Society

Thursday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Staged: a handful of VIP events is no substitute for normality

Wimbledon is back. The start of the tournament in June marks the opening of the British summer, sending a signal to everyone that it’s time to take it easy: enjoy a glass of fizz, some strawberries and some sporting drama on the grass. And this year, for the first time, we witnessed a roar of applause from the crowd on Centre Court for Britain’s vaccine success. It looks very much like life as normal. The same was true at Wembley stadium, where thousands of fans cheered on England this week when they beat Germany. A few plays have opened as well. Several politicians were in attendance at the Garrick for

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Cake expectations: afternoon tea has gone OTT

The other day, I came across a description of afternoon tea written by Alfred Douglas in 1920: ‘Two kinds of bread and butter, white and brown, cucumber and tomato sandwiches, cut razor thin, scones, rock buns and then all the cakes — plum, madeira, caraway seed — the meal had about it the lavishness of a Victorian dinner.’ There are a few things about this feast which I find striking. It includes two kinds of bread and butter. Sliced bread and butter never features on the modern table but a century ago, people used it to fill themselves up; it took the edge off your appetite. Note also the simplicity

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The Nicola Sturgeon effect on house prices

Nicola Sturgeon depresses me and seems to be having the same effect on Scottish house prices. In a housing market described by departing Bank of England economist Andy Haldane as ‘on fire’, the flames have been rising higher the further away from London — but more or less extinguishing themselves at Hadrian’s Wall. Why buyers are scarcer in Nicola’s domain is a question I’ll leave to our political writers, but the broader picture of soaring home prices across the rest of the UK is an unforeseen pandemic effect that may have painful consequences. Nationwide’s June data shows an annual price-rise bar chart increasing steadily from 7.3 per cent in London

The Spectator

How many people are self-isolating when they’re told to?

Isolated cases Large numbers of people are still being ordered to self-isolate in spite of having been vaccinated — 137,560 people were identified as close contacts of positive Covid cases through the Test and Trace system between 10 and 16 June. How well have they been adhering to the rules? — 79% say they have fully conformed. — 80% claimed they had had no contact with non-household members. — Of the 21% who didn’t adhere to the rules, 90% said they had left home during the period in which they were supposed to be isolating and 21% said they had had visitors to their home. — 41% said that isolating

Gethin Chamberlain

Lockdown killed my mother – and thousands like her

I barely recognised my mother when I saw her in the hospital bed the night she died. It had been many months since we were last able to meet, when she was still a force of nature. Now there was almost nothing left of her. The death certificate records that Elizabeth Carol Chamberlain died of dementia and kidney disease aged 88. But it was lockdown that really killed her. For my parents, like so many people of their generation living out their later years in care homes, lockdown offered not protection but imprisonment. ‘It’s cruel,’ Mam would say, over and over again, in the painful and awkward phone calls that

Jon Day

The mysterious world of pigeon racing

Pigeon racing isn’t much of a spectator sport. Race birds are driven to the ‘liberation point’, where they’re released to fly back to their homes. Only the liberation and the return are witnessed — what happens in between is a mystery. This is partly what makes pigeon racing so fascinating. It’s also what can make it so stressful. A week ago, between 5,000 and 10,000 pigeons went missing during a race from Peterborough. Usually fanciers aren’t too worried if a few birds don’t make it straight home from a race; they’ll rest up and return a few days later, no worse for wear. But this time the losses were exceptionally

Bruce Anderson

A new take on New Zealand wine

‘The doors clap to, the pane is bright with showers.’ With ‘summer’ determined to do its worst, there is one obvious question. How were the English able to invent cricket and tennis? Apropos tennis, there is another obvious question. How long will Wimbledon remain mired in sexism? It has now been established beyond peradventure that women are at least as good as men at everything. Anyone who claims that those who were born female — an increasingly irrelevant criterion — are not as strong as men is likely to encounter the wrath of the criminal law. Quite right too: supposed free speech must not be allowed to trump common sense.

Dot Wordsworth

Does it matter if Priti Patel drops her Gs?

In 1923 in Whose Body? we were introduced to Lord Peter Wimsey on his way to an auction where he hoped to buy a Caxton folio from 1489 of The Four Sons of Aymon. But he had forgotten his catalogue, so said to the cab driver: ‘D’you mind puttin’ back to where we came from?’ Lord Peter drops his g’s, as people say, in the manner of the huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ aristocracy. I’m not sure who first put that triad of gerunds together and would be grateful for early citations. But that archaic mannerism is unwelcome to some viewers from the lips of Beth Rigby of Sky News. ‘I

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Hancock out, Javid in and MoD papers found at a bus stop

Home A lively game of hunt the issue followed the resignation of Matt Hancock as Secretary of State for Health after the Sun published a photograph of him kissing an aide, Gina Coladangelo, in May, in contravention of the law at the time on meeting indoors. The Prime Minister had tried to declare the matter ‘closed’ when Mr Hancock apologised, but some Tory MPs and many citizens were scandalised that the man in whose name coronavirus restrictions were made law (as statutory instruments) should exempt himself from their strictures. Mr and Mrs Hancock parted company. Questions were raised over how the security camera images reached the Sun, and how Ms

The Spectator

Letters: We can’t build our way out of the housing crisis

Excess demand Sir: Liam Halligan (‘The house mafia’, 26 June) treats us to an exposé of the shoddy products of the mass housebuilders. In the course of his article, however, he accepts as given that the solution to the housing crisis is to build more houses. The problem, however, is not one of deficient supply; it is a problem of excess demand, driven by ultra-low interest rates, kept so low for so long that the result has been an out-of-control housing boom. The young are being prevented from buying a house, not because housebuilders hoard land and refuse to build, but because buyers with access to eye-watering amounts of borrowed

