Features

Saturday

Michael Henderson

Life of pie

‘To tell the truth,’ says Peter Myers, his Cumbrian baritone untouched by four decades of life in Manhattan, ‘I’m glad it’s all over.’ By ‘it’ he means Christmas and new year, when Myers, the sausage-knotter and purveyor of pies to New Yorkers, is at his busiest. ‘It was bedlam. They began to queue up outside the shop ten days before Christmas for their mince pies. We were making thousands a day. Bedlam, I tell you’. Myers of Keswick, the shop on Hudson Street that bears the name of his birthplace, is not your average butcher’s.

Mike Paterniti

The hero of Nanjing

The Nanjing Yangtze river bridge is four lanes wide and four miles long, a monument to Maoist endeavour clogged with the traffic of China’s economic boom. And every weekend, at one of its two towers, you can see Chen Si. He is 42 years old, with spiky black hair, a rasping cough from cheap Nanjing-brand cigarettes, and a baseball cap bearing the slogan ‘THEY SPY ON YOU’. Around his neck is an oversized pair of binoculars, through which he watches the crowds unceasingly. In the past six years, according to his blog, he has saved 174 people from suicide. Mr Chen used to be a functionary at a transport company.

Bryan Forbes

A rare, unvarnished honesty: Pete Postlethwaite remembered

Pete Postlethwaite, with whom, sadly, I never worked, belonged to that group of journeymen actors who command the respect and admiration of their peers but are denied the wider honours until death claims them. How amazed he would have been by the enormous photograph that graced the front-pages of the newspapers — his unique, craggy face that had never known botox or cosmetic surgery, displaying more character than many of his more vaunted fellow thespians. It is sometimes forgotten that an actor’s career is more often than not sculptured in snow and disappears so quickly when he or she is removed from public view, for it is an inescapable fact that for the majority who choose the profession there is little public recognition.

Patrick Allitt

At war with the Greeks

America’s love of the ancient republics has had military consequences in the present If you’re 40 or older and I ask you to think back to the worst moments of your life as a schoolchild, memory will probably take you straight to Latin class. Remember how it was taught by a wizened old beak in a faded gown, who favoured merciless drilling, responded to grammatical errors with a rap of the cane, and squeezed the fun out of even the most heroic Roman tales? Latin has largely disappeared from English schools and I dare say that 19 out of every 20 among you don’t miss it. By contrast, it is thriving on the other side of the Atlantic. Eager young teachers offer Greek and Latin classes in a growing number of schools, public and private.

Saturday

Michael Deacon

Lords of laughter

What do the following comedians have in common? Morecambe and Wise, Ronnie Barker, Frankie Howerd, Bob Monkhouse, Peter Sellers. They’re all dead, yes. But something else. None of them was knighted. Instead they were all made OBE, an honour Michael Winner once charmingly described as ‘what you get if you clean the toilets well at King’s Cross station’. Still, they did better than Les Dawson, Tony Hancock, Tommy Cooper and Peter Cook. Those four got nothing. I find this curious. In most cases, at least. Hancock died a bit too young (suicide at 44), and accepting anything from the honours system would have turned Cook from satirist to court jester, in two ways a fool. But the rest?

Mary Wakefield

Egyptian Notebook

The adventures of a wrecked ship can be pieced together from entries in its log book. The last moments of some doomed flight can be reconstructed by consulting its black box. If Dominic and I come a cropper here on the hard shoulder of the Cairo–Alexandria desert road, our iPhones will tell our story in Google searches: 23:30: ‘how do you get out of Cairo airport?’ 00:07: ‘why don’t Egypt drivers use headlights?’ 03:00: ‘Toyota Corolla won’t start’ 03:30: ‘How to deactivate Toyota Corolla immobiliser?’ 04:00: ‘Hertz Cairo number’ 05:00: ‘Hertz worldwide emergency number’ 05:14: ‘What time sun rise in Egypt?

