Society

Saturday

Interconnect

This lethal golden elixir

It used to be the taste of shame. Something that could induce nightmare Proustian flashbacks to teenage years of furtive pub trips and buying jumbo supermarket two-litre bottles. Never go back! And yet we all apparently have: this alcoholic madeleine is cider, and it appears that everyone loves it now, unreservedly, without any embarrassment. But this lethal golden elixir has evolved a little from the days when it was something to be drunk in parks, by the swings. Now it comes in all varieties, and vintages, and prices, in bottles with pretty labels, and is there to be found in smart gastro-pubs and at swanky dinner parties. Look at Waitrose,

Toby Young Toby Young

I was so good at talking up Shepherd’s Bush that I can’t afford to live there now

I first bought a flat in Shepherd’s Bush in 1991 and I’ve never missed an opportunity to tell the world just how marvellous it is. The shops, the streets, the people — it really is a showcase for Britain’s multicultural society. You couldn’t ask for a more vibrant and lively neighbourhood. My intention, obviously, has been to boost property values in the area so I can afford to move somewhere else. Almost anywhere in west London would be preferable — Olympia, Baron’s Court, Queens Park — but Notting Hill would be my first choice. If only I could bring local property prices into line with most other west London neighbourhoods,

Interconnect

Spoiled for choice

Was last weekend the most stirringly chock-full and eventful ever in sports broadcasting history? BBC Radio 5 heroically, breathlessly, covered the lot. Television viewers possessing the full works — satellite, terrestrial and all the trimmings — must have been frenziedly fingering their remote dibber like demented teenage girls texting myriad mates on their mobiles. For an all-embracing sports nut, Saturday teatime threw up an almost impossible challenge of choices: where did you begin with at the five o’clock kick-off — England football’s utterly crucial match at Wembley on BBC1, or gallant Northern Ireland in Latvia on Sky Sports? Or England rugby’s opening defence of their World Cup against USA in

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 15 September 2007

During the summer I worked in my step-father’s office. I discovered that while he is generally well liked his (25) employees do have one gripe. Q. During the summer I worked in my step-father’s office. I discovered that while he is generally well liked his (25) employees do have one gripe. At Christmas he always arranges for each one of them to receive a present of a hamper of ‘luxury’ foods. These, apparently, often contain items such as olive paste, wild boar sausages, crystallised fruit and stem ginger which the recipients are none too keen on. One employee told me they have Googled the cost of these hampers and, frankly,

Roy Hattersley

Junior leaders

I should not have been surprised to discover that The Spectator has a profound influence on village life — a happy state of affairs which was illustrated last Friday evening immediately before the start of our junior fell races. I should not have been surprised to discover that The Spectator has a profound influence on village life — a happy state of affairs which was illustrated last Friday evening immediately before the start of our junior fell races. As the young contestants were lining up, I was handed a box and a sealed envelope. The box contained a revolver and inside the envelope there was a note about how the

Jeremy Clarke

Sparks flying

She lay on her side and watched the people coming and going from the tented stalls and music stages. I lay on my back beside her and stared up at the billowing ceiling. We’d arrived at the Ragged Hedge Fair, put up the tent, had a series of unbelievably petty squabbles in the process, and were now paralysed by apathy. We lay in our tent, barely speaking, until it was dark. The Ragged Hedge Fair, held in the Cotswolds each summer, is one of a growing number of small ‘green’ summer festivals springing up to cater for those disillusioned by the squalor, commercialism and criminality at Glastonbury. Power is supplied

Taki

Birthplace of blondes

I simply can’t understand why so many Greek women resemble Scandinavians. Everywhere I look there are blondes — fat blondes, short blondes, hairy blondes, but blondes nevertheless. On board S/Y Bushido I simply can’t understand why so many Greek women resemble Scandinavians. Everywhere I look there are blondes — fat blondes, short blondes, hairy blondes, but blondes nevertheless. Could it be the carbon-dioxide emissions that cause this phenomenon, or is there something in the water that turns dark-haired women into fair ones? I suppose we’ll never find out. Never mind. Whereas northern types have been known to snore at the wrong moment, Greek ladies are hot-blooded, hence Greek men get

