Society

Thursday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: Mrs Malaprop turns tour guide

In Competition No. 3212 you were invited to provide a spiel that a well-known character from the field of fact or fiction might give in their capacity as a tourist guide to a capital city or notable monument. In a hotly contested week, I was sorry not to have space for P.C. Peirse-Duncombe’s Tristram Shandy (‘To begin at the beginning of our tour — for to begin elsewhere might be a beginning though not the beginning and thence to a conclusion which we could not call The End, let us commence with this view of a tower, a mere 324 metres of lattice ironwork created by Gustave Eiffel…’) or David

Luke McShane

No. 667

White to play and draw. The conclusion of an endgame study composed by J. Hašek (1951). Black is preparing a queen infiltration via a6. But with the right move, White can ensure that is not fatal. What should White play? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 23 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 Ra8+ Bxa8 2 Nc8+ Ka6 3 Rb6 mate. Last week’s winner Andrew Espley, Masham, N. Yorks

Luke McShane

Containment

‘Exchange chess’ (also known as bughouse) is the chess equivalent of a three-legged race. It is played in teams of two, on adjacent boards with opposite colours, and it works best when nobody takes it seriously. The only essential rule is that when you capture an opponent’s piece, you hand it to your partner, who may later plonk it down on an empty square in lieu of moving a piece. A checkmate on either board wins, no matter how dire the adjacent situation. A long time ago, when we couldn’t convene a foursome, a friend taught me to play ‘one-board exchange chess’. This variant, which I now see is listed

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

The Covid vaccines may affect periods. Are we allowed to talk about this?

It’s fashionable to talk about periods. Books on the subject, with glossy red and pink covers, are bestsellers. They have sassy titles like Period Power: A Manifesto for the Menstrual Movement and Period:Twelve Voices Tell the Bloody Truth. The Periodical is a podcast for ‘everyone who bleeds, and their friends’. And this being our ultra-capitalist world, you can obviously buy a T-shirt, notebook or phone cover with a period-related slogan slapped across it. ‘Anything you can do, I can do bleeding’ is one mantra. I admit to having not engaged much with this world. My period has always seemed to me a private matter, of no interest to anybody else

Clarissa Ward

Even the Taliban are in shock: my week on the Kabul front line

Kabul I’ve been to the front line in Iraq, Syria and Libya and witnessed all kinds of crazy, unlikely events. But I have never seen anything like what’s happening in Kabul. Only two weeks ago, I was reporting for CNN in the city of Kandahar. It was clear that this provincial capital would not be the last to fall. Then on Sunday morning, we heard that the Taliban were at the gates of Kabul itself. In the afternoon, we heard that they had entered the city. By the evening, Taliban fighters were manning checkpoints on every street corner, wielding guns but not using them. How on earth did they take

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: how do I stop my fat friends breaking my chairs?

Q. We have two very longstanding and generous-hearted (female) friends. Both have always been overweight, but since Covid they have ballooned and now are obese by anyone’s measure. On the two occasions when we have hosted them for an outside lunch, they have unknowingly broken one of our metal garden chairs each. It will soon be time to invite them to our house again but I know that our chairs won’t stand the strain. Our reserve furniture is even less robust than our regular set. What can I do to avoid more ruined chairs and a potentially very embarrassing scene? — R.A., Como, Italy A. The design classic ‘Director’s Chair’,

Simon Cooper

Right as rain: don’t blame climate change for the British weather

I spend a lot of my life worrying about the climate. When you have more than 100 miles of precious chalk streams under your care, rain becomes the currency of your life. Too much in summer. Too little in winter. Or sometimes the other way around. Other times a bit of both. For us river folk, as for farmers, the weather is never quite right. Who do I blame when it is not quite right? Well, mostly us. People. Society. Urbanisation. Too many people sucking too much water from too few rivers. Water companies pumping untreated sewage into already critically depleted rivers. Politicians who allow the building of houses on

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: the Taliban take Afghanistan

