Society

Saturday

Mian Ridge

A question of ethnics

Two elderly men and a woman sit on a jagged rock beside a limpid pool of water in the green hills of the Lake District. They are Indians, wearing shalwar-kameezes beneath layers of cardigans, coats and scarves; the men wear white Muslim topi caps. On the next page of Visits to National Parks — a Guide for Ethnic Communities a group of windswept Chinese men and women stand smiling, cameras round their necks, in the Yorkshire Dales. In the Broads National Park, meanwhile, members of a large Afro-Caribbean family laugh as they trip through a field of long golden grass. These pictures were taken on a series of experimental outings

Peter Hitchens

The danger of China

The Chinese word for an empire of prison camps is just as easy to remember and to pronounce as its Russian equivalent. But while most educated people in Britain know what the Gulag was, few have ever heard of the Laogai. I sometimes wonder if we will never pay any attention to such things, anywhere in the world, until it is too late to learn from them. As I recall, it was quite difficult to persuade our cultural establishment to worry about the Gulag when it still existed, because it was so unwilling to believe that the USSR was as wicked and nasty as it was. Now that it has

Aidan Hartley

Ode to a leaf

Laikipia According to an imminent Home Office decree, I am on drugs, I cultivate drugs and I intend to push drugs. I thought Blair’s government was moving to decriminalise narcotics such as marijuana. Instead it wants to burden the police and customs further by banning the vegetable stimulant Catha edulis. Otherwise known as miraa, qat, or khat, this plant is grown in the Horn of Africa and Yemen, and millions chew it. Countless thousands of perfectly respectable immigrants in Britain consume miraa daily. I have always chewed the leaf. It’s my new little cash-crop project on our farm. The privet-like shrubs will grow into trees and they clearly thrive in

Jaspistos

Horatian

In Competition No. 2426 you were invited to supply a poetic invitation from one friend to another to come and stay in the country and enjoy its pleasures. The title was meant to suggest that I was looking for a charming, straight-faced piece such as Horace or our 17th-century poets might have written, but most of you refused to throw away the jester’s cap and bells. ‘Come to Devon soon. But hurry./ Now’s the season we spread slurry,’ warbled Martin Parking, while Mark Ambrose offered rural entertainment of a most unusual sort: ‘There is also bell-ringing if you are still keen./ We ring in the nude: it’s a sight to

Matthew Continetti

Boomtown rats

Washington Observers of American politics would do well to learn how to pronounce the name of a former Republican lobbyist, Jack Abramoff. The first syllable should be enunciated not, as is common, like the stomach muscle, but rather like the nickname of the 16th American president, Honest Abe. Of course, Abramoff was dishonest. And this has landed him — and the party of Lincoln — in a lot of trouble. In early January, in a Washington DC courtroom, Abramoff pleaded guilty to charges of tax evasion, mail fraud and conspiracy. Looking like Al Capone in a black fedora and matching trenchcoat as he left the courthouse, Abramoff travelled to Miami

Leo McKinstry

Hate, hypocrisy and hysteria

When it comes to sex, Britain now seems to be gripped by a dangerous form of schizophrenia. On the one hand, there is mounting panic over the issue of paedophilia, where a media-driven climate of hysteria means that even the mere allegation of child abuse can be enough to destroy careers and wreck lives. Yet, on the other hand, we have a youth culture that is obsessed with sex. In the relentless promotion of adolescent sexual freedom, all moral boundaries have disappeared, pornography has been brought into the mainstream and the law on the age of consent is derided or ignored. It is this grotesque double standard which makes the

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters to the editor | 14 January 2006

Our successful railways From Adrian LyonsSir: Your leading article (7 January) suggested that railway operators are a cartel bent on exploiting their customers, but this is grossly unfair. Fares have risen, but an overall increase of 3 per cent above inflation since 1995 hardly constitutes ‘steeply rising prices’. Furthermore, a tremendous range of fares and journey options is on offer. Your leader quoted one London–Manchester rail fare without giving the bigger picture. This morning I could have bought a return for travel today for less than £60. Nor do I believe that railway operators would consider the industry to be risk-free. All the recent franchise competitions have resulted in the

