Society

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 28 January 2006

A reader, whose name is beyond recall because my husband put his letter in a safe place, is unhappy at the general ignorance of the origin of the word dog, and wonders if I can throw any light. My lamp is burning, with spare oil at hand, but the footsteps of the dog are as invisible as ever. I don’t know if it’s more extraordinary how many words we know the origins of, or the commonness of the words of which we remain ignorant — bun, bird and pig, for example. For dogs, hound is the word we once used, as hunting folk do now, but suddenly in the 11th

The Spectator

Letters to the editor | 28 January 2006

Too much, too young From Judith HerefordSir: I agree with Leo McKinstry (‘Hate, hypocrisy and hysteria’, 21 January). To read the newspapers, you’d think that Ruth Kelly was singlehandedly responsible for all the outbreaks of paedophilia in Britain, when in fact it’s the fault of our debased culture. But let’s not forget that as Education Secretary Kelly contributes to that culture, especially with regard to the government’s sex education policy. If school teachers talk to children as young as seven about sex, telling them anything goes, why should they worry when another adult, in another place, broaches the same subject? When every magazine they open tells them about sex, how

Frank Keating

Hitting the target

The club records of a couple of soccer’s fabled old goal-scorers were levelled this month. Two nice round numbers, too, as the silky and sometimes sulky Frenchman, Thierry Henry, matched the 150 league goals banged in for Arsenal in the 1930s by the then boy wonder from Devon, Cliff Bastin; and aging thoroughbred Alan Shearer briefly perked up Newcastle United’s generally crestfallen supporters by reaching the 200 of Jackie Milburn, his predecessor as Tyneside’s dearly beloved totem in the No. 9 shirt. Of course, each of them has potted around half as many again outside league competition and for other teams, but neither has a realistic chance of threatening history’s

Robin Oakley

Mutual respect

Racing yards all have their own character, some pretty as picture books, some run like military camps. Down a muddy lane in deepest Hampshire Emma Lavelle’s stables are all about cheerful teamwork. At the top of her gallops last week we were reflecting how the great Vincent O’Brien insisted on having the straw in each box perfectly plaited, a bowl of water at the barn door to ensure his boots remained sparkling. At Emma’s Cottage Stables, the rooks were cawing in ivy-clad trees as the trainer stood in puffer jacket and jeans amid the circle of horses clattering on the tarmac, O’Brien might have raised an eyebrow at the cheerful

Simon Courtauld

Bargain brace

It is one of life’s little mysteries that, outside the circle of those involved in game shooting, so few pheasants are bought and eaten, in a country where between 15 and 20 million birds are reared each year. I have sometimes wondered whether the association of pheasants with wartime food — during the winter of 1940 the shooting season was extended into February to provide an additional stock of meat — may provide part of the answer. This may once have been so, but surely not now. The more likely explanation has to do with a fear of the unfamiliar, and of breaking a tooth on a random pellet which

Taki

Good enough for TT

To Harrow, the most heroic of public schools, for a speech about the press, probably among the least defensible of professions. I say the most heroic because Harrow lost 644 boys in the Great War, more than any other public school, I believe. One enters the building where I spoke about the unspeakable through a shrine, with a sarcophagus on the left and its surrounding walls carved with the names of those who fell on the field of honour. Passing through the shrine one enters a large space where a wreath of stone commemorates the dead of the second world war. Say what you will about the class system, public

Jeremy Clarke

Group therapy

I feel sorry for Gorgeous George. It was a terrific idea to go on Big Brother and turn himself into a popular icon and get his political ideas across to a young audience. Full marks for that. And it might have worked if our close scrutiny of his interaction with a random group of strangers had shown him to be the cool guy he imagines he is. Unfortunately, the horrible truth unfolding daily before our very eyes, made more vivid, perhaps, by cruel editing, is that Galloway is a vain, arrogant, prickly, two-faced, conniving, paranoid snob. I still like him, though. I admire his balls, which were on show the

