Society

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 5 February 2005

Radio Four had a trailer programme for a series it will run in August called Word 4 Word. (Yes, it is a bit silly to have a visual pun on the wireless.) It is intended to contribute to Leeds University’s new dialect map of the United Kingdom, a splendid project. I am not sure how much Radio Four’s findings are contributing so far to the Leeds survey, since the programme encouraged interviewees to come up with what were in effect nonce-terms and jocular slang coinages. An example was five-finger disco for shoplifting — not a lexical item that is likely to find a long-lived place on the nation’s verbal atlas.

Jeremy Clarke

Under a lowering sky

Back on track with the abstinence regime after the debacle at the dog lunch, I treated myself last weekend to a guided walk on Dartmoor. The walk, advertised in the Dartmoor Visitor, was called ‘Crock of Gold and Childe’s Tomb’. Twenty Gore-Tex-clad people, some with ski poles, plus yours truly, dressed appropriately perhaps for a longish journey on the District Line, met at Princetown, under the massive granite walls of Dartmoor Prison. The guide introduced himself as Brian. He was clean-shaven, 50-ish and if you closed your eyes when he spoke he might have been Alan Bennett. The first piece of information he gave us was that there were nine

Deborah Ross

Restaurants | 5 February 2005

Off to the Gun, the Docklands gastropub. It’s a brisk walk from Surrey Quays station. Well, I say brisk but of course it is impossible to get anywhere briskly these days, what with the swarms of swarming immigrants swarming all over the streets and everything. They are everywhere. Everywhere! Indeed, just this morning I shook three out of my hair and if I’ve caught them, then you can almost guarantee the rest of the family have them too. So it’ll be off to Boots for that special stinky shampoo and then all that combing, combing, combing. Such a faff. I blame our son. Attending an inner-city multicultural school as he

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 5 February 2005

Dear Mary… Q. I am becoming increasingly annoyed by friends and acquaintances who think it is acceptable to snort coke. At civilised dinner parties, we find increasingly that someone will bring it out in a pathetic attempt to show they are still young and groovy and rather good fun. Living in seedy west London and working with people whose relations have been murdered in turf wars, I am becoming more and more incensed at the irresponsibility of this behaviour by people who should know better but are well protected from the consequences of their actions. How do we deal with this without ruining everybody’s party? Name and address withheld A.

Diary – 5 February 2005

It has been a most nerve-racking week, whose trauma has seemed quite impervious even to the ministrations of Valium. I speak, of course, of my concern for Katy Harris and Martin Platt, the Mandy Smith and Bill Wyman of Coronation Street, who have just unleashed news of Katy’s surprise pregnancy on her psychotic father Tommy. It will all end, I learn from the tabloids, in patricide then suicide — so I do hope Spectator readers weren’t hoping for the highlights from last week’s London social scene. Anyone expecting a diarist to forego death in Weatherfield for some book launch has either not read my column in the Guardian, and assumes

Jaspistos

Peccavi

In Competition No. 2377 you were invited to supply a poem describing your regrettable failure to keep a recent New Year’s resolution. ‘Indeed, indeed, repentance oft before/ I swore — but was I sober when I swore?’ asks FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat, or as old Ovid put it, ‘Video meliora, proboque; deteriora sequor.’ Among your mainly banal broken resolutions concerning drinking, smoking, dieting and fitness, it was a relief to find some more unusual aspirations: Paul Griffin resolved to ‘see the meaning in these winter days’, Josh Ekroy to be late for every date, and Shirley Curran to put the cat out before going to bed. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25

Stephen Glover

Is Murdoch about to cut the cover price of the dumbed-down Times?

To read the mind of Rupert Murdoch is difficult and not necessarily pleasant — difficult because he is cleverer than almost any other publisher who has ever lived, and not necessarily pleasant because he is nearly always planning to do someone down. But students of the man generally agree that the only thing that drives him is circulation. It is all that matters. There is no point in having a low-circulation quality newspaper if it can be turned into a higher-circulation title of less quality. That is why he slashed the cover price of the Times in 1993, which more than doubled the sales of the paper and accelerated its

The Spectator

Baghdad spring

For a negative interpretation of events in which the rest of the world can see nothing but good, the Guardian’s editorial pages are much to be recommended. Sure enough, on Monday, while millions of Iraqis were waking up with stained fingers to the first day of democratic Iraq and enjoying generous tributes to their courage from sometime opponents of war such as Vladimir Putin, Salim Lone, the former director for the UN’s special mission in Iraq, was whining in the Guardian about the unfairness of it all. The risks taken by voters, candidates and election organisers, he declared, were in vain: ‘A high turnout does not change the fact that

Interconnect

A crushing defeat for the insurgents

Tikrit Sitting beneath a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt pinned to the wall of his office deep inside a former Baathist presidential palace, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Stockmoe lolled back in his chair and roared with laughter at the fatal idiocy of so many of his enemies. ‘We’ve had well over a dozen examples of these knuckleheads doing stupid things,’ he chuckled. ‘Here’s a funny story. There were three brothers down in Baghdad who had a mortar tube and were firing into the Green Zone. They didn’t have a baseplate so they were storing the mortar rounds in the car engine compartment and the rounds got overheated. Two of these clowns dropped them

