Society

Saturday

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

Alistair Campbell

Diary – 6 December 2003

Addis Ababa The last time I was here was to cover the story of the mid-Eighties famine for the Mirror. The story was complicated by the fact that we had Robert ‘Mercy Mission’ Maxwell for company. I was summoned to the presence for a briefing by Captain Bob. ‘First, we are going to save the starving. Second, we must do it in a low-profile way. And third, I want you to organise the TV coverage.’ Once there, a photographer and I had to exhort him not to come with us to the famine-relief stations. The picture of big fat Bob with little dying babies was the kind of bad visual

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 6 December 2003

Dear Mary… Q. I have always deplored the practice of having to shake hands with strangers. After a burly oaf at a smart luncheon party shook my hand with unseemly force, I was barely able to hold my knife. The pain and fear that he had crushed the bones made me acutely aware of the barbarousness of the practice of handshaking in general. (I recall that the late Duke of Windsor had his arm in a sling for three months after visiting India.) Since this unfortunate episode I have, understandably, been shy of hearty handshakers. My position is complicated by the fact that I live in South Africa where any

Frank Johnson

Now we know: discrimination against exhibitionists is politically incorrect

Writing from the Commons for the Daily Telegraph this week, though alluding to him, I went to tortuous lengths not to name the MP whom a Sunday newspaper had exposed as the subject of the latest ‘gay sex scandal’. Why should I have mentioned him in the first place? Because only the day after the Mail on Sunday had made him famous, he strolled into a committee’s proceedings as if nothing untoward had happened to him. In my line of work, it was therefore impossible not to mention him. He did not say a word, but his presence distracted all of us. We were at the standing committee on the

Stephen Glover

Naked couples walking through cornfields ‘ anything else is evil

As the days pass, more and more people are assuming that Hollinger International will be forced to sell the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator. Of the home-grown suitors, the favourite remains the pornographer, Richard Desmond, owner of Express Newspapers. Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT) is another potential bidder. Let me declare an interest. Although I write a column for the Daily Mail, I would be perfectly happy if a benign foreign publisher such as the Washington Post group acquired the Telegraph newspapers. My aversion to Richard Desmond is based on this simple fact ‘ that he has made his fortune partly out of publishing hard-core pornography.

The Spectator

Equality is unfair

On Monday the Employment Equality Regulations 2003 came into force, making it an offence, subject to an unlimited fine, for employers to discriminate against their staff on the basis of their religious belief or sexual orientation. On Tuesday the Norwich Union announced that it was cutting 2,300 call-centre jobs in Britain and moving them to India. If the link between the two events isn’t immediately obvious, one is a cause, the other an effect of the increasingly high cost of employing people in Britain. For a discussion of the merits of these regulations, it is no use thumbing through back issues of Hansard. Parliament is no longer considered a proper

Rachel Royce

Health and safety spell danger

Have you noticed that whenever there is an armed siege these days the police quickly seal off the area, surround the site with at least 20 marksmen, send for the trained negotiators and, um …wait until the victim is good and dead before they venture in to have a peek at what’s going on? I expect that’s probably a gross oversimplification ‘ and one which will have police commanders up and down the country in an apoplexy of rage. But it has the ring of truth about it, doesn’t it? I have been haunted by the case of Lorraine Whiting. She was the woman who bled to death while on

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 29 November 2003

In the Queen’s Speech the government announced plans to remove hereditary peers; take failed asylum-seekers’ children into ‘care’; let universities charge fees of £3,000 a year; make sellers of houses produce ‘information packs’; prosecute wife-beaters; control firemen; impose identity cards; introduce ‘gay marriages’; but not to ban hunting. The government let it be known that it was prepared to see negotiations for a European constitution fail. On a visit to Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, President Jacques Chirac of France was given roast pork and Ch

Barry Humphries

Diary – 29 November 2003

I keep forgetting where I am. A different American city every week makes it hard to remember where the light switch is on the bedside table. Is it up or down, do you push it or twiddle it or is it connected to a more complicated system that you have to get out of bed to operate? The ‘turn-down service’ also seems to be a turn-on service: that’s to say, you come home from the theatre to music, or ‘Mozak’, leaking into the room from an invisible source. Finding where it’s coming from reminds me of the old days, looking for the bug in Prague hotel rooms, but it’s not

