Society

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Smoking opium with Mr Nazim – and a gecko

‘I used to go to India for a few months every year. A couple of times we even drove there. You could in those days. One year I went to Benares. I rented a place for next to nothing and stayed about three months. Back then there were a lot of hippies in India. They’d run out of money and you’d see them begging. In Benares the hippies all hung out in the same places but I was staying in another part of the city. I think I paid something like three quid a month for my place, which I shared with two other Indian guys.’ I’d brought a bottle

Melissa Kite

Our local Tory candidate’s leaflet was the most disturbing of them all

‘Oh, it’s you!’ said the builder boyfriend to the Tory MP in his shooting jacket, as he made his way down the street handing out leaflets. The BB was standing outside his builder’s yard in suburban south-west London where he enjoys a good argument at election time. During the referendum campaign, he fixed a placard to his roof declaring his support for Brexit. When the London lefties walked past visibly struggling with their gag reflex, he disgusted them further by bidding them good morning in a cheerful, courteous tone. If they did stop to argue, they would soon regret it, as the BB is not to be argued with. He

Toby Young Toby Young

How could any woman fail to be won over by my new cinema room?

As Christmas approaches, fighting has broken out in the Young household. No, I’m not talking about my three boys, aged 11, 12 and 14, who have taken to playing a no-holds-barred version of American football in the kitchen. Rather, it’s Caroline and me who have been going at it. My sin has been to assume responsibility for the decor of one of the rooms in our house. This has been Caroline’s domain until now. She chooses which colour to paint the walls, what furniture to buy at Ikea and how that furniture should be arranged. My role is confined to assembling desks and bookshelves and occasionally moving beds around. But

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Sumptuous, remote – and forgettable: Locket’s reviewed

Locket’s is a new café from the owners of Wiltons in Jermyn Street. Wiltons is the restaurant that dukes visit when they have fallen out with White’s. It has a sign featuring a lobster that looks like Benjamin Disraeli wearing a top hat. When a bomb fell nearby in 1942, its anxious owner immediately sold it to the banker Olaf Hambro, who was sitting at the bar, by adding the price of the restaurant to his bill. It appeared, thinly disguised, in Jeffrey Archer’s First Among Equals as Walton’s, in which a fictional Tory minister plots the seduction of a woman called Amanda. I like Wiltons, even if the female

Dot Wordsworth

Where did ‘aconite’ spring from?

‘What,’ asked my husband teasingly, by way of an early Christmas game, ‘connects wolf’s-bane with Woolwich Arsenal?’ It took me a little time, but I got there via aconite. Ovid put its origins most vividly. When Cerberus was dragged by Heracles from Hades, triply barking as the steel chain was twisted round his necks and averting his eyes from the glare of day as he came up through a cave on the shore of the Black Sea, the monstrous dog dropped slobber on the ground, from which grew the poisonous flower aconite. We now call this kind of aconite wolf’s-bane, for its lethal properties. Keats wrote: ‘Go not to Lethe,

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: What can we do about our son’s girlfriend’s appalling table manners?

Q. My son has a girlfriend who we like but who has appalling table manners. They come to stay most weekends and I really find it painful to sit at a table with her and cannot understand how my son can put up with it. What would you advise, Mary? — Name and address withheld A. Next time they come to dinner, invite the family of a small child to eat with you and conspire with the parents to keep telling the child off for speaking with its mouth full, leaning on the table or any other infractions. In this way, you can give a proxy lecture on how his

The Spectator

Politics has fractured along new fault lines – those elected must repair the cracks

Boris Johnson stood for party leader as a One Nation Tory, he fought the campaign as a One Nation Tory and this is the agenda that has given him the largest Tory majority since 1987. Much is being made of the collapse of the Labour party’s vote, but something more profound is under way. The Tories are changing, and they have a message that was directed at – and understood by – a new cohort of voters. It has the potential to transform British politics. It’s wrong to say – as many do – that the phrase ‘One Nation Tory’ is senseless. Its meaning comes from Disraeli’s dictum, in Sybil,

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Trains stop, a volcano erupts and the nation goes to the polls

Home The nation went to the polls. Engineering works compounded the misery of passengers on the South Western Railway where the RMT union is holding a strike until the end of the year. Leatherhead was utterly cut off. Hundreds of Greater Anglia services were cancelled when a signals failure turned into problems with rolling stock. After 22 years, Virgin Trains relinquished the franchise to run the West Coast Main Line, which was granted to Avanti West Coast, a partnership between Aberdeen-based firm FirstGroup and Italy’s Trenitalia. All 27,000 chickens on a farm in Suffolk were culled after cases of avian influenza were found. Vernon Unsworth, a British caver who helped

Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan: The evidence against Trump is overwhelming

When people ask me what the mood is in DC these days, the only word I can come up with is ‘surreal’. Everyone in this town — including almost all the Republican senators — knows Trump is guilty as charged over Ukraine, and then some. The evidence is overwhelming. And seeking to get a foreign power’s help in a domestic election is such a textbook case for impeachment — the Founding Fathers were obsessed with foreign meddling — it really should be over by Christmas. It won’t be because of Roy Cohn. That legendary lawyer had a simple technique whenever his clients, Fred and Donald Trump, were sued. He would sue

