Society

Thursday

Neil Clark

Real football fans watch non-League football

Oxford City vs Rochdale at Court Place Farm doesn’t have quite the same ring as Chelsea vs Liverpool at Stamford Bridge, but last Saturday’s match was important all the same. At this level, you feel part of the match, which never happens in an executive box at the Emirates ‘The Hoops’, Oxford’s oldest football club, founded in 1882 when Gladstone was prime minister and Old Etonians won the FA Cup, were playing their first ever home game in the fifth tier of English football. Rochdale, whose 102-year membership of the Football League ended in May, were playing their first away game in the Vanarama National League. Seven hundred and eighty-one

Wednesday

Cosmo Landesman

Can this dating gimmick help me find love?

When it comes to dating, I’ve tried every kind of matchmaking method you could imagine: dating apps, speed-dating, slow-dating and even no-date dating. Consequently, I’ve suffered from date-app fatigue and repetitive disappointment. So I’m the perfect person for a new dating trend: the Pear ring. Pear rings aim to return the hunt for romance back to that golden era before swiping, griping and ghosting For a one-off payment of £19.99 you get three Pear rings – turquoise–coloured ring bands of different sizes – which, when worn in public, signal to other single people that you are open to being approached. The Pear rings aim to end our dependence on dating

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club: Delicious, great-value wines from Domaine du Grand Mayne

This ridiculous cost of profiteering crisis is taking its toll. All of us – apart from the sleek, smug fat cats – are suffering and tightening our belts, but I’m damned if I’m going to be done out of my vino. And I’m damned if you are too. I mean, what else is there to take our minds off things during these dark days of doom and despondency?  I take my duties as your drinks editor seriously and feel it timely, therefore, to reintroduce you to the wines of Domaine du Grand Mayne, producer of some of the tastiest, best-value wines around. The ‘nectar’ of the Côtes de Duras was

Quentin Letts

London theatre needs Kevin Spacey

Lee Anderson, deputy chairman of the Conservative party, popped a few monocles by saying asylum seekers reluctant to stay on a Home Office barge could ‘fuck off back to France’. Wash your very mouth out! Where did Anderson think he was performing? At the Royal Court theatre? The Guardian, which long teased Mary Whitehouse for being a prude, clutched its pearls at the ‘nasty’ remark. Westminster journalists, few of whom can complete a sentence without an F-word, wrote about Anderson’s ‘shock’ remark. Radio 4’s Nick Robinson (so one gathers, not having been a Radio 4 listener for seven years) was so aghast that he had to be given camomile tea and

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week: Inflation falls, Hawaii burns and Oxford Street is raided

Home The annual rate of inflation fell to 6.8 per cent in July, from 7.9 per cent in June. Wages in the period of April to June were 7.8 per cent higher than a year earlier, according to the Office for National Statistics. GDP grew by 0.2 per cent in the second quarter, after growth of 0.1 per cent in the first quarter. The number of people inactive because of long-term sickness rose to more than 2.5 million, 400,000 more than at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Unemployment rose from 3.9 per cent to 4.2 per cent. Food prices were 12.7 per cent higher in the four weeks to

The Spectator

The government can’t be trusted with our data

This week Norfolk and Suffolk constabularies confessed that, replying to a freedom of information request, they had managed to release the personal details of 1,200 victims and witnesses of domestic abuse. The information was not readily visible but could be accessed by those with technical skills. The protection afforded by ID cards is only as good as the security of the system This came just a week after the Police Service of Northern Ireland admitted that it had similarly released, again in response to an FOI request, the names and ranks of its officers, along with the offices in which they were based. It is hard to think of a

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The great sociology con

My default mood at the moment is bleak despair, although it can sometimes be triggered into nihilistic loathing, which I think I mildly prefer. The most recent occasion this happened was last Monday when I drove through torrential rain to three retail parks in search of an item which – as I found out later – didn’t actually exist. While turning the car around to drive home I switched on the radio and Stephen Fry was bashfully admitting to some fawning sap of an interviewer how bloody brilliant he was. Triggered, right there, at the roundabout where you enter the old coal-mining village of Pity Me. It took ages for

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Is university still worth it?

Imagine that, just as Britain was closing down for the first Covid lockdown in the spring of 2020, you were 18 years old and had received an offer from the university of your choice, subject to good exam results. The grades proved to be no problem – with all exams cancelled, you were graded in accordance with your teacher’s estimate of how you would perform, and sailed through. But then the time came to go to university and you couldn’t – not properly, anyway. ‘Lots of students end up in jobs deemed to be low-skilled that would not need a degree in the first place’ You kept finding yourself imprisoned

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Will the Online Safety Bill target moths?

As is now well-known, Ulez (the ultra-low emission zone) will expand from 29 August, taking in suburban parts of Kent, Surrey, Essex, Herts. This fact gave Richard Lofthouse, an editor and motoring journalist, an idea. He has done much to help car4Ukraine.com, a volunteer group within Ukraine which seeks gifts of 4×4 pickups abroad and repurposes them to help the war effort. Some are armour-plated, for instance, and fitted with a gun turret at the back. Others can be turned into field ambulances, and so on. There is an endless need for wheels in Ukraine, the life of each pick-up ‘in theatre’ being a matter of weeks. As I write, nearly

The Spectator

2615: Bronze pile – solution

Unclued lights are some laureates of the Nobel Prize in Physics. There were two CURIEs (35). The clued name was Max BORN (8). The title is an anagram of NOBEL PRIZE. First prize Sid Field, Stockton on Tees Runners-up David Carpenter, Sutton Coldfield G. Asher, Bucknell, Monmouthshire

