Society

Saturday

Frank Keating

At odds with England

The prediction racket is a sportswriting staple. When the World Cup kicked off three weekends ago this corner boldly blogged the prophecies for The Speccie’s website: that is, the England team would be home for the first week of Wimbledon; the Berlin final on 9 July would finish Argentina 2, Czech Republic 2 (the latter winning on penalties); and the likeliest lottery longshots to reach the semi-finals would be one of Switzerland, United States, Ivory Coast or Australia. Hey-nonny-no, you pays your money and you takes your choice. Just meaningless fun and, at about the same level, I suppose, as the barmy vote-catching gimmick which had grave tartan Chancellor Brown

Friday

Diary – 30 June 2006

I arrive in Las Vegas bleary-eyed and irritable, having been awake nearly 24 hours. I’m greeted by the familiar airport slot machines and garish show posters, but something is different. Then I realise it’s the slot machines: they’re functioning but they aren’t making any noise — no electronic jingles, no tinny fanfares. Is it possible they ‘mute’ the machines at night? A rare example of restraint in the 24/7 city. On the escalator a college-aged kid in front of me spies an advertisement for Celine Dion’s ‘A New Day’. ‘Oh God, that makes me want to go to Caesars so bad,’ he says. ‘I don’t like her that much,’ his

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody – 30 June 2006

MONDAYMr Maude stormed out of his Still A Very Long Way To Go Sub-Group meeting this morning. Normally, he is the only one who enjoys these but Nigel says that JRI (as the ‘Jonathan Ross Inquest’ must be referred to round the office) is really pushing him to the edge. Confused: the briefing on Saturday was that Dave’s appearance on — well, on that TV show — had been a triumph. Mr Letwin said that, in his judgment, the interview had ‘exuded perhaps the most tempting, appealing and altogether succulent aroma of any Cameron televisual appearance to date’. (Mr Letwin talks about ‘aromas’ a lot these days: Poppy says he

Thursday

Philip Bobbitt

We haven’t absorbed the lessons

Philip Bobbitt, the acclaimed author of ‘The Shield of Achilles’, says that the attacks were the work of an ultra-modern movement — closer to Mastercard than the IRA in structure. The worst is not inevitable: but it is distinctly possible With terror, the murderous act itself is always nihilistic; it is the reaction that gives the atrocity political meaning. The meaning of the London transport bombings is that a society accustomed to the predations of the IRA and, within living memory, the terror bombing of the second world war will not be easily shaken. This stoic reaction masks, however, several troubling, less reassuring reactions here in London and in the

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

‘Opinion-formers are Christophobic’

Is it ethical to snoop around an Archbishop’s sitting-room? Surely, I decide, a gentle stroll around furniture is OK: past a gilt mirror and a large crucifix, past a picture book of the Jewish Haggadah and over to a baby grand tucked into the curve of a bay window. There are two piano pieces on the stand and no sign of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor — it seems sensible, not sneaky, to see if the music offers any insight into the man’s mind. The first piece is Chopin’s Grande Valse Brillante; underneath it, Francis and Day’s Community Song Book with optional guitar accompaniment. Then, behind me, a voice, ‘Do you play

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

What really insults the Scots

The Scotch First Minister, Jack McConnell, will doubtless be huddled before a television screen today, dressed in a Portugal football shirt and perhaps munching salted cod, out of respect. An awful lot of his compatriots will be doing the same thing: the Treaty of Windsor, signed with Portugal in 1386, may well be the longest lasting alliance in English military history, but it will be superseded by the less formal, 90-minute Treaty of Gelsenkirchen between Scotland and Portugal. If the Portuguese win their World Cup football game against England, there will be immense jubilation north of the border — free drinks all round, the waving of the Portuguese flag out

