Society

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How can I hide my lockdown weight gain?

Q. For professional reasons it is important that I am not fat. However I have put on more than a stone and a half during lockdown. This would not matter in the short term as I am not required to appear anywhere physically for some weeks and am already on a successful weight-loss programme. My problem is that one of my competitors, so to speak, rang to say that she is going to be in the area and could she drop in for lunch. My kind but unthinking husband picked up and told her that she would be welcome. Under no circumstances can I let her see how fat I

The Spectator

Letters: Why do we need beavers?

It’s not about money Sir: Professor Tombs criticises Alex Massie (Letters, 22 August) for ignoring evidence when the latter claims that economic concerns ‘no longer matter’ in great political decisions. But the evidence from the last Scottish referendum tends to support Massie. At the beginning of the Scottish referendum campaign in 2014, polls showed 26 per cent of Scottish voters favoured independence. The Better Together campaign amassed compelling evidence that independence would be a financial disaster and set about presenting this to the Scottish public in an exercise they christened Project Fear. The result was a rise of support for independence to 45 per cent, and it is widely considered

Jeremy Clarke

How to seduce a Border Force officer

There was only a handful of us arriving at Bristol on flight 6114 from Nice. Oscar and I had the leisure to choose which of the four available UK Border Force officers we most liked the look of. None of them were your usual bruisers. One was a careworn, perhaps broken old man and during the brief wait in the taped corridor we speculated on the nature of the tragedy that had brought him here to this. My speculative theory was that he had impulsively married an unpresentable woman, who had turned out to be an incurable alcoholic who beat him. Oscar’s was that he had been discharged from prison

Taki

The art of being a mistress

Gstaad The jokes about keeping a mistress are old and I’ve yet to hear a truly funny one (‘The difference between a wife and a mistress is like day and night,’ and so on). Like many other good things, mistresses have fallen out of fashion, the closing pay gap between the sexes being one of the main reasons for their demise. History tells us a lot about great men who had mistresses, which most great men did. Beauty and physical attributes aside, the most important quality for a kept woman was her discretion, with a capital D. Which brings me to the downfall of ex-King Juan Carlos of Spain, whose

Emma Byrne

Is the government about to bankrupt thousands of homeowners?

Within the next year or two, I could go bankrupt. My mistake: to join a government-backed affordable housing scheme and purchase a one-bedroom flat in east London. For the past four years, it has been my pride and joy — not to mention my savings, my pension and my financial future. I was grateful for the government’s help in getting a foothold in the city. But now another government policy is hurtling towards me, against which I have no defence. Nor do potentially tens of thousands of first-time buyers and the owners of affordable housing in my position. It might be the next big scandal to hit the government. It’s

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

The problem with pretty floral face masks

Now that we must all wear face masks, it is hardly surprising that they have started to become a fashion accessory. An Israeli jeweller has created a gold and diamond-encrusted mask that is said to be worth $1.5 million. According to the designer, the man who commissioned the extravagant mask — which weighs nearly 100 times as much as a typical surgical mask — had two demands: that it be completed by the end of the year and that it be the most expensive mask in the world. Diamond-encrusted face masks may not yet be everywhere, but floral ones certainly are. Once you start spotting them, you will see them

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Zac Crawley, a cricketing giant

Crowds, Covid and sport: could it get any crazier? I don’t mind about golf: no idiots yelling ‘Get in the hole’ at every opportunity. But Formula 1 without a few thousand petrol heads going berserk is even more tiresome than usual: a minor wheelspin at the start, then Lewis wins. One-day cricket in an empty ground will feel a bit odd. Not even a lone voice abusing Steve Smith in the upcoming games against the Aussies. Sport as purely a TV event is pretty limited. A friend had missed the PM’s volte-face on letting small crowds into the Bob Willis games, so was turned away when he tried to buy

William Moore William Moore

The joy of commuting

I was on a train from Sussex to London, my first since lockdown, when I realised I like my commute. The thought worried me a little. What kind of weirdo have I become? A commute is a psychological hurdle, something to be endured, not enjoyed. What’s next? The giddy thrill of waiting in a queue? A root-canal fan club? There are some aspects to commuting I don’t enjoy — the expense of a season ticket, of course, and frustrating delays — but overall, yes, I do like it. And during lockdown I actually missed it. What makes my enjoyment even weirder is that I have no interest in trains. There

Luke McShane

Carlsen vs Nakamura

Facing Magnus Carlsen, you have two problems. The first is obvious — he’s the best player in the world. The second lies in your awareness of the first. Countless players have seemed bewitched by the world champion, drained of the confidence needed to push for a win. In a single game, a strong grandmaster may well hunker down and steer the game towards a draw, but that’s a doubtful strategy in a long match, where critical mistakes will inevitably occur. I didn’t credit Hikaru Nakamura with much of a chance against Carlsen in the finals of the Magnus Carlsen Chess Tour, the series of elite online events held over recent

Luke McShane

No. 619

Nakamura–Carlsen, August 2020. Carlsen has just advanced 40…g6-g5+, laying a nasty trap. Only one move gives White a fighting chance here — what is it? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 31 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 51…Qh3+!! 52 Kxh3 Rh1 mate.Last week’s winner John Prust, Earley, Berks

Lavatch

2472: All-inclusive

An 11-word quotation (in ODQ) reads clockwise around the perimeter from square 1. Other unclued lights are names of a kind. A final thematic name (5) associated with the source of the quotation must be highlighted in the completed grid.   Across 14 Incompetent person of great status (7)15 Rapidly put away card, not large one in pack (7, two words)16 Devils Gauguin cubistically captures (6)17 It may be instrumental in police work (4)19 Sibling eats spice, keeping one for discriminating types (8)21 Least imaginative rendition of stretti (7)22 Beastly remark, one that’s fine (4)23 Resorting to gaffes out of the public eye (8)27 European agreement after port wine (5)29