Charles Moore Charles Moore

My run-in with Westminster’s TV news circus

Leaving an evening meeting in Westminster on Monday night, I walked to Charing Cross. Approaching the public path which runs across College Green by Parliament, I found, as so often nowadays, that it was fenced off to allow those pop-up studios which the big television channels erect to create their instant news circus. Fed up that the normal way was yet again blocked by what Psalm 84 calls ‘the tents of wickedness’, I lifted the barrier open and walked through. Two security guards leapt out of the nearest hut and tried to block me. I pressed on, however, and they could only scamper after me calling out ‘Health and safety! Health and safety!’ At

Luke McShane

no. 584

White to play. Aronian–Carlsen, December 2019. Carlsen won the third-place playoff, but Aronian found a nice finish in this game. What move prompted Carlsen’s resignation? We regret that owing to print deadlines this is not a prize competition.   Last week’s solution  1…Qa7!! wins, as 2 Bxa7 Rxg2+ 3 Kh1 Rxh2+ 4 Kg1 Rag2 is mate. Last week’s winner Paul Bell, London N10

Luke McShane

Ding’s wings

Ding Liren, from China, was a convincing winner of the 2019 Grand Chess Tour, which reached its climax in London last weekend. The Grand Chess Tour Finals, a four-player knockout, was the flagship event at this year’s London Chess Classic. The match format was a blend of classical (slow), rapid and blitz games. Although the slower games held more weight in the scoring, the very inclusion of faster time limits reflects their increased status in the modern game.   The first semi-final, between Magnus Carlsen and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, went to a tiebreak. The Frenchman won a topsy-turvy game in his beloved Najdorf Sicilian, as Carlsen went astray amid wild complications. In

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 12 December 2019

These days, young people expect to learn new skills online, for free. So how do we introduce a new generation to the joys of bridge? The most exciting initiative for a long time is the New Tricks Bridge Club, whose aim is to propel the game back into the modern age through the internet. The team behind New Tricks has produced a series of excellent YouTube videos, from tutorials for beginners to ‘tournament masterclasses’ featuring world-class stars like Zia Mahmood and Dennis Bilde.   I recently watched the first of these (www.newtricksbridge.club), and was immediately hooked. The players talk us through their thinking — always fascinating — but what was

Smurf

2438: Shining bright

One clued solution (which solvers must highlight) can be linked with eleven unclued solutions, (one in the plural). Brewer confirms them all, even showing that two of them can be further linked as a trio, thematically too!   Across 5    Character in Eliot drama, also in the saga that inspired it (6) 9    Maladjusted, he sued aunt for speedy carelessness (10, two words) 16    Primrose, perhaps, taking drug Vi slung out? (6) 17    A great deal of gas over Germany (5, two words) 20    Composer brought to court for judgment (7) 22    Bullies orchestra terribly, having lost artist (7) 24    One ducking the issue? (7) 25    Indian’s rejected fine material

Colin Greenwood

The Great Barrier Grief — and countless other marine disasters

In the last, wrenching episode of BBC’s Blue Planet 2, there’s a distressing moment when a young Australian diver, expert in his patch of the Great Barrier Reef, admits ‘I cried in my mask’ as he swam over an ossuary of recently bleached-out coral bones. Professor Callum Roberts’s memoir of a life devoted to the study of our oceans, and in particular their coral reefs, is a ravishing, alarming account of these underwater palaces of wonder, and the existential threat they face from humanity and our warming climate. Reefs take up just 0.1 per cent of our planet’s surface, yet provide home and breeding grounds for more than a quarter

William Cook

Is St Edmund’s body buried beneath a Suffolk tennis court?

Here in St Edmundsbury cathedral, a bunch of clerics and local bigwigs are preparing for a most unusual anniversary. Throughout 2020 the inhabitants of this historic market town will be celebrating the 1,000th birthday of a building that ceased to exist nearly 500 years ago. The Benedictine Abbey of Bury St Edmunds was founded by King Canute in 1020 to house the body of King Edmund, England’s original patron saint. Traditionally said to have been born in 841 and crowned King of East Anglia in 855, Edmund was captured in 869 by the Danes, who told him he could be their puppet king if he renounced Christianity. He refused, so

Debbie Hayton

Trans activists are making life harder for trans people

This was the year that the word ‘non-binary’ went mainstream. It has now officially entered the dictionary — lexicographers at Collins have defined the term as ‘a gender or sexual identity that does not belong to the binary categories of male or female, heterosexual or homosexual’. Non-binary also entered the Liberal Democrat manifesto, though Jo Swinson may now be regretting this decision. Non-binary is easy to announce; it’s rather more challenging to explain to the electorate — or to journalists. In a series of difficult interviews this week, she even denied the fact that every human being is either male or female. I’m a science teacher; if she had been

Lara Maiklem

A river of lost souls: the extraordinary secrets of the Thames

If you spend enough time on the Thames, you will eventually come across human remains. It is a river of lost souls, filled with suicides, battles, burials, murders and accidents, with people so poor their families couldn’t afford to bury them, or so destitute they were never missed. Their bones wash up on the foreshore in the drifts of smooth, honey-brown animal bones, the remains of 2,000 years of dining and feasting. I know this because I am a mudlark and I’ve found my fair share of lost and forgotten Londoners. Mudlarking is best described as a hobby for the archaeologically curious. Twice a day, the tidal Thames falls low