Society

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: is it OK to drop by to see a friend’s garden during the pandemic?

Q. I own a small, somewhat shabby and antiquated but well-located flat in central London which I have been happy to lend out to friends as I wasn’t using it much myself. No one was there during lockdown but four separate people stayed for various lengths of time just before. No one paid to stay there and I wouldn’t have wanted them to, but arriving there myself this week, for the first time this year, I found a vital piece of equipment broken — the glass jug of the ancient coffee machine. It’s not the cost (and difficulty) of replacement which annoys me, but the thought that one of my

Dot Wordsworth

The French have made a hash of the hashtag

‘So my poor wife rose by five o’clock in the morning, before day, and went to market and bought fowls and many other things for dinner, with which I was highly pleased,’ wrote Samuel Pepys on 13 January 1667. They were eight. ‘I had for them, after oysters, at first course, a hash of rabbits, a lamb and a rare chine of beef. Next a great dish of roasted fowl, cost me about 30s, and a tart, and then fruit and cheese. My dinner was noble and enough.’ My husband said he liked the sound of this and asked if I might manage something similar out of doors, for six,

David Mitchell

Let’s not forget all the decent cops out there

One victim of police brutality is police decency. Our son has a tutor, J., who works with autistic kids in our corner of West Cork. After lockdown began, she was no longer able to work with her students, one of whom had a birthday coming up in March. The boy lives in Bandon, 15 miles away, so J. phoned our local garda station to ask for permission to drive beyond the lockdown radius to deliver a small gift and card. The garda on duty gave her a polite no, as birthdays weren’t on the list of exemptions. Fair enough. Twenty minutes later, the sergeant called J. back. He had to

Peter Jones

The ancient Greeks would not have spared Dominic Cummings

When the PM’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, was discovered to have made his fateful journey to Durham during lockdown, there was uproar. Now that Durham police have judged that trip legal, one might have thought the issue would disappear. But as ancient Greeks knew, such hatreds last a long time. They would have seen three eternal issues at stake here: legal obligations; standing in society; and (most of all) friends and enemies. The fact that, as the police agreed, Cummings was following government regulations on ‘reasonable excuses’ for his trip to Durham, would have been to the Greeks quite irrelevant. Many ancient surviving court cases suggest that the jurors were

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Repulsive, depraved and oddly political: Monster Munch crisps reviewed

Now that I have considered Monster Munch I decide to eat one mindfully. I put it in my mouth, and it is as if I can taste it for the first time. It is repulsive, and I feel cheated. This is, then, an intervention. My husband wrote in these pages that I am always watching Spooks and eating Monster Munch. It was a giggle that went on for 400 words but is eating Monster Munch really so depraved? Doesn’t Jay Rayner eat Skips in the darkness when he is alone? Didn’t A.A. Gill eat Frazzles? I know I do, but only when I am depressed — which is quite often

Taki

I went to hell and back to meet my new granddaughter

Wolfsegg, Austria I have finally understood what’s wrong with the modern world: motorways. These dehumanising slabs of asphalt covering our continents are Prometheus-like chains that lure us into non-stop movement and uniformity. But before you start screaming that you’ve been isolated for months and would give up a night with Jennifer Lawrence to roar down a highway, let me explain. It all began when Alexandra and I decided to visit my daughter and the new baby in Austria. It was my idea to drive there, the Swiss-German-Austrian borders having opened that very day. When the wife suggested a chauffeur, I said no. When the son assured me that I’d get

Toby Young Toby Young

Why is YouTube so afraid of free speech?

