Society

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

My neighbour’s dinner party was a near-death experience

At dawn, starving, I drove to a commercial laboratory in the town centre where five phials of blood were taken from my arm. I was then handed a plastic jar and a refreshing wipe and directed to the nearest unisex lavatory to give a urine sample (mid-stream). Then a nurse stuck a long cotton bud up my nose as far as it would go and twiddled it this way and that. Blood, urine and Covid tests were preparatory to a hospital admission for a procedure involving a general anaesthetic. Then I drove home and ate a kipper for breakfast. While I was eating, Catriona stuck a hypodermic needle in my

Melissa Kite

The strange case of the ‘alleged bonfire’

The council has told me that what I saw was an ‘alleged bonfire’. When I described flames towering into the sky and black smoke curling over the village, that was an ‘alleged bonfire’. When the builder boyfriend was shutting the field gate and could see a bright blue explosion, what he was witnessing was the start of an ‘alleged bonfire’. We often meet at the horses after he finishes work, then we drive home in our separate cars. He let me out the gate first and stayed behind to lock it. After he rang me and told me what he could see on the horizon, I turned round and drove

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 21 November 2020

The rubber bridge world has lost one of its best and most flamboyant players; David Herman was an emaciated, elegant American lawyer who made TGRs his second home. If David wasn’t in the club, you knew he was either travelling or sick. I last saw him the day before lockdown in March. He got into a taxi and said: ‘See you soon, sweetie — when they sort out this mess.’ Alas it was not to be. I got a call in June to say he had passed away. Cutting in at his table was always exciting as he generated so much action. Some players thought his style was too aggressive

Taki

In praise of femininity

New York Who was it that first coined the expression ‘It ain’t over until the fat lady sings’? The great Yogi Berra got credit for it, but what he really said was: ‘It ain’t over till it’s over.’ Well, I think it is all over, although it’s going to be dragged out by The Donald, who never knows when to stop. But as Roger Kimball writes in American Greatness, the fix was in; that’s why the man who lives in a basement remained in the basement while Trump flew manically all over the country rallying the troops. Apparently the cheating was on an industrial scale. We’ll know the final outcome

Luke McShane

Speed freaks

Writing in January, I described internet bullet chess, where the players have one minute for all their moves, as ‘popular, addictive and pointless’. Bullet games are shallow and unwholesome because if you stop to think, you lose the game on time. Never mind a junk food tax: taxing bullet chess is the real social imperative — or indeed banning it. Blitz chess, where the players have three or five minutes per move, is a much healthier proposition. The pleasure of a well-played blitz game goes beyond a mere adrenalin rush and the experience might well be beneficial — as part of a balanced diet, of course. Were he alive, I

Luke McShane

No. 631

White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by Sam Loyd, 1857. Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 23 November. 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 Qg7+!! Kxg7 2 Nf5+ Kg8 3 Nh6 mate.Last week’s winner David Pearson, Herstmonceux, East Sussex

Smurf

2484: Troubled

The unclued lights are of a kind. Across 9 Go in with force, showing initiative (10) 14 Cast is enormous, but not good (3) 16 China’s new restrictive measures (6) 17 Girl showing leg in meadow (5) 18 Best buddies regularly skipped study (5) 20 Mites and ticks from a vehicle by Cretan mountain (7) 22 Best arrangement is to have a meal in home (7) 24 Craftsman is wearing plaid, though topless (7) 25 Keel that’s empty sunk with mine (5) 26 Old Thai coin given a soft touch, we hear (5)28 Won’t carve the bird? Come, come! (7, two words) 31 Racehorse stumbles, he is off to Irish

Peter Jones

Aristotle would have seen Trump’s behaviour as entirely normal

Donald Trump may be a narcissist, but since he is not mentally ill in the technical sense, he is not a pathological one. Aristotle would have seen him as entirely normal — a man driven by rage that the world does not see things his way. For Aristotle, a man becomes angry because of what has been, or will be, done to him. According to Aristotle, Trump’s current feelings would be that he has been belittled and humiliated in an election in which he was by far Joe Biden’s superior. The consequence of that, as Aristotle says, is anger: anger that Biden — whom Trump sees as e.g. ‘inferior, of

The Spectator

What does it mean to be ‘fit as a butcher’s dog’?

Boris and the butcher’s dog Who first coined the phrase ‘as fit as a butcher’s dog’? It has been traced to Lancashire. It is not the only quality attached to butcher’s dogs, however — such animals were perhaps widely observed as a result of customers having to entertain themselves somehow while the butcher prepared their cuts, and a dog gave them something to watch. A variant has someone as ‘happy as a butcher’s dog’. John Ray, in his collection of English proverbs from 1670, describes the expression ‘as surly as a butcher’s dog’. John Camden Hotten, in his Dictionary of Modern Slang (1859), mentions ‘to lie like a butcher’s dog’

The Spectator

Letters: The limitations of a Covid vaccine

Still distant Sir: In James Forsyth’s analysis (‘Boris’s booster shot’, 14 November) he infers that a vaccine, if provided to the majority of the UK population, would deliver herd immunity from Covid-19, noting that ‘it seems increasingly probable that by the second half of next year, we will be emerging from this Covid nightmare’. I pray that he is right, though fear he may not be. In a recent Lancet editorial the view expressed was the exact opposite, as it notes that any vaccines are ‘unlikely’ to prevent transmission, though will reduce the severity of symptoms and likelihood of death. Critically, if transmission cannot be stopped via vaccine, in the

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Will my friend be offended if I buy her an XL dress?

