Modern manners

Thursday

Henry Jeffreys

Downwardly mobile

Last year, I found a pair of trainers in our communal recycling bin: Nike Air Max in black and grey size 10, very smart and hardly worn. I’d been wearing them a week when the teenager who lives in the flat below pointed at them and laughed. He told me that he’d discarded them because they were scuffed. This is where I’ve got to, I thought: wearing trainers that I found in a bin on a council estate. Such foraging isn’t un-usual for us. The sideboard in our kitchen, the bookshelf in the hall and the big mirror in our bedroom were all found on our street. I worry that

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 30 June 2016

Q. The setting was dinner for 16 at one of Europe’s most civilised houses. Sitting on the right of the guest of honour (sixty-something) was a blonde beauty (twenty-something) who stared into social media on her iPhone for the entire first course. The crime was compounded by the light from the iPhone focusing on her grinning face. The conversation was obviously disrupted as she was totally ignoring her neighbour. Believe me, Mary, this girl was brought up to know better. The issue was that our host had turned to his right so couldn’t see what was happening. I felt I should have intervened but could not see how to do

Wednesday

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 22 June 2016

Q. A friend’s daughter is marrying soon. She and her husband-to-be, both art-lovers, have dispensed with a wedding list, instead asking that each of the 200 guests give something they have made. My husband and I are loath to add to the mountain of garbage the young couple will feel honour-bound to find roomspace for. Would it be kinder to come empty-handed? — M.D., Wiltshire A. The request may be less naive than you think. It would be well worth storing 198 pieces of grot if, for example, David Hockney and Bridget Riley were to be among the guests and delivering something handmade. Meanwhile you could compromise by knocking up

Harry Mount

The misery of black tie

Men don’t look good in black tie. They might think that they look like Sean Connery in Dr No, but they end up looking like David Brent at the Wernham-Hogg annual Christmas do. Black tie doesn’t lend parties glamour; it just makes them depressing. The one good thing about black tie is that it is an invariably reliable pointer to a terrible evening. Agonising teenage balls, with adolescents clashing braces in dark corners? Black tie. Boorish sports club dinners at university? Black tie. Prize-giving evenings in cavernous hotel ballrooms? Black tie. Business conventions with an after-dinner speech by Jeffrey Archer? Black tie. The words ‘black tie’ on an invitation hope

Thursday

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 16 June 2016

Q. My daughters and I were recently taking our seats on an aeroplane. From behind us came the recorded refrain ‘If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands’. Several further verses ensued. A toddler was watching something on his dad’s phone: he was too young for earphones. I turned and asked politely for the volume to be reduced or turned off. The dad replied, ‘Well, if you’d rather hear him screaming.’ I simply asked again that the volume be turned down, and it stopped shortly afterwards. No screaming ensued. But might there have been a better rejoinder to the father’s annoying response? — A.C., London A. Assuming a

Anthony Whitehead

An elegy for Oldham

My home town of Oldham is the sort of place people imagine when they think of ‘The North’. It has mill chimneys, redbrick terraced streets and a rain-swept football ground (the third highest in the country) where supporters of the perpetually struggling Oldham Athletic queue for hot Vimto or a bag of black peas. Oldham is now the most deprived town in England, according to the Office for National Statistics. Crime and unemployment are high; investment, wages and prospects generally are pitifully low. Boarded-up shops and dilapidated factories tell a sorry tale of economic woe. It wasn’t always like this. My family’s home, in the leafy suburb of Werneth, was

Thursday

Matthew Bell

The rise of groomzilla

We had been engaged for maybe three weeks before it became apparent I’d be the one throwing hysterical wedding-related hissy fits. In no time, I had turned from a reasonable sort of chap into a wailing, screaming princeling, demanding white-gloved waiters, palm trees and a grand entrance by vintage Rolls-Royce. Like the hideous creature that pops out of John Hurt in Alien, so groomzilla was born. At least, this is according to my soon-to-be wife. My soon-to-be mother-in-law now refers to me as The Dauphin, and there was a tussle over zebras. My point was, why shouldn’t we have a few scattered around the lawn, serenely grazing in the background,

Thursday

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 2 June 2016

Q. We moved recently and new neighbours invited us to join them for dinner at a nearby restaurant. I planned to offer a contribution — perhaps to pay the cost of our meals — but no explicit arrangement was made beforehand. Our friends began by ordering champagne for themselves, while we confined ourselves to glasses of wine. One of them had turbot, which was twice as expensive as any other main course. Without consulting us, they ordered successively two bottles of Chassagne Montrachet. The bill when it came revealed that these had cost £62 each, and the total came to about £350. I produced my card, which was laid beside

Toby Young Toby Young

Call yourself a friend?

