Society

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 19 July 2018

Instead of carpeting the upstairs of the house, I had grass fragments removed from the dogs’ ears. I can’t say I enjoyed the grass removals as much as I might have enjoyed having carpet to walk on. I had picked out a lovely stripy pattern that wouldn’t show the dirt, and was really looking forward to not slashing my feet with splinters every time I stepped out of bed on to bare floorboards. But then Cydney and Poppy managed to coordinate the shoving of razor-sharp pieces of vegetation down their lugholes, hospitalising themselves just a week apart. Cydney was first, dashing around the green outside the house and diving headlong

Robin Oakley

The turf | 19 July 2018

For Coleridge, ‘…the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us’. Not in racing it isn’t. However sharp the instincts of bright young apprentices on the way up, however exciting the pace shown by a novice horse on the home gallops, there is simply no substitute for racecourse experience. Odd, then, that English trainers have mostly been slow to make use of one of the world’s most battle-hardened front-line jockeys, who has chosen this season to base himself in Britain. Gérald Mossé, whose strong Gallic features and courteous charm would never have him taken for anything but a Frenchman, now

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 19 July 2018

Last Friday, merrily on my way to Young Chelsea (still the best IMPs duplicate in town), I couldn’t know that my very dull outfit would cause offence. I found a seat, and was sitting with my back to the room getting settled when the lovely new manager, Louisa, beckoned me over. There had been a complaint, she said, about my trousers! Apparently, someone had asked her to tell me that they were too low-cut, which resulted in a wardrobe malfunction visible through the cut-out in the chair. I can’t remember if she said they were distracted, disgusted or disturbed — let’s go with distracted — but what can he/she/they have

Doc

2368: Cobbled together

The unclued lights (two of two words, and the rest paired) are of a kind.   Across 1    Book with smears around comments on jackets (6) 7    Fashions in stationers (6) 11    Made supple, brewing old-time ale (10) 14    US novelist left out, downstairs (5) 15    Wife and marine attacked telegraph fitter (7) 17    One of England’s winners in Moscow — or loss! (7) 18    Articles on Monteverdi’s first choral work (6) 19    Tax is small on poet’s little home (4) 22    Boy rejecting green and gold in France (6) 24    Jumpers touched, we’re told, by president (9) 25    Short film translator leaves passenger plane (5) 26    Athenian cavalry commander

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Who governs Britain?

There are moments that cut through the din of braggadocio, vindictive utopianism and arrant stupidity surrounding Brexit. Anna Soubry has provided one in an impertinence during yesterday’s debate on the cross-border trade bill. She let into Jacob Rees-Mogg and his European Research Group (ERG) for coercing ministers to abandon much of the substance of the Chequers Brexit blueprint. Then, standing mere metres from the Treasury benches, she enquired: ‘Who is in charge? Who is running Britain? Is it the Prime Minister or is it the Honourable Member for North East Somerset? I know where my money’s sitting at the moment.’ Before the crazy set in, an MP taunting the Prime

Colin Brazier

Last rights

My wife died earlier this month. We knew it was coming. A lump in the breast begat bone tumours, begat liver lesions. In the end, cancer in the brain carried her off quickly. A ‘good death’. I keep staring at my wedding ring and its redundant metallurgy. In one of our final lucid conversations my wife urged me to be ‘sensible’. No tantrums. I don’t rear up when another call centre executive offers me condolences for her ‘passing’. Someone exercising similarly benign thoughtlessness called me a single parent recently, and that didn’t feel quite right either. Rather, I have entered a world of Victorian melodrama. I am the widower. I

The Spectator

to 2365: Beds

GARDEN (at 46 Across) reveals the theme. Paired solutions are ‘gardens’ in ‘countries’; 8/10, 32/1D, 33/28+29, 12/36, 37/34, 38/2, and 41 on its own.   First prize Helen Stone, Horfield, Bristol Runners-up Jenny Atkinson, Amersham, Bucks; Sara Macintosh, Darlington, Co. Durham

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Is losing your religion really good for wealth?

According to the Times, a new academic study finds that nations become richer when they become more secular. It contests the traditional idea that a nation gets rich, probably with the help of Protestantism, and then loses interest in religion. Instead, a nation first becomes secular, then becomes rich. There might be some truth in this: the keenest capitalists are often rational individualists who idolise financial success. Enough such people can affect a nation’s economy. But the study, judging from the Times’ report, explains the trend differently. The authors found ‘that a decrease in religious belief was linked to an increase in tolerance for individual rights, including of women and gay

Tom Slater Tom Slater

What’s up with Generation Sensible?

As Love Island enters its final fortnight and the ink dries on the annual moralising thinkpieces, decrying a younger generation happy to flaunt their bronzed bodies and sex lives before the viewing public, a new survey reminds us of the more depressing reality: that young people are less debauched than ever. According to the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, teenagers are much less likely to have sex, or drink, and are as happy spending time with their families as with their peers. Of 1,000 16- to 18-year-olds, two-thirds said they had never had sex. And 24 per cent said they had never drunk alcohol. It’s further proof of what has previously been

Eric Weinberger

The World Cup is the only football that matters

Every four years, when the World Cup ends, I make a promise to follow the players I’ve come to know, or the ones I’d forgotten about for four years, until the next tournament; but I never do. It’s not that following the Premier League, the Bundesliga, Serie A, La Liga, or Ligue 1 is difficult, even in the United States: matches for all these leagues are on television each week. Instead, I glance briefly at the scores in the Monday papers. When the Champions League reaches the semifinals in spring, I pay slightly more attention, and might look back to see who were the losing quarterfinalists. But when it’s always the same teams

