World, especially Chile and Argentina where, with the low US dollar, they managed to secure some gorgeous wines

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Spectator Sport | 16 February 2008

My friend Simon has a lovely bench in his garden made up of the blue-painted wooden seats he sat in with his dad when they went to Rugby League decades ago. He bought them when the old Swinton ground was knocked down. That’s what a lot of sport’s about: you mustn’t let the past disappear. But we can’t sidestep the future either. So naturally Manchester United did a brilliant retro job last weekend for the Munich anniversary derby against City: the plain red shirts were gorgeous, the trad scarves on every seat inspired, only the haircuts had changed — oh, and the performance was rubbish. And of course the minute’s

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The Archbishop is little more than a posh John Prescott in a black dress

Rod Liddle is infuriated by a church leader who refuses to confront the inhumanity perpetrated in the name of Islam or the consequences — visible in Malaysia — of legal apartheid I assume it is simply Dr Rowan Williams’s impressive beard which has persuaded everybody that he is an ‘intellectual’; certainly, it cannot be anything he has ever said or written. His latest contribution to the national reservoir of stupidity was the business about sharia law, of course. It was both inevitable and indeed desirable that the state would, somehow, devolve to our Muslim communities jurisdiction over certain — largely domestic — disputes, he opined. Cue a justifiable outrage. Then,

Samantha Weinberg

Green Wife

My chocolate chip cookies have arrived at the farm shop. Caroline apologises as I walk in: ‘I’m afraid they’re Fairtrade.’ ‘All the better,’ I reply. ‘Why on earth would that be a problem?’ ‘They’re a little dearer. Some people don’t want to pay the extra pennies.’ Eleven packets equals a few extra pounds, but I’m happy to spread a little ethical largesse, particularly since we’re going to sell them for £1 each (including a cup of tea) at the big badger debate. Organic Fairtrade would have been even better. I wonder whether 99 biscuits is enough, and almost turn back for more. But I can’t quite believe that we’re going

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Another Voice | 16 February 2008

‘How was it,’ asks George Eliot in Middlemarch, ‘that in the weeks since her marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observ-ed but felt with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind were replaced by ante-rooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither?’ I cannot reread that passage without thinking of a more modern marriage: the Church of England’s with her latest Archbishop. Given the tremendous row, we really should read Dr Rowan Williams’s recent speech on Islam and the Law properly, from start to finish. The more I read, the more I am struck by the

Merryn Somerset-Webb

You wouldn’t buy Britain in this state, so why hold your cash in pounds?

A few minutes reading the Daily Mail and you might think that there wasn’t a person left in Britain with a penny to their name. But it isn’t so. Half the nation may have spent the last five years churning credit cards and overpaying for city-centre new-build flats, but the other half has been busy getting rich. The long bull market, the housing bubble, the City bonus boom and an entrepreneur-friendly culture (yes, really — try starting a business in France) have all combined to make a lot of people a lot of money. The question now is what on earth they should do with it. They can’t buy houses

Dominic Prince

The wisdom of selling ahead of the crowd

Dominic Prince says that some of the world’s canniest investors have consolidated their fortunes by moving into cash as soon as economic storm clouds started to gather Six weeks before the stock market crash of 1987 Sir James Goldsmith met the Australian financier Robert Holmes à Court. Then at the height of his financial prowess, Holmes à Court was reckoned at the time to be the richest man in Australia, wealthier than either Rupert Murdoch or Kerry Packer. Intrigued, Goldsmith was convinced Holmes à Court must be a genius. After the meeting he began to gather as much information as he could on his business methods. But once he’d assembled