Society

Sunday

7 Oct 2007

Allez les Bleus!

Sympathy? You gotta be kidding me. The New Zealand press has not – suprise! – taken France’s stirring victory in Cardiff yesterday very well. Of course, like their neighbours across the Tasman Sea they’re not quite so insufferable in defeat as they are in victory. Even so, schadenfreude* demands that one scour the Kiwi press today: Shattered All Black rugby fans can ease their mental pain by sticking with the World Cup until the bitter end, psychologist Marc Wilson says. Ignoring the tournament in the wake of yesterday’s shock 20-18 quarter-final loss to France would not help people get over the All Blacks’ early exit, said Dr Wilson, deputy head

Saturday

6 Oct 2007

Richard Sennett

Just say no | 6 October 2007

In New York, I head for Citarella on Broadway only to be confronted by a noisy demo at the entrance. (Among New York foodies, Citarella is to Whole Foods what in London Waitrose is to Tesco.) People in straw sandals and peasant dresses are handing out leaflets proclaiming ‘Say no to foie gras!’ Citarella is probably one of the few places in the world which sells foie gras in volume, so this is a strike, as it were, at the very heart of the evil empire. Foie gras is goose liver swelled up by force-feeding just before the bird is killed; the liver, lightly sautéed or made into a terrine,

Jeremy Clarke

Smoking zone

As of this week my boy (17) is no longer legally entitled to buy cigarettes. His half-brother (16) the same. It must be galling for a teenager finally to reach an age when he or she becomes legally entitled to join the adults in one of their glamorous vices, to enjoy that entitlement to the full for several months, and then to have it peremptorily withdrawn again by a sanctimonious Scotsman. My boy has only two months to go before he can service his addiction legally again. To bridge the time gap he popped across to Brittany on a cross-Channel ferry last week to stockpile a couple of thousand cigarettes.

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 6 October 2007

Arnie on the big screen Sir: There’s no truth in Fraser Nelson’s suggestion that Governor Schwarzenegger changed his schedule in response to polls or any other political considerations (‘This will be Cameron’s finest hour’, 29 September). The Governor was delighted by the opportunity to speak to the Conservative conference, and only regrets that other responsibilities prevented him from making an appearance. We’re grateful that technology allowed the Governor to appear via a video link. Governor Schwarzenegger appreciated Mr Cameron’s invitation and was pleased to highlight how California’s move away from hardline partisanship has helped the Governor’s administration achieve groundbreaking new policies. Mr Cameron is realising a similar opportunity with the

Iain Dale

Diary – 6 October 2007

Thank the Lord this will be the last time conference-goers have to endure the hellhole that calls itself Blackpool. The last time I stayed in a Blackpool hotel at a party conference was in the mid-1990s. I woke up at 2 a.m. on the first night covered in sweat. I hadn’t been indulging in any, er, nefarious activity and didn’t feel ill, but I eventually worked it out. The caring Blackpool hotel owner had thoughtfully put rubber incontinence sheets on the bed. Now I am sure some people would pay good money for that sort of thing, but I decided to check out the next morning. Each time I have

Toby Young

Ten years on, I’m still prone to a townie’s faux pas when I go deerstalking

As a lover of good drama, my favourite week of the year falls in the late summer when I make my annual pilgrimage to Scotland. The fabulous scenery, the weird and wacky costumes, the inventive use of language — it all adds up to a very memorable few days. No, I’m not talking about the Edinburgh Festival, but about deerstalking in the Highlands. For sheer, heart-stopping excitement, it knocks spots off a trip to the theatre. If you’re lucky, you’ll come home with more than just a fistful of programmes, too — though hand-luggage restrictions make it advisable to stick such souvenirs in the hold. Admittedly, it has taken me

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 6 October 2007

I was having lunch with friends last week in a fairly swanky gastropub, and the menu promised a ballontine of quail. The waiter told me that ballontine meant that the quail had been deboned, then stuffed. It was quite nice to eat, but I have only just discovered what the menu intended to say, which is ballotine. I was put right by an amusing little book on French words in English with the not fantastically funny title of French Letters and the English Canon (Timewell Press, £9.99). It is by Mark Daniel. Actually, Mr Daniel says that the correct spelling is ballottine. He has seen it on menus even as

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 6 October 2007

Q. An elderly relative has developed the disgusting habit of licking her knife after using it for, say, jam, and then using it again to help herself to butter. It’s horrid having to take butter from a dish into which some one else’s saliva-strewn knife has been plunged. Any ideas? B.M, North Berwick A. Re-educate your relation by giving her tea at your own table. Serve scones from the oven, handing out the first one ‘to test’ by an accomplice who will have been primed to load it with butter, then lick his knife. As his knife-wielding hand now lunges for the jam, cry ‘Greystoke! Greystoke!’ and steer the hand

Alex Massie

When Morons Attack

It’s the baseball play-offs. Hurrah. Let’s Go Yankees! But that also means it’s time for America’s sportswriters to be even dumber than is customarily the case. For the sake of your sanity as well as for proper hilarity, trot on over to the lads at Fire Joe Morgan. Recent highlights include: how your mother probably has a better understanding of the value of “wins” than the average Hall of Fame voter, why yes of course you’d be better off packing your team with people who aren’t very good at baseball come the play-offs because, hey, they’re plucky! And gusty! and, today, yet another welcome takedown of America’s worst gasbag, Mr

Alex Massie

Picture of the Day | 6 October 2007

I trust that Steve Clemons, pride and joy of the New America Foundation, won’t object if I thieve this adorable picture of his dogs, Oakley (left) and Annie. I grew up with spaniels and have no idea about Weimeraners at all. Are they loopy and excessively highly-strung? Or are they as beautifully melancholy as they look? Explain, people, please. PS: Now that I think of it, the Weimeraner is a cousin of the (regal) Vizsla, is it not?

