Society

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 16 June 2007

Q. My wife has always had a wide network of friends, many of whom she makes contact with each day as they bring her up to date with how things are going in their lives. She is a good listener and always sees the point of things. She very much enjoys being abreast of all gossip as it ‘breaks’. This would be fine but she is now on the telephone for, I estimate, around four hours a day, two of them with an earpiece while she is doing the school run. I would not mind if the emotional traffic were two-way but it always seems to be my wife who

Jeremy Clarke

Enchanted wood

My sister was round at our house at the weekend, trying to give up cannabis after 35 years. It’s her idea but she was absolutely furious about it and her mouth was twisted with vexation, even when she lay asleep on the sofa. On Saturday afternoon me and my boy thought it best to be well out of the way should the volcano erupt again. So we drove up to Dartmoor and sat in the shade of a small primeval oak wood for the afternoon. Wistman’s Wood is a rare and unusual remnant of the kind of oak woodland that used to cloak the moor. It has survived because it grows out of

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 16 June 2007

Blair’s conscience Sir: Charles Moore may be correct that Mr Blair wishes to become a Catholic on relinquishing office (The Spectator’s Notes, 9 June). Whether this is appropriate or not is another matter. Throughout his time in Parliament Mr Blair has failed consistently to follow the unequivocal teaching of the Church — on the protection of the unborn child, for instance, on experimentation on human embryos and on civil partnerships. His government was particularly vicious in handling the hierarchy and Catholic adoption agencies over the Sexual Orientation Regulations. As a convert to the faith, Mr Moore knows that after professing the Nicene Creed, those being received into full communion with

Taki

A smacker with a spook

I kissed a top FBI agent flush in the mouth while in my cups at Elaine’s last week, and lived to write about it. And it was a stolen kiss, at that. They’re the best kind, now that I’m old enough to see how corny a prelude to a kiss is at my age. I was on my way to the loo when I saw Elaine, the proprietor, talking to the agent. I was introduced and I used a variation of the old Mae West joke, ‘Is that a gun you’re carrying, or do you like my girlfriend?’ Then I grabbed the G-man and kissed her. Special agent Anne Beagan

Simon Hoggart

JUNE WINE CLUB

Here’s a very exciting offer. We start with two wines which are phenomenal value. They are from the Pierre Henri estate in southern France. This is a big enterprise (they have just taken an order for 50,000 cases from Royal Thai airlines) and you might expect the wines to be bland and mass-produced: alcoholic grape juice. Not so. The Syrah 2006 is plump and fruity, and the Chardonnay 2006 is fresh, lively and packed with flavour. There’s perfume provided by the 5 per cent Viognier that M. Henri adds when nobody is looking. These wines are sold under a different label in one of our best-known chains for £5.90 a

Paul Johnson

Rubbish, entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

One of the secrets of the universe is buried in the word rubbish. The word itself is secretive: no one knows its precise provenance. The big OED says: ‘Of obscure origin app. related in some way to rubble.’ But if you look up rubble, it says: ‘Of obscure origin, app. related in some way to rubbish.’ Dirt is matter in the wrong place. Rubbish is matter in the wrong place but on a larger scale. Getting it into the right place is beginning to perplex governments as never before. The earliest general attempt in English history to deal with the problem can be found in the Parliament Roll for 1392–93:

Tom Fleming

A choice of first novels

American Youth by Phil LaMarche (Sceptre, £12.99, pp. 221) is a sparsely written, penetrating tale of a boy who finds himself in a moral dilemma when he abets the accidental killing of a neighbour. Fourteen-year-old Ted LeClare tries to impress the Dennison brothers by showing them his father’s rifle, but when he leaves the room briefly the brothers squabble over the loaded gun and the elder one accidentally shoots the younger. Ted’s mother coerces him into denying that he loaded the gun, leaving him in a legal and ethical quandary. When he starts high school, moreover, he finds that he has become the poster-boy for a sinister, right-wing group of

Frank Keating

The bonny Falstaffian

Here’s a singular cricket team, well  balanced, hard to beat: Dick Spooner, Geoff Cook, Colin Milburn, Tom Graveney, David Townsend, Peter Willey, Alan Hodgson, George Sharp, Alex Coxon, Jim McConnon, Bob Willis. No-nonsense openers, some glistening strokeplayers, a mean and hostile pace attack,  two Test match off-spinners, and Spooner and Sharp can share the gauntlets. A clue to provenance: at Chester-le-Street’s Test match this weekend I’ll be reverently downing a stiff one in the Milburn Lounge in fond memory of that bonny Falstaffian which the bar honours — good Colin, 17 years dead this year, still grievously mourned. It is hard to believe that Durham weren’t even a first-class county

Lucy Vickery

Psychobabble

In Competition No. 2498 you were invited to submit a speech by one of our newly ‘emotional literate’ politicians unveiling a piece of legislation and incorporating the following words: ‘dysfunctional’, ‘narrative’, ‘empower’, ‘co-dependent’, ‘holistic’, ‘self-actualisation’, ‘closure’. The traditional ministerial waffle of government policy documents now has a new ingredient as politicians vie with each other to feel our pain, threatening to drown us in an ocean of empathy. David Cameron’s much-mocked ‘Hug a hoodie’ slogan is but one example. To my list you added some horrors from the ever-expanding self-help lexicon: ‘proactive’, ‘inclusivity’, ‘self-esteem’, ‘intuitive’; and this one, a corker from Alan Millard, ‘endemic idealistic adherences to institutionalised norms’. Curiously,