On Sunday, the hosts of Trigger–nometry, a YouTube show, posted an interview they’d done with Peter Hitchens. They labelled it ‘Lockdown is a catastrophe’, which is an accurate summary of the journalist’s view. Over the next 24 hours, instead of generating tens of thousands of hits, which their interviews normally do, it got very few. Why? The hosts got out their laptops and discovered that when they searched for the video on YouTube or Google, its parent company, it didn’t come up. That wasn’t a technical hitch. On the contrary, it’s a tried-and-tested method that YouTube and Google employ to suppress traffic to material they regard as suspect. It’s a

Melissa Kite

Our first outing to the beach was ruined by angry two-metre-ites

We went on our first outing, to the beach at Littlehampton, but I’m not sure it was as stress-relieving as it could have been. We kept getting into trouble with the two-metre-ites. These are the people who are using the two metre rule as an excuse to be damnably rude. We packed a picnic and put the spaniels in the car with our beach mats and swimming things. We stopped at the filling station in Dorking to pump up a tyre and as the builder boyfriend saw to that, I went into the shop and got myself into trouble. I picked out some goodies to add to our picnic —

Prue Leith

Why is it that age limits never apply to men?

I’d never have thought I’d be good at doing nothing. Or rather walking the dogs, loafing in the sun, trying to match Paul Hollywood’s tête de brioche (third time of trying), doing jigsaws and reading hefty books. But I’m lovin’ it. The only thing that stresses me — indeed brings me out in lower-deck language most unbecoming to an octogenarian — is doing live shows or podcasts on Zoom or Skype while our broadband buffers, stutters or crashes. And some poor presenter is trying to fill the gap, desperate for me to make the technology work. Calls to Relate have tripled under lockdown I’m told because seeing too much of

The Spectator

And end to decent dying

From 22 March 1986: They used to say that war is the ruin of serious soldiering. Too much disorder, too many accidents. So it could be said of the bubonic plague: it spoilt dying completely. There was so much to fear. Not merely a sudden, unexplained and incurable form of disease, since brevity of life and mysterious illness were commonplace; besides, there was no lack of plague-theories and official nostrums. What was truly dreadful was the subversion and mockery of all that was usually done to dignify the final moment, of the pains taken to celebrate death, and prevent him from doing irreparable harm to the community. So plague gave

Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson

Dying of neglect: the other Covid care home scandal

Officially, more than 44,000 deaths in England and Wales have involved Covid-19. But how many have died as a direct result of the disease itself and how many are victims of the fear and neglect that it has engendered? It is remarkable how many deaths during this pandemic have occurred in care homes. According to the Office for National Statistics, nearly 50,000 care home deaths were registered in the 11 weeks up to 22 May in England and Wales — 25,000 more than you would expect at this time of the year. Two out of five care homes in England have had a coronavirus outbreak; in the north-east, it’s half.

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The £39.99 gadget that will transform how you work at home

Hours of googling have left me unable to find the essay on domestic horticulture, written by a Victorian aristocrat, which contains the legendary sentence: ‘Any garden, of whatever size, should contain at least three acres of mature woodland.’ And though that seems a high bar to set, in times like this, millions of Brits have suddenly discovered that nothing beats a bit of outdoor space. Indeed, unless you are Dennis Nilsen, there’s never been a worse time to buy a top-floor flat. So to help remote workers restock your vitamin D, here’s some gadgetry which can get you out of the spare bedroom and into the sunshine. Never, ever reveal

The Spectator

2457: Beginning solution

Unclued lights suggested a section of the international radio communications alphabet: Bravo (VILLAIN: 6), Charlie (DIMWIT: 16), Delta (DEPOSIT: 19), Echo (MIMIC: 15A), Foxtrot (DANCE: 38), Golf (GAME: 36) and Hotel (BOARDING HOUSE: 1D). ZULU appears in the third row and was to be shaded. The title suggests ‘alpha’. First prize Geoffrey Peake, Stalybridge, Cheshire Runners-up Hugh Aplin, London SW19; Jenny Mitchell, Croscombe, Somerset