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Diary – 28 January 2006

‘To my knowledge, in my lifetime three prime ministers have been adulterers,’ Evelyn Waugh wrote in 1963, ‘and almost every Cabinet has had an addict of almost every sexual vice.’ Another pious Christian put it statistically higher: of the 11 prime ministers he had known, Gladstone said, seven had been adulterers. Mark Oaten’s addiction might have seemed a little outré to the GOM and Waugh, but neither of them was suggesting that private irregularity was a disqualification from public life, and it was Gladstone who had the last word at the time Parnell’s career was ended by the divorce scandal in 1890: ‘What, because a man is called leader of

Nicholas Kenyon

The composer and his phoenix

One of the most memorable images in the much-disputed film of Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus shows Mozart retreating from an ugly family quarrel in Vienna. Leaving his demanding father and new wife to bicker, Mozart retreats into his room; with manuscript paper scattered across the billiard table, he knocks a few balls around and writes the wonderful scene of family reconciliation at the end of The Marriage of Figaro. That famously beautiful final scene is a utopian vision of what could be possible, but as we listen we surely know that it is as unlikely to endure as perfect harmony in the Mozart household. David Cairns writes that ‘Mozart’s reconciliations

Robin Holloway

Heaven and earth

I don’t really like Radio Three’s recent venture into blockbuster one-man blow-outs. It’s a bit sophomoric and anorakish, and the completism can reduce even the greatest composers to wallpaper. Bach is unquestionably one of the greatest. But during ‘Bach Christmas’ it often seemed as though one were switching on into the same piece extended on an endless loop: might as well have been Telemann! This impression was compounded by a tendency to prefer jogtrot ‘sewing machine’ performances. Many minutes must have been shaved off the project by going for modern high-speed baroque. In fairness, I must add that of course I couldn’t hear everything, and did catch some diversity of

Christopher Fildes

A foxy Chancellor knows many things, but a hedgehog learns the hard way

Tutti possono sbagliare: we can all make mistakes, as the hedgehog observed, getting down from the hearth-brush. Whether our prickly Chancellor is a student of Italian proverbs, I cannot say, but he could learn from this one. In the five and half years since he auctioned half the nation’s gold reserves, the price of gold has doubled. He was bid rather less than $280 an ounce, the hammer fell, and he put the proceeds into dollars, yen and euros — but none of them has been as good as gold. Looking on as the price soared above $560, I could only reflect on the timing that caused him to sell

Paul Johnson

‘Should there be a retiring age for writers?’ Discuss

‘You writers never retire, do you?’ said the guest at the party condescendingly. ‘“Scribble, scribble, scribble, right to the end,” as Edward Gibbon said.’ ‘No,’ said I, ‘it was said to Gibbon, either by George III or the Duke of Gloucester, accounts differ.’ ‘Quite a know-all, aren’t you?’ the man said. ‘But my point is this: there’s no retiring age for writers, and perhaps there ought to be.’ I might well second that wish, ill-natured though it was. I recall vividly V.S. Pritchett, then in his late eighties, telling me how he had to drag himself, groaning and cursing, up the high stairs to his study at the top of

Jaspistos

Surprise, surprise

In Competition No. 2427 you were invited to supply a poem or a piece of prose beginning ‘It began as a — but it turned out a —’, filling in the blanks as you pleased. It was that forgettable and forgotten poet Austin Dobson who wrote a triolet beginning, ‘It began as an ode/ But it turned out a sonnet.’ Your variations were legion: ‘It began as a hedge but it turned out a casus belli’ (Alanna Blake); ‘It began as a treat but it turned out an error’ (V.M. Perrin, referring to the apple in the garden of Eden) and ‘It began as a total disaster/ But it turned

