Society

Thursday

Smurf

2420: Crafty

Four unclued lights are thematic and are defined by two others. They are found in The 21 and 2 (also the singular of a fifth unclued light). Another unclued light is partly thematic, yet another was a high officer, whilst a final pair show status. One clued light is an abbreviation.   Across 11    Thankless daughter that’s broken up loves and leaves for season (7) 12    Biblical character with pain in both hands (6) 13    Carpet has nap woven round edge, all in scarlet (9) 14    Fantasy – in short, ecstasy (5) 16    Despots – Middle Eastern – contract lung infection (5) 19    Type of movie with lots of drawings? (7)

Kevin Dent QC

It’s time we cracked down on people carrying knives

An 18-year-old girl stabbed in the back in the West Midlands; three people stabbed at a party in Borough; a teenage boy left fighting for his life in New Cross; a police officer attacked with a machete in Leyton – and that is just in the past week alone. Over the past five years offences involving knives have soared by 74 per cent, from 25,600 in 2013/14 to 44,500 in 2018. Knife offences last year included 252 homicides and 368 attempted murders. Knives were used in more than 400 rapes in the year and 150 other sexual assaults. Those of us who prosecute and defend in cases of serious violence are

The Spectator

to 2417: Six nations

The unclued lights are LAND OF (25A): MILK AND HONEY (11A), CAKES (12A), HOPE AND GLORY (39A), ENCHANTMENT (7D), MY FATHERS (9D) and BEULAH (29D).   First prize Adam Hughes, Liverpool Runners-up Richard Stone, Barton under Needwood, Staffordshire; J.P. Green, Uppingham, Rutland

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Is the Treasury secretly trying to scrap cash?

It is three months since the former chancellor Philip Hammond backtracked and announced that the government would not, after all, abolish pennies and two pences. But then comes the news that the Royal Mint has produced no new one pence and two pence coins for the past 12 months. So much for official policy – it seems that behind the scenes, Treasury officials are quietly getting on with the business of enacting the abolition of cash regardless. True, there is a case for saying that the real value of a penny has been so eroded by inflation that it no longer serves any useful purpose – a penny in 1971,

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The towns making waves

The real secret behind Margate’s revival isn’t so much the restored Dreamland amusement park, but the trains. A decade ago, it gained high-speed, InterCity-like trains to St Pancras, putting it within 90 minutes of London. Before the trains get to Margate they stop in Whitstable, which I remember as a bit of a hole in the 1970s. I went back recently and couldn’t believe how horrible the beach is — black sludge, sharp stones and shells. But then I got to the quayside and it was all posh seafood restaurants. Accessibility as much as native charm has made Whitstable one of the most remarkable turnaround stories of any seaside town

Max Pemberton

Bill of health

It would be daft for someone to offer you £1.8 billion and you turn it down. That sort of money isn’t to be sniffed at. This is how much Boris Johnson announced he would give to the NHS as an extra funding boost. And I don’t want to seem churlish or ungrateful — after all, those of us who work in the health service are always banging on about how NHS resources are near breaking point. But I have some reservations. The first is the most basic — I’m not sure this is quite the cash windfall it’s made out to be. While Boris has assured us that ‘this is

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Stop booing Steve Smith – he’s a hero

During the World Cup (remember that?), Virat Kohli, the very model of a modern major cricketer, appealed to Indian fans not to boo the returned Australian players. It would be nice to think that Joe Root might call for something similar over the next few days from the increasingly egregious English supporters. Current boo-boy tactics haven’t worked particularly well so far. Part of the problem has been the sanctification of Edgbaston as if it was the cricketing equivalent of Notre Dame. Now the sight of a lot of pissed-up Brummies dressed as parrots and chanting ‘Championes, championes…’ seems to be England’s contribution to the summer game. Besides anything else, the

The Spectator

Spectator writers on the UK’s best beaches

Tom Holland Trevone, Cornwall   Pretty much every summer, my family and my cousins head for a farm in north Cornwall, strategically situated for visits to our favourite beach: Trevone. A beautiful cove with breakers, cliffs and an unobtrusive shop, its chief appeal is the opportunity it provides for building colossal sandcastles. Each year, our ambitions grow ever more Babylonian. This summer we excelled ourselves. It was my nephew’s 21st birthday, and to mark his coming of age he wanted to build a sandcastle on a truly lunatic scale. His dream was fulfilled. Armed with industrial shovels and a wheelbarrow, we constructed a vast array of fortifications: a towering central

Victoria Lane

Savannah

Savannah GA is supposed to have lots of ghosts, but I’d forgotten that. It was an April morning and sunlight filtered through the Spanish moss. As I arrived at Wright Square, someone fell into step with me and we crossed the road together. At the other side I glanced to see who it was. No one. Huh. This is the Ghost Coast and there is an industry around it, including night-time tours in a black trolley bus that end in a visit to Savannah’s most haunted residence, the gothic Sorrel-Weed House. At dusk you pass groups of people being told unsettling stories — I caught a snippet about a cat that

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Like so many parents, I’m a panic junkie

On that record-breaking, sweltering day at the end of July, my three-year-old son did a pirouette in the paddling pool — ‘look at this Mama!’ — then tripped, slid under the surface and lay there on his back staring up at me through two foot of water. I was in the pool too, just an arm’s length away, and it seemed to me that I did nothing for ages. I had time to think: he looks so calm. Why isn’t he moving? And, why am I not moving? Then I had hauled him out and we were spluttering on the grass. When he could speak, Cedd was more proud than

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Cast astray

There’s a cultural problem at the BBC, isn’t there? The Corporation is trying to attract under-35s — the sort who don’t really listen to scheduled radio programmes and who probably listen, if to anything from the BBC at all, to Radio 5 Live. This is the most obvious way to explain what’s happened to Desert Island Discs. It’s the only possible reason why Lauren Laverne, DJ, pop musician, a face for television rather than radio, replaced Kirsty Young for her sick leave. The bad news is that Kirsty isn’t coming back. She was good: she knows everyone, she’s probing and she’s sympathetic. Given that the programme, with its brilliantly simple

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Should we be sad or happy that the pound has buckled?

