Holy war | The Spectator

The noble work of chairlift diplomacy

In 1956, three British MPs encountered a group of Swiss politicians in the bar of the Hotel Flüela in Davos and after a few drinks challenged them to a ski race. A timed slalom contest took place the following day, with the three-person Swiss team beating the Brits by a combined four seconds. Not willing to take this lying down, the MPs insisted on a rematch the following year and thus was born the Anglo-Swiss Parliamentary Ski Week, which celebrated its 70th anniversary earlier this month. I heard about it from my friend Dan Hannan shortly after I became a peer, and immediately put my name down, imagining it to be a massive freebie. Not so.

Rory Sutherland

The real reason we should be burning our own gas

Regular readers of this column will be familiar with my promoting an idea called a “Paceometer.” Rather than presenting speed in, say, miles per hour (distance/time), it presents speed the other way round, in minutes per ten miles (time/distance). Created by the cognitive scientists Eyal Peer and Eyal Gamliel, the Paceometer shows something which is mathematically trivial but completely nonintuitive. Quite simply, the faster you are going already, the less time you save by going 10mph faster still. Accelerate from 20 to 30mph and you save ten minutes on a ten-mile journey. Accelerate from 70 to 80mph and you save just over a minute.

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: how can I tell a friend she has Mounjaro face?

Q. Like many women of a certain age, I’m “on the pen.” I’ve lost about 20lb on Mounjaro, which I judge to be enough. However, the friend who urged me and many others to try it has lost more than 60lb. Not only does she have the dreaded Mounjaro face – deeply lined – but she wears short, sleeveless dresses that reveal arms and legs that are, bluntly, not those of a 20-year-old. Mary, I have always felt that tight garments are both unflattering and vulgar. I am also anxious because this well-meaning friend has become a subject of private mockery for turning herself from a voluptuous size 18 beauty to a haggard size 10. How can I tactfully suggest that she needs a bit more flesh? – C.P., London NW1 A.

David Whitehouse

A journey to the dark side of the Moon

The climax of the Artemis II mission lasted just a few hours. The capsule, named Integrity, rounded the Moon, the crew becoming the most distant humans in history as they moved from its sunward side into its shadow. The familiar features of the permanently Earth-facing side made way for the more heavily cratered far side. This is not the Moon we know. The far side is different. It has a thicker crust, no major solidified lava plains and is more heavily cratered, like the aftermath of the final war. Before reaching it, the crew saw two Apollo landing sites: Apollo 12 touched down on Oceanus Procellarum (Ocean of Storms), and Apollo 14 landed on the plains of Fra Mauro, the target for the aborted Apollo 13 mission. There have been travelers here before, but not like this.

Dot Wordsworth

Is a ‘link-up’ a modern ‘flash mob?’

The public disturbances in south London, achieved by social media link-ups, have their precedents. “You can imagine what an exhilarating week this has been,” wrote Harold Nicolson in 1945, “the surrounding of Berlin; the link-up with the Russian armies.” Link-up, first recorded from 1945 by the Oxford English Dictionary, has since been applied chiefly to military connection and that of spacecraft. On the same day as the first Clapham disturbance, three “flash mobs” were honestly busy in Slough High Street, doing little dances and holding up placards calling for the place to be named UK Town of Culture 2028. This outbreak belonged to a slightly old-fashioned trend that began in 2003 for crowds suddenly to materialize to do something attention-seeking.

And Finally