Home Parliament was recalled after the rapid fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban. Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, returned from a foreign holiday on Sunday. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, declared as Kabul fell: ‘We don’t want anybody bilaterally recognising the Taliban.’ But Mr Raab said that Britain recognised states, not governments. Britain sent an extra 300 soldiers to help extract British citizens and people such as interpreters now in danger. Ben Wallace, the Defence Secretary, wept when he said on the radio that some people for whom Britain had responsibility ‘won’t get back’ from Afghanistan. The government announced what it called a ‘bespoke’ scheme to settle 5,000 Afghans in

Gus Carter Gus Carter

My strange night in a sensory deprivation tank

Hidden below St George’s Wharf in Vauxhall, down the road from a now defunct gay sauna, is Floatworks, a wellness centre that offers ‘floatation therapy’. Sensory deprivation tanks can be found in most British cities — in bohemian towns like Bristol and Brighton, but also in Birmingham and Belfast. The concept is simple enough: people are locked in an unlit pod and lie there with nothing but their thoughts. Some people report hallucinations, others a deep sense of calm. Wally Funk, the 82-year-old who was blasted into low earth orbit last month aboard Jeff Bezos’s private rocket, endured ten hours of sensory deprivation when she trained as an astronaut. Ten

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Why I swapped my country pile for a tiny London pad

‘Londoners searching for more space during Covid are buying up English country manors,’ said a Wall Street Journal headline in January — and that was certainly the trend reported by eager out-of-town estate agents. The middle classes,spurred by a temporary stamp-duty cut, were deserting the city in search of green pastures, home offices and the safety of low rural infection rates. Except for me, that is. I was going the other way, swapping my ‘country manor’ for a flat that’s as compact as it is uncompromisingly urban in the historic enclave of Seven Dials. Why? You might well ask — or if you happened to have seen the full-page Yorkshire

Peter Jones

The ancient Athenians knew how to soak the rich

Oxfam is arguing that if all billionaires forked out 99 per cent of their profits made during the Covid pandemic, the whole world could be vaccinated and every unemployed worker given a handy payout. Dream on. The ancient Athenians had rather more intelligent ways of soaking the rich. They raised annual taxes only for specific, stated ends (‘hypothecation’). These were funded by the 300 richest property-owners. A typical wealth-level was four talents (2,400 drachmas; an average wage was about 350 a year) and around 100 events a year needed to be covered. The tax was called a leitourgia (literally ‘work for the public’) from which we get our ‘liturgy’. The

The Spectator

Where did the Taliban come from?

Student takeover Where did the Taliban come from? — The word ‘Taliban’ means simply ‘students’ in Pashtun. They were originally a group of 50 students from the Sang-i-Hisar madrassa in Kandahar, led by Mohammed Omar, and committed to the overthrow of the warlords who were running Afghanistan in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. The movement emerged in 1994. By November of that year it was already in control of the city of Kandahar and two years later took control of the whole country. Hydrogen balloon The government published its ‘hydrogen strategy’, which it claimed could create 9,000 jobs by 2030 and eventually account for between 20% and

Dot Wordsworth

Aleatory, fate and a rolling of the dice

‘What do they mean, “Guess”?’ asked my husband, staring suspiciously at a page of the Daily Mail that had been used as wrapping for a secondhand book he had bought through the post. He finds old newspapers more interesting than the morning’s fresh issue. ‘Guess the definition: Aleatory (c.1690),’ it said. ‘A) A concealed repository. B) Interrogatory, always asking questions or inquiring. C) Relating to luck (especially bad luck).’ The answer was C, though I don’t know why it said ‘bad luck’. The word, deployed a little annoyingly in arty talk, comes from the Latin alea, meaning ‘dice’, or ‘die’ (the singular). Dice is a funny word too. In gaming

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Can cricket go on like this?

