Society

Saturday

Jaspistos

Nostradamian

In Competition No. 2424 you were invited to write a poem naming in each line a startling event which will occur during each month this year, ending with a four-line glimpse of the more distant future. ‘Fasten your seatbelts’ was the consensus. I shall gag myself to make space for the winners, pausing only to mention Adrian Fry’s prediction (optimistic or pessimistic?) that this month will see the Queen’s limericks published in the Times. The prize-takers, printed below, get £25 each, and W.J. Webster nabs the bonus fiver. Thank you, the person who sent me a Christmas card. Jigsaw puzzles take the world by storm;Forswearing f-words now becomes the norm;Mandarin

Paul Johnson

Three cheers for life and to hell with the pessimists

When I first came to London, half a century ago, the head of the journalistic profession was Arthur Christiansen. ‘Chris’ was much admired in the trade. I considered it a signal honour to have a drink with him in what his employer, Lord Beaverbrook, called ‘El Vino’s Public House’. Beaverbrook made him editor of the Daily Express, and over the quarter-century of his rule there he raised its circulation from 1,700,000 to well over four million. It was the finest popular newspaper in the world. One of Chris’s sayings was, ‘You may speak with the tongues of angels and write with the pen of Shakespeare but you cannot beat news

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Celebrity squares

It is a long, long, time since the Conservative party had the support of a clever, truculent lesbian. In fact, has it ever happened before? Clever, truculent lesbians are usually very left-wing, in my experience. But now one of them has come out, so to speak, for David Cameron — the extremely talented writer Jeanette Winterson. He must be bowled over. I mean, inclusive or what? It’s a long time since British writers were allowed to be Conservative, never mind clever, truculent lesbian British writers. The question, I suppose, is whether the truculent lesbian community has swung decisively to the Right or the Conservative party has made itself more amenable

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 31 December 2005

I shall look upon two vegetables in 2006 very differently from the easy regard in which I held them in 2005. The first is the aubergine. I had assumed that it owed its name to Arabic, which, only a couple of steps removed from English, it does. The Portuguese took the Arabic word al-badindjan and made it beringela (which is also whence brinjal comes, an Indian English name for the vegetable). But the Arabs borrowed the word from Persian, an Indo-European language like our own. In Sanskrit the aubergine was called vatinganah. The compilers of that enjoyable but unreliable dictionary called Hobson-Jobson attribute to the Sanskrit word the meaning ‘the

Frank Keating

Germany calling

No mistaking the centre of sport’s universe in 2006. Found the flags of St George in the loft? Ordered the white van on which to display them? Ingerland! Ingerland! Ingerland! ’Ere-we-go! ’Ere-we-go! ’Ere-we-go! June will be busting out all over with World Cup football. Forty years on, England genuinely fancy their chances of regaining the trophy and the relentless national optimism will have reached bursting point by kick-off night against Paraguay in Frankfurt on 10 June. When the final in Berlin on 9 July does not involve England, the wailing post-mortem grief will fill the second half of the year. England might be fielding its youngest World Cup squad, and

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 31 December 2005

Q. Having been well entertained by the ‘pyjama gaping’ problems and solutions, may I briefly insert my neat response? Gentlemen should obtain comfortably large pairs of Directoire ladies’ knickers in acetate fabric. Discreet shops do have them. Carefully snip into the single thickness hem where elastic is gathered at the knee. Draw out the elastic in a loop and discard it. This smooth garment is thus rendered comfortably discreet and impossible to expose — and, furthermore, it is functionally perfect for nocturnal visits to the bathroom. Acetate is preferable to nylon as the latter, despite anti-static claims, can develop interesting effects.J.B.T., Bournemouth, Dorset A. I publish your letter not because

