Society

Saturday

Ben Schott

Unreal, uncertain and mostly silent: life in the centre of New York’s coronavirus storm

‘How are you bearing up?’ ‘Is everyone terrified?’ ‘What’s the mood?’ These are the questions concerned family and friends are kindly asking about New York City which, according to my armchair epidemiology, is about ten days behind Italy and ten days ahead of Britain. It would be reckless to describe things as calm, not with a New Yorker dying every seven (?!) minutes, and refrigerated trucks parked ominously outside hospitals. But I sense no mass panic. Life, of a sort, still goes on. People run, dogs are walked, post is delivered, Amazon arrives, and the shelves are stocked with food. The absence of cars without the presence of snow is

Taki

Covid-19 shows us that virtue trumps freedom

Look at it this way: we’re all doing Desert Island Discs nowadays, and unless you’ve got the bug, it’s a damn good thing, too. I did the desert island bit around 30 years ago, when Sue Lawley was the presenter, and we got along fine, even after I commented on air that she had nice legs. I suspect it would have been a different story today, but another good thing about the virus is that it has knocked #MeToo off the front pages. For good, I hope, but I doubt it. Among my desert island picks was a version of ‘Lili Marlene’ sung by an army choir that I first

Bruce Anderson

Drinking in isolation is far less appealing

Spring sense, caressing sunshine: last week, London enjoyed village cricket weather. Even in normal circumstances, the season would not have begun; the anticipation would. Soon, one would be watching the run-stealers flicker to and fro, a pint of beer at hand. ‘A pint of beer’, four simple words, but in these times my tastebuds were flooded with memory. Où sont les boissons d’antan? Friends of different strategems were fighting off that lowering virus, cabin-fever. I am re-reading Macaulay — there is no more joyous prose in English — and alternating him with Gibbon, whom I am ashamed to have never read all the way through, at a ratio of four

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

The longer lockdown continues, the more imperilled we become

Comically, Chinese Communist party officials have speculated that Covid-19 was planted by the US army. Yet a respectable conspiracy theorist would deduce that a virus sending the rest of the world into an hysterical, wholesale economic shutdown has ‘Made in China’ written all over it. After all, China didn’t flat-line its entire economy to contain the contagion. At the end of this debacle, then, China could rule the world — although it won’t have many solvent customers left to buy its products. The only other countries calling the shots in future could be South Korea, Japan and Sweden, having thus far resisted the stampede to lockdown. In my 1994 novel

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Don’t let anyone tell you there’s a war on

‘Shut up — don’t you know there’s a war on?’ Strong hints of that attitude have emerged in recent weeks, and the hints are getting stronger. The attitude is mistaken. The right answer to any enquiry about whether we know there’s a war on is that there isn’t a war on. Nobody with sensible questions to ask about the current strategy or its implementation should be abashed to ask them. Hitler’s spies are not listening, Lord Haw-Haw will not be broadcasting them, and a grown-up citizenry does not confuse intelligent questioning with unpatriotic breaking of the ranks. No doubt some questions will be misplaced, some will have easy answers and

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The oddest thing people are stockpiling? Hens

Is there nothing people won’t panic-buy during this crisis? Having stripped shelves of food and toilet roll, shoppers are now turning to chickens. Coop company Omlet reports a 66 per cent rise in sales, and breeders have sold out of pullets. The British Hen Welfare Trust, which rehomes caged hens, has stopped taking new customers out of fear that the people bidding for their birds were either planning to eat them or didn’t really know how to look after them. Keeping chickens does seem like a really good way of avoiding going to the shops. A good layer will give you an egg almost every day at this time of

Geoff Wilson

My polar journey puts coronavirus isolation into perspective

I arrived on Novolazarevskaya base on the northern coast of Antarctica in a Russian plane, flown by an ex-USSR air force pilot and his crew. I was here to begin the longest non-mechanised polar journey ever done by man — 5,306 km to the summit of Dome Argus, the highest and coldest point of the Antarctic plateau. The next morning, I headed south towards the Somo Veken glacier with my drop-off team. Over 14 hours we climbed to 9,000 feet and passed between majestic mountains jagged and untouched. Eventually we stopped between two peaks. This was Thor’s Hammer, my start point. After we unloaded the sleds, the cars turned, headed

Lionel Barber

How will the world be changed by the war against coronavirus?

