Society

Saturday

Beryl Bainbridge

Diary – 26 May 2007

This week I’m going to the Hay-on-Way literary festival to take part in a discussion following the showing of a documentary made for BBC4 by Charlie Russell. It’s called The Last Year of my Life. Mine, that is. It was filmed over the past three years, and began because I mentioned that my parents, my grandparents and my aunts all died at the age of 71. I said I wouldn’t last much longer. Obviously I feature throughout, cigarette mostly in hand, and once seen falling over at a Foyles ‘do’, but that, I protest, was because my lovely friend Bernice Rubens had died the day before. It’s a very good

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 26 May 2007

Q. I will be celebrating a ‘milestone’ birthday this summer and marking the event with a cocktail party for 60 one evening and a dinner for 100 on another. Having lived in various parts of the globe over the years (now New York), a large number of guests are flying in from far-flung lands to join in the celebrations. My dilemma, Mary, is how best to word my invitations regarding the delicate matter of gift-giving by well-meaning friends. Here are some of the concerns with which I’m presently struggling. At this point in my life I am fortunate enough to have all the material possessions one could reasonably want or

Taki

Bad taste in ‘ladies’

New York The funny thing about Sarkozy being president of France is not his size, but his family. His father, Pal Sarkozy, used to frequent the same nightclubs as I did back in the early Sixties. Of the ‘beau monde’ he was not. Pal was sort of sleazy, and sort of a conman, and sort of a playboy. None of us knew what he did, and by that I don’t mean to suggest he was dishonest, but there were always rumours about him. An inveterate womaniser, a good thing for a father of a French president to be, his women, alas, were a pretty lousy bunch. Except for one of

Robin Oakley

Don’t make me tile the sea

Sadly the racing season both for pure-bred Arabians and even for camels was over when I was in Qatar last weekend. But I did discover that Arab mums, like British trainers, tend to wear rose-tinted spectacles. ‘To an Arab mother,’ the Gulf saying goes, ‘every donkey is a gazelle.’ I do rather like, too, the way angry Arabs don’t tell someone to ‘go and jump in the lake’ but to ‘go and tile the sea’. I can only hope, after the traumas of seconditis that we suffered with our winter Twelve To Follow, that I don’t get too many end-of-season invitations to go aquatic tiling. And hope was resurrected over

Michael Mcmahon

Coup de thé

There are two invaluable rules for a special correspondent — Travel Light and Be Prepared …remember that the unexpected always happens. Evelyn Waugh, Scoop Huge potholes scar the road from the Keda mountains to the Black Sea port of Batumi. My driver cannot see them for the snow, and I can’t feel the bumps because I have been anaesthetised by lunch. I have fallen victim to traditional Georgian hospitality: a meal that ends in toasts drunk from clay horns shaped so that they can’t be put down until they are drained. I raised mine to my driver, to my translator and to the two strangers who led us to our

Molly Watson

China Blues

I think you can rate the success of any trip abroad by how relieved and happy you feel to be home as your plane makes its final approach to land you back in Britain. Flying into Heathrow last month I was pretty much off my head with joy. Gazing down as we circled over a rich tapestry of scruffy fields and housing estates stitched together with arterial roads and gravel pits, I felt a rush of affection for the landscape, coupled with a surge of relief to be home. It takes a lot to make a person’s soul sing out at the sight of Hounslow. In my case, it takes

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 26 May 2007

Is it right to aspire? Sir: According to your leading article, ‘The Tory party is a party of aspiration or it is nothing’ (19 May). If this means that the Tory party is a party in the interest primarily of that ambitious minority which wants to rise in the world, then I should like to disagree, if only because the great majority of the nation, thank God, are not social climbers. By which I do not mean that the great majority of the nation do not have aspirations — to lead good and decent lives, for example — only that they do not necessarily have aspirations to join the rat

James Forsyth James Forsyth

How good is Kevin Pietersen?

Well, after his innings of 226 today, there’s only one player who has scored more runs than him in their first twenty five tests and that’s Don Bradman. Pietersen might actually be as good as he thinks he is.

The Spectator

Punk, it’s over

When I became Editor of the Spec, I mentioned to one interviewer that “Pretty Vacant” by the Sex Pistols was my favourite pop record. This, most entertainingly, was declared by some in the blogosphere to mark, definitively, the death of punk. Last night’s Ten O’Clock News included an item on punk’s 30th anniversary, including an interview with a very cuddly Johnny Rotten looking back on the mayhem he caused in the late Seventies with wry amusement. These days, he’s a prosperous property developer and quite likes the Queen. Fiona Bruce’s indulgent smile at the end of the item said it all: if there was any life left in punk, Fiona

Petroc Trelawny

‘The name is Elder, not Elgar’

A large portrait of Mark Elder hangs backstage at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester. It’s not a flattering representation; in it the Hallé’s music director looks tired, haggard, old. Interestingly, the picture is positioned so that the conductor doesn’t have to go anywhere near it as he passes through the corridors from his dressing room to the concert platform. On 2 June, the 150th anniversary of Edward Elgar’s birth, Elder turns 60. He could pass for a man 15 years younger. We meet outside his north London home. I arrive early, and he catches me loitering round the corner as he marches down the street after a haircut. Even though

Robin Holloway

Talent spotting

An officially commissioned company history: recipe for yawns! Most such hardly amount to more than an exercise in corporate piety with surreptitious window-dressing. But let me ‘declare an interest’ (which I’ll hope to convey and share). Boosey & Hawkes have been my publisher for even longer than I’ve been writing Spectator columns — 32 and 19 years respectively. And this, by Helen Wallace (published for the firm this month), really is different — not merely for the absorbing saga of vision, audacity, happy accident, brilliant timing, an unlikely yet successful match of old-style wariness with slick newstyle entrepreneurial flair, yielding gradually via galvanising play of vibrant personalities to a downward

