Society

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 17 June 2006

My husband suddenly found it necessary to discuss some hair-raising medical developments with other doctors in the sunshine of an out-of-season ski resort in the Pyrenees, and for once he let me come too, and enjoy some healthy walks while the menfolk were playing at Frankenstein. Perhaps he had heard they have reintroduced wild bears in the Pyrenees. Well I wasn’t eaten by a bear, but I did get an appetising sample of a language that I hardly knew existed. I don’t mean Basque, which is a language that does not belong to the Indo–European group. This one does, and it is called Aranese (Aranes by its speakers). It is

Taki

American blunders

From my open window in Cadogan Gardens I can hear a woman’s lovely voice singing something from Mozart’s Requiem; at least I think it’s Mozart’s oeuvre. One can never go wrong with Wolfie at a hot and brilliant sunny day’s end, especially when the rest of the world’s slobs are out there singing football songs and other such rubbish. God, I find football boring. Even more boring than clay-court tennis. The only team I’m rooting for is Germany, but it has nothing to do with the Wehrmacht. The Germans are playing attacking football, and will pay the price for it, but who cares? Better a German blitzkrieg that ends in

Simon Courtauld

Free for now

If, as I was told the other day, much of the frozen chicken and duck meat brought into this country comes from the Far East, it may be that some of us have already been exposed to the risk of contracting avian flu. But I don’t suppose that this will weigh with the government when there is another major scare — a couple of chickens found to have the dreaded virus in a heavily populated part of southern England. With its instinct for over-reaction, the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs will order that all poultry be kept indoors. When shall we then be able to enjoy a

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 17 June 2006

Major Bruce Shand, father of the Duchess of Cornwall, who died at the weekend, was a man of great charm. He had a very attractive combination of enough confidence to put you at your ease and enough diffidence not to seem arrogant. In old age he had a lovely, interesting, funny face — creased, like a more military, bucolic version of W.H. Auden. Although he did not seem in the least bitter, it hurt him a great deal that the press persecuted his daughter — bringing grief also to his wife — for so long. But he stuck to the old principle, which he referred to as ‘FHB’ (‘Family Hold

The Spectator

Leading article: From Guantanamo to Forest Gate

After the initial horror — 9/11, Madrid, 7 July The purpose of terrorism is not only to cause bloodshed, but also to spray psychological shrapnel across the societies it attacks and seeks to subvert. After the initial horror — 9/11, Madrid, 7 July — the strategic objective is to force democracies, in their rage and panic, to make mistakes, to falter, and to resort to internal squabbling. Action is supplanted by introspection. It is this that links the botched police raid in Forest Gate, east London, on 2 June with the suicide of three inmates at Guantanamo Bay, who were discovered hanged in their cells on 10 June. The next day, Colleen

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Time for a naked protest against global cant and in support of Jeremy Clarkson

Time for a naked protest against global cant and in support of Jeremy Clarkson I was all set to join some of my more liberated neighbours on York’s Naked Bike Ride last Friday, until I discovered that it was yet another protest against ‘global oil dependency’. The debate about climate change, carbon emissions and who is doing what to the planet has reached such a fever pitch of self-righteousness and middle-class guilt that it is time for sensible people to start backpedalling. The first thing that made me want to launch my own naked protest against global cant was the pronouncement by Dr Antonio Filippone of Manchester University that if

Frank Keating

The history boys

Last Saturday afternoon in Frankfurt’s tent-like Waldstadion, British football writing’s dumpling eminence Malcolm Brodie, 80 next birthday, laid out his pad and his pencils at his pressbox desk. ‘What’s new?’ he could have been excused for muttering in that tinny Ulster snort of his, but the rheumy eyes, deep set in his weathered, walnutty old face, were bright with anticipation for the start of the Belfast Telegraph man’s 14th World Cup. It was all of 52 summers ago that Malcolm first picked up his telephone to dictate a report of a World Cup match — Scotland’s narrow 0–1 defeat by Austria in Zurich in 1954’s fifth World Cup in Switzerland.

