Driving

‘Twenty is plenty’ say the passive-aggressive road signs as you drive very slowly through 20mph zones all over Britain. The slogan is accompanied by a cartoon drawing of a snail. Then you get a frowny-frowny-frowny electronic sign and you slow from 25 to 20 to make it turn into a smiley face. That’s how we’ve been softened up: with a cocktail of the sanctimonious and the kindergarten. As I crawl along the empty dual carriageway of Park Lane late in the evening, where the speed limit has been reduced from its previous 40mph to the now blanket central-London limit of 20, I hiss: ‘No, twenty is not plenty. Twenty is

Jesus wept Sir: Sam Dunning’s brilliant exposure of the corrupting links between Jesus College, Cambridge and the Chinese Communist party (‘Centre of attention’, 5 February) raises the question of how the college can be rescued from its current leaders. Their virtue-signalling gestures (the Benin bronze, the Rustat memorial etc) have already prompted many of us alumni to delete Jesus from our wills. But this association with vile tyranny is altogether more serious. Perhaps an academic boycott might bring the Master and Fellowship to their senses. Certainly something must be done to save this ancient Christian foundation from its present role as an agent and support of manifest evil. Francis Bown

Another minute Addressing COP26 in Glasgow, the Prime Minister claimed it was ‘one minute to midnight’ in the fight against climate change. How many warnings have we had? — ‘We have a small window of time in which we can plant the seeds of change, and that is the next five years’ James Leape, WWF international director-general, 2007 — ‘Our planet has reached a point of crisis and we have only seven years before we lose the levers of control’ Prince Charles, Copenhagen climate summit, 2009 — Our ‘last chance to avert dangerous climate change’ Earth League, 2015 — ‘We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN’

Thornton Wilder remarked that there are individuals who fall in love with an idea long before its appointed rendezvous with history. We hurl ourselves against the indifference of the age. It is now four decades since one of my first columns was published in London’s Evening Standard. In it I proposed an idea of which (if you read on) you’ll hear more. I got no response. It’s nearly 20 years since I wrote essentially the same piece as a whimsical side column for the Times. Labour’s Alistair Darling had called for debate on the idea. It never happened and my column attracted little notice. Fifteen years later, excited by a

There is a Saudi Arabian film that I love. It is called Wadjda and is about a young girl who longs to have her own bike, so that she can play outside and ride wherever and with whomsoever she likes. Yet Riyadh’s restrictive patriarchy frowns upon women having agency over their means of transport, even bicycles, ensuring that they are forever at the mercy of capricious and often irascible male drivers.  I have thought about this film and its message a lot this year, when the many benefits of having our own independent methods of transport, primarily cars, have been amply highlighted. Those of us with four wheels have been

Boris and the butcher’s dog Who first coined the phrase ‘as fit as a butcher’s dog’? It has been traced to Lancashire. It is not the only quality attached to butcher’s dogs, however — such animals were perhaps widely observed as a result of customers having to entertain themselves somehow while the butcher prepared their cuts, and a dog gave them something to watch. A variant has someone as ‘happy as a butcher’s dog’. John Ray, in his collection of English proverbs from 1670, describes the expression ‘as surly as a butcher’s dog’. John Camden Hotten, in his Dictionary of Modern Slang (1859), mentions ‘to lie like a butcher’s dog’

Why is it so insanely difficult to buy a car? And especially if you are a woman? Part of the trouble is that car salesmen are a particularly unreconstructed breed of men who think ‘lady’ customers will be more interested in the size of the vanity mirror than the fuel consumption. But it’s not just that — it’s the fact that they treat the transaction with all the pomp and gravitas of applying for a half-million-pound mortgage. This started back in February when I left a party (remember those?), got into my Volkswagen and set off into St James’s. Somehow I pressed the accelerator instead of the brake and drove

Late one evening in Yangon in Myanmar a few years ago, I noticed a grey Morris Minor van patrolling the streets. It had an old-fashioned double–ended trumpet loudspeaker on its roof blaring out an amplified voice. ‘What’s it saying?’ I asked my guide. ‘It tells the people “It’s late! Stop drinking and go to bed! You have a busy day tomorrow!”’ That’s the spirit. We should get some of that in London. ‘Stop eating! Get on your bike! Pedal faster!’ Why has Covid brought out a rash of virtuous bullying? I have lost count of the number of times that Radio 4 has asserted that this plague needs to create