Society

Wednesday

31 May 2023

Wine Club: perfect summer fare from Swig

There are worse ways of spending the late May bank holiday than tasting a dozen or so wines from Swig, the merchant beloved of my sainted predecessors Messrs Waugh and Hoggart. Mrs Ray did question why I had to start so early, finish so late and ask so many neighbours to help but then she, too, got swept up in the fun and agreed that putting out spittoons would only spoil things and add to the washing up. She’s a trouper all right. This selection from Swig is the perfect summer fare The 2021 Di Meno Grillo (1), from the hills of north-west Sicily, is so engaging it demanded inclusion.

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I persuade my wife to get my friend into her private members’ club?

Q. My wife has for some time been a member of a fashionable members’ club. A dear friend and ex-colleague recently approached me to ask if he could submit her details as reference for his application to such club. In some circles he may be deemed to be somewhat rough around the edges. Personally, I would have no hesitation in recommending him as I believe I owe him a great deal – indeed, I believe we all owe him a great deal. As a sometime servant of this country, he survived a near fatal wound in one of Mr Blair’s ill-advised expeditions to the Middle East. My wife has refused

Julie Bindel

Why I was evicted from a lesbian squat

Since my squatting experience back in the 1980s, the practice has gone somewhat out of fashion. Squatting laws in the UK have become much stricter, and eviction by police and landlords is easier. Spanish squatters have it relatively good at the moment, with criminal gangs targeting second homes in Spain, claiming to be homeless and using their young children to make eviction far more difficult. I recall my time squatting in a large, ramshackle terraced house in Surrey Docks, south London, when I first moved to London from Yorkshire. I was in my early twenties, claiming benefits, doing political activism, with no bank account or savings and I urgently needed

Rory Sutherland

The case for building more roads

Suella Braverman was completely wrong to ask her civil servants to investigate the possibility of arranging a one-on-one speed awareness course. This is not because this was in breach of the ministerial code. That aspect of the affair was one of the worst examples of contrived, sanctimonious outrage I have ever seen; it pains me to think anyone thought it remotely newsworthy. No, the main reason Suella was wrong to request a one-on-one course is far simpler. Attending a speed awareness course in the company of a random selection of other people is a total blast, and too great an entertainment opportunity to miss. It’s like Twelve Angry Men with

Ross Clark

When will striking rail workers admit defeat?

It is nearly a year now since the latest round of rail strikes began. They have cost union members thousands of pounds in lost income. But according to Mick Whelan, general secretary of Aslef, on the Today programme this morning the union has made ‘zero progress’ in its negotiations with the Rail Delivery Group, which represents train companies. This was the point, eleven months in, at which Arthur Scargill finally gave up and sent his members back to work ‘with their heads held high’. But not Whelan, apparently. He indicated that he is digging in for the even longer haul, contemplating another year’s worth of strikes. The trouble for the

James Esses

Childline has a safeguarding problem

It is hard not to be increasingly concerned about the safeguarding of children at Childline, an arm of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC). I believe that young, vulnerable and impressionable children are being exposed to worrying material, grounded in ideology, on the charity’s website. Childline runs a message board which children can use to talk to each other about issues they are struggling with. The intention is for it to act as a form of peer support. But there appears to be inadequate safeguarding in place on its site. I looked at a random sample of messages in the ‘Gender Identity’ section of Childline’s message boards and was appalled by what I discovered.

