Society

Saturday

Frank Keating

The ball’s the thing

Fifa has tossed back the sponsored ball which was expensively designed for June’s World Cup: it was too inclined to wobble in flight. Also last week, the on-going fuss over the size and aerodynamics of the golf ball came to an interim conclusion when both the Royal & Ancient and the US Golf Association admitted secret research into the manufacture of a larger, lighter ball which can be propelled less far. Modern clubs and a stronger generation have been pinging the thing such distances that many of the game’s fabled courses are becoming obsolete. The ball is kernel, core and be-all of so many games that such news items make

Olivia Glazebrook

Diary – 21 January 2006

I have a strange aversion to white goods and have never been able to bring myself to buy a washing machine. Once a week, therefore, I take my clothes off to the washeteria and sit in a sort of trance, watching them blur round. The other day I fell into conversation with the lady who runs the laundrette with her husband. She is small, round, and in her late fifties, I would guess. Her hair is set just so, like Elizabeth Taylor’s, and she wears a pair of spectacles on a chain around her neck. Her husband is a placid man who stares out of the window, as if to

Jeremy Swift

A desert as dangerous as ever

Exploration has come a long way since the Chinese traveller Hsuan Tsang visited India and central Asia in the seventh century AD, returning to warn about biting winds and fierce dragons in the Gobi. His advice for future visitors was don’t wear red garments or carry loud calabashes. ‘The least forgetfulness of these precautions entails certain misfortune.’ Red rags clearly annoyed dragons. Until the early 20th century, exploration was largely driven and funded by missionary zeal, scientific curiosity and the search for natural resources. Early explorers were employed to stake claims to the imagined fabulous cities of Africa or the gold of the Americas. European rulers sent explorer monks to

Allan Mallinson

Good companion in the field

After a year and more of Trafalgar it is perhaps time to turn once again to Waterloo. By comparison with the feast, or glut, of Nelsoniana, there is something of a paucity of safe accounts of 18 June 1815. Besides Andrew Roberts’s ultra-compact Waterloo: Napoleon’s Last Gamble, an impressive overview of both the battle and campaign, there has not been a straightforward narrative in many years. The German historian Peter Hofschröer’s two-volume history (both reviewed in these pages) was an attempt to discredit the Duke of Wellington and claim the battle honours for the German-speaking people, and as such stands as substantial but indigestible, as well as wrong. In truth,

Hugh Cecil

Will Haig end up as a cuddly toy?

If you ask most people in Britain today for their views on the first world war, they tell you that it was a futile holocaust in which our nation’s brave and disillusioned young men were herded into a hell of mud and machine-gun fire by incompetent products of the English public schools. Executions for cowardice were a daily occurrence. Fairly or unfairly, they will cite such various sources as Ben Elton’s Blackadder Goes Forth, Alan Clark’s The Donkeys, Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong, the poems of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen and sundry articles by Max Hastings and others. This is the modern myth. Only a few question it: war buffs obsessed

Jane Rye

The brilliant and the damned

It would be a mistake to assume that this account of the work of one of the 20th century’s most celebrated designers (a familiar name to many for his London Underground and Shell posters of the Twenties and Thirties) is a book to be bought chiefly for its illustrations, splendid though they are. The text is certainly scholarly, and there is talk of printing processes and type-faces, but it’s not just for the specialist. It is free from jargon and wide-ranging in its references to contemporary art and literature as well as to what you might call the cultural aspirations of the time: the anticipation of social revolution after the

Paul Johnson

What I would do if I were a multibillionaire

There is nothing sinful in amassing wealth, provided it is done justly. Andrew Carnegie, in his essay ‘Wealth’, got it right. What is reprehensible is to hang on to it: ‘The man who dies thus rich, dies disgraced.’ By the time he went, in his sleep, in his 84th year, Carnegie had disposed of virtually everything, and he was buried at Sleepy Hollow, Tarrytown, New York, next to Washington Irving. A sizable volume, A Manual of the Public Benefactions of Andrew Carnegie (1919), shows that, by this date, $350,695,693.40 had been spent on a variety of gifts, including 2,811 free libraries and 7,689 church organs. The last item, considering he

