Society

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 16 December 2006

Dawkins vs GodFrom R.F. ClementsSir: Richard Dawkins might be convinced of the existence of God (‘A man who believes in Darwin as fervently as he hates God’, December 9) by ‘a large-scale miracle which could not have been engineered by a conjuror’. What evidence does he want for the greatest miracle of all time? It happened 2,000 years ago. The physical resurrection of Jesus Christ was attested by some 600 people, most of whom had no idea that Jesus had to suffer and die on the cross and would be raised by the power of God. But (Acts x 40) ‘God raised up (Jesus) the third day, and showed him

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 16 December 2006

For most of my life I have disliked the run-up to the British Christmas, on religious grounds. Advent is intended to be like Lent, a time of abstinence. Your thoughts are directed to the Four Last Things — Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. The Twelve Days which begin on 25 December are the time for feasting, and the fun lessens if it is pre-empted. Advent is expressed in the great Sentences (‘Drop down dew, ye heavens from above…’ etc.), and in rather mystical hymns like ‘Come, O come Emmanuel’, not in God-rest-ye-merry-figgy-pudding stuff. And even Christmas itself, though certainly joyful, has never been and should not be the most important

David Furnish

Diary – 16 December 2006

Last week, after years of the best possible intentions, I finally managed to make my virgin visit down under to sunny Sydney. With Elton fully ensconced in a fortnight of antipodean touring and work to be done promoting our new teen comedy It’s a Boy Girl Thing, I was able to justify the trip while hoping to overcome the abject terror of having to spend nearly 24 hours trapped on a plane. So many of my globetrotting mates have been slobbering on for ages about the genius of Singapore Airlines. Justifiably so, as I find myself awash with joy at being cocooned within the hedonistic splendour of their first-class cabin.

Claire Tomalin

Before we became respectable

Vic Gatrell’s investigation into rude old-fashioned laughter almost bursts out of its covers, with 700 pages and 289 illustrations showing political caricatures and prints ridiculing the fashionable and the badly behaved. Much of the mockery is aimed at the libertine sons of George III and their friends, male and female, but there are also even-handed attacks on radicals, whores and their clients, evangelicals and even the optimistically named but short-lived Society for the Suppression of Vice. Bottoms, nipples, vomit, bloody hands, chamber pots, men and women farting, peeing and shitting, whores merry and dejected, drunkards and fornicating couples crowd the pages. Most of these things are still about, but artistically

Antonia Fraser

A meditation

I’m at Washington airport on a book tour. My escort, an agreeable man whom I have encountered on several previous occasions, says farewell and then asks, ‘Are you still writing?’ I smile nervously. ‘A few more years left?’ he ventures, either in hope or dread, it doesn’t matter. Still. The ‘still’ word. ‘Are you still playing tennis?’ I’m not but I (still) was when I was first asked the question — in my early sixties from memory. ‘Are you still …’ well, alive, active? It’s no good replying, ‘See for yourself’ because that’s presumably just what they haven’t been able to see. Still. Such a beautiful word. Stille Nacht, sung

The Spectator

Evil at a holy time

The juxtaposition of the sacred and the unholy is always shocking. This week, as we attend carol services, decorate our trees and prepare for Christmas with a levity of spirit, the news from Ipswich provides an unbearably horrible counterpoint. In the first ten days of this murder investigation, the bodies of five women were discovered relatively close to one another in Suffolk. The psychosis that underpins these murders remains a matter of pure speculation, but the killer is evidently animated by a savage desire to slaughter as many prostitutes as he can, as quickly as he can. Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, spread out his 13 murders over six years.

Tamzin Lightwater

A Notting Hill Nobody at Noel

Monday Now I know why they call it the unhappiness agenda. Am suicidal. I never want to have anything to do with ‘social justice’ again. I shouldn’t have even been at the press conference, but Dave was nervous after things went a bit nuclear at the weekend, so nothing left to chance. Captain Smithy — Mr IDS-Pod himself — was wired up with a team backstage shouting answers into his ear. Afterwards, his people asked if I wanted to join them for a late lunch. What could be nicer, I thought, imagining a cabbage and beetroot smoothie in one of the usual hangouts. Well! Call me Ms Picky, but I

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The English Bible has made us

There is an interesting debate doing the rounds at the moment: should we allow faith schools in Britain? The debate has been occasioned by our tortuous and interminable wrangling with all things Islamic; it has suddenly occurred to us that allowing children to be inculcated into an ideology which may be antithetical to our national culture is a dangerous and divisive thing. And during the course of filming a two-hour documentary for Channel 4 about the translation of the Bible into English, I was struck by the strange, almost perverse nature of this debate. It seems to be polarised: you are either for faith schools or you are against them.

Peter Jones

Natale Christi hilare et faustum annum novum!

Journalists are paid to be thought-provoking, but something very odd comes over them when they unfold their thoughts on the subject of Latin. Neal Ascherson, for example, once argued in the Independent on Sunday that he had been taught Latin at Eton as ‘a rite of exclusion for those outside, a ceremony of submission for those inside’, with a view to ‘subordinating the will on a mental barrack-square’ and producing people subservient to authority. Further, it prevented him learning Slavic languages. He concluded that Latin was ‘part of England’s fake heritage, part of that pseudo-ancient landscape which I call Druidic. And it should be left to fall down.’ There is

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

In San Pedro, I learned that the name Pinochet could stop a conversation

The last time I was in Chile it was the anniversary of the accession to power of General Augusto Pinochet. I had been unaware of the holiday. My companions and I had walked down from the high Andean plateau of south-western Bolivia into the little desert town of San Pedro de Atacama in the extreme north of the country. About 1,000 miles from Santiago, this is close to the great copper mine of Chuquicamata, source of so much of Chile’s wealth; not far from the sticky, seedy mining port of Antofagasta; not far from the Pacific. But San Pedro inhabits a different world. Its situation is high and, in winter,

Paul Johnson

The significance of the order: ‘All hands on deck!’

