Society

Thursday

9 Aug 2018

Temper your expectations

Temper is a new pizza restaurant in Mercers Walk, Covent Garden, and it is as glib and polished as you could wish. Temper is the third of that name; it follows restaurants in the City of London and Soho, which served BBQ and breads, and did them well enough to merit a sister. (The founding chef, Neil Rankin, was at Barbecoa, Jamie Oliver’s failed meat barn in Piccadilly.) It lives on the ground floor of what appears to be a new building, or development, made of bright orange bricks, with bright green false balconies, above an L-shaped court that runs from Mercer Street to Langley Street. On the ground floor,

Alexandra Shulman

Diary – 9 August 2018

The British weather is just like the worst boyfriend. The kind that keeps you in a state of permanent insecurity over their intentions. ‘See you later,’ they say blithely on departing in the morning, a comment that could equally well mean after lunch, or sometime in the second half of the year. Our programming for disappointment is so deep that even during the recent weeks of sunshine it’s been hard to feel completely safe in making future plans. Supper tomorrow in the garden? A picnic next weekend? Is that hubristic? Should we have a plan B? Of course when the days have turned out to be glorious, just as when

Dot Wordsworth

Crest

A friend of my husband’s, yet a well-educated man, said in conversation as we walked to Tate Modern: ‘Is that the crest of the City of London?’ It wasn’t just the crest, but the coat of arms of the City, the whole achievement, with shield and supporters and motto and crest and all. What is it about heraldry that makes most people unrepentantly misuse a term such as crest? It is partly that heraldry demands a completely new vocabulary, in which or means ‘gold’, proper means ‘as in nature’ and sinister means ‘the right-hand side of the shield’ (the left, of course, for the man carrying it). But I think

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 9 August 2018

Q. Good friends, who moved away from our city suburb a couple of years ago, retain a pied-à-terre the better to pursue their sensitive professional lives. They are, however, not entitled to parking permits for themselves or their morning visitors, so for some time we have been passing on to them extra parking permits. When they come round to pick up (and pay for) these, we all enjoy a quick glass of wine together. They are intelligent and upstanding and we like them and can’t believe that they can be so insensitive as not to suggest other meetings where we could spend more time together. — Name withheld, London A.

Toby Young

Thanks, Ryanair, for wrecking our holiday

The Young family’s annual summer holiday could not have got off to a poorer start, thanks to Ryanair. As veteran customers of the budget airline will know, you have to jump through an endless number of hoops beforehand to avoid having to pay punitive fees at the airport. In fact, the cost of failing to navigate the advance check-in website correctly is so high, ‘fees’ is the wrong word. Fines, more like. Fees are what you have to pony up in order to avoid paying the fines, since checking in is far from free. Anyway, Caroline got one thing wrong in spite of peering at Ryanair’s website for at least

Taki

High life | 9 August 2018

They used to say that the primary function of a boat was to be beautiful. I suppose that is why boats were feminine, as in ‘she’s a real beauty, that one’. Puritan is certainly a beauty and I’ve had a great time on board, especially when anchoring near some modern horror or other, bloated and overstuffed with ‘toys’, its occupants reflecting the boat: fat, ugly and invasive. Why is it that boats reflect their owners, as dogs do, and as women used to, although one can get oneself killed nowadays for describing a female as ‘owned’? Show me a tart and she’s sure to be with a James Stunt type.

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 9 August 2018

Me in a black polo-neck jumper looking sour; Oscar wearing a floppy hat; her youngest daughter nude and stooping to dry her feet with a towel; a mountain profile at dusk; a labourer’s stone hut in a vineyard; a copy of Augustus John’s ‘Robin’. Strangely inspired by John’s ‘Robin’, Catriona first picked up a paintbrush 18 months ago, and these pictures, collected and hung on the wall of the local bar, comprised her first public exhibition. They will hang there for the month of August and she held a vernissage to celebrate the occasion. About 50 people turned up from six o’clock onwards and mingled with about an equal number

Melissa Kite

Real life | 9 August 2018

The engineer from Beko arrived and got to work trying to mend the new fridge. Having spent a very long time on the phone to customer services being grilled about my part in its apparent downfall, I was under no illusions that he was going to try and pin this on me. During two extremely unpleasant calls to an 0333 number, I had been subjected to a series of interrogations worthy of Guantanamo Bay. Trick questions abounded, and the chilling impression was given that they knew I would incriminate myself, it was just a matter of time. And they had all the time in the world. They could keep me

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 9 August 2018

Over the many years I’ve been playing competitive bridge, I’ve managed to cobble together a system-file which now runs to about 20 pages. It’s basically a melting-pot of suggestions from the various pros I’ve been lucky enough to partner. But I haven’t a clue how to lay it out properly, and it’s full of gaps and inconsistencies. I’ve always looked with envy upon the neatly enumerated notes that some players carry around. But now I finally have my own, thanks to Peter Crouch. Peter is well-known as an England international, but he’s also the man to go to if you want any sort of help with your system. His efficiency

Doc

2371: In a paddy

In loving memory of 20 41 Considine (10/10/27–24/7/18), the doyenne of crossword compilers. The unclued lights and those clued without thematic definition are of a kind. Ignore two accents. All are confirmed in Chambers. Across 4 Poor twerp forced to know his lines thus? (11, hyphened) 11 Travelling bohemians leave me out (7) 13 Finish in airport building, losing bit of luggage, note (9) 14 Novelist rejecting material (5) 19 Thanks team about seaman parked in 6? (7) 21 State of posh topper returned (4) 24 One of 37 runs away from Spanish city (4) 25 Full-bodied lover (7) 31 Sound preceding the foxtrot (4) 32 Looking seedy, I

