2681: ‘I see wets…’ – solution
The unclued lights are all types of sweet. The title indicated SWEETIES, an anagram of ‘I SEE WETS’. First prize Will Devison, Shaldon, Devon Runners-up Philip Grindrod, London W4; Emma Corke, Abinger Hammer, Surrey
Society
Thursday
Christmas crossword: Organic Message
Down clues and entries are normal. Across clues have normal definitions but wordplays that omit a single letter from each answer, whose enumeration is given, and whose reduced form must be entered in the grid. Read in clue order, omitted letters spell out an Organic Message. Download a printable version here. Across 1 Mistress fixed this South African town (9) 7 Architect cycles to revive (5) 10 Allure of extremely adept discretion (7) 14 Worry bully, humiliate oneself (3,4) 16 Prepared study (5) 17 Escort gold checker briefly (8) 18 Rebuke solver after identical working (5,2,3) 19 Garnish good oatmeal rolls (9) 21 Somehow rids Co-op of arachnids? (9) 22
Notes from a national treasure
I’ve started rehearsals for the pantomime Beauty and the Beast at Richmond Theatre: two shows a day and just 13 days to learn everything, with songs, tongue-tying shticks, ghouls, hairy beasts and all. It’s like weekly rep with falsies and fart jokes. At the first rehearsal I confess I felt a little out of place in the cast of ridiculously bright-eyed young things with shiny cheeks and Lycra shorts. The director asked us all to introduce ourselves in one sentence. ‘I’m Maureen Lipman,’ I muttered, ‘and I’m a fucking National Treasure.’ The baked potato I eat in a café near the old Battersea Town Hall, now a slightly bedraggled, palazzo-style
The prescient politics of Tintin
Georges Remi, better known as Hergé, the creator of Tintin, was a failed journalist. His first job after leaving school was on a Brussels newspaper, Le Vingtième Siècle, but boringly in the subscriptions department. His mind was set on becoming a top foreign correspondent like some of the leading names of the 1920s. Having failed to join the ranks of renowned reporters, Hergé had created one in Tintin He really had started on the bottom rung, for subscriptions were located in the basement of the newspaper building. At every opportunity he would migrate upstairs, to the busy newsroom and especially to the cuttings library, where he discovered the world at
Don’t tell me to ‘unwind’!
The most irritating word of the year was ‘unwind’. ‘Unwind with one of our artisan cocktails in the curated ambience of…’ and so on. For most of us, the call to ‘unwind’ promotes the very stress it purports to alleviate. Radio 3 is currently the station most fretful about unwinding, beseeching us to ‘ease into your day with welcoming harmonies’ and ‘focus for the morning with stress-busting music’. Its new ‘24/7 stream’ is called ‘Classical Unwind’. Is this a wind-up? If you’re still feeling anxious by the evening, Classic FM offers ‘Calm Classics’ at 10 p.m.: ‘The perfect soothing soundtrack to help you wind down at the end of the day.’
A Spectator Christmas poll: Who is the most overrated painter?