Friday

Geordie Greig

Diary – 16 June 2006

I feel something of a gooseberry as Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher sit snugly side by side on a sofa in the upstairs room of The Ivy. They are sort of flirting, bonding over old times and cold climes as the magic of their relationship is quickly rekindled. At one moment they clutch each other’s hands, giggling at how they fought their corners in their early talks at Chequers. It is moving to see such intimacy and warmth between these two old titans who together with Ronald Reagan literally changed the world. My fellow hosts, Evgeny and Alexander Lebedev, and I all fade into the background as the Iron Lady

Tamzin Lightwater

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody – 16 June 2006

Hot: where’s the glacier when you need it? MONDAY Hot: where’s the glacier when you need it? Am sick of trawling internet for violent lyrics Dave can use for campaign against rap: just because someone called ‘Lethal Bizzle’ said he was a ‘donut’ — I don’t even understand why this is an insult. Various references to cracking skulls, shooting up and hanging with crews — or should I say ‘crewz’? Found repeated use of ‘their’ instead of ‘there’, possessive its with an apostrophe etc. Honeztly, Dave should launch a campaign against bad spelling in hip-hop if you ask me. Thankfully, we are moving on soon. Our next campaign is an

Wednesday

Tim Walker

In praise of the patriotic playwright

Ronald Harwood, the Oscar-winning writer of The Pianist and The Dresser, tells Tim Walker that he is delighted to be in demand — but never wants to be ‘fashionable’ I first came face to face with Ronald Harwood three years ago as we were waiting for our coats after the party to mark the opening of the Saatchi Gallery in the old County Hall building in London. Two disgruntled lines of people had converged and he thought I was queue-barging and I thought he was. It could have gone either way. Either a big row or the start of a friendship. Happily, it was the latter. Harwood does charm but

Theodore Dalrymple

Medicine and letters | 14 June 2006

My copy of Schopenhauer’s essays was owned before me also by a doctor, J. Raymond Hinshaw, MD. Hinshaw, a former Rhodes Scholar, was professor of surgery at Rochester, New York, and an expert in the use of lasers in surgery upon which subject he wrote a book. He died in 1993, aged 70, and the postgraduate medical centre in Rochester is named in his honour. I am not sure how far Schopenhauer is suitable reading for a doctor. Whatever their mental reservations, doctors are committed to optimism, to the belief that life can be made better or at least more bearable. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, sees human life as

Jaspistos

Bizarre books | 14 June 2006

In Competition No. 2447 you were invited to supply an imaginary extract from one of three real book titles: The Philosophy of Beards, Five Years of Hell in a Country Parish, Unmentionable Cuisine. The first title, by Thomas S. Gowing, was published in Ipswich by J. Haddock c. 1850; the second, by the Revd Edward Fitzgerald Synnott, published in 1920, describes the torments of a vicar in the parish of Rusper in West Sussex which end in his being acquitted of charges of impropriety; the third, by Calvin W. Schwabe, contains, among others, recipes for silkworm omelette and red ant chutney. The second title failed to elicit much entertainment from

Judi Bevan

The Hooray who became a middle-class style guru

A black-helmeted cyclist half-circles in the middle of the road and wobbles to a halt to greet me in front of the Boden headquarters in North Acton. Johnnie Boden, eponymous founder and chairman of the mail-order-clothes-for-middle-class-families business, is arriving at work. Comparisons with David Cameron inevitably spring to mind. Boden also went to Eton and was a prominent member of the hell-raising Bullingdon Club at Oxford. Both he and Cameron have classy, team-playing wives and three young children apiece. There, however, the similarity ends. At just 45, Boden is a few years older than Cameron and diffident rather than slick. While the Tory leader embraced the world of business and