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Labour tries its hand at privatisation — and hands John Major’s firm a fast buck

QinetiQ, the business created out of the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, is Labour’s first attempt at full-scale privatisation, and it has deservedly run into heavy flak. The Daily Telegraph is particularly agitated about the fact that private investors cannot apply for shares in next month’s £1.1 billion flotation, which is open only to institutions. Bankers handling the sale say QinetiQ is too complex to explain to ordinary punters without spending unjustifiably large sums on a marketing campaign. Spokesmen for small shareholders declare that every citizen should have the chance to benefit from the sell-off of state assets. The bankers’ attitude is certainly patronising, but the institutions that will take

Mian Ridge

A question of ethnics

Two elderly men and a woman sit on a jagged rock beside a limpid pool of water in the green hills of the Lake District. They are Indians, wearing shalwar-kameezes beneath layers of cardigans, coats and scarves; the men wear white Muslim topi caps. On the next page of Visits to National Parks — a Guide for Ethnic Communities a group of windswept Chinese men and women stand smiling, cameras round their necks, in the Yorkshire Dales. In the Broads National Park, meanwhile, members of a large Afro-Caribbean family laugh as they trip through a field of long golden grass. These pictures were taken on a series of experimental outings

Peter Hitchens

The danger of China

The Chinese word for an empire of prison camps is just as easy to remember and to pronounce as its Russian equivalent. But while most educated people in Britain know what the Gulag was, few have ever heard of the Laogai. I sometimes wonder if we will never pay any attention to such things, anywhere in the world, until it is too late to learn from them. As I recall, it was quite difficult to persuade our cultural establishment to worry about the Gulag when it still existed, because it was so unwilling to believe that the USSR was as wicked and nasty as it was. Now that it has

Aidan Hartley

Ode to a leaf

Laikipia According to an imminent Home Office decree, I am on drugs, I cultivate drugs and I intend to push drugs. I thought Blair’s government was moving to decriminalise narcotics such as marijuana. Instead it wants to burden the police and customs further by banning the vegetable stimulant Catha edulis. Otherwise known as miraa, qat, or khat, this plant is grown in the Horn of Africa and Yemen, and millions chew it. Countless thousands of perfectly respectable immigrants in Britain consume miraa daily. I have always chewed the leaf. It’s my new little cash-crop project on our farm. The privet-like shrubs will grow into trees and they clearly thrive in

Jaspistos

Horatian

In Competition No. 2426 you were invited to supply a poetic invitation from one friend to another to come and stay in the country and enjoy its pleasures. The title was meant to suggest that I was looking for a charming, straight-faced piece such as Horace or our 17th-century poets might have written, but most of you refused to throw away the jester’s cap and bells. ‘Come to Devon soon. But hurry./ Now’s the season we spread slurry,’ warbled Martin Parking, while Mark Ambrose offered rural entertainment of a most unusual sort: ‘There is also bell-ringing if you are still keen./ We ring in the nude: it’s a sight to

Matthew Continetti

Boomtown rats

Washington Observers of American politics would do well to learn how to pronounce the name of a former Republican lobbyist, Jack Abramoff. The first syllable should be enunciated not, as is common, like the stomach muscle, but rather like the nickname of the 16th American president, Honest Abe. Of course, Abramoff was dishonest. And this has landed him — and the party of Lincoln — in a lot of trouble. In early January, in a Washington DC courtroom, Abramoff pleaded guilty to charges of tax evasion, mail fraud and conspiracy. Looking like Al Capone in a black fedora and matching trenchcoat as he left the courthouse, Abramoff travelled to Miami

