Society

Thursday

26 May 2022

I’m being priced out of eating out

I used to be able to afford to go to restaurants. Yes, it was a treat, but it was just about doable, and though it was never a pleasure to be presented with the bill, it didn’t leave you reeling from shock and buyer’s remorse. The schnitzel in my favourite London restaurant has gone up from £12 to £20 for the small one and from £22 to £33 for the normal-sized one. Meanwhile, restaurants and pubs all over Britain no longer offer a mere hamburger. It has to be called a ‘short rib and flank burger, smoked Applewood Cheddar, shallot marmalade, garlic aioli and skin-on fries’ to justify its £17.50

Martin Vander Weyer

Is the Elizabeth line worth the cost?

It’s 8.16 on Tuesday morning and I’m actually writing this on a moving Elizabeth line train. Moving in the sense that we’ve just zipped from Paddington to Liverpool Street in 13 minutes – which if nothing else will be a boon for City commuters from west of London. Moving also in the sense that I’ve been writing about the project formerly known as Crossrail, first in optimism but later in frustration and rage, since its then chairman Terry Morgan gave me a personal tour of the Bond Street diggings back in June 2013. Now that the central section is open at last – even with its Bond Street station still

Lionel Shriver

Why I was almost thrown out of South Africa

On my 2 p.m. arrival for a week-long work trip to South Africa a fortnight ago, an immigration agent flapped my passport while inquiring as to the purpose of my visit. ‘To appear in the Franschhoek Literary Festival’ clearly meant nothing to this woman, but hey, lit fests aren’t exactly Glastonbury. I only grew, shall we say, concerned when she announced that because my passport lacked two sequential completely clean pages, she was denying me entry to the country. ‘You’re kidding me,’ I said – quietly; I didn’t shout. Yet this reflex expression of disbelief was all it would take for the entire team of Cape Town’s gatekeepers to blackball

Matthew Parris

The close friend I never really knew

I have just read an extraordinary new book. It’s by a close and old pal whom I’d count as one of my best friends. He was my lodger in London for ten years. His book is autobiographical. And I now realise I never knew him at all. In Don’t Ask Me About My Dad, Tom Mitchelson charts a life story that is entirely strange to me, and shocking. And yet the weird thing is that I know many of the people in it – or thought I did. His late father, Austin, who helped launch the Sunday Sport, I met and thought a likeable if flaky chap, and good company.

Taki

Welcome to post-truth America

A couple more weeks in the Bagel and then on to dear old London. I’ve had a very good time partying with young friends here, but the place reeks, literally as well as metaphorically. The rate of violence is creeping up, with gangs shooting at each other even on 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, right where the poor little Greek boy grew up. Where a commemorative plaque marking young Taki’s residence should have been put up long ago for services to American women, there was a corpse. The next day, it was forgotten, as an 11-year-old was gunned down in the Bronx. What used to be extreme radicalism is now

James Bartholomew

Why I’ve spent £68,500 on a tank

Buying a tank is not as easy as you might think. When we started looking for one, people delighted in telling us: ‘Oh, you should have bought one in the 1990s. There were hundreds available for practically nothing!’ Well, not anymore. Especially not if you are picky about what sort of tank you want. I’m collecting artefacts for a new museum of totalitarianism and wanted a T-54 or T-55, two models which are pretty much the same as each other with just a few alterations and which are the most-produced tanks in history. They were used by the Soviet army to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956; they were deployed

Dot Wordsworth

The strangeness of station names

In Kyiv they have voted to change the names of some metro stations. Heroes of the Dnieper is to become Heroes of Ukraine. The station was named after the street outside, and there’s nothing wrong with the river Dnieper, which winds its S-shape through Ukraine like the Grand Canal through Venice. The trouble was that the counter-offensive in 1943 by the Soviet Union against the German invaders made much propaganda of a united effort by all nations under the Marxist flag, even though Stalin had not so long before presided over a famine that killed millions in Ukraine. Another Kyiv metro station is changing its name from Minsk to Warsaw.

Julian Glover

Farmers vs rewilders: can they find their common ground?

Our age isn’t the first to set an English landscape of our dreams against the one which actually exists, or see earning a living from the land as something base and destructive. The tension has always been there between people who work the land and the utopian dreamers for whom every mark of the plough is a scar. Farmers bristle at talk of countryside utopias and rewilding, and passionate wilders can’t see why land managers do things which they think are harmful to the land. Both groups complain about being misunderstood by the other, all the while failing to spot that the much more profound threat to the countryside comes

Rory Sutherland

Why sat navs are a conversation killer

When my daughters learned to drive, I suggested they take their tests in automatics as driving manual cars would soon be redundant. I worry about this. Not because I think I was wrong, but because I fear that gear-changing is yet another of those once commonplace skills which may soon be lost to technology for ever, like double-declutching or the ability to memorise more than three phone numbers. As evidence of this depletion of tacit expertise, consider how the satnav has eroded map-reading skills in anyone under 40 – something which might explain why the Russian army sticks to main roads even when driving tanks. Since nobody uses printed maps

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Should house guests pay to charge their electric cars?

