Society

Saturday

4 Mar 2006

Dear Mary… | 4 March 2006

Q. I deeply fancy someone in my office who sits near me. Our exchanges have always been businesslike and I doubt she has noticed my interest. The other women I work with appear to find me congenial and we socialise outside the office although none seems to perceive me as a ‘sex object’. Having said that, former partners have never complained. I don’t want to risk ongoing embarrassment by making a move and being rejected, so how can I find out first if I have any chance? Name and address withheld A. Choose one of your female colleague friends to act as unwitting emissary. Confide that your concentration is being

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 4 March 2006

Genghis was a leftie From Daniel Hannan, MEPSir: Paul Johnson demolishes the ludicrous expression ‘to the right of Genghis Khan’ and wonders what the Mongol leader’s true politics might have been (And another thing, 25 February). I’d have thought Genghis was a clear-cut leftie. His tactic, on conquering a tribe, was to liquidate the aristocracy and elevate the lower orders. He was a proto-Europhile, mingling his subject clans so as to prevent the development of a sense of national identity. Where modern socialists want to use the education system to cut high achievers down to size, the Khan was more literal, forcing his vassals to walk under a yoke and

Frank Keating

European Blues

Treats all round next week if the second-leg matches in football’s Champions League are as compelling as the first. Chelsea and Rangers, each playing in Spain, are at serious risk of elimination, but Liverpool and Arsenal should be in the hat for the quarterfinals. Liverpool, a goal down, may lack a front-line scorer but a coherent, fluent midfield and the importance of being earnest should ensure another heady night at Anfield and satisfactory progress in defence of the title they won so seismically last summer. Arsenal’s glistening win against pallid Real in Madrid might well have revived their entire winter. They simply can’t blow it now, surely. Chelsea and Rangers

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 4 March 2006

Last week our local hunt met at a subscriber’s farm. Because it was a weekday, the mounted field was small — half a dozen or so. As soon as they moved off, they were pursued by 31 masked men, many of them carrying fence posts. When three of the field rode up to them to tell them to leave the private land, some raised the posts above their heads, two-handed, and tried to bring them down with full force on a horse’s face. The rider, a woman aged 60, turned so that she, not her horse, took the force of the blows, and the happy side-effect was that the horse

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 4 March 2006

Mrs Tessa Jowell, the Secretary of State for Culture, said that she had signed without asking any questions a form that her husband, Mr David Mills, used to gain a mortgage for a house, which he repaid a month later with an alleged bribe of £340,000 from Mr Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy. Mr Mills denies receiving such a payment; an Italian prosecutor is investigating the allegation. Mr Ken Livingstone was suspended for four weeks as Mayor of London by the Adjudication Panel for England when it found that he had brought his office into disrepute by saying to a reporter who had told him he was Jewish

Deborah Ross

Restaurants | 4 March 2006

Is it just me, or does everyone have a bit of a problem warming to Gary Rhodes? I know, I know, all celebrity chefs have their annoying shortcomings: Jamie’s wet lips; Nigella’s sloppy eating habits (sucking her fingers, juices dribbling down chin); Delia’s full-on, aproned bossiness; Rick’s silly dog, Chalky; Ainsley’s just about everything. And Gary? There is just something quite chilly and rather sinister about him. It doesn’t help, I suppose, that as time goes on he looks more and more like Freddy Kruger, possibly via a spring onion, what with the stupid hair. I don’t know what I’d put down first, Rick’s silly dog or Gary’s stupid hair.

