Society

Thursday

14 Oct 2021

What makes a conker champion?

Last weekend, for the 54th time, hundreds of competitors met to compete for the title of world conker champion in the village of Southwick in Northamptonshire. King Conker was there to oversee the proceedings. Jasmine Tetley beat the men’s champion Ady Hurrell in the Grand Final to retain the title she won in 2019. There are several different versions of the game of conkers, but essentially it involves ‘smashing’ your opponent’s nut before they break yours. At the world championships, competitors have to draw a conker blind from a bag for each match, and then have three swings at their adversary’s conker, before receiving three. This repeats for up to

Madeleine Kearns

Baby doomers: why are couples putting the planet ahead of parenthood?

For much of the last century, people had good reason to wonder whether it made sense to have babies. Millions of young men had died or been maimed in the trenches, and then along came the risk of being pulverised by an atom bomb. Nonetheless, men and women continued to have children and after both world wars there was a baby boom. As C.S. Lewis wrote in 1948: ‘It is perfectly ridiculous, to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances.’ Somehow, we have lost this perspective. Back then,

Martin Vander Weyer

Why we should all start hoarding cash and loo rolls

If there’s anyone in Britain who knows how to keep grocery shelves stacked, it’s former Tesco chief executive Sir Dave Lewis, who has been named as Downing Street’s ‘supply chain tsar’. Application of Tesco’s mastery of logistics and fierce discipline on suppliers should keep delivery trucks moving, so long as they have drivers. But even Lewis won’t be able to avert the pre-Christmas surge of panic-buying which I’m told Cabinet Office planners fear — especially if it’s combined with a major outage in the banking system. Last week’s Facebook crash was a warning that blank screens are only a couple of burned-out circuits or a cyberhacker’s half-hour away. And if

Julie Burchill

The characteristic I most admire in politicians? Petulance

Many negative qualities are ascribed to politicians — name-calling, absenteeism, drunkenness — but you rarely hear of my favourite political emotion: petulance, which has caused us so much public entertainment in the political arena and promises to cause so much more. Think of Dominic Raab refusing to accept his demotion until he was made Deputy Prime Minister; the spat between Liz Truss and Dominic Raab over who gets to stay at Chevening; Angela Rayner’s scathing letter on Commons notepaper to a Brighton shoe shop after it failed to put a pair of £195 heels aside for her; the spectacular Starmer meltdown in February when Sir Keir went ‘puce’ and kept

Dot Wordsworth

The ground rules, from coffee to marriage

There’s a rude gesture in Pickwick that I don’t quite understand. Mr Jackson, a young lawyer’s clerk in conversation with Mr Pickwick, ‘applying his left thumb to the tip of his nose, worked a visionary coffee-mill with his right hand, thereby performing a very graceful piece of pantomime (then much in vogue, but now, unhappily, almost obsolete) which was familiarly denominated “taking a grinder”’. When I asked my husband he said, ‘Something sexual’, which I think unlikely. I’d contemplated grinding while trying to find out whether coffee grounds are so called because they are ground-up coffee or because they are like earthy ground fallen to the bottom of the cup.

Laura Freeman

The joy of a cluttered museum

On a clear day, from the balcony of Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery in Carlisle, you can see the McVitie’s factory. If the wind were in the right direction, I like to think you’d smell digestives on the breeze. Originally, it was the factory of Carr’s, bakers of table water biscuits since 1831. Carr’s held the Royal Warrant from 1841 until 2012, when it lost the crown due to ‘changing tastes’ in the royal household. I blame Duchy Originals Oaten Biscuits. Inside the museum is a display of Carr’s covetable vintage biscuit tins and, on a satin hanger, the brown velvet waistcoat worn by Jonathan Dodgson Carr himself. The

Roger Alton

Where did all of rugby’s fans go?