Peter Jones

The Romans wouldn’t have understood our exam obsession

Many commentators have argued that the recent grading controversy indicates just how important public examinations are. Up to a point, Lord Copper. Romans did jobs, not ‘education’. Most who went to school (there was no state provision) probably learnt not much more than the basic three Rs (peasant families — the majority of the population — needed their children to work the land). A freed slave in Petronius’s Satyricon boasts that he knows ‘no geometry or fancy criticism or any such meaningless drivel, but I do know the alphabet and I can work out percentages and measures and currency’; Horace mocked pupils for being asked what is left from 1/12th

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

My steak cooking lesson turned into a sitcom

Pandemic has brought many truths, the most minor of which is: I can’t cook steak. I thought I could. I burnt butter and seared meat and — lo! — perfect steak. Then I asked Matt Brown, the executive chef at Hawksmoor, the best steak restaurant in London excepting Beast (and Beast is a charnel house and a metaphor, and it is weird) to help me improve my steak in a Zoom lesson and — lo! — I cannot cook steak. I was kindly disposed to Hawksmoor because of its name. Names are important. I have fallen in love with people because of their names. Hawksmoor is the real hero of

Dot Wordsworth

What’s the difference between ‘reticent’ and ‘reluctant’?

Anna Massey had no dramatic training before appearing on stage in 1955 aged 17 in The Reluctant Debutante by William Douglas-Home. She took the part to Broadway, but then in the film it was taken by poor Sandra Dee, who, if she was born in 1942, was still only 16 when it was released in 1958, the last year debutantes were presented at court. If it had been called The Reticent Debutante, the juvenile lead might have had fewer lines. I have noticed, with annoyance naturally, that reticent is now often used to mean ‘reluctant’. An article in the Telegraph about TikTok said that the businessman Zhang Yiming had been

The Spectator

Tanking the tanks could be a big mistake

That an abundance of tanks is no guarantee of a happy and secure nation was evident from the Soviet Union’s annual May Day parades through Red Square. A more controversial point is whether Britain can remain a serious military power without any working tanks. The government is reportedly considering, as part of its promised defence review, mothballing the country’s entire fleet of Challenger 2 tanks in order to save money and invest in evolving forms of military technology such as cyber and space warfare. This has raised the ire of some military figures, such as the former chief of the general staff General Lord Dannatt, who this week described the

The Spectator

The BBC tradition of trying to remove patriotic songs from Last Night

About Last Night It was suggested that the BBC might ‘decolonise’ the Last Night of the Proms by removing ‘Rule, Britannia’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ made its first appearance at the Proms in 1902 (Edward Elgar’s march had been played the previous year without the words). Sir Henry Wood’s ‘Fantasia on British Sea Songs’ followed in 1905. But the Last Night in its modern form began only with the first televised Last Night in 1947. Twenty-two years later began another tradition: the BBC trying to remove patriotic songs from the programme. The move was defeated in 1969 and again in 1990, in the

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: BBC drops songs, museum drops Sloane, and KFC and John Lewis drop slogans

Home Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, made pupils wear face-coverings in school corridors. It didn’t take long for the UK government to follow suit in England, for secondary pupils in areas of high transmission. The chief medical officers of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales said that the fatality rate for those aged five to 14 infected with coronavirus was 14 per million, lower than for most seasonal flu infections. Sally Collier resigned as chief regulator of Ofqual, which had been caught up in the chaotic assessment of A-level and GCSE candidates. It was ‘vitally important’ for children to go back to school, said Boris Johnson, the Prime

John Lee John Lee

Our immune system is the pandemic’s biggest mystery

What have we been witnessing these past few months? A worldwide crisis caused by the arrival of a new virus of exceptional virulence — or a crisis of awareness, in which incomplete information led to a wildly disproportionate reaction? Have lockdowns, face coverings and the rest saved millions of lives worldwide? Or have they had relatively little effect on the course of the pandemic, and ended up causing more harm than good? And why, so far, is Britain not seeing the surge of Covid-19 infections reported in Spain and France? What are we missing? We still know a lot less about Covid-19, and about viruses in general, than you might

Lucy Vickery

Paradise Lost in four lines

In Competition No. 3163 you were invited to submit well-known poems encapsulated in four lines. Now that the internet has all but destroyed our attention spans, who has the mental wherewithal to plough through Paradise Lost or The Faerie Queene? Well, thanks to the cracking four-liners below, you don’t have to. Props to David Harris, who boiled all of Shakespeare’s sonnets down to a single quatrain, and to -Philip Roe’s impressively pithy two-line version of that charmer Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’: ‘We’ll soon be dead/ So come to bed’. Honourable mentions go to unlucky runners–up Martin Brinkworth, Richard Woods, Neil Crockford, Bill Morris, Brian Miller, Penelope Mackie, and Richard

Aidan Hartley

What a relief it is to be back among level-headed Kenyans

Kenya I stood under huge skies in the open country of our farm in northern Kenya and, after months of London lockdown, I remembered those Japanese tourists I had once seen, weeping with wonder at the sight of Africa’s savannah after their lives imprisoned in cities. I’ve been savouring every little detail of home since we returned the other day: the taste of water and mangoes, the joys of talking cattle with the stockmen, seeing my 95-year-old mother at last, birdsong and crickets, long treks with our dogs tearing off wildly after baboons and buck. I woke up before dawn when several lions noisily killed a zebra in front of