Q. My son has moved his girlfriend into our fairly small house for the second lockdown. I am grateful for their company, but unfortunately his girlfriend has started addressing me in a baby voice. My son either hasn’t noticed or doesn’t seem to mind. Mary, as I suspect she is a little nervous of me, how can I tactfully let her know how annoying this is without ruffling feathers? She also ‘pony-trots’ between rooms, but I don’t mind that nearly as much as the baby voice.— Name and address withheld A. Collude with a good friend to call you on your mobile, timed for a moment when the three of

Dot Wordsworth

The language of lounging around

At the Austrian embassy in Naples, a German diplomatist asked the great beauty Madame de Ventadour if she had been in the Strada Nuova that morning. ‘What else have we to do with our mornings, we women?’ replied Madame de Ventadour. ‘Our life is a lounge from the cradle to the grave.’ How true. The observation comes in Bulwer Lytton’s novel Ernest Maltravers (1837). I was put in mind of lounging by remarks that Anne McElvoy made on the wireless about the use of video-conferencing and broadcasting allowing people to attend to their visible top half while wearing lounge pants below. I wasn’t too sure what lounge pants were. I

The Spectator

Denial is not a strategy, Prime Minister

The psychodrama in No. 10 is badly timed. The government has used emergency powers to ban meetings, church services and even family visits. A million jobs have gone since the first lockdown, with at least a million more to follow when the furlough money runs out. Children’s education was so badly set back by school closures that there are calls to cancel summer exams because pupils won’t be ready. Millions are facing financial ruin. A country looks to its Prime Minister for leadership. Yet the big announcement, made on the eve of the Brexit deal Boris Johnson was elected to deliver, is that he will ban the sale of new

Robert Peston Robert Peston

The truth about me and Dominic Cummings

It is such a relief that Dominic Cummings has gone. Not for the sake of the country or the government — you can make your own mind up about that. No, no, I’m talking about me. Over the past year or so, the abuse I’ve received on Twitter and Facebook for reporting anything perceived to have originated anywhere near Cummings has been wearing. I’ve never endorsed anything he said or did. That’s not my job, as you well know. My job is to tell you the thoughts, plans, hopes and dreams of the most powerful member of the government (which he was for a period last autumn). Sometimes that was

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Me, myself and Thai: my cooking lesson from Cher Thai Eatery

Lockdown is hurting everyone except the chickens. I have bought them a conservatory because Philippa, a Light Sussex, looks like ancient pants in rain. It is really plastic sheeting to hang under the henhouse; they need it because the rain is horizontal. They stare out like chickens from film noir. I have exhausted local take-aways, and you cannot get fresh hampers here. Someone sent me stock cubes for beef stroganoff in the post, which feels joyless, but everyone is selling condiments — you can lick them, call it lickdown — or chocolates or alcohol, as if for a loveless Valentine’s Day. What do I seek? Thai food. I spent my

Toby Young Toby Young

The dangers of censoring anti-vaxxers

Earlier this week, the Labour party wrote to the government urging it to bring forward legislation so that social media companies which fail to ‘stamp out dangerous anti-vaccine content’ can face financial and criminal penalties. ‘The government has a pitiful track record on taking action against online platforms that are facilitating the spread of disinformation,’ said Jo Stevens, Labour’s shadow culture secretary. ‘This is literally a matter of life and death and anyone who is dissuaded from being vaccinated because of this is one person too many.’ My first thought on hearing this was how pitifully out of touch the Labour party is. Does Keir Starmer not realise how zealous

Christopher Howse

Who decides what’s allowed on a gravestone?

A parishioner in West Yorkshire has been allowed to put an inscription in Chinese on a relative’s gravestone. ‘There is no general prohibition on the inclusion in inscriptions on headstones of words or phrases in a language other than English,’ said Mark Hill QC, Chancellor of the Diocese of Leeds, sitting in a consistory court. If that is so, why was a family of Irish background forbidden by a consistory court in June from putting an Irish inscription on the gravestone in a Nuneaton churchyard of Margaret Keane, who had died aged 73? The inscription would have said: ‘In ár gcroíthe go deo.’ Perhaps not many people in Nuneaton would

Guy Walters

First names are for friends and family, not bosses and builders

Recently I was listening to Lieutenant-General Tyrone Urch, the army’s Commander Home Command, being interviewed by Martha Kearney on Today. I cannot remember what he was talking about, because I had become quite agitated by the officer’s insistence on using Ms Kearney’s name in every response: ‘Good morning, Martha… It absolutely is, Martha… The things the military is able to do, Martha… I’m no biochemist, Martha…’ On and on it went, this patronising and repeated use of the interviewer’s name. But what rankled more than the repetition was that Lieutenant-General Urch was using Ms Kearney’s first name. Did Ms Kearney tell Lieutenant-General Urch that it was all right for him

Jim Lawley

The dark art of playing world-class Scrabble

When the top players gathered in Torquay last year for the World Scrabble Tournament (this year’s contest should have been this week, but has been cancelled thanks to you-know-what), it was to use ‘words’ like these in their games: dzo, ch, foyned, ghi… Yep, that’s right; a whole lot of words that, let’s be frank about this, are not words. That’s why my spell-checker underlines them in red. The top players, you see, don’t win tournaments by being cleverer than the rest of us. They do it by memorising a long list of non-words so they can avoid the problems ordinary players encounter. With O I I I I U U on the rack, most of