Society

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Why don’t my neighbours appreciate my 8 p.m. Thursday firework?

Q. For me the hallmark of a really close friend is someone with whom you feel comfortable enough to bring a phone call to an abrupt halt with no need for explanation. I too am over 70, but unlike your correspondent from New Zealand (Dear Mary, 9 May) am still working full-time — now from home. Yet my telephone rings throughout the day with calls from the sort of people I might see, at most, twice a year in the outside world, now wanting lengthy chats. I could just tell them that I am still working flat-out but the problem is that these are often people I feel guilty about

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Mixed messaging is good for us

A friend, a senior retired mandarin, emails. He complains that rural lockdown means that he and his wife have ‘got out of the habit of making even the simplest decisions’. I know exactly what he means, and I suspect the problem is more widespread than the shires. The capacity to decide is like a muscle: if it is not exercised, it quickly atrophies. This may explain why some people are so querulous at the suggestion of Boris Johnson that they should now, given the declining rate of infection and death from Covid-19, decide whether to go back to work. They complain of ‘mixed messaging’, instead of the clear earlier instruction

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Does Google know me better than I know myself?

My research assistant, John Steele, is also a songwriter. A friend emailed him with the lyrics of a Fleetwood Mac number. These days Google often appends emails with a shortcut to save you typing your own answer by suggesting one or two likely responses. In the Fleetwood Mac lyric a former lover wonders whether her ex can see her reflection in the snow-covered hills. Google’s suggestion was ‘No’. Musicians have pondered some of life’s most profound questions, so John and I tried posing a few in emails, to see Google’s suggested response. Some were hilarious. If only David Bowie were here to know that ‘Yes!’, there is life on Mars.

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

This is not a natural disaster, but a manmade one

Should our future permit an occupation so frivolous, historians years from now will make a big mistake if they blame the nauseating plummet of global GDP in 2020 directly on a novel coronavirus. After all — forgive the repetition, but certain figures bear revisiting — Covid’s roughly 290,000 deaths wouldn’t raise a blip on a graph of worldwide mortality (reminder: 58 million global deaths in 2019). Covid deaths will barely register in the big picture even if their total multiplies by several times. For maintaining a precious sense of proportion, check out some other annual global fatalities: influenza, up to 650,000. Typhoid fever, up to 160,000. Cholera, up to 140,000.

Robin Oakley

How to get your racing fix under lockdown

There is racing elsewhere in the world. It restarted in France on Monday, la course de chevaux being classed in that fine country as an agricultural activity. My friend the form guru, who combs back six races in search of clues, has even cast his net to include somewhere called Morphettville in Australia where last week he succeeded in backing a 65-1 winner. When, over the phone, he sensed my raised eyebrow at a horse with truly believable form being allowed to start at such odds, he explained that the animal had won two previous races: ‘The horse wasn’t to know they were lower-class events. He still got the same

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Have you caught the remote-working bug?

One of the few benefits to emerge from this pandemic is that the world’s population has been given a crash course in complexity. If nothing else, many people may have learned why it makes sense to plot infection rates on a logarithmic scale, and a few may even have learned to use the word ‘exponentially’ in its true sense, rather than as a synonym for ‘a lot’. I hope this proves an enduring lesson. Because, in truth, very little in life can be understood properly without first understanding such concepts, since barely anything involving humanity changes in a linear way. Behaviour is contagious, and much of what we do results

Bruce Anderson

The best New Zealand wine I’ve come across

I was once invited to the Cheltenham races and found the experience underwhelming. Everything was too respectable: not nearly Hibernian enough. I had expected to see Blazes Boylan, Flurry Knox, the Joxer and Christy Mahon, propping each other up in a determined attempt to drink the west of England out of Guinness. The reality was much tamer. But there was one source of amusement. By halfway through the afternoon, undeterred by their skill in dispensing losing tips, a lot of my journalistic colleagues had become equine experts. The previous day, these chaps would not have known the difference between a foal and a fetlock. Yet here they were, insisting that

Tom Haggie

Is pasta puttanesca the perfect lockdown dish?