Wednesday

Bella Pollen

Borderline

For a soulless city, Phoenix certainly has an interesting airport. The last time I was here, supposedly on business, I had my boarding pass issued by a vampire and found myself being herded through security by an official dressed as a giant chicken. Then it was Halloween, but here we are on an ordinary June afternoon and circumstances seem no less strange. I am stuck in a lift between arrivals and car rental with a Mexican cradling a large, foul-smelling ice chest in his arms. What’s in the box? I ask. ‘A feesh,’ he whispers, ‘for my wife and children. I catch him in Veracruz.’ A sea bass, you understand,

Judi Bevan

‘I’m absolutely not interested in why it can’t happen’

Charles Dunstone wants Carphone Warehouse to be the Tesco of telephony. ‘You grow your market share, provide the best service at the best price and keep investing the gains you make into the business to make prices even more competitive.’ It is a typical Dunstone statement: simple to say, hard to do. It is no coincidence that his chairman at Carphone is the former Tesco buying director John Gildersleeve, part of the team that helped Tesco overtake Sainsbury’s a decade ago. ‘Charles has a remarkable hunger to do the right thing for customers,’ says Gildersleeve, echoing the Tesco mantra. ‘He has not got a big ego that gets in the

Robert Beaumont

The Knightsbridge of the North — and the doughnut of deprivation that still surrounds it

Had Lou Reed lived in Leeds rather than New York, his signature tune ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ could just as easily have been inspired by the derelict, crime-infested Holbeck area of the city as by the mean streets of Harlem and the Bronx. In the Seventies and Eighties Holbeck, just a five-minute stroll from the city centre, was Leeds’s guilty secret. It was the haunt of drug addicts, prostitutes, alcoholics and criminals, while its sprawling, post-apocalyptic landscape was a chilling study in urban decay.This didn’t seem to matter to most people, least of all to the city council. But for students of history it was a terrible shame. For

Allister Heath

Only fools and Europhiles

Every time one of his doomed money-making schemes collapsed in ignominy, a deluded Derek Trotter in the BBC’s marvellous Only Fools and Horses would insist that despite this latest setback, ‘this time next year we will be millionaires’. Few Brussels apparatchiks have ever ventured to Peckham, but they seem to have learnt a trick or two from David Jason’s character, as can be seen by their touching conviction that an economic renaissance in the eurozone is always just around the corner. In the same way that the Trotters’ luck sometimes turned and profits briefly flowed in, only to be lost again in richly comic circumstances, the eurozone occasionally enjoys an

Jaspistos

As the bishop said to the…

In Competition No. 2449 you were invited to provide an Alice in Wonderland-style conversation between two chess pieces, either in prose or in verse. Le beau valet de coeur et la dame de piqueCausent sinistrement de leurs amours défunts.It was this wonderful image of Baudelaire’s that suggested to me the notion of a conversation between chess pieces. Among those of you who gave your entries a contemporary slant, I particularly enjoyed Tim Raikes’s lines: ‘But is that a man by the shrubs I can seeHaranguing a blooming camellia tree?’‘Now that…,’ said the Queen as she fingered her ring,‘That is my son, and he wants to be King.’The prizewinners, printed below,

Saturday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 24 June 2006

As a parent of GCSE children, I now see clearly that modern education has abolished the summer term. In all the teenage years except the first, there are public exams to be done. These are spread out, beginning in May, and are pretty much finished this week. The run-up to them is dominated by the ever-growing burden of coursework and, naturally, by revision. As soon as the pupils finish their exams they are sent home, since no power on earth can make them stay. For those of us who pay boarding fees, this early departure means that the cost per child of time actually spent on the premises is now

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 24 June 2006

Age of innocence? From Mrs Sam JettubreckSir: Having lived in the same street for many years and seen the area gradually taken over by feral youths, I wonder what Peter J.M. Wayne might suggest I do to stem the rising tide of crime in my street? ‘These are children …for goodness sake,’ wrote Wayne in his review of David Fraser’s A Land Fit for Criminals (Books, 17 June). So that makes their vile insults, burglary and aggression to the community acceptable? When a 14-year-old boy next throws a brick at my windows, and smashes glass in the nearby park so that my grandchildren cut their feet, or when next I