Alan Judd

Profit and loss

Depreciation is to cars what compound interest is to us: it bites sooner and deeper than you think. In March 2006 my sister-in-law paid a main dealer £8,000 for a 2002 Renault Laguna Sports Tourer Dynamique, an 1,800cc estate equipped with air-conditioning, sunroof (the UK market is apparently the only one that demands both), alloys, CD player, and so on. It was a one-owner car with a full main-dealer service history throughout its 25,500 miles. In August this year, 17 months and 15,500 miles later, she sought to part-exchange it for a 2004 Mazda MX5. The Mazda main dealer offered her £2,000 for the Renault (What Car? gives £3,500 as

Robin Oakley

She’s got rhythm

Former US champion jockey Eddie Arcaro has entered the new Oxford Dictionary of Quotations with his comment, ‘When a jockey retires he becomes just another little man.’ Former US champion jockey Eddie Arcaro has entered the new Oxford Dictionary of Quotations with his comment, ‘When a jockey retires he becomes just another little man.’ Nobody in politically correct America pulled him up for not saying ‘person’, despite the 3,700 winners of races worth some £46 million ridden by the marvellous Julie Krone before she quit the saddle. In Britain, sadly, the question would not have arisen. We have plenty of successful women trainers: nobody could have handled triple Gold Cup

Lucy Vickery

School daze

In Competition No. 2511 you were invited to describe, in prose or verse, Christopher Robin’s first day at a comprehensive school. In Competition No. 2511 you were invited to describe, in prose or verse, Christopher Robin’s first day at a comprehensive school. The idea was to wrench Pooh’s chum from a cosy world of Nanny, Hornby train-sets and bedtime prayers and plunge him into the lawless pandemonium of an inner-city comprehensive, where presumably the only ‘hoppity hopping’ he’d be doing would be to dodge the bullets, and his fellow pupils would more likely have a dose of the clap than sneezles and wheezles. How did he fare? Over to you.

Interconnect

Almost an Englishman

Within this great mound of words (there are at least 200,000 of them) there is a rather good book lurking. Its first merit is that it is very well written. The style is easy, lively, fresh, vernacular. The writing is devoid of clichés and prefabricated prose. Secondly, the story it has to tell is pleasantly exotic. The author was born shortly after the end of the first world war in eastern Germany. His mother, Wilhelmine, was the daughter of a Yorkshire clothing manufacturer, memorably called Abimelech Wainwright, and his depressed wife Elizabeth, who appears to have said nothing during the later years of her life. His father, Albrecht von Blumenthal,

Leo McKinstry

Why the kid should have gone to the chair

Towards the end of the classic 1957 American courtroom drama Twelve Angry Men, the toughest juror turns bitterly on his colleagues: ‘Brother, I’ve seen all kinds of dishonesty in my day, but this little display really takes the cake.’ Furious that the rest of the jury now seem to be inclined towards a ‘not guilty’ verdict in a murder case, despite a wealth of evidence against the defendant, he protests, ‘You all come in here with your hearts bleeding all over the floor about slum kids and injustice …What’s the matter with you guys?’ It is a question that could be addressed to those who now run the British criminal

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Lenin and Sid Waddell provide words to describe the leader of the Tube strike

Don’t mind me asking,’ a Geordie lad accosted me on the train, ‘but aren’t you Sid Waddell?’ I looked blank. Don’t mind me asking,’ a Geordie lad accosted me on the train, ‘but aren’t you Sid Waddell?’ I looked blank. ‘Go on, you are, aren’t you,’ his mate insisted, pumping my hand. ‘Hiya, Sid.’ Thanks to an on-board internet connection and Google Images, I was able to prove to my new friends that I was not the veteran metaphor-mangler of television darts commentary. Nevertheless the three of us agreed that I might just have been mistaken for him across the fog of a crowded club in pre-smoking-ban days, and I