The lockdown could have been the moment I was waiting for: a chance to make those long, slow recipes whose immense time commitment has previously wrong-footed me. Briskets. Cassoulet. Anything that involves soaking a dried bean. Alas, all that must be saved for the next pandemic. This one has so far been devoted to pasta puttanesca. For the uninitiated, it’s simple. Heat oil. Add chilli flakes. Add a tin of tomatoes. Add half a tin, or a tin, of anchovies to taste. Add olives and capers. Stir into pasta. Consider that recipe. It hits, with masterly economy, all five ‘taste groups’. Sweet tomatoes. Salty capers. Sour olives. Hot chilli. The

Leaf Arbuthnot

How to go clubbing without leaving your living room

To my surprise, what I miss most about life before the lockdown are parties. As others pine for restaurants and theatres, I am longing for sticky floors and 4 a.m. Ubers. Give me plastic cups and music so loud you feel it in your kidneys. Sylvia Plath wrote disparagingly of the ‘shrill tinsel gaiety of parties with no purpose’. It’s precisely that shrillness and pointlessness that I’m yearning for: drunk young bodies cramming together for no reason other than to be close to one another. At the weekend, my longing finally spilled over and I decided to make do online. I put on a nice top and loaded my lashes

Alexander Pelling-Bruce Alexander Pelling-Bruce

Lockdown, foot down: driving in the time of Covid

After the post-apocalyptic fall-off in traffic at the start of lockdown, cars are now slowly starting to return to the roads. Well, if you’ve seen a smug git cruising through north Perthshire in a 1989 Atlantic Blue BMW 320i convertible, that’s me. I’m rediscovering the love of the car. I started lockdown in London, hurtling down Edgware Road blasting out ‘Ghost Town’ by the Specials. Having decamped to the Highlands (in defiance of the SNP edicts to stay away), I now chug along at 20 miles per hour below the speed limit, with a gentle accompaniment of Hall & Oates. It’s pure bliss. Is driving for pleasure within the government’s

Susan Hill Susan Hill

Who can still make a Sunday joint last a week?

Sunday lunch was always roast beef and, in the traditional way, the Yorkshire pudding was served first with gravy, supposedly because if you were full of cooked batter you wanted less meat. Monday saw cold meat, jacket potatoes and pickles, while the beef bone went into the pot with lentils, pearl barley, carrots and onions and bubbled on the hob for days, the basis of every dinner until Friday’s fish and Saturday’s sausages and mash, before Sunday came round again. That is what everybody had and, like all housewives, my mother made the most of every morsel. Throughout and after the war, waste was a crime. I hate cooking and

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

In defence of the lockdown

I realised things were getting back to normal when I threw away a third of a tin of chopped tomatoes last week. Back in March you couldn’t get them for love or money. I still remember the appalled look on a woman customer’s face at our local farm shop, in mid-April, when she was told that, while the store was out of tinned tomatoes, she could have real ones instead. ‘That’s not the same,’ she said, with a degree of rancour. ‘Um… if you chopped them up with a knife, I think they’d be pretty similar. You know?’ she was informed, but she wouldn’t have it and stomped off. There

Lucy Vickery

Authors making sneaky appearances in their own novels

In Competition No. 3148 you were asked to imagine what the result might have been had a well-known writer slipped a self-portrait into a scene from one of their works. The challenge was inspired by artists who insert a sneaky selfie into their paintings, a well-known example of which is Velazquez’s ‘Las Meninas’. But authors have done it too: Douglas Coupland made an appearance in his 2006 novel jPod and Barry Baldwin tells me that Malcolm Bradbury smuggled himself into The History Man. There were creditable Hemingway cameos courtesy of Christopher Linforth, J.E. Tomlin, and The Parson, and I enjoyed J.C.H. Mounsey’s sketch of self-confessed misanthrope Evelyn Waugh, and Martyn