The Spectator

Letters to the editor | 31 December 2005

Apathy rules Peter Oborne’s article ‘The Triumph of Tradition’ (10 December) is badly mistaken in its electoral analysis. New Labour has never had and cannot rely on the goodwill of over 40 per cent of the electorate. In Blair’s 1997 victory his 13.5 million votes comprised 30.8 per cent of the electorate. This year he was down to 21.5 per cent. It was not always like that for Labour. Clement Attlee scored 40 per cent in 1951 — and was defeated by Churchill. Nor is it true that the ‘Lib Dems were the only real movers’. Nor did they ‘steadily gain ground’ at the expense of the Conservatives and ‘towards

Peter Jones

Ancient & modern – 31 December 2005

The British are about to replace the Americans in Afghanistan. Let us hope they take a good life of Alexander with them — Arrian or Quintus Curtius Rufus will do — because conditions for military campaigns have not changed much since then. When Alexander finally defeated Darius III and his Persian army in 329 bc — the purpose of his expedition — he pushed into Bactria/Sogdia, as it was then, to pursue the leader of the Persian resistance, Bessus. Bessus was duly turned in by his treacherous Bactrian lieutenant Spitamenes. But Alexander needed to feed his army and secure his rear, and did so by plundering widely and garrisoning the

Hugh Massingberd

Diary – 31 December 2005

The other day in Whiteley’s shopping centre in Queensway — somewhere I usually try to avoid — I suddenly found myself engulfed by a gang of over-exuberant and oddly menacing adolescents. ‘Hey, you!’ their leader, a well-fed girl of some 12 summers in expensive sportswear, addressed me. ‘I like your umbrella — where d’you get it?’ My mumbled response to the effect that the lurid lime golfing number happened to be a present from my bookmaker failed to ease the strange tension. ‘Give it to me,’ she commanded. ‘Show some respect.’ Her male minions took up the Blairish chant: ‘Respect, respect, respect!’ I edged my way towards the exit and

Andrew Lambirth

A look ahead

Even though museums have got themselves into the very strange position of no longer simply purveying culture, but competing with their fellow public institutions for box-office profits to fund increasingly elaborate bureaucracies, 2006 still looks set to furnish us with a richness and variety of visual fare. The National Gallery, disappointed in a poor turnout for Rubens, will hope to recoup on a trio of fine exhibitions, ending with the grand slam of Vel

Jaspistos

Are we down-hearted?

In Competition No. 2423 you were invited to write a poem in the voice of a fed-up soldier, of any country or date, far from home. I was apprehensive that most of you would use this invitation to vent your feelings about the unhappy war in Iraq, but I was pleasantly surprised by the variety in time and space of your fractious servicemen (there was only one servicewoman) — a tribesman from the steppes bored in Rome, a redcoat on St Helena after Napoleon’s death, a conscript from Clerkenwell stuck in Wales during Edward I’s campaign, a French quartermaster in Egypt with Napoleon, a German soldier not enjoying Stalingrad…. The

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Should I have urged my rich friend to try to pay a ransom for poor Margaret Hassan?

Do you not find that when a wrong has been done, time may elapse before the wrongfulness pricks through into our consciences? I mean not only wrongs we do ourselves, or which are done to us, but also the sense we may have that a small or large injustice has been done in the world, and nobody has acknowledged this or tried to put it right. In the dead of night, goaded into wakefulness by something sharp the unconscious mind has sifted from the rubble and will not let drop, we run again through events under which we, or those we know, or our politicians, have supposedly ‘drawn a line’

The Spectator

Portrait of 2006

JANUARY In Iraq Sunni insurgents targeted the politically dominant Shiites; Iranians were accused of supporting Shiite militants. Austria, taking up the EU presidency, accused Britain of being the ‘Sick Man of Europe’. Labour floundered over its Education Bill. FEBRUARY Dr Rowan Williams announced his retirement to a monastery in Anatolia after the greater part of the Anglican Communion, led by Nigeria, broke away from Canterbury over the consecration of a lesbian bishop in Canada. Sir David Frost was prosecuted under anti-terrorist legislation for his involvement with the new al-Jazeera international television channel. MARCH Israeli forces made retaliatory air strikes on Gaza following a wave of suicide bombings during the elections

