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The Spectator

Feedback | 13 December 2003

Comment on You have been warmed by Tom Fort (06/12/2003) The climate changes. The effects of sunlight on the earth’s surface, varies with location, cloud cover, air movement and pressure and the radiant properties of a cocktail of trace gases (measured in parts per million or billion) in the various levels of the gas envelope we all live in. Global warming caused by anthropogenic gaseous production, carbon dioxide and sulphur from burning of fossil fuels, methane from livestock, fluorocarbons from sprays all affect, as one might say, is a burning issue in science today. Superficially, it is portrayed, invariably by simple-minded people, i.e. politicians, as a “simple” issue. However, the

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 13 December 2003

This year we have seen a word born like one of those volcanoes off the coast of Iceland. The word is issue, in a new and puzzling meaning. It had been looming through the seawater for many months before, but now it has come hissing and steaming above the surface. I had become used to people, usually employed in the social services, speaking of issues around things like race, ‘gender’, poverty, class, alcohol. The adoption of the pronoun around was pretty annoying, and since many of the people who used issues around were fools, I quickly came to assume its use was foolish. Moreover the meaning of issues in this

Peter Jones

Eat, drink and be merry — but be virtuous too if you want to be happy

Since Christmas is the season of good cheer but seems to leave millions squabbling, resentful and as miserable as sin, it is an appropriate time to consider what the key to happiness is. The ancients provided two distinct but highly practical theories, easily condensable into the average cracker. The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 bc) is popularly associated with the philosophy of hedonism (Greek h

Taki

Scrooge got it right

New York Boy, oh boy! The Christmas double-issues come quickly now. Once upon a time the run-up to the holidays was unending, with non-stop parties up to the final explosion on New Year’s Eve. No longer. Now Christmases come and go quicker than you can say tempus fugit, which in a way is better for Mankind’s fallen condition. Just last week I read that a mob of shoppers had trampled the first woman in line for a DVD sale and knocked her unconscious. The woman’s sister said that the crazed shoppers had ‘walked over her like a herd of elephants’. But, as one Washington pundit noted, ‘elephants do not behave

Jeremy Clarke

Tea and telly

I don’t watch a lot of telly these days because I’d rather read. But when I was going out with my boy’s mother, she and I watched it all the time. It was all we ever did. I’d come home from work and we’d sit on the sofa and watch the telly until it was time for her to go to bed and for me to go home. She was living with her family at the time and we’d all watch telly together in their tiny front room. There’d be me, her, her mum, her dad, her gran, her older sister and her younger brother in three inward-facing rows, night

Petronella Wyatt

An enduring love affair

Virginia I have had for a long time a certain obsession. It began in France when I was about 14 or 15. To be exact, it began in Paris, in the restaurant of the George V hotel. It happened when I first saw the brown topping oscillating towards me, giving off the warm scent of chocolate mingled with vanilla. I am referring, of course, to soufflés. Once you have been bitten by a soufflé, or rather once you have bitten into it, there is simply no going back. For many years, alas, few London restaurants have emulated Paris. Paris has one eaterie simply called Soufflé, where the practised soufflé-eater can

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 13 December 2003

Dear Mary… From the Rt Hon. Michael Howard, QC, MPQ. A friend of mine was walking up St James’s recently behind a girl with a stunning figure. Admiring her form, he happened to notice, somewhat to his alarm, that her tightly fitting trousers were slowly beginning to split. If he speeded up his steps and tapped her on the shoulder to tell her, she might have assumed that it was an advance and delivered a resounding slap. If he slowed down his steps or crossed to the other side of the road, he was leaving her to face embarrassment in a shop or her place of work. What was his

Aidan Hartley

Plum pudding on the beach

Laikipia My favourite Christmases are in Nairobi. This is how it goes. We gather in the suburbs, at my sister and brother-in-law’s hotel, which they close for the holiday. It has giraffe and warthog on rolling lawns under the shadow of the Ngong Hills. There are butlers, a genius chef, and it’s the only place that has enough bedrooms to fit all of us under one roof. As December progresses, friends and family disembark from British Airways with offerings of walnuts, cherry brandy, gravadlax and Stilton from the Harrods food halls. On Christmas Eve, the turkey turns up still alive, blinking, riding pillion on a bicycle pedalled by a man

Martin Gayford

The Good News of Isenheim

In the Christkindlesmarkt — the Christmas market — in Nuremberg at about this time of year you will see an astonishingly large array of Christmas decorations. The market stalls are full of them — carved ones, tinselly ones, glittery ones, some woven out of straw — those stalls, that is, which are not selling sausages, spiced biscuits and specially rich varieties of seasonal cake. English Christmas, as everyone knows, was imported by Prince Albert. When you visit, say, Nuremberg or Bamberg at this time of year, you feel you’ve traced it to its source. It’s a festival with roots deep in the art of the North. The spirit of Christmas,

Stephen Glover

Is BBC 2 becoming so chippy that it will lose the plot — and therefore its point?