The world as we have known it for the past 40 years has come to a stop. We have a supply chain crisis, a demand crisis, a labour market crisis and an oil price crisis. The second crash that people were long predicting has arrived — but against the backdrop of the Covid-19 threat, it seems like a second-order story. The pound has already hit its lowest rate for decades, and more shocks may occur in the bond and currency markets. How long the disaster will last — or how much worse it will get — is anyone’s guess. Thanks to the virus, events which earlier this year would have

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Coronomics: Ordinary remedies won’t be enough for a surreal crash

We have seen crashes before, recessions and depressions, but nothing like this. Our fear of coronavirus has hindered and halted every aspect of daily life. We look out of our windows and barely recognise the country we’re in: police film dog-walkers and pour black dye into lagoons to deter swimmers. We wait in queues for empty-shelved supermarkets. The stock market collapses, surges, then collapses again. None of the old rules make sense. Welcome to the world of Coronomics. If this were a normal recession, the remedy would be simple: encourage people to go out, spend money and boost the economy. But today’s public health concerns require the government to repress

David Rose

Revealed: Extinction Rebellion’s plan to exploit the Covid crisis

As we contemplate the havoc being wrought by coronavirus, most of us see mainly sickness, death and economic ruin. Dr Rupert Read, spokesman for the climate protest group Extinction Rebellion — plus sometime Green party candidate, and associate professor of philosophy at the University of East Anglia — has rather a different view. In this pandemic, he writes, ‘there is a huge opportunity for XR… It is essential that we do not let this crisis go to waste.’ Read’s thoughts are set out in a paper entitled ‘Some strategic scenario-scoping of the coronavirus-XR nexus.’ The paper is not meant to be widely read. ‘NB, this is a confidential document for

Lucy Vickery

TripAdvisor reviews — with added spice

In Competition No. 3142 you were invited to supply a review on TripAdvisor that has been spiced up with a number of misprints. You saw this challenge for what it was: a brazen invitation to lower the tone. Take this snippet, for example, from Brian Murdoch: ‘The only problem we had was that I had taken my tablet, but the wife never seemed to function in the bedroom, so if I wanted to get on to the pet I had to go into the pubic areas downstairs.’ And Mike Morrison: ‘Constant hot waiter on top in each room.’ But while most went the full oo-er-missus! there was the occasional respite

Robin Oakley

Does horse-racing have a future?

Asked, after his Imperial Aura’s impressive win in the Northern Trust Novices’ Handicap Chase at the Cheltenham Festival, if he had been worried about one particular challenger in the race, Kim Bailey wryly replied: ‘Of course I was worried. I’m a racehorse trainer.’ Trainers now have a lot more to worry about. When we finally resume racing — and few expect it to be after the six weeks originally announced — how many of the 14,000 racehorses in training as the suspension was announced will be coming back? How many owners whose businesses have suffered from Covid-19 will see paying bills for forage, farriers and vets’ attentions as a priority

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

NHS workers deserve our applause – but so does the telecoms industry

Next time there is a highly deserved round of public applause for NHS workers, do add one additional clap for the tele-communications industry for — so far — keeping the show on the road. High-speed broadband, for those lucky enough to have it, has made self-isolation more tolerable, and may have significantly reduced the impact of the disease in Britain. I say this because, for several weeks before it became mandatory to stay indoors, a large number of people did so voluntarily. That includes me. Ever since my grandfather contracted jaundice and so avoided landing at Suvla Bay in Gallipoli, there has been a proud family tradition of calling in