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Why I won’t buy a Tesla

I loved the Ford Mustang Mach-E which I had on loan for four days. It was gorgeous to drive, and slightly saner than the Tesla Model 3 — in that some of the controls involve physical switches and buttons, rather than an on-screen interface. The only annoyance was a persistent whining noise. This came from my teenage daughter who endlessly delivered her strongly held opinion that a fat, 55-year-old advertising man shouldn’t be driving a Mustang. As I patiently explained, when you are a 55-year-old man, you don’t really buy a car for yourself, you buy it for your Jungian shadow-self. So whereas your real-life wife and children might not

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Don’t pity me for living in London

Londoners have had to learn, more than ever before, to master the art of fielding pity. We’ve been on the receiving end of lots of it this year from people living in the country who care about us, which makes it worse because we’re supposed to be grateful. I’m still smarting from a few recent zingers: ‘I do feel sorry for you, being cooped up in that small house.’ ‘It must be stifling there. We’ve got a nice breeze down here.’ ‘It’s all so lovely and green. Even London must be looking quite green.’ I bat away this pity that comes across as one-upmanship, bleating: ‘It’s been fine, actually’, ‘I

Charles Moore Charles Moore

‘Fear and bullying’ at the National Trust

Is Winston Marshall — guitarist, banjo player, composer of Mumford & Sons, and father of the west London ‘Nu-Folk’ music that eventually conquered the world — a martyr to the Twitter mob? I find his story more interesting than that. He was trolled earlier this year for tweeting in favour of a book by Andy Ngo about the power of the far-left in the United States. (I haven’t read the book; I gather it is polemical, but in no way fascist.) Because of the difficulties this created for the band, he apologised, but later felt uneasy since he believed he had said nothing wrong. After consulting his fellow band members,

James Graham

The true cost of theatre closures

It turns out that if there’s one thing more expensive than making theatre, it’s not making it. Empty buildings haemorrhage money. Postponing a show already in rehearsal or raising the curtain only for it to be dropped shortly after — as happened in December when theatres reopened just to close days later — scares off investors and unsettles audiences. (I might also say that being unable to gather as a community to make sense of the world through stories is costly not just in a financial sense. But then I am a pretentious playwright.) No, what we need is to begin filling our diaries once again with plays, musicals, comedy

Lucy Vickery

A literary-critical analysis of Abba’s ‘Waterloo’

In Competition No. 3205, you were invited to supply a rigorous literary-critical analysis of a well-known pop song. Thanks to Oliver Hawkins, who drew to my attention J. Temperance’s real-life analysis of Boney M’s ‘Daddy Cool’ (The New Inquiry, 2015): ‘We may paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari and state that “it is within capitalist society that the critique of ‘Daddy Cool’ must always resume its point of departure and find again its point of arrival.”’ Which gives a sense of what you were aiming for. Fiona Clark’s dissection of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ hit the spot: ‘Arguably, the “poor boy” or “Little silhouetto” embodies the quintessentially paradigmatic figure of the Pharmakos or scapegoat,

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

My voyage back through the landmarks of my life

I was looking forward to my dinner at Daquise in South Kensington, a Polish restaurant that’s been there for ever yet feels curiously up-to-date; but that wasn’t until 7.30. I’d finished my afternoon’s work, I’d brought in the washing and written two thank-you cards, and it was still only five o’clock. I hate hanging around. By Tube to South Ken is only half an hour — so what to do? ‘Why not go the long way, on foot and by river?’ I thought. My flat is by the Thames in east London, so I could walk along the river to the Canary Wharf jetty and hope for a river bus

Aidan Hartley

How WhatsApp mums saved Kenya’s castaway children

Kenya In March, Global Britain signed a new, post-Brexit trade deal with Kenya. This was a welcome agreement for my homeland, where the pandemic has caused tremendous economic suffering, but where comparatively few deaths have occurred among the fit, young population. Weeks later, on 9 April, the UK condemned its former colony to the red list of countries. Non-citizens were banned from travelling to the UK from Kenya, while arriving UK passport holders faced a £1,750, ten-day incarceration in a quarantine hotel. Such extreme measures were imposed on the excuse that a ‘significant’ number of passengers arriving from Nairobi tested positive for a variant of concern. It appears that, in

Melissa Kite

The National Trust delinquents strike again

The woman sat alone and stony-faced in the passenger seat of the car as it blocked the road. She was wearing a mask, but I could see that she wore the blankly determined expression of someone who thought they had every right to stop where they liked. Sure enough, the National Trust sticker was on the windscreen. The driver’s door had been left open by her husband, and I had watched him get out and walk on to the village green to stand up against a tree and relieve himself. The couple, both in their sixties, had pulled up and parked, for this purpose, in the middle of the road

Jeremy Clarke

It’s the end of lockdown – and the village has gone wild

The village square is a long and pedestrianised oblong shaded along its length by massive pollarded plane trees. It’s known as ‘le Cours’. There’s a Tabac and a Spar and an ancient fountain that children play on and a shop selling Panama hats. Otherwise le Cours is dominated by the tables and chairs of a dozen or so bars, cafés and restaurants. Viewed from one end at the height of summer, it looks like one great dining hall under the trees. In July and August chic families drive up here from the Mediterranean coast to eat. One recognises the clothes and that forbidding, peculiar aura of new wealth. Until last