Society

Saturday

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

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Let the people of England speak

In the middle of December last year, five police officers turned up at the Welsh home of Nick Griffin, leader of the British National party, and arrested him on suspicion of inciting racial hatred. Griffin was driven to Halifax police station and forced to watch three hours’ worth of his own speeches, which the police had surreptitiously recorded. He was then released without charge, bailed and told to reappear on 2 March this year — precisely at the time campaigning is expected to begin for the next general election. Mr Griffin is standing against David Blunkett, in Sheffield Brightside. A bunch of other BNP members were arrested at the same

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 18 December 2004

I felt, the other day, like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken. The nova in my telescope was not just a new word but a new tense. No doubt this heavenly portent bodes no good. The tense might be called the past continuous future. (It is something the opposite of the paulo-post-future.) There was a good example on the television receiver after the collapse of the panda-like mating ritual between Mr Gerry Adams and the Revd Ian Paisley. ‘There were always going to be recriminations after the failure of the deal,’ said the reporter. Were there, indeed? That rather supposes the inevitability of

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 18 December 2004

Lord Butler of Brockwell, who had headed the inquiry into intelligence about Iraq, accused Mr Tony Blair’s administration of ‘bad government’, being unchecked by Parliament and free to bring in a ‘huge number of extremely bad Bills, a huge amount of regulation and to do whatever it likes’ with an eye to the next day’s headlines. The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, denied a fresh allegation that he had helped fast-track a tourist visa to Austria for his ex-lover’s nanny, Leoncia Casalme. Dame Janet Smith, in a 1,300-word report, her fifth on the mass murderer Dr Harold Shipman, blamed the General Medical Council for perpetuating the ‘mutual self-interest’ of doctors, and

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 18 December 2004

People won’t put it in Books of the Year, but there is no more entertaining Christmas present than The Lord Chamberlain Regrets by Dominic Shellard and Steve Nicholson (British Library). It is a history of British theatre censorship, and describes the strange system by which, until 1968, the chief courtier, the Lord Chamberlain, pre-censored all plays that were to be publicly performed. The system was always mistaken, and became increasingly absurd, as, well into the Fifties, the Lord Chamberlain tried unhappily to maintain the policy that there could be no jocular portrayal of Queen Victoria or even her son (‘the play shows up King Edward VII in a tiresome light

Simon Courtauld

Eel good factor

We are in danger of losing our eels. To many people this may be of little interest, but it is a serious matter. The vast numbers of baby eels (elvers) which cross the Atlantic from the Sargasso Sea, somewhere near Bermuda, and end up in European rivers two or three years later have been falling dramatically. Many are being netted offshore, but the principal explanation blames the warming of the Arctic Ocean, resulting in weaker currents to carry the elvers to their destination. When they struggle into the river estuaries and begin the last stage of their journey upstream, they may meet modern sluices without eel passes, or they may

Alan Judd

Figure it out

Years ago, when the Times was a newspaper for grown-ups, it was said to have published a letter illustrative of our misuse of statistics. This was to the effect that there were about 3 million people in Wales, of whom about 3,000 had one leg and 300 no legs at all. Thus, the ‘average’ number of legs per person in Wales was 1.99 whatever, and therefore ‘most’ people in Wales had fewer than two legs. We read such basic statistical errors daily. Even the sad figures for road deaths over the Christmas period — intended to shock — are sometimes misleading, albeit differently, because it’s not always pointed out that

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 18 December 2004

Once again Mary has invited some of her favourite members of the prominentii to submit queries for her consideration. From Toby YoungQ. I am a theatre critic currently appearing in a one-man show in the West End. Not surprisingly, several of my colleagues have been less than generous about my performance. One in particular, a man I’ve always had a very congenial relationship with, was absolutely vicious, saying he hoped I’d leave the country. When I resume my duties as a critic, I’ll inevitably bump into this man two or three times a week and I’m not sure how to behave. Should I just pretend I didn’t read his review

Petronella Wyatt

A surfeit of fish

People ask me why I spend Christmas in South Africa. Why don’t I remain in England and have a proper British Christmas? Or, why don’t I go to Hungary, where I used to go, for the snow and the River Danube, which, when partly iced over, resembles shattered crystals? I’m not sure myself. In England, Christmas seems to last too long (no one in the rest of the world, for example, seems to understand the idea of Boxing Day). And, much as I love Hungary, there is simply a surfeit of fish. Not on the streets, that is, but on the dining table. Hungarian Catholics, who include the maternal side