James Ball

Don’t be deceived by Covid stats – we know a lot less than the numbers suggest

There is a concept at least as old as computing itself — Charles Babbage, the father of the field, expressed the sentiment, if not the words themselves — ‘garbage in, garbage out’. The idea is not a complicated one: no matter how advanced the calculation machine, no matter how good the statistical model, no matter how intricate the formulae, if the data on the way in isn’t reliable, the calculation that comes out will be suspect at best — and is liable to be outright wrong. We are regularly told that figures for economic growth were wrong and have to be dramatically revised. So what hope do we have of

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Spare a thought for the poor estate agents

The suspension of the residential property market is disheartening for those who were hoping to buy a first flat or new-build house this spring. But spare a thought also for estate agents, who are usually well back in the queue for public sympathy but are nevertheless a familiar part of our high-street fabric, their windows and websites feeding the national aspiration to home ownership that also fills so many hours of Kirstie-and-Phil television. With government urging completions to be deferred, mortgage lenders tightening their terms, viewings and removals impossible and shares in the bellwether London agency Foxtons down by half, the whole sector is now in what Niraj Shah of

Susan Hill Susan Hill

My isolation reading list

A psychiatrist once told me that it takes one’s subconscious about three weeks to catch up with a significant life event, and that is certainly holding good now. We have gone through shock and disbelief while simultaneously accepting the situation. Mostly we have also accepted the rules and restrictions, and I wonder if many who flocked to holiday places on the first sunny days of school closures and went dozens abreast in parks and on beaches were not deliberately sticking up two fingers to the virus or the law, but simply in denial. It took more deaths, especially among the young and otherwise fit — plus the Prime Minister’s television

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The corona curtain-twitchers are watching

Welcome, then, to a country in which the police send drones to humiliate people taking a walk and dried pasta has replaced the pound as the national currency. ‘Gimme that pappardelle, mofo.’ ‘Not until you prise it from my cold dead hands, punk.’ A week is a long time in politics, but also a long time in pestilence. And the next time someone uses the phrase ‘the new normal’, I may well break my social distancing regimen and chin him. The lockdown has come as a great boon to the police, who seem to be enjoying it immensely, and indeed to Britain’s vibrant community of curtain-twitching, onanistic, meddlesome ratbags. Police

The Spectator

2448: Issues solution

The novels are A Modern Utopia (anagram of AORTAE IMPOUND 17/5), The Time Machine (HEATHEN/MIMETIC 22/27), Tono-Bungay (BATON/YOUNG 29/31) and Men Like Gods (SMOG/LIKENED 8/26) by H.G. WELLS (33). First prize Joanne Aston, Norby, Thirsk Runners-up David Morgan, Gilesgate, Durham City; R.R. Alford, Oundle, Peterborough

Luke McShane

Half measures

Would you slice a book in two? I learned of this peculiar practice in January, and I can’t fault its brutal pragmatism. Undeniably, half of War and Peace is more portable than the whole thing, and perhaps even less intimidating. When you finish the first chunk, you just swap it for the second. Books want to be read, not fetishised. For all that, I recoil from the idea, and I’m not alone. The Candidates tournament in Yekaterinburg, a 14-round epic, was put on hold after just seven, but not due to illness among the players. When the Russian government announced that international air traffic would be suspended indefinitely, Fide’s president

Friday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The truth behind ‘do not resuscitate’ orders

Coronavirus is revealing many good things about our society: the number of people willing to volunteer to help tackle the outbreak and help the isolated, the number of former doctors and nurses keen to return to the front line, and the number of businesses that have switched to making equipment and protective clothing for those healthcare workers. But it has also revealed our ignorance about many matters that are still important outside of a pandemic. Today’s example comes, inevitably, from our general reluctance to think about what old age and end-of-life care look like. Care homes have expressed concern that residents and their families are being pressured into signing ‘do not resuscitate’