Those who like to laugh abandoned Hope long ago
He may have been born British in the London suburb of Eltham; but the humour of
Society
Saturday
Pre-emptive force
It is a sad sign of the times that a man who shot a burglar dead and wounded another should have become a national hero. The frustration that millions of householders feel about the inability or unwillingness of the British state to perform its one indispensable function – namely to protect the person and property of its citizens, despite its consumption of nearly half the country’s economic product – has turned Tony Martin, who was released this week, into a symbol of decency, common sense and middle-class revolt. The fact is that many a law-abiding person rejoiced to hear that Mr Martin shot his intruder dead, and wished only that
Giving something back
In the past, great benefactors to the visual arts have generally doubled as tastemakers. Their success, as the US critic Jed Perl recently noted, is often best judged by the extent to which their avidities become what the culture takes for granted. But how does taste, which is private, become public in this way? It’s a complicated question, and in answering it one can never hope to filter out sheer force of personality as a decisive factor. In curmudgeonly cases such as Grenville L. Winthrop, whose spectacular collection is showing at the National Gallery, and Albert Barnes, as well as more effervescent personalities such as William Beckford or Peggy Guggenheim,
Bring back Beeching
Simon Nixon says that we must build more motorways – and scrap railway lines Perhaps the most important discovery I have made over the last few years is that the way to stay sane in Britain is never to use public transport. The Department of Health tells us to eat five portions of fruit a day and to give up booze and fags. But what it dare not tell us is that the best way to reduce the risk of a heart attack and a host of other stress-related ailments is never to use the bus, Tube or train when you can drive a car or ride a bicycle instead.
Plain Hinglish
A n early-morning phone call the other day alerted me to the news that my midday appointment in New Delhi had been ‘pre-poned’. Could I ‘do the needful’, the voice said, and ‘get my skates on’. A few months ago, I received an invitation from an Indian ministry. First they sent a fax giving me ‘advance intimation’ of the event, then two more faxes advising me of a ‘formal intimation’. After this, an invitation card arrived with the preamble: ‘Sir, we would like to confirm our intimation….’ Welcome to the wonderful world of Hinglish, a Hindu-inspired dialect that pulsates with energy, invention and humour – not all of it intended.
Friday
Ancient and Modern – 1 August 2003
Dr David Kelly was a government expert but, in his desire to put the record straight about Iraqi arms, found himself crushed between the grindstones of government determination to impose it own views about the weapons of mass destruction, whatever the truth, and the sense of duty he had to ensure that the public was properly informed. The issue boils down to one of morality, as the opening of Plato’s Republic shows. Socrates and his friends are trying to define ‘morality’, and Thrasymachus asserts that morality is ‘acting to the advantage of the stronger party’. His reason is that the government defines what is right and moral for citizens to
Saturday
Portrait of the Week – 26 July 2003
Dr David Kelly, a Ministry of Defence scientific expert on Iraqi weapons, was found dead near his home in Oxfordshire with a cut wrist and a container of pain-killers. Hours earlier he had appeared before the Commons foreign affairs select committee and, when asked if he was the main source for an article by Mr Andrew Gilligan that blamed Downing Street for ‘sexing up’ the government dossier on Iraq last September, he said, ‘My belief is that I am not the main source.’ Mr Andrew Mackinlay MP had said to him in a rough manner, ‘I reckon you’re chaff. You’ve been thrown up to divert our probing. Have you ever
Diary – 26 July 2003
I am invited to the Oxford Union to speak in the last debate of the term. I had originally been invited to speak on the death of feminism earlier in the year, but as I couldn’t go they kindly invited me back. The motion is less onerous – ‘Life is too short to drink cheap wine’ – and I am speaking for, along with Peter Stringfellow, among others. I have been preparing for weeks, soliciting everyone I meet for jokes and anecdotes, and obsessively honing my speech. Two days before I’m due to speak I make the mistake of running the final draft past three of my friends at dinner.