‘Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers, and — as George Orwell said — old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist.’ Thanks to John Major, former prime minister and noted cricket lover, for those words uttered in 1993 — and that are not worthy of the derision with which they would almost certainly be greeted today. The beer may still be warm, the suburbs nearly as green, and dog owners as dottily doting as ever, but these days the shadows on county grounds are as likely to be cast by floodlights

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

‘Lifeless and necrotic’: Native at Browns is an ode to joylessness

Browns is a famous fashion boutique in deepest Mayfair. It occupies a curved cream townhouse on Brook Street, which seems sunken and shuttered. Perhaps it is the lingering effects of the pandemic or because it’s late summer, but the interior — carefully designed over multiple eyries over many floors, like gold teeth fallen on a garden — feels lifeless and necrotic. High fashion needs joyful people to wear it (or at least people pretending to be joyful, which is more usual) and here there are none. Perhaps they are all in the south of France? Perhaps they never existed and were invented so the rest of us, regarding their perfection,

Douglas Murray

The flaw at the heart of humanitarian intervention

One of the most interesting aspects of President Biden’s speech on the American withdrawal from Afghanistan is that it shows he suffers from faulty memory syndrome. Like many of the rest of us, I suspect. Today Biden says that the mission of the allies in Afghanistan ‘was never supposed to have been nation-building’. But back in the early years of the conflict then Senator Biden was all for this now dirty phrase. ‘Our hope is that we will see a relatively stable government in Afghanistan,’ he said in 2001. One that ‘provides the foundation for future reconstruction of that country’. He was still holding to this line in 2003 when

Leo McKinstry

How corporations rebrand poverty

The other week, when I was shopping in Margate, I saw a number of posters from Boots urging support for its campaign against ‘hygiene poverty’. Barely aware of the term, I looked it up online and was soon presented by claims that much of Britain is gripped by a crisis of personal neglect because of penury. According to the charity In Kind Direct, more than a third of people have either had to cut down on their hygiene essentials or go without them completely due to lack of money. The same charity warns that 43 per cent of parents of primary schoolchildren have had to ‘forgo basic hygiene or cleaning

Alastair Crooke

Like it or not, the Taliban are now players on the world stage

Many years ago, before the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988, I was based in Peshawar in Pakistan, near Afghanistan. I was responsible for British diplomatic reporting on the war and engaging with Afghan leaders. I came to know the Taliban. They were, to put it mildly, not particularly nice guys: intensely parochial, geographically and politically sectarian, xenophobic, misogynistic, tribal and rigid. As fierce Pashtuns, the biggest minority in Afghanistan, they would kill other ethnicities wantonly: Shia Hazaras in particular, as apostates, were killed. They detested Ahmad Shah Massoud, the ‘lion of Panjshir’ and a hero of the resistance to the Soviets, because he was a Tajik. Some of their

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The blind spot in the SNP’s ‘war on drink’

Scotland’s grim reputation for abnormally high drug fatalities has become embedded in the public consciousness over the past year. The fact that fake benzodiazepines (‘street valium’) can be procured for 50p a pill on the streets of Dundee and Glasgow is now common knowledge, as is Scotland’s unenviable place at the top of Europe’s drug deaths league table. However, belated attention to this crisis should not allow signs of another to slip below the radar. New figures from National Records of Scotland (NRS) show a 17 per cent surge in alcohol-specific deaths between 2019 and 2020, a rise from 1,020 to 1,190 in the space of 12 months, what NRS

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Tom Tugendhat’s speech was a masterclass in oratory

An ounce of emotion, it has been said, is worth a ton of fact. Tom Tugendhat’s remarkable speech to the Commons today was delivered with a current of emotion – pathos, as scholars of oratory call it – that was all the more electric for its restraint. His jaw clenched and trembled; his voice, now and again, seemed on the verge of faltering. As he said in his opening words: ‘Like many veterans, this last week has been one that has seen me struggle through anger, and grief, and rage. The feeling of abandonment of not just a country but the sacrifice that my friends made. I’ve been to funerals