Society

Thursday

Clemency Burtonhill

One of the best places in London to hear music

I spent last night in one of my favourite places in the whole of London: Wilton’s Music Hall. Anyone who hasn’t yet been to the magical, near-derelict building which is hidden down Graces Alley near the Tower of London: go. A treat is in store for you. The place where the Can-Can was premiered—and promptly banned—it is the oldest surviving music hall in the world and is also included, sadly, in the world’s 100 most endangered buildings. Stepping from the blustery September wind into its warm, crumbling interior last night I was reminded of the wonderful sense of history that envelops you there: the faded gilt and mahogany holding the

Stuart Reid

Now for something truly horrible

They say that things will be better between Britain and American — or at any rate between No 10 and the White House — when Hillary Clinton becomes president. How depressing is that? For an answer, check out these clips of the Laughing Hillary from Jon Stewart’s team at the Daily Show. The woman has been so thoroughly groomed for television that she is now scarcely human. Her laugh must be the most grisly product on the face of the earth. It’s so horrid it’s hilarious.   Yet this is the person most likely to be the next President of the United States. What’s wrong with America? There are no

Liz Anderson

BT need to be more broad minded

Success – of a sort. I first contacted Virgin Media seven weeks ago as I wanted to change from dial-up to broadband. Yesterday (after some five weeks of almost daily nagging) I was sent a text message that my ‘Virgin broadband service is now active’. Why the delay? Virgin blamed BT, and BT wouldn’t speak to me as I was not a retail customer. During the five-week impasse, I asked BT – retail sales division — how long it would take to set up its broadband on my (BT) telephone line. Five working days, I was told. If BT can fix broadband for its own customers so quickly, why not

Mark Amory

Have the Angry Young Men won out?

Proofs of The Letters of Noel Coward and a new book about the Royal Court Theatre arrived at The Spectator together and their conjunction made me wonder, who is winning? In 1956 Look Back in Anger arrived in Sloane Square and is supposed to have blasted the genteel primness from the London stage forever. A motley group were roped together as Angry Young Men (Iris Murdoch? Angus Wilson?) and stood for the future. Naturally this could not quite be true overnight but the new playwrights flourished and multiplied, new actors with new accents became stars, the plays transferred to the West End and Broadway. Soon the Royal Court directors made

Matthew Dancona

The McCanns go through hell again

The longing for the girl snapped in Morocco to be Madeleine McCann rippled round the world. This story has taken so many twists and turns, many of them savage, but it has always been underpinned by a hope, however remote, that the child may still be alive. So it is heart-breaking to learn that the pictured girl is, in fact, a blonde Berber called Bouchra Benaissa. One can only imagine the new misery suffered by the McCanns themselves as yet another dawn proved to be false. They must wonder each morning how many varieties of Hell are left for them to be put through. I was reminded of a passage

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

A Facebook Agony Uncle Emerges…

What’s the appropriate way to deal with a “Will you be my Facebook Friend?” request from someone you don’t know? How many damn friends should you have anyway? The estimable Reihan Salam tells you what you need to know about these and other social networking dilemmas..

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Fat Bastard Actually Accurate Characterisation of the Modern Scot

Oh great. Who knows, perhaps this is even true. I blame Glaswegians. Obesity levels in Scotland are the second highest in the developed world behind the USA, new statistics have revealed. The figures were published as the Scottish Government announced plans to  remove sweets and fizzy drinks from schools. Under new rules, the amount of chips served in school meals will also be cut and more fruit and vegetables provided. Children’s Minister Adam Ingram said he wanted to change young people’s habits. The figures , released by ISD Scotland, the statistical wing of the NHS, said the “obesity epidemic” in Scotland must be addressed and outlines the extent of the

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Way of the World: Off yer bike edition…

Yes, it’s from the doom-peddlers at The Daily Mail, but still… A police force has banned hundreds of its officers from riding bicycles for safety reasons. Greater Manchester Police has stopped 300 fully-fledged officers and PCSOs from patrolling on their mountain bikes. The patrols are popular with the public because they allow officers to chase criminals down narrow lanes and through parks and because they act as a visible deterrent. But police chiefs say they fear the officers do not have enough training to handle road conditions across Greater Manchester.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Ahmadinejad and Irving

Reasons why jailing David Irving for “Holocaust Denial” was a bad idea, cont.: It allows Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to say that clearly there must be something to this point of view if “researchers” can be imprisoned for pursuing research from a “different perspective”. And, of course, implicitly he’s arguing that despite all your fancy, high-falutin’ talk, you in the west are no better than the rest of us. You censor too.  Tend to the beam in your own eye before looking to the mote in mine etc etc.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Save our hyphens!

