Society

Saturday

Mary Killen

Your Problems Solved | 22 May 2004

Dear Mary Q. Here’s a solution to noisy New Zealand neighbours having barbies in the garden late at night. The last time ours had one my husband went over and told them the noise was absolutely fine by us, but there was a lunatic on crack in the assisted housing flats next to them. Said crack addict had come at him with a leafblower one evening when we’d had the gardeners in and actually smashed a pane of glass in the front door trying to kill him. The police came round and said they couldn’t do a thing about it, of course, which meant it was quite likely he would

John De-Falbe

A thick Celtic mist

Areview copy of Shade comes with two pages of admonitory blurb about what an important film-maker Neil Jordan is. This information might be useful for those with gossip columns to fill but it has no more bearing on the likelihood of this being a good novel than if we were told that the author is big in Morris dancing. Either John Murray is indifferent to reviewers in its new berth at HodderHeadline, or the message is, Don’t dare review this badly, pipsqueak, cos we can make sure you never work again … Then there is this quote from John Banville, Ireland’s best writer: ‘With this fierce, dark and yet luminous

Stephen Glover

Piers Morgan may be a charming and lovable rogue, but he was not a great editor

The sacking of Piers Morgan as editor of the Daily Mirror has been greeted with ululation from media commentators, former and existing editors and several newspapers. Piers, we are told by no less an authority than the legendary Harry Evans, was a great tabloid editor. My esteemed colleague Professor Roy Greenslade can barely be consoled. Mr Morgan’s defenders concede that the pictures he published which showed British soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners may have been fakes, but it is claimed that they illustrate a wider truth. The only discordant voice I have heard amid the general wailing and gnashing of teeth is that of Martin Kettle in the Guardian. What does

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

In Peru llama incest is common, but this is

Last Sunday I collected a waistcoat made from my own pet. From the same source came a hat, gloves, scarf, and a teddy bear wearing a little waistcoat of its own, though (saucily) no trousers. A lady called Chan Brown, from Chesterfield, has organised this for me. I keep llamas, and she spins. She belongs to a group who call themselves the Spinsters and are sometimes to be found on a summer Sunday demonstrating their craft down at Cromford Mill, Joseph Arkwright’s magnificent and until recently neglected first mill, on the Derbyshire Derwent near Matlock Bath. The mill and its surroundings, which are beautifully situated, are being restored by a

The Spectator

Let the poor feed us

Amid the mayhem in Baghdad this week, it would be easy to overlook a significant development towards international peace and security. It came in a letter from Pascal Lamy, EU trade commissioner, and Franz Fischler, agriculture commissioner, to the trade ministers of all 148 members of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The EU, they wrote, is prepared to end export subsidies paid to European farmers who sell their goods abroad. By making this offer, the EU raises the possibility that the Doha round of world trade talks, which failed in Cancun last September, can be revived. The threat of trade sanctions is bandied about all too easily in international politics.

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Cursed are the peaceniks

James Delingpole gives both barrels to the ‘pea-brained’ isolationists who fill the papers — even The Spectator — with their defeatist snivelling Anyone who has ever smoked will be familiar with that awful sinking feeling you get when, one by one, your fellow nicotine-addict friends start to quit. United you feel strong, happy, immune to the finger-wagging of health fascists and probably even to lung cancer, secure in the knowledge that for all their minor defects, tabs are basically great and possibly better than sex. But as the number of smokers in your circle dwindles, so too does your morale. You feel depressed, insecure, let down. You start wondering whether

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

‘The West is like the Great Satan’

Sir Crispin Tickell tells Mary Wakefield that George Bush’s ‘illegal’ war has brought shame on us all I’m on the telephone, talking to the editor of this magazine, trawling for last-minute background information, when Sir Crispin Tickell, GCMG, KCVO, our former ambassador to the UN, appears in the doorway. He looks alert, beaky, sleek, like a smallish, zoo-kept hawk. ‘Well, his middle name is Cervantes, does that help?’ says the voice in my ear. ‘Sorry!’ I mouth at Sir Crispin. Cup of tea, Sir Crispin? Coffee? Neither. Since signing the open letter that warned the Prime Minister to ‘see better’ over Iraq and Israel, Sir Crispin has been caught in

Friday

Peter Jones

Ancient and Modern – 21 May 2004

Last week, we observed ancient attitudes to wanting to live for ever. Being against it, the ancients developed many ways of dealing with death. Since there were no scriptures or creeds in the pre-Christian world, there could have been as many beliefs about death as there were believers. What generally emerges from ancient Greek literature is that religion was all about success and failure in this life, and success depended on having the gods on your side. Consequently, if one dishonoured the gods by e.g., refusing to acknowledge them, one would not have to wait till the afterlife for punishment — it would be visited on you at once. Further,

Saturday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 15 May 2004

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, apologised conditionally for crimes that British soldiers might have committed in Iraq: ‘We apologise deeply to anyone who has been mistreated by any of our soldiers.’ He and Foreign Office ministers denied having seen until very recently a Red Cross report of alleged Coalition abuses that was delivered to high Coalition officials in February. More evidence was found for the inauthenticity of photographs published by the Daily Mirror purporting to show British troops mistreating Iraqi prisoners. Mr John Scarlett was named as the next chief of MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service; he had been chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee when he took control

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,