Society

Saturday

Hugh Massingberd

Diary – 31 December 2005

The other day in Whiteley’s shopping centre in Queensway — somewhere I usually try to avoid — I suddenly found myself engulfed by a gang of over-exuberant and oddly menacing adolescents. ‘Hey, you!’ their leader, a well-fed girl of some 12 summers in expensive sportswear, addressed me. ‘I like your umbrella — where d’you get it?’ My mumbled response to the effect that the lurid lime golfing number happened to be a present from my bookmaker failed to ease the strange tension. ‘Give it to me,’ she commanded. ‘Show some respect.’ Her male minions took up the Blairish chant: ‘Respect, respect, respect!’ I edged my way towards the exit and

Andrew Lambirth

A look ahead

Even though museums have got themselves into the very strange position of no longer simply purveying culture, but competing with their fellow public institutions for box-office profits to fund increasingly elaborate bureaucracies, 2006 still looks set to furnish us with a richness and variety of visual fare. The National Gallery, disappointed in a poor turnout for Rubens, will hope to recoup on a trio of fine exhibitions, ending with the grand slam of Vel

Jaspistos

Are we down-hearted?

In Competition No. 2423 you were invited to write a poem in the voice of a fed-up soldier, of any country or date, far from home. I was apprehensive that most of you would use this invitation to vent your feelings about the unhappy war in Iraq, but I was pleasantly surprised by the variety in time and space of your fractious servicemen (there was only one servicewoman) — a tribesman from the steppes bored in Rome, a redcoat on St Helena after Napoleon’s death, a conscript from Clerkenwell stuck in Wales during Edward I’s campaign, a French quartermaster in Egypt with Napoleon, a German soldier not enjoying Stalingrad…. The

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Should I have urged my rich friend to try to pay a ransom for poor Margaret Hassan?

Do you not find that when a wrong has been done, time may elapse before the wrongfulness pricks through into our consciences? I mean not only wrongs we do ourselves, or which are done to us, but also the sense we may have that a small or large injustice has been done in the world, and nobody has acknowledged this or tried to put it right. In the dead of night, goaded into wakefulness by something sharp the unconscious mind has sifted from the rubble and will not let drop, we run again through events under which we, or those we know, or our politicians, have supposedly ‘drawn a line’

The Spectator

Portrait of 2006

JANUARY In Iraq Sunni insurgents targeted the politically dominant Shiites; Iranians were accused of supporting Shiite militants. Austria, taking up the EU presidency, accused Britain of being the ‘Sick Man of Europe’. Labour floundered over its Education Bill. FEBRUARY Dr Rowan Williams announced his retirement to a monastery in Anatolia after the greater part of the Anglican Communion, led by Nigeria, broke away from Canterbury over the consecration of a lesbian bishop in Canada. Sir David Frost was prosecuted under anti-terrorist legislation for his involvement with the new al-Jazeera international television channel. MARCH Israeli forces made retaliatory air strikes on Gaza following a wave of suicide bombings during the elections

Lucy Beresford

Emotional incontinence

This year will be remembered as the one in which the psychopathology of Britain slipped down the toilet. Just last month the imagination of the nation’s television viewers was captured — some would say hijacked — first by the comedy show Little Britain, with a series of sketches about a geriatric woman who is oblivious of her own urinary incontinence, and, secondly, by the sight (courtesy of infrared cameras) of Carol Thatcher taking a night-time pee beside her camp bed on I’m a Celebrity — Get Me Out of Here! And there’s no point in telling yourself that I’m the sad one for watching these programmes, or that they are

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 17 December 2005

For her traditional Christmas treat Mary has invited some of her favourite figures in the public eye to submit personal problems for her attention. From Robert HiscoxQ. Christmas time brings the threat of having to dance at a staff party. As a chairman in my sixties I wonder how to maintain any dignity when dragged on to the dance floor and faced by a gyrating young female. I believe actually holding a lady in your arms while dancing is as out of date as the Charleston, and would be highly dangerous in today’s threatening climate of employment litigation. Refusing to dance at all would be deeply stand-offish. Is there an