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 29 November 2003

In connection with J.R.R. Tolkien — who with the much feebler J.K. Rowling is soon to be dominating school-holiday cinema once again — there was an interesting piece in the TLS this month by that clever old philologist Tom Shippey. It was about Joseph Grimm’s ironly scientific success in analysing and predicting historical sound changes in language and his lack of success in similarly regimenting myth. I can’t help thinking that Tolkien wanted to supply a worthy body of myth for an ideal of England so obviously flawed in reality — a Shire under Sharkey, as we have it now. Anyway, one of the remarks that Professor Shippey quoted from

Jeremy Clarke

In Coventry, in Verona

Before going to Venice, we spent two days in Verona. It was my first time in Italy and I got a crick in the neck from looking up at so many amazingly old, beautiful buildings. ‘If you think this is beautiful, wait till you see Venice,’ they said. Our host was David Petrie, a Scottish lecturer of English at the university. David is currently suing the Italian state for discriminating against foreign lecturers, and naturally this course of action hasn’t endeared him to his hosts. He’s been sent to Coventry. He’s been given a smaller office, then given no office at all. He’s been sacked. He’s been reinstated by an

Petronella Wyatt

Beagles and booze

Virginia On a Sunday afternoon in the winter there is practically nothing that well-off people in the state of Virginia like to do more than go beagling. So it was that I found myself in the grounds of an ante-bellum plantation house last weekend along with a pack of small dogs, assorted senior citizens and some men in bright-green jackets. The men were also attired in jodhpurs, but without the usual boots. Indeed they appeared to be wearing bedroom slippers and so their legs resembled those of capons that had been dropped in a bucket of dye. Dr Johnson once defined pointless activity as being like getting on horseback on

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 29 November 2003

Dear Mary… Q. Recently I have developed an enigmatic passion for a rather grand gentleman. Unfortunately it is not entirely reciprocated and I wondered if I could glean some advice as to how to go forward with this. I fear the main problem is that he is rather disturbed by my lack of good furniture and, while I don’t have the funds to go out and buy such, I would not be entirely against the idea. I am in my middle years and have to admit to being clearly rusty at seduction. An Edwardian sideboard, perhaps?Name withheld, London SW1 A. You miss the point. If you are the kind of

Aidan Hartley

The age of innocent adventure

Between antiquity and the 18th century, aside from a couple of Portuguese priests in Abyssinia, we have no record of Europeans venturing into the heart of Africa; incredible but true. Following in the priests’ footsteps came James Bruce, the Scottish laird who returned home to be ridiculed by Dr Johnson for his tales of Ethiopians hacking steaks from living cattle. Anthony Sattin picks up his narrative after that in 1788, when at last Sir Joseph Banks, veteran of Cook’s voyages and a beacon of Enlightenment science, brought together a circle of learned friends in a London tavern to found the African Association. Their challenge was daunting, yet simple. The Association

Rose Prince

FOOD AND DRINKPheasant pilav

Thanks to a hot summer, the countryside heaves with pheasant, dead and alive, and it must be eaten, or shooting, too, will enter the sights of the anti-enjoyment lobby. If this means just cutting the breasts from the carcass — and to hell with the rest of the bird — so be it. Life may well be too short to pluck pheasants. Pilav is a sympathetic recipe for cooks that cannot bear the tedium of another roasted game bird. It is also a dish that takes the now so-English pheasant back to the Islamic countries of its roots — regions very much in mind — where vine fruits and nuts

Damien Mccrystal

FOOD AND DRINKCheesy feat

This is the most important time of year in the calendar for that part of me which loves cheese. I yearn for it all year. I talk about it for months — perhaps not as animatedly as I bang on about the coincidental start of the shooting season, but euphorically none the less. For this is the time of year when you can buy vacherin, the finest, most extravagant pressed-curd product ever devised by those cheese-eating surrender monkeys across the Channel. Oddly enough, the first time I ever tasted it I was in a Chelsea restaurant called Monkeys, which delights in snorting with contempt at the myriad health guidelines laid