Society

Wednesday

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 09 September 2023

The Bermuda Bowl, the most prestigious bridge World Championship, ended last weekend with a riveting final between Switzerland and Norway. Congratulations to Pierre Zimmermann’s team of ‘Swiss’ players: Michal Nowosadzki, Jacek Kalita and Michal Klukowski, Sjoert Brink and Bas Drijver. You would be quite right in thinking they don’t sound very Swiss, but hey – you can’t have everything. They defeated Norway by 68 IMPs over the 96-board final with no-nonsense aggressive bridge, while Norway made a few too many mistakes. There were of course a number of fantastic moves in the card play – which you expect from a world final – some of which went a bit over

Robin Oakley

The charm of Carmel races

Racing at Cartmel probably began in the 15th century when Brother John wagered a mug of ale with Brother Cain at Cartmel Priory that his mule could give his fellow monk two lengths start and beat him back to the Abbot’s orchard. Nowadays Cartmel is one of racing’s precious smaller jewels. The tiny track nestled in a Cumbrian valley and reached by a tangle of winding country lanes not only attracts jump racing crowds of up to 20,000 (only Cheltenham and Aintree do better) but it also gives them an experience not to be found anywhere else. Where else would the racecourse commentary declare: ‘And as they pass the Sticky

Melissa Kite

Concrete, marmite and jam: the fight against Ulez 

‘We’re renegades now. We’re outlaws. Bandits.’ This was my assessment as the builder boyfriend pulled up outside the house in his old truck with a load of wood hanging off the back. White van man and dirty great pick-up truck man, in the case of the BB, have found a way around paying the Ulez. Mostly, they present their customer with the £12.50 a day charge, which is what they have been doing since the Ulez first started in more central areas of London. Now it has been expanded to all London boroughs, including where a lot of these chaps live and have their work yards, they have had a

Taki

How to train like Taki

Gstaad Here’s a tip for you young whippersnappers: don’t get old, but if you do, you can fool Father Time by training the smart way. By this I don’t mean you should follow all that bull that floats around online. I don’t use social media, but I’m told that a system exists, which reaches millions across multiple platforms, that spreads misinformation about health, and then some. The wellness industry means big moolah, and is as phoney as Hollywood morality. Take it from Taki: all you need in order to feel good and be able to enjoy yourself is a little exercise before breakfast, and some semi-hard training in the afternoon.

The Spectator

2618: Chain gang – solution

Adjacent pairs in the ordered chain of unclued entries [38] CHAIR, [14] MAN, [25] POWER, [15] STATION, [10] MASTER, [40] KEY, [8] RING, [29] FINGER, [36] POST, [44] CARD and [17] BOARD form single words in their own right. First prize Andy Wallace, Ash Green, Coventry Runners-up Jonathan Jones, Oxford; Elizabeth Duff, London NW5

Mr Magoo

2621: Faux

You can calculate 48 by 1 + 47 (ten words in total). However, 21 32 12 23 47 (nine words in total). The remaining unclued lights are the two authors who said so.         Across 14    Not so sure judge needs latitude to be good (6) 17    Sacred halls rebuilt in poor area (7) 18    9 stocks such organs (4) 19    Woman wanting hospital to make changes (4) 20    Sign of aging, like an Irish circus, say? (4,4) 22    German idioms translated in the style of a letter (7) 26    Weather problem has troubled swimmer (6) 27    Bridge player quick to change lead (4) 28    Painting over withdrawn mixture (4)

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: how the poinsettia became – origin stories of flowers

In Competition No. 3315, you were invited to invent a legend that explains the origin and nature of a flower other than a sunflower or narcissus, whose well-known origin story tells of Narcissus, the beautiful youth who draws the vengeance of the gods, falls in love with his own reflection in the waters of a spring and, in Ovid’s version, wastes away, the flower that bears his name springing up where he died. The winners below take £25. ‘I will come to you,’ said the young man, ‘under cover of darkness. Wait by the sea-cliff’s rocky edge, where I will surprise you.’ ‘But come to me in folds of silk,

