Culture

Is it possible that London commuters are now unable to tell the difference between the cry of God is Great, Allahu Akbar - a sentiment that unfortunately accompanies every IS atrocity - and the actual Bible? It seems like it from the reaction on the Shepperton to Waterloo service at 8.30am yesterday. As one report put it, 'a man with a rucksack began reciting what seemed to be passages from the Old Testament. He apparently declared homosexuality and pre-marital sex to be a sin.' Or as one commuter put it, 'Some nutter starts reciting verses from the Bible… and causes such panic that some people have forced open the doors and jumped onto the tracks. He recited lines about homosexuality and sex outside marriage being a sin. God gave his only son for our sins etc.

When you pick up a packet of meat from the supermarket and it says 'Willow Farms', what is the image you conjure up in your mind? Do you imagine the chickens reared on this farm happily pecking around a thatched cottage, searching for grubs in a field that rolls gently down to a river flanked by weeping willows? Of course you don’t. You’re shopping in Tesco and you’re not that stupid. The country’s biggest retailer (and the UK’s biggest private sector employer) is not buying any of its fresh produce from small-scale farmers, especially not its chickens. Some of you, however, might reasonably expect that Willow Farm exists. That it has a geographical presence -- even if it is on an industrial scale. Even that is a little optimistic.

I got to know Hugh Hefner quite well when I lived in LA in the nineties and was a fairly regular visitor to the Playboy Mansion. As the Times of London's Hollywood Correspondent, I was a regular on the guest list for The Playmate of the Year awards and occasionally was asked over for one of his supper evenings in his private cinema – with drinks served by waitress-style bunnies. During one Playmate of the Year awards in 1992, I wrote a piece for The Spectator about covering the LA riots from his study as the city went up in flames. Hefner's life philosophy was that 'Life is too short to live somebody's else dream'.

Housing – and specifically the dearth of reasonably priced housing – is an issue that crops up again and again in the political conversation. Young people are being priced out of the housing market; even where new housing is being built, very little of it could be classed as ‘affordable’. So today’s news that the average house price is now eight times the average wage will, probably come as little surprise. House prices have been increasing exponentially over the last few decades; in 2000, the average house was 3.96 times the average income, and even since 2007 the average house price has increased by 19%. The fact that it isn’t a surprise doesn’t mean that it isn’t something we should be concerned about, however.

Last December, Lavinia Woodward threw a laptop at her boyfriend and stabbed him in the lower leg with a breadknife, and injured two of his fingers. She then tried to stab herself with the knife before he disarmed her. For unlawful wounding, this medical student at Christchurch Oxford, could have got a three-year prison sentence; instead she got a 10-month sentence suspended for 18 months on Monday. The judge, Ian Pringle, when he first heard the case, observed that a custodial sentence would harm her career. Quite. And he declared, as he handed down the suspended sentence, that there were 'many, many mitigating factors' in the case, and the injuries inflicted were 'relatively minor'.

Do you have to be a boring lefty to enjoy the films of Ken Loach? The reason I ask is, the British Film Institute have just rereleased three of Loach’s finest films on DVD, and though I loved them when they first came out, when I sat down to watch them again, after twenty years, my heart sank. Why? Because nowadays, when people mention Ken Loach, I don’t think of his masterpieces like Kes (one of the greatest British movies ever made) so much as his dreary appearances on political discussion programmes like Question Time. Ken Loach is a socialist filmmaker – whatever that means. If you’re a socialist, maybe that makes his movies even more enjoyable. Who knows? But what if you’re not a socialist, or even particularly left wing?

How much time would you say you spent in your car per week, on average? Of course it’s something that varies hugely from person to person, but I’d put money on the fact that it’s more time than you might think. Recent research shows that the average UK driver spends 8 hours a week in their car, which works out at 18 days per year. That’s just the average, though; in the North East, ten per cent of those questioned said they spent over 20 hours per week in their car, while people in London were most likely to drive for under an hour a week. Naturally, the more time you spend in your car, the more important it is what car you choose. At the same time, if you’re spending more time in your car, this means that you’re also spending more money on fuel.

