Society

Saturday

Sally Emerson

Diary – 10 February 2007

Since my two children have dispersed to Hollywood and gap-year Sydney, I spend a great deal of time at home with the individual who needs me most: my house — mean, moody, magnificent, prone to upsets if left. Its tanks conveniently overflowed when we went away to Los Angeles at Christmas. That’ll show me. Today yet another painter came to inspect the damage and I thought I heard the pipes gurgle a little, as if with laughter. This house used to be the Chinese military attaché’s, and we still receive letters trying to persuade us to buy used fighter planes. Once we had an invitation to a party on a

The Spectator

Letters to the editor | 10 February 2007

It’s about the child From John Parfitt Sir: Matthew Parris should do better than his elegant nonsense about so-called gay adoption (Another voice, 3 February). Until the inclusiveness lobby turned the word ‘discriminating’ into a boo-word, it was a compliment, meaning the ability to know the difference between good and bad, deserving and undeserving; to prefer Beethoven to Big Brother. We all discriminate every day, and why not? We favour the things we like. Likewise, if my Catholic friends wish to run an adoption service for married couples, why not, especially when others are catered for elsewhere? Or will the government now insist that the Shipwrecked Mariners’ Society make grants

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 10 February 2007

Q. At a recent lunch in an hotel to celebrate my parents’ wedding anniversary, my wife and I found ourselves engaged in animated conversation by our respective neighbours on all manner of interesting topics. However, in their enthusiasm they seemed totally oblivious to our need to deal with our well-behaved but still very young children who were sitting between us. What is the right balance to strike in such a situation when one’s children — both under two and being good as gold for the first hour or so — begin to show promise of hurling bread rolls all around the room?D.R., LondonA. There is a tendency for adults —

Jeremy Clarke

Matrimonial relations

Las Alpujarras There’s a man in one of the high mountain villages who lives with a cow and spends much of his time studying the cloud formations. By all accounts he can predict the weather for months, even years ahead with some accuracy, a skill passed down from father to son. For several months now, however, the clouds have consistently baffled and amazed him. Nothing like them, apparently, has been seen either in his lifetime or his father’s. If pressed to stick his neck out, his prediction for the coming year or two is tragedy, miracles, and meteorological cataclysm. On Saturday I joined a protest in the town square of the

Henrietta Bredin

Poetry and music

The great lyric poets of the English language wrote — and, I hope, are still writing — words which have their own melodic quality, cadences which lure composers to add music to them. Shakespeare, Herrick, Blake, Tennyson, Burns, Yeats have been set to music by numerous composers, creating a lasting heritage of English song. A smaller but intriguing category is poetry that is not turned into song but is spoken to music. Grand master of this compositional genre is Jim Parker. ‘I was an orchestral oboe player,’ he says, ‘but I was always wanting to get away from that and do something a bit more creative so I joined the

Peter Way

Unfinished Painting

The artist Fothergill; the scene an Essex landscape.Tall trees framing the fields, a church beyond.And riding towards the painter on a sturdy cobA country figure followed by vestigial shapes. The foreground grass growing from half-brushed strokes.The trees massing to summer leaf, as yet part-formed.Those nearly people following the rider and his horse,These ghostly labourers on the land, ephemeral folks. How often do unfinished works compel our gaze.Perhaps because we can complete them in our minds. Michaelangelo still emerging from the marble,Semi-suggestion, a sentence hinted from a phrase.

Paul Johnson

Is this a toasting fork I see before me?

Ghosts are fashionable just now. There are two productions of Ibsen’s play and a movie. At dinner parties, if conversation falters or begins to move down forbidden (by me) tramlines, I ask, ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ Instantly there is a babble. Nobody believes in ghosts personally. But everyone knows somebody who does, and provides an instance of what happened to him or, more often, her. This illustrates Dr Johnson’s dictum on haunting, ‘All argument is against it, but all belief is for it.’ Dr Johnson was torn between his great fear of death and confidence in supernatural agency, and his contempt for credulity and the delight he took in

Frank Keating

Too little, too late

Ignore an atoning little flurry at the death, England’s cricket winter has been a ghastly shambles. Embarked upon with such overweening bumptiousness — an arrogance admonished by this corner in the autumn, I might add — the expedition has long been a wrecked write-off all round. The Ashes urn was spinelessly surrendered — against admittedly a mighty fine team — by five-nil. In the follow-up one-day tournament England have been almost as pitiful. That has not quite finished as I write, but should they fluke a second place in the three-horse race, such a travesty should not remotely be allowed to camouflage the excruciating campaign. ‘Sorry we have let down people

Judi Bevan

The last of the City’s frequent flyers

When Win Bischoff and his colleagues Robert Swannell and David Challen threw a party last month to celebrate 100 years of working together at Schroders and Citigroup, it was quite a bash. Not only did it draw the cream of FTSE-100 chiefs — Sir Chris Gent, Sir Nigel Rudd and Stuart Rose, to name just three — but the throng in the Victoria and Albert Museum included a fair scattering of rival investment bankers. ‘You only have to play golf with Win to know how competitive he is, but he’s always worked well with other bankers,’ said one guest. Seven years earlier to the day, the tall, stylish Bischoff had

Joanna Pitman

Antiques: better value than Ikea

Not many people seem to realise this, but it’s cheaper in the long run to buy a solid carved mahogany antique chest of drawers than a modern pine one from Ikea. Without having to search far, you can get a beautiful Victorian chest of drawers in excellent condition for £200 which will last you and your descendants for a hundred years or more. The equivalent from Ikea might cost a quarter of that, but will probably last for only five years. And you have to build it yourself as well. ‘Basic “brown” antique furniture is extremely good value at the moment,’ says Mark Boyce of Ross Hamilton in London, dealers

