Society

Saturday

Marcus Berkmann

Diary – 15 May 2004

Having once reviewed TV for a living, I obviously never watch the damn thing at all these days if I can help it. But like many males of my age and temperament, I was engrossed late last year by a series called Grumpy Old Men, in which celebrities railed in a futile but well-paid manner against some of the iniquities of the modern world. Some of these men were funny, others were just furious, while a few had obviously been chosen because they were celebrities, and not because they had anything of the slightest interest to say. But never mind. The extraordinary impact of this programme confirmed my own long-held

The Spectator

Feedback | 15 May 2004

Does Nanny know best? Of course Toby Church is right (‘More nanny, less tax’, 8 May). How did we ever come to swallow the notion that the NHS consumer has an inalienable right to receive costly treatment for continued self- inflicted poor health? Banning anything merely diverts it to an area behind the garden shed and is highly undemocratic to boot, and would clearly indicate that our politicians trust us even less than we trust them. One answer surely lies in encouragement; the tax rebate we used to get for health insurance subscriptions, plus rebates on subscriptions for regular gym attendance, etc., should be given in the next Budget, even

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 15 May 2004

To pronounce when reading aloud an entirely different word from the one written on the page might seem a more than Mandarin complication, or perhaps be reminiscent of the Hebrews’ reverence for the Name that prompted them to substitute ‘Adonai’ orally for the word represented by the tetragrammaton. Yet we do just such a thing with Mrs. Once it stood for mistress. Quite when the spoken realisation became missis is not easy to tell. ‘The contracted pronunciation, which in other applications of the word has never been more than a vulgarism,’ comments the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘became for the prefixed title, first a permitted colloquial licence, and ultimately the only

Jeremy Clarke

Units minus time

On Sunday, fielding in the gully, I passed some of the time between balls calculating how many pints of bitter I could allow myself when it was our turn to bat and drive home without being wildly over the limit. The arithmetic was fairly simple: the number of pints consumed, multiplied by two for the number of ‘units’, minus one unit metabolised for every hour we’d been playing. The delicious egg-and-cress sandwiches we’d stuffed down our throats at tea allowed me to massage the final figure slightly upwards. Though it behoved me, too, to take into account that I’d put one or both of my contact lenses in inside-out that

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 15 May 2004

Dear Mary… Q. My son attends a school where all the parents, apart from his own, appear to be either Yummy Mummies or Superdads as well as multimillionaires. Since most of these mothers don’t work, they are all very competitive with each other, and the key competition of the year is coming up in the last week of term, the PTA-arranged tennis tournament. I dread the thought of being ritually humiliated both on and off the court. When confronted by the PTA member who will shortly be standing outside my son’s classroom asking me to put my name down for singles or doubles, how can I decline without seeming antisocial

Harriet Waugh

The cad with the toothbrush technique

Of Nicci French’s six novels three deal with the subjugation of women by an aberrant man. Now the seventh tips the scale by making four out of seven. At least in the last novel, The Land of the Living, and in Secret Smile the heroines do not knuckle under; but one cannot help wondering whose fantasies — worst fear for women or a de Sade-style inclination in men — the husband and wife team that is Nicci French is addressing. I would guess that it is mostly women who read the novels, as they have yet to have a male protagonist. Miranda, the heroine of Secret Smile, is a nice

Stephen Glover

Here’s the scoop: the Telegraph’s great strength is that it has a lot of older readers

Last weekend the Observer media page published a photograph of the Daily Telegraph news conference. It looks to me a pretty standard affair. The camera shows the back of the editor, Martin Newland, who is hunched over his desk and appears energetic and keen. There are eight other senior executives in the room, all of them apparently middle-aged, if by that we mean between the ages of 35 and 55. Two of them are women. Everyone looks dutiful and alert. It is a scene such as one might imagine in any newspaper office, though in some you would be lucky to find as many as two female executives. But to

The Spectator

Misogyny

It is an unfortunate facet of modern life that many parents feel they cannot let their children play outside by themselves for fear of their meeting a similar fate to that which befell Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham on the evening of 4 August 2002. It is no less unfortunate that when Maxine Carr, the former fiancée of Holly and Jessica’s murderer, Ian Huntley, leaves jail this weekend she will have to change her identity and go to live in an unnamed town many miles from her home town of Grimsby. What Ms Carr did was wrong. When questioned by police about her movements on the evening Holly

Vanessa Tyrellkenyon

Luxury Goods: Pet parlours

We didn’t have ‘pets’ when I was little. We had dogs — gundogs. Working dogs that lived in outdoor kennels and ate great slabs of rotting meat straight from the butcher. Occasionally we dunked them in a tub full of eye-watering flea-killer. I do remember them being brushed, but roughly and only to dislodge stubborn thistles. Now that I have my own dog — a Parson Jack Russell called Cato — I am somewhere in between the dog and pet worlds. She lives inside (mainly on the furniture). When she lets me, I brush her. I clip her toenails and wash her if she’s rolled in something foul. I can’t

James Leith

Luxury Goods: Spas

The intended heading for this piece was to have been ‘Spa Wars’, since the demand for luxury pampering in country-house-hotel surroundings seems insatiable. Three country-house-hotel spas have opened within half an hour’s drive of here (on the Wiltshire/Gloucestershire borders) in the last 18 months, and no expense spared. Even if you knew what thalassotherapy was, would you pay a pound a minute to get it? Or the same amount to reap the benefits of the Hammam bed? Apparently this last, being a sort of solid massage table, is butch enough to get men to agree to a pampering massage without feeling even a little bit gay. But who are these

