Society

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 16 July 2005

A recent cartoon in the Los Angeles Times showed a punkish teenager saying to a more conventional youth, ‘I’m bored. Can I shave your head?’ Ho, ho. But then the paper published a letter from ‘Merrill’ from Nova Scotia saying, ‘Would you please explain why nobody here knows the difference between can and may? In Nova Scotia, our teacher would not let us out of grade three if we didn’t know the difference.’ In reply the paper said, ‘Cartoon creators want their characters to be believable, so they have them speak in a way that would be typical for the characters.’ Then it went further: ‘In our country, so many

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 16 July 2005

More than 50 were killed and 700 injured when four bombs exploded in London on the morning of 7 July. At about 8.50 a.m. three bombs exploded in the Underground: between Russell Square and King’s Cross on the deep Piccadilly Line, with at least 25 killed; between Aldgate and Liverpool Street on the Circle Line, with at least seven killed; and between Edgware Road and Paddington, further west on the Circle Line, with at least seven killed. At 9.47 a.m., in Tavistock Square, a bomb on a No. 30 bus killed at least 13. Islamist extremists allied to al-Qa’eda were blamed. A man from Leeds reported missing by his family

The Spectator

Feedback | 16 July 2005

After the bombs Words of condemnation are not enough. Here are a couple of suggestions about how to act after the bombings of last week. First, we must fight back by stepping up the war in Iraq. If the insurgents win, it will embolden terrorists throughout the Middle East, since it will demonstrate that the most powerful nations on earth cannot stop a relatively small number of radical Muslims. But if we win, it will cause the Middle East itself to turn towards representative government and Western values. Nothing is more important for future world security. Second, we must encourage Muslims in this country to stand up for freedom. What

Frank Keating

Love at first sight

Three good old boys of summer —portly Pickwickian paragon cricket umpire, David Shepherd, took off his white coat for the final time in an international match at the Oval on Tuesday, and we shall know this morning whether nonpareil Jack Nicklaus has made the cut at St Andrews to extend by two days his cathartic farewell to golf. They bent the rules to offer Shepherd, 65 in December, next week’s momentous Ashes Test at full-dress Lord’s for his swan-song, but there is no remote drama-queen thesp in ol’ Shep, no milking the occasion like a Dickie B, and plebeian Kennington he said, was good enough for him. Nicklaus was 65

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 16 July 2005

Dear Mary… Dear Mary… Q. I have a six-week-old baby and have been invited to a lunch party by a neighbour. It was going to be my chance to meet all the other mothers in the street and chat about schools and so on. Now another mother has rung to say that she is bringing her 18-month-old son, with chickenpox, to the party, adding, ‘Everyone else’s children will be at school but I thought I should just warn you in case you might prefer not to come if you are worried about your baby possibly catching it.’ Am I right in thinking that this mother should be the one to

Simon Courtauld

Waiting for whiting

Whiting does not seem to be fashionable these days — perhaps it never was — but in my early 20th-century edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica it is described as ‘one of the most valuable food fishes of northern Europe’. This may be due in part to its not necessarily enviable reputation as being good for invalids. It is said to be wholesome and digestible, especially when steamed, but unfortunately the ‘invalid’ tag puts one in mind of hospitals and old people’s homes where the smell from the kitchen of watery, overcooked cabbage mingles with the smell of watery, overcooked and not entirely fresh fish. Whiting deserves better than that. Its

Interconnect

Tripping and bonking

Paul Theroux’s new novel finds Slade Steadman, the 50-year-old author of a celebrated travel book, on the trail to darkest Ecuador in the company of some deeply unpleasant American tourists and his disillusioned doctor girlfriend Ava. The object of his quest is a rare hallucinogen, shyly administered by the local shaman, with which our man hopes to end his long-standing writer’s block and get his professional life back on track. Equally irksome is a second blockage: ‘The sexual desire he had once described in starved paragraphs of solitude … as something akin to cannibal hunger was something he had not tasted for a long time.’ Whatever else may be said

Mark Steyn

The ultimate movie pro

I happen to be writing this on board ship, in a little café, at a table by the window, with an idle eye on any glamorous women passing by. And as always in such settings I think of North by Northwest, which contains the all-time great strangers-on-a-train/ships-in-the-night scene. In a lifetime’s travel, everyone should have a North by Northwest moment: on the Twentieth Century train to Chicago, Cary Grant walks into a crowded dining car and is seated opposite Eva Marie Saint, the coolest of cool blondes. The conversation starts out quietly smouldering and heats up from there: He: The moment I meet an attractive woman, I have to start

Jaspistos

Herculean task

In Competition No. 2400 you were invited to write a sonnet picturing one of Hercules’ labours. I used the word ‘picturing’ with a purpose: I wanted you to be visual. I was thinking of the sonnets in Les Trophées (two describe vividly the Nemean and Stymphalian missions), written by José-Maria de Heredia, that gifted, Cuban-born (father Spanish Creole, mother Norman) Parnassian French poet whose cameo-like glimpses of the Classical world enchanted me early. Out of the 12 labours, easily the most popular (are you filthy-minded?) was the cleansing of the Augean stables, which would have defeated seven maids with seven mops, sweeping for half a year. The winners, printed below,