Jonathan Meades This is a crowded field. A few years ago, I was delighted when Tracey Emin walked out of an address I was giving at the Royal Academy. But she’s no painter. The crown, then, has to go to Lucian Freud who was, unquestionably, a painter but a really bad one. Early on in his career were a few works which owed their being to the neue sachlichkeit (although he denied it). Soon however the primacy of ‘the mark’ asserted itself – splodgy, messy, coarse, smeared, oafish, impasted and increasingly auto-plagiaristic. It’s all very well attempting to reduce your models and daughters (often the same) to bulky chunks from
The curious cures of ancient Greek medicine
Ancient Greek thinkers tried to explain every natural phenomenon in human terms, without reference to magic or gods. That was a major intellectual revolution. Greek doctors’ contribution was to invent what has been called ‘rational’ medicine, embedding a principle of the highest importance, however hopeless its premise: which was that the health of the human body depended on the proper mixture inside it of four ‘elements’: earth, air, fire (i.e. heat) and water and their associated properties (heat, cold, wetness, dryness and so on). Further, since dissection was mostly forbidden, they knew little about how the body actually worked (they did not know what the heart was for). But because
I’m a fighter, not a quitter
‘Ring out the old, ring in the new…’ This was the year I discovered that one of my ancestors had been a housemaid deflowered, impregnated and turfed out on to the street by her self-evidently villainous employer – but also that another had been land agent to Lord Tennyson. The perfect incentive for me, then, this festive season, to curl up with ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’ The poem’s tone of plangent melancholy, its regret that the years must slip by, will be more than usually in tune with my mood: for in 2025, a mere five days after new year, I shall be marking my 57th birthday. There is, as Tennyson
The surprising truth about old myths
I visited Mycenae for the first time this autumn. While the ruins of classical Athens can seem almost familiar, the ancient hillfort of a millennia earlier truly feels as though it belongs to the world of gods and heroes, of Homer and the Trojan War. If my imagination hadn’t been destroyed by decades of television, I could almost imagine myself there. One of the curiosities of findings in archaeology and DNA is that many of the old myths appear to be true Walking past ancient burial mounds and gazing at Argos in the near distance, I liked to think that I was in the footsteps of a real Agamemnon –
In defence of faith
For what should we give thanks this Christmas? The faith that sustains millions through life’s challenges and inspires countless acts of compassion every day? The hope that our world may be redeemed by love? The charity that makes us think of the voiceless and the vulnerable who need our love and protection? Faith, hope and charity are virtues at the heart of Christian belief. They are not exclusive to Christianity, of course, but the place of religion in our national life has underpinned the moral reasoning which has upheld our civilisation. The idea that atheists are privyto some higher level of neutrality doesn’t stand up to scrutiny The principle of
A world without Jewish artists
It’s Christmas, and the far left have a gift for us in their stocking: a cultural boycott of Jews. They don’t call it that, of course. Rather, they say it is a boycott of Israel, and that those who support Israel, and people who confuse Israelis with Jews – that is, most people – are anti-Semites. That peace-seeking, leftist Israelis and Jews (good Israelis and Jews) will be those boycotted (I can’t see Itamar Ben-Gvir turning to romance fiction) doesn’t seem to bother them any more than murdering good Israelis and Jews mattered to Hamas on 7 October 2023. It was, rather, the point of it all. Hollywood Jews often
The joy of our village Christmas play
We are just recovering from the village play. This annual Christmas event was taken over last year by our son William, who writes it and acts in it, and his wife Hannah, who directs. Last year, it subverted the genre (as critics like to put it) of ghost stories. This year, it did a similar trick with whodunnits. It was entitled Death on the Dudwell, a reference to the trickle of a tributary which runs beside our fields. The play, set in 1935, opens with the idle would-be heir Arthur Prince (William) reading a contemporaneous Spectator on a sofa. It concerns the murder of his father, the unsavoury Lord Haremere (played
Portrait of the year: Subpostmasters scandal, Rishi in the rain and Syrian rebels topple regime
January After an ITV drama, the government suddenly proposed to do something about the unjust prosecution of sub-postmasters. Junior doctors went on strike. There was a surge in scabies. The King went to hospital and was later found to have cancer. The Princess of Wales was in hospital with what turned out to be cancer. Five migrants died boarding a boat for England off Wimereux. In Beirut, Israel killed the deputy head of Hamas. Israel said that it expected war in Gaza to continue throughout the year. The United States, with token British support, struck sites in Yemen to deter Houthi attacks on shipping. Russia mounted the biggest missile bombardment
The Twelve Hates of Christmas
I have set my husband a Christmas game. He wins a small chocolate sprout each time he spots a word in my list of Twelve Days of Christmas Hates. He does not like chocolate sprouts but Veronica’s children do, so they will be pleased by a goodly heap of them by Boxing Day. 12. Outside Starbucks a sign declared: ‘The holiday icons you’ve been waiting for are back!’ The icons were things like gingerbread latte, indicating that holiday meant ‘Christmas’, an unpleasant usage from America, where holidays are rare and they have invented one called Kwanzaa in case anyone feels left out. It just happens to be at Christmas. Besides
Can you tell a good guy from a bad guy in the Middle East?
