I thought my husband had fallen unconscious on the doormat, for I could not push the front door open. But I was mistaken. It was a huge drift of post complaining that I had used the word quick as an adverb. The problem was solved by a bit of jiggling backwards and forwards
It was lunchtime at a Church school and there was a large dish of rosy apples. A nun placed a note on the fruit: ‘Take only one: God is watching.’ Further down the line was a dish of biscuits. ‘Take all you like,’ one child was heard telling another, ‘God is watching the apples.’ That child surely grew up to be a bookie, and at this stage of the Flat season they are cramming the cookies while we punters flounder, trying to discover which yards have got it together despite the cold spring and which three-year-olds have trained on through the winter. At Kempton on Saturday, the only time I
While we are all worrying about the threat to poultry from an alien virus which has now reached these shores, there seems to be little concern at the threat to our countryside and livestock from an alien animal now roaming free in England. I am referring to wild boar, hundreds of them, which are inhabiting forested areas of Kent, Sussex, Dorset and Gloucestershire, having escaped from farms and bred in the wild. If nothing is done about them, there could be many thousands of wild boar in 20 years’ time, marauding through woodland, threatening walkers, destroying crops and pasture, and spreading diseases — swine fever, bovine tuberculosis — to domestic
Do any of you remember a film called The Blue Max? It is about a German flying squadron during the first world war. A working-class German soldier manages to escape trench warfare by joining up with lots of aristocratic Prussian flyers who see jousting in the sky as a form of sport, rather than combat. Eager for fame and glory — 20 confirmed kills earns one the ‘Blue Max’, the highest decoration the Fatherland can bestow — the prole shoots down a defenceless British pilot whose gunner is dead. His squadron leader is appalled. ‘This is not warfare,’ he tells the arriviste. ‘It’s murder.’ I know it’s only a film,
Last two standing. For the muddied oafs of winter, this is the cruellest week. So near, yet…. Defeat in a semifinal, they say, is the hardest to bear. There are a lot of them about. Today soccer stages its two FA Cup semis. In the European Champions’ League, Arsenal played the first-leg semifinal this week, the second next; ditto Middlesbrough in the Uefa Cup. And at rugby union, the European club game’s defining Heineken Cup also stages two momentous semis this weekend. Death or glory, relief or jubilation — and cruelty. For neutral students of (in equal measure) both round ball and oval — they do exist, I can testify
Q. I work in a City office, staffed mainly by young, trendy middle-class males, most of whom like to sport the silly fashion of trousers almost dropping off, exposing vast expanses of undergarments, in some cases almost bare buttocks! We girls don’t have a problem with this, but are disgusted by one young man who is obviously wearing the same underpants for several days, in fact almost two weeks — not a pretty sight. How do we politely approach him with a view to suggesting he become more hygienic with his personal grooming?S.J., London NW2 A. One of you should send a round-robin email. ‘Lost within the office, an unopened
Yes, the BNP is unpleasant and hate-filled. But why does everyone feel the need to say it so much? Or rather, why don’t people say it about all the other hate-filled organisations in this country, as well as about the BNP? The Socialist Workers Party is hate-filled; so is Respect, so is Hizb ut-Tahrir, so is Sinn Fein, so are some in Greenpeace and some in Ukip, and so is John Prescott in relation to field sports and Ken Livingstone in relation to Israel, America and Britain’s imperial past. The BNP, like the now resurgent old Labour party, finds the basis of its support in resentment. Old Labour expresses that
When this book first came out in 1966 it covered the entire period during which Charles Moran had been Winston Churchill’s physician from 1940 onwards. It caused a good deal of controversy, less because it was in any way hostile to Churchill than because it showed him as a fallible human being. The Churchill family were particularly exercised by its publication. Ran dolph Churchill said that all he asked of Moran was that he should have followed the standards of the ordinary GP, which he had failed to do. Randolph’s sister Mary Soames, denounced the work as disgraceful. It was so, even though her husband Christopher had emerged from it
What a relief it must have been for Hugh Grant when he realised he could relax and play bastards. What torture it must have been to be made housewives’ choice after playing characters so totally unlike himself (Charles in Four Weddings, the nincompoop in Notting Hill, Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility). With what joy must he have delivered the role of Daniel Cleaver, Cleaver the handsome rotter for whom Bridget Jones sported those giant pants. Then Grant was on a roll. His haircut for About a Boy caused almost as much controversy as Jennifer Aniston did with hers in Friends. He played a bastard leopard-type who changes his spots
There was a definite gaiety among MPs as they came back from Easter recess this week. The winter has been longer and colder than any in recent memory. Westminster, cheerless and crepuscular at the best of times, has a way of magnifying the gloom. Now spring has finally arrived with a series of fine sunny days. Best of all, we have the local elections. Ministers are out in force on the doorstep, and as a result carry an enviably tanned and weather-beaten appearance. This loosening of mood is palpable at the top of government. There are, for example, undeniable signs that Gordon Brown and Tony Blair have been working together
