Society

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How can I wind up a Zoom call with a chatty friend?

Q. Is there a tactful way to wind up a Zoom call when one of you has more time on their hands than the other? A friend, living alone in London, Zooms me on a regular basis. He is immensely good value — and as a successful stage actor is clearly missing the audience he would have were it not for lockdown. Much as I would love to be entertained by him for lengthy periods, I need to get things done while the children are at school. How can I halt his flow without wounding his ego? — M.N., Tetbury, Glos A. With a small amount of preparation you can

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: England’s lockdown, America’s meltdown and houses fall down

Home The government imposed a lockdown on England to last until 2 December. On television, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, looking unhappy, said of Christmas: ‘It’s my sincere hope and belief that by taking tough action now we can allow families across the country to be together.’ People would have to stay at home except for work that couldn’t be done there. The furlough scheme, due to have expired at the end of October, was extended for the new lockdown period. Exercise and recreation outdoors were allowed. Households might not mix indoors or even meet one person in a private garden. Schools and universities were to stay open. Non-essential shops

Peter Jones

The ancients knew the value of the natural world

The ancients knew nothing about global warming, but they still reflected on the relationship between man and nature. In the absence of modern technology and with few sources of power (men, animals, wind and water), the ancients were limited in the use they could make of natural resources. Fire brought about the most radical change to nature’s offerings (cooking, pottery, smelting), with weaving, wood- and stone-working a close second. This could provide the farmer with all he needed, as Cato the Elder tells us: tunics, togas, blankets, shoes, iron tools, scythes, spades, mattocks, axes, carts, sledges, storage jars, pots, tiles, oil-mills, nails, buckets, oil-vessels, water-carriers, wine-urns, bronze vessels, etc. Cicero

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Churches are more Covid-secure than trains or takeaways

Monday night’s murderous gunman in Vienna is officially described as ‘Islamist’. Brahim Aioussaoi, the man accused of murdering worshippers in a Nice cathedral last week, arrived (reported the BBC) with ‘three knives, two phones and one Quran’. These would seem to be the basic toolkit required. A friend who lives in southern France tells me that although the latest lockdown measures prevent church services being held, so serious is the terrorist threat to churches that many are guarded by police. So it seems natural that President Macron of France warns of the danger to French Catholics and speaks of ‘Islamist terrorist folly’. Each of his three chosen words rings true,

Melissa Kite

How do we stop the Lycra dads using our stable yard as a toilet?

The cyclist pulled into our gateway, got off his bike and grabbed hold of the electric fencing. Installing game cameras, along with signs making clear to passers-by that they are on film, has not always deterred trespassers, but it has provided us with interesting viewing. And so it was on this occasion, as the cyclist pulled in for what cyclists pull in for. By this I don’t mean they necessarily relieve themselves swiftly against a bush. I mean sometimes they duck under the tape to go inside the field or stable yard where they make themselves at home, in a semi-seated position. Look, it’s not nice to have to describe

Toby Young Toby Young

What I’ll miss most in Lockdown II

A second lockdown won’t cause me much suffering. I don’t have a shop selling ‘non-essential’ goods (e.g. books) that will go out of business. As a freelance journalist, I’m not at risk of losing my job. I don’t have a life-threatening disease so I’m not going to die because my local hospital won’t admit me. I have only one elderly relative and she’s in our family’s ‘support bubble’. My biggest worry is that schools will close again, not least because one of my children is doing her A-levels next year and another his GCSEs. Boris has absolutely, categorically ruled that out so I give it about another week before he

Jeremy Clarke

The joy of red wine

Everything is happening so fast. First we were put under a night curfew. A few days later M. Macron announced another lockdown. Then, pretty much overnight, I developed a taste for red wine. The Damascene conversion was a bottle of Clos de l’Ours, a local vineyard. It was pricey admittedly, even when bought direct from the vigneron’s shop, but it was a gateway. Now I’m guzzling red. It’s like finally liking sausages after a lifetime’s aversion. The suddenness and completeness of the conversion I can only put down to an organic deterioration in the brain. Old age, perhaps. Or years of drinking this unpretentious, paralysing brand of gin that is

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Why I like right-wing fruit

I recently bought some quinces in our local farmshop as part of my new policy of investing heavily in right-wing fruit, vegetables and legumes. This undertaking, born of principle, has meant a surfeit of cauliflower in our diet, the brassica having been identified by the Democratic party congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a signifier of white colonialism. That the quince is decidedly right of centre is surely beyond dispute. It was first grown in England by Edward I, the ‘Hammer of the Scots’, a man who would have made short work of Nicola Sturgeon. In the 5th century BC the fruit cropped up in Aristophanes’s play The Acharnians, when the farmer

Alberto Giubilini

The (absent) ethics of lockdown

Is it ethical to lock us down again? This is not a facetious question. Over the past eight months, we have heard a great deal about the policies used to manage the virus, but very little about the ethics. This is a mistake. We should be asking how we can critically and reasonably strike a balance between conflicting values and interests. Yet even now, with so much at stake, this basic question on the ethics of our policies is not being properly asked. When it comes to public health, the ethical balance is simply expressed: how do you achieve a certain public health goal with the fewest restrictions on individual

