Society

Saturday

Jaspistos

Occasional verse

In Competition No. 2431 you were invited to write a poem commemorating the recent death of the whale in the Thames. Verse marking a special occasion can be serious (Tennyson’s ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’) or light (Gray’s ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes’). I can only explain the fact that this was the smallest entry I have ever received by the supposition that many of you wrongly thought that I was asking for a funny poem on an unfunny subject. Perhaps it would have been easier to treat the subject with a straight face if it

The Spectator

Lock up your chickens

A grim inevitability hangs over the country as we go to press. Some time over the next week or two the first dead swan of spring will be pulled from the rushes in the south of England, taken to a laboratory and declared to have perished from the H5N1 virus. From that moment on, the news virtually writes itself. Exclusion zones will be formed, schools and businesses closed, bridleways sealed off. Poultry farmers will be imprisoned in their homes, children’s budgies seized and put to death before their wailing owners. Country fairs will be called off, hunting and shooting will cease, and there will be demands for the Grand National

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Why not share Anglican churches among Catholics, Muslims — and Anglicans?

Suppose a public body owned tens of thousands of acres of real estate across England, mostly in prime residential areas. Suppose it showed little inclination to rationalise its holdings in any tough-minded way, but drifted on, barely able to maintain the property it owned. Would there not be a strong case for HM Government to step in and reclaim some of these assets from the inertia-bound body? Such a body exists. She is called the Church of England. There can hardly be a reader who within a few minutes’ walk from his own doorstep could not identify acres of land with a crumbling building in the middle of it, often

Charles Haviland

A divided kingdom

Kathmandu, dawn on Sunday Under the early sun, a silver disc in a grey sky, candles flicker on the walls of the pagoda temples. People offer morning prayers at shrines. Women from the countryside sit by the roadsides, smoking and selling armfuls of white radishes. Spring is already here; the Himalayas, visible on crisp winter days, have disappeared in a smoggy haze, and the stench of human waste and litter is once more wafting up from the sacred Bagmati river. Later there’s a big military pageant on the central parade ground, for this is Democracy Day, the anniversary of the ruling Shah dynasty regaining power in 1951 from a rival

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

Toilet talk

Brendan O’Neill discovers that public lavatories are plastered with government propaganda, much of it telling us how disgusting we are Under the Blair terror, you can’t even take a piss in peace. The other day, standing at a urinal in a plush cinema in north London, I found myself staring at a notice on the wall in front of me. ‘Relax, go ahead and read’, it said. ‘No one knows you’re a wife-beater. You don’t look like someone who would hit a woman.’ The ad further advised that I should not flee the setting in which I had apparently been battering my partner, because ‘we will track you down’ and

Saturday

Taki

What a carve up

Ancona I am here on a pilgrimage, honouring the descendants of this greatest of Italian towns, men like Galileo, Michelangelo, Dante and, of course, Matthew d’Ancona, considered among those in the know the greatest Anconan of them all. Just kidding. I’m in Gstaad, and just did three runs before breakfast, because the plebs have arrived for the high season and the slopes are as crowded as the mosques in Tottenham during Ramadan. The trick is to wake up early, put on the boots, ski for about an hour, and then head for home. Easier said than done, needless to say. At my age the hangovers are terrible, but the mountain

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 18 February 2006

Q. Some friends and I have been discussing the vexed question of vegetarians, and opinions are divided as to whether they should announce this (or any other dietary requirements) when an invitation is given, or wait until they arrive. The former suggests that something special needs to be prepared for them, while the latter could cause a last-minute panic for the host/hostess if nothing suitable was to hand. Perhaps any host/hostess would be wise nowadays to check this when issuing the invitation, but please give us your guidance, dear Mary!F.W., Siena, Italy A. I have taken guidance from a much-in-demand vegetarian within my own circle. She is someone who, unusually,

The Spectator

Letters to the Editor | 18 February 2006

A ‘Rhineland moment’? From David Jones OwenSir: You claim you will not publish the Danish cartoons because they are ‘juvenile’ and offensive (Leading article, 11 February). Does that mean that The Spectator will no longer publish silly cartoons with religious content, as it has done so often in the past? Or could it be that it is really the reaction to the offence that is causing you concern? You seem to allude to that when you refer to the risks not only to editorial staff but also to others who would be in the firing line in such circumstances. So there we have it: liberty is precious and must be

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 18 February 2006

Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, began speaking about all sorts of things outside his ministerial responsibility: security, identity cards, patriotism, a proposed Veterans’ Day each 27 June. The phrase ‘dual premiership’ came up in a question put by the Observer to Mr Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary; in answer to which he said, ‘That’s what Tony would always want, what Gordon should do.’ Mr Brown had met something of a reverse when a by-election at Dunfermline and West Fife, the constituency in which he has a house and in which he spent some time campaigning, resulted in a 16 per cent swing from Labour to the Liberal

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 18 February 2006

My husband has discovered ‘organic’ dried apricots, which lack the traffic-light glow of their coloured cousins and the concomitant taste of sulphur. He chews them while watching rugby on telly, then complains that he has lost his appetite for dinner. The apricot seems a fruit straight from the Arabian Nights. One is so used to coming across words that we borrowed from Arabic that there is a tendency to forget that the Arabs borrowed some words from Indo–European languages in the first place. And the apricot first received its name from the Romans. Apricot is related nominally to dementia praecox, for in Latin the apricot was labelled as a fruit

