Friendship

Thursday

Ariane Sherine

Dating stinks

[audioplayer src=”http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/265889180-the-spectator-podcast-the-lying-game-the-art-of-post.mp3″ title=”Ariene Sherine and Cosmo Landesman discuss dating” startat=1244] Listen [/audioplayer] I am crouching with a tall paper bag over my head, with holes cut out for eyes, nose and mouth, while sniffing a stranger’s hairy armpit. All the faces around me are equally obscured by paper bags, and each is inhaling the scent of underarms; we look for all the world like a very niche branch of the Ku Klux Klan. This is not a gathering of white supremacists or strange fetishists, but an ultra–modern speed-dating night called Romancing the Armpit, and I am here to find love. Aged 35, never married, and alone for nearly two years,

Thursday

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 25 February 2016

Q. Former colleagues, with whom I got on very well in the context of the office, are buying a house near my own and say they are depending on me and my husband to introduce them to ‘all’ our friends in this area. This has been giving me nightmares. Like us, our friends down here are busy with jobs and children and would not thank us for foisting on to them new neighbours who would not be on the same wavelength. It’s a sense of humour thing. We are so tired we just want to relax when socialising. But I don’t want to be unneighbourly. How can I tactfully dispel

Thursday

Matthew Parris

When did we become a nation of police informers?

There’s a danger that in what follows your columnist may seem to be recommending an attitude. Please don’t think that. It’s true that I would never shop a friend for drink-driving — but frankly I doubt I’d shop a friend for murder. This column isn’t about what we should do if we know a friend drink-drives — responses will be various and variously arguable — but about shock at my own serious misreading of my countrymen. I was tooling along in our Mini on the first Saturday of the year, with BBC Radio 2 playing. It was Graham Norton’s fizzy and engaging morning show, where a regular feature is his ‘Grill

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Learning to love a man who whistles through his nose

Q. What can you do when disorganised friends say they would love to come to a concert with you but you suspect they won’t get round to buying the tickets? The concert in question, run by the Friends of the Georgian Society of Jamaica, is this Saturday at St James’s, Paddington, with folk songs collected by Dr Olive Lewin and music by Tippett and Ramirez, and I want to plan dinner afterwards. How can I, without seeming like a bully, make them get their acts together and buy tickets before they are sold out? The dynamic of our relationship is that, were I to buy them, they would feel even

Thursday

Jeremy Vine

Jeremy Vine’s diary: Zipcars, hipster milk and the word that means I’m losing an argument

Last Tuesday I tried to sign up to a new life. My wife and I argued, slightly. ‘I don’t think this will work!’ she laughs, and I reply feebly: ‘But babe, it’s the future.’ (My use of the word ‘babe’ is like a label on the conversation — WARNING: HAVING ARGUMENT WHICH I AM ABOUT TO LOSE). She protests that she needs a car for ferrying kids and clearing the allotment and occasional 5.30 a.m. starts at work, and I produce a small piece of plastic and wave it, like Neville Chamberlain. This is my trump card. I have signed up to Zipcar. With this rectangle I can unlock a hire car

Thursday

Lucinda Lambton

A girl, a train and a miniature pistol: how I met the Everly Brothers

I was drifting in and out of sleep last week, listening to the news, when suddenly eight words — at first sounding no different from the general run — slammed into my senses. ‘Phil Everly of the Everly Brothers is dead.’ For the first time I knew how it felt when ‘the earth stood still’. One of the two brightest flames of my youth had been extinguished. I was friends with both Phil and Don Everly for some 45 years and it was, to be sure, a dazzling friendship. Beat this for its beginnings: it was 1960 and we met at midnight, boarding the Flying Scotsman at King’s Cross, surrounded

Thursday

Ben Hamilton

The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer – review

Thick, sentimental and with a narrative bestriding four decades, Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings feels above all like a Victorian novel, one which finds itself as comfortable in our time as it would have been 150 years ago. It’s an American story ruled by classic English themes. Fate, coincidence, class and envy are what bind — and in some cases disperse — the six central characters. It begins in the mid-1970s, in Spirit-in-the-Woods, a summer camp for young people interested in the performing and visual arts. Run by a couple of bohemians, the camp is supposed to be an approximation of utopia, or, as one character remarks, the opposite of Lord

Saturday

Robert Chandler

Ultimate issues

In his preface to this anthology of brief memoirs, Robert Silvers suggests that its ‘invisible, tragic core’ is to be found in an account by Isaiah Berlin of one of his several meetings with Boris Pasternak. Pasternak told Berlin how Stalin had once telephoned him to ask him two questions: had Pasternak been present when Mandelstam read out his notorious ‘Epigram’ about Stalin; and was Mandelstam a ‘master’? Pasternak sidestepped these questions by saying that it was essential that he and Stalin meet: they needed to ‘speak about ultimate issues, about life and death’. This was in 1934, not long before Mandelstam’s first arrest. Over a quarter of these essays,