Modern manners

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 17 November 2016

From our UK edition

Q. Following a lavish house party I received a flood of effusive thank-you letters, the bulk of which praised the impeccable service, the luxurious treats laid on nightly, and my attentiveness to my guests’ every whim. One letter, however, commenced in a fairly complimentary vein but soon devolved into a letter of complaint about a fellow guest. So vehemently did the author express his antipathy that he covered two sides of paper. I concede that the young woman in question is an acquired taste, but I resent my friends being subject to character assassinations. How can I reprehend the scribe? — Name withheld, London W2 A. Bear in mind that this letter is something of a compliment. The author defies convention to put your welfare above his own.

Ariane Sherine

The perfect mismatch

From our UK edition

“Is she really going out with him?’ asks the old Joe Jackson song about a mixed-attractiveness couple. ‘They say that looks don’t count for much — there goes your proof.’ High society used to abound with couples in which the woman was far more beautiful than the man. But while we can still point to famous aesthetically mismatched partners (pudgy Trump and pulchritudinous Melania anyone?), the mating patterns of the young now mean we are witnessing the death of the mixed-attractiveness couple. This is thanks to the way millennials fall in love — more often than not, online. They flick through potential matches on sites such as Match.com and MySingleFriend with distressing rapidity, discounting anyone they don’t fancy straight away.

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 10 November 2016

From our UK edition

Q. A man I know (but not very well) has invited me and another girl to stay in a villa he’s been loaned. He says the only thing I’ll have to pay for is my flight but I suspect that though we’ll probably have picnics on the beach each day for lunch, we’ll go to expensive restaurants at night and split the bill three ways. I like them both, but they are spoilt while I’m an artist and just can’t spend what they can. It would be so uncool to start saying, ‘But I only had the salad and water and you’ve had the oysters and champagne blah.’ Nor would I want them to subsidise me every night. So I would love to go but how can I get around this bill-splitting problem?

Dot Wordsworth

Hygge

From our UK edition

‘If there’s one thing I can’t stand,’ said my husband, ‘it’s scented candles.’ Now, we have never knowingly harboured a scented candle in the house. He was merely rebelling against the notion of hygge, named by Collins’ dictionaries as one of the words — English words — of 2016. The motive for naming it may stem from the dictionary wars mounted by rival publishers’ marketing departments, but hygge is indeed everywhere, not least bookshops, where the Christmas shelves offer Hygge, The Book of Hygge, The Little Book of Hygge, How to Hygge, Keep Calm and Hygge, The Cosy Hygge Winter Colouring Book. I’ll stop there. What does it mean? ‘Cosiness’.

Cosmo Landesman

Like Uber, but for hippies

From our UK edition

On the same day I put my spare room on Airbnb I also had my first cabshare experience, courtesy of Uber. When I mentioned this to a young friend of mine, he patted me on the back and said, ‘Welcome to the sharing economy!’ The sharing economy is one of those buzz terms that everyone uses these days — but what exactly is it? Apparently, it refers to a whole range of online goods and services that instead of buying and owning, we can borrow, rent or have access to — sometimes free, usually for a price. Likewise, we can be the ones providing these goods or services, and make a profit. Share a taxi ride, borrow a dog for an afternoon or rent out your flat for the weekend and you’re part of the sharing economy.

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 3 November 2016

From our UK edition

It is a great relief that there will be no inquiry into the ‘Battle of Orgreave’ in 1984. The weirdness is that Mrs May’s people ever entertained the thought in the first place. The push for an inquiry is a classic example of the attempt by the aggrieved, usually on the left, to turn history into a trial. If we were to inquire into the miners’ strike, more than 30 years on, it would be far more pertinent — though still a very bad, divisive idea — to establish the full facts about how Arthur Scargill got money from Gaddafi’s Libya and was promised it by the Soviet Union. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse is current proof of how retributive urges make a just process impossible.

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 3 November 2016

From our UK edition

Q. Some elderly friends of mine love to entertain in their London club on their visits, but a problem arises when their London friends want to reciprocate. Recently one of these gave a special dinner for them in her flat, taking enormous trouble with the food. However, the stress of getting there — they are both infirm and had to hire a car with a low chassis and then climb stairs — exhausted them. Restaurants are problematic due to noise and mobility issues. How do we return their hospitality? — E.S., London W11 A. Hotels are always superior to restaurants as hosting venues for the fragile. The solution is to take them to lunch or dinner at the Grosvenor hotel. This establishment has much to recommend it.

Martin Thomas

Vicar, can you spare a dime?

From our UK edition

‘I am a Messianic Jew,’ says the jittery young man at the rectory door. He is pale and drawn, with a close-shaven scalp and several days of bristles on a sharp chin. The bloodshot eyes search for me swimmingly. ‘A Jew, a Messianic Jew,’ he emphasises. I should have a clever rejoinder, but I am assessing if he has a knife so I only manage, ‘Ah yes, and how can I help?’ ‘Is this you?’ is thrown back at me, as he jabs his finger at the screen of his phone and then holds it up to my face like a mirror. I admit my identity (an image from our website), and this makes him confident of success. ‘You must pay my bus fare to-Latvia.’ Such encounters are the commonplace of the daily life of the urban vicar.