Edie G-Lush

How cyber-crime became a multi-billion-pound industry

Imagine you’re the finance director of a quoted financial services company. You receive an anonymous invitation to a ‘Party of a Lifetime’ in the form of a USB memory stick. Hopeful of some welcome distraction, you plug it into your office computer. But unbeknown to you, the stick has been sent by a criminal gang seeking a way into your company’s IT system. The stick searches your directories, sends private files to the gang, inserts a ‘keylogger program’ which records your keystrokes and passwords, and sets up a way for the gang to attack your network. Farfetched? No, it isn’t. Earlier this year 500 UK finance directors received memory sticks

Lucy Beresford

Golf and global brands signal rising prospects for the Himalayan kingdom

The hills are alive with the sound of golf balls. The hills in question are the highest in the world: the Himalayas. And golf is the new buzzword in Nepal. A global sport, golf attracts high-net-worth tourists, especially from South Korea and China, which have recently begun direct flights to Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan Airport. That’s good news for the Nepalese economy. Golf tourists, bags crammed with gleaming titanium Big Bertha drivers, spend more per head per day than the penny-pinching backpackers who previously made up Nepal’s tourist population. Caddies get decent cash tips and entrepreneurship flourishes among the children who perch on the perimeter wall, waiting to sell you back your

Theodore Dalrymple

Global warning | 16 June 2007

I was sitting in a train recently, wondering why everyone’s mobile telephone conversations, except my own, were so utterly banal, when a young black man sitting two rows behind me answered the irritating wail of his instrument of the devil. He began to speak, and I wished that I had learnt shorthand. ‘Hancock’s definitely put in a plea,’ he said. ‘Moran’s in the early stages. I’ve got to go back next week, but for the moment I’m on bail.’ As is often the case, his telephone rang non-stop. ‘There was a lot of negotiation going on while we worked out a plea bargain,’ he said. He was quite well-spoken, more

Friday

The Spectator

How will the violence in Gaza end?

It is hard to see anything good coming out of this brutal civil war in Gaza right now. But Martin Indyk, US ambassador to Israel under Bill Clinton, sketches out a positive—and possible—end-game in the Washington Post today : Whatever transpires, Gaza has become Hamas’s problem. It’s a safe bet that the real attitude of Abbas and Fatah is: Let Hamas try to rule Gaza, and good luck.This turn of events would free Abbas to focus on the much more manageable West Bank, where he can depend on the Israel Defense Forces to suppress challenges from Hamas, and on Jordan and the United States to help rebuild his security forces.

Thursday

The Spectator

Iraq edges away from the brink

The fact that the violence in Iraq has not reached the point of no return after yesterday’s bombing of the mosque at Samara is reassuring. John Burns, the New York Times’ incomparable Baghdad correspondent, has a must-read on why the reaction to-date has been so muted. If the situation remains calm, in relative terms, through Friday prayers this moment of acute danger will have passed. However, the situation in Iraq is still sobering. Today’s Washington Post has an informative summary of the current situation. “Sectarian killings and attacks — which were spiraling late last year — dropped sharply from February to April, but civilian casualties rose slightly, to more than

Wednesday

The Spectator

A friendly mistake

“We’ve gone on holiday by mistake”. So says Richard E Grant’s unforgettable character in Withnail & I. The other day I was trying to get on to Facebook to list myself as one my wife’s friends and write something nice – an innocent enough objective, I thought. Somewhere down the line – not quite sure where – I managed to join the whole damn thing by mistake. Well, that’s my excuse, anyway. Would that stand up in court? I doubt it very much. Now I have to fret about how many Facebook friends I have (a paltry 20 at present), “poking” and networks. As if I didn’t have enough to

The Spectator

The Tony n’ Dave show, catch it while you can

A few thoughts from the penultimate Cameron v Blair show. The Prime Minister has a new phrase, “the end of waiting as we know it,” which doesn’t mean waiting has ended at all. He’s sharply reduced the number waiting over six months. But the median inpatient wait for an NHS operation is 5.4 weeks, exactly what it was in March 1994 (not that they publish these figures). I’m afraid that’s waiting, and as we know it. But, again, the knockabout was classic. Blair’s swipe at Cameron “he has the imprint of the last person who sat on him” had environment minister Ben Bradshaw clapping with delight. “I’ll miss him,” said

The Spectator

Checking up on progress

At PMQs today, David Cameron raised the whole question of what had happened to the information sharing measures which were supposedly going to be put in place after the Soham murders to protect children from paedophiles. For some background on the matter, do read this article by Tessa Mayes which details just how slowly the process is moving.

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The picture on the ground

To those who find the Iraq coverage too Baghdad-based (Our Boys are in the south, from which we hear almost nothing) here is a superb photo essay from Michael Yon with the Queen’s Royal Lancers in the Maysan province.

The Spectator

Blair’s red lines

Mark Mardell has a handy guide to the negotiations on the EU Constitution. He identifies four red lines for Blair and Brown. • Calling it a constitution, or any mention of flags or anthems. That battle was won ages ago.• The idea that this is “a consolidating treaty” – Blair wants it to be “an amending treaty”. This sounds technical but is politically vital because the government will argue that no Conservative government ever gave a referendum on treaties amending existing texts. • Losing the veto on proposals about policing and justice. Britain could win an opt-out on this. It already has a similar opt-out on migration policy.• The Charter