Lucy Vickery

Hot Property | 4 March 2006

Perhaps it’s the association with The Goodies and with Dennis Nilsen, serial killer, but people are reluctant to admit that they live in Cricklewood. ‘Well, it’s sort of on the Hampstead border,’ they mutter sheepishly, when quizzed on their new home. But they’ll be hollering it from the top of Brent Cross shopping centre before long if Cricklewood Redevelopment Ltd has anything to do with it. ‘It was a place a man came in order to go to other places via the A41’ is how Zadie Smith describes the area in her novel White Teeth. But though roads dominate this unglamorous suburb — the A406 North Circular, the A5, the

Beryl Bainbridge

Diary – 4 March 2006

I was revolting from a very early age and more than once thought of taking over a radio station and starting a revolution. In those days the wireless exerted far more influence than the newspapers, at least in our house. I can still remember the opening sentence of my call to arms. Rise up, rise up, the moment is at hand. At this distance I can’t recall what particular cause provoked the necessity for an uprising, but I do know I’d been reading Red Eagle by Dennis Wheatley and that in my satchel I had a picture of Marshal Budenny, a man with a moustache straight out of a pantomime.

Martin Vander Weyer

The prince of start-ups is entitled to speak louder than any big-ego business knight

Every time Sir Alan Sugar fires a contestant on The Apprentice, the nation quivers in admiration; likewise whenever Sir Richard Branson launches another airborne publicity stunt. Serial entrepreneurs are accorded guru status, yet whenever Britain’s most prolific kick-starter of enterprise sticks his head above the parapet he is showered with abuse and told to get on with his real job, which is — as the comedian Marcus Brigstocke tastefully put it — ‘waiting for his mother to die’. The Prince of Wales, through the charity he set up when he left the navy in 1976, has helped more than 60,000 young people to start their own businesses. But he gets

Paul Johnson

Kindly write on only one side of the paper

A scare article in the Guardian says that handwriting will soon disappear. Not so. In fact, in the last two years I have reverted to doing all my writing by hand as they no longer make the machines I like, and my eyes object to staring at a screen. My assistant, the angelic Mary, puts my scribbles on computer or disk. Being left-handed, I have to hold my pen in a funny way, as writing from left to right is unnatural to sinistrals. I envy the Ancient Egyptians, who carved their hieroglyphs either way and wrote hieratic (the written version) from right to left. When I was writing my history

James Delingpole

Rural rides

Important stuff first: can the chap with the farm address in Shropshire who very kindly said he’d let me have his hunt coats and boots for a modest sum please get in touch again on Jamesdel@dircon.co.uk? My email has been playing up something rotten — apologies to all those of you who’ve not been getting replies — and my archive has been wiped. God, I hate technology. Right, now to TV. My theme this week is how I hate not just technology but also pretty much every aspect of the modern world. All I want to do is retire to the country — Wiltshire is current favourite because I’ve lots

Andrew Lambirth

Meditation for Lent

Andrew Lambirth on Charlie Millar’s pavement of resin casts in Canterbury Cathedral For Lent, the artist Charlie Millar (born 1965) has installed a pavement of 308 resin casts, like transparent bricks, arranged in a rectangle on the floor of the Eastern Crypt of Canterbury Cathedral. Millar casts these bricks himself, embedding within them an eclectic mix of objects. Each in itself is an individual work of art, but combined they make an image-rich meditation for Lent, a series of tableaux which are infinitely suggestive, and throw the viewer back upon his or her own resources and responses, in a quest for meaning. By focusing upon the detail of such unconsidered

Jaspistos

Clerihews

In Competition No. 2432 you were asked for double or treble clerihews. It was E.C. Bentley’s son Nicholas who invented the double clerihew, and treble ones have been recorded. You were in pioneer country. A clerihew, as I see it, deals with one person, and so accordingly should a double or treble. I was prepared to accept Father, Son and Paraclete separately treated, but not the three Bront

The Spectator

Policies, please

For a politician to invite the television cameras into his home is a risky business. An inexperienced Mrs Thatcher in 1975 merely had to open her larder to the nation to find herself accused of hoarding food. Tony Blair was criticised for the heavily draped curtains in his former Islington home, and John Major’s conservatory impressed nobody but the double-glazing industry. Some Conservatives will have been dismayed that David Cameron, too, has fallen for the temptation to be filmed in a domestic situation, even if his kitchen has proved to be a model of sensible, restrained taste. They will argue that it confirms their concerns that the new Conservative leader

Douglas Davis

Will Jordan be the new Palestine?