Ben Shapiro

Wind-up position

Los Angeles Baseball is the best American sport. It’s great because it’s timeless — it exists in a space beyond time. Unlike other major sports, baseball requires no clock. It’s a ballet of set pieces — at-bats, walks, strikes, balls — and bursts of motion. The grace of a swing, the artistry of a double play — none of these run to the ceaseless demands of a clock. It’s a balance between individual achievement and team play. We know the names of the individual greats, but it requires a team of great individuals to win the World Series. The tension can be incredible. A flamethrowing pitcher facing down a slugger

Rupert Wright

Beyond the pale | 9 August 2018

When we first moved to the Languedoc, the less poncey part of the south of France nearly 20 years ago, there were two kinds of rosé. The first, piscine rosé as the French dubbed it, was thin, pale and uninteresting. It was best served in a large glass full of ice cubes, preferably around a swimming pool by a tanned French girl in a bikini. The second, darker in hue and fuller of flavour, carried the scent of the garrigue, thyme, lavender and rosemary. It went well by the pool, of course, served by anyone in a bikini, but was equally good with merguez sausages and pork chops grilled over

The Spectator

to 2368: Cobbled together

The unclued lights (6, 20/9, 21, 23/31, 30D/13, 34/3 and 42/32) are characters in Coronation Street with its COBBLED streets. First prize Lucy Robinson, London N16 Runners-up D.P.B. West, Birmingham; Roland Rance, London E17

Cindy Yu

The Spectator Podcast: the New Narcissism

Are young men becoming too self-conscious of their body image? We discuss the trend to diet and use food replacement powders in a bid to become superhuman. We also talk about the Crocodile’s election victory in Zimbabwe – is British foreign policy in Africa too negligent? And last, how are pale rosés driving dark rosés into extinction? Huel – short for ‘human fuel’ – is taking the world by storm. This powdered food claims to have all the nutrients a human needs to survive, while being vegan, environmentally friendly, and cheap. But Lara Prendergast isn’t convinced, and in this week’s cover piece, she argues that Huel is a symptom of

Ross Clark

Another £43bn for HS2?How about some austerity instead

There is a big glaring problem for anyone trying to accuse the government of ‘austerity’ – a charge that is continuously laid by virtually all opposition parties. Just where does that charge fit in with HS2? True, the nation’s roads are full of potholes, the bins in some places are being emptied only once every three weeks and the NHS is trying to wriggle out of offering hernia operations – something it seemed to manage perfectly well to perform in 1948. But still it is a little hard to square the charge of austerity with a government planning to spend £56 billion of public money on a single railway line,

Douglas Murray

Jeremy Corbyn and the cynical tactics of the left

It is August, so perhaps it is inevitable that parts of the left are getting somewhat over-heated. But it can’t just be the weather. Take this segment from the bottom of a story in Sunday’s ‘Observer’ which was about something else (comments by Labour’s Deputy Leader on that party’s Leader): ‘[Tom] Watson’s intervention came as Corbyn was forced to “entirely disassociate” himself from an organisation whose website lists him as a member of its international advisory panel and which openly supported a prominent writer convicted of Holocaust denial. In 1996, the Just World Trust, an international NGO that has been a trenchant critic of Israel, wrote a letter defending the

Qanta Ahmed

As a Muslim woman, I’d like to thank Boris Johnson for calling out the niqab

As a Muslim woman observing Islam, I am fully supportive of Boris Johnson’s rejection of the niqab. And I wonder how many of the former Foreign Secretary’s critics understand my religion, what this form of dress represents and the subjugation it implies. To defend the niqab and to defend Muslim women are, I can assure you, two very different things indeed. Growing up Muslim in Britain, not once was I compelled to cover my hair. This changed when I moved to Saudi Arabia to practice medicine. Arriving in the Kingdom, by Saudi Arabia’s Sharia law, I could not go out into public without concealing my entire body, save face and

Cosmo Landesman

Desperate housewives

Freud famously asked: what do women want? And I think that after two marriages, a dozen long-term relationships and a thousand-and-one dates, I’ve discovered the answer to that great mystery: they want a man with a beautiful house. In my twenties I thought that what women wanted was a man who was funny, intelligent, sensitive and kind. A man who would be faithful to them and a good and caring father to their children. Yes, for the modern woman those are all desirable qualities in a man; but they won’t seal the deal. No, what women really want — well, many women — is a man with a big beautiful

Lara Prendergast

The new narcissism

My friend recently met a man on a dating app and went out for dinner with him. When he arrived, the man announced that he didn’t drink. Nothing unusual about that: plenty of young men are abstemious these days. His next declaration was more surprising: he didn’t eat. Instead, he lived off something called ‘Huel’. Huel — an abbreviation of ‘human fuel’ — is a type of powdered food made of oats, peas, flax and rice. I’ve tried it and it is disgusting — gruel, essentially, in smart packaging. But it’s hugely popular: Huel is now one of the fastest growing companies in Britain. Huel is low in fat and

Rod Liddle

Why Boris is wrong about burkas

Were you aware that men who transition into women can suffer period pains, despite not having a uterus? Oh, they can, apparently. There is of course no scientific explanation for this phenomenon, nor could there be, other than perhaps that the transitionee is mentally ill. But it is no longer enough simply to accept that a bloke who has had his scrotum turned inside out is as authentically female as a, um, female — you have to accept his right to a whole plethora of imagined victimhoods which are real enough in proper females but couldn’t possibly pertain to him (and which may, further down the line, include this new