Martin Gayford

Luxury Goods: Absolutely priceless

A couple of weeks ago I attended a reception in the Banqueting House on Whitehall to mark the opening of an exhibition by the American painter Cy Twombly at the Serpentine Gallery. A vast and lavish buffet was laid on tables down the length of Inigo Jones’s grandest room. Wealthy collectors drank champagne with Turner Prize-winning artists beneath Rubens’s only surviving ceiling. Lord Palumbo gave an exquisitely embarrassing speech in which — as has been widely reported — he repeatedly muddled the name of the principal guest, Cy Twombly, with that of the owner of Condé Nast, Si Newhouse (who was not there). Altogether, it was a highly satisfactory evening,

George Monbiot

Less is more

It’s time to lighten up about falling birthrates, says George Monbiot. The world will be a happier and better place with fewer people There is a group in North America — I am not joking — whose motto is ‘Back to the Pleistocene’. Its followers would like human society to revert not just to a pre-industrial past, but to a pre-agricultural one. Humans would subsist on the untended fruits of nature, hunting the beasts of the earth and the fowls of the air, gathering roots and berries from the derelict cityscapes reclaimed by the wild. It all sounds rather splendid, if you are young, fit, perfectly sighted, and don’t mind

Simon Heffer

Sack them

For the 500 or so at the Thatcher jubilee dinner it was, if not the high point, certainly one of the more important. Having cheered themselves hoarse at the entry of the lady herself, and roared their joy at a gem of a speech by Norman Tebbit, the diners applauded Michael Howard. He said he was a Thatcherite, and that the party would follow a Thatcherite direction. They loved it, for they believed it was necessary. They could be right. Certainly, when Tony Blair had the previous day accused Mr Howard of being a Thatcherite, many Tories felt the Prime Minister had given them a huge boost. Now Lady Thatcher

Emma Williams

Trapped behind the wall

As the slaughter in the Holy Land continues, Emma Williams reports on the miseries caused by Israel’s security barrier, and wonders whether there is any way out of the cycle of violence Last week yet more children were slaughtered in the Holy Land. Four little Israeli girls and their pregnant mother were gunned down by Palestinian terrorists on a settlement road in Gaza. Eleven Palestinian children were killed by the IDF, also in Gaza. ‘Nothing changes,’ said my Israeli host in Jerusalem as we left his home on our way to a restaurant. ‘We need something — God, do we need something — to pull us out of this madness.’

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 8 May 2004

Labour published a summary of its achievements, under the title Britain is Working. Mr Tony Blair celebrated the seventh anniversary of his becoming prime minister even more quietly than Lady Thatcher celebrated the 25th anniversary of her becoming prime minister. Dr Paul Drayson, who used to run PowderJect, a company awarded a £32 million government contract, and Sir Kumar Bhattacharyya were two donors to the Labour party among its 23 nominees as new peers; but the Tories had three donors among its five new peers, including Sir Stanley Kalms. Mr Blair visited Dublin to make optimistic noises with Mr Bertie Ahern, the Taoiseach, about the future of the Northern Ireland

Stuart Reid

Diary – 8 May 2004

My granddaughter was christened at the Brompton Oratory on Saturday. Although the day was muggy and storms had been forecast, I am sorry to say that there was no thunder and lightening. Like Hector Berlioz recalling the circumstances of his birth — ‘I came into the world quite naturally, unheralded by any of the signs which, in poetic ages, preceded the advent of remarkable personages’ — I was a little put out that Holly’s reception into the Church was not accompanied by some celestial commotion. Other than that, the only bleak thing about the service was that it forced me yet again to confront my own perfidy: over the years,

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 8 May 2004

‘Yes, the post never comes till two now,’ said my husband, thereby demonstrating that he hadn’t been listening to what I’d been saying, and by implication that what I had been saying was boring. So then I read out something to make him laugh, which I’ll come to later. But the occasion for my original remark was that someone on the wireless had just said, ‘That’s a post facto justification.’ I had merely observed that it isn’t post facto but post factum, since ‘post’ takes the accusative, not the ablative. The reason it is so often wrong is because of a confusion with the phrase ex post facto, used by

Jeremy Clarke

Speed limit

Personally, unlike some, I’ve nothing against the holidaymakers who flock to this part of the world as soon as the primroses are out. They liven up the place. In winter, the geriatric ghettoes dotted along the coast hereabouts are too unnaturally quiet. Owing to the infirmities of age, artificial joints, strong winds, blindness, deafness, incontinence and fear, the indigenous inhabitants that do venture out of doors tend to creep from A to B slowly and tentatively, keeping to the shadows, pausing often to renew their strength. In winter it’s like living in Madame Tussaud’s after normal business hours. There’s no gossip about sexual infidelity or reproduction in our village because

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 8 May 2004

Dear Mary…. Q. A friend who invited me to stay for a few days in France has told me I can get a lift in the plane of one of the other guests. I am a nervous flyer at the best of times and particularly nervous at the thought that the plane-owner, whom I do not know well but who has an aura of recklessness about him, might be at the wheel. How can I delicately find out whether it will be he or a proper pilot with braid on his shoulders? Should the former be the case and my destiny be in the hands of the plane’s owner, I

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Forget that frontier spirit stuff: Australians are neither adventurous nor subversive

New South Wales The name of the station seemed to ring a bell. An hour or so south of Sydney, and through the window of my double-decker Australian railway carriage, I could read the sign ‘Thirroul’. Wasn’t that the little seaside town where D.H. Lawrence stayed with his wife, Frieda, and where he began his novel Kangaroo? Did the couple not stay in a bungalow here close to the Pacific and where the story starts? I did not much care for Kangaroo when I first read it. But as with Patrick White’s work, I later found that having thrown the book aside, thoughts it had aroused stayed pulsing strongly in