Society

Thursday

Susan Hill Susan Hill

Diary – 2 August 2018

The swifts had not arrived by June, nary a one, though a Yorkshire Dales friend reported their return, and there were masses in France. I read that there was a national shortage, bird people were doing surveys and panicking. In the 1970s and 1980s, swifts wheeled round every church tower, dashed through the streets screaming. Not now. I could have wept. Possibly I did. Why had the French ones not crossed the Channel? Was this yet another thing to be blamed on Brexit? Then, one July evening, there they were a few, then dozens, soaring, diving, swooping, crossbows in the blue sky. I have abandoned work, reading, watering, even drinking

Dot Wordsworth

Signage

My husband, in company with a similarly superannuated medic on the unfamiliar London Underground, was bidden at Baker Street to ‘follow the signage’. When do signs, he wondered, become signage? At the same level, I suspect, that rooms become roomage. Hardy wrote in his beguiling way: ‘When moiling seems at cease/ In the vague void of night-time, /And heaven’s wide roomage stormless/ Between the dusk and light-time,/And fear at last is formless,/ We call the allurement Peace.’ Suffixes function in a subconscious way. We use them without explicit intent. Signage, roomage or cellarage belong to Type 1 of four types of nouns ending in -age. Signage is the whole caboodle

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 2 August 2018

Q. My husband doesn’t wash his hands after spending a penny and he doesn’t wash his hands after ‘spending tuppence’, as my grandmother put it, either. I know this as he uses the downstairs gents while I am hard by in the kitchen and I can monitor all the appropriate liquid sounds. When I was driven to raise it a few years ago he said: ‘Don’t be silly, I don’t defecate on my hands.’ I am aware that some men think it’s common to wash hands (in the Lords I heard they put washbasins in the men’s conveniences only within the past 50 years). Thoughts? — N.F., London W6 A.

Toby Young Toby Young

Joining the Twitchfork mob is not the answer

This summer has seen yet another group of thought criminals being mobbed on social media. Some of them are the people you’d expect, such as the American journalist Jesse Singal, who wrote a cover story for the July/August issue of the Atlantic about parents of transgendered teens agonising over whether to accept their children’s new identity or to try to talk them out of it. That dilemma is particularly acute when the teens in question are only 13 and pushing their parents to allow them to have surgery. Singal’s crime, in the eyes of trans activists, is that he interviewed several older teens who have changed their minds about transitioning

Pabulum

2370: Problem XII

Fans of classic 12 will know that where ‘Q’ = ‘the number of’: Q26 x Q1D x (Q34 + [Q36D/5A x Q15D]) x Q14/20 = Q the puzzle. 14/20 is four words in total.   Across   1 Red vestment eastern compère retains (6) 10  Seeds of casaba once processed (10, two words) 11  Ruth from the East posed outside for painter (6) 15  Contralto with yen for bonbons (5) 16  Blissful Enid cycling in the City? (6) 22  Analyst’s father exactly mirrored John (8) 23  Quiet rivers fuel wells (7) 24  Crosses as decorations (4) 25  Criminal idle in old age (4) 27  Take a bath beside fellow washer

The Spectator

to 2367: When pigs fly

The quotation ‘NEVER (1A), NEVER (35), NEVER (41), NEVER (7), NEVER (32)!’ is from King Lear (V.iii.310). Lear was the FATHER (18) of GONERIL (19), REGAN (15A) and CORDELIA (23). LEAR (in the ninth row) was to be shaded. First prize R.J. Green, Llangynidr, Crickhowell Runners-up Brenda Widger, Altrincham, Cheshire; Alexander Caldin, Houston, Texas

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The interest rate rise is better late than never

When interest rates were lowered to an ‘emergency’ level of 0.5 per cent in 2009, the market consensus was that rates would probably rise again by the following February. I am sure that absolutely no-one would have predicted we would have to wait until 2nd August 2018. Not even Mark Carney, then still governor of the Bank of Canada. How many times has he given us ‘guidance’ on when interest rates would rise – only for it to be no guide at all? Exactly five years ago, for example, he said that rates would rise once the unemployment rate, then 7.8 per cent, fell below 7 per cent. It is

Rupert Darwall

How Brexiteers can still save Brexit

Brexit hangs by a thread. The Chequers Plan has already failed. Public hostility and its one-sided nature mean that it cannot provide a durable basis for the UK’s future relationship with the EU. Only eighteen months ago, the Prime Minister was saying that Britain could not possibly stay in the EU Single Market. It would mean “not leaving the EU at all.” Yet this is precisely what the Chequers Plan does, with its acknowledgment that the Single Market is built on a balance of rights and obligations and its proposal for a new framework that “holds rights and obligations in a fair and different balance.” Fair and different is not

Josephine Bartosch

The limits of Stonewall’s tolerance

‘Acceptance without exception’ is the aspirational slogan emblazoned across the website, merchandise and literature of Stonewall, the UK’s largest LGBT charity. The problem is that there are exceptions. Those who are not accepted include those who refuse to believe that a person can change their sex simply by saying: ‘I identify as.’ The fractious nature of the LGBT alliance – and Stonewall’s intolerance for dissenting voices within the community – is becoming increasingly clear. At this year’s London Pride, a group of protestors from ‘Get the ‘L’ Out’ made their feelings known by marching to the front of the parade with banners, including one reading ‘Transactivism Erases Lesbians.’ The actions

Douglas Murray

Elin Ersson’s ‘citizen-activism’ comes at a heavy price

Last week, a 22-year old Swede called Elin Ersson made headlines around the world for her ‘citizen-activism’. Learning that a failed asylum seeker from Afghanistan was to be deported from her country, she bought a seat on the plane that was due to take him part of the way back home (as far as Turkey). Once she was on board the plane Ersson refused to sit down. Filming the whole thing on her mobile phone (natch) Ms Ersson insisted that to send the failed asylum-seeker to his home country would be consigning him to ‘death’ because Afghanistan is ‘hell’. After about 15 minutes of this Ms Ersson got her way.

