Society

Saturday

Frank Keating

Molineux memories

There is a calming domestic languor about new year sport. Pleasant. Like things used t’be. Olde tyme talk is of minnows and giant-slayers and the ‘magic’ of the Cup, and this weekend’s FA Cup third-round matches are bound to provide — as they have been doing for a century and beyond — a few memorable little asterisks on provincial calendars. Like it or lump it, the big-time Premiership dandies have to revert to their muddy roots. The European swanks of Italy and Spain have shut up shop for the January snows, but their handful of strutting English counterparts have to knuckle down, get their knees dirty in parochial challenge, and

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 8 January 2005

Dear Mary… Q. My parents own a house in Cornwall which they normally rent out at New Year for a huge sum of money. This year they very kindly allowed me to have it and to invite ten friends from uni. It all went really well and everyone had a brilliant time. My problem is that although my guests all thanked me — mostly orally, in some cases by texting — I am worried that none of them will get round to thanking my parents in writing. It may not even occur to them to do so. How can I tactfully remind them to get on with these bread-and-butter letters?

Jeremy Paxman

Diary – 8 January 2005

This diary is what happens if the editor fails to get a lobotomy. I had rung him to ask whether he’d like to grace Newsnight and the nation with his views on the affair between the former home secretary and the publisher of this journal. His response, verbatim, was: ‘Er, cripes. I think I’d need a prefrontal lobotomy before I did that,’ followed by, ‘You wouldn’t do a diary for us, would you, old boy?’ For those of us who do not have access to The Spectator’s water-cooler and whatever it contains, this is akin to being invited to appear on Trisha. But, as it happens, I had a bit

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 8 January 2005

The Archbeard of Canterbury has proclaimed that the tsunami disaster in Asia justifies people’s doubts about the existence of any God, let alone a good one. If he needs comfort on the matter, Seneca (the millionaire philosopher and adviser to Nero, d. ad 65) will provide it. Since the world and its gods were formed at the same time — when Uranus (Sky) mated with Gaia (Earth) — the gods and nature were inseparably linked. When nature therefore turned violent, that proved the existence of the god of that particular phenomenon — how else could nature act with such terrifying power? The question then was: why had the god so

Jaspistos

Hard work

In Competition No. 2373 you were given Gilbert’s line ‘A policeman’s lot is not a happy one’, and asked for a poem beginning the same way but with some other worker replacing ‘policeman’ and (if you like) using ‘lot’ again for ‘one’. Unhappy is the lot of the comper and competition-setter, of course, but I was impressed by the range of your other unfortunate toilers — gorillagram-deliverers, apostles, toddlers, wheel-clampers, goalies, newsreaders, pedants, backbenchers, porn stars and greengrocers (spelling problems). God bless us every one, as Tiny Tim said. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the Cobra Premium beer goes to Martin Parker. A poet’s lot is not

Paul Johnson

The decline and fall of the femme fatale

My old friend Peregrine Worsthorne was deploring the other day the decline in the quality of courtesans. And it is true that those who get themselves into the headlines today, either by the voracity of their sexual appetite or their status as mistresses of prominent men, do not strike one as notably interesting or desirable. But were they ever? And what is a courtesan anyway? A lady of easy virtue with court connections? A royal whore? Nell Gwyn did not hesitate to use the word, calling herself ‘the Protestant whore’ to an angry mob hunting for well-connected papists. There is in the Correr Museum in Venice a suggestive panel painting,

Christopher Fildes

Instant ethics — just open the package and give your conscience a break

How convenient it would be if we could find something out of a package — a computer programme, presumably — to do our conscience’s work for us. Then we could switch off and stop worrying. Happily, in the world of investment, this need has been met, with the invention of ethical funds, armed with ethical codebooks. These are the investors’ equivalent of buying bubble baths from the Body Shop — a tepid glow of self-satisfaction comes with them. The Financial Times even has an ethical investment index, smugly entitled FTSE4Good. Along the way, ethics have been codified and redefined to fit the package. Now investors in Framlington’s Health Fund find

Sholto Byrne

The faithful departed

‘Where have all the Methodists gone?’ This question, posed in the kind of fusty second-hand bookshops where those behind the counter actually read, or at least take an interest in, the wares they sell, led to a baffled silence. The toppling rows of volumes may have contained theses on John Wesley, or detailed accounts of the fierce schismatic battles that split Methodism again and again in the 19th century. But on the current state of the Methodist Church, they had nothing to say. Eventually a fellow browser offered an opinion. ‘To America?’ Here, when we talk of Methodism, it is nearly always in the past, of its role in the

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Globophobia | 8 January 2005

The national ‘giveathon’ provoked by Boxing Day’s tsunami in the Indian Ocean is an admirable response to an emergency. Rather less can be said of the thousands who fell for this year’s fashionable Christmas present: sending a goat to the Third World. Oxfam, one of several charities to run a ‘give a goat’ scheme, says it has sent 30,000 animals at £25 a time, many of them to East Africa. ‘How many times have you bought your uncle a tie, a plant or a book that he doesn’t need?’ reads the bumf on the Oxfam website. ‘The Oxfam catalogue can solve your problems by allowing you to buy him a

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of 2004

JANUARY Lord Hutton’s report declared that the government was not ‘dishonourable, underhand or duplicitous’. Mr Mikhail Saakashvili, who had led popular demonstrations in Georgia against Mr Eduard Shevardnadze, won the presidential elections. Hundreds of reformist candidates were banned from standing in the Iranian elections. Hope was given up of hearing any signal from Beagle 2, the British craft sent to Mars. Dr Harold Shipman, who had murdered at least 215 patients, was found hanged in his prison cell. Parmalat, the Italian food group, was exposed in a vast fraud. The dollar weakened against the euro. Police in Madhya Pradesh were paid a bonus of 35p a month to grow moustaches