A wave to the FT team whose weekend feature on how the pound has been hit by fears of no deal began with this arresting sentence: ‘Sterling has finally buckled.’ I almost spilled my café crème as I read that in a sunlit French square and contemplated JP Morgan’s ‘conservative’ forecast of a $1.15 no-deal exchange rate, with a possible further 10 per cent fall beyond that, to compare with $1.50 before the referendum and ‘purchasing power parity’ (per UBS) of $1.57. As for the euro, more in a moment — but we’re already only a whisker from pound-euro parity. Should we be upset by this decline of a national

James Delingpole James Delingpole

A gang of sheep rustlers is stalking our county

Though autumn is happily still some way off, we’ve already reached that stage in the shepherd’s calendar when full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn. In fact they now look bigger than their mothers. The easiest way of differentiating the ewes from the lambs is that the latter still have their fleeces while the former are shorn and look thoroughly careworn and knackered from having to feed their demanding and needy adolescents long after it’s strictly necessary. What’s rather spoiling my nature notes at the moment, though, is the nagging fear that next time I venture out into the fields on my morning walk with the dog, our pastoral idyll

Greg Sheridan

Losing our religion | 8 August 2019

There is no faster way to get yourself classed as dim than by admitting that you hold religious belief, especially Christian belief. Anti-Catholicism used to be the anti-Semitism of intellectuals; now Catholics get no special attention. All believing Christians are regarded as stupid, eccentric or malevolent. Some conservatives will make the case for the social usefulness of Christian values. The conservative asks: if society prospered with these traditions and customs, is it really wise to throw them away without a moment’s hesitation? That is just what the West is doing, especially the Anglophone West. Britain, Australia and even the God-fearing United States are becoming atheist societies. Britain is more atheist

Lucy Vickery

Redoing the hokey-cokey

In Competition No. 3110 you were invited to provide a version of the hokey-cokey filtered through the pen of a well-known writer.   Thanks to George Simmers and C. Paul Evans, I now know that doing the hokey–cokey — said by some to have been composed by Puritans in the 18th century to mock the Catholic mass — could constitute a hate crime. Mr Evans weaved this into his amusing take on Kipling’s ‘If’. Equally enjoyable were reworkings by D.A. Prince, David Silver-man and John O’Byrne of Henry Reed’s ‘Naming of Parts’ (‘Today we have shaking of parts…’) and Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of My Self–Humiliation’, courtesy of Mark McDonnell. There was

Anna Aslanyan

Out of sight, out of mind | 8 August 2019

Yoko Ogawa’s new novel takes us to a Japanese island where things keep disappearing: ribbons, birds, musical instruments, fruit. People, too, are at the mercy of the Memory Police, an efficient lot hunting for those who can’t shake off their memories. Each disappearance involves not just getting rid of the physical object, but also of every trace of it in everyone’s mind. The unnamed narrator’s mother is among the disappeared, but things she collected remain in the house where the daughter still lives, writing novels about people losing something. ‘Everyone likes that sort of thing,’ she says of her books, as if to imply that every island has the writers

Tuesday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Michael Buerk wants to let fat people die early? That’s a bit rich

I nearly choked on my Krispy Kreme when I read that the journalist Michael Buerk had announced that fat people (I’m not going to use his word, obese; fat is perfectly serviceable and doesn’t have the same judgemental, almost parasexual feel) should be allowed to drop dead and no longer trouble the NHS with their chubby troubles. All those years I listened to The Moral Maze thinking of him as a cross between Solomon The Wise and Mr Miyagi from The Karate Kid and he turns out to be some superannuated playground bully! It’s a bit rich that Buerk himself is a whopping 73 years old; there are a lot

Andrew Griffiths

In the shadow of the Whaley Bridge dam

It was two days after the storm, or ‘extreme weather event’ as we call them now. I was trying to get into the Derbyshire town of Whaley Bridge, which sits below a reservoir with a crack in its dam wall. The reservoir had topped over during the night and the build-up of pressure meant the wall was beginning to crumble. Fifteen hundred people in the town have been evacuated since the storm, with hardly even the time to pick up their keys. They have sought shelter in schoolhalls and with friends and acquaintances in nearby towns and villages. The world’s media quickly descended on the town and before journalists could

Monday

James Adams

The last hurrah of an America I once knew

It’s all too easy to overreact to yet another mass shooting in America. But the two shootings on Saturday, hours apart that killed 29 and wounded dozens more, seem in some respects to be the last hurrah of an America that I once knew. The recent tragedies have been met with all the usual tropes: hand-wringing by editorial writers; meaningless clichés from the White House and political leaders; calls by the left to ban all guns; calls by the right to stop name-calling. And on and on. None of this counts for anything at all and will be trotted out at the next massacre in exactly the same terms and