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 14 January 2006

Q. I belong to a small reading group in the village in which I live and have always enjoyed our meetings. Recently, however, one member of the group took it upon herself to invite a new neighbour to join us. We wanted to be welcoming and so said nothing; unfortunately, however, the newcomer has rather too much to say for herself, none of it worth listening to. She is also entirely lacking in self-awareness and so, despite increasingly obvious hints, does not realise just how much we resent her raucous tones and attention-seeking. She also likes rotten books and drives a Footballers’ Wives’ car. This woman has spoiled the group’s

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 14 January 2006

Mr Charles Kennedy, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, called a press conference and said, ‘Over the past 18 months, I’ve been coming to terms with, and seeking to cope with, a drinking problem…. I’ve not had a drink for the past two months and I don’t intend to in the future.’ He invited rivals to stand against him for the leadership in an election by the party’s 73,000 members. But two days later, after 25 MPs had said they would not serve with him, he resigned, and Sir Menzies Campbell, 64, rapidly put his name forward, to be followed by Mr Mark Oaten, 41, while Mr Simon Hughes, 54,

Frank Keating

Cup tied

After the Lord Mayor’s show…. It is back to the humdrum for football today following last week’s all-embracing showstoppers in the FA Cup. Two or three years ago, we know-alls were writing off the world’s most antique annual tournament (est. 1872) as a geriatric diversion far past its sell-by date. Winning it offered no access to that licence to print money, the European Champions’ League, so once the strutters of Manchester United didn’t even bother entering. The supposed pre-eminence of the Premiership had moved things on, so the very idea of ‘dragon-slaying minnows’ was as preposterous in possibility as it was convoluted in metaphor. But Manchester United are desperate now

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 14 January 2006

I am not much comforted by those notices in railway stations and shopping centres reading, ‘Caution: slippery when wet.’ A variant is, ‘Slippery in conditions of ice or rain.’ If they can put up expensive signs, why not do something about the slipperiness? I can understand a sign at the back of the church, ‘Ladies: do not leave handbags on the seat while receiving Holy Communion.’ It is no simple matter to catch the thieves that make the warning necessary. At the same time, I have been told that pick-pockets like to hang around signs that warn, ‘Pick-pockets known to operate in this area,’ because when people see the signs

Susan Hill Susan Hill

Diary – 14 January 2006

Sky like the inside of a saucepan and a mean little drizzle stinging your face, garden sunk deep in midwinter gloom, except for the winter-flowering cherry trees with small, sugar-pink blossoms prinking from bare branches to lift the heart. I look for the first snowdrop, then the first aconite, then crocus, but forget about these cherries. The slender twigs last for weeks in a cool room. We have planted 1,000 snowdrop bulbs every autumn since coming to this North Cotswold farmhouse 15 years ago, and now there are great drifts of them. I always pick the first one I find and sniff. It smells very faintly of honey. Talking of

Iain Sinclair

The return of the colonel

This is a great Homeric return. With The Vengeance of Rome, Michael Moorcock releases his hobbled Odysseus, Colonel Pyat, from the maelstrom of history, the impossible burden of cultural memory. The original migrant — born in Kiev, assaulted and prostituted in Egypt, lionised in Hollywood — folds back into a case of greasy papers, technical drawings, sepia postcards, abandoned in Notting Hill and later deposited with Moorcock in Texas. Right from the start of the ‘Between the Wars’ quartet, a narrative trajectory was established. The conclusion of the sequence was as much predetermined as the fate of a family breakfasting in Stepney under the flight path of a V2 rocket.

