And Finally

‘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.

“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.

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.

“Why doesn’t anyone ever do what you ask them to?” inquired my husband, who is something of an expert on the question, I should have thought. He was referring specifically to a plea I made three years ago to people I’ve never met to stop sending emails that begin: “I am reaching out to you.” But it has grown worse. Using the expression makes it sound as though the emailer is deranged. Reach out has for more than a century meant “to offer sympathy, support or assistance” to people. Correlatively it can mean to seek those things. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has acquired the habit of issuing a Christmas message. For 2025 he said: “At this time of the year, which celebrates love and abundance, loss or hardship can feel even more acute. Reach out.

As part of the planning for a retreat I’m organizing in May, I recently visited Scotland. I spent time near Edinburgh to learn more about the work of designer and weaver Araminta Campbell, whose approach reflects the connection between nature and clothing. Her atelier, set within a fairytale castle outside the city, is renowned for its team of skilled artisan handweavers who create bespoke textile designs. It is a place I have long admired, a magical world of tartan and tweed. As a model, you become attuned to the clothes you wear – how they shape your image and how others perceive you. But it took time for me to realize that the clothes themselves also shape the world. Eleven years ago, I became interested in the environment.

For the first 50 years of the corked bottle, there was no easy way to get into it. The combination of cork and a strong glass bottle came together around 1630, but the first mention of a device to open the bloody thing wasn’t until 1681. Cavalier get-togethers must have resembled the teenage parties I attended, with everyone desperately trying to open bottles using keys, pens, knives etc. Or using that technique where you bang the bottle against a wall with the heel of a shoe. Halcyon days. More likely the Cavaliers would have just taken the top off cleanly with a swift blow from a saber. Early devices for extracting corks were called “bottle screws.” According to wine writer Hugh Johnson, the word “corkscrew” was first used in 1720.

The late Pope Francis hated gossip. In his Christmas message to his Vatican advisors last year, he warned that it is “an evil that destroys social life.” It wasn’t the first time he’d attacked rumor-spreading. He once compared gossips to terrorists because “he or she throws a bomb and leaves.” His condemnations are of particular concern for me because I was recently accused of being a “notorious gossip.” I vehemently reject the charge, but if it were true, at least I’d be following a proud journalistic tradition. In fact, if it were not for gossip, this very magazine might not exist. The original Spectator’s founders, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, filled the 1711 incarnation by hovering around coffee-houses, picking up gossip for stories.