Lucy Beresford

Emotional incontinence

This year will be remembered as the one in which the psychopathology of Britain slipped down the toilet. Just last month the imagination of the nation’s television viewers was captured — some would say hijacked — first by the comedy show Little Britain, with a series of sketches about a geriatric woman who is oblivious of her own urinary incontinence, and, secondly, by the sight (courtesy of infrared cameras) of Carol Thatcher taking a night-time pee beside her camp bed on I’m a Celebrity — Get Me Out of Here! And there’s no point in telling yourself that I’m the sad one for watching these programmes, or that they are

Saturday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary… | 17 December 2005

For her traditional Christmas treat Mary has invited some of her favourite figures in the public eye to submit personal problems for her attention. From Robert HiscoxQ. Christmas time brings the threat of having to dance at a staff party. As a chairman in my sixties I wonder how to maintain any dignity when dragged on to the dance floor and faced by a gyrating young female. I believe actually holding a lady in your arms while dancing is as out of date as the Charleston, and would be highly dangerous in today’s threatening climate of employment litigation. Refusing to dance at all would be deeply stand-offish. Is there an

Taki

Clash of values

Liberal columnists, especially in London, New York and Los Angeles, can’t quite grasp why some Christians get upset about people saying ‘Happy Holidays’ instead of ‘Happy Christmas’. ‘People who use the word holiday now face angry Christian protests,’ they assert. Well, if they have faced such protests, it’s news to me. Most Christians I know simply snicker when the C-word is avoided in order not to cause offence. What reasonable people get upset about is being forbidden to say Happy Christmas themselves, or call a Christmas tree a Christmas tree. Actually, I don’t think I know of a single Christian who rubs his Christianity into non-Christians by wishing a Happy

Jeremy Clarke

Guiding light

A special-needs bloke comes to our gym sometimes. He can’t speak, and he’s deaf, I think, and he doesn’t walk too well, but the disciplined intensity of his work-out is an example to us all. A carer follows him around to advise, guide and watch over him; an elderly man with a neatly trimmed beard and moustache. His respectfulness towards his charge borders on the abject. The special-needs bloke obeys his carer, allowing himself to be guided from machine to machine, but shows him no affection nor does he look him in the face. I’ve yet to see the special-needs bloke do anything controversial. Always well turned out in designer

Simon Courtauld

Carpe piscem

Where are the pike, the char, the carp of yesteryear? Still in English lakes and rivers, but they are not to be found in the English kitchen. Pike, then called luce, are mentioned in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and they were on the menu at King Henry IV’s coronation banquet at the end of the 14th century; but today the cooking of them is left to the French. Char live in the Lake District: salted char was sent down to Hampton Court for King Henry VIII’s pleasure, and potted char was popular in the 18th century. It was good to see Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall cooking them on television the other day, on

Alan Judd

Confessions of an anorak

Am I an anorak? An uncomfortable thought, like discovering that some feature you had never noticed in yourself — your Adam’s apple, perhaps, or your ears — is what people always remember about you. I wore an anorak, long ago during my teenage motor-scooter period. That comprised Lambretta 1, which cost £8, was a slow starter and died of engine seizure, but not before it had caused my motorcycle test to be abandoned by an impatient examiner known locally as Failer Fowler. (That in turn provoked me to remove my L-plates and ride illegally for the rest of my brief two-wheeled career.) Lambretta 2 cost £3 and ran faultlessly until

Barry Humphries

Diary – 17 December 2005

If I die I hope it won’t be in Melbourne. The chief obituarist of a Melbourne morning paper takes a dim view of me, and since the London Daily Telegraph pioneered the custom of pissing on the recently deceased, the Melbourne obituarist is pretty likely to do the same to me. A couple of years ago he wrote an autobiography in which he impugned my patriotism in a rather nasty way. It’s quite a fat autobiography, as are usually the memoirs of uninteresting people — the women who talk longest on the telephone are invariably women who have nothing to talk about. Anyway, I suppose this little prick’s obituary is