And Finally

Thursday

Brian Morton

Potatoes are one of life’s great simple pleasures

My wife found the list in the back pocket of my gardening trousers. That ought to have been a clue, but she didn’t pick up on it. She marched into the study with an interrogative stride. “Who the hell are Mimi? Orla? Charlotte? Anya? Lady Christl!?” I felt a pang of relief that she hadn’t found my “tasting notes” as well. “Charlotte – firm, puts out well, nice finish.” If my wife had been a gardener or an allotmenteer she would have recognized the names as varieties of spud. Still, I can’t blame her. The faintly porny air does persist, as do some mysteries. Mimi, for instance – a redhead, “small, but plentiful” – disappeared suddenly some years ago and no one knows exactly why.

potatoes
Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Is my dentist profiting from my gold filling?

Q. I went to stay in the new house of a close, but not very close, friend. She put me in a charming room, but it was above a really noisy boiler that kept randomly firing up throughout the night. In the morning, when the husband asked me in front of the breakfast table if I had slept well, I told him about the boiler. I could tell from everyone’s faces that he and the other guests thought I had been rude to mention it. But if I had not said something, the next guest put in that room would be up all night just like me. What else could I have done, Mary? – Name and address withheld A. You could have used the following method. Asked had you slept well, you could have gushed: “Like a top. Such a comfortable room!

Rory Sutherland

Why engineers beat lawyers

I once asked my friend, the engineer Guru Madhavan, why engineering faculties at most universities were outliers in containing more than a small minority of conservatives and political moderates. He explained it in a single sentence: “In engineering, you are peer-reviewed by reality.” ‘Legal’ thinking now precedes ‘engineering’ thinking rather than the other way around In any field where you are judged more by the quality of the outcome than the quality of your argument, there is a limit to the extent to which you can adhere to some all-encompassing ideological world view. If a bridge falls down, it is not a good bridge. The opposite is also true: in real life, if something works, you don’t always need a theory to explain why.

Toby Young

White working-class boys are being left behind in Britain

Late March marked the fifth anniversary of the publication of the report of Lord Sewell’s Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities (CRED). In spite of a suitably diverse group of commissioners (or perhaps because of that), it refused to blame “systemic racism” for the underachievement of certain ethnic minorities in the UK. It didn’t dismiss that hypothesis entirely, but concluded that other factors – class, geography and family background – were more important. This analysis (supported by lots of data) did little to protect the commissioners from the fury of the woke left, who denounced them for ignoring historical injustices.

white british boys

Saturday

Toby Young

Am I an extremist?

The Communities Secretary Steve Reed recently rose in the House of Commons to unveil “Protecting What Matters,” the British government’s new “action plan” to “strengthen social cohesion” and “tackle division.” According to the accompanying press release: “Millions of families, friends and neighbors will feel a stronger sense of community, unity and national pride thanks to renewed efforts to stamp out extremism, hate and division announced today.” I was not among those millions. Conspicuous by omission in the announcement was any mention of Islamist extremism.

extremist

Tuesday

Dot Wordsworth

A meta-analysis of meta

“That’s really meta,” said my husband, attempting to imitate a stoned hippie at a festival, but only achieving his usual character role of a tipsy retired major in a Hampstead saloon bar. I had been trying to pin down what people think they mean by meta. The dominant element is the self-referential, as in a review in the Guardian of James Acaster playing a tribute act to James Acaster and “making meta-merry in a carnival of self-satire.” We must clear the ground with a brief visit to metaphysic. This was first found in a translation made in 1387 by the estimable John Trevisa, the Cornish-born vicar of Berkeley, Gloucestershire, and Fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford.

Steve Morris

My phobia is not to be sneezed at

In January 1894, an assistant of Thomas Edison made a five-second silent film of Fred Ott taking snuff and then sneezing. It was the second ever film to be copyrighted – and it started with a sneeze. The sneeze is a blessing and a curse, associated with both good fortune and ill omen. In ancient Greece it was a prophetic sign from the gods – a sneeze could confirm the gods’ blessing of a decision. By the end of the 6th century, with plague sweeping through Rome, it had become associated with illness and death. Pope Pelagius II died from plague midsneeze. His successor, Gregory the Great, declared by papal decree that “God bless you” was the appropriate response of a Christian when someone sneezes, to keep the wildness and danger at bay.