Please excuse the tone of jubilation, but I have been dancing around my kitchen for the past couple of days, in a state well beyond elation, at the removal from power of Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime in Syria and its successors who, I am convinced, are a little like our own Liberal Democrats, except with powerful rifles. No matter how deranged the dictator, whoever is trying to oust him will be about ten times worse An expert from a Washington D.C. thinktank told the BBC that some of the chaps who had marched through from Homs to Damascus were ‘moderates’. This was the line taken up, so far as I
The lesser-known anniversaries of 2025
Root cause As in every year since 1947, a spruce tree given by the people of Oslo adorns Trafalgar Square. Yet the tradition actually began in 1942 in the middle of the second world war when a Norwegian commando and resistance fighter, Mons Urangsvag, conducted a raid on the island of Hisoy, off Bergen. He felled and brought back two trees to Britain, one of which was given to the Norwegian king in exile and the other erected in Trafalgar Square. The adventure was said to have been inspired by Ian Fleming during a dinner at the Savoy. Year we go 2025 will be the 50th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher
How Rory Stewart led me astray
I have just returned from a tour of Australia and New Zealand, on whose citizens I inflicted An Evening With Stephen Fry. I first ‘played’ Australia in 1981. The Cambridge Footlights Revue that Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, Tony Slattery, Paul Shearer, Penny Dwyer and I had put on in Edinburgh attracted the attention of an Australian impresario called Michael Edgley. Would we be interested in taking our show around his country? Tony had another year of university to go and in the end Hugh and Emma joined up with the previous year’s Footlighters, Robert Bathurst and Martin Bergman. That summer Ian Botham had sensationally and all but single-handedly wrested the
Wednesday
The Saudi Arabia 2034 World Cup is a new low for Fifa
Saudi Arabia has been confirmed as the host country for the 2034 World Cup tournament. It has been an open secret for some time that the Saudis would be given the nod. In the event, it turned out to be the easiest of contests, with no opponent and no actual vote – and all courtesy of Fifa, the tournament organisers. The Saudis were declared victors by acclamation, a way of doing things that will be met with approval by a country with an absolute monarchy, no political parties and scant regard for basic rights. Fifa, and in particular its president Gianni Infantino, have delivered the greatest sporting prize on a plate
Shame on the men exploiting Lily Phillips
Lily Phillips, who had sex with 101 men in a single day in October, has hit the headlines, but the focus should instead be on the men that exploit her, and the men that queued up to have sex with her. Having appeared in a YouTube film, I Slept With 100 Men in One Day, this young, vulnerable woman is now planning her next endeavour: to have sex with 1,000 men in 24 hours, or one minute 44 seconds per sexual encounter, non-stop for a day. Doubtless, this publicity stunt will increase her already substantial annual earnings. But Phillips will pay a heavy price. When women like Lily talk about
Labour’s planning reforms look like a way of punishing Tory voters
Is the government’s housing policy aimed principally at increasing the stock of homes and making them more affordable or at punishing Tory voters? I ask because of its obsession with Nimbys and the green belt. According to Keir Starmer last week the planning system exerts a ‘chokehold’ over the housing supply. Writing at the weekend Angela Rayner declared: “I won’t cave into the blockers as the last government did”. You have to be blinkered to think that the reason young people find it so hard to get on the housing ladder is mainly down to Nimbys True, Nimbys exist. Green belts help to strangle cities – green wedges would be better,