The Spectator

Mother knows best

‘All new rights,’ said Gordon Brown in one of his more memorable utterances, ‘will be matched by new responsibilities.’ It would come across as a more honourable principle if the government were prepared to apply it in reverse. Yet as far as the parents of wayward children are concerned it seems that new responsibilities are to be accompanied by a diminution in rights. Last week, the Prime Minister unveiled his ‘Respect’ agenda, within which is the proposal to make parents more culpable for the misbehaviour of young children. In spite of our misgivings over Asbos, which it seems are now to be given to children as young as ten, we

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Sven’s seven deadly sins

Here are a few reasons why the Football Association should have sacked the manager of England, Sven-Goran Eriksson. 1. Allowing England to lose to one of the worst teams in the world, Northern Ireland, in a crucial World Cup qualifying game. 2. Spending what seems to have been most of his free time attempting to find even more lucrative employment elsewhere. 3. Failing to get past the quarter finals of both the European championship and the World Cup despite possessing the most talented and competent English team for more than 40 years. 4. Preparing the ground to take over as manager of an English Premiership team, Aston Villa, and implicating

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Reefer madness

After some consideration I am not sure that I can get excited about the debate as to whether cannabis should be classifed as a Class B drug or whether, as the Home Secretary Charles Clarke decided last week, it should remain Class C. Rather, I am coming round to the conclusion that it should be declassified as a drug altogether — and reclassified as a banned foodstuff. Instead of being handled by a bunch of creepy do-gooders from the drugs’ charities, the battle to keep it off the streets would then be run by the zealots of the Food Standards Agency. You wouldn’t get dopeheads and smalltime dealers being let

William Cash

Instrument of terror

William Cash meets a Devon farmer who keeps the family’s gruesome family heirloom — Hitler’s red telephone — in his safe A week before Christmas the Grampian microphone that Sir Winston Churchill used to make his VE Day speech in Westminster Chapel went under the hammer at a specialist sale of historical documents at Ludlow Racecourse by the Shropshire auctioneers Mullock Madeley. The estimate was a fairly modest £700–£1,000. The microphone — whose wooden plinth is engraved with the words ‘The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance’ — has a curious history. In the 1950s it was the star attraction at a famous London restaurant, but it then crossed the

Mark Steyn

Osama doesn’t matter any more

Mark Steyn says that only Democrats and Europeans will be fooled by the offer of a truce from the ‘exiled Saudi dissident’ You know this fellow David Cameron? Well, obviously you do. But I’m thousands of miles away and I don’t, not really. I mean, I know who he is, and I read The Spectator, and I buy the London papers when I’m up in Montreal. But I’m not sure I’ve ever knowingly seen this Cameron guy on TV and I wouldn’t recognise the sound of his voice on the radio. And if I had to give a speech to, say, some Tory ladies in Banbury about the challenges facing

A.N. Wilson

The enemy of liberal cant

When the Twin Towers collapsed, I read nothing sane upon the subject in any newspaper until Michael Wharton, as Peter Simple, filed the following to the Telegraph: ‘Only a stony-hearted fanatic could have been unmoved by the massacre in America. Yet for us feudal landlords and clerical reactionaries, cranks, conspiracy theorists and Luddite peasants, the downfall of the Twin Towers that symbolised the worldwide empire of imaginary money is not in itself a cause of grief. Ever since the atrocity, dense clouds of hysterical rhetoric have been drifting about the world. America is at war, says President Bush. Britain is at war, says Tony Blair, dutifully echoing his master. The

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Misery of the Polish newcomers

Everybody loves the Poles. Everybody loves reliable plumbers and natural-born nannies. Only Andrzej Tutkaj, of the Federation of Poles in Great Britain, is sceptical about the benefits of the march from East to West. I spoke to Mr Tutkaj on the telephone this week and asked him how all the new Poles were faring in London. There was silence, then a sigh. ‘I personally,’ said Mr Tutkaj, ‘don’t like to over-glorify the Polish people. They are far from ideal. ‘Since Poland joined the EU, it has been very hard work for the people in the firing line having to deal with desperate Poles with no money and nowhere to live.