The Spectator

2454: 17 Across Solution

The thirteen unclued lights are all breads, hence the puzzle’s real title at 17A. First prize Nicholas Grogan, Purley, SurreyRunners-up Clare Reynolds, London SE24; Mrs E. Knights, Wisbech, Cambs

Wednesday

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Teaching unions, not Boris, are the reckless ones

The National Education Union, the largest teaching union in the UK, has branded Boris Johnson ‘reckless’. What’s he done now? He said Britain’s schools should start to reopen in June.  This is how weird politics has become in Covid-hit Britain. The ‘Evil Tories’ want working people, especially teachers, to get back to work, while the unions are saying: ‘No, thanks. It’s too dangerous.’ Our apparently uncaring government wants kids to mix together once again and to get back to the incredibly serious business of learning. And the supposedly loving left is pushing back and pretty much insisting that schools should remain closed and kids should stay stuck at home. Political

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

How to save our nightlife after coronavirus

The one certainty about crisis is that it makes bad situations worse. Anyone working in restaurants, pubs, cafes and clubs that depend on alcohol sales will have noticed ominous developments before Covid-19 struck. Like so much else that matters, government policy has had nothing to do with the cultural change. The drying out of Britain has been fuelled by changes the authorities never initiated: greater awareness of the dangers to health, the growth of British Islam with its religious prohibitions, and the young turning away from their parents’ addictions. 20 per cent of people said they did not consume alcohol in 2017. The amount drinkers reported consuming had fallen by

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Is this the dawn of a new totalitarianism?

20 min listen

This week’s Holy Smoke podcast is about the strange and unstable world created by digital technology: one in which distinguishing between truth and falsehood is becoming almost impossible. It’s a follow-up to an article I wrote in The Spectator last week in which I argued that, trapped between populist conspiracy theories and liberal media bias, and confronted by thousands of sources of dubious information on YouTube, people are discovering that ’the more we know, the less we know’. This is the environment in which the churches are trying to survive – and failing miserably, because they don’t understand the Internet and don’t know how to talk to people. But this

David Goodhart

Let’s use this crisis to tackle Britain’s woeful skills shortage

Training. What a turn-off. The very word casts a shadow over the page. That is partly because it has become such a specialised field, awash in hundreds of different programmes producing less and less of what we need as a society. Most policy makers don’t understand it, let alone citizens. The Covid-19 crisis is a chance to change this. The economy is on the point of a great reshaping and if the state can pay the wages of millions it can support the retraining of millions. Too much of our education and training spend now goes on 18 and 19-year-olds in higher education doing full-time residential three or four year courses. This means

Tuesday

Johan Norberg Johan Norberg

Can we trust Covid modelling? More evidence from Sweden

At last we’re getting a debate about Covid-19 modelling. When people finally got to look under the hood of the famous Imperial College study, they found twisted and tangled code. And most of the model’s predictions bear little resemblance to what is actually happening. Some defend the models by saying that their predictions turned out to be wrong only because governments imposed harsher restrictions than the coders expected. If so, we have a perfect experiment. Sweden did not close borders, shut down schools, businesses, restaurants, gyms or shopping centres and did not issue stay at home orders. So it should be the one country where the models fit. Let’s see.

Thomas Grant QC

Who killed courtroom drama?

The death in February of one of the titans of the Bar, John Mathew QC, cut another link with the post-war period of ebullient criminality and showy trials. Mathew defended one of the Great Train Robbers and David Holmes in the Jeremy Thorpe trials, and prosecuted the Krays and Harry Roberts. He remembered a period when you could park your car outside the Old Bailey and saunter through its grand main entrance unhindered by the tiresome security apparatus lawyers and members of the public are subject to today. But he also recalled a time when jury nobbling and police perjury were common. Any study of the true-crime shelves of Waterstones