Cheesecracker

2618: Chain gang

Eleven unclued entries may be connected from 38 to 17, their unchecked letters spelling out CHAIN’S PAIRS, WE AGREE?         Across    1    Maximum animosity reported (4)    3    Vineyard by cross (4)    5    Losing starter, rubbish service is behind (6)    9    Again communicate on mobile in van (10) 16    Mostly free car port (6) 18    Shocking accompaniment to seizure? (5) 20    Dull as a lake? (7) 22    Bill lying about clear English dramatist (7) 24    Tosca libretto nails level of excellence (7) 26    Lies about lines in peeled paint (5) 28    Not wanting tax, at leisure? (3,4) 31    Defector, note, very upset with EU (7) 33    Capital

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: Miss Havisham’s wedding cake and other recipes by fictional characters

In Competition No. 3312, you were invited to supply a contribution to a book of recipes invented by fictional characters, entries being for the Carrollean, Dickensian or Shakespearean sections. Commendations to Martyn Hurst and Jon Robins, both of whom provided Uriah Heep’s recipe for humble pie, and to Mike Morrison’s Hamlet (‘Sous-vide or not sous-vide, that is the question…’); a dishonourable mention to Joe Houlihan’s Fagin (‘in a pilfery pie the ingredients is never the same, being, as I like to say, bestowed by the Almighty… some carrots from the parson’s garden, lifted of a black night; a pound of beefsteak, vanished from beneath the very beak of old Butcher

Luke McShane

No. 765

White to play. Erigaisi-Azarov, Baku 2023. The Bh6 looks in trouble, but Erigaisi found a powerful move to decide the game in his favour. What did he play? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 21 August. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Qg4. Then 1…Kxe8 2 Qg8# or 1…Kf6 2 Rf8# or 1…Bg7 3 Qe6# or 1…Bf6 3 Qg8# Last week’s winner John Shipley, Anglesey

Luke McShane

Baku burner

If you love chess enough to play hundreds of tournaments you will, sooner or later, play like a numbskull. You lick your wounds, go to bed, and hope the engine belches into action the next day. As a wise man once told me, the great comfort of a knockout tournament is that if you play badly, at least you get to go home. Except that doesn’t apply to Magnus Carlsen, or at least not yet. The world no. 1 is the top seed at the Fide World Cup, currently underway in Baku, Azerbaijan. But he suffered two serious glitches on consecutive days in his fourth round match against Germany’s Vincent Keymer,

The Spectator

Where were the longest A&E waits?

The bare platform A 112-space car park built to serve the railway station in the Cambridgeshire village of Manea was used by just three cars in its first week. — The station, formerly a ghost station with one train a week, has been revived but even so is only served by two trains every hour. — Yet had it not been for the Civil War, it could have been the capital of England. Charles I planned an English Versailles there, surrounded by a great city called Charlemont – all built on land reclaimed from the fens. Thanks to the war, however, nothing ever got built. — The name Charlemont lives on

William Cook

How the British intelligentsia fell out of love with Germany

An economic slowdown, the far right on the rise, even apocalyptic hailstorms – what on earth is happening in Germany? Is Europe’s industrial powerhouse on the slide? Well, yes and no. Germany is in recession, and Germany’santi-immigration party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), is growing stronger, but the bad news coming out of Germany indicates a more lasting sea change: liberal Britain has finally fallen out of love with the Bundesrepublik. It’s not just British Teutonophiles who are troubled by the rise of AfD. This week Germany’s domestic spy chief, Thomas Haldenwang, warned about growing right-wing extremism within the party and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has echoed these concerns. ‘Ban the

Dot Wordsworth

The problem with ‘black market’

The term black market should be replaced with illegal market because it could suggest racial bias or discrimination, according to UK Finance, a trade body for British banking and financial services. I suppose it is asking for the black never to be used with negative connotations. That will be a black day for the language. Who ever thought that black market had anything to do with black people? It’s not as if black people are stereotyped as illicit money-changers. It cannot be long before Penzance changes the name of its principal street, Market Jew Street. The name has nothing to do with Jews but derives from the Cornish Marghas Yow,

Douglas Murray

Prince Charming is cancelled

The only strikes I really enjoy are actors’ strikes. Teachers’ strikes leave me cold. Train strikes get me into a cold fury. But there are few more enjoyable spectacles in life than members of the acting profession making demands which – if left unmet – will see them refuse to work. Why should girls dream of being something like a deputy under-secretary at the United Nations? My first urge is always to clasp my head in my hands and in my best South Park voice scream: ‘You mean no movies with Susan Sarandon for six months? Nooooo.’ Then there’s the fact that most of the strikers haven’t seen work in

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: should I admit that I don’t like my daughter’s mother-in-law-to-be?

Q. I was at a house party in Yorkshire where one of the other guests had contributed a large joint of cooked beef. Eighteen of us were within minutes of sitting down to eat it with salad for lunch, but while helping to lay the table I could smell that something was not right. The meat was fashionably rare and had also travelled for more than four hours in a hot car from London. Our host agreed with me. The very last thing she wanted was to offend this guest who had spent so much and made such an effort, but she could not think of how to explain her

Roger Alton Roger Alton

England’s rugby World Cup has disaster written all over it

England’s preparation for the upcoming rugby World Cup is beginning to look like a slow-motion car crash, after two pathetic performances against Wales. Those of a betting disposition might want to bung a bit on Argentina muscling England aside when they meet in their first pool encounter on 9 September. The Pumas aren’t world beaters, though they have had a fantastic recent run under new coach Michael Cheika, beating New Zealand, England and Australia. But England are on a seemingly irreversible downward trajectory and are becoming the most unloveable rugby side in the world, lacking any spark, method or much creativity, just a wearying kick-and-chase predictability. England are becoming the