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

We have treated the McCanns as if they were Big Brother contestants

Madeleine’s disappearance sparked a grotesque media circus Did Kate McCann inadvertently kill her daughter Madeleine and then confect a four-month long parade of grief and concern for the benefit of the media, in order to avoid being done for the crime? This seems to be what the Portuguese police have come to either believe or hazard. The McCanns are back in England but they are now — exotically — ‘arguidos’, which means that the Portuguese cops suspect they may have a case to answer. One or both of them may yet be charged, so far as we understand the machinations of the Portuguese legal system. It is said that traces

Margareta Pagano

‘Greedy? Short-termist? No, quite the opposite’

In the 1880s two young American salesmen-cum-pharmacists, Silas Mainville Burroughs and Henry Wellcome, invented the ‘tabloid’. It was not a cut-down newspaper but a form of compressed pill — the name was an elision of ‘tablet’ and ‘alkaloid’ — which they imported to Britain. Helped by its sales, their company Burroughs Wellcome achieved huge success: insulin was another of their inventions, while Henry Wellcome created the first proper medical bags, giving them to Stanley for his trips to Africa and Scott for his walk to the Pole. When Sir Henry Wellcome (as he became) died in 1936, he left a fortune which he asked five trustees to distribute for the

Richard Northedge

How the Governor lost his eyebrows

‘Bank of England denies NatWest rescue move,’ screamed an Evening Standard headline in December 1974 as the credit squeeze strangled the clearer most exposed to the secondary banks that were falling like dominos. This month the Bank has been denying it has just rescued Barclays: the £1.6 billion lent at short notice was not an emergency loan, it insists, simply the use of a strategic safety valve. Just as well, because it is no longer the Bank of England’s job to go round rescuing banks that run out of money. When Gordon Brown put the Bank in charge of setting interest rates a decade ago he took away its role

Peter Oborne

The Establishment is dead. But something worse has replaced it

The Spectator political commentator Henry Fairlie, in his column of 23 September 1955, famously identified the Establishment as the mechanism through which power was exercised in this country. His analysis, though at once recognised as authentic, was written as the British Establishment was about to collapse. Today it enjoys some residual notoriety (manifest through former ruling-class institutions such as White’s Club) but no political significance. Though the eclipse of the Establishment is well-documented, the Political Class which replaced it is so far poorly understood. This is regrettable because the Political Class has come to occupy the same public space that the Establishment was supposed to until the end of the

Paul Johnson

What did the Duchess get up to in her wood-and-turf hut?

There are many odd tales behind the origins of classic gastronomic dishes. Who would have believed that the old Ipswich bruiser, Cardinal Wolsey, was responsible for that perfect combination, strawberries and cream? No one had thought of serving them together before. There is an even more curious history of that admirable side dish, pommes duchesse. It was not invented by Talleyrand’s chef or a three-star maestro from the Michelin, but by that earthy, not to say peat-stained, painter Sir Edwin Landseer (1803–72). How so? He came from a fairly humble background. His father was an engraver who campaigned vigorously (as any student of the Farington Diary will know) for those

Friday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Iraq’s magic schools

President George W Bush has just finished his post-Petraeus address to the nation. Yet again he reported that progress was being made in Iraq – far from the headlines of course – and that this could be measured by the fact that, yes, schools are being rebuilt. Given the frequency with which this nugget of good news is displayed one might conclude that every school in Iraq must have been rebuilt and reopened at least three times. Other, more considered thoughts, later. PS: Megan is not too impressed that Iraq has passed a budget. Or rather, as she says, that’s a low bar for progress…

The Spectator

Old is the new new

The old Latin rite of Mass is officially reinstated today. It’s not easy to explain the significance of this to non-Catholics (or even to Catholics under the age of 50), but it’s as though Rome had closed all the great cathedrals of Europe and stripped them bare and had now decided to re-open them and reinstall the art treasures. The junking of the old Mass almost 40 years ago was quite simply an act of vandalism. That is not to say (as my extreme extremist friends do) that the new Mass is invalid. Many of the abuses of the 1970s have been abandoned, and gimmicky celebrations are now largely confined