Julia Hobsbawm

The joy of coaching

The Daily Telegraph estimated last month that roughly a third of the bosses of FTSE 100 companies use a personal coach — ‘and not the guy who tells them to do more press-ups in the company gym’. But you would be hard-pressed to find a newspaper feature anytime soon in which any of those business leaders recommended their coach, any more than they would their psychoanalyst. Despite its growing ubiquity, consulting  a coach is still regarded by senior businesspeople as private and absolutely not something to declare openly. Although good ‘executive coaching’ is something which devotees regard as potent and effective, it often earns a sniff of disapproval from the

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

At the Oval, I reflected once again on John Major’s remarkable legacy as PM

Cricket. Aargh. My gorge rises at the very word. Days — months — years of schoolboy misery; long, wretched, empty afternoons of boredom, fear and wasted time. Which is no way to say thank-you to Sir John Major for inviting me to a remarkable book launch for what looks and sounds like rather good book: More Than a Game. But the truth is that I made my way to the John Major suite at the Oval in south London on Monday last week more out of affection for Sir John than for cricket. I’m so glad I did. That busy, crowded room will fix itself in the memory as a

Caroline Baum

The wild one

You can hardly blame a woman of 102 for being a bit hazy when it comes to giving directions. ‘Drive to the Italian border,’ said Lesley Blanch on the telephone, after initially attempting to discourage my visit. ‘When you get there, make a U-turn and I’m the first on the right.’ And so she was, tucked away in a house high above Menton on the French Riv- iera. ‘It is always useful to be near a frontier, in case you need to make a dash for it.’ There were countless times when she crossed frontiers that most people would have trouble finding on a map, not fleeing but restlessly searching

Lucy Vickery

Playing God

In Competition 2495 you were invited to submit a poem establishing the principles of a new religion. This competition was inspired by Larkin’s ‘Water’: My liturgy would employImages of sousing,A furious devout drench… A lot of entries were slightly gloomy satire recommending the twin creeds of selfishness and shopping. Commendations to Barbara Smoker and G.M. Davis, and to Moyra Blyth for her paean to the carrot, but the winning poems are printed below. The prizewinners each receive £30, and the bonus fiver goes to D.A. Prince. My faithful ones, our principles must beBoth carbon-neutral and pure, GM-free.No living creature should be harmed (though germsMay be exempted, as any gastric worms).As

Frank Keating

The boy wonder

Fasten your ear-muffs for a deafening weekend — din and dissonance, vrooms and fumes. Around Silverstone, lock up your dogs and daughters while the leaning, leather-clad boy racers sort out the British leg of the world motorcycling championship. Down on the Riviera, the straw-bales and (what we used to call) the starlets are in place for Monaco’s round-the-houses Grand Prix on Sunday, while across the pond in Indiana the world’s largest annual sporting throng has gathered for the always hairy-scary Indianapolis 500. Brits ignore most all-American sports; at home, as well, motor-cycling coverage is pretty well blanked by the mainstream backpages, though it strikes me as a more genuine sport than

Simon Nixon

A very expensive drop of Scotch

Driving through the pretty towns of Speyside, as I did last week, it’s hard to believe you’re at the centre of a booming global industry. As the road follows the course of the river into the Highlands, you can spot the chimneys of the distilleries every few miles. But they’re mostly small-scale and they still retain the look and feel of a cottage industry. At the picturesque Strathisla near Keith, with its traditional pagoda-style malting towers, pretty girls in kilts greet you at the visitor centre. At Glenlivet, I was given a guided tour by a former excise man whose job it once was to police the distillery. There’s tartan

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Hot tips in the World Bank stakes: Blair, Bono, Clarkson …but not me

Shortly after the death of John Paul II in 2005, the wise and amiable Father Dominic Milroy, former prior of the Benedictine college in Rome, leant across a dinner table and said, ‘Martin, you’d make a good candidate for Pope.’ ‘But father,’ I protested, ‘I’m not even a Catholic.’ ‘Oh don’t worry,’ he responded, ‘We can soon see about that.’ Likewise I’m glad to discover that not holding a US passport does not rule me out as a candidate to succeed Paul Wolfowitz as president of the World Bank when he departs next month, so long as I’m prepared to convert: his predecessor, Australian-born James Wolfensohn, took American citizenship in

Paul Johnson

Why we don’t know who killed Cock Robin

That fierce neighbouring cat, which has killed or scared off our mice, has not yet destroyed our robin. Cats do not enjoy eating robins. If they do so by mistake, they vomit. But that does not stop them attacking the birds for sport. We think of robins as very tame, and they are — in England. In the past we killed them for various purposes. In the 17th century robins (and sparrows) were eaten to break up kidney stones, for which a surgical operation, in those days, was dangerous if not impossible. If the surgeon was not swift and skilful enough to get the stone out within 20 minutes, the

Boris Johnson

The pursuit of happiness

You’ve got to realise they would have done it. They would have gone right ahead and swept another priceless heirloom from the mantelpiece of history. They were revving up their bulldozers, ready to roar into the ancient and irreplaceable ecosystem. Another great tree would have been felled in the forest of knowledge, and the owl of Minerva would have fled in terror from her roost. Had it not been for a few romantic reactionaries, then the technicians who run our reductionist system of education — with the complaisance of the Labour government — would by now be halfway to the demolition of the ancient history A-Level. The children of tomorrow,