Should we be surprised that friendship isn’t always mutual? That is one of the findings of a team of researchers at Tel Aviv University who’ve just published a paper in an academic journal. They asked several hundred students to identify which members of their peer group they considered to be ‘friends’. On average, half the people included in this category by each respondent did not feel the same way about them. According to the researchers, this news would come as a shock to most people. The students in the survey thought that 95 per cent of the people they regarded as ‘friends’ would identify them as ‘friends’ too. But I

Claire Fox

The snowflake factory

Another week, another spate of barmy campus bans and ‘safe space’ shenanigans by a new breed of hyper–sensitive censorious youth. At Oxford University, law students are now officially notified when the content of a lecture might upset them. In Cambridge, there were calls for an Africa-themed end-of-term dinner to be cancelled just in case it caused offence to someone somewhere. It all seems beyond parody. ‘What is wrong with these thin-skinned little emperors?’ we cry. But while we can harrumph and sneer at Generation Snowflake’s antics, we miss a crucial point: we created them. First, it is important to note that young people who cry offence are not feigning hurt

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Great news for fatties: it’s really not your fault

I’ve noticed for some time now that thin people, genuinely slim ones, have a secret loathing of fatties. Kindly though they may otherwise be, the sight of rolls and overhangs, jowls and bulges, makes them angry. One extremely thin woman I know finds it hard, she told me, even to have fat friends. Another shivers with horror if she catches some poor podge in the act of wolfing a treat. It’s not an aesthetic affront, she says, so much as a moral one. Where’s their willpower, where’s their grit? It’s hard to argue with a censorious thinny. We all know, these days, that there’s no excuse for being a lardarse.

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

Joan Collins

Diary – 19 May 2016

Not only are today’s young girls having to work hard on their abs, butts and glutes, now the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Kim Kardashian are instructing the poor lambs in the art of keeping their ‘lady garden’ in mint condition. Subject to the approval of their best mates, apparently, the formerly taboo subject of ‘down south’ is now open for discussion. Some celebs now cultivate, manicure and moisturise the ‘no-fly zone’ with as much effort as they put into their faces. Whatever next? Will Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt suddenly inform all studs how to take care of their gentleman’s gentleman? I’ve been on Twitter for four years now

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 12 May 2016

How do you persuade your pleasant dinner guests to go home when they will stay into the early hours if not evicted? I once fell asleep and awoke at 3 a.m. to find our two friends still here! They had seen me nod off in my chair, but hadn’t thought to leave of their own free will. — C.P., Lawford, Essex Slip out of the room and dial on your landline *55*0303#. Then return. Three minutes later a BT robot will call. Cry: ‘Who on earth could that be ringing in the middle of the night? Oh my goodness it must be an emergency for them to be ringing in the

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Soho in Somerset

It is summer and the listless metropolitan thinks of grass. It cannot afford to stay at Durslade Farmhouse, Somerset, a branch of the Hauser & Wirth art gallery that serves food and plays cow noises in a former barn as authentic country folk rip their eyeballs out. Locals talk about Durslade Farm as a child that died. I think it is a Holocaust memorial for cows, but oblivious. Babington House is the country branch, and it is open to members, their friends, and hotel guests. There is a a spa called the Cowshed that sells ‘Lazy Cow’ and ‘Moody Cow’ beauty products (misogyny masquerading as irony), a restaurant and a

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The internet’s war on free speech

The dream of internet freedom has died. What a dream it was. Twenty years ago, nerdy libertarians hailed the web as the freest public sphere that mankind had ever created. The Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, written in 1996 by John Perry Barlow, warned the ‘governments of the industrial world’, those ‘weary giants of flesh and steel’, that they had ‘no sovereignty where we gather’. The ‘virus of liberty’ was spreading, it said. Now it seems that the virus has been wiped out. We live our online lives in a dystopian nightmare of Twittermobs, ‘safety councils’, official procedures for ‘forgetting’ inconvenient facts, and the arrest of people for being

Stewart Dakers

The death of the funeral

Funerals ain’t what they used to be. Today’s emphasis is more on celebrating a life past than honouring the future of a soul. While I am not averse to a celebratory element, the funeral is morphing into a spiritually weightless bless-fest. This was brought home to me last week at the funeral of Enid, a lady I knew only through our mutual attendance at bingo in the community centre. I was uncomfortable from the moment we gathered outside the church, where my sombre suit set me apart from the Technicolor crowd of family and friends. The atmosphere was more akin to a wedding, even a hen do, than a funeral,

Mark Mason

Guilty displeasures

Strawberries. Ella Fitzgerald. Lying on the beach. They’re three of my ‘guilty displeasures’. You haven’t heard of the guilty displeasure? That’s because the concept hasn’t been invented yet. But it needs to be — and quick. The phrase ‘guilty pleasure’ is widely known. It was coined by the DJ Sean Rowley, who, not content with being the man on the cover of What’s the Story Morning Glory? by Oasis, applied a label to the songs we love despite them being uncool. The idea expanded, and now anything naff can be a guilty pleasure: chocolate spread, knitting, Countdown, you name it. But what about the opposite phenomenon, the supposedly cool things

Thursday

Henry Jeffreys

Beware the Lycra louts

Spring is here and the air is alive with the sound of sweaty manmade materials rubbing together, as middle-aged cyclists fill every road, dressed head to toe in Lycra. They whizz along, jumping red lights, weaving in and out of the path of trucks, screaming at pedestrians and taxi drivers; barely evading death three times a morning. Lycra isn’t just a fabric; it’s a state of mind. At work, these often portly, always angry, red-faced individuals might be mild-mannered middle managers who work in marketing. But in their cycling kit they are superheroes who happen to swear a lot. The double Olympic champion Laura Trott was once asked to help

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Tea and honesty

We recently moved -offices from Canary Wharf to Blackfriars bridge. When you move after a long time in one place, you notice the surprising ways in which your behaviour is subliminally affected by your surroundings. On my second day in the new office, someone came from Victoria to meet me. After about 25 minutes of useful conversation, I thanked them and they left. Something about the encounter seemed strange; I suddenly realised that, back in the old office, I’d never had such brief meetings. Instinctively it felt discourteous to give anyone who had made the longer trip to Canary Wharf any less than 45 minutes of your time. This sense