Christopher Snowdon

The unstoppable rise of the nanny state

It has been a pathetic sight to watch politicians pleading with the supermarkets to lower food prices. Inflation has yet again proven to be more persistent than the government expected and it will do almost anything to bring it down. The Chancellor has even said that a recession would be a price worth paying to get the cost of living under control. But while the government resorts to ‘voluntary price caps’ on food, it still plans to ban most buy-one-get-one-free food offers in October. A double-digit hike in alcohol duty will come into effect in August. Smokers of rolling tobacco have already endured a tax rise of inflation plus 6

Mary Wakefield

Dr Jean Twenge: Gen Z aren’t OK

There’s never been an older generation that didn’t complain about the younger one. Parents tut and fuss over errant youth. That’s the way of it. But in the end the kids come around. Swingers grow into Karens. The wild child pays his bills. But kids these days… they do seem different. It’s not just that we, the older generations, are worried about them, but that they’re desperately worried about themselves. And according to Dr Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University who studies generational changes, we’re right to worry. Almost 30 per cent of American girls have clinical depression and it’s the same across the Anglosphere. The suicide

Matthew Parris

Price caps are a slippery slope

Sometimes it’s the little things that depress most. I groaned last week to hear the news item. The government is contemplating a ‘price cap’ on ‘basic items’ in ‘supermarkets’. Forgive the quotation marks, but each of these terms is so horribly problematic that one has to start by asking what they even mean. Has Conservatism in the 2020s lost its ideological moorings? Or perhaps one should start with a quick recapitulation of the history of this idiotic idea, because price control has been tried before, first by a Labour government, and then by their Tory successors who went on to consolidate the folly. The background to those repeated attempts to

Eva Gaida

My life as a meth addict

I’ve spent most of my adult life addicted to amphetamines, including crystal meth. I first tried speed when I was 17 at a techno party while visiting Germany. I had been struggling with my A-levels and always found school hard because I was constantly exhausted, sleeping for 12 hours a day and still falling asleep during lessons. I was depressed and sometimes felt like I didn’t want to live any more. Speed changed all that. For the first time ever, I was motivated, I could concentrate and I felt that I could deal with life. I went from failing school to becoming a straight-A student, and I honestly don’t think

Douglas Murray

The strange obsession with Phillip Schofield

As I have noted before, there is always another circle. I thought that last week’s scandal (originally entitled ‘Suellagate’ or ‘speedgate’ by the papers) could not be surpassed for its sheer vacuousness and pointlessness. But then I did not foresee that the next week would be one in which every newspaper and news bulletin would lead with a story about a morning television presenter. Yet here we are, after more than a week of national debate about Phillip Schofield. I first became aware of Schofield when he was presenting children’s television from the BBC’s ‘broom cupboard’ with Gordon the Gopher. I have not followed the career of either character very

Peter Jones

Jeremy Clarke would have felt at home in Pompeii

Classical literature has the reputation of being pretty serious stuff, far removed from the world that Jeremy Clarke inhabited. But he would have felt perfectly at home in Pompeii. Take the conversation decorating the grave monument of the bar-owners Lucius Calidius Eroticus and Fannia Voluptas (beat that, Frankie Howerd!): ‘Innkeeper! The bill!’ ‘You’ve had a sextarius of wine, and bread: one as. Relish, two asses.’ ‘Right.’ ‘The girl, eight asses.’ ‘Right.’ ‘Hay for the mule, two asses.’ ‘That mule – it’ll be the ruin of me.’ Jeremy would also surely have admired the lifestyle and works of the scandalous author Petronius, whom the historian Tacitus described as follows: ‘He slept

The Spectator

Letters: Jeremy Clarke was an example to us all

Goodbye, Jeremy Each week I opened The Spectator at Low Life in part to read that brilliant column and, more recently, to see how Jeremy Clarke was coping with his deteriorating health. Always hoping the column would be there; that he had, despite excruciating pain, penned us another. Like very many of his regular admiring readers, I had found the last two weeks disturbingly sad and last week we learned that he has died and is free at last from his suffering. As an oncologist, during a career treating thousands of patients, at first ones with prostate and other urological cancers, and later ones with breast cancer, I have seen