Feedback | 26 July 2003
Comment on No flies on Bush by Mark Steyn (19/07/2003) I read Mark Steyn’s article on the harmlessness of the lies told by the USA and the UK on the world stage and tried to be reassured by his joviality. After all, I thought, what’s a few thousand dead people when, as your poll showed, the people ‘liberated’ by us, know that we are really after their oil. Who else is going to notice a few lies (about Saddam Hussein’s links to al-Qaida, promises that Iraqi oil money is controlled by Iraqis and the creation of democracy (shouldn’t this happen before the country is privatised?) except mad anti-war activists and
Mind Your Language | 26 July 2003
Britain invented lasagne, according to a front-page report in the Daily Telegraph. The claim came from organisers of a mediaeval banquet at Berkeley Castle. They appealed to ‘the world’s oldest recipe book’, The Forme of Cury, compiled under Richard II in 1390. It seems the Berkeley banqueteers meant that not just the food but the word itself were English, for the dish concerned was called loseyns. At this point I smelled a rat. To me loseyns looked like a medieval form of lozenge, and so the OED confirmed it to be. Under the word lozen, ‘a thin cake of pastry’, it actually quotes The Forme of Cury. Part of the
Matters of fact
St Tropez Like Rick, when asked why he would come to Casablanca for its non-existent waters, I presume the hack was misinformed. An item in the Evening Standard’s Londoner’s Diary had me announcing that I had gatecrashed Lynn Forester de Rothschild’s party for the Clintons. ‘Dearest Taki,’ writes Lynn. ‘You lied! Of course you were invited…’ A kind and sweet note from Lynn, except for the fact I never said it. At my age one simply doesn’t gatecrash, but hacks have been known to make things up. Oh well, it wasn’t very serious. What was serious and sad was the death of Philip Heslop, the Silk who brilliantly got me
Hello, sailor
I hate avoiding people I like just because
Leave her alone
I have a summer cold. My eyes feel as if they have been rammed into the back of my head by pokers, my chest tells me that a boa constrictor has wrapped itself around it, and the rest of my body is convinced that it does not belong to me but to the Michelin man. Why are summer colds more painful and more difficult to shake off than proper winter ones? Perhaps germs thrive in warm weather or maybe it is simply nature mocking one, as others happily chatter outside street-corner cafés, and the victim lurches from room to room in a dressing-gown. Feeling sorry for yourself, on top of
Your Problems Solved | 26 July 2003
Q. A colleague who sits next to me at work has a propensity to break wind violently whenever he feels inclined to do so. Far from being embarrassed by these eructations, as I imagine most people would be, he seems to see it as a social indelicacy on a par with coughing or slurping coffee; that is to say, not necessarily polite but certainly nothing to apologise for. Needless to say, I feel rather differently. How do I broach the subject without awkwardness? I have tried getting up and walking away every time the malodorous offences are committed, but he doesn’t take the hint. Whether this has anything to do
Banned Wagon | 26 July 2003
Anyone who believes that the anti-competitive ethos in state schools originates with a handful of ideologues in our local authorities should take time to study the United Nations output on education. The UN Commission on Human Rights’s ‘special rapporteur on education’ recently attacked British schools for being too competitive. Katarina Tomasevski, a Swede, complained that the Department for Education’s regime of tests for seven-, 11-, 14- and 16-year-olds breaches Article 29 of the Human Rights convention. Forcing children to sit down and take exams, she says, perverts the aims of education, which should be ‘directed to the development of the child’s personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their
Being on the radio was a welcome relief from duck husbandry
Let me tell you the story of the Docklands Eight, otherwise known as the Docklands ducklings. They came into my life briefly and by chance, ushered in by Kim. Kim helps me keep my London flat, by the Thames in Limehouse, clean and tidy. A great animal-lover, she comes in on Monday mornings bringing new stories of the family of ducks which has been hatching on the stones in a shallow section of canal near where we live. Last year there was a disaster when a water-disinfecting operative eliminated a whole generation of ducklings in a single morning, so this year Kim has been watching over the brood and feeding
England’s national saint
Shakespeare is all things to all people. The greatest writer we have, he was subtle to the extent of ambivalence. As a man he was sexually fluid, politically ambidextrous and not prepared to commit himself on anything, least of all religion. It’s sometimes said that the son of a provincial glove-maker could not have had sufficient knowledge or experience to write the plays and poems he is credited with. These people perhaps forget the quality of imagination. Shakespeare is imagination and he was naturally a master of disguises. Those who say his plays were written by Sir Francis Bacon may be forgiven: they weren’t, because Bacon didn’t have the imagination.
Boycott Britain
The British tourism industry appears to be gripped by a form of schizophrenia. On the one hand, we are told that holidaying in Britain has never been more fashionable, with hotels and resorts enjoying a boom this summer. ‘Suddenly our seaside towns are the places to be. Santorini is out. Scarborough is in,’ gushed the Sunday Times last weekend. On the other hand, it is barely a month since we were warned that domestic tourism was facing its deepest ever crisis. Overseas bookings were plummeting, down 15 per cent in April compared with the same period in 2002, revenue was falling and the government was urged to bail out the
My hero
Few Tory MPs set off for the summer recess in a confident mood. There is unease about the opinion polls, and the leader. There is also grumbling about IDS’s failure to sharpen up the shadow Cabinet, though it would have been hard for him to do that. The obvious candidates for the sack are Quentin Davies, John Hayes and Bernard Jenkin, the shadow Defence Secretary who makes Geoff Hoon look like Bismarck. But they are also IDS’s closest political allies. So instead, he merely made minor changes to the back row of the front bench. Yet one of these, even if unlikely to transform the party’s short-term fortunes, has provided
Sword of honour
If you are looking for some fun, and have a research grant to spend, try this. Visit an American university, bump into random students in the corridor and loudly call each one ‘asshole’. Then measure their reactions. This is what a team of psychologists did in a controlled experiment at the University of Michigan. The results were most interesting. Students from the southern part of the United States reacted far more violently and aggressively than those from the North, were shown to have much higher levels of cortisone and testosterone, and in tests regularly suggested more belligerent solutions to problems. America, it seems, remains culturally divided along the Mason