Society Archives

Thursday

27 Aug 2020

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

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

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

Fiona Mountford

Covid has exposed our confusion about food

These past five Covid-buffeted months have shone a spotlight as never before on the choices we as a nation make about and around food. We are quite confused when it comes to eating. The government’s two recent messages on the subject are in conflict with each other: it’s our civic duty to ‘eat out to help out’, we’re told, but also we need to lose weight to protect the NHS. These muddled messages were evidenced by the somewhat mad poster advertising ‘eat out to help out’: after listing the practical terms of the scheme, the optimistic last line reads ‘Look out for better health choices’. I don’t know about you,

Suzanne Moore

How progressive misogyny works

It happens a lot lately. Not just in a Twitter DM or an email but in real life. Someone tells me they can’t really say what they think in their workplace any more. What awful things do they think? Mostly that the rights of vulnerable women should be protected and that children should be allowed to express their gender however they like without being whisked to a clinic. In the café the other day, a woman I vaguely knew from the playground asked me if I had received a letter she had sent to the Guardian. I hadn’t. She needed me to know that she and her friends who work

The Spectator

2469: Breadth solution

The unclued lights were: 12 CORNI, anagram of Corin (As You Like It); 23 MANDIRA, Miranda (The Tempest); 27 LARDOON, Orlando (As You Like It); 38 GRADE, Edgar (King Lear); 1D SIROC, Osric (Hamlet); 8 HAMPERING, Erpingham (Henry V); 21D EUTROPHIC, Petruchio (The Taming of the Shrew); 34 ANGER, Regan (King Lear). Title: anagram of ‘the Bard’. First prize Mrs F.A. Bull, Canterbury, KentRunners-up Aidan Dunn, Newton Abbot, Devon; Chris Price, Swansea

John Keiger

The French are baffled by the BBC’s Rule Britannia censorship

From 1940 to 1944, the Vichy regime set aside France’s 150-year-old rousing national anthem La Marseillaise for Maréchal nous voilà, a sycophantic hymn to France’s collaborationist leader Marshal Pétain. Pétain in the southern zone and the occupying German forces in the north brutally punished any singing of La Marseillaise. During the Second World War, Land of Hope and Glory and Rule Britannia were popular hymns of resistance to fascist invasion and oppression by British peoples in these islands and across the world. Rule Britannia was played at the ceremonial surrender of the Japanese imperial army in 1945 by the massed band of Australian, British and American forces. The BBC in its

Wednesday

26 Aug 2020

Debbie Hayton

Boris’s mask debacle is doing a disservice to teachers

The latest U-turn – this time on face masks in schools – comes less than a week before hundreds of thousands of teachers, including myself, return to the classroom. But is the announcement that secondary school pupils may have to wear masks as they make their way around schools really a smart idea? I’m not convinced. The English edict on masks in schools follows previous woolly guidance from Boris Johnson’s government. In place of decisive leadership, we are told that head teachers will have the ‘flexibility’ to introduce masks in their schools. Yet surely either masks work – in which case all schools should use them – or they cause

Gavin Mortimer

World Rugby’s trans women ban is a wise idea

By the time I was 15, I had put two rugby players in hospital. I broke the arm of one and knocked the other unconscious. Both were legitimate tackles, I was just better developed: bigger, stronger and more aggressive than my opponents. I got my comeuppance in New Zealand when, as a 19-year-old, I launched myself at a Polynesian second row in an Under-21 match. I have a photo on my wall of the aftermath of my attempted tackle. My face is a tapestry of pain: a broken nose, a broken cheekbone, one eye black and the other glazed with concussion. I came off lightly by comparison to Max Brito.

Tuesday

25 Aug 2020

Kate Andrews

Don’t Panic! How to talk about climate change

23 min listen

Can the conversation around climate change all too often get heated, hysterical, and panicked? Should we be appealing for more calm in the climate debate? In the first of this mini podcast series featuring Bjorn Lomborg and Matt Ridley, host Kate Andrews challenges Bjorn and Matt on their views over the best way to conduct what some say is the most important debate of our lifetimes.