Society

Thursday

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 30 May 2020

One of the drawbacks of online bridge is the lack of après-bridge fun — those spontaneous drinking sessions where we go through the hands and laugh at what went wrong. Mind you, it does mean I’m getting to bed earlier; a few of us have a habit of leading each other astray. Perhaps my most extreme memory of post-bridge excess is an evening spent with the Swedish pro Gunnar Hallberg and the French player Catherine Fishpool. We’d been playing rubber bridge at TGRs and decided to go on to the nearby Grosvenor Victoria Casino in Edgware Road. We all chose different games (Gunnar the slot machines, Catherine poker, me blackjack),

Luke McShane

Swindlers’ art

A lost cause at the chessboard is hard to define, but, like obscenity, I know it when I see it. There comes a point where prolonging the matter is downright indecent, so thank goodness that custom permits us to save our blushes with a timely resignation. Then again, there are a great many chess positions that lurk in the shadows — distasteful, but not beyond redemption. The degenerate defender must thirst after a swindle to salvage a draw (or more!). I confess that so long as some hope remains of a juicy swindle, I can stomach almost any position, no matter how unseemly. The Complete Chess Swindler (New in Chess),

Luke McShane

No. 606

Tamas Fodor — Michael Adams, Hull 2018. White to play. One from the puzzles section of Smerdon’s book, which I witnessed myself. Adams’s last move, 60…Kf6-f7 set a trap. White’s next was a queen move that walked right into it. What was the losing move? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 1 June. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1.Qf6! Mate follows with Qf2/Qf3/Qxe5/Qxd4/Nxf5/Rb3, depending on Black’s reply.Last week’s winner A. Footner, Dorset

Mr Magoo

2459: 22 Down

Six unclued entries (three of three words, and one of two words) can be combined to make a quotation (in ODQ), and the remainder combine to reveal its author. Across 11 Fashionable mission deemed impossible ultimately (7)13 Far-reaching lake beside farmhouse (9, hyphened)14 Unhealthy-looking meat snack (5)21 Keen to get drunk in bender (4)23 Sailor avoiding company seafood (7)24 Granny turning over half of Indian bread? (4)25 Dullness — there’s nothing quick about it (7)30 Told US schoolgirl about ground nut (7)31 Cleaner shot in the arm? (4)32 Fizzy beer criticised, litre being wasted (7)34 Holly Willoughby’s second law (4)35 Gentleman succeeded queen in republic (7)40 Taste fluid and gas

The Spectator

What is there to see in Barnard Castle?

Site test What’s on offer in the town of Barnard Castle? — Ruined 12th-century castle perched high above the Tees, built by Bernard de Balliol and later passed into the hands of Richard III, whose emblem appears above an inner window. — Bowes Museum: magnificent 19th-century French-style gallery built by mine-owner John Bowes and his wife, Josephine. Contains works by El Greco, Goya and Canaletto. Most popular exhibit is a mechanical silver swan which preens itself every day at 2 p.m. — Teeside Way: riverside walk in gorge of River Tees. — Barnard Castle Band: a brass band which has been going since 1860. Signs and symptoms The government broadened

The Spectator

Letters: Why we need music festivals

Disastrous decisions Sir: One cannot but agree wholeheartedly with Lionel Shriver (‘This is not a natural disaster’, 16 May). Given the unremarked impact of other diseases which she mentioned, Covid-19 is small beer. The government set out on the right path with its herd immunity policy, but was bounced into lockdown by the ‘science’, hounded by the media in full cry. We are now in a situation where employees, mainly in the public sector and supported by the unions, refuse to rise from their feather beds and return to work. This is not a situation from which we will recover easily — if at all.George KellyMaids Moreton, Buckinghamshire Guarantee improvement

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The ferocious bias against Dominic Cummings

At Dominic Cummings’s press conference on Monday, reporters tried two lines of attack. One was to behave like local detectives, fixating on exact details of the Cummings family journey to Barnard Castle, such as why the car had stopped en route (answer: so that the Cummingses’ son, aged four, could have a pee). The other was to invoke viewers, readers, members of the public blind with fury that there was ‘one law’ for government bigwigs, and ‘another’ for everyone else. Yet Mr Cummings’s statement and answers made a good case that there had not been ‘one law’ for him, but that he had the ‘reasonable excuse’ that the law permits

Toby Young Toby Young

Unfortunately our new puppy is not just for lockdown

Will the huge surge in demand for puppies and kittens during lockdown lead to a lot of abandoned pets when life returns to normal? That’s the concern of various professional bodies and animal welfare organisations. The Kennel Club has warned those searching for puppies on its website that a dog is for life, not just the coronavirus, while Battersea Dogs Home initially slapped a ban on rehoming, allowing only fostering during the crisis. ‘Now isn’t the right time to bring home a puppy, or make an impulsive decision to get a pet,’ warned Holly Conway, head of public affairs at the Kennel Club. The Young family acquired Malinky, our five-month-old

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: What is the etiquette about watching graphic sex scenes as a family?

Q. Please can you tell me the correct etiquette about signing the visitors book after you are married? Obviously you don’t sign your parents’ one before marriage — but your fiancé does. After you are married do you both sign — even if you have lived in the house all your life? — Name and address withheld A. There is no reason for any former child of a house to feel offended if the parent (or step-parent) asks them to sign the visitors book after marriage. It is not a veiled insult or a signal that ‘this is no longer your home’. The visitors book is a matter of record,

Dot Wordsworth

What’s the difference between ‘scaffold’ and ‘scaffolding’?