Jane Root, the controller of BBC 2, has decided to axe the award- winning current affairs programme Correspondent. Thirty years ago there were a number of such programmes on the BBC, and the disappearance of one of them would scarcely have been noticed. But in Greg Dyke’s increasingly dumbed-down BBC, Correspondent is probably unique, and so its passing is of some significance. In consigning it to his-tory Ms Root reveals a great deal about herself. According to her, the programme’s title conjures up visions of ‘an Eton- educated guy in a white linen suit’. It will be replaced by an international current affairs series called This World which, we can

The Spectator

One world

It is traditional at this time of year to feel a kind of self-disgust. After the wrapping-paper has been burned in the fire, and the last mince pie has been forced down the gullet, you sit back, crapulous and afraid, and try to find some spiritual meaning in the festival of Christ’s nativity. What’s it all about, eh? you say to yourself as you watch your children fool apathetically with toys more costly and complicated than anything you could have expected as a child. Is this it, then? you wonder, and, as the mercury sinks in the mouth of the dying day, you may be inspired by this guilty thing

Mark Steyn

It’s been a good year

New Hampshire In California, Muslim community leaders have applauded the decision of the Catholic high school in San Juan Capistrano to change the name of its football team from the Crusaders to the less culturally insensitive Lions. Meanwhile, 20 miles up the road in Irvine, the Muslim Football League’s New Year tournament will bring together some of the most exciting Muslim football teams in Orange County: the Intifada, the Mujahideen, the Saracens and the Sword of Allah. That’s the spirit. I can’t wait for the California sporting calendar circa 2010: the San Diego Jihadi vs the Oakland Sensitives, the Malibu Hezbollah vs the Santa Monica Inoffensives, the Pasadena Sword of

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Recipe for success

Mary Wakefield meets Nigella Lawson and finds that she is friendly, confident, beautiful — but nervous with it In a window-seat at the far end of the bar in the Rib Room of the Carlton Tower Hotel, Nigella Lawson, dressed in black, sits waiting for me. The lighting is mellow, the seats leather and her eyes modestly downcast. If she were auditioning for the part of Anna Karenina, there would be no contest. It seems a great waste that instead of Vronsky, she gets me, struggling to free myself from my anorak. We shake hands over the salted cashew nuts and get off to a rocky start. ‘I’m not quite

Digby Anderson

Go to work on Christmas Day…

Good generals know when it is time to give up an impossible defence and seek a more secure position to hold. It is time to give up Christmas. It is now utterly overrun by the combined forces of sentimentality, irreligion, bad manners and worse taste. I do not say that on ‘the day’, as it is now called, we shouldn’t mount the odd raid to attend church — though the same hostile forces have long been within its gates too, infantilising its liturgy, replacing its sacred music with ditties and recorders, and plastering its walls with the scrawlings and daubings of children. They are especially noticeable at Christmas. Be very

Rachel Polonsky

Stop flattering Putin

Moscow Russia’s Duma election was not an irrelevant farce. It marked an important stage in the continuing struggle between President Putin and the enlightened few who are striving, with talent, energy and courage, to create democracy and a civil society in this country. Though the political events in the preceding weeks sometimes looked like impenetrably intricate clan wars within ‘the elite’, they exposed this struggle in all its simplicity. Beguiling imagery covers the surface of the city. This month’s big prize at the Shangri-La Casino on Pushkin Square is a ‘prezidentsky kortezh’, a familiar sight for Muscovites. Get lucky and you win two Mercedes-Benz saloons and a boxy jeep, complete

Tom Stacey

Window of opportunity

Tom Stacey on how, as an act of penance, his great-great-uncle donated the great west window to King’s College Chapel As the choristers of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, fill our ears on radio and our eyes on television with their double Christmas bill of carols for the birth of Jesus, the light that plays upon the Chapel’s sublime fan vaulting is, as ever, exquisite. Yet behind that light I have a tale to unfold, mysterious and dark. The Chapel’s great west window was the largest single scene in stained glass in Europe when consecrated in 1879. For all I know, it is so still. It depicts the Last Judgment —

Theodore Dalrymple

Reasons to be cheerful

Theodore Dalrymple on the joy of seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary — in gooseberries, for example, even in human beings In my line of work, it is rather hard to think of reasons to be cheerful. On the contrary, it requires quite a lot of concentrated intellectual effort: one has the sensation of scraping the bottom of one’s skull for thoughts that just aren’t there. Of course, since lamentation about the state of the world is one of life’s unfailing pleasures, the world is a greater source of satisfaction than ever. Another consolation is that most people are not nearly as miserable as they ought to be, or would

Cormac Murphyoconnor

We need to be saved

Hell exists, says Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, but so does hope. Choices have consequences, and by making the right choices we move towards God Before very long, I would imagine, together with my fellow-Cardinals, I will be going to the Vatican for the election of the successor to Pope John Paul II. The election takes place in the most precious jewel of the Vatican Museum, the 15th-century domestic chapel of Pope Sixtus IV, known as the Sistine Chapel. Here, twice a day, the Cardinals assemble and one by one place their vote in a silver urn for the one whom they truly believe is the best person to assume the mantle

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 6 December 2003

‘What? What! What?!’ said my husband with a provoking profligacy of punctuation. ‘What?’ I said before I could stop myself. ‘Buttonhole,’ he said. ‘You say here it’s nothing to do with a hole. But it is. Look. I put my poppy in it.’ ‘No dear, the verb.’ Buttonhole, as a verb meaning ‘detain in conversation’, comes from the idea of holding a button of someone’s coat. The word button-holder is first found at the beginning of the 19th century. By the 1830s examples crop up of buttonhold. And as late as 1880s it took the past tense button-held ‘ Charles Lamb, being button-held by Coleridge, simply cut off the button.

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 6 December 2003

The Democratic Unionist party became the biggest in Northern Ireland after elections for the Assembly there, which has been suspended for more than a year; ‘A democrat will not sit down with armed gangsters and murderers to negotiate the future of this country,’ said the Revd Ian Paisley, the leader of the DUP. The DUP has 30 seats, the Ulster Unionists 27; Sinn Fein with 24 overtook the Social Democratic and Labour party with 18. More than half the Labour party’s backbenchers at Westminster signed an early day motion questioning government plans to allow university top-up fees of ‘3,000 a year payable after graduation. A vote on the issue was