Frank Keating

Des back in res

On the face of it, Manchester United at Liverpool is the irresistible FA Cup tie of the weekend, with needle all the sharper for the rancorous matches the two clubs have played of late. But don’t bank on it, for the contest could be muted this time as each club knows it has far bigger fish to fry next week when the European Champions’ League resumes intensely serious business. In that, Liverpool are defending champions, of course, while United are in fierce need of continental money-spinning progress not only to decorate their season but to relieve some debts of their American owners. Two other British sides in Europe, Arsenal and

Richard Littlejohn

Diary – 18 February 2006

The film-maker Michael Cockerell has a priceless ability to persuade politicians to make fools of themselves. His chosen technique is flattery. Cockerell manages to convince them that his gentle fly-on-the-wall documentaries will reveal the human being behind the public image. Once voters see politicians up close and personal, selflessly burning the midnight oil in the national interest, their natural cynicism will melt like a Mivvi in a Miami heatwave. Cockerell’s latest offering, shown on BBC2 last weekend, centred on Britain’s shambolic six-month presidency of the European Union and the horse-trading over Turkey’s application to join the club. Our chief negotiator was Jack Straw, a man whose tiny feet may stride

Alexander Chancellor

Sweet and sour flavour of the Big Apple

The first thing that came into my mind after reading Gone to New York was a song — ‘Why, oh why, oh why, oh/ Why did I ever leave Ohio? Why did I wander to find what lies yonder/ When life was so cosy at home?’ This splendid, nostalgic song from the 1953 Leonard Bernstein musical Wonderful Town, recently revived on Broadway, has assumed some real-life significance at last. For one can’t help wondering why Ian Frazier, who spent an idyllic youth in the little Midwestern town of Hudson, Ohio, chose to abandon it for ever to become a writer in New York, a city whose night- marish aspects he

Laura Gascoigne

Visual tapas

Last spring, in honour of the reopening of the refurbished York Art Gallery, the statue of local artist William Etty RA outside the entrance — striking a swagger pose to rival Reynolds’s outside the Royal Academy — got a wash and brush-up from the City Council. This spring, it welcomes the public to an ambitious exhibition for a provincial gallery: Spanish Masters, the first Spanish painting survey in Britain since the one at the Academy in 1976. Admittedly, York’s survey is a little smaller. By borrowing ten works from the Bowes Museum — owner of the UK’s biggest collection of Spanish paintings outside London — and adding others from here

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Even Lassie gets to Yorkshire quicker than the Royal Mail these days

Watching the charming remake of Lassie, I realised — stifling a sob — how easy it was to suspend my disbelief that a soulful collie could make a solo journey from the Highlands via Glasgow to a village in Yorkshire, arriving home just in time for Christmas. But I find it much harder to believe that a Christmas card posted in Sloane Street on 21 December could have taken until 8 February — almost seven weeks — to reach me in Yorkshire. Had the card, like Lassie, been impounded by pompous officials en route but bravely outwitted them? Had it tagged along with a good-hearted travelling showman in a caravan?

Aidan Hartley

Hope in hell

Nairobi The finest view of what Kenya’s corrupt political leaders have done to this beautiful nation may be observed from the summit of Africa’s largest rubbish dump, Nairobi’s Dandora dumpsite. A horde of children and women are sifting through the stinking trash, recovering scrap metal to be sold at twopence a kilo. They each make 30p a day. A squealing fat pig with a plastic bag stuck on its head runs in circles among the destitute. Dandora’s garbage spontaneously combusts each day after sunrise, igniting a square-mile fire that throws a column of poisonous smoke across central Nairobi. Slum residents die young. The state hospital has a ward for respiratory

Jaspistos

How to be more British

In Competition No. 2430 you were invited to suggest some items in a government programme of ‘events’ designed to improve our sense of national identity. How British am I? I sometimes wonder. I am sorry for our troops in Iraq but I don’t support them. I am a republican who dislikes pubs, is bored by soccer and doesn’t drink tea or enjoy roast beef. I’ve been investigated by MI6. I fail the sports loyalty test: if the British Lions were trounced by the Solomon Islands, I wouldn’t give a frozen hoot. And yet I regard myself as deeply patriotic. Odd, isn’t it? The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Trial by tabloid

I have no idea whether Sion Jenkins — the former Hastings deputy headmaster who was this week acquitted of murdering his foster daughter after juries in two successive trials failed to reach a verdict — committed the foul deed or not. I wasn’t there. Maybe Jenkins suffered one of the fits of rage which his former wife, Lois, now claims are part of his character and slugged poor Billie-Jo over the head because she had spilled paint on the carpet, then stuffed a piece of black bin-liner up her nose in a deliberate attempt to implicate the mysterious ‘Mr B.’, a lowlifer with a plastic fetish who used to frequent

Saturday

Taki

Civic limits

Gstaad I am personally in touch with British Muslim leaders and appealing to them to spare the life of my friend Claus von B

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 11 February 2006

Q. My new husband has baggage from his previous life in the form of two best friends, a couple he has known for over 20 years. The female member of this couple drives me nuts. My husband, who adores her (and definitely does not fancy her), says she is not trying to wind me up, I am just reading her wrong and she is a lovely person. I can just about bear to have dinner with them occasionally, but now they have invited us to spend a week with them at their incredible house in the sun. It is luxurious there and my husband has been many times and longs