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: how do I seat lesbians at a dinner party?

Q. I’m getting married next year and, instead of having a wedding list, my boyfriend and I would like to ask for donations toward our honeymoon. We are aiming to travel to South Korea with any proceeds. My future mother-in-law has said it would be very rude to ask people for money, but the problem is that, between us, my boyfriend and I have got everything we need to equip our flat. Any advice, Mary? – S.D., Epsom A. It’s not so much that it would be rude to ask for money but that it would be unproductive. Most wedding guests are psychologically primed to want to play their part in furnishing a happy home for the couple to live in. They therefore enjoy buying, for example, a table lamp and imagining the couple thinking of them each time it is turned on or off.

Rory Sutherland

‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ is genius marketing

I recently delivered a speech to mark the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s second-best book: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The year 1776 was a momentous one for many reasons. It saw the installation of James Watt’s first steam engine, the recognition of Captain Cook by the Royal Society for his work in preventing scurvy and his departure on his final and ultimately fatal voyage. It witnessed the publication of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Common Sense by Thomas Paine.

Tuesday

William Atkinson

Why my mustache had to go

I loved my mustache. Unfortunately, my fondness for it seemed inversely proportionate to its popularity among my peers. After much unsolicited feedback from friends ("You look like a young Peter Mandelson") and online strangers ("You look like a 1970s porn star"), I put a poll on my Instagram asking my followers whether or not I should scrap it. Four-fifths said I should. After a brief consideration of my options (ignore the results? Rerun the vote? My mustache was making me think like a Latin American dictator), I reluctantly shaved. God how I miss it. There is something intoxicating about a mustache – a small hedgerow on his top lip can convince even the dowdiest man that he looks like a Battle of Britain pilot.

Sunday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: how can I stop people pitying me for being made redundant?

Q. I have just got off a nine-hour overnight flight from Miami to Heathrow. I was in premium economy in the middle of the plane, an Airbus A330, sitting in the left aisle seat of a middle row of three. Beside me was another man and on his right, also in an aisle seat, was his wife. He made several trips to the loo during the night, and each time he chose to climb over and wake me up rather than disturbing his wife and using the other aisle. I just didn’t have the nerve to start something up with him about it, but now I wish I had. How could I have dealt with it? – R.H., London SW3 A. You might have switched to woke mode and told a member of the crew that this fellow passenger had rubbed against you inappropriately and you feel violated.

people

Saturday

Rory Sutherland

Does The Spectator hate the Welsh?

This St. David’s Day weekend, I devote this column to a celebration of the world’s most under-appreciated ethnic group. Under-appreciated, certainly, in the pages of The Spectator, whose editorial policy suffers from a Pictish delusion that its readers are eager to hear of the appointment of a new procurator fiscal in Ayrshire, or political divides on Pitlochry council, while having zero interest in the finer country to the west. Sometimes mere exposure to Wales may be enough to inspire greatness, as in the work of Alfred Russel Wallace or Led Zeppelin Now in celebrating Wales, we need some ground rules. Since the Welsh are much more agreeable than other Celtic tribes, they are widely content to have sex with people from other cultures and ethnicities.

welsh

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

‘Both things can be true’: The creep of an annoying cliché

‘It’s lunchtime and it’s raining. Both things can be true at the same time,’ said my husband, putting on the face that makes him look like John Betjeman on a windy day. The use of this gnomic formula has grown so popular that not many minutes go by without encountering it. Danny Fortson, in the Sunday Times, wrote: ‘If the question is “is AI ‘real’ or a bubble?”, the answer is “yes”. Both can be true.’ A leading article in the Times observed that ‘violent crime has dropped to historic lows, yet a rise in antisocial behavior has made many Londoners feel less safe. Both phenomena can be true at the same time.

Toby Young

Why I’m a proud Zionist

The bomb shelter reserved for ‘volunteers’ at Kibbutz Dafna near the town of Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel was definitely substandard. It was damp and smelly, more like a lavatory than a fortified bunker, and not considered fit for the kibbutzniks: a pampered species compared to us. But when the Soviet-built ordnance started raining down on us, it did its job. We emerged, unharmed, the following morning, blinking into the dawn light. The terrorists had not succeeded in hitting the kibbutz with a single Katyusha rocket. No, I’m not embedded with the Israel Defense Forces on the Lebanese border, although the area surrounding Kiryat Shmona was under fire from Hezbollah earlier this week. This was in 1981 and I was just 17.

