Society

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Someone told me their extraordinary life story, but I tuned the whole thing out

Q. After a recent dinner I found myself on a two-seater sofa enjoying the restful company of a woman who seemed happy to do all the talking while I just nodded and pretended to be listening. I regret my insincerity, not least because of what happened later, but I was slightly drunk. I came to my senses, however, when my wife wanted to leave. It was just in time to hear this woman saying, with a portentous look on her face, that she had never told anyone else what she had just told me. She said that now, having talked about it for the first time, she realised that the whole

Susanna Gross

Bridge | 15 January 2015

This may sound odd, given its male-only membership, but the Portland is one of my favourite bridge clubs. I’m one of many women who are invited there regularly (in fact, I can claim to be the first woman to have played at its new premises in London’s St James’s Square), and we’re always welcomed with tremendous friendliness — not to mention gourmet dinners and far too much wine. I was last there in December for the club’s inaugural auction pairs, the brainchild of its new chairman Chris Kemp. My partner was Patrick Lawrence and I loved every minute — despite being duffed up by the eventual winners, the brilliant Scottish

Owen Matthews

Panic, profiteering and a mysterious girl in a Mini: notes from Moscow

 Moscow Here we go again. The rouble slides, then tumbles, and slides again. For those of us who remember the crash of August 1998, the drill is familiar. For Muscovites, the old instincts have surfaced from the 1990s like a sausagey burp. Shoppers besieged Ikea, Auchan and other mega-markets, desperate to spend rapidly devaluing roubles. Cynical expatriates such as myself did much the same with our newly inflated hard currency. I cleared my local posh wine shop of a thousand bucks’ worth of Burgundy, now half-price in dollar terms. A correspondent colleague raided the Moscow Apple store to the tune of two iPhones and a pair of laptops before they

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 15 January 2015

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that he wanted to change the law so that there would be no ‘means of communication’ which ‘we cannot read’, in order to thwart terrorists. Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, said this meant ‘scooping up vast amounts of information on millions of people — children, grandparents and elderly people who do nothing more offensive than visiting gardening centre websites’. Andrew Parker, the director general of MI5, said that 20 terrorist plots against the West had links to Syria in the past 14 months. Steven Emerson, an American commentator, apologised for saying on Fox News that in Britain ‘there are actual cities like

Dot Wordsworth

The changing meaning of ‘prolific’, from Orwell to the Premier League

I read somewhere recently of a Soho artist who was a ‘prolific drinker’. The meaning is clear, but hasn’t the word been taken for a walk too far from the neatly hedged semantic field where it was bred? Prolific is hardly ever used in the literal sense of ‘producing many offspring’. I had thought it was most often employed metaphorically of authors, but then my husband surprised me by saying something both true and relevant: that prolific is most often paired with goalscorer. He’s right. It is used dozens of times a week in the sports pages. ‘Adam Rooney,’ the Times notes, ‘is undoubtedly the most prolific of Aberdeen’s strikers.’

Doc

2194: Joe Green

The unclued lights (one of three words and two of two words), individually or as a pair, are of a kind.   Across   5    Bit of tiffin is hardly perfect (6) 12    Fail to see active service (5) 13    Waistcoat cloth that’s not in ablutions (8) 16    Beer mug in set cracked (5) 17    Mourns for old sheriffs (7) 18    Additionally suggest Tory memo (7) 20    Civic dignitary, a lord, with topless Berliner, say (8) 26    Extra portion of lamb? Yes! (3) 27    Tailless bird – dead duck in the Loire (6) 29    Aussie expert involved with 8 for

Doc

Christmas crossword: the solution

First prize Roly Harris, London N1   Runners-up Michael Collins, Petts Wood, Kent; Clare Reynolds, London SE24; Tony Mouzer, Shard End, Birmingham   Additional runners-up G.E. Bell, Hexham, Northumberland; Hugh Dales, Dysart, Fife; J. Caldwell, Winster, Windermere; Jenny Staveley, Kingsdown, Bristol; H.V. Machin, Gateford, Nottinghamshire; Lorraine James, Llanwrda, Dyfed

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Dear David and Barack, Britain and America didn’t defeat the Nazis alone

It’s easily done, I know, when you’re trying to convey the beauty of a two-way relationship, to remember that others may have been involved in the events that brought you closer. But when it’s the Second World War, these little lapses of memory are less forgivable. In a moving article in The Times today (£), with a joint byline and double byline picture (same colour ties! Purple), David Cameron and Barack Obama describe the events of modern times in which the special relationship really mattered. ‘Together we defeated the Nazis’, they begin brightly (or, to be fair, whichever bloke from the Foreign Office/State Department cobbled this together). Fine. The US

Tarek S Arab

Obesity a disability? Only lawyers will benefit from the ECJ’s farcical classification

Real disability is humbling for those who have to live with it and those who care for the disabled. A true disability — degenerative neurological disease, for instance — involves the equivalent of a daily war to live in the way that most of us take for granted. We shouldn’t mock the truly disabled by misusing the word. Yet the European Court of Justice has classified obesity as a disability, meaning that we are all now expected to view those who, in the majority of cases, attained morbidly-obese status by determined and unrelentless bad-lifestyle choices as deserving of our understanding and admiration as those who battle real disability everyday. The interesting

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

The real reason GPs are grumpy: the robots are coming for them | 15 January 2015

There’s something wrong with the relationship between patients and their GPs. I’ve spent much of this winter in my local surgery, what with one thing and another, sitting among the stoic and snivelling, drifting between different doctors. They’re pleasant, if perfunctory, but with each visit I became more sure that something fundamental is awry. The docs seem ill at ease, as if their collective nose is out of joint, and I don’t think it’s overstretching or underfunding that’s the problem. My unprofessional diagnosis is that there’s a change under way in the balance of power between patients and medics; the status of GP as unimpeachable oracle is under threat, he

