The Battle for Britain | 11 April 2020
Society
Thursday
Bridge | 11 April 2020
I think it was Warren Buffett who said: ‘Bridge is such a sensational game that I wouldn’t mind being in jail if I had three cellmates who were decent players.’ It is so endlessly fascinating and surprising that you are rarely bored and never alone. Since the shock of all the bridge clubs closing overnight, and a day or two of walking around (indoors ofc) like headless chickens, it soon became clear that a new and parallel bridge universe was opening up online. BBO (download it for free) has more than tripled its log-on figures in two weeks. You can play random games, set games, watch the champs or take
At your own risk
If there were regulatory oversight of chess openings, some would come with a litany of disclaimers. ‘You may lose more than your initial gambit.’ ‘Possible side effects may include dizziness and nausea.’ ‘Use at your own risk.’ Nonetheless, such openings as the King’s Gambit, the Dragon Sicilian, or the Botvinnik Semi-Slav often enjoy a cult following. Their devotees tend to be audacious types, who won’t let a few slings and arrows obscure the prospect of a glorious victory. These openings are exciting to play, and not necessarily bad, but they demand a special energy to handle well. In general, grandmasters prefer more conservative, rugged openings, particularly when they are Black.
No. 599
A position adapted from Vojtech Plat–Ravi Haria, Hull GM tournament, 2019. The d6-pawn is crucial here, but White needs a clever move to sweep aside the blockade. What is it? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 13 April. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Qh2! threatens 2 Qb8+ Qg8 3 Qd6! with a winning attack. (But not 1 Qg3? Qc1+!, or 1 Qe3? Qf7!) Last week’s winner Aaron Milne, Northwich, Cheshire
2452: Comme on dit
The unclued lights (five of two words and one of three) should be paired to reveal four expressions verifiable in Brewer. Ignore one accent. Across 10 Plant setter left, it being covered in resin (5)11 Hardy bay tree? Obviously not (6)12 Bioethical problem of 150 willing to participate with 18 (7)16 Central American distributed narcotics – a fool (10, two words)17 Be subject to stress pointlessly (8)20 Purple stonecrop – otherwise almost rosé, in France (5)21 The very nature of German city church (7)22 Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip have no love for old coins (5)24 Several parishes with services starting mid-week (3)27/18 Positive evidence of porcine acupuncture? (6)31 Toss
Could this pandemic be the death of veganism?
‘Do you want some of the private stuff from out the back?’ said the butcher to the builder boyfriend, leaning forward over the counter and winking theatrically. The builder b winced a little for this was starting to feel like the terrifying scene in League Of Gentlemen when Mr Briss starts selling a mysterious and highly addictive ‘special’ meat to the residents of Royston Vasey. Thankfully, this butcher was only selling private lamb. He revealed his secret stash to the BB because he took a liking to him. The butcher grinned, revealing big teeth between rosy cheeks, before disappearing out the back and returning with an entire side, which he
Only Boris can end the lockdown
Events make a mockery of predictions. And events of recent days have borne that truth out most starkly. Nobody could have predicted where our nation stands today. We have gone from being a supposedly divided country into one united in response to an unprecedented crisis. The news that the Prime Minister has been admitted to intensive care has united the country in shock — and in hope for his recovery. From the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, Boris Johnson led in the way he always has. He threw himself into efforts to counter the virus. He dispensed optimism and hope where there was understandable fear. He successfully persuaded the British
In this time of modern contagion, I find myself turning to ancient prayers
There is an ancient Celtic prayer that is as relevant today as it was all those centuries ago: Be Thou between me and all things grisly, Be Thou before me in all things mean, Be Thou between me and all things gruesome Coming darkly towards me. We live in a grisly time and don’t quite know what to do with the gruesomeness of it. This little prayer, whose origin is sometime between the 5th and 9th century, has that sense of foreboding that we are feeling in these dark days too. For the Celtic Christians, the darkness was all too real. They were a largely rural people, living in turbulent
Throughout history, dark humour has helped us cope in a crisis
In these strange times, people naturally turn to the past for orientation: Londoners recall the spirit of the Blitz, while citizens of St Petersburg look back to the Nazis’ Siege of Leningrad to remind themselves what they can overcome. But tales of suffering and heroism take us only so far. Humour is just as important. It punctures the sense of pervasive anxiety and shines a light into unfamiliar and dark places. Here, too, the past can serve as a guide. History reminds us that laughing in the face of fear is a powerful impulse, regardless of the risk involved. Soviet citizens lived in a world where a single wrong word
Coronavirus must not rob us of our liberties forever
The American economist and historian Robert Higgs noted long ago that during the 20th century the various wars, and the various declared equivalents of war, such as against drugs and viruses, regularly led to permanent expansions of state power. Power is the ability to coerce physically, war being the pre-eminent coercion. There has to be some reason that citizens of the UK and US are coerced to pay about 40 per cent of GDP for the wars and other activities of the state, whereas a century ago they paid about 10 per cent. Further, the state’s recently expanding regulation of many private activities — literally a million regulations promulgated by
Will coronavirus hasten the demise of religion – or herald its revival?