Sunday

Dot Wordsworth

Me, myself and the i

Misuse of myself "should be a capital offence," suggests Oliver Duff, the editor of the i Paper. "As reflexive pronouns, myself and yourself require a prior subject (I, you)," he says. I applaud the prospect of a general massacre of abusers of the English language, but by Mr. Duff’s criterion, Shakespeare and Richardson, Ruskin and the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson himself should have been slaughtered. Historically, myself began not as a reflexive pronoun but as an emphatic, and as an emphatic it is often still used. Other constructions allow it too. In a letter in 1782, Johnson wrote that "both Williams, and Desmoulins and myself are very sickly." There it is used as part of a compound subject.

myself

Saturday

Stuart Heritage

The horror of the male wig

Horrible injuries are commonplace in boxing but none, surely, has been quite so devastating as that sustained by the heavyweight Jarrell Miller. In the moment it took for an uppercut to land, the Brooklyn boxer’s life changed forever. Miller went from professional athlete to, well, "the man who got his wig punched off." I have rewatched Miller’s hairpiece getting punched off countless times, my hand clamped to my mouth. Why didn’t his team throw in the towel? Why didn’t the referee just stop the fight? Why didn’t Miller, his wig flipped up at 90 degrees like a kitchen trashcan lid, simply step out of the ring, exit the arena and start a new life several thousand miles away under an adopted identity?

wig

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Do only bitches bitch?

‘How many letters?’ asked my husband, as though it were a crossword we were doing together. ‘Five,’ I replied. ‘Begins in b, ends in h.’ The clue, according to the Daily Telegraph, was that the head of Norfolk county council had told opponents not to ‘b---h and moan’. ‘Belch?’ asked my husband optimistically, adding at intervals, in exactly the same hopeful tone: ‘Blush? Birch? Bunch? Bleach?’ ‘Too many letters,’ I replied to the last suggestion. Obviously the intended word was bitch. But I wondered why it had to be blanked out. Is bitch taboo in every sense? Would it be blanked out in the Crufts sense of a female dog? The doublet ‘bitch and moan’ is quite common.

Andrew Watts

What Freud would say about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s teddy bears

It is widely known that when a Duke of York is down, he is down, and the recent hit-piece in Heat – "'Pathetic' Andrew’s tantrums over prized teddy bears" – found a new way of kicking Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Its royal source said that "being forced to move [out of Royal Lodge] has sent him into a full-on meltdown because he keeps telling people the bears won’t cope with the change… as he says, it’s their home too." When it was reported last month that Andrew’s teddy bear collection was being sent to a south London storage facility, I was on the verge of feeling sorry for him; until I realized I was actually feeling sorry for the bears. There are no wonderful games to play in a lock-up. Of course I anthropomorphize teddy bears: that is what they are for.

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

‘Invalid’ has become invalid

“They should ask me. I’m a complete cripple,” said my husband, heaving himself from his chair with great determination to reach the whisky. Britain’s Department for Transport is asking disabled people whether the term invalid carriage in legislation should be changed and what term they might prefer was used instead. “Language has moved on and changed,” the UK government says, since 1970, when the legislation was first drafted. One problem is having to keep changing terminology. No one, even my husband, should be called a cripple. No one should be called handicapped. Now it has been decreed that no one should be called disabled, but rather a person with a disability. These changes are paralleled in the languages across Europe.

invalid

Friday

Christa D’Souza

The politics of long hair

What is the literal cut-off point for women having very long hair (and by “long” I mean where it almost goes into the toilet bowl)? Thirty? Forty? Fifty? Try 65 – the age I turned this year. If this strikes you as grossly inappropriate, in theory I’m with you. The unspoken rule is that the older you get, the shorter your hair should be. Nobody within ten or even 20 years of me has hair as long as mine. What can I say? As with wearing inappropriately colored nail polish, it is just another small act of defiance women d’un certain age can employ to remind this cruel world that we do actually still exist. My hair has been this length for so long it has become a part of my identity: how I see myself in the universe. I am my hair and thus find it hard to imagine life without it.