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 24 June 2006

Q. One of my husband’s best friends is married to someone who, we know from past experience, is too demanding and controlling to be good company at a house party.  The couple often go their separate ways on holiday and might well not object if he were to come without her to our house in France — but it seems a bit crude to invite him to come on his own. Can you suggest a tactful way in which we can get him alone?  Name and address withheld A. Go through the list of fellow guests you might also invite. Choose someone Mr P has never met — let’s call

Taki

Bright young things

Suleiman Khan, son of Imran and Jemima, got me out late last Saturday, after a fast-bowling Ben Elliot had failed to do so despite employing all sorts of tricks against the poor little Greek boy, who only took up cricket aged 64. There was only one thing wrong. Suleiman is nine years old and less than five feet tall, whereas I am 69 and 5-foot-nine. The little blighter is a spin-bowler and he confused me enough to ensure that I was caught out. Mind you, the Hanbury team, which I play for, won over Zac Goldsmith’s Eleven with some brilliant cricketing by Mark Shand, Dave Cottrell, Harry Worcester and others

Frank Keating

TV loves tennis

The Wimbledon tennis begins sharp at 2 p.m. Monday and, as has often been the case, competes with a haughtily oblivious lack of concern against the football World Cup in Germany. The tennis will make for far better telly, and see if I’m not right a fortnight today when what Wimbers still refers to as ‘the gentlemen’s singles final’ will serve as afternoon overture to the evening’s clamorous soccer climax in Berlin. I find it hard to believe now that some years ago when the two championships coincided I had to fly back and forth to cover the pick of the matches in the so incongruently different games. Other times, assigned

Friday

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody – 23 June 2006

MondayAm contemplating a serious hissy fit. On phone this morning briefing Dave’s family speech, dutifully telling a v. rude journalist that ‘this is all about traditional Tory values’, when suddenly I hear Poppy on the other line, in full mockney accent, saying: ‘Yeah, that’s right, this spells the end of traditional Tory values.’ This is outrageous! Why is it me who gets lumped with the boring ‘core’ briefing whilst Poppy gets to spin the opposite line about tax breaks for gays?! Is it because she wears drainpipe jeans to the office? I can be daring and street too, actually. Beneath this perfect blow-dry there’s a liberal slacker just fighting to

Diary – 23 June 2006

Every year, under the terms of a 17th-century benefaction, Jesus College, Cambridge must hold a feast (the Rustat Feast) and invite three College guests. An invitation comes out of the blue from the Vice-Master, Stephen Heath, and — since my husband is an old Jesuan and fancied a trip down memory lane — we accept. All the Fellows are free to invite one person along. Looking down the list of guest biographies before dinner, I am thrilled to think of the convocation of specialists that is about to materialise and more than a little daunted at the prospect of making conversation. Will I be tongue-tied before Ullrich Steiner, professor of

Wednesday

Simon Hoggart

Spectator Wine Club June Offer

Yapp Brothers is one of the country’s more distinguished wine merchants. Yapp Brothers is one of the country’s more distinguished wine merchants. It has a short but choice list, almost all coming from the Loire or southern France. Robin Yapp, who is now retired, used to select all the wines by touring vineyards, some in appellations so small that few outside France, or even in France, had heard of them. Deals to buy the produce of a tiny property would be secured over a loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese and a bottle. The results were as far away from mass-produced supermarket plonk as it is possible to imagine.

Brian Power

The forecast is disaster

The oracle bones in Peter Hessler’s book were discovered in the 19th century, near Anyang in the North China Plain. They were the shoulder blades of oxen and deer and the carapaces of turtles. Archaeologists dated them to about 1300 BC in the Bronze Age. The bones had been used for divination. Questions in ancient Chinese were inscribed on them; they were then heated with a live coal, and the replies of the gods were indicated by the shape of the cracks produced. The replies were brief; ‘disaster’ was a favourite word. Peter Hessler’s account of his fascin- ation with archaeological finds is inter- woven with his writings as a