Society

Thursday

Olivia Potts

The glory of gravy

In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, when Ben Gunn is found by Jim Hawkins, sunburnt and wide-eyed after three years of being marooned on the island, the first thing he asks Hawkins for is cheese: ‘Many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese – toasted mostly.’ As a greedy person prone to daydreaming, I’ve often wondered what my ‘cheese – toasted mostly’ would be. A dozen oysters? A cold negroni in a fluted tumbler? A perfect quivering soufflé? I think it’s gravy. That’s my desert island dream, the idea I can’t shake, the touchstone I’d return to. I’d take gravy in any form: thick and rich, made from meat scraps,

Rory Sutherland

Could a degree make you less employable?

A few years ago my employer, the advertising agency Ogilvy, introduced a recruitment scheme called ‘The Pipe’. It was a ‘non-graduate’ recruitment scheme, the name a pun on the smoking implement of choice of the company’s founder, David Ogilvy. Ogilvy himself was kicked out of Oxford in 1931, so this seemed doubly appropriate. The idea was conceived and promoted by two people in our creative department alarmed by the risk of monotone uniformity which results from formalised, risk-averse recruitment procedures. Our aim, in short, was to introduce a kind of stereophonic sound to hiring. Just to be clear, we did not exclude university graduates from applying: it was simply that

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Can I remain friends with someone who has a frozen face?

Q. A close friend of my own age, 52, has had various things done to her face and now looks different. She definitely looks younger than 52 – certainly when photographed – but in real life the effect is just weird. I feel I can’t properly communicate with her, i.e. ‘read’ her. I have said this to her but she clearly thinks I’m just envious because she’s offered to front the money for me to have the same treatment. We are at an impasse. How can I rescue this long-term friendship when I don’t enjoy interacting with a frozen face and dread seeing her? – S.H., London W11 A. No

Bruce Anderson

A Frenchman who does not drink wine is a disgrace

The world is in an even greater mess than was apparent. I am not referring to Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan or other swamps of mayhem and misery, although they are bad enough. No: the new crisis is in France, and it has two malign and reinforcing aspects. First, large numbers of the younger French have given up drinking wine. It is not clear what they are substituting: Coca-Cola, perhaps. If so, God help us (and them). A Frenchman who does not drink wine is a disgrace to his history and heritage. After the liberation in 1944, and in order to punish collaborators, the new French government created a crime: indignité nationale.

Luke McShane

AI puzzles

Generative artificial intelligence is a modern marvel. Should you wish to see an octopus juggling dinner plates in the desert, it is now just a few keystrokes away. Images, videos, poetry, music – everything is possible. But have you ever scrutinised an AI-generated picture of people playing chess? Inevitably, the position will be incoherent. Look closer, and you may find that the board dimensions are wrong, with adjacent corners both white or both black. Squint a bit, and perhaps you will notice squares that are somehow both colours at the same time, like some clumsy knockoff of an M.C. Escher print. Producing anything of real artistic merit turns out to be quite

Dot Wordsworth

Who has ‘roadman’ vibes?

The Alibi bar in Altrincham, Cheshire, caused a hoo-ha last week by banning single entrants after 9 p.m. The landlord, Carl Peters, explained: ‘Sometimes, if you let people in on their own, the reason why they’re on their own is that they’ve got no one to talk to, so they start mithering other groups.’ Mithering is a familiar word in the north-west. Mrs Gaskell, who was brought up in Knutsford, nine miles from Altrincham, used it in Mary Barton (1848): ‘Don’t mither your mammy for bread.’ Mr Peters had other things on his mind, too. His quite chatty sign on dress code specifies: ‘No sportswear/trackies. No Stone Island. No ripped/frayed

Luke McShane

No. 878

White to play. A nice example from the ‘Generating Chess Puzzles’ paper mentioned above. Which move allows White to force checkmate on the kingside? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 1 December. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Qg7+! Rxg7 2 fxg7+ Kg8 3 Nf6+ Kxg7 4 Nxd5 and White won Last week’s winner Stuart Bahn, Teddington

Nicholas Farrell

The Italian approach to cheating

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna The unseasonably warm wind blowing in across the fields from the brooding Adriatic caused my wife Carla to announce ‘Tira aria da terremoto’ (‘earthquake air’). She feels our family lives on a knife edge, encircled by omens and demons. And who can blame her? Looked at one way, we have had it pretty tough of late. The other day the post person, who is a woman on a three-wheeled scooter and never brings good news, handed me with her grim habitual smirk a court order obtained by Ravenna city council. It requires us to demolish the front door of our house and a skylight on the sloping

Lucy Vickery

Spectator Competition: Lines of beauty

For Competition 3427 you were invited to write a paean on a place traditionally considered to be ugly. In an accomplished entry, in which many took inspiration from William McGonagall, the Bard of Dundee, honourable mentions go to Ralph Goldswain, Richard Warren and Elizabeth Kay. The winners, led by Bill Greenwell on the Pompidou Centre, are rewarded with £25 John Lewis vouchers. You wear your insides on the out Like knickers over jeans – Your architect’s a gadabout On art’s amphetamines – You’re lost inside each scaffold-tube Each Quadro-coloured duct As garish as a cheap Galoob For us to deconstruct But how I love your bold and brash Riposte to