Mark Steyn

Bleak portrait

‘You know I ain’t queer,’ Ennis Del Mar says to Jack Twist. ‘Me neither,’ says Jack. Then they get back to having sex with each other, high up in the hills of Wyoming. I would have liked to have seen Brokeback Mountain with a Wyoming crowd, or at any rate an audience of rugged laconic men in tight jeans, such as Jack and Ennis. Unfortunately, Brokeback doesn’t appear to be playing in any rural districts other than, er, the Hamptons and Provincetown. So I had to go and see it in Montreal, where its author, Annie Proulx, once attended Sir George Williams University. The joint was packed, and you could

Robert Cooper

Hellish motorway experience

Listening to Jim Norton reading The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on this outstanding recording is a first-class way of either revisiting James Joyce’s autobiographical novel or of dipping your toe in the water for the first time. I am a toe-dipper and whilst there were moments when Joyce’s ‘stream of consciousness’ technique threatened to drag me out to sea, I found that a few jabs at the ‘Play Again’ button kept me both buoyant and enlightened with regard to the author’s alter ego, Stephen Dedalus. A memorable early scene sees young Dedalus home from boarding-school for Christmas. He is allowed to join the grown-ups for the

Jeremy Clarke

Low life

On the second day of the New Year, I rose, dressed, arranged myself on my crutches and hobbled down the road to the station. It was wonderful to be outside again. (Never give credence to ideas that occur to you indoors, said Nietzsche, which I think I’ll take as my New Year’s resolution.) At the station there was a handy ramp up to the ticket office that I’d barely noticed before, then a footbridge over the railway lines to platform two. At London Bridge station I toppled off the train and stumped through the ticket barrier, down an escalator and along a subway to the Underground station, where I took

Paul Johnson

What happened to all that ‘ivy never sere’?

People have mixed feelings about ivy (Hedera helix). It is believed to do unhurried damage to buildings while artfully concealing its depredations. ‘Creeping ivy …hides the ruin that it feeds upon,’ as Cowper says. Not long ago, Jerome, who looks after our London garden, had to cut back the ivy covering the high wall abutting the veranda of my library, thus exposing the brick. This grievously disturbed my post-breakfast period of contemplation, when I look out on the garden and work out what I will write during the day. However, with its characteristic tenacity and fecundity, the ivy has grown back again, the bricks have vanished and the incident is

Peter Oborne

It wasn’t the booze: Cameron did for Kennedy, and now Blair is the target

A myth is beginning to be constructed around the events of the last week at Westminster. It needs to be challenged at once before it gains ground and becomes acknowledged fact. It goes as follows: Charles Kennedy was sacked as leader of the Liberal Democrats because he was a heavy drinker. This is open to challenge — both the claim that Kennedy was a heavy drinker, and the associated proposition that he was driven from office on account of his drinking. Kennedy’s consumption of alcohol was at most moderate — and negligible compared with an earlier generation of politicians: Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins, Harold Wilson, Ken Clarke. All of them

Jaspistos

Love lecture

In Competition No. 2425 you were invited to do as Ovid did: give poetic advice as to how to pick up, seduce and keep a lover of either sex. Here’s one of Ovid’s shrewd pieces of advice to girls (my translation, The Modern Library, New York, rush out and buy it): Steer clear of the young professorOf elegance, the too good-looking snappy dresserWho’s always arranging his hair — he’ll tell you a stale,Thousand-times-told tale,But his heart’s a gipsy, it camps, it moves.What can a woman do when the man she lovesIs smoother than she is and, for all she can tell,Has more men than she does as well? Not many

Taki

Pandora’s box

Gstaad On the evening that Charles Kennedy resigned, Barry and Lizzie Humphries came to dinner. My German cook Alexander made a special cake for Dame Edna, but Barry smelled a rat. He asked if the cake contained any alcohol. The answer was almost none at all. ‘Well,’ said the great man, who has not had a drink in 30 years, ‘if I ask for another ten helpings, we’ll know what’s in it.’ The idea that these Liberal creeps got rid of a man who had done a good job as leader of such a shitty party for having a drink too many is quite revolting. It’s almost as bad as