Taki

Clash of values

Liberal columnists, especially in London, New York and Los Angeles, can’t quite grasp why some Christians get upset about people saying ‘Happy Holidays’ instead of ‘Happy Christmas’. ‘People who use the word holiday now face angry Christian protests,’ they assert. Well, if they have faced such protests, it’s news to me. Most Christians I know simply snicker when the C-word is avoided in order not to cause offence. What reasonable people get upset about is being forbidden to say Happy Christmas themselves, or call a Christmas tree a Christmas tree. Actually, I don’t think I know of a single Christian who rubs his Christianity into non-Christians by wishing a Happy

Jeremy Clarke

Guiding light

A special-needs bloke comes to our gym sometimes. He can’t speak, and he’s deaf, I think, and he doesn’t walk too well, but the disciplined intensity of his work-out is an example to us all. A carer follows him around to advise, guide and watch over him; an elderly man with a neatly trimmed beard and moustache. His respectfulness towards his charge borders on the abject. The special-needs bloke obeys his carer, allowing himself to be guided from machine to machine, but shows him no affection nor does he look him in the face. I’ve yet to see the special-needs bloke do anything controversial. Always well turned out in designer

Simon Courtauld

Carpe piscem

Where are the pike, the char, the carp of yesteryear? Still in English lakes and rivers, but they are not to be found in the English kitchen. Pike, then called luce, are mentioned in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and they were on the menu at King Henry IV’s coronation banquet at the end of the 14th century; but today the cooking of them is left to the French. Char live in the Lake District: salted char was sent down to Hampton Court for King Henry VIII’s pleasure, and potted char was popular in the 18th century. It was good to see Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall cooking them on television the other day, on

Alan Judd

Confessions of an anorak

Am I an anorak? An uncomfortable thought, like discovering that some feature you had never noticed in yourself — your Adam’s apple, perhaps, or your ears — is what people always remember about you. I wore an anorak, long ago during my teenage motor-scooter period. That comprised Lambretta 1, which cost £8, was a slow starter and died of engine seizure, but not before it had caused my motorcycle test to be abandoned by an impatient examiner known locally as Failer Fowler. (That in turn provoked me to remove my L-plates and ride illegally for the rest of my brief two-wheeled career.) Lambretta 2 cost £3 and ran faultlessly until

Barry Humphries

Diary – 17 December 2005

If I die I hope it won’t be in Melbourne. The chief obituarist of a Melbourne morning paper takes a dim view of me, and since the London Daily Telegraph pioneered the custom of pissing on the recently deceased, the Melbourne obituarist is pretty likely to do the same to me. A couple of years ago he wrote an autobiography in which he impugned my patriotism in a rather nasty way. It’s quite a fat autobiography, as are usually the memoirs of uninteresting people — the women who talk longest on the telephone are invariably women who have nothing to talk about. Anyway, I suppose this little prick’s obituary is

Emma Tennant

Heroes who looked, saw and thought

I imagine that most people, if asked who was responsible for the familiar method of classifying plants and animals into families, genera and species, would name the 18th-century Swedish naturalist Linnaeus. It is true that he named more species than anyone else, but in this magisterial book his work is seen as little more than a footnote to that of his predecessors. Linnaeus was a filer and an organiser, who eliminated synonyms, and standardised the binomial system whereby two words — the generic name and the specific epithet — describe every species in the Kingdom of Creation. Linnaeus’ predecessors were the original thinkers whose story Anna Pavord tells. In doing

Bevis Hillier

Smut from the Warden of Wadham

Like Sir Edward Marshall Hall and the first Lord Birkenhead, Mr Justice Rigby Swift was one of those lawyers around whom stories accrete like barnacles. He was a Lancastrian who stayed what they call ‘true to his northern roots’; barristers referred to him as ‘Rig-ba’ in imitation of his accent. Born in 1874, the same year as Churchill, he had not gone to university but trained in his father’s chambers in Liverpool; in court, the two called each other ‘m’learned friend’. In 1920, at 46, Swift became the youngest High Court judge. In most respects he was liberal and jovial. He thought the divorce laws ‘cruel’ and believed there was