A friend of mine recently sustained terrible injuries to his hand when his shotgun blew up. Such accidents fill me with horror, not least because they remind me how important our hands are to us, and how easily — in scores of different ways — they can be damaged. Hands are miraculous things, and one of the delights of observing children is to see how quickly they make use of them — pointing, turning knobs, pressing buttons, above all using a pencil. I have just received a delightful photo of my transatlantic granddaughter drawing. It is a Vermeer-like study in intense concentration. Though she is only 20 months old, she

Richard Northedge

Will 2007 repeat the madness of 1987?

If you remember 1987 at all, it is probably for the October hurricane and the stock market crash. Because they coincided, they are inextricably linked as though one caused the other. In fact, despite falling 23 per cent, the market was back on its feet before the debris of the storm had been cleared. Share prices ended 1987 higher than they began, making the crash a downward blip on a rising graph — unlike the turn-of-the-21st-century meltdown that has left prices well below their dotcom levels after six years. As the 20th anniversary of 1987 looms, rather than remember the October storms we should look back to the preceding months

Allister Heath

Multinationals bring festive cheer

Here’s a provocative thought for Christmas. Instead of buying your nearest and dearest one of those charity goat-for-Africa cards, it would make far more economic sense to buy them a few shares in a multinational corporation which is going to help boost the African economy. It may be deeply unfashionable to say so, but the much-demonised multinationals do far more for the poor than all the world’s charities put together. Charity workers should not take this personally. They are doing their best in appalling conditions, and have saved or improved millions of lives. But however hard they work, and however many goats they provide, there is a limit to what

Joanna Pitman

Plafonniers and station platforms

Christmas is almost upon us and you still haven’t sorted out that significant present for the woman in your life who has everything. And there’s the rub. She already has the jewels, the houses, the horses, the cars, the shoes and furs and more cashmere dressing gowns than she could possibly ever want. Knowing the way she’s capable of burning through your money, you’d like to give her something under the tree that will at least hold its value, and perhaps become a family heirloom. So does she have, I ask you, any Lalique plafonniers? My first thought was that a plafonnier was something to do with platform shoes, although

Judi Bevan

High-risk investing: the Christian defence

Philip Richards is an extreme investor. His willingness to bet against the crowd has turned his initial £150,000 investment in his hedge fund company RAB Capital into £150 million since 1999. In particular, his Special Situations Fund, which he manages personally with the credo ‘to maximise returns with minimal restrictions’, has performed spectacularly. Since he started the fund in January 2003, with a big bet on an obscure Russian gold mine, it has made the handful of investors who were in at the beginning almost 40 times their money. ‘I believe it’s the best performing fund in the world,’ says Richards, an avowed Christian not averse to preaching his own

Cormac Murphyoconnor

My parish church in Rome

One of the great joys of my life has been to spend nearly 14 years living in Rome, first as a student and then as Rector of the Venerable English College. I suppose the best way to know a strange city is to walk everywhere. As a student, I rarely took public transport and would remember at night my day’s walk, piazza by piazza, church by church, from Pantheon to Forum to Colosseum. Those years were in many ways a delight and I can honestly say, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, that I learnt nearly as much from viewing the city of Rome as from my studies in the Gregorian University. Nowadays

Miles Kington

Miles Kington on Jean- Jacques Sempé

There is a drawing by Sempé of the Tour de France which is so brilliant that when Geoffrey Wheatcroft first saw it, he just knew he had to have it on the front of his history of the Tour de France. It is an aerial view of a gloomy, grimy French town round the streets of which a stream of dazzingly coloured bicyclists flow like a river of jewels meandering through a rubbish dump. It’s not funny; it’s not pointful; it’s just a lovely counterpoint between the glamour of the big occasion and the banality of the watchers’ lives, exquisitely composed and drawn. The odd thing is that Sempé could

Alan Dixon

Jackdaws

Happy the jackdaws surrounded by their playmate Boisterous wind with which they wrestle and roll,Diving against it, wings closed; gripped and thrownMany ways, open-winged, spun in it chacking and looping. Easy to envy jackdaws. Even thoseWho never look up, who curse the stopped and creepingTraffic must see their low flight in the distanceAs they descend to towns jackdaws poke fun at,See them in swirling pairs, amused and matedFor life, defeated only when no one knowsAnd never bullied by a wind too gusty. Having lived too long in a town no jackdaw trusted,Where graveyards lacked their disrespectful tread,I spend my careless time airing my head.

Fergal Keane

Ireland’s laureate of Christmas

Paddy Kavanagh died with Christmas only a few weeks away. The poet was taken down by a virulent bout of pneumonia, aided and abetted by his addiction to strong drink. He had once cuttingly remarked that the ‘standing army of Irish poets never fell below 20,000’. His death robbed the country of one of the very best of them. Kavanagh had battled alcoholism all his adult life. But by the end of November 1967 he had lost any strength for the fight. He died at home in County Monaghan, among the little hills of the Irish borderlands, in the very place where he had written his magnificent ‘A Christmas Childhood’.

David Rennie

The keepers of the sprout

With the possible exception of charades, no element of a British Christmas rivals the Brussels sprout when it comes to dividing families. In any well-ordered family, the sprout is a source of fierce disagreement, with those that love the vegetable on one side and haters on the other. There is no Third Way of the sprout. This gulf of opinion is highly satisfactory for those of us who love sprouts. It transforms a liking into a badge of honour, even gallantry, as we tuck into sprouts like so much green candy while siblings, wives and children turn pale at the sight. When the Rennie family was first posted to the