Society

Thursday

Lucy Vickery

Poems about schadenfreude

In Competition No. 3156 you were invited to supply a piece of verse or prose on the subject of schadenfreude, a challenge inspired by the late great Clive James’s glorious poem ‘The Book of my Enemy Has Been Remaindered’, of which he said: ‘Not my most worthy moment, but somehow I had more fun writing that one than anything I ever wrote.’ Poetry outshone prose this week. Nick MacKinnon’s riff on ‘That’s Amore’ and F. Shardlow’s clever haiku both caught my eye, but they were eclipsed by the winners below who take £25. Because young Norman often smiledHe seemed to be a pleasant child.But sad to say, his joy aroseFrom

The Spectator

2462: Over and Out? solution

The seventeen entries clued by definition only required removal of the abbreviation BR ( = Britain), in keeping with the highlighted ‘BREXIT POLICY’. First prize Elizabeth Hogg, London SW13Runners-up Peter Moody, Portchester, Hampshire; J. Anson, Birmingham

Robin Oakley

Aidan O’Brien’s Derby victory was an act of grand larceny

It wasn’t so much a Derby victory this year as an act of grand larceny. Aidan O’Brien isn’t just a master racehorse trainer. He is a master of psychology too. On Serpentine, a son of his first Derby winner Galileo, he put up a capable but little-known jockey who hadn’t had a winner for 260 days assuring him that his mount would last two furlongs more than the Derby distance. Emmet McNamara duly pushed Serpentine into a massive lead and the other jockeys assumed they would blow up well before the finish, just as two front runners had done earlier in the Oaks. By the time the others realised that

Charlie Campbell­

How dangerous are cricket balls?

The Prime Minister recently blamed the delay in the resumption of amateur cricket on the ball itself, calling it ‘a vector of disease’. Happily, tests have disproved this. Balls contaminated with Covid-19 showed no trace of it 30 seconds later — and recreational cricketers will be allowed to return to the field from this weekend. Much of the complexity of cricket comes from the interplay between wood, turf and the leather of the ball. Bats have changed greatly over the centuries, from curved to straight, from thick to thin and back to thick again, but the ball has remained much the same. A core of rubber and cork wrapped tightly

Michael Moorcock

We’re spending lockdown defending a family of mice

Austin My first Independence Day in the US for many years. Usually I’d be in Paris avoiding Texas heat. My wife and I are self-isolating with much more square feet and wildlife to enjoy. Our garden is lush and green, full of flowers, owls, hawks, possums, squirrels, skunks, armadillos and snakes. Recent wild fires drove more animals into town. Joyously athletic with the recklessness of youth, squirrels and redbirds chase each other through our oaks and pecans and it’s pretty good to sit on the front porch with a cooling drink and the rich scent of magnolias in the evening air. The young hawks are in heaven. They have discovered

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How can I leave a boring WhatsApp group without upsetting anyone?

Q. During lockdown I have done my level best to assist with household chores. Last week, while my wife was taking her daily constitutional, the washing machine finished its cycle and I took it upon myself to hang the clothes on the washing line. On her return, my wife upbraided me for hanging out her ‘smalls’ as she refers to them — somewhat ironically given their size. Is there a protocol for what washing can be dried on public display and what needs to be aired indoors?— D.R.D., Northamptonshire A. You did well to try to help but your actions must be regarded as at best unimaginative, and at worst

Dot Wordsworth

The increasingly irritating language of ‘love’

It is 17 years since we began to hear McDonald’s: ‘I’m lovin’ it.’ This was always annoying, but most of us could only object by asserting that one simply could not say: ‘I’m lovin’ it.’ It should be: ‘I love it.’ Yet I doubt we’d be more convincing by saying (truly enough) that love is a stative verb which cannot be conjugated in the continuous aspect. In that it resembles know, fear, own or hear. Anyway, apart from the great McDonald’s annoyance, I have become increasingly irritated by the widespread use of love followed by a clause introduced by that. An example in the Sun was someone enthusing about a

The Spectator

What are online shoppers most likely to snap up?

Price of protest Greenpeace was fined £80,000 for defying a court order and occupying an oil rig in the North Sea. What else have protestors been fined for in Britain in recent times? £750 for spray-painting a war memorial in Whitehall in a climate change protest. £430 for spraying slogans on a pavement against Barclays, accusing it of investing in fossil fuels. £400 for eating a raw squirrel at a vegan food market in Soho. £150 for chaining themselves to the gates of a nuclear submarine base. Travel money The tourism industry is opening up again. Who spends the most: Britons holidaying abroad or overseas tourists coming here? — In

Toby Young Toby Young

Does the curriculum really need ‘decolonising’?

Layla Moran, the Lib Dems’ education spokesman, has written to Gavin Williamson urging him to do something about ‘systemic racism’ in schools. ‘Changes to the history curriculum, such as learning about non-white historical figures and addressing the darker sides of British history honestly, are a vital first step to tackling racism in our education system,’ she wrote. ‘This chasm in information only serves to present students with a one-sided view of the events in history.’ I’m not sure Moran knows very much about how the education system works. For one thing, Williamson cannot dictate how history is taught in free schools and academies — they don’t have to follow the

John Lee John Lee

The fatal mistakes which led to lockdown

Over the past few weeks, my sense of the surreal has been increasing. At a time when rational interpretation of the Covid data indicates that we should be getting back to normal, we instead see an elaboration of arbitrary responses. These are invariably explained as being ‘guided by science’. In fact, they are doing something rather different: being guided by models, bad data and subjective opinion. Some of those claiming to be ‘following the science’ seem not to understand the meaning of the word. At the outset, we were told the virus was so pernicious that it could, if not confronted, claim half a million lives in the UK alone.

