Society

In Competition No. 3243, you were invited to submit a poem about the recent discovery of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance. This comp, suggested by a kind reader who thought a chink of good cheer amid the general bleakness worth celebrating, elicited a smallish entry in which echoes ranged from Keats to Benny Hill. An honourable mention to David Silverman’s haiku: Fuss over a boat Goes to show the importance Of being Ernest The winners, printed below, net their authors £25 each. Chill polar sirens wooed Ernest H. Shackleton, Singing him southward with Wintry allure. Ice trapped and sank him, then Hypergelidity Deep undersea helped his Ship to endure.   Weddell Sea life forms are Contra-xylophagous. Vessels of wood are a Snack they abjure. Far

Delayed, on Southern Rail Home From the Hill is a 1987 documentary by Molly Dineen about Hilary Hook, an elderly colonel who after a life in Kenya and the Far East retires to a nasty flat in England. Poor old Hilary has never had to prepare his own food and now, in his twilight years, he can’t even open a can of soup. He is horrified by Britain, its culture and bad weather. When I first saw Molly’s superb film as a young man it struck a chord. Some 35 years later, on a brief visit to England from Kenya, I can almost hear and feel myself becoming Hook. It’s

As Keir Starmer still struggles to tell us what he thinks the word ‘woman’ means, some much-needed common sense has been injected into the transgender debate. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has published guidance for providers of single-sex and separate-sex services: in short, it says bathrooms and domestic abuse refuges can be single sex in certain circumstances. This is welcome news for women – and for transgender folk like me. For too long, lobby groups have ruled the roost in this area, obfuscating language and denying reality. And the inevitable howls of protest in response to this publication have already started. I can understand the upset and anxiety being expressed by other trans

My children have never felt the need to hide their Jewishness. That’s the heart of it, I suppose. A few months ago, a boy picked up his books and declared, ‘I’m not sitting next to the Jewish girl’, before moving to another seat. When she told me about it, my daughter, who is 14, said the kid had just been seeking attention. It was a one-off, she said. She didn’t want me to contact the school. So I decided to let it go; the lesson for her, perhaps, was that this stuff happens in life. Thinking about it, it had happened once before, a few years ago. It was Chanukah,