Society

Friday

Michael Heath

Diary – 21 October 2005

At home I work in a cupboard under the stairs just to keep me grounded, so you won’t hear me talking about my ‘studio’ — unlike some cartoonists I could name. My cupboard has in it, apart from old clothes, a cat litter tray and a collection of hundreds of jazz CDs. Do I put them back in their cases when I’ve finished playing them? I do not; anyway, I now have an iPod with all my music downloaded on to it. Fancy that! All those wonderful CDs on a machine the size of a packet of five Woodbines. Now I can have music wherever I go, so don’t even

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 15 October 2005

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said that the government had ‘got to make sure that the police have the powers they can to deal with people who are drug dealing in the street’. Mr Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, said that the government had abandoned plans to introduce a new offence of ‘glorifying terrorism’. Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, the new Lord Chief Justice, said, ‘Occasionally one does feel that an individual politician is trying to browbeat the judiciary.’ Britain’s Assets Recovery Agency and the Irish Republic’s Criminal Assets Bureau looked into the Provisional Irish Republican Army’s link to a £30 million property portfolio in Manchester. The government put

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 15 October 2005

The Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill, currently before Parliament, is often discussed in terms of absolute morality. It can never be right to take a life, says one side. The right to choose extends to the right to choose to die, says the other. I wish more attention focused on a prudential argument about an underlying tendency of human nature. People have a very strong desire for the old to hurry up and die. Sometimes this is straightforward greed for their money and possessions; sometimes the Darwinian impatience of the young to get more power and destroy what is unproductive; sometimes our selfish, though natural, dislike of caring

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 15 October 2005

You know how you can tell a Frenchwoman or a Spaniard in a crowd without hearing them speak a word? Well, a friend of my husband’s who is interested in anthropology refers to that bundle of cultural characteristics as the jizz. It was not a word with which I was familiar outside a fairly grubby slang meaning familiar to Veronica’s generation. But I gather that it is widely used in ornithological practice, with reference to recognition of a species in action by its special behaviour and appearance. The word appeared no earlier than 1922, in the work of T.A. Coward (1867–1933). He was a Cheshire man, the son of a

Frank Keating

A sumptuous summer

Quaintly, you could say that what the BBC in its heyday used to call ‘this great summer of sport’ finally ends this weekend in Shanghai. It may be two weeks until we adjust the clocks to signal the closing-in of winter, but 2005’s summer calendar snaps shut tomorrow with the running of the final round in China of the Formula 1 motor-racing season. Or nearer home, if you prefer — and even more cockeyed for old timers, seeing as it was traditionally the most mud-slurped and frost-bitten of wintery games — with the final whistle of today’s rugby league Grand Final at Old Trafford. The air-raid siren squeal of Formula

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 15 October 2005

Dear Mary… Q. Your child of not super-rich parents (8 October) needs to be aware that, if his parents hand ownership of their house to him, for the transfer to be valid for tax purposes they would then have to pay a full rent to him, and they might not want or be able to do this. T.W.A., Surrey A. Yes my correspondent might well have found that this was the case and it might well not suit the parents to shell out the full rent. However, the point was to prompt the parents into confronting the issue of legal tax avoidance in the first place so that they can

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 15 October 2005

Appeasing evil Israeli policy in the occupied territories, says John Denham (‘Israel’s actions affect our security’, 24 September) ‘is not simply a matter of foreign policy, it is a matter for British domestic security policy too’. His logic seems to run as follows: the Palestinians suffer from their conflict with Israel, their plight is heeded by ‘young Muslims [who] very much identify with Palestinians’, some of whom express their dissatisfaction by self-immolation in locations chosen to ensure the maximum death toll among British civilians. Therefore, if only we could appease the Muslim extremists by adopting a more hostile attitude towards Israel, the global jihadists groups would lose their cause célèbre

Deborah Ross

Restaurants | 15 October 2005

The newly released Zagat survey has just named the top ten most popular London restaurants and put Wagamama, a cheap noodle bar restaurant, at number one. So how come I’ve never been? Especially when you consider there are now 50 of them worldwide, 24 of which are in London, and a new one appears to open every ten minutes. Go and answer your door and there’ll probably be one in your living-room by the time you get back. I think it’s possibly because I have always equated Japanese food with sushi and, while I know sushi is very fashionable and an art form and all that, I’m afraid I just

Simon Courtauld

Terrific turbot

You don’t often see a large turbot these days. My guess is that the big ones, like most of the lobsters and crabs caught in our waters, go to Spain or France. The specimen which I saw in Paris earlier this year was being cut into fat steaks for sale at 90 euros per kilo, or about £27.50 per pound. Perhaps there is no market in Britain for the king of white fish at this sort of price. I have in the larder a long, oval fish kettle suitable for salmon, but I wonder whether anyone still uses the diamond-shaped kettle which was designed, probably in the 19th century, to

Robin Oakley

A good read

Seeking to persuade Mrs Oakley to wager a bottle of Ledaig single malt on which of three wet sheep will be first up a windy escarpment tends to be as close as you get to racing when holidaying on the Isle of Mull. But one of the great blessings of the sport is its depth of anecdotage, and the three latest volumes kept me going for the week. The preface to Leigh and Woodhouse’s Racing Lexicon (Faber, £9.99) mentions the racing enthusiasm of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, which reminded me of the bishop who declined an invitation to say grace at the Gimcrack dinner ‘because I don’t