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

The magic money tree – what can possibly go wrong?

After every Budget, big or small, Tory backbenchers usually meet with the Chancellor. But on the evening of Rishi Sunak’s mini-Budget this week, they had already scheduled in a meeting with Andrew Bailey, the new governor of the Bank of England. This was extraordinary. Since when does the governor talk to MPs? Or risk upstaging the Chancellor? Worse still, the Treasury had not been told about the governor’s new gig. When the news was broken (by Katy Balls on The Spectator’s website), phone calls were made and the Bailey address was rescheduled. Natural order was restored — for the time being, at least. But had the governor appeared, the Tories

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Finally, we’re unboxing the teleporter

This week’s Wiki Man may read a bit oddly. You see, I haven’t ‘written’ it at all; I’ve dictated it into a kind of dictaphone (an Olympus LS-P4, at £130, needlessly expensive for the purpose, but that’s how I roll) and then uploaded the audio file to an online transcription service called otter.ai. The reason I’m doing this is to find out how long it takes to write a Spectator article when you dictate it and get it transcribed online, compared with writing it on a keyboard like it’s 1940 or something. I’ll let you know the result at the end of this article. But I’m doing this because I

Liam Halligan

Quantitative easing is a dangerous addiction

The FTSE-100 index of leading stocks is over 20 per cent up since Britain went into lockdown — ‘bull market’ territory. The government borrowed £55 billion in May, nine times more than the same month last year — yet borrowing costs are down, with some investors now paying to lend to an increasingly indebted nation. Who cares if the UK economy will shrink some 10 per cent this year, as our national debt rockets above 100 per cent of GDP? Stocks are up, bond prices are up and the laws of economics have been suspended. It’s different this time — and all because of quantitative easing. Back in 2009, with

Bruce Anderson

The best wine since incarceration

The woodpecker jinked across the lawn like an especially cunning partridge. Its goal was a skilfully constructed bird table with wire surrounds, to provide safe feeding for finches, tits, woodpeckers and other small birds, while denying access to corvids, grey squirrels and raptors. A sparrow hawk regularly sweeps across the garden. The ‘sparrow’ element is misleading. This is an avian pocket-battleship, with not a molecule wasted in the pursuit of lethality. Sparrows? I have seen it feasting on a pigeon. It is a pity that real-life nature offers so little scope for sentimentality. Magpies are handsome creatures, but if you want songbirds, you will need a Larsen trap to control

Robert Tombs

Is Prince Harry really prepared to face up to the Commonwealth’s past?

When people such as Prince Harry say they want us to face up to the past, do they really mean it? It’s a demanding task, needing patience, humility, and effort. Some people spend their whole lives on it. It means understanding people from very different cultures with very different values. It means acquiring some feeling for the hard physical conditions they had to face, their insecurity, their limited resources, the always slow and often imperfect spread of information, and the frequent illnesses and pains they took for granted. It means gaining some insight into their beliefs about the universe, their understanding of their own history, their fears about their present, and

Wednesday

James Kirkup James Kirkup

Are whistleblowers being silenced at the NHS gender clinic?

The Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust carries out some of the most complex and contentious clinical work in the NHS. It deals with children and young people who are experiencing discomfort over their gender identity, but is it raising patient safety concerns? Some of the children it sees go on to change their legal gender. Some receive physical treatment in the form of puberty-blocking medications. Some go on to have further treatments including cross-sex hormones and surgery. The service, which is heavily over-subscribed, is a divisive one. A number say it offers vital, even life-changing care to children in great distress and

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Boohoo, BLM and the price of virtue signalling

If companies were judged on what they said rather than what they did, business would be booming for Boohoo. In the wake of the killing of George Floyd, the fashion firm was saying all the right things about what it would do to make the world a better place. ‘We are louder together. Say his name. #GeorgeFloyd #BlackLivesMatter’ Boohoo told its followers on Instagram.  Boohoo wasn’t finished there. In a follow-up post, the company assured its customers: ‘We are committed to use our influence as a brand and community to help your voices be heard’.  ‘At Boohoo we will no longer just be doing our thing,’ the company said. ‘We will be doing better.

J.K. Rowling

It’s time to speak out against cancel culture

Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favour of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in

Sam Ashworth-Hayes Sam Ashworth-Hayes

If Rhodes falls, we’ll regret it

Why should we leave memorials to evil men standing? Even for those who oppose the toppling of statues like Edward Colston’s, it’s a hard question to answer. But one reason to stand against the destruction of memorials to those who have come before is because of what it might mean for those who come after us. While some wealthy people make donations or leave bequests to good causes out of a simple desire to build a better future, others are motivated more by the selfish, vain, and utterly understandable desire to be remembered, or to add a gloss to a life that would otherwise be viewed as without redeeming features.