Saturday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 29 January 2005

The government ardently denies that its proposal to allow 24-hour drinking will lead to streets filled with drunks. It then legislates to, er, deal with streets filled with drunks. Nothing could more perfectly exemplify Plato’s brilliant image of law-makers as people ‘slashing away at a kind of Hydra’ — the many-headed monster which grew two heads for every one chopped off. In his Republic, Plato (429–347 bc) argues that it is the mark of a badly governed society to need constant rafts of legislation. He likens such societies to the sick, who imagine that they will get better by stuffing themselves with varieties of medicines, when they should be changing

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 29 January 2005

Do I, asks Mr Peter Andrews, who lives romantically at the New River Head, know the origin of the phrase ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’? Does anyone know, really? One can judge its vintage from the fossilised word omnibus; one would never say ‘man on the Clapham bus’. I had thought that it was coined by Edmund Yates (1831–96), the rackety (brought up above the Adelphi Theatre, bankrupt, four months for criminal libel, died after an attack at the Garrick Theatre) journalist. The trouble is that in the phrase as attributed to him by George Augustus Sala (1828–95), that other rackety (son of an actress, drunken, imprisoned for debt,

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 29 January 2005

The government proposed that foreigners suspected of terrorism and held illegally at Belmarsh prison should be let out but somehow put under restriction. Four British citizens held in America’s prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba were flown home and arrested. Mr Michael Howard, the leader of the Conservative party, said he sought a substantial reduction in immigration, which has averaged 157,000 a year under Labour; if the Tories won the election they would withdraw Britain from the 1951 UN convention on refugees. But European Union officials said that EU law prohibited Britain from setting a quota for refugees. The government revealed the wording of a referendum to be held, probably

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 29 January 2005

Immigration is an issue like new housing in the Green Belt — governments have to permit it and they have to try to restrict it. This is because the interest of those already present — the indigenous population, the nimby houseowner — is damaged by the arrival of many more people and yet, at the same time, it is also helped. People may say that they want a ban on immigration, but if that happened, they would quickly discover that they could not find enough building workers, waiters, cleaners, plumbers to satisfy their wants. The government is probably right to say that the immigration it has recently permitted from Eastern

Simon Courtauld

Don’t be fobbed off

There is plenty of life, as well as recent death, in a fish market. For its colour and noise and atmosphere the market by the Rialto bridge in Venice is as fascinating to me as a visit to the Scuola degli Schiavoni to see the Carpaccios. To buy, or just to admire, the fish landed on the Spanish Mediterranean coast I would highly recommend the Boqueria in Barcelona; and there is no better place than the wholesale market in Vigo to see the variety of Atlantic fish which are unloaded on to the quay throughout the night. Though I have never been to the famous market at Boulogne, a friend

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 29 January 2005

Dear Mary… Q. I am a 22-year-old man and I recently left university. While I had thought that I would at least be engaged to be married by now, the truth is that I find it almost impossible to date girls. It seems to me that girls of my age adopt a herd-like strategy when they go out, making it terrifying or threatening for boys to approach them individually. When you do so, if you talk to one girl, the others in the herd all stare expectantly or titter. On top of this, every time I pass a news-stand, I see girls’ magazines shouting out ‘demand four orgasms a night

Frank Keating

Ports in a storm

Once again, soccer’s top-flight League contests in both England and Scotland seem condemned to be unchallenging two-horse races. The respective managers of Arsenal and Manchester United have been told to cool down their playground animosities, and we shall see this Tuesday evening if they can manage it. The singular Alan Shearer has at last potted his 400th goal; the Geordie is an old-time English centre-forward of authentic vintage, true inheritor of the line from Bloomer and Dean through Lawton and Lofthouse. Which leaves an uncluttered stage for the ancient FA Cup competition to fill with some bold strokes of genuine theatre in the fourth-round ties this weekend. Worries about the

Taki

Numero uno Numero uno

Gstaad Sir Roger and Lady Moore braved a snowstorm but made it on time driving from Crans-Montana. Sir Peter Tapsell flew in from Britain, snow or no snow on the runways. The poor little Greek boy had to travel less than a mile, but was the last to get there. While Gstaad was being covered by the thickest snow we’ve had in years, some 50 lucky souls dined with the finest product of this region, the one and only Ruedy Mullener, the uncrowned King of Gstaad and its environs. The occasion was Ruedy’s 80th birthday, and some enterprising young man should try to bottle him and sell him to Hollywood.

Petronella Wyatt

The race card

My 17-year-old niece recently won a place at Trinity College, Oxford. Although she is one of the brightest girls at her private school, and often works through the night, she was almost convinced that her application would not be accepted. This was because clever, white children from middle-class backgrounds are frequently told that they will be overlooked in favour of foreign, less privileged offspring. This fear turned out to be unfounded. My niece considered the selection process fair and scrupulous. I was thus surprised when Michael Howard decided to play the race card the other day, or rather to play the whole deck. Why this sudden zero-tolerance attitude towards immigration?

Miriam Gross

Diary – 29 January 2005

The Telegraph Group, for which I work, happens to use the same taxi firm as the BBC, and in the days when I was lucky enough to be driven to my office at Canary Wharf, I made friends with several of the firm’s regular drivers. In the course of our chats I couldn’t help learning something about the habits of some BBC executives — though these discreet drivers never, unfortunately, named names. Shopping trips, taking children to school, theatre outings and drives to the country were among the services provided. The drivers also spent many hours waiting for their passengers. So I wasn’t all that surprised by the recent revelations