Christopher Fildes

Hockey and hanging baskets count as risks, but now we have a real one

Risk assessment is the mantra of our time. You cannot organise a girls’ school hockey match without having to assess the risk that the combatants will bark their knuckles. The baskets of flowers that used to hang outside the Ring of Bells pub in Norton Fitzwarren have been assessed as a risk to passers-by who, if they were more than eight feet tall, might have to step into the road or bump their heads. Trustees of charities and pension funds must assess their risks or take the consequences. Much good all this did for us on the day when City and suburban life developed a new kind of hazard: the

The Spectator

No concessions

The bombs in London last week killed people of all races and religions indiscriminately — as of course they were intended to. The terrorists who planted them were not interested in distinguishing between kinds of people: they simply wanted to kill as many of us as possible. The police now believe that the killers were suicide bombers who found fulfilment in blowing themselves up on the London Underground. The murderers were Britons born and bred. They were raised and educated in West Yorkshire. The revelation that the murderers did not come in from abroad has understandably prompted people to ask: what has gone wrong with our society that it is

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Driven cyclist

Pau, France Until 1981 no American even so much as rode in the Tour de France. Since then an invading fleet has crossed the Atlantic to dominate what was once a European sport, and a race whose very name is its country’s proud standard. First of the Yanks was Greg LeMond, who won the Tour in 1986, then Bobby Julich, and more recently Tyler Hamilton. After his Olympic triumph last year he is now in disgrace, charged with the faintly ghoulish offence of ‘blood-doping’, transfusing someone else’s blood, although nothing can erase his heroism in the great centennial Tour of two years ago, riding for three weeks in agony from

Stephen Schwartz

Literary courtesan

Cultural tourism can be an edgy adventure when promoted by intellectuals, no less than when pursued by ordinary travellers. Backpacking across the Pakistan–Afghanistan border could get a foreigner killed. The tourist mentality inhabiting Western literary circles, however, carries no such fatal risk. Anglo-American critics and publishers foist their taste for exoticism and leftism, exemplified by authors like the Colombian Gabriel Garc

Boris Johnson

Just don’t call it war

If we were Israelis, we would by now be doing a standard thing to that white semi-detached pebbledash house at 51 Colwyn Road, Beeston. Having given due warning, we would dispatch an American-built ground-assault helicopter and blow the place to bits. Then we would send in bulldozers to scrape over the remains, and we would do the same to all the other houses in the area thought to have been the temporary or permanent addresses of the suicide bombers and their families. After decades of deranged attacks the Israelis have come to the conclusion that this is the best way to deter Palestinian families from nurturing these vipers in their

Friday

Lucy Kellaway

Diary – 15 July 2005

Wednesday last week, back when travelling on the Tube was no big deal, I was on the Central line on my way to White City to appear on a BBC2 lunchtime business programme whose usual select viewing audience was going to be greatly swelled that day by my mum and dad. The loudspeaker at the end of the carriage crackled to life: ‘We would like to inform all customers that London has been successful in its bid to host the 2012 Olympics.’ I looked at the line of people in seats opposite. They responded exactly as they would have done to ‘Stand clear of the doors. Mind the closing doors,

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 9 July 2005

The G8 leaders (of the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Canada and Russia) assembled in Gleneagles to discuss Africa, climate change and that sort of thing. The Live 8 concert for 200,000 in Hyde Park, intended to attract attention to poverty in Africa, passed off without incident. About 225,000 people walked through Edinburgh in a similar cause. The next day police arrested 100 in violent clashes with anarchists. Around Gleneagles 3,000 police, some from England, gathered; there was fighting in Stirling and nearby Auchterarder was overwhelmed. London was chosen as the venue for the Olympic Games in 2012. The government admitted that about half a million illegal immigrants

The Spectator

Feedback | 9 July 2005

The war will be won It is nonsense to suggest, as Michael Wolff tried last week (‘The nation wobbles’, 2 July), that the war in Iraq is almost lost. Terrorists are certainly doing their best to destroy the hopes of Iraq. But the resistance to them is strong. Mr Wolff dismisses the fact that eight million people defied the terrorists in January to vote as merely a ‘high moment of triumphalism’. So much for the freest election ever held in the Arab world. He claims that the Sunni 30 per cent of the country who did not vote are now ‘supporting an insurgency against both the occupiers and the rest

Robin Oakley

Fashion stakes

An American Treasury official was commenting recently on Tony Blair’s efforts to get one item on the G8 agenda. ‘We said no over dinner,’ he declared. ‘We said no on the ride home. We said no on the front porch, and still he said, “Come to bed.”’ By the time you read this we will know whether Mr Blair’s persistence has paid on an international financing facility for poorer nations. But persistence clearly pays on the racetrack. As an admirer of Terry Mills’s highly efficient stable, I am always delighted when the no-nonsense Epsom trainer gets his hands on a good one, as he has with the sprinter Resplendent Glory.

Taki

First-rate educator

A note from Jeremy Sykes enclosing an article about a friend of mine who died 40 years ago last Tuesday, on 5 July 1965. In his kind letter, Jeremy Sykes assumes that I knew the man who died in his Ferrari returning from a Parisian nightclub so long ago, and he is absolutely spot on. In fact, I was with Porfirio Rubirosa until 3 a.m. in New Jimmy’s, the legendary Montparnasse club, and had left only because I had to be on court in Nice the next morning for a tennis tournament. (That’s how we trained back then: in nightclubs doing a fast mumbo.) Rubi left Jimmy’s after 6 a.m.,