Luke McShane

No. 768

Black to play. Wall-Raczek, Northumbria Masters 2023. Black’s next move brought the game to a swift close. What did he play? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 11 September. 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 Nd5! Qxb5 2 Nc7#, or 1…Qxd6 2 Nf6+ wins. The game continued 1…exd5 2 Qe2+ Ne5 3 Qxe5+ Kd7 4 Qxh8 and Black resigned a few moves later. Last week’s winner Kevin Taylor, Syston, Leicestershire

Luke McShane

Norm score

‘How do you become a grandmaster?’    ‘You must climb the mountain, and defeat the opponent at the top.’ Alas, the answer is not nearly so succinct, and when I get asked the question, I remind myself to spare the finer details. The gist is that you must outperform an ‘average’ grandmaster over the course of an event of around ten classical games. Each time you clear that bar you earn a ‘norm’, and racking up three norms earns you the title. There is no limit on the number of grandmasters in the world, and since their introduction in 1950, a couple of thousand players have attained that level. By

Steerpike Steerpike

Just Stop Oil protests cost Met police more than £9 million

Staging sit-ins, slow marches and protests throughout the spring and summer, Just Stop Oil (JSO) and Extinction Rebellion (XR) have been doing their best to hammer home the cost of climate change to the planet. But have they ever even thought to consider the cost of their protests to the public purse? Might the slogan ‘Just stop wasting our money’ feel more apt? Dealing with the antics of JSO and XR between April and June this year have cost the Met over £9 million, according to police data seen by Mr Steerpike. Nearly 24,000 police officers were roped in to deal with climate activists – and more than £1.2million was paid out in

Tuesday

Philip Patrick Philip Patrick

The tragedy of Jordan Henderson

‘Money has never been a motivation,’ according to footballer Jordan Henderson, the ex Liverpool captain and recent recruit to Al Ettifaq in the Saudi pro-league. But it is hard to believe that the main reason for moving to the Middle East wasn’t the reported £700,000-a-week contract. For many football fans, Henderson tarnished his reputation with his high-profile transfer earlier this summer. Now, he has finally broken his silence on the subject. Yet his interview with the Athletic might make matters worse.  One of the biggest criticisms aimed at the footballer – who was a vocal advocate of the rainbow laces and armband campaign in support of LGBT rights during his time in the Premier

Jawad Iqbal

Labour can’t pass the buck for Birmingham’s troubles

Whose fault is it that Labour-controlled Birmingham city council, the country’s biggest local authority, is now effectively bankrupt? The answer, according to the council’s leaders, is that it is anyone and everyone’s fault except their own. It is the fault of the government for imposing funding cuts over the last decade, the ballooning costs of rolling out a new IT system, and a historic equal pay settlement that is proving impossible to fund. In other words, it is nothing to do with those actually elected to run Birmingham. Is anyone surprised that politicians are held in such low esteem by the voters?  The bare facts are these. The council has issued

Monday

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic problem

Ladies and gentlemen, please make sure your seat belt is securely fastened and your seat backs and tray tables are in their full upright position. Richard Branson will this week once again blast his Virgin rocket ship into space. Although not really, because at best his sub-orbital ship will only get to the edge of space, and only for a few moments, before gliding back to Earth. Galactic 03, on 8 September, will be the company’s third commercial flight after a successful mission in August and will carry three as-yet-unnamed passengers who bought their tickets on the company’s space plane back in the 2000s. ‘Space is Virgin territory,’ boasts Branson, who

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Silicon Valley’s curious obsession with building old-fashioned communities 

It’s a peculiar thing about billionaires: they don’t half have a weak spot for building ideal communities from the ground up. You could call it pluto-utopianism. The latest manifestation of this is California Forever. A number of ultra-wealthy Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs have been quietly buying up 55,000 acres of farmland in Solano county, California, and at the end of last week they launched a website revealing what they planned to do with it. Behold, the future of rural America: a new community rising from the empty earth, the vision for which is set out in a series of watercolour-style illustrations.   Here is a version of that anxiety transmitted into town-planning: a sudden burst of