Johan Norberg

The great debt bubble of 2011

Have our governments averted a financial disaster – or paved the way for one? ‘The worst of the storm has passed,’ declared Barack Obama at the start of last year, seeking to calm the fearful. For his part, Gordon Brown assured Britain that talk of tough years ahead was ‘simply not true’. Both men spoke of their resolve to cure their economies, and did not seem to mind using the same techniques that created the old bubble. Bank bailouts and massive stimulus efforts have indeed encouraged us to borrow, spend and speculate again. Bank interest rates have dropped to historic lows, bringing cheap credit to the housing market and the high street. The mood this year is one of cautious optimism. It would all be reassuring, were it not so eerily familiar.

Theo Hobson

‘Jesus hung out with freaks’

Why does the American religious right get all the attention: is there not also a religious left? Why is it always on the back foot? Why, though such a basic part of the nation’s history, does it seem un-American? It suffers from the same problem as its political cousin: most Americans think of the left as something for metropolitan elites or angry black radicals. (President Obama is associated with both.) But liberal Christian voices are breaking out. A few young preachers have edged away from conservative evangelicalism, but their criticism of the dominant religious culture tends to remain cautious (why lose the chance of a massive congregation?). A notable exception is Jay Bakker, 35-year-old pastor of a church for the young hipsters of Brooklyn, called Revolution NYC.

Saturday

Andrew Sullivan

Taking the world as it is

Michael Oakeshott’s philosophy fits no ideological or party label – but there is no better case for conservatism I met him only once. He lived at the end of his days in a tiny slate cottage near Langton Matravers on the Dorset coast. On a damp November day, he came to greet me at the gate to his small garden, made me a small lunch of cold meat, and then sat me down in front of a coal fire to talk. I was in awe; he seemed thrilled to have a Harvard doctoral student examining every word he had ever published. And at the time, in November 1989, his delight was understandable. Mine was only the second doctoral dissertation written about him, after he had spent six decades producing some of the finest philosophical writing of the 20th century.

Neil Tennant

Winter in Poland

Wrocław in Poland was Breslau in Germany until 1945. We’ve travelled here to record the orchestral parts of the music we’ve written for a ballet, The Most Incredible Thing, which opens at Sadler’s Wells in March. It takes me several days to work out how to pronounce the Polish name of the city. Some foreigners call it ‘Vratslav’ but apparently the correct pronunciation is ‘Vrotswaff’ (I think). Actually no one seems to mind. We’re recording in the old Große Saal des Polnischen Rundfunks built in Breslau in the Nazi era as a concert hall for radio broadcasts.

The Spectator

Christmas Survey: What will happen in 2011?

Some notable friends of ‘The Spectator’ share their hopes, fears and predictions for the year ahead Dame Eileen Atkins I hope we start getting education right. Michael Gove is correct when he says we should go back to an emphasis on five basic subjects: English, maths, geography, history and a foreign language. These should not be purely the province of the naturally academic. I grew up on a council estate. It was not expected that anyone from my area would go to university. My honorary degree was one of my proudest moments. There is no use making education easy and then celebrating success if young people leave school unable to write or add up.

Joan Collins

Christmas on stage

Thanksgiving is always a huge deal in the US and this year was no different, except for the fact that the media were full of dire warnings about the inconveniences travellers would face at the airports due to the new regulations imposed by the Transportation Security Administration in the US, and the new body-scanning techniques and the euphemistically named ‘pat-down’, which is not so much a pat-down as a feel-up.

Bruce Anderson

Confession of an atheist

As soon as I moved beyond childhood pieties, I became a bigoted atheist. Like Richard Dawkins, I found it personally offensive that anyone could be so naive and stupid as to worship God. Over the years, that has softened. Although I cannot believe, I no longer think it absurd to do so. One has to respect Christopher Hitchens: no one has been so atheistically defiant in the face of death since Don Giovanni on his way to hell. Even so, the stridency of Messrs Dawkins and Hitchens reminds me of my own jeering adolescence. It is worth remembering that a substantial majority of the cleverest people who ever lived have believed in a God. Anyone who thinks that there is progress in ideas is invited to justify that position, with reference to the 20th century.

Paul Johnson

The plum pudding trick

Which was the best Christmas party ever? Perhaps it took place on Boxing Day, Tuesday 26 December 1843, at the home of Nina Macready, wife of the famous actor. It was her birthday, but her husband was away on tour, and to cheer herself up she decided to give a children’s party, but invited a lot of grown-ups too. One of them was Jane Carlyle. Her grumpy husband, battling with his book on Cromwell, refused to go. She was feeling dyspeptic, having been obliged, for the first time, to stuff a turkey. Feeling horrible on the morning of Boxing Day, Jane was about to send an apology when a note arrived from a distraught Mrs Macready, imploring her not to ‘disappoint my poor little daughter’.

