Society

Pluscarden Abbey, just outside Elgin in northeast Scotland, is one of the most beautiful places in Britain. But to those who have visited in winter over the years, it has also felt like one of the coldest. After the war, when Benedictine monks arrived to restore what was a medieval ruin they slept with no roof, let alone heating. Then came the paraffin burners, which gave the monks a choice between freezing and asphyxiation. Central heating arrived in 1980 (it’s needed, if your day starts with prayers at 4.30am) but it was used sparingly. But when I went to visit last month I found a miracle had happened. There is a biomass boiler

While Mr S is used to reporting from the sideline on Twitter wars, he tends to refrain from taking part in them. So Steerpike was amused to find himself in Louise Mensch’s firing line this morning. His sin? Being Peter Hitchens, apparently. Mensch accused the Mail on Sunday columnist of being the author of this very column. She said that unlike Hitchens, she didn’t write stories about him. When Hitchens pointed out that he hadn’t written about Mensch for seven years, the former Tory MP suggested that he was in fact… Mr Steerpike: While Mr S is sorry to break the news that he is not, in fact, Hitchens, happily, this

From ‘How to Use Our Home Guard Volunteers’, The Spectator, 19 June 1915: There is a technical objection which for the moment seems to raise an insuperable barrier against the military authorities getting what, in many cases, they so eagerly desire, and against the Volunteers rendering the aid which they are equally anxious to render. Clause 6 of the War Office letter of November 19th, 1914, to Lord Desborough, the letter which regularized the position of the Volunteer Training Corps and contains the War Office recognition of all those affiliated to the Central Association of Volunteer Training Corps, and is also the charter of the Volunteers, makes the following stipulation:

Captaining a bridge team in a knock-out competition can be a thankless task. Sometimes, the hardest thing of all is simply finding a date when everyone can play. Several years ago, for instance, I managed to get my dream teammates for the Hubert Phillips Bowl: David Gold, Andrew Robson and Alexander Allfrey. Trying to arrange our very first match nearly gave me a nervous breakdown: our opponents offered five possible evenings over a four-week period (which was all they were required to do). After hundreds of emails to and fro, it became clear that there was simply no evening we could all do — and we were forced to concede

Off to prison to visit a writer friend, first jailed led some years ago for trying to find a hit man to kill his mother’s toy boy. My friend had no objection to his mother having boyfriends per se, but what irked him was that she’d left the toy boy her house. After good behaviour, my friend was released on the condition that he would not leave the UK. But he did, phoning every so often from unexpected places such as Lake Geneva and Chartres. A court meanwhile had awarded him the house, so the hit man had been unnecessary. Last year, re-entering the UK by plane, my friend was met

The campaign to keep Greece in the euro has resulted in five years of groundhog days. The unfortunate country seems to be forever approaching a day of repayments it cannot afford. Ministers and diplomats assemble to thrash out a deal. Meetings collapse in bad temper, and markets sink. Then, at the eleventh hour, a deal is somehow forged. Greece agrees to reforms which seek to cut spending and balance the books in return for billions of pounds of bailout cash. Markets rebound. The money is paid, the debt repayments met. And then all starts to go wrong again. A few months later we are back where we began. Anyone who