Robin Oakley

Two days in New York

In Britain I never drink cocktails, but on arrival in New York it has become a ritual that my first drink is a Manhattan. Sipping this year’s drink, I realised that my regular two-day forays to the Big Apple have become one long ritual. We stay on Fifth Avenue to allow for a saunter among the brown baggers in Central Park, with delicatessen lunches from Zabar’s. Day one starts in Barnes & Noble to browse the latest US political biographies and pick up the new Alan Furst espionage paperback — after a diversion for Mrs Oakley to update her holiday wardrobe at Tommy Bahama. Among New York’s formidable art collections

The Spectator

Victory is nigh

From ‘The fifth year of war’, 3 August 1918: There are those who think that Germany will try to regain the initiative, and may very likely succeed. They point to the large unexhausted reserves under the command of Prince Rupprecht, and remind us that we have an unpleasantly narrow slit of territory to manoeuvre in between the Flanders front and the Channel coast. We are more sanguine. The recent rains have re-created the bogs of Flanders, and though the ground is drying, the autumn is not far distant. The ‘greatest effort’ of Germany lies in the past.

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 4 August

Our Spectator Winemaker Lunches are extremely cheery affairs, held in the boardroom at 22 Old Queen Street. There are never more than 16 of us — a dozen or so readers plus the winemaker and your humble correspondent — and, during a cold, four-course Forman & Field lunch, we enjoy around six or seven different wines. Spittoons are scoffed at and consumption runs at an average and rather impressive one bottle per head, despite which I’m delighted to report that we’ve never run dry. We do sometimes resort to flicking the lights at meal’s end, though, just to remind readers they have homes to go to. The following six wines

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Bigots of the world, unite!

If Jews would get out of Israel and also stop drinking the blood of gentile children, perhaps the rest of the world would like them a little more. That seems to be the fairly broad view among the Hamas groupies on the white British left as well as throughout almost the entire Islamic world. But in particular within the left of the Labour party, which has imbibed this foul ideology for a long while (dating back to the Cold War). A member of the party’s National Executive Committee, Peter Willsman, has blamed Jewish supporters of Donald Trump for fabricating claims of anti-Semitism against Labour. Willsman then asked fellow members if

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Wealth vs freedom

H.L. Mencken once said that a rich man is anyone who earns more than his wife’s sister’s husband. The anthropologist David Graeber takes a slightly different view. When I interviewed him about his wonderful book Bullshit Jobs, he explained that, rather like the Laffer curve, there is an optimal amount of wealth for anyone to have: if you have too little wealth, you spend all your time worrying about money. If, on the other hand, you have too much wealth, you spend all your time worrying about money. I’d always noticed a similar middle ground with cars. You want a car that’s nice enough not to fret about whether it

Bruce Anderson

Mindful drinking

When I was at school, some time before the last ice age, the final day of term was a quasi-holiday. There might be slide shows, and I remember my housemaster introducing me to Klee and Mondrian (I am still unconvinced about Mondrian). Today, it is all very different. I gather that once the exams are over, the brats are sent on trips or expeditions. The fear is that if they were confined to barracks, they would wreck the place. The Tory high command (if there is one) clearly needs to consult a cunning modern schoolmaster. In the final days of the last term, Conservative MPs came close to sabotage and

Robert Tombs

Holiday Notebook

Sharing a plate of oysters with a three-year-old: where could this be but France, where children are brought up not to be faddish. The fads are for adults. It’s a relief to be away from Cambridge, where summer is bad for the soul. I find myself getting constantly annoyed: with suicidal cyclists, psychopathic taxi drivers, imbecilic pedestrians and double-decker buses allowed to hurtle through narrow streets belching diesel fumes. And hundreds of thousands of tourists trooping gormlessly up and down King’s Parade with not much to do. Here in Biarritz, the streets are calm, the traffic is regulated and people do not shout at each other in the street —

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

What’s bad for slick estate agents is good for working Londoners

Those twice-weekly sales emails from Foxtons that the recent GDPR clean-up has failed to stop have lately been spattered with the words ‘recent price reduction’ in big red capitals. Hence no surprise that the glossy estate agent and bellwether of London residential property has just reported a first-half loss of £2.8 million, compared to £3.8 million profit in the first half of last year and reflecting a sharp drop in sales revenues. Chief executive Nic Budden says his marketplace ‘is undergoing a sustained period of very low activity levels’. Foxtons’ flotation in 2013 at an absurd valuation of £650 million was the strongest possible indicator of overheating house prices at

Michael Henderson

Forever stumped

‘There can be no summer in this land without cricket’, wrote Neville Cardus, whose rhapsodic vision of the game lies at the heart of its mythology. Hardly a week goes by without somebody borrowing a phrase or two from Cardus to emphasise what cricket means to England — or used to mean, for the modern landscape is very different. When England play their 1,000th Test match this week, against India at Edgbaston, it will be the only first-class cricket to be found anywhere in the kingdom. Between 28 June and 19 August, seven plump weeks at the height of summer, spectators have only one round of championship matches to enjoy,