Leo McKinstry

Hate, hypocrisy and hysteria

When it comes to sex, Britain now seems to be gripped by a dangerous form of schizophrenia. On the one hand, there is mounting panic over the issue of paedophilia, where a media-driven climate of hysteria means that even the mere allegation of child abuse can be enough to destroy careers and wreck lives. Yet, on the other hand, we have a youth culture that is obsessed with sex. In the relentless promotion of adolescent sexual freedom, all moral boundaries have disappeared, pornography has been brought into the mainstream and the law on the age of consent is derided or ignored. It is this grotesque double standard which makes the

Saturday

The Spectator

Letters to the editor | 14 January 2006

Our successful railways From Adrian LyonsSir: Your leading article (7 January) suggested that railway operators are a cartel bent on exploiting their customers, but this is grossly unfair. Fares have risen, but an overall increase of 3 per cent above inflation since 1995 hardly constitutes ‘steeply rising prices’. Furthermore, a tremendous range of fares and journey options is on offer. Your leader quoted one London–Manchester rail fare without giving the bigger picture. This morning I could have bought a return for travel today for less than £60. Nor do I believe that railway operators would consider the industry to be risk-free. All the recent franchise competitions have resulted in the

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 14 January 2006

Q. I belong to a small reading group in the village in which I live and have always enjoyed our meetings. Recently, however, one member of the group took it upon herself to invite a new neighbour to join us. We wanted to be welcoming and so said nothing; unfortunately, however, the newcomer has rather too much to say for herself, none of it worth listening to. She is also entirely lacking in self-awareness and so, despite increasingly obvious hints, does not realise just how much we resent her raucous tones and attention-seeking. She also likes rotten books and drives a Footballers’ Wives’ car. This woman has spoiled the group’s

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 14 January 2006

Mr Charles Kennedy, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, called a press conference and said, ‘Over the past 18 months, I’ve been coming to terms with, and seeking to cope with, a drinking problem…. I’ve not had a drink for the past two months and I don’t intend to in the future.’ He invited rivals to stand against him for the leadership in an election by the party’s 73,000 members. But two days later, after 25 MPs had said they would not serve with him, he resigned, and Sir Menzies Campbell, 64, rapidly put his name forward, to be followed by Mr Mark Oaten, 41, while Mr Simon Hughes, 54,

Frank Keating

Cup tied

After the Lord Mayor’s show…. It is back to the humdrum for football today following last week’s all-embracing showstoppers in the FA Cup. Two or three years ago, we know-alls were writing off the world’s most antique annual tournament (est. 1872) as a geriatric diversion far past its sell-by date. Winning it offered no access to that licence to print money, the European Champions’ League, so once the strutters of Manchester United didn’t even bother entering. The supposed pre-eminence of the Premiership had moved things on, so the very idea of ‘dragon-slaying minnows’ was as preposterous in possibility as it was convoluted in metaphor. But Manchester United are desperate now

Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 14 January 2006

I am not much comforted by those notices in railway stations and shopping centres reading, ‘Caution: slippery when wet.’ A variant is, ‘Slippery in conditions of ice or rain.’ If they can put up expensive signs, why not do something about the slipperiness? I can understand a sign at the back of the church, ‘Ladies: do not leave handbags on the seat while receiving Holy Communion.’ It is no simple matter to catch the thieves that make the warning necessary. At the same time, I have been told that pick-pockets like to hang around signs that warn, ‘Pick-pockets known to operate in this area,’ because when people see the signs

Susan Hill Susan Hill

Diary – 14 January 2006

Sky like the inside of a saucepan and a mean little drizzle stinging your face, garden sunk deep in midwinter gloom, except for the winter-flowering cherry trees with small, sugar-pink blossoms prinking from bare branches to lift the heart. I look for the first snowdrop, then the first aconite, then crocus, but forget about these cherries. The slender twigs last for weeks in a cool room. We have planted 1,000 snowdrop bulbs every autumn since coming to this North Cotswold farmhouse 15 years ago, and now there are great drifts of them. I always pick the first one I find and sniff. It smells very faintly of honey. Talking of