Julian Barnes

Christmas Short Story: Carcassonne

In the summer of 1839, a man puts a telescope to his eye and inspects the Brazilian coastal town of Laguna. He is a foreign guerrilla leader whose recent success has brought the surrender of the imperial fleet. The liberator is on board its captured flagship, a seven-gun topsail schooner called the Itaparica, now at anchor in the lagoon from which the town gets its name. The telescope offers a view of a hilly quarter known as the Barra, containing a few simple but picturesque buildings. Outside one of them sits a woman. At the sight of her, the man, as he later put it, ‘forthwith gave orders for the boat to be got out, as I wished to go ashore’.

Fraser Nelson

Access all areas | 18 December 2010

It is an exciting day for Liberty Osborne, the Chancellor’s daughter, to join him at work. The windows at HM Treasury are boarded up, workmen line the road replacing the bombproof (but not student-proof) glass. Graffiti defaces the walls, but although several politicians are named and shamed in spray paint (‘Why did Nick Clegg cross the road? Because he’d promised not to’) there is nothing unkind about the author of the cuts: George Osborne himself. When we meet the Chancellor at 10.30 a.m. in 11 Downing St, he does not look the slightest bit like a man under siege. Seven-year-old Liberty bounds out of his study, waving at us cheerfully. The Chancellor is no less upbeat.

Oliver Rackham

Leaves on the line

What is happening to trees in Britain? Horse chestnuts now turn brown in July. A microscopic caterpillar eats out the green insides of the leaves; only the outer skins remain. Horse chestnuts also weep dried blood from their bark, and sometimes the huge trees spectacularly die. Alders have been weeping bloody tears and dying. Newspapers warn of sudden oak death and acute oak decline. The Forestry Commission has stopped planting Corsican pine because of red-band needle blight. The problem is globalisation of pests and diseases. Diseases which for millions of years evolved to come to terms with their local hosts are introduced to other countries and find new host trees that have not adapted to living with them. The horse chestnut itself symbolises globalisation.

Michael Heath

Memories of wartime

I was born in London in 1935. By the summer of 1939, it was considered wise to get children out of the city before the war started. I wasn’t separated from my sobbing mother at Victoria station and put on a train holding a gas mask. Instead, my mother and I went down to Devon to stay with my grandmother, who had rented a house in the village of Torcross. In London, the war did not stop for Christmas. Toy shops before the war had sold small forts modelled on the Maginot and Siegfried lines. Now boys in the city wanted toy planes like the ones they saw flying overhead. But in Devon in 1940 things were still peaceful and we had a big Christmas lunch with all the trimmings. We were joined by an uncle whose job it was to pull bodies out of bombed buildings in London.

Rod Liddle

I told you so

It’s jolly nice to be proved right about everything The most important, and comforting, thing to emerge from all that Wiki-Leaks business was that, by and large, we were right. All the things we suspected, or knew either instinctively or through common sense, were proved to be correct. Prince Andrew — arrogant, rude and with the IQ of a corgi? Yep. The oil company Shell effectively runs Nigeria? Sure thing. Gulf state Arab leaders are a tad duplicitous? No kidding, bub. It is always uplifting to discover that you were right all along, and that, in secret at least, the establishment agrees with you.

Quentin Letts

O come all ye faithless

The Spectator understands the work pressure on vicars at this time of year. We know it is tempting simply to read out the diocesan Christmastide message. So here, for all clerks in holy orders, we offer this cut-out-and-preach sermon for use at carol services: May I speak in the Name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost — though for many of you it might as well be in the name of the heathen god Thor. Interesting chap, Thor. Red-headed. Liked to hurl bolts of lightning and cause mayhem. A Norse Simon Heffer. I come not in peace. I will not wring my hands and speak to you in the voice of a primary school teacher. I am not going to employ some drippy parable while smiling at you like a flatulent goat. The Britain of Jeremy Paxman demands something ruder.