Alex Massie

OK, let’s talk Turkey…

Andrew Sullivan says Turkey may be the United States’ “most important ally” (really?) and condemns “myopic” Europe for not immediately welcoming a non-European country into the EU. Easy for him to say of course. So does Andrew support the resolution coming before Congress that would (finally) recognise the Armenian genocide? Or does he line up with the American foreign policy establishment and think this is a subject best left under the carpet? I think I can recall Andrew being pretty vociferous about the horror of western indifference to Darfur and I doubt he’d be quite so friendly towards anyone who denied the Jewish (and gypsy and homosexual) holocaust so where

Fraser Nelson

Brown’s Black Saturday

This is Brown’s Black Saturday. He could have won even on these polls, but it would have been a fight rather than a massacre. And this is what he balked at. He has shown himself to be a graduate of the Scooby Doo school of conflict: he saw danger, yelped “yikes” and skedaddled. Fleet Street will not forget this in a hurry.

Martin Vander Weyer

A chastened City

Can we make a link between the chopping of 1,500 jobs, mostly in London and New York, by the Swiss banking giant UBS, and the news that the City of London Corporation has come up with a £300 million contribution to the financing of Crossrail, the long-awaited Heathrow-to-Docklands transport link? Well, connecting unrelated news events on any given day and extracting lessons from them is what columnists are supposed to be for. So let me have a go. The jobs lost at UBS Investment Bank, which include that of its chairman and chief executive Huw Jenkins, are the tip of the iceberg of City redundancies to come this autumn. Not

Frank Keating

While you were away

This corner has already broken its fundamental annual rule not to get worked up about football till the clocks are altered at the end of this month — there is ample time ahead to concentrate on soccer’s unending imbroglio of speculation, satisfaction and scandal — and any number of faraway correspondents write to say they relish the seasons being topped and tailed with some shafts of basic information. In providing a few for you distant Spectator subscribers, I’m warmed by the memory of the late Peter Cook telling me how, as a schoolboy on summer hols from Radley at his father’s distant colonial service outpost in West Africa, the Times

Simon Hoggart

OCTOBER WINE CLUB

This is a cellar that looks like a cellar, with stacks of wine in wooden cases, some of it covered in dust and cobwebs, the finest stored in a locked cage with a creaking door. In spite of that, they have a modern approach to pricing. The business has an enormous turnover, and the inevitable consequence is that they overstock on some wines, which have to be priced to clear. These are absolutely first-rate bottles, but some are a little unfamiliar and won’t sell off the page; others are so good that Averys’ people bought them in vast quantities. The result is that once again we are offering some terrific

Lucy Vickery

Taking the rap

In Competition No. 2514 you were invited to recast a fairy tale as a rap. I thought that fairy tales might translate well into the language of rap. After all, violence is a dominant theme in both genres (especially in the Grimms’ original x-rated versions, which featured scenes of murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide and incest that would make Stephen King blanch). The winners this week, printed below, were outstanding. Convincing raps, like successful Mills & Boon romances, are not easy to pull off. So it’s a well-deserved £30 each. Natural-born rapper Bill Greenwell nets the bonus fiver. Felicity Powell didn’t enter this week’s comp but, driven to despair by the

The Spectator

A man worthy to be Prime Minister

Ten years after New Labour came to power, it is remarkable that the unions can still hold us all to ransom. This issue of The Spectator has gone to press a day earlier than usual, to minimise the risk of disruption to our readers from the threatened postal strike. It is depressing that such precautions should still be necessary in 2007. So much for strong, Thatcher-esque leadership in No. 10. Those who ask why the country needs a fresh start need look no further than this petty display of Jurassic union power. In Blackpool this week, David Cameron confounded those who said that he is incapable of leading the Tories

Hugo Rifkind

The Tory conference made me feel like Simon Callow in Four Weddings and a Funeral

Hugo Rifkind on the party conference season Are we sure that party conferences are good things? Are we convinced that they do the job? Certainly, they are great fun. That, I would never dispute. The booze. The talk. And the rooms. Any connoisseur of weird, shabby, out-of-town hotels with ominously crumbly ceilings and carpets that suck would have been thrilled by my temporary berth in Blackpool last week. Five damp beds in my room for one, and two cold taps that only ran hot. An actual karaoke bar, through which I had to pass to get in and out. The ever-present smell of cigarettes and that other familiar tang which, after

Paul Johnson

The countryside should be a place of life, not of death

This is the time of year when I am irritated by the pop-pop of shotguns near my house in Over Stowey. Not that West Somerset is a great county for shooting. It is a place for hunting. I have counted up to 13 packs of hounds in the neighbourhood. Most of them are foxhounds, and there are staghounds too, of course, but also beagles and harriers not so far away. I favour hunting as the best way of solving difficult problems — keeping down foxes which kill chickens for fun, and dispersing the red deer, which otherwise congregate in scores and can kick to pieces a big field of turnips

Matthew Lynn

A symbol of change – but is she the real thing?

It wasn’t hard to see what was in it for President Nicolas Sarkozy when he appointed Christine Lagarde as France’s new finance minister in June this year. After a glittering career in international law, Lagarde had become a star in American business circles: the 30th most powerful woman in the world, according to that ultimate arbiter of commercial influence, Forbes; the fifth best female executive in Europe, according to the Wall Street Journal. Sarkozy, like all modern politicians, is obsessed with symbols and narratives. In Lagarde, he had his storyline made flesh. Look, he’s saying — we’re changing. This is not the old, closed-for-a-four-hour-lunch, anti-globalisation France. This is the new,