Matthew Dennison

Don’t cancel Beatrix Potter

I spoke too soon. Beatrix Potter, I suggested in an afterword to my 2016 biography of the author and illustrator, had escaped the distortions of sexual and racial revisionism that now blight so many eminent and long-dead British writers. But no longer. Last week a specialist in postcolonial literature at a northern university accused Potter of failing to acknowledge her indebtedness to an oral storytelling tradition of enslaved Africans working on American plantations. Welcome, please, a new Potter for the 21st century: exploitative, colonialist, dishonest. Potter’s concealment, claims Dr Emily Zobel Marshall, ‘[feeds] into a damaging and recurring appropriation of Black cultural forms that continues today’. Blimey. Zobel Marshall’s hypothesis

Melanie McDonagh

How Ireland lost its craic

So, which country is putting health warnings and calorie counts on bottles of alcohol for the benefit of its citizens? Nope, not Canada or New Zealand. But you’re getting warm… It’s Ireland, the country that gave us Guinness, Jameson, Bushmills and, for those who like that kind of thing, Baileys. That’s right: a health warning just like for cigarettes. But instead of rotting lungs, presumably there’ll be a lovely picture of a liver with cirrhosis. What effect will it have on me? None, dear reader, none. I drink to forget this sort of thing. But that’s the way Ireland is going (actually has gone) for a generation: not so much

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 03 June 2023

Three enormous cheers for Thomas Charlsen, Norwegian International and great friend and teammate, for setting up and working day and night to organise the World Bridge Tour ‘hybrid’ invitational, which last week saw the first live tournament held in Sopot, Poland’s Brighton-on-sea. Twelve teams competed at the wonderful Grand Hotel where we stayed and played. Waseem Naqvi and Lee Rosenthal, both living in London, formed a team with a strong Polish pair, previously unknown to them, and they did very well indeed. Today’s hand shows their most spectacular result (See diagram). Lee and Waseem are not a regular partnership but they both have the same ethos and don’t mind an

Robin Oakley

The science of horse racing

Everybody in racing is looking for an edge. With 7-4 the field, the punter is looking for a 2-1. The racecourse executive wonders which pop group will add 4,000 to the gate if booked for after-racing entertainment. The jockey on a confirmed front runner plans to slip the field out of the stalls. Trainers all seek an extra ingredient to help win them races consistently. At Sarsen Farm, a state-of-the-art new yard in Upper Lambourn built on the site of what was once a decrepit farmhouse then a Jockey Club tractor depot, Daniel and Claire Kubler are hoping that what a famous if ungrammatical advertisement for white goods used to

Melissa Kite

The BB wants to put my dream farm on a skip

‘Have you got your passport? Your phone? Your wallet?’ The builder boyfriend patted his pockets and told me not to worry as we drove through the Gatwick drop-off lane where they charge you £5 to open your car door for three seconds and push someone out. When I arrived back home, he texted: ‘I left my euros in the pocket of my work jeans.’ No matter. He could draw out cash when he got there. It had been a last minute rush to get him on a flight to Cork to view this dream farm I had found, in the sun-drenched valley. It was really a modest white bungalow but

Taki

The death of fair play

New York He’s oilier than Molière’s Tartuffe but gets away with more. His latest move involves the martial art of jiu-jitsu, where he managed to get a referee to reverse his decision. I’ve been competing in martial arts for close to 60 years now, and have rarely, in fact never, witnessed a ref reverse his or her decision. But I’m no bad loser like Zuckerberg. Some of you old-timers may even remember something called fair play. Bad calls are inevitable in sport, and one is used to taking the bad ones with the good ones because in the end they all even out. Facebook’s honcho ended up a multibillionaire under

Debbie Hayton

Kathleen Stock and the rejection of reality

Last night, Professor Kathleen Stock told the Oxford Union that we need to talk about ‘reality’. She is absolutely right. Make no mistake, Stock is a reasonable voice in a political debate where many appear to be living in some sort of fantasy world. Her views are what many would consider to be mainstream. For example, that human beings are sexually dimorphic, and it is sometimes appropriate to provide separate services for each sex. But by voicing those ideas, Stock has been subjected to opprobrium. In 2021, she was hounded from her job at Sussex University. The scenes surrounding Stock’s talk last night were depressingly familiar. Young people – who