Could rugby union get any better? The entertainment in the Premiership is breathtaking and the overall product as good as any you get in sport. But why is it not more widely loved? If you missed Harlequins’ epic comeback (where have we heard that before?) against Bristol last week, deepest sympathies of course, but do your best to savour any of Quins’ sensational tries. It was Marcus Smith’s in the 72nd minute that did it. The Quins’ dazzling stand-off was confronted with massed ranks of Bristolians and so Smith ran across the field (even though they tell you not to at school) before magically turning back on himself at a

Tanya Gold

The Batman restaurant that’s totally bats: Park Row reviewed

There is a Batman restaurant in London, or rather there was: Savini at the Criterion on Piccadilly Circus. Savini was a haunted grey Italian restaurant that closed in 2018 and was artistically dependent on salt. It appeared in The Dark Knight, in which Batman, who is Bruce Wayne to everyone but himself (I have a theory that everyone knows Bruce Wayne is Batman, but they pretend not to because he is an orphan), owned this restaurant, in which case he should have fixed the telephone lines. (Savini was plagued by a dispute with BT.) But because you cannot ever have enough of a strange thing, there is a new Batman

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: should I have asked out my rush-hour crush?

Q. On a train journey the other day I sat opposite someone I found immensely attractive. We struck up a conversation and talked for 40 minutes until he left the train, a few stops before my own destination. I am 90 per cent sure he returned my feelings, but he was rather a shy man and we had talked for just too short a time to merit the exchange of contact details. Mary, I’m in despair but what could I have said, without seeming pushy, to ensure we could meet again? — E.W., Exeter A. When such a promising brief encounter occurs, swiftly taper the conversation to allow you to

The Spectator

In praise of Irn Bru

Gasbags Sir: Seb Kennedy tells us that, like Covid, our looming energy crisis came from China (‘Power grab’, 9 October). Its roots are nearer home. The capitulation of successive governments to doom-mongers such as Insulate Britain and the catastrophists who are due to fly to Glasgow in a few weeks for COP26 is just as much to blame. Britain has sufficient shale gas reserves to last hundreds of years, yet in the face of a few illegal demonstrations, the government abandoned the opportunity to secure gas supplies for generations to come. It caved in to those who opposed planning permission for shale mines in Lancashire and elsewhere. The naivety of

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: power failures, toy shortages and Boris’s Marbella mountain villa

Home In an extraordinary wrangle between government departments, the Treasury accused Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, of ‘making things up’ by saying he had held talks with the Treasury about helping companies badly hit by soaring energy prices. With the price of wholesale gas having risen fourfold in a year, businesses expected to close factories. To stir the pot of government discord, some demanded that Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, should ‘knock heads together’, though he was on holiday in the mountains above Marbella at a villa belonging to Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park. There were signs that prime-ministerial favour rested upon Mr Kwarteng. The Queen, aged 95, used a

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 16 October 2021

The Gold Cup is the most prestigious Open Teams event in Britain, and has been ever since Colonel ‘Pops’ Beasley first held the trophy aloft in 1932. Last weekend’s online final was as thrilling as any I can remember — a neck-and-neck race between Janet de Botton’s team and Tim Leslie’s, with de Botton pulling ahead in the last few boards to win by 20 imps. The players had been battling it out from Saturday morning until Sunday evening with hardly a break. But if they were exhausted they didn’t show it — they fought for every point right up to the end in a terrific display of stamina and

Robin Oakley

Charlie Appleby is the trainer to beat

I know what Keats was on about with his mists and mellow fruitfulness, but autumn is less of a joy when you daren’t rock up at the local petrol station with a jerry can to fill the mower for fear of being lynched by fuel-hungry vigilantes taking you for a hoarder. For me this time of year is defined more by my annual quest to bring off the autumn double, finding winners two weeks apart for the Cambridgeshire and the Cesarewitch. This year I managed two seconds with Anmaat (11–2) and Burning Victory (13–2): the dream goes on. The Cesarewitch is my favourite, partly because it brings to Newmarket a