Douglas Davis says that George W. Bush’s drive for global democracy may hand the Hashemite kingdom over to Hamas If unintended consequences are the progeny of political activism, then the fate of King Abdullah of Jordan is a lesson to us all. The West’s best friend in the Arab world is now the region’s most vulnerable monarch. It was, after all, America’s war against Saddam Hussein that produced Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, al-Qa’eda’s main man in Iraq and a sworn enemy of the Hashemite throne in his native Jordan. And it was America’s drive to bring democracy to the Middle East that propelled the Palestinians to the polls and produced the

Bryan Appleyard

Sex and Society: Design fault

‘Designer babies’ is headline shorthand for a weird new world of genetic enhancement. Thanks to several generations of science-fiction imagery, it evokes an unnatural and evil world of blond, staring, probably homicidal children, which scares ordinary people. Headlines create a cartoon world that subverts understanding and wisdom, but there is some truth in them. Human ‘enhancement’ is now being pursued in many ways, through life extension, psychoactive drugs like Ritalin and Prozac, information technology and, most obviously, through control of reproduction. The decoding of the human genome in 2000 signalled the start of an era in which we could hope to cure hitherto intractable diseases. But it also offers the

Clarke Hayes

Sex and Society: A short visit to hell

Several years ago, in another lifetime it seems, I played a porn star. In fact I played the Pornstar, in a fairly successful little two-hand play called The Dyke and the Pornstar. The piece gained a deserved reputation for being daring, risqué, even provocative. It was described by one critic as being ‘artfully performed, and sexy as hell’ and it was nominated for something called a UK Freedom Award. (We didn’t win.) Though it played unashamedly on the tactic of shock and awe, we in the company were often surprised that our appreciative, though often embarrassed, audiences overlooked the underlying theme of the piece — the loneliness and emotional fragility

Ariel Levy

Sex and Society: Get a life, girls

Why do middle-class mums go to the gym for pole-dancing classes? Because, says Ariel Levy, they have been conned by kitschy, slutty ‘raunch culture’ Some version of a sexy, scantily clad temptress has been around through the ages, and there has always been a demand for smut. But whereas this was once a guilty pleasure on the margins — on the almost entirely male margins — now, strippers, porn stars and Playboy bunnies have gone mainstream, writing bestsellers, starring in reality television shows, living a life we’re all encouraged to emulate. Prepubescent girls wear ‘thong’ underpants, their mothers drive off to the gym for pole-dancing classes after lunch. Last week

Miles Douglas

Sex and Society: A sad scene

Miles Douglas on the jealousy, ageism and sexual intrigue of gay men’s lives A few months ago I persuaded one of my oldest and best gay friends to invite his lively, articulate heterosexual neighbours to dinner. The meal was, as I had expected, a great success. Conversation was amusing, flowed naturally along with the wine, and covered an impressive range of subjects. Like any good dinner party, it left a warm afterglow. I have had a long and, many would say, complicated relationship with my host, and later that night I asked him to admit that the party was far more successful than his many all-gay evenings. He did so,

Harry Mount

Sex and Society: Ruth and consequences

One of America’s most celebrated ‘sexologists’ tells Harry Mount that there are some problems she will not advise on New York ‘I tell them about pressure, foreplay …I introduce them to a vibrator but I tell them never to get too used to it. The penis can never duplicate the vibrations of a vibrator.’ At 77, Dr Ruth Westheimer has still got the old magic. It remains as odd as ever to be taught orgasm lessons by a 4ft 6in grandmother who speaks with the seductive rolling ‘r’s and the guttural ‘achs’ of Marlene Dietrich. That this grandmother should have been orphaned by the Nazis, put on the last train