Society

Saturday

Robin Oakley

Ask the expert

He may, unusually, have a Cambridge economics degree but nobody in racing looks the part better than John Gosden. The panama or brown trilby according to the weather. The upright physical presence of a man you could easily imagine as a battalion commander. The crinkle of experience about eyes which have studied the racing scene from the inside at his father Towser’s Lewes yard, in Caracas, Venezuela, on America’s West Coast and at Manton. The calm confidence exuding from the man who learnt his trade at the feet of masters like Vincent O’Brien at Ballydoyle and Noel Murless in Newmarket, which is once again Gosden’s home base. Listen to John

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 13 October 2007

Q. I have started to commute to London and although I do not travel in every day I find myself constantly wearing the wrong kit in the wrong place. A Barbour looks dreadful in London — equally a Crombie or a Chesterfield looks somehow provocative at Westbury station. I can’t be expected to carry two coats at all times. How do other commuters solve this conundrum? M.C., Somerset A. Head for Cordings at 19 Piccadilly, London W1 (www.cordings.co.uk). Your particular needs will be met by a classic ‘covert coat’ (£425) suitable for wear in both country and town and favoured by social types as diverse as the late Lord Deedes,

Toby Young Toby Young

The angst of grown-up social life is as nothing compared to children’s parties

Toby Young on the social pitfalls of your child’s birthday party I suppose it had to happen. There comes a time in every father’s life when his son’s social activity begins to eclipse his own. I used to find it amusing when Ludo received a stiffy in the morning post. ‘What is it now?’ I’d say, waving the letter about in mock indignation. ‘Another garden party at Buckingham Palace?’ These days, I sneak downstairs before he gets up and root about in the pile of invitations on the doormat, trying to find one that isn’t addressed to him. It wouldn’t be so bad, but the little bugger is only two-and-a-half. The

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 13 October 2007

A mondegreen is a term for a misheard word or phrase from a poem, song or piece of prose. It derives from a couplet in an old ballad, ‘They hae slain the Earl Murray/ And laid him on the green’, with the last line misheard as ‘And Lady Mondegreen’. Mondegreen was coined in Harper’s Magazine by Sylvia Wright in 1954. I’ve just been leafing through a collection of mondegreens and malapropisms by Martin Toseland in The Ants Are My Friends (Portico Books, £9.99) The title refers to a mishearing of the Bob Dylan lyric ‘the answer my friend’ (is blowing in the wind). Mr Toseland also includes eggcorns. This neologism

Deborah Ross

Restaurants | 13 October 2007

Now, let me see if I can get this right. My sister’s husband has a brother who has a friend who is friends with a couple in Zimbabwe who read The Spectator and are ‘very big fans’ of mine. I think that’s it. Anyway, might I email them, just to say ‘hello’? They’d be really chuffed. So I email and say, naturally, that should they ever find themselves in London they should get in touch and we’ll go out to lunch and, blow me, if they don’t then turn up in London (on holiday) saying: ‘Well . . . ?’ It’s not them who worry me. I’m sure they are

Bella Pollen

The age of beige

Bella Pollen on Jaeger’s ‘new’ look: old-fashioned tailoring made sexy With so many things in the world designed to make you angry, it seems pointless to get worked up about a colour, but I can’t help it — I have a thing about beige. It conjures up support tights for Scottish pensioners, ankle bandages and cheap hotel lobbies. Granted, French and Italians manage to look all exquisite and Louis Vuittonesque in it. However, your average Englishwoman dressed in beige more resembles something rolled in breadcrumbs, or worse — embalmed. But colour isn’t my only prejudice. I don’t just loathe beige. I fear it. I fear it in the same way

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 13 October 2007

Damocles was the courtier who told Dionysius the tyrant that his happiness was complete. Dionysius ordered Damocles to his banquet and sat him under a sword suspended by a single hair for the whole of dinner. I hope David Cameron is doing the same to any adviser who shows Damoclean tendencies. It is absolutely true that the Tories have done well, and that their leader has done better than any of them. This is the first time since John Major won the election of 1992 that any Tory leader has passed the second big test in his role (the first being to become leader at all). But almost all the

Joanna Shields

Diary – 13 October 2007

An internet executive taking to the streets of London without a BlackBerry is about as rare a sight as the Circle Line working normally. But sometimes you have to let go of the familiar to discover important home truths. So it was that at the end of the week the entire staff of Bebo’s headquarters in London was ordered to down tools, put on T-shirts emblazoned with the company logo and embark on a scavenger hunt across the capital. Away from the business of writing code and building a social network, we actually managed to bump into our social network in person. It’s an extraordinary feeling to be mobbed by

Mark Daniell

World Cup Vodoo

Mark Daniell previews the Rugby World Cup semi-finals. Mark Daniell Chaos theory states that because of its incomprehensibly complex structure, the universe and everything in it is unpredictable.  Established in the twentieth century, the idea is accepted as ‘good enough for now’ by most budding astrophysicists, and lately it would seem by most rugby fans too. The theory suggests that the tiniest influence, so easily overlooked at source, can have a monumental effect somewhere else, and is most famously illustrated by the Butterfly Effect: a butterfly flapping its wings in London may cause a hurricane in Mexico. (Interestingly, the inverse effect has yet to be studied, but it has been

Matthew Vincent

How to stay sane when computers go crazy

‘I’m on the beach with my BlackBerry,’ a senior banker told the Financial Times back in early August. ‘Normally, banks run on half or two thirds of normal staff in August, which can make it difficult, so every banker has to remain vigilant, even if you’re on the beach like me.’ But, at precisely the same time, in a small back office at an investment bank on Wall Street, one highly vigilant trader was in a frenzy of activity — constantly checking seemingly unbelievable market data and firing off trade after trade, but still ending the week 30 per cent down, and wiping nearly $1 billion off the value of