The OED is giving in to the Americans and the internet, abandoning the hyphen. Some 16,000 words in the new edition of the shorter OED have lost their hyphens. Examples of words that now look wrong: Formerly hyphenated words split in two: fig leaf, hobby horse, ice cream, pin money, pot belly, test tube, water bed     Formerly hyphenated words unified in one: bumblebee, chickpea, crybaby, leapfrog, logjam, lowlife, pigeonhole, touchline, waterborne Kevin Drum asks: “Ice cream” used to be hyphenated?  Really?  Was this a British thing?  Even the New Yorker isn’t pretentious enough to hyphenate “ice-cream,” is it? Well, maybe it is a British thing. But what’s pretentious

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Brown fails to inspire

Was that it? Gordon Brown’s speech was no launch-pad for an election or anything else. It was competent and workmanlike but its shopping list of initiatives recalled his duller budgets. The NHS saved his sight, he says. Maybe so, but biographies of Brown tell how frustrated he was with years of duff advice from the NHS while he feared he would go blind – before an (Asian immigrant) consultant managed to help him. The rather muted ovation reminded us that the audience had grown used to Blair style oratory, which they won’t hear for a while now. Anyway, I can now understand why cabinet members were told to keep their

Sunday

The Spectator

Jon Cruddas’s conference diary

All week, Jon Cruddas will be writing a conference diary for us from Bournemouth. We’ve just posted his first entry in which Jon explains why the Labour party is parting like it is 1996 all over again and why he suspects that his wife might not have voted for him for deputy leader.

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 22 September 2007

Walking to the station the other day I was thinking how annoying it is that, when people are invited to name their favourite words, so many answer serendipity. Then, blow me if the next news report I read didn’t detail an invitation from Education Action, a charity, to send in favourite words to celebrate Literacy Day. (There is such a thing.) ‘The most popular so far,’ said someone involved, ‘are those associated with positive aspirations, like peace, love, and serendipity.’ Yet serendipity is in a different category from peace or love. People might like peace and love, but it’s the sound of serendipity they like. It is like Boris Johnson’s

Clover Stroud

Inside Russia

Churchill described Russia as a ‘riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. Churchill described Russia as a ‘riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. He was referring to the Soviet Union, all eight million square miles of it. Slightly reduced, the Russian Federation now stretches to just over six and a half million square miles, but her enigmatic allure remains strong, and if anything has been intensified by the Litvinenko poisoning and a refreezing of post-Cold War relations. Churchill was right, because Russia is exciting, but sometimes very confusing for the visitor: walking past the psychedelic peaks of St Basil’s in Moscow or the glittering imperial splendour of

Rosemary Behan

Elias calling

‘Do you mind if I take off my shirt?’ Elias took another long draw on the water pipe and looked at me. As we reclined in the shadow of his crumbling palace in the medina, the midnight air was still warm and the sound of a nearby celebration scarcely intruded into the sanctuary of the courtyard. The muezzin had laid on a feast of spicy seafood, a selection of breads and piles of perfectly ripe fruit — dates, figs, melons and grapes. Now we sat under a canopy of orange and banana trees and jasmine flowers. Slowly and without warning, Elias intoned: Allahu akbar, Allau akbar Ashadu an la Ilah

James Leith

Going walkabout

Court, non-residents were only allowed access to the four ‘public’ beaches as the guest of a resident. Ask any non-African what ‘safari’ means and they will almost certainly say that it has something to do with looking at wildlife, probably through the windows of a Land Rover. It doesn’t. Safari is a Swahili word meaning ‘a journey’, which in turn derives from the Farsi safara, meaning ‘travel’. If you’re ‘on safari’, you’re ‘incommunicado’ or, probably closest of all, ‘gone walkabout’. And if this is what you long for in a holiday — to disappear into the wilderness — few places on earth will meet your requirements better than a tiny

Christian House

A mean time in Greenwich

At 17, Truman Capote ‘just wanted to get out of Greenwich and get to New York’. At 17, Truman Capote ‘just wanted to get out of Greenwich and get to New York’. The local high school paper may have provided his first byline, but the dazzle of the bright lights, big city proved too much. Over half a century on I found myself only too pleased to be reversing Truman’s adolescent trajectory. Central Station was feverishly hot as I bought my ticket for a break away from the humidity of summer in the city. Leaving Manhattan to simmer in its juices, I joyfully barrelled upstate on the Metro-North Railroad. After

Stanley Johnson

Winter wonderland

At the beginning of 1984 — more than 23 years ago — I was lucky enough to be invited by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) to join its research and supply vessel, the John Biscoe, on a six-week trip to Antarctica. At the beginning of 1984 — more than 23 years ago — I was lucky enough to be invited by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) to join its research and supply vessel, the John Biscoe, on a six-week trip to Antarctica. On that occasion, we left Punta Arenas in Tierra del Fuego, Chile’s most southerly port, and crossed the dreaded Drake Passage below Cape Horn, to visit BAS bases

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Heaven and hell | 22 September 2007

6.57 a.m. I wake up three minutes before the alarm is due to go off, aware that I have slept badly: dipping in and out of consciousness. All night I’ve been fretting, imagining the various ways in which I might kill myself on the mountain today. I am not a good skier. I often fall over and sometimes, in deep snow, become cast like a sheep, wedged, unable to rise. If frightened I freeze, like a rabbit. Cousin Peter, my septuagenarian ski-guru, says that I’m finally ready to come ski-touring off-piste with him and his guide, Fred. I feel sick. I want to stay in the chalet and sketch, or

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 22 September 2007

I work in an office where the loo is shared by three separate professions — all rather civilised ones, at that. Q. I work in an office where the loo is shared by three separate professions — all rather civilised ones, at that. However, we are not money-makers, and therefore cannot afford a cleaner. And yet, despite my efforts to make people aware of the mess they create, I have found that again and again it is my office which buys the cleaning fluids, cleans the loo, empties the over-flowing bins and so on. How, Mary, can I make the others share the burden? Name and address withheld A. Start