Peter Jones

It was tribalism that finished Rome, and it will finish Brussels too

Whenever the subject of the EU comes up, someone is bound to compare it to the Roman empire. If the comparison relates to the beginning and subsequent development of that empire, it fails. But the end of the Roman empire in the West in the 5th century ad may well offer quite a good model of how EUthanasia will set in. Rome entered the imperial stakes after defeating Carthage in the first Punic war (264–241 bc). The two greatest powers of the western Mediterranean had been fighting it out over control of Sicily, which became Rome’s first provincia when Carthage surrendered. After the second Punic war and the defeat of

The Spectator

Feedback | 1 January 2005

We are not evil I am sorry that Steve (‘We are all Pagans now’, 18/25 December) believes that we Dominicans are evil. I expect he thinks that we are so awful because we are supposed to have run the Inquisition. Actually, there were many different ‘inquisitions’, some run by the Church and others by the State. Sometimes they did terrible things, and we Dominicans should repent of our part in their cruelty. But we did not generally run the inquisitions and were not even the order most involved. Witches should look back to the inquisitions almost with affection, since wherever they operated there was vastly less persecution of witches. They

Taki

That’s Rich

New York Lest there be some of you that missed it, a lifelong dirty dealer is walking around us free as a bird, and there’s nothing any of us who don’t flout the law can do about it. Let’s start the new year right and not be beastly to Mr Marc Rich. He is the man who was pardoned by Bill Clinton on the last day of the Draft Dodger’s presidency. (Rich was indicted on tax-evasion and other crimes but had fled the United States and was living in Switzerland as a very rich fugitive.) When the Clinton pardon came through, all hell broke loose. It was considered too venal,

Petronella Wyatt

Peacocks on parade

So many outfits in so many shapes and colours; so many ruched tight trousers, or legs encased in flowing chiffon; sharp jackets in claret or blue velvet; frilled, slit skirts and shirts with enormous bows. Yes, men have worn all these since the 14th century, until the day when it was decreed that the male sex, when socialising, should no longer have fun dressing up. Now, the party season is heaven for a woman’s wardrobe. It is the time to get out that slightly outré dress you haven’t worn all year, or that interestingly shaped top in some gloriously indeterminate colour. Then you may curl your hair, douse yourself in

Frank Keating

Testing time for Sky

With 2004’s multinational motley done, dusted and delivered, other activities can bloom. The jingo-jangle palaver and babel of the Olympics, European soccer, and the Ryder Cup are now consigned to musty files, and a happy new year is herald to less hyperbole and ballyhoo. The world athletics gala at Helsinki in August will work up a passing tizz as to who’s on drugs or not, and whether Kelly Holmes will be fit or bothered enough to make the starting line or, indeed, if Paula Radcliffe is ditto enough to make the Finnish finishing line. The new year’s three most delectable asterisks for your diary warm the midsummer: rugby’s British Lions

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 1 January 2005

Dear Mary… Q. I have a huge crush on a man who works in the same building as I do, but on a different floor. He lives quite near me but, although I have bumped into him on the Tube from time to time and in the lobby of our building and he seems to find me not unattractive, he has made no attempt to see me outside work. I have a friend and ally who works on his floor and chats a lot to him. She says he definitely does not have a girlfriend and definitely is not gay. She says he is just shy. How can I push

Tony Parsons

Diary – 1 January 2005

Heathrow. Crawling back into the country like a whipped cur after another disastrous American book tour. Difficult to pick the most abject humiliation. Dallas, where just one person showed up for the event? Boston, where it was twice that number, but one of them was a homeless bum taking advantage of all the empty seats? Never again. I give up on America. I am tired of book events in Midwestern hell-holes that resemble the Mary Celeste. I am tired of flying everywhere by ‘coach’. I am tired of fat rednecks telling me to take my shoes off at the airport. America — I quit. Hampstead. The unpacking is almost done.

Jaspistos

Escaping Xmas

In Competition No. 2372 you were given 12 Christmassy words and invited to incorporate them, in any order, into a piece of prose that has nothing to do with Christmas. I take my judge’s wig off to you all for the variety of scenarios you managed to conjure up, fisticuffs being the only recurrent one. To make room for seven worthy winners (Brian Braithwaite’s ‘shorty’ is too impressive not to include) I am simply wishing you all a happy New Year with my most benevolent beam. The winners, printed below, get £25 each, and the Cobra Premium beer is Margaret Joy’s. The two ‘wise men’ were allies in adversity. One

Frank Johnson

Religion is never easy, and sometimes it’s hard to be a truly faithful Wagnerite

Two weeks ago, quite a few of us in London were at a religious occasion. On the face of it, this was unsurprising since it was just before Christmas. But few competing religious occasions would have had this one’s air of reverence. It was the first night of the first part of what will become a new production of Wagner’s Ring at Covent Garden. Many of us arrived early just so that we could stand around and experience the mass expectation. Over the throng in the bars there was a sense that we were about to be admitted to something sacred. The seats had sold out within hours of going

The Spectator

Don’t mimic Blair

It may seem trivial, when so many thousands lie dead on the shores of the Indian Ocean, but we are now perhaps 14 weeks from a general election, and it is time to consider the apparent — the appalling — success of the Labour government. In circumstances that would be almost fatal to a Tory administration, Mr Blair has just lost a close Cabinet colleague. He has recently returned from Baghdad, where he saw the catastrophic consequences of the coalition operation in Iraq. Many of us who supported the war did so in the hope that it would be in the interests of the Iraqi people. Those hopes now look