When I taught logic at an American university, the chief problem was to entice students to take the course. The smorgasbord approach they used to build a degree meant that students wanted things which might be useful to them, or ones they might be good at. Logic, alas, was perceived as neither, and classes were largely made up of very bright students who were not afraid of it and who thought it might be fun. It would be difficult to show that it is a valuable life skill, given the remarkable number of successful people who happily get by without it. Many high-achieving executives, respected media commentators and prominent politicians
I am wandering the gilded streets where it all began. A few hundred yards from here a handful of clever, public-school-educated young men met of an evening to discuss how best to transform the thing they loved, the Conservative party. They would meet for something called ‘supper’, apparently. Yes, I am in that little, extortionately expensive triangle of west London between Kensington and Notting Hill and I have the scent of history in my nostrils. Well, it’s either history or truffled polenta — hard to tell at this time of day. I’m here to meet a woman called Shireen Ritchie. Those youngish men who met for supper in Notting Hill
Michael Ashcroft, a devoted collector of the Victoria Cross, marks the 150th anniversary of the medal’s creation and salutes its simple beauty The concept of bravery intrigues me as much today as it did when I was a schoolboy. What is the crucial factor that makes some people more courageous than others? Is it in their genes, their upbringing or their training? Are they motivated by patriotism, religious conviction, respect for those who fight with them or simply an old-fashioned sense of duty? Is the bravery of most people premeditated or is it a spur-of-the-moment response to the heat of battle? These are the sorts of questions I started to
Boris Johnson goes to Beijing on a mission to sell democracy, but finds his hosts — as wedded to authority as they have been for the last 4,000 years — politely declining his offer It was towards the end of my trip to China that the tall, beautiful communist-party girl turned and asked the killer question. ‘So, Mr Boris Johnson,’ she said, ‘have you changed your mind about anything?’ And I was forced to reply that, yes, I had. Darned right I had. I had completely changed my mind about the chances of democracy in China. Before flying to Beijing I had naively presumed that the place was not just
Aged 12 or 13 I copied several poems by Housman into a commonplace book I had been encouraged to keep. An English master had read several Housman poems to us, and I’ve been grateful ever since. For some years Housman was my favourite poet, till superseded by Byron (Don Juan especially) and Eliot. The melody or music of the verse no doubt appealed, the mood and message also: ‘We for a certainty are not the first/ Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled/ Their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed/ Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.’ Just the stuff for an adolescent oppressed by an unsympathetic housemaster and
In Competition No. 2439 you were invited to write a poem in praise of a friend. The only time I wrote a poem in praise of a friend, he shortly afterwards committed murder, followed by suicide. There are, though, much happier examples. Pope’s ‘On a Certain Lady at Court’ ends:‘Has she no faults then,’ Envy says, ‘Sir?’Yes, she has one, I must aver;When all the World conspires to praise her,The Woman’s deaf, and does not hear.The compliment is spiced by the fact that she actually was deaf. I also like Day Lewis’s poem ‘For Rex Warner on his 60th Birthday’, which contains the shrewd line, ‘“Keeping up” a friendship means
Truly good people have always been rarities, and ours is not an age which nourishes them by attention and respect. When a good person dies, it is not headline news but, rather, a private tragedy for friends, who thereby lose a beacon in their own confused and muddled lives, someone they could regard as a mentor and who could be relied on to tell them gently but truthfully where they had lost direction. That was how I, and I think many others, saw Christian, Lady Hesketh, always known as Kisty: someone to turn to in time of trouble, for counsel and comfort. Her death earlier this month, swift and peaceful,
Many readers will have read The Spectator Easter survey — ‘Did Jesus really rise from the dead?’ — with intense interest. I did. The results of a survey posing the simple question, ‘Do you believe that Jesus physically rose from the dead?’ were sharply different from what I expected. Just one avowed atheist was interviewed, plus 22 believers. Yet between almost all of them, including the atheist, a most arresting consensus arose: one which only Charles Moore and perhaps Fergal Keane seemed reluctant to join. The atheist, Richard Dawkins, put it like this: ‘If the Resurrection is not true, Christianity becomes null and void and [Christians’] life, [Christians think], meaningless.’
I was about to write ‘Everyone knows the story of James Lind, the Scottish naval surgeon, who conducted the first controlled trial in the history of medicine to prove the curative value of citrus fruits in scurvy’ when I realised that it would have been a silly and, worse still, a snobbish thing to say. After all, my clinical experience suggests that a good, or should I say a bad, percentage of British youth does not know the date of a single great historical event, such as the Battle of Hastings or David Beckham’s marriage, let alone has any familiarity with medical history which, however glorious and uplifting, must always
SUNDAY NIGHTDave’s private office has just rung to say he wants me to accompany him on his earth-saving trip to Norway to highlight global warming — am so excited my climate’s changing! (Memo to self — restrain rubbish humour, must be picking it up from poor Mr Letwin.) V. select group. DC, Chief of Staff, Environment Spokesman and me — not so shabby being on the ‘gumby’ Defra brief now, eh Poppy?! Best thing is we’re travelling there on luxury private plane. MONDAYMentioned trip 17 times this morning. Made me popular for a bit but think may now be losing friends. The other press officers are clearly trying to ruin