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Michael Gove’s Brexit regret is much too little, much too late

Not the least extraordinary thing about the campaign to leave the European Union is that it turns out no-one was in charge of it. Things just happened and decisions were just made without the oversight or knowledge of the most senior politicians whose support for the project was reckoned, with some reason, to be crucial to its essential success. If Boris Johnson gave the Leave campaign a popular – and populist – presence in the nation’s television studios, Michael Gove gave it a certain intellectual credibility amongst the – admittedly small – percentage of the electorate that worries about such things. And with good reason: Gove’s intelligence, if not always

Douglas Murray

Does Teen Vogue understand what it means to be ‘literally a communist’?

If anyone wanted an encapsulation of the screwiness of our times just consider the following straight question being asked of an interview subject. ‘How does being a communist impact your view of the US presidency, whether it’s Obama or Trump?’ And then consider that this pleasant question was being asked by Teen Vogue. It was posed to a young woman called Ash Sarkar who writes for an obscure blog named Novara Media. Last week Sarkar had her 15 seconds of fame when she managed the impossible and appeared to out-arrogant Piers Morgan in a television shouting-match ostensibly about Donald Trump’s visit to the UK. The exchange finished with Sarkar telling

Bruce Anderson

New reign in Spain

The Kingdom of Spain always sends outstanding ambassadors to the Court of St James, none more so than the appropriately named Santiago de Mora–Figueroa, Marqués de Tamarón, who was en poste when José María Aznar was the Spanish premier. Santiago is also a highly regarded poet, and he has a further advantage. He looks like a Grandee of Spain as painted by Velázquez or Goya. So during one of his recent visits, a good audience assembled to hear him. There was an obvious agenda: Catalonia, the closely fought left/right conflict in Spanish politics, and Spanish attitudes to Brexit. We took wit and charm for granted, while awaiting enlightenment and controversy.

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

We’re all Luddites at heart

When I saw my first jogger in Wales in the early 1970s, I assumed he was running away from the police. Presumably joggers were familiar in California by then, but not elsewhere. I can’t imagine any of the characters in Goodfellas going jogging, any more than I can imagine Rick in Casablanca going to a spinning class. Nothing was stopping you from running around the streets back then. It was simply that there is always a high social cost to doing things most people don’t do. Our brain’s two most powerful default settings are social copying and acquired habit. Hence our preferences are not independent of our past behaviour, nor

Mark Mason

The Bank of England

‘Safe as the Bank of England.’ So goes the old phrase. And yes, with walls 8ft thick, the Old Lady is pretty impregnable. Even the keys to her vaults are more than a foot long (the locks also now incorporate voice-activated software). Until 1973 the building was guarded at night by soldiers from the Brigade of Guards, who received a pint of beer with their dinner there. With all this security, how can you hope to get in? One answer came in 1836, when the directors received an anonymous letter inviting them to meet the letter writer in the bullion room late one night. At the agreed hour they heard

Jean Quatremer

Jean-Claude drunker

The atmosphere in Brussels has become, of late, reminiscent of the late Brezhnev era. We have a political system run by a bureaucratic apparatus which — just like the former USSR — serves to conceal important evidence. Especially when it comes to the health of its supreme leader, Jean-Claude Juncker. At the Nato summit gala dinner last week, videos emerged showing Juncker unable to climb the few steps leading to the podium. He hesitates at the bottom before being grabbed by the very sturdy Ukrainian Petro Poroshenko. He is then held up during the ceremony. Afterwards Juncker — who is only 63, hardly an old man — staggers and wobbles

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 21 July

My old mate Jason Yapp was chirpier than ever when we met to taste his wines the other day. Never knowingly under-ebullient, Jas (despite the whisperings of a hangover) had an extra spring to his step having just bagged three gongs at the previous night’s International Wine Challenge, namely that of Rhône Specialist Wine Merchant of the Year and ditto for both the Loire and Languedoc-Roussillon. We tried some delicious wines together and these six were my favourites, all ideal for mid-summer sipping. The 2017 Domaine l’Ancienne Cure (1) is an organically farmed, un-oaked blend of Sauvignon Blanc and Sémillon from Bergerac, south west France. Bergerac can be a pretty

Harry Mount

Losing streak

England didn’t just lose the World Cup. When it comes to male nudity, the country has also lost its sense of shame. Everywhere — on the Tube, in buses, on the streets, in the pub — men are striding around topless. On Sunday in north Oxford I saw a man skiing topless, on roller-skis, with poles, down the Banbury Road. It’s as if Adam and Eve never ate from the tree of knowledge. Yes, it’s very hot. And yes, in the summer of 1976, men took their tops off but only in particular situations: on the beach, on a building site or in their back garden. I must admit that

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Why are middle-class football fans so racist?

It’s middle-class commentators – not supporters – who seem obsessed with the number of black players There were altogether too many darkies in England’s World Cup Squad for me to take any pleasure in their moderate achievements out in Russia. They did not represent me. I learned this via the Guardian in an article by a man called Steve Bloomfield who insisted that the team represented only the 48 per cent of Britons who voted Remain, because there were too many ‘players of colour’ in the side for the likes of us gammon-faced scumbag racist Leavers. Also, they were young. Apparently we ‘don’t usually like’ these kinds of people. Steve had been through the squad and