The Spectator

The cockpit of truth

The tragic death in Iraq of Lance Corporal of Horse Matty Hull under US ‘friendly fire’ in March 2003 has become a bleak parable of the flaws at the heart of the US-UK ‘special relationship’. Only now, and only thanks to a leak to the Sun of a classified recording of the conversation between two American pilots, has the precise nature of the accident become clear. As terrible as that error was, however, it is much more comprehensible than the disgraceful saga of bureaucracy and disdain which it triggered. All servicemen accept that there is a risk that they will be hit by friendly fire, or that they will fire

Jaspistos

Poor relation

In Competition No 2480 you were invited to supply a song beginning, ‘Oh, what have you done to your …?, the blank to be filled by a relative of your choice. When you’re young, relatives — barring the family, of course — are automatically ridiculous. ‘Oh, Aunt Jemima, look at your Uncle Jim./ He’s in the duckpond learning how to swim./ First he does the breaststroke, then he does the side./ Now he’s under the water, swimming against the tide!’ I used to sing that giggling when I was a lad. Now I’m an ancient Uncle Jim, it’s less of a hoot. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Not all faith schools are the same

At last, a British school where pupils are inculcated in a strict moral code, but also taught to think for themselves. Get your kids’ names down for the King Fahad Academy in Acton, west London, quick. It’s a Muslim faith school, as you might have guessed from its title, but don’t let that put you off. The pupils, from the age of five, are taught that Christians are ‘pigs’ and Jewish people are ‘apes’ — none of that dripping-wet equivocation you get from the national curriculum. And crucially, while the teaching is strict, the children are rewarded for ingenuity and inventiveness. For example, they are asked to think up ‘some

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 3 February 2007

A reader wrote in to share his triumph at thwarting an attempt by an organisation to which he belongs to change the title ‘chairman’ to ‘chair’. The current chairman happens to be a woman. ‘It is ridiculous,’ our reader writes, ‘what person has four legs and is made of wood? The syllable man does not mean masculine only.’ Well, it is one thing to argue that man can refer to a woman, another to argue that chair cannot. The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary were perfectly familiar with the use of chair to mean ‘the occupant of the chair, as invested with its dignity (as the throne is for

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 3 February 2007

SUNDAY Hideous day of torment fielding non-stop calls from rude reporters asking, ‘What’s Dave got against Catholics?’ and ‘Does he support gay rights, or what?’ (We should go ahead with Gids’s plan to put the press through to a call centre in Delhi at weekends.) Was only just coping when Nigel rang to ask how the holding line on gay adoption was holding up. I said the holding line wouldn’t hold much longer and he said, ‘Well, then, you’re going to have to tell them what Dave really feels about it.’ Protested that I hadn’t the faintest idea what Dave feels. Jed hasn’t decided yet. Long pause, then he said, ‘You’ll just

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 3 February 2007

Will we look back on the last quarter of the 20th century as the only time since the Reformation when Roman Catholics have really been tolerated in Britain? During the long period in which Cardinal Basil Hume was Archbishop of Westminster, the Catholic Church came out of the ghetto. The row about gay adoption shows that this process is now going into reverse. The New Labour enthusiasm for homosexuality is so great that anyone who does not share it is to be prevented by law from full participation in the life of society. Both Tony Blair and David Cameron accept this public doctrine, though they pull long faces about the

Charlie Higson

Diary – 3 February 2007

There are a few fantasy gigs around, those jobs which we minor celebrities know deep down that we’re never going to be offered, but which we prepare for anyway, just in case. Appearing on Desert Island Discs, hosting Have I Got News For You, playing James Bond in the movies, writing the Spectator Diary. All right, perhaps writing the Spectator Diary is not quite up there with playing James Bond, but it is something of an honour. I have always had a fear, though, that I would be asked to write a diary piece when I was doing absolutely sod-all. People will happily read about glamorous parties, meetings with great

Taki

Get Carter

Gstaad A London friend has sent me a book whose subject caused a few faint complaints in the beginning but has now escalated to a full-scale furore, Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Racist and anti-Semitic have been the operative words used by outraged pundits to describe it, while people such as the Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and the director of the Anti-Defamation League Abe Foxman have gone overboard in calling the 39th President of the good old USA not only an anti-Semite but a Christian madman and a pawn of the Arabs. Let’s take it from the top. Jimmy Carter has dedicated his life to humanitarian causes and is as anti-Semitic

Robin Oakley

Genetic advantage

What makes a successful racehorse trainer? Patience and an eye for detail. Man management and a flair for publicity. But the right genes help, too, and there Nick Gifford, the handler of the first-class hurdling prospect Straw Bear, does have an advantage. Son of the former trainer and ex-champion jockey Josh Gifford and of an international show-jumper mother, Nick didn’t so much learn training skills as absorb them through the pores. There was no need, in his case, to seek experience in other stables, although he did show his independence by running his own point-to-point yard for three years. You soon see why a preparatory career as a jockey wasn’t

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 3 February 2007

Arrogant, not brave From Jolyon Connell Sir: Michael Gove is heartened by the left-wing writers who have denounced Islamic terrorism rather than seeking to make excuses for it (‘All hail the new anti-Islamist intelligentsia’, 27 January). Fair enough. But he also seems pleased that such a number of them backed the Iraq war. He calls these writers brave. Brave is not the word I’d use. Invading Iraq was always likely to appeal to left-wing intellectuals. Its most fervent supporters were the American neocons, many of whom, after all, were one-time left-wing Democrats. The idea of creating a new promised land in the Middle East was arrogant, naive, impractical and almost