David Dimbleby

Unconventional site- seeing

I know of a man who took his new bride as a honeymoon treat on a tour of the sites where the Yorkshire Ripper had murdered his victims. A curious choice, but she declared herself well pleased with the visit and in particular with the delicious salami sandwiches her husband provided. I remembered this odd tale when browsing through Clive Aslet’s Landmarks of Britain. Among his ‘Five Hundred Places that Made Our History’ is Bridego Bridge near Cheddington in Buckinghamshire, scene of the Great Train Robbery. All I remember of that night in 1963 was that the train driver was brutally beaten about the head and was so badly injured

Jaspistos

Diabolical

In Competition No. 2422 you were invited to write a poem or a piece of prose entitled ‘Dinner with the Devil’. ‘My meal consisted of an omelette made from eggs seven years past their sell-by date and stuffed with the minced brains of lunatics who never attended church on Sunday’ — Adam Campbell’s menu, reminiscent of Miss Thatcher’s recent gastronomic ordeals on television, struck the sort of flesh-creeping note that Dickens relished at Christmas. But the winners, printed below, were the ones who remained urbane and witty rather than horripilant. They get £25 apiece, and Adrian Fry has the bonus fiver. I wish you all as happy a Christmas as

Paul Johnson

Time for St George to start slaying dragons again

The most striking work in the spine-tingling show at the National Gallery, ‘Rubens: A Master in the Making’, is the enormous painting of St George slaying the Dragon (Prado). What I like about Rubens is that he always goes over the top. Here, the head of the saint’s charger, and especially the mane, is a creative phantasmagoria of hirsute auxesis, and balancing it is the monster’s crazy head, especially the mouth, already skewered by St George’s lance, and exhibiting catastrophic cavities of such horror that it ought to hang in dentists’ waiting-rooms as an example of what happens if you don’t scour your teeth with a yard-brush. The dragon is

The Spectator

Portrait of the Year

JANUARY Mr Ken Macdonald, the Director of Public Prosecutions, said it was all right to kill burglars ‘honestly and instinctively’. Iraq held elections. Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, the al-Qa’eda leader in Iraq, said, ‘We have declared a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy.’ The numbers killed by the deadly wave that devastated the fringes of the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day 2004 was put at 178,000. Mrs Adriana Iliescu, aged 67, gave birth to a baby girl in Bucharest. China decided to measure Mount Everest, amid reports that it had shrunk by four feet. FEBRUARY Members of the IRA murdered Robert McCartney, a Catholic, at a Belfast pub, provoking

The Spectator

The audit of war

Following the example of progressive local authorities, this magazine will not, on this page this year, be celebrating Christmas but an alternative festival of light in which Muslims can share too. It is called the elections for a permanent government in Iraq. As we go to press, the polling booths are being prepared to enable the people of Iraq, for the second time in a year and only the second time in their history, freely to elect their own leaders: this time for a four-year term. Like ‘winterval’, the secular, multicultural festival concocted by the City of Birmingham, nobody is quite sure what it all means. Does it mark the

Minette Marrin

Don’t even ask

‘Say seebong-seebong, say seebong-seebong,’ sang the Filipino band in their white tuxedos, swaying cheerfully from side to side. ‘Si bon, si bon,’ whispered Sweetie to the music, smiling carefully, swaying her sumptuous jade earrings in time to the Filipinos’ narrow hips and tapping her manicured nails on the tablecloth; everyone said that before she had left her last husband, who was with the Banque de L’Indochine, she had made him pay for a face lift and a bottom lift. ‘Si bon, si bon,’ she half-sang again, looking archly at her guests round the table; she was giving a birthday party for her new husband, a Scottish investment banker. For its