Barry Humphries

Diary – 18 December 2004

New York In Brisbane there was, and may yet be, an old-fashioned shopping arcade with a little tea shop on an upper gallery. There you could sit at a table with a cup of tea, a lamington or perhaps an asparagus roll (two Queensland staples) and, having drained your teacup and inverted it over the saucer, receive a ‘reading’ from one of the psychic ladies who shuffle from table to table ministering to the credulous. You may assume that I am a regular patron of astrologers, palmists, tarot readers and assorted sibyls. I can’t resist a glimpse, however occluded, into the future. At Byron Bay, a famous New South Wales

Jaspistos

Utter zoo

In Competition 2371 you were asked to provide rhyming couplets describing imaginary animals, involving eight consecutive letters of the alphabet. ‘The progress of the Unipod,/ As you’d surmise, is rather odd.’ This perhaps unillustratable couplet by Jeremy Lawrence is one of many splendid offerings among the runners-up. Hugh King made me smile with ‘The Umpzov, from remote Siberia,/ Is quite like Eeyore, only drearier.’ And W.J. Webster, Adrian Fry and Bill Greenwell were all in sparkling form. There was a ginormous entry, judging was pleasure mixed with agony, and I confess that sheer caprice played a part in my final decisions. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and Jill

Aidan Hartley

The borrowers

Laikipia When I saw the Chief in his Land Cruiser filled with hangers-on bouncing towards me through the bush I knew he was after his Christmas fatted lamb. It is customary in this part of the world for ranchers to hand out barbeque-ready slaughter animals to our local officials as thank-you presents for the help they genuinely give us through the year. At the time of Uhuru, the Europeans and Africans used to sit down to consume such gifts together while discussing the issues of the day. Sadly, these days the government vehicles tend to tour farms to pick up sheep and goats that are scoffed at ceremonies to which

Paul Johnson

A Christmas message to New Labour: give up preaching class hatred

Christmas is a time of goodwill and I must, as usual, suspend my dislikes for the season. What are they? The list lengthens every year. It now includes Scotch announcers on the BBC and radio reporters who use what I call Elementary School Sing-song when reading their (often ungrammatical) dispatches. All footballers and their managers (and mistresses) and football fans. Men who shave their heads; Welshmen (not Welshwomen, far from it); TV producers, and especially their assistants who ring me up and ask me to appear on their beastly programmes and call me ‘Paul’; all New Labour MPs and life peers and, a fortiori, Social Democrats — David Owen, who

Christopher Fildes

A City Christmas, with seasonal grumbles from Ebenezer and Timmy

In the narrow courts between Cornhill and Lombard Street, where the old City lives on, I find the senior partner in his seasonal bad temper. He likes to get on with his work but, he says, nobody else does — and, what is worse, nobody thinks that they should. ‘Take that clerk of mine, Cratchit,’ he grumbles. ‘I never see him at all. First of all it was stress and now it’s paternity leave. He’s taken the year off. Still expects to be paid. Claims he’s looking after Tiny Tim. When I told him that’s a poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket, he threatened me with a tribunal.’ His

The Spectator

Let them marry

It is 12 years since the Queen stood up at dinner and coined the expression annus horribilis to describe the miseries of 1992. She probably didn’t even have in mind the fact that her Chancellor of the Exchequer had just frittered away £5 billion of taxpayers’ money and caused thousands of homeowners to lose their homes in the futile cause of pegging the pound to the Deutschmark; it was more a way of describing her sadness at losing part of Windsor Castle to fire, having to endure pictures of the Duchess of York cavorting on a Mediterranean beach, and above all having to suffer the announcement that her eldest son

Andrew Taylor

Waiting for Mr Right

I live in a city of the dead surrounded by a city of the living. The great cemetery of Kensal Vale is a privately owned metropolis of grass and stone, of trees and rusting iron. At night, the security men scour away the drug addicts and the drunks; they expel the lost, the lonely and the lovers; and at last they leave us with the dark dead in our urban Eden. Eden? Oh yes — because the dead are truly innocent. They no longer know the meaning of sin. They never lose their illusions. Other forms of life remain overnight — cats, for example, a fox or two, grey squirrels,

Theodore Dalrymple

Second Opinion | 18 December 2004

Empathy these days is the greatest of the virtues, and he is best who empathises most. That is why pop singers and British politicians are the best people in the world: they can’t see the slightest suffering without empathising with it. Whether they behave better than anyone else is beside the point; it is what they feel, especially in public, that counts. In my own small way, I also sometimes empathise. Last week, for example, a patient came to see me who seemed very nervous. He looked around him as though he expected at any moment to be taken by a giant raptor. ‘Are you like this all the time?’