On Saturday evening, Christians will prepare for an Easter unlike any other. With every church closed, from St Paul’s Cathedral to the meanest country chapel, Anglican worshippers will be directed to a website where lay leaders, priests and bishops will hold a ‘virtual vigil’ ending at dawn on Easter Sunday. In Westminster Cathedral, the mother church of Catholics in England and Wales, a deacon will sing the great Easter proclamation known as the Exsultet. But this year, when the final syllable dies away, he will look out into the nave and see row upon row of vacant seats. It’s faith, but without the faithful. It’s happening the world over. This
Monkeys, bats and our national trust
There was always one key flaw in our species. Which is that someone always shags a monkey. I have expressed this thought fairly regularly in private, often to friends who don’t get the reference about the likely origin of Aids and look at me strangely ever after. Still, I find it a useful rule. We humans are — perhaps always have been — as weak as our weakest member makes us. And if just one of us chooses of an evening to force themselves on one of our simian cousins, then before long people across the planet start dropping dead. I suppose the monkey-shagger rule will now have to be
Spectator competition winners: Love in the Time of Covid-19
In Competition No. 3143, a nod to García Márquez’s 1985 novel, you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘Love in the Time of Covid-19’ in the magical realist style. Magic realism has been contaminated somewhat by overuse and is in any case not to everyone’s taste. But if done well it can be wondrous and transporting, and it lends itself well to trauma narratives. As the late poet and translator Alastair Reid wrote of Márquez: ‘What … [he] is showing us all the time is the humanising power of the imagination. In all his writing, the imagination is no mere whimsy, nor a Latin-American eccentricity: it is a
2449: stateless solution
The unclued lights, when preceded by a US state, form MISSISSIPPI 11, CALIFORNIA 22, VIRGINIA 27, HAWAII 37, RHODE ISLAND 40, OREGON 10, KENTUCKY 14 and INDIANA 7D. First prize David Simmonds, Crayford, DartfordRunners-up Fran Morrison, London SW15; Andrew Herbert, Brooke, Norfolk
At least some of the Chancellor’s promises are actually working
The phrase ‘sharing economy’ was coined a decade or so ago to describe collaborative new business models made possible by the internet, from Airbnb and Uber to crowdfunding, peer-to-peer lending and skill bartering sites. It was about ways of monetising assets, circulating capital and earning casual livings that boosted economic activity after the ‘great recession’ and it will be a hive of creativity in the next recovery — even though its partner is the ‘gig economy’ whose insecurity has left so many people in hardship now. But I want to propose a more urgent purpose for the same phrase: to describe how every business should share the impact of the
The online museums you’ll never want to leave
‘We don’t talk about the war.’ Yet those of my generation and older reference it daily. The coronavirus is an unseen enemy but for every-one not in military service, so were our past enemies — Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia — invisible mainly because the mainland was never physically invaded by any of them, so the only sightings were on the newsreels. All we can see of the virus is that horrible furry ball with round-ended spikes sticking out of it, which is what it looks like under a microscope, but this is still a war, the same as any other. We were not actually quarantined then but travel was both
Coronavirus has made amateur mathematicians of us all
‘What is the point of learning maths? When do you ever actually need it? How does it ever affect your life?’ That’s the frequent complaint of my school-age children, labouring over their times tables and number bonds. It was my complaint as I struggled to tell median from mean, or sine from cosine. Well. Now we have a nation and a world bewitched and terrified in equal measure by a ground-level demonstration of what an exponential function does. Our entire society is being shaped for a generation by that elegant, predictable, horrifyingly steepening curve. One shred of comfort in this catastrophe is the thought that no journalist will ever again
If anything is ‘essential’ right now, it’s cigarettes
The owners of my local grocery shop, a mile or so from my house, very kindly sell me cigarettes in blocks of 200 at a time — and they have also delivered them to my house during this lockdown. This is useful for several reasons. Most importantly it aids my self-isolation programme. But it also minimises the risk of me being caught in the shop by a lurking Matt Hancock or perhaps a chief constable of the police, anxious to punish people who may be purchasing goods which they do not consider ‘essential’. If anything is essential during this time of compulsory boredom, it is cigarettes and alcohol. I have
I’m walking round Britain – in my back garden
What’s the best way to keep in shape during the lockdown? That’s the First World problem I’ve been using to distract me during these strange, distressing times. My wife and teenage children are doing online workouts, but that looks far too tiring. Instead, I’m walking round Britain — in my back garden. I got the idea from a walking trail called Walk the Planets, in Ruislip Woods, not far from where I live. It’s a round trip of about two miles, which doubles as a tour of the solar system. At a scale of five billion to one, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are barely a hundred yards apart (on
My Japanese toilet has made me a lockdown hero
Compared with every other household chore, progress in bum-wiping has been glacially slow. It’s only in living memory that schools and institutions stopped using something called Izal, a box of medicated toilet wipes similar in texture to greaseproof paper, and thus spectacularly ill-suited to its purpose. It was characteristic of the Britain of my childhood, where things were made gratuitously unpleasant on purpose, since to do anything nice was seen as effeminate. The Muslim world is far ahead of us here. In most Islamic countries a toilet cubicle comes with a bum gun — a kind of handheld spray. Yet in the supposedly enlightened Anglophone world we think dry paper