Melissa Kite

The unexpected aftermath of the BB’s car crash

The garage owner came at me with an angry expression as I pulled on to his forecourt, which was the last thing I was expecting. His employee had just crashed head on into the builder boyfriend while driving a sales car and, in my naivety, I was expecting the garage owner to cover the cost of the removal of the resulting wreckage – the written-off pick-up truck belonging to the BB and the totalled car driven down the wrong side of the road by the garage worker. But for some strange reason, which I hoped would become clear, he had let me pick up the bill for the recovery. I

Rod Liddle

The obvious truth about BBC bias

For quite a few members of the House of Commons culture, media and sport committee, the answer to the claims of left-wing bias against the BBC could be annulled by the simple expediency of firing the only supposedly right-of-centre person within the corporation, Robbie Gibb. It is a curious logic that the left employs. This is especially true in the case of Labour’s Rupa Huq, the MP for Ealing Central and Acton (which, I am told, is in London), who believes that people can only be ‘black’ if they subscribe to the same idiotic world view as herself. Ol’ Rupa has twice been in trouble for racism: once when she

Aidan Hartley

Somali charity scams have come at a high price

Kenya Here’s why house-hunting in Nairobi, where I can’t afford to buy even a bedsit these days, gives me flashbacks of a famine in Somalia long ago. It’s dawn in 1992 and I’m on a Red Cross lorry touring the camps of Baidoa, collecting the 400 corpses of those who died overnight. The body truck tours Baidoa every dawn. I take notes and hope my Reuters dispatches will stir people to help end this catastrophe in a faraway African war. Months later, I accompany a food convoy out of Baidoa, escorted by US Marines in armoured vehicles. After the Americans and TV cameras depart with this feel-good story, Somali militias

Pabulum

2731: Knots

‘4D!/18A/3D!’ (four words in total) is a quotation from a tale by the author of 9D (three words). Remaining unclued lights give the names of the two protagonists of the tale and that of the 24A in which it was told. Across 1 Hot wind from Honduras dogging opponent … (5) 6 … in the middle of game nursing chocolate bar (7) 11    Not a Good Friday rite the New Testament pushed hard (10) 13    Earl so rotund cooking thick beef fillet (9) 15    Computer component, quartz in the centre (4) 16    Flowers strike children with wonder, we hear (7) 17    Argonaut, say, having only

Nicholas Wade

The scientific case for marriage

‘Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.’ With this stern admonition, the Church has long been a fervent defender of marriage. But as religion has faded as a social force, so too has marriage. The annual number of marriages in the UK has halved since 1970, with a similar decline in the rate in the US. Does it much matter if people choose to shack up together instead of tying the knot? What is lost if some men are incels or if women decide a husband is a bothersome surplus to their needs? The problem is that all lifestyles alternative to marriage serve to undermine it.

Madeline Grant

Marriage is the real rebellion

Jonathan Swift had a suitably unromantic attitude to holy matrimony. Once, when sheltering under a tree during a storm near Lichfield, he was asked to marry a heavily pregnant bride to a rather guilty-looking groom. Asked to provide evidence that he had performed the shotgun wedding, Swift found a piece of paper and wrote: Under an oak, in stormy weather,I joined this rogue and whore together;And none but he who rules the thunderCan put this rogue and whore asunder. Despite his cynicism, even Dean Swift would lament the marginalisation of one of our foundational institutions. Marriage is undergoing a seemingly inexorable decline. In the 1970s, almost three quarters of the

Lara Brown

Are you too cool for marriage?

The term ‘spinster’ doesn’t seem to scare young women like it once might have. In fact, it is rarely heard nowadays. Instead, women are declaring themselves ‘alpha singles’ and eschewing dating altogether. Influencers are keeping their relationships quiet, for fear that simply posting photos of a new amour can lead to an exodus of followers. Vogue has declared boyfriends to be unfashionable. Women, it seems, are swapping engagement rings for solo travel, matcha lattes and nights spent at home with an LED face mask. Is marriage suddenly uncool? There are certainly plenty of women pushing this idea. Elle McNamara, a beauty influencer who goes by the name ‘Bambi Does Beauty’,

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: a shambolic Budget, Ukrainian plan and justice overhaul  

Home Before Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, delivered the Budget, the Office for Budget Responsibility accidentally released its contents. She will increase the tax take to an all-time high of 38 per cent of GDP in 2030-31. She froze tax thresholds until the end of 2030-31 and introduced a council tax surcharge on properties worth over £2 million from 2028. She scrapped the two-child benefit cap. She froze fuel duty for only another five months but brought in a tax of 3p per mile on electric vehicles. The amount that can be added annually tax-free to a cash Isa was reduced from £20,000 to £12,000 (except for over-65s)

Wednesday

Rosie Lewis

The pointlessness of removing the two-child benefit cap

If the leaks are correct, Rachel Reeves will use today’s Budget to abolish the two-child benefit cap. Another £3.4 billion a year will flow to larger families. On paper, half a million children will be lifted out of poverty. Labour backbenchers will congratulate themselves on a job well done, and columnists on the left will cheer that compassion has been restored. Forgive me for not joining in with the applause. Addiction, chaos, and learned helplessness don’t vanish because the monthly bank transfer gets a little fatter For 20 years I’ve been a foster carer working closely with underprivileged families, and what I’ve learned is that simply giving parents more cash won’t