Taki

Palazzo party

Venice I may have spoken too soon. Venice is also a good place for a party. The only trouble with Venezia is that anything one writes about the place has already been written. Even what I’ve just said has been said a thousand times. Original pronouncements about the Dresden of the south are rare; as rare, in fact, as men who have served their country among the slobs of New Labour. But let’s not be beastly to the barbarians. Or even think about them. Not here, in one of the most historic city-states of the Western world. After Greece and Rome went down the Swanee, it was the creativity of

Jeremy Clarke

Open door

It’s believed by some that the town we use for shopping has something therapeutic in the air. Those who have looked into it go further. They say that the town stands beneath an intersection of ley lines, which subtly energises the inhabitants. This belief that occult energies permeate the town attracts to the area people who are well off, educated even, but permanently tired, dissatisfied with themselves and assailed by minor illnesses. They come in search of that spiritual key, pin number or magic word that will restore them to health and imbue their lives with significance. Last week a philosopher came to town, name of Freke, and I went

The Spectator

Feedback | 15 October 2005

Comments on ‘David Davis has suddenly acquired the air of the runner-up’ by Peter ObornePeter Oborne is right. Clarke & Cameron should work together for the good of the country & offer this partnership to the wider electorate for endorsement. I hope that both men, and their supporters, are humble enough to recognize this.Stephen WrightKuala Lumpur Comments on ‘Why the NHS isn’t fit for a dog’ by Rachel JohnsonThere is something to be said for round-the-clock vet care. One of my Scottish Terriers recently needed surgery for bladder cancer and my regular vet sent me to a specialist hospital. The 24/7 care was great – but the bill, a little

Interconnect

Singing splendidly for supper

Julian Maclaren-Ross died in 1964, in circumstances quite as chaotic as the moth-eaten, bailiff-haunted atmosphere of his novels. Despite occasional murmurs over the intervening 40 years, the real revival of interest in his work began with a 2001 Penguin Modern Classic edition of his South Coast vacuum cleaner salesman epic Of Love and Hunger. There followed a diligent biography by Paul Willetts (Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia, 2003), a volume of selected stories and last year’s Collected Memoirs. Now comes another bumper paperback containing the 30,000-word novella of the title, various scraps of short fiction, a tranche of film criticism and a couple of dozen book reviews, the latter mostly

Byron Rogers

Fact or fiction?

John Simpson is a television journalist. Indeed he is far more than that, being the BBC’s World Affairs editor, an amazing title that makes me think of Emperor Ming the Merciless, enthroned above the galaxies. Apart from the fact that Mr Simpson does not provoke calamity, their job descriptions are not dissimilar: the bombers go in, and there he is, in safari suit or burkha, white-haired, his face sleek with concern, presiding over the ruins of cities. The only thing is, what does he do with the rest of his time, when there are no bombers and the cities are merely falling apart? The answer seems to be that he

Gary Dexter

Surprising literary ventures | 15 October 2005

The Recipe Book of the Mustard Club (1926) Dorothy L. Sayers And he replied: ‘The flames unquenchableThat fire them from within thus make them burnRuddy, as thou seest, in this, the Nether Hell.’ It is unlikely that when Dorothy L. Sayers produced the lines above she was thinking of mustard: unlikely, but not impossible. The distinguished translator of Dante (and creator of Lord Peter Wimsey) was, in her early career, a copy-writer for Benson’s, an advertising agency whose most important client was Colman’s of Norwich. While there, she wrote, among several other mustard-related items, The Recipe Book of the Mustard Club. The club was at first fictional, featuring characters such

Jaspistos

Lunary spines

In Competition No. 2413 you were invited to supply a poem such as might have been written by the Revd Spooner. William Archibald Spooner, the myopic, albino warden of New College, was not, as I had always imagined, a Victorian figure: his wardenship was 1903–24 and he died in 1930. As an educationist he would have been shocked if he had overheard his fellow Oxonian Wystan Auden referring dismissively to the poets ‘Sheets and Kelley’ and even more aghast had he lived to witness a feminist theatre group touring Britain in the 1970s under the name Cunning Stunts. My own favourite among his reputed blunders is ‘The Lord is a

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

If Katrina was the vengeance of Allah, what

So far, at least, we are none the wiser about why God sent an earthquake to kill so many people in Kashmir, Pakistan and Afghanistan. We can only hope that sooner or later his purpose will be made evident, so that we all might learn. Why would he torture his people so? The mullahs have been remarkably silent. The earthquake struck during the onset of Ramadan in two of the world’s most devoutly Muslim countries. It is almost unbelievable that not a single bearded cleric from this most certain and steadfast of religions has offered some sort of explanation for the appalling loss of life and destruction of property. Is

The Spectator

Paternity madness

There were three news stories this week which might at first appear to be unrelated. The government announced that its forthcoming Work and Families Bill will give new fathers the right to take six months’ unpaid paternity leave. The BBC demanded that its licence fee rise at 2.3 per cent above inflation over the next eight years, perhaps taking it to £200. And Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, warned that the economy is heading for a bout of the 1970s disease: low growth and higher inflation. But of course there is a link between these three things. While the Chancellor of the Exchequer will inevitably blame

Richard North

Europe is costing us a bomb

The threat to our national security has seldom been greater. Not only are historic regiments being scrapped — or amalgamated — but the fundamental reorganisation of armed forces now under way is likely to undermine the special relationship with the United States, and thus a key element in our defence strategy. There is, of course, nothing wrong in principle with the reorganisation: it has been embarked on to accommodate a technological revolution in warfare. This revolution is as profound as the switch from horse to tank. The term for the new military technology is ‘netcentric warfare’ and it aims to meld high-tech weaponry with the power of computers, satellites and