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: deflationary couplets

In Competition No. 3173 you were invited to give a fresh twist to a well-known single line of poetry by adding a line of your own to it. This was a wildly popular competition, and my inbox was flooded with entries. Many of you were thinking along the same lines, which produced a fair amount of duplication. There were lots of variations on this topical adaptation of Wordsworth, courtesy of John Priestland: ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud,/ As household mixing’s not allowed.’ And on this new slant on Milton, from Iain Morley — ‘Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new/To tear them up for dear old HS2.’ D.A. Prince’s take

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The infantilism of locking down to ‘save Christmas’

It seems, then, that this latest lockdown has been instigated simply to protect two very questionable institutions — the National Health Service and Christmas. Both have a certain historicity about them and were widely liked. Both, too, have become bloated and hideous caricatures of what they once were. There is a certain infantilism about the repeated demands to ‘save Christmas’ which conjures up the image of serious adults — Chris Whitty, for example, or Sir Patrick Vallance — hanging up their stockings on Christmas Eve and jumping up and down on the bed in excitement at five o’clock the following morning. There is no Santa Claus, Patrick. There is no

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Ruthless Ryanair could show us the future of aviation

Aviation, nuclear power and public transport — along with good restaurants, golden retrievers and hand-knitted bed socks — are, as Julie Andrews put it, a few of my favourite things. So in a week when the news is as depressing as I can remember since the dark winter of 1973-4, I might as well write about all of them. I’ll try to find points of light along the way but it’s not going to be easy. First the plight of airlines, now so extreme that it’s hard to foresee any outcome other than nationalisation for many major carriers. Even if the new ban on leisure travel ends, only pre-flight Covid

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

In defence of Emily in Paris

A frothy new drama called Emily in Paris arrived on Netflix last month. Starring Lily Collins — daughter of Phil — it tells the story of a pretty social media ‘expert’ who moves from Chicago to Paris, where she manages to offend almost everybody she meets, and yet somehow triumphs. It is Eloise in Paris for the Instagram/Trump generation. The show is a croquembouche-esque fantasy of Frenchness. Anorexic-looking chicks eat croissants and pretend to enjoy them. There are pre-war apartments with parquet flooring, and windows decorated with twinkling fairy lights. The men are handsome bastards who know how to cook omelettes. This is television designed for women the world over

Michael Nazir-Ali

The best response to Islamism is Christianity

It has become normal to think of the Islamist attacks in Europe as attacks on a secular way of life. The beheading of the teacher in Paris, the murders in Notre-Dame in Nice and the shootings in Vienna are presented as a struggle between radical Islamism and a particular kind of enlightened secularism born of the French Revolution. That’s the way Emmanuel Macron sees it; that’s the way most educated atheists across Europe see it. But what they forget is that Enlightenment ethics — the ideas of tolerance and fairness — have their foundation in Christianity. And the best response to violent Islamism isn’t humanism, but the idea of a

Sam Carlisle

What lockdown means for families with disabled children

When lockdown starts, all kinds of things stop. The first one, in March, was the worst time of my life as a parent, not because of my daughter’s severe disabilities, but because of the lack of support. Elvi is 19. She has a mental age of three, sleeps four hours a night and can’t walk. She has to be showered, dressed, fed and physically moved around our home. I have learned so much from my beautiful, funny daughter. She works incredibly hard to achieve the smallest things. We were told Elvi wouldn’t live past two and that she was unlikely to speak. In the summer she said her first five-word

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Will our churches ever reopen?

There used to be a joke, repeated by English tourists in deserted piazzas, that the Italian for church (chiesa) and for closed (chiusa) were almost the same. Whatever the orari on the door, you were always several hours out. And so you would consult your guidebook, admire in miniature the Ghirlandaio, the Lippi, the really very special fresco — and go for a consoling ice cream. The joke was told with the smug Anglo-Saxon certainty that our churches were open to all-comers from before breakfast until after vespers. Not so now. And not during the months we weren’t in lockdown — for all the bishops are protesting about the new

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Sporting spectacles to look forward to in lockdown

‘At least there’s sport,’ said the woman in the supermarket queue. True enough, and in a welcome sop to an embattled world elite sport has largely been saved from the wreckage of second lockdowns around the globe, leaving a great deal to look forward to and argue about. 1. The much-delayed US Masters — will Bryson DeChambeau, the American built like a brick outhouse, pummel Augusta National into submission like a pitch and putt on Bognor seafront? The Augusta committee won’t want that and will have set the course up to stop him. Should be a compelling spectacle, though I rather fancy the ever-consistent Spaniard Jon Rahm, the one-time world

Lynn Barber

Why is buying a car such an ordeal?

Why is it so insanely difficult to buy a car? And especially if you are a woman? Part of the trouble is that car salesmen are a particularly unreconstructed breed of men who think ‘lady’ customers will be more interested in the size of the vanity mirror than the fuel consumption. But it’s not just that — it’s the fact that they treat the transaction with all the pomp and gravitas of applying for a half-million-pound mortgage. This started back in February when I left a party (remember those?), got into my Volkswagen and set off into St James’s. Somehow I pressed the accelerator instead of the brake and drove