Ian Cowie

Don’t put your money under the mattress

Extreme stock market volatility and the crisis at Northern Rock have prompted some crass comment about how to look after savings in uncertain times like these. Probably the worst is the glib recommendation, so often trotted out during a panic, that you might as well keep your money under the mattress. But the only people to benefit from financial advice like that are burglars. Quite contrary to what pessimists might have you believe, anyone can still enjoy risk-free, tax-free returns comfortably ahead of inflation. Meanwhile, the more adventurous may seek to profit from setbacks suffered by others. Long before the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, hurriedly announced that taxpayers would provide an

James Delingpole James Delingpole

A good share is like a good wife

James Delingpole admits to ‘utter crapness’ as an investor in the past, but thinks he now has a winning strategy It has been over a year since I checked my share portfolio but when I did the other day I had the most pleasant surprise. Apparently, despite understanding next to nothing about the workings of the stock market, I had managed to net myself a cool £3,000 profit. ‘Warren Buffett eat your heart out,’ I thought — at least for the few seconds it took me to work out what had really happened. This wasn’t my real portfolio at all. It was my paper (or, more accurately, ‘screen’) portfolio, based

Jonathan Davis

Spend more time in the library

Where do most investors go wrong in making their investment decisions? Warren Buffett, whom many like to think of as the world’s most successful stock market investor, has no doubts. People need to spend more time with their nose in a book, thinking about the way the world works, and less time looking at the price of the shares that they own. Buffett has long since moved on from buying individual shares to buying whole companies, but the way he spends his time has not changed much in the 50 years he has been a professional investor. One day a couple of years ago, he received a faxed letter about

Margareta Pagano

Riches from oily rags

If recycling your domestic rubbish is a pain, imagine what it’s like running a car-repair workshop: batteries, bolts, bulbs, bumpers, plastics, oily rags, scrap metal and toxic liquids are just a few of the nasties. Understandably, most of Britain’s 25,000 garage owners either don’t bother — nearby rivers are handy — or they take the rubbish to landfill sites or incinerators where they pay a packet to get rid of it. Either way they are likely to be breaking the law, or to be about to break it: a new EU directive comes into force at the end of this month stipulating that all waste must be pre-treated before it

Tamzin Lightwater

Notting Hill Nobody | 13 October 2007

Monday What can I say?! Happiness and General Wellbeing levels through roof! Dave is the greatest! We’re definitely going to win in 2009!! But more importantly, I have been seconded on to the Brown Attack Unit! Am at centre of fevered preparations ahead of PMQs involving cut-throat political strategy. So far have come up with Great Clunking Cowardy Custard and Big Fat Miserable Loser. For some reason, neither of these seem to have made it on to Jed’s shortlist of insults to be hurled across dispatch box by Dave, but there’s time yet. Have never seen Gids so happy. He’s commissioned limited-edition flock wallpaper with the words ‘I Told You

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 13 October 2007

A-bomb or B-movie? Sir: I have no idea whether or not we really came close to WW3 last month, as your correspondents Douglas Davis and James Forsyth insist (‘We came so close’, 6 October), but one line in their exciting piece brings doubts to mind. After ‘secretly’ crossing into Syria (as opposed to coming in on a guided tour, presumably) soil samples collected by ‘elite’ Israeli commandos (thank heavens they didn’t use run-of-the-mill commandos) at Tartous ‘suggested that the cargo [from North Korea] was nuclear’. Really? Presumably any such nuclear material would have been transported and stored in rather robust, sealed and shielded containers. If this stuff was radioactive enough,

Paul Johnson

They sang ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ as the Titanic went down

To me, history has always had a double magic. On the one hand it is a remorseless, objective account of what actually happened, brutally honest, from which there is no appeal to sentiment. On the other, it is a past wreathed in mists and half-glimpses, poetic, glamorous and sinister, peopled by daemonic or angelic figures, who thrill, enchant and terrify. I like both, and see them as complementary. My father taught me the first, under his maxim: ‘Never believe a historical event as fact unless you can document it.’ My mother taught me the second, when I was a child cradled in her arms, listening to her soft, musical voice

Aidan Hartley

The terrible secrets of Beijing’s ‘black jails’

The author’s arrest while investigating Chinese prisons A crowd of faeces-stained, starving figures with haunted eyes stared at us from behind the bars. Some looked cold and wet, as if they had been hosed down with water. Most of them were old, and some handicapped. They began wailing and pleading with us. ‘Let us out!’ they sobbed. ‘This is a prison!’ They showed us one ragged woman. ‘Look at this. She was beaten!’ They carried another elderly woman towards the bars who appeared to be paralysed. Guarding the inmates were young men in black jumpsuits. I knew they would stop us filming any second now, but at first the guards

Hywel Williams

Democracy can’t compete with the history of kings

Archaeology in north-eastern Syria was once a poor relation to the great sites that lie to the south and over the Iraqi border. Southern Mesopotamia is long established as the area that shows the urban roots of advanced civilisation. Ur may or may not be Abraham’s birthplace but by the 3rd millennium bc it was certainly the centre of a sophisticated court society. Nineveh, lying adjacent to modern Mosul, rivals — and may surpass — Ur in antiquity and was an Assyrian centre by the end of the 2nd millennium bc. Widespread looting and military action now make archaeological investigation next to impossible at such centres. But digging has continued