A.S.H. Smyth

A day in the life of Britain’s sexiest man

There are, presumably, a great many people who dream about what they will say when the day comes that they get to meet David Gandy – but I have to confess I wasn’t one of them. So when I found myself, six months back, sitting across from him in the ‘interview room’ of the Sun Hill police station, I felt somewhat under-prepared. I mean, it’s not like this was actually supposed to be an interview. If memory serves, we ended up discussing dogs (with reference to Battersea?), weddings (mine; his in theory), foreign travel (Africa, I think), British manufacturing (he’s bought a boot company), the rights and/or wrongs of the

The Spectator

From the archives | 15 January 2015

From ‘Music and the war’, The Spectator, 16 January 1915: The war, so far, has not thrown up any supreme musical product. It would be an affectation to pretend that the taste of the average British soldier is elevated. As in the Boer War, his repertory is confined to music-ball tunes and songs of an extreme and lugubrious sentimentality… The average ‘Tommy’ does not sing folk-songs or graceful chansons populaires, e.g., ‘Meunier tu dors, ton moulin va trop vite’, like our allies, but at least he does not submit to dictation from above: be chooses for himself. The curious fact about ‘Tipperary’, a marching song of a mild ragtime order

Douglas Murray

‘Religion of peace’ is not a harmless platitude

The West’s movement towards the truth is remarkably slow. We drag ourselves towards it painfully, inch by inch, after each bloody Islamist assault. In France, Britain, Germany, America and nearly every other country in the world it remains government policy to say that any and all attacks carried out in the name of Mohammed have ‘nothing to do with Islam’. It was said by George W. Bush after 9/11, Tony Blair after 7/7 and Tony Abbott after the Sydney attack last month. It is what David Cameron said after two British extremists cut off the head of Drummer Lee Rigby in London, when ‘Jihadi John’ cut off the head of

Qanta Ahmed Qanta Ahmed

How to save Islam from the Islamists

The terror attack in Paris last week represents Islamism’s most explicit declaration of war on free society. Non-Muslims were slaughtered in a non-Muslim country to avenge a so-called crime against a blasphemy law that is not even Islamic — but merely Islamist. If there’s any blasphemy here, it’s that of Islamism itself against my religion, Islam. At last, on New Year’s Day, the president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, did what no other leader of the Muslim world has done to date: he named Islam’s real enemy. In a gathering of religious clerics at Cairo’s ancient Al Azhar University, he called for the rescue of Islam from ‘ideology’. His speech

Bruce Anderson

The battling brilliance of Burgundy

There is only one answer to the question ‘Burgundy or claret?’ ‘Yes, but never in the same glass.’ Yet I am about to make an observation which cannot be true. I think that good Burgundy sets the conversation ranging widely in a way that claret does not equal. If one was a mystic, there would be an easy explanation. Bordeaux is a fine culture; Burgundy, a transcendent civilisation, whose glories express the paradoxes of the human condition. Over the centuries, Burgundy often revelled in grandeur: equally often, relapsed into misery (consider the career of Charles le Temeraire, who came close to becoming a Burgundian Charles XII). The highest expressions of

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

The sheer joy of hunting

This time three years ago, I hadn’t jumped a single thing for almost ten years. This season, I am happily jumping hedges that my horse and I can’t even see over the top of. Crazy? Most likely. But when the adrenaline is pumping, and an inviting-looking hedge is looming directly in front of you — well, what’s a girl to do? The sheer joy of hunting comes from far more than just dressing up in a smart coat and shiny boots and drinking port. It’s the simple pleasure of being out in the field, watching the hounds do what they do best, and enjoying the pure beauty of the sport.

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The joys and sorrows of two-way ratings systems

‘J’ai failli attendre’ — ‘I almost had to wait’ — allegedly said by Louis XIV when his carriage drew up just a few seconds before he reached the bottom of the palace steps. Pathetic, I know, but I try to re-enact this moment with taxi booking apps: I watch the car approach on the map on my phone, then time my departure to emerge from the building exactly when the car pulls up at the kerb. It is a moment of synchronicity which delights the trivial mind — in the way many men enjoy timing the flushing of a lavatory so that the end of the flush coincides with the last moment of

Lucy Vickery

Hard sell | 15 January 2015

In Competition No. 2880 you were invited to provide a publicity blurb for the Bible to sell it to a modern audience. Kieran Corcoran presents Jesus as a social media sensation — ‘He used to have 12 followers but now he has TWO -BILLION!’ — and Derek Morgan pitches the Good Book as the go-to self-help manual: ‘Going to a garden party and nothing to wear? Trouble finding accommodation at peak season in a small town in the sticks? A house on a flood plain and weather forecast looks bad?’ Other strong performers in an uneven field were John O’Byrne, Sylvia Fairley and Josh Ekroy. The prizewinners, printed below, earn

Aidan Hartley

I want to do for field rations what Jamie Oliver did for school dinners

Hell’s Kitchen My ambition to open a fish and chip shop in Mogadishu has not happened yet, though I remain optimistic. Food, I’ve decided, is the thing to go for on my next entrepreneurial adventure. For a while I dreamed of going into the chicken trade, importing refrigerated containers full of wings and drumsticks from Brazil for sale up the furthest reaches of the Congo. Fortunes have been made in brokering African chicken deals. But so far my forays into the food business have not gone very well. I tried, for example, to sell pots of honey with my friend Tom at various local fêtes. We branded our product rather