Melissa Kite

My horse is allergic to beige carpet

The horse lorry arrived and lowered its ramp — and I stood in front of it knowing that my thoroughbred was not going to load. We were already beyond stressed, having been told our lease at the farm was not being renewed, and with the shooting season bearing down on us. In one week the guns would be going off around us. The horses had to be moved. But this blasted ramp was covered in beige carpet. If it had been red carpet, Darcy might have been happy. She is so precious, so oversensitive, so self-absorbed that I have no doubt she would have appreciated a red carpet. But lumpy

Jeremy Clarke

Acorns and aliens: lunch with Vernon and the Ukrainians

Catriona and I were late for lunch at Vernon’s because I couldn’t get out of bed. The four of them — Vernon and the three Ukrainians — were sitting outside drinking in the sun when we walked up the path. The Ukrainians are renting Vernon’s other house. Nina is married to Andrij. Valentyna is Nina’s friend from their college days. They had been talking about me. ‘Talk of the wolf,’ said Valentyna. ‘That is what we say in Ukraine when we talk about someone and they come,’ she explained. ‘Quand on parle du loup,’ said Vernon, who is French-American, ‘on en voit la queue. That’s what we French say. When

Taki

Succession gets the rich and powerful all wrong

They have stepped into the pop-culture spotlight via the HBO hit Succession, a hatchet job on the very rich and powerful produced by the very rich and much more powerful Adam McKay (The Big Short). McKay started off by doing a lot of cheesy comedies, made a large fortune, and then went after Wall Street types. Nothing wrong with that; films are supposed to go after the rich and powerful, and always have. It’s the media’s coverage of a TV series about a fictional family that is slanted and totally false. The media hint that the mogul and patriarch Logan Roy is based on Rupert Murdoch, and that Roy’s dysfunctional

Damian Thompson

Ex Anglican Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali converts to Catholicism

Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester and one of the best-known Anglican clerics, could be ordained as a Catholic priest as early as next month. The conversion of such a high-profile intellectual would be an enormous boost for the Catholic Ordinariate, set up by Pope Benedict XVI to receive Anglicans into the Roman church. Friends of Nazir-Ali say that he has already converted and is now a member of the Ordinariate which over the years has seen several Anglican clergy, many of them married, serve as Catholic priests. Its services are distinctively Anglican in style and include passages from the Book of Common Prayer. Pakistan-born Nazir-Ali, 72, was Bishop

Tim Stanley

Brexit has ended Thatcherism. And about time, too

A Conservative government is raising taxes to fund the NHS and telling business to pay its workers more. The world is upside down, and classical liberals are furious. Steve Baker, one of those MPs, tweeted a picture of a pile of books including Hayek, Popper and Von Mises and said ‘This is what we believe’, reminding us of a time when Conservatives sought to shrink the government, not grow it. Until recently, most of us thought Margaret Thatcher and Conservatism were synonymous. We were wrong. While Hayek, Popper and Von Mises are definitely part of the conservative canon, and classical liberals part of the family, they dominated the right at

Olivia Potts

Recipe: Chicken Marbella

What is it about retro food? I don’t mean nostalgic food, from school dinner favourites to your grandmother’s signature dishes. I mean food you’ve probably never even tried. Thoroughly old-fashioned dishes that nevertheless light up your culinary imagination — or at least mine. I’m talking devilled eggs. Prawn cocktail. Beef stroganoff. Perhaps it’s because many of these recipes hail from the golden age of dinner parties. They speak of glamour, excess, a touch of kitsch, all washed down with a snowball. These are dishes that should be accompanied by shoulder pads and strong opinions about the royal wedding. Following a long period in which it was illegal to hold a

Andrew Roberts

Would your party pass the ‘Gove Test’?

I’m on a book tour which involves 65 speeches in 60 days in Britain, Washington, Philadelphia, Virginia, Mexico, California and New York. I suspect the second part will be tougher than the first, as Americans understandably hold a less charitable view of King George III. I’m a lot kinder about their Founding Fathers than the woke crowd in the States, though. The National Archives in Washington is threatening to put up a sign next to the Declaration of Independence stating that some of its views are ‘outdated, biased, and offensive’. Of course they are referring to its clause about Native Americans, but I’m going to try to persuade Americans that