However stressful and bad things get for a parent of young children, there is always one thought that puts it all in perspective - just wait until they're teenagers and they're calling you up at 3am asking for a lift from a nightclub in New Cross. So reports like this one, showing that one in four adolescent girls suffer from depression, are bound to add to that gnawing feeling of dread. Firstly the caveats - any statistic that claims '1 in such and such' suffers from this, or is a victim of this, should be treated with scepticism. Depression is also an ill-understood term, a medical diagnosis widely applied by non-medical experts. But it's safe to say that a lot of people are unhappy, and in particular a lot of young women.

Funnily enough, you don’t come across too many pieces in the Guardian blaming black people for crime or women for bad driving. The newspaper would perhaps consider itself a pioneer in trying to drive out racial and gender stereotypes from daily life. It seems a different matter, though, when it comes to the inadequacies of white men, or, more specifically, elderly white men, to throw in a bit of ageism as well. An extraordinary piece in today’s Guardian tries to link what it calls 'climate denial' to race, gender and age.

We at The Spectator are delighted to announce that Lionel Shriver is joining us as a columnist. As regular readers will know, she has written a few diaries for us and is one of the very best writers on either side of the Atlantic. She’s a hugely successful novelist but what marks her out as a journalist is her understanding of the currents of life and politics. Her writing has all of the qualities that Spectator readers most admire: originality of thought, elegance of expression, independence of opinion. Her first piece is a brilliant evisceration of the movement against historical statues. All of us in 22 Old Queen Street are thrilled that her new column starts this week: she will alternate with Matthew Parris.

The price of offshore wind power has halved, making those giant inshore turbine arrays we love to hate look competitive with new nuclear power for the first time. The headline number in this story is £57.50, which is the guaranteed electricity price per megawatt hour bid by two windfarm ventures in the government’s latest ‘contracts for difference’ subsidy auction. Both due for first delivery in 2022-23, these projects at Hornsea on the East Yorkshire coast and Moray East off the north of Scotland, are between them theoretically capable of powering 2.4 million homes. Just two years ago, windfarms were bidding up to £120 per megawatt hour in comparable auctions; their slashed pricing today can be set alongside the £92.

I’ve been in Los Angeles for the last week, and it takes a special set of occurrences for someone to return to the UK from LA and think that Britain is getting a bit weird. Yet we appear to have managed it. While I was away there was the row about Jacob Rees-Mogg expressing his adherence to the Catholic church’s views on social issues (over which he has no legislative control). Then there was a row about whether it is bigoted to see any differences between boys and girls, and whether children can or should ‘choose’ which gender they are.

We live in a society with a tendency towards liberal intolerance, in which the fury of the mob turns on anyone who dares hold a different belief to the mainstream particularly if they are from an unpopular group such as conservative Christians. But we also live in a society where some people who hold non-mainstream beliefs don’t feel they really have to think them through. Last week, I wrote about the difference between directing scorn at Jacob Rees-Mogg for holding unpopular beliefs which he is happy to justify, and directing scorn at those who hold unpopular beliefs which they aren’t prepared to debate in public, possibly because those beliefs are in fact half-baked.

We at The Spectator don’t ask for CVs when recruiting interns so we had no idea that our last one of the summer, Katherine Forster, would be a 48-year-old mum-of-three from Yorkshire. Our aptitude test is intended to draw the most promising talent from anywhere. But her writing up her story for the magazine has caused a minor sensation. She has been on the BBC three times and has been the subject of the lead Evening Standard diary story and is interviewed in p23 of today’s Sunday Times (who took the above photo). She’s an inspiring person with a simple question: why, aged 48, shouldn’t she roll the dice again? If we’re all going to work until 70, that’s plenty time to learn a new trade.

Were I to wake up one morning experiencing sudden doubts over my sexuality I don’t think I would turn to Mike Davidson, still less the Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries, which has been accused of offering a 'cure' for homosexuality, or anyone else offering gay cure therapy, gay conversion therapy or whatever else people call it. The very names hint to me of quackery, of people wasting their money on pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo. But then I am inclined to put much psychotherapy into the same category, along with all the self-help books imploring us to create a better self. But does that mean I want to ban any of them above? Not at all. If people want to pay someone to try to change aspects of their personality that is their own free choice.