Lucy Vickery

Famous writers get to grips with DIY

In Competition No. 3151 you were invited to imagine famous authors reflecting on their struggles with DIY. Highlights in a terrific entry included John Osborne on grouting, A.E. Housman on the torture of cutting your own hair and several accounts of W.B. Yeats’s botched attempts at sorting out the plumbing (‘things fall apart’). I much admired Mike Morrison’s reworking of Robert Frost’s ‘Mending Wall’ and also tip my hat to strong -performers -Patrick Massey, Dominica Roberts, Nick Hodgson, Bill Greenwell, George Simmers and Anne Parsons. It was especially tough to choose the winners this week but those who made the cut appear below and pocket £25 each. While we were

Simon Barnes

Why whales sing: it’s a question of culture

A few years ago I was sitting in Carl Safina’s yard on Long Island, drinking tea, occasionally patting a dog who was lying at my feet. Safina was talking about the magnanimity of wolves. A wolf in Yellowstone National Park, known as Twenty-One, never lost a fight, and unlike most wolves, never killed a vanquished opponent. Park rangers called him the perfect wolf. ‘When a human releases a vanquished opponent rather than killing them, in the eyes of onlookers the vanquished still loses status but the victor seems all the more impressive,’ Safina said. ‘Onlookers might feel it would be desirable to follow such a person, so strong yet inclined

Laurie Graham

A death, live-streamed: my husband’s Skype funeral

When my husband died last month, I was as prepared as a person can be. Howard had been afflicted for many years by early-onset dementia and that, as we all know, is a one-way street. What I was totally unprepared for was the lockdown factor. Could we even have a funeral? Yes, we could, as long as we adhered to some rules. And would I like the ceremony live-streamed to those unable to attend? Well yes, I suppose I would. The offer of live-streaming solved my biggest problem. Howard was an American who had lived for many years in Europe. He had family and friends who couldn’t possibly travel to

Aidan Hartley

The intense pleasures of lockdown

I used to live in Mogadishu for months at a time, cooped up in compounds behind fortified walls. Venturing on to the streets meant a flak jacket, escort vehicle bristling with guns, chain-smoking as we zoomed through smashed districts, militias, ambushes and roadside bombs. Despite the incarceration, Somalia gave me some of my happiest memories. At home on the ranch in Kenya we often make a point of staying away from town for as long as possible. Our record is three months of no shops, offices, crowds or traffic — just cattle, pasture, birdsong and the rarest of visitors dropping by for a beer. And as a child in north

Neil Clark

Nothing brings people together like a coach holiday

Amid all the Covid-19 coverage, it’s hardly surprising that the collapse of a coach-tour operator last week didn’t make too many headlines. But the end of Shearings, the largest such operator in Europe, could mean the end of coach holidays in the UK, and if that happens, something very special will have been lost. Coach holidays are unique. They engender a sense of camaraderie which is so hard to find nowadays in our very atomised world. You begin the week as strangers, waiting for the departure bay number of your coach to be called out, and end it exchanging addresses. There’s great anticipation as you take your seats on the

James Kirkup James Kirkup

The NHS has quietly changed its trans guidance to reflect reality

Imagine you have a child who says they believe they were born in the wrong body, describing what amounts to a fundamental and painful mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity. Imagine the child you see as your daughter declaring that they are in fact a boy. Where would you turn for information? No doubt a lot of people in such a position would consult the NHS. That ‘mismatch’, after all, could be a sign of gender dysphoria, a condition recognised – and treated – by the health service. What would you find if you looked up this issue on the excellent and comprehensive NHS website? First, you’d

Wednesday

Tom Slater Tom Slater

Why is Ben & Jerry’s lecturing us about ‘white supremacy’?

When this chapter in America’s history of its struggle against racism is written, two names will stand out among all the others: Ben and Jerry. Or at least that seems to be what the ice-cream company hopes, given the somewhat bizarre statement that it issued this week.  In response to the brutal killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, and the protests and riots that continue to roil the United States, this peddler of sickly sweet desserts proclaimed: ‘We must dismantle white supremacy. Silence is NOT an option.’ It says that nothing will change ‘until white America is willing to collectively acknowledge its privilege, take responsibility for its past