Saturday

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 10 June 2006

Isn’t it time now that the Conservatives fulfilled their new leader’s pledge. Although we send 250 police in search of possible terrorists in east London, our government takes a completely opposite attitude to the subject whenever it’s Irish. After the IRA was involved in the murder of Robert McCartney and the robbery of the Northern Bank, the US government last year reimposed the ban on Sinn Fein fundraising in the United States. At the time Mr Blair supported this, but now we are in the extraordinary situation in which the Americans, who since 9/11 have tried to be consistent in their attitudes to terrorism, object more strongly to the IRA

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 10 June 2006

Schools for success From Barnaby Lenon Sir: Robert Yates rightly explains that grammar schools were the path to academic success and a good job for clever working-class children in the period 1935 to 1975 (‘Grammar schools are liberal, Mr Cameron’, 3 June). To these should be added the many direct-grant schools, independent schools that charged fees but took clever children from low-income homes on local authority grants. They were the most successful schools in Britain academically and of course had children from a wide range of social backgrounds. For example, in south London, a relatively low-income area, these included such schools as Dulwich College, Eltham College and the Whitgift Foundation

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 10 June 2006

Q. Recently visiting the city where a niece of whom I am very fond is in her final year as an undergraduate, I asked if she would like to meet for lunch or a coffee. I was taken aback and a little hurt to be told that, as she would have been celebrating handing in her dissertation the previous evening, she expected to have a hangover and did not therefore feel up to accepting my invitation. To my surprise, my sister-in-law, who had been consulted on the matter, encouraged her to take this approach. How should I have responded? Disinheritance seems excessive, but how should I have conveyed to my

Michael Henderson

The madness begins

Overture and beginners, please. This is it, for real, and mercifully the hysterical months of jingo-jangle jibber-jabber are stilled and silenced into concentration today when, at long last, the England football team plays the first of its three qualifiers in the World Cup against Paraguay in Frankfurt. To reach the sudden-death knockout stages in a fortnight’s time, England also need, as they say, ‘a result’ against Trinidad & Tobago in Nuremberg on Thursday, and against  Sweden in Cologne on Tuesday week. The strident tedium of the trailers has been excruciating. Now all shall be revealed. Will the defence dither and drift? Has the once dagger-sharp Lampard refound his edge; Gerrard his

Deborah Ross

Restaurants | 10 June 2006

I try to make a booking at Dans Le Noir?, the new London restaurant where diners eat in total darkness and are served by blind and visually impaired staff, although I still don’t think I’ve quite worked out what the point is exactly. Anyway, I call and speak to a very nice-sounding Frenchman who asks if he might call me back. ‘Iz just that I cannot find ze bookings book just now.’ When he doesn’t return the call, I email via the restaurant’s website. No reply. I am beginning to think that this is why blind people, on the whole, don’t make especially good restauranteurs. However, this doesn’t mean I

Taki

Boat people

On board S/Y Bushido We hit a hurricane while sailing off the coast of the Riviera last week, or, to be more precise, a hurricane called Tim Hoare hit us. I have never in my long life met anyone quite like Tim. The words tumble out so fast, enwrapped in alliteration and so clogged with onomatopoeia, that a foreign-born like me misses about three out of every four words. Bursting with bombast, generously pronouncing Bushido among the most beautiful boats afloat, Tim then casually informed us how his private jet had an engine blow up in flight and how for 20 long minutes they looked like goners. Even worse, he

The Spectator

Water, water, everywhere

The emergency water-rationing measures now affecting 13 million people across the south-east have rekindled memories of the last serious drought to afflict the country, in 1976. Britain in many ways is an unrecognisable country from the Britain of 30 years ago, when scraggy figures in flared trousers queued up at the standpipes. But one thing hasn’t changed. In spite of privatisation, the public water supply remains a creaking service using the same old Victorian mains pipes and the same system of demand management as it did 30 years ago: one where stuffy bureaucrats are dispatched to jolly us into public-spirited acts like bathing only every other day and leaving our