Sunday

Robin Ashenden

A tribute to the lost art of letter writing

There are many good reasons, we’re constantly told, for millennials and Generation Z to resent their elders. What they can barely imagine, we took for granted: affordable housing, state-paid education, free dentistry and slow, misspent youths on unemployment benefit. But there is another justification for their envy, one that is hardly ever mentioned: we wrote letters to each other. Mine was the very last generation to do so. Bleak and empty was the day you didn’t find a stuffed envelope, in handwriting you recognised, waiting for you on the doormat. As well as being a sign you weren’t forgotten, letters could, at their best, be sources of sheer delight. Many went

Niall Gooch

The terribleness of a progressive Bond

The latest Bond villain is Nigel Farage. Not literally, of course. But he was clearly a major inspiration for the chief antagonist in the most recent James Bond book, On His Majesty’s Secret Service. This master of international skulduggery is known as Athelstan; a former City trader with a Kentish accent, he espouses a boisterous, saloon-bar English nationalism of the kind usually ascribed to the former Ukip leader. The men drawn to Athelstan’s scheme are preposterous caricatures of the kind of people whom Higson dislikes – i.e. people who have any kind of reservations about any aspect of progressive politics The author, Charlie Higson, has had a certain amount of

Saturday

Francis Pike

The forgotten end of the second world war

Two weeks ago, VJ day (Victory over Japan day) celebrated the end of the Pacific War. On 15 August 1945 Emperor Hirohito, with his high-pitched voice and arcane royal language, which was heard by his people for the first time, announced Japan’s surrender. Huddled around their radios the Japanese heard Hirohito say: ‘We have ordered our government to communicate to the governments of the United States, Great Britain, China and the Soviet Union that our Empire accepts the provisions of their Joint Declaration [The Potsdam Declaration 26 July 1945, signed by President Truman, Winston Churchill and Chiang Kai Shek, ordered Japan’s unconditional surrender or face ‘prompt and utter destruction’]… The

Friday

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

Ukrainian pupils face an impossible dilemma

Today, almost five million Ukrainian pupils have gone to school – in person or remotely. Most didn’t have festive assemblies with flowers, songs and first graders reciting poems by heart, as they would have done before the war. The first of September doesn’t feel like a day to celebrate anymore. Today, every third child in Ukraine stayed at home – schools that could not build bomb shelters or are in the 60-mile danger zone from the frontline have not been allowed to reopen. These precautions are in place as gatherings of Ukrainians, even children, can attract Russian missiles and drones. Lockdown demonstrated, starkly, the detrimental effects of ‘home learning’. Screens

Kristina Murkett

The Tories’ dreadful handling of the school concrete crisis

Pupils are due to head back to school over the coming days, but now it seems that some of them might not. Yesterday, the government told schools to prepare evacuation plans for buildings made with RAAC concrete. This morning, schools were instructed to close these buildings altogether. This has caused immense disruption to at least 156 schools who now have to arrange alternative provision a mere couple of days, or in some cases, hours, before their students were due to crowd their corridors. To add insult to injury, schools will have to pay for these new measures themselves, and some parents have already been warned that disruption may last until 2025.

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

GDP revisions show UK economy almost 2% larger than thought

It’s not often that we see a GDP revision as startling as the one published today. In its Blue Book for 2023 – which includes updated methods for a range of calculations – the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has upgraded the size of the economy in the final quarter of 2021 by 1.7 per cent. This means that by the time the Omicron variant hit, the UK economy was actually 0.6 per cent above its pre-Covid level – not 1.2 per cent below, as previously stated.  This is a staggering difference. It was thought as recently as this summer that GDP still had not returned to its pre-pandemic levels.