Q. My wife’s father, who she adored, has died and she is to be his sole beneficiary. She intends to import a mass of low-grade ‘ornaments’ and unappealing furniture into our home. I’m afraid these things will, to be blunt, lower the tone of the house I inherited myself. I am fairly well-known in the art world – so it matters. Any advice, Mary? – Name and address withheld A. Enthuse to your wife that you feel her late father’s possessions, so redolent of his distinctive character, would get lost if inserted piecemeal into the existing decor of your house. Instead, why not make it a project to magically recreate

Katy Balls

‘China is all-out against us’: an interview with Lithuania’s foreign minister

On the 16th floor of a tower block in Vilnius, Lithuania, is an office with a nameplate so incendiary that it has started a trade war. The ‘Taiwanese Representative Office’ violates a rule that China imposes upon its trade partners: never allow Taiwan to open official offices. Call it ‘Taipei’, or anything, just not ‘Taiwan’. Lithuania recently decided that an important principle is at stake: should small countries be bullied by big ones? It thought not – and has allowed Taiwan to use its own name at what is regarded as a de facto embassy. This was Vilnius going out on a limb, saying it was time to defend democracies

Peter Jones

Putin is repeating Emperor Vitellius’s mistakes

Given Putin’s less than triumphant operation in Chechnya, where the Russian army suffered catastrophic losses, it is hardly surprising that his control of the ‘special operation’ in Ukraine does not seem to be a howling success. His inability to deal with the situation there bears a striking resemblance to that of the short-lived Roman emperor Vitellius. After the chaos that followed Nero’s suicide in ad 68, the year 69 is known as ‘the year of the four emperors’. Vitellius was the third to try for the throne, before falling to the ultimately successful pro-Vespasian forces. The Roman historian Tacitus was scathing about his military abilities. Vitellius in fact had some

Ian Rankin

I’ve written the perfect book

I met a Canadian couple for lunch in Edinburgh. They were from Vancouver – he a judge, she an opera singer – and had won me at a charity auction. I do this several times a year. It’s a painless way of helping good causes. Of course it’s a very one-sided blind date: they know more about me than I do about them, at least to start with. But the conversation always flows easily and I’ve met some fascinating characters. After the lunch, a drink at Inspector Rebus’s favourite watering hole, the Oxford Bar, was part of the deal. It too has character to spare. Speaking of which, I also

The Spectator

Letters: The true state of Oxbridge admissions

Applying myself Sir: It was interesting to read David Abulafia’s rather damning critique of the Oxbridge admissions process (‘Who’s out’, 14 May), given the fact that he entirely contradicts much of what he must have seen as a professor of history at Cambridge. Abulafia criticises the fact that ‘candidates from one type of school with better scores (on the TSA) are being turned away in favour of those from another type of school with lower scores’. I’m a Year 13 student at a state school and was turned away from Cambridge this year after applying to study philosophy. For me, there was little to no advice given by the school,

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Sue Gray reports, ScotRail slashes trains and monkeypox spreads

Home Sue Gray starched and ironed her report for publication after the Metropolitan Police wound up its own enquiries into breaches of coronavirus laws in and around Downing Street, with 126 fixed penalty notices being issued, only one to Boris Johnson. Meanwhile the nation contemplated photographs published by ITV News of the Prime Minister raising a glass at Downing Street on 13 November 2020. Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, said in an interview: ‘I would want to see Moldova equipped to Nato standard. This is a discussion we’re having with our allies.’ A ballot of 40,000 members prepared the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers union for a national strike. ScotRail

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 28 May 2022

For those of us who are prone to anxiety before playing in big tournaments, there are plenty of self-help books to turn to. They don’t specifically address bridge, of course, but the lessons have universal application. Among my favourite authors is Martin Seligman, the celebrated ‘father of Positive Psychology’. Whenever I sit down to play, I try to remember his words on the importance of optimism and positive thinking. Yet there’s one piece of advice nowhere to be found in any of his books: what do I do when my opponent turns out to be… Martin Seligman? Let me tell you, the man shows no mercy at the bridge table.

Robin Oakley

Poor prize money is killing British horseracing

Seeing Fully Wet win the European Breeders Fund Maiden Stakes at Goodwood on Saturday was a genuine source of pleasure, and not just because I had thought her the pick of the paddock and taken the 8-1. My previous ‘best in paddock’ had finished last. The good news was that Fully Wet was the first winner in Britain for Barry Schwartz, the former CEO of Calvin Klein who is a leading owner-breeder in the US. The fact that he and fellow owner Andrew Rosen have chosen to have the £120,000 filly trained in Britain by John and Thady Gosden was a ray of hope amid the gloom and doom over

Melissa Kite

The village parking wars have taken an ugly turn

The dynamics of the village can only be understood with reference to what’s happening to the parking. Unless you study the parking, you have no way of understanding the village. Not really. You may think you understand it, but you are just scratching the surface of the alliances and enmities that make the village go around. For example, we recently lost the residents’ parking sign relating to the dozen spaces down the unmade track that leads to my house which had been used by those of us stuck down this track through no fault of our own, other than we had a rush of blood to the head and decided

Jeremy Clarke

The art of oncology

The main side effect of the six-month course of chemotherapy was ‘fatigue’. The main side effect of the three-monthly hormone injection is ‘fatigue’. The one and only side effect of the expensive, new-generation, last-chance-saloon anti-prostate cancer drug that I’ve been started on is ‘fatigue’. I’m clapped out. At night I sleep for 11 hours and wake up tired. Then I have about three hours to spend doing things in an upright position before lunch. After lunch I sleep for another two or three hours. After a long afternoon nap I wake up tired again. But I can read lying down on the bed or the terrace recliner. Then it’s a

Samantha Smith

Who cares? The real problem with social services

After a tumultuous childhood and breakdown in family relationships, I ended up in the hands of social services. I remember my social worker dropping me off at the door of my emergency accommodation with a bag of clothes and little else. On my first day, while filling out my induction paperwork in the office, a staff member asked me: ‘What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?’. I was far too ‘nice’, he said, to be trapped in their prison-like environment. His comment perfectly summarises a common attitude within the social care system to the young people it was set up to help. This week, the Independent Review of Children’s