Whenever I turned on the news last weekend, my husband took to humming the March to the Scaffold from the Symphonie fantastique. He was expecting a political decapitation. Political metaphors tend to the violent: toast, under a bus, the high jump. Berlioz didn’t use échafaud, ‘scaffold’, in the title of his movement, but supplice, ‘torment’. But J.M. Neale, the author of ‘Good King Wenceslas’, wrote a less successful ballad on the martyrdom of Archbishop Laud that included these lines: ‘So steadfastly the scaffold-steps/ That good Archbishop trod/ As one that journeyed to his Home/ And hasten’d to his God.’ Scaffold has a different connotation from scaffolding, with its loud voices,

Taki

I’ve made up for missing all my children’s and grandchildren’s births

Gstaad Well, Theodora did not wait and I missed yet another grandchild’s birth (the prettiest little blue-eyed thing ever, even if I say so myself). The funny thing is, I’ve never been able to be there when it counts. I missed my daughter’s birth because I was playing tennis in Palm Beach and got to the Bagel ten minutes too late (she rarely forgets to mention it). I missed my boy’s because I went to sleep and Alexandra chose not to wake me. My grandchildren Taki and Maria were born in Rome, and Antonius and Theodora in Salzburg. That makes it children and grandchildren: six; yours truly: 0. Nothing to

Jeremy Clarke

We have a communist bar and a fascist bar. If only I could remember which is which

When I first came to this village, I was told that one of the bars was a ‘communist’ bar and the other ‘fascist’. The information was appended with vague mutterings about the Nazi occupation being a live rail in the collective village memory even after 60 years and that it was probably best not to enquire too persistently or deeply into the subject. French bars are great for getting very drunk very quickly while standing up on a tiled floor, but are not comfortable or cosy like a British pub. Therefore I haven’t yet made a habit of patronising either of the village bars except occasionally during the busy summer

Melissa Kite

All I want to do is de-worm my horse

We arrived at the country store with only three minutes to closing time so our chances of scoring horse wormer were not good. ‘Leave it to me. Don’t you dare say a word,’ I told the builder boyfriend, who has form in this particular shop, where he is wanted for crimes against worming bureaucracy. I should explain, for those who don’t own horses: buying a horse wormer is more difficult than scoring crack. I don’t know about crack, of course, but I’m assuming it’s not straightforward. In any case, buying a wormer has to be more complicated because I get the impression people buy crack all the time whereas for

Anthony Horowitz

The Cummings road trip debacle is my last straw

I can’t remember the day I realised Santa Claus wasn’t real but I will never forget the moment I lost my belief in the Conservative party. It happened very recently — this morning, in fact. It was an odd day anyway which began with my reading an email from Mary Wakefield, inviting me to write this diary, even as she was appearing on my TV screen: an unnerving experience. Should I accept? Should I pretend that I’m ignorant of the biggest news story of the moment? I’m reassured that the one of the most trenchant and earliest attacks on Dominic Cummings’s road trip was written by Alex Massie and appeared

The Spectator

It’s time to end lockdown – and switch to voluntary social distancing

Who occupies the post of chief adviser to the prime minister is not generally an issue of great interest to the public. That Dominic Cummings has come to dominate the news for several days is partly explained by the long shadow of Brexit and his role in the referendum campaign. But it is no use attributing to that alone the furore over his decision to travel from London to Durham at the height of lockdown. People are genuinely aggrieved that when they have made personal sacrifices to conform to the ‘stay at home’ edict, a man who helped devise those rules appears not to have done the same. In vain

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Cummings under fire, protests in Hong Kong and a big cat in East Finchley

Home Open-air markets and car showrooms will be allowed to open from 1 June and other ‘non-essential’ shops from 15 June. Sales of goods in April had fallen by 18 per cent, those of clothing by 50 per cent. Government borrowing rose sharply to £62 billion in April, the highest sum known. The Office for Budget Responsibility predicted borrowing for the year of perhaps £298 billion, more than five times the estimate at the time of the Budget in March. The government announced funding for new long-term housing for 6,000 rough sleepers, of whom more than 14,000 had been given emergency accommodation from the start of the coronavirus lockdown. The

John Lee John Lee

The way ‘Covid deaths’ are being counted is a national scandal

As a pathologist, I’m used to people thinking that my job mainly involves dealing with death. But nothing could be further from the truth. That is why I and many of my colleagues are so dismayed by changes introduced during the coronavirus epidemic which mean that pathology has not been able to play the role that it should have in helping to understand this new disease. The word ‘pathology’ tends to conjure up images of body bags, mortuaries and murder investigations. ‘Ho ho,’ people say, ‘your patients can’t answer back.’ They imagine days spent trudging across fields to reach murder scenes, Silent Witness-style, and nights sifting through arcane evidence to

Susan Hill Susan Hill

I’m sick of people patronising Captain Sir Tom Moore

Nobody earns the right to respect just by having lived into old age, whenever that begins — it has happened by chance and by virtue of having dodged a few bullets. But everyone has the right to be treated with good manners and kindness by those with any power over them — even prisoners and toddlers having pyrotechnical tantrums. Mostly, politeness and consideration are forthcoming. It is always a shock if a bank clerk, dentist or traffic cop are brusque, perhaps because it is so rare. Still, I can stand rudeness more easily than I can tolerate being patronised, something older people encounter regularly. When Colonel Sir Tom Moore raised

Fiona Mountford

As the primary schools go back, it’s the older kids who suffer

It now appears that school’s out till after the summer for pretty much all secondary pupils. The loudest cries, an equal mix of exaltation and despair, come from those who were due to sit GCSE and A-l-evel exams this term: groups now split between delight at unstructured months of leisure time and anxiety that lackadaisical efforts in mock exams won’t prove enough to secure them the required grades. Yet my sympathies in this stalemate lie with those in Year 12, or the lower-sixth, the sandwich year between the two public exam groups. The Prime Minister has said that from 15 June, these 16- and 17-year-olds will be allowed ‘some contact’