James Delingpole

Hell is other people’s dogs

From our UK edition

I’ve now just about reached that delightful stage in life where you’re no longer exposed to the horrors of other people’s children. This is because my friends’ offspring are mostly either safely away at university or virtually invisible in some far-off room staring at a screen, appearing only briefly to grunt some cursory greeting as they collect their food or drink before retiring once more to their virtual teenworld. But just when I thought it was safe to go back into the water, I’ve discovered that it isn’t, actually, because my friends have started to replace their vanishing children with something much, much worse: their stupid bloody annoying dogs. Like children, dogs are the litmus test for all your friends’ worst weaknesses.

Matthew Bell

Take a letter

From our UK edition

Enrolling at Parsons College in New York the other day, a friend was asked to state her name, subject and PGPs. Her what? Her preferred gender pronouns. In other words, did she want to be referred to as ‘she’ and ‘her’, or ‘he’ and ‘him’, or ‘it’, or ‘they’, or none of the above, and was she a Mr, Miss, or Mx? If she wasn’t sure, a support group was on hand to help, called the LGBTQIAGNC. There was no need — she said her name was Clare and ‘she’ would do fine. And the rest of the class? ‘No one stated a PGP other than the obvious,’ she reports, ‘although we do have a large LGBT community.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Diary – 27 October 2016

From our UK edition

I have never met Donald Trump, but I knew his parents. A fact that makes me feel about 100 years old. Which was actually nearer the age Fred and Mary Anne Trump were when, as a teenager, I made my first trip to New York. I remember riding backwards in their limousine on the way to lunch with the extended Trump clan and the lovely Mary Anne apologising that her son Donald would not be joining us. ‘You know about Donald?’ she inquired. I nodded, and recall her adding rather wistfully, ‘He’s always been the outgoing one.’ One of the great pleasures of life, I now realise — and a fine compensation for slowly greying hair — is watching other people navigate the slalom of their careers.

Tanya Gold

No place like Rome

From our UK edition

Roma sells ancient-Roman-style food near Fenchurch Street station at the east end of the City, near Aldgate. It is, therefore, a themed restaurant in a conventional, ebbing financial district, a cursed place in need of Windolene; and this is something to applaud, at least theoretically, because it is ambitious. Who remembers ambition, which is more interesting than greed? The last themed restaurant to open in these parts was Fable, a repulsive fake library and fusion destination for lawyers on Holborn Viaduct which I hope has burnt down, or at least been sued for copyright infringement by-makers of fairy tales everywhere. It was as magical as date rape, and the fairies fled. A Roman-themed restaurant could work here now, if you want to eat metaphor; the parallels are thick and easy.

Emily Hill

‘Hillary Clinton is a disaster!’

From our UK edition

Talking to Camille Paglia is like approaching a machine gun: madness to stick your head up and ask a question, unless you want your brain blown apart by the answer, but a visceral delight to watch as she obliterates every subject in sight. Most of the time she does this for kicks. It’s only on turning to Hillary Clinton that she perpetrates an actual murder: of Clinton II’s most cherished claim, that her becoming 45th president of the United States would represent a feminist triumph. ‘In order to run for president of the United States, you have to spend two or three years of your life out on the road constantly asking for money and most women find that life too harsh, too draining,’ Paglia argues.

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 13 October 2016

From our UK edition

Q. My father has been on the warpath to eradicate Tineola bisselliella, the common clothes moth. He told me to sort through my dressing room and administer sprays and pheromone strips. He’s finally eradicated them, or at least that’s what he thinks. In truth, I never bothered to go through my own clothes back in May. When I went to pull out a tweed jacket yesterday, out came a skeletal shell which had been savaged by moths. There is an infestation, he will be furious, and I have no idea how to get rid of them without him finding out I’ve been providing a sanctuary all summer. — A.J., Taunton, Somerset A. Clear your entire wardrobe into black dustbin sacks and drop them out of your bedroom window.

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: Your problems solved | 6 October 2016

From our UK edition

Q. A family of five from Brazil who are close friends of mine are visiting London next week. They have been kind and generous to me in the past so we arranged to take them to lunch at a Michelin starred restaurant. However since this plan was made, in true Latino fashion they have invited four others to join the party, two of whom I have never met. Mary, how can I now a) change the venue to a less expensive option, and b) ensure they do not stray off the set menu? —Name withheld, Wiltshire A. I know you are well connected, so why not commandeer a friend’s central London premises and hold the luncheon there instead? In this way, even if you have it catered, you can control the prices.

Simon Jenkins

Why cathedrals are soaring

From our UK edition

Something strange is happening in the long decline of Christian Britain. We know that church attendance has plummeted two thirds since the 1960s. Barely half of Britons call themselves Christian and only a tiny group of these go near a church. Just 1.4 per cent regularly worship as Anglicans, and many of those do so for a privileged place in a church school. Yet one corner of the garden is blooming: the 42 cathedrals. At the end of the last century, cathedrals were faring no better than churches, with attendances falling sometimes by 5 per cent a year. With the new century, everything changed. Worship in almost all 42 Anglican cathedrals began to rise, and it is now up by a third in a decade. This was in addition to visits by tourists, who number more than eight million.

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 29 September 2016

From our UK edition

Q. When an invitation to shoot arrives in the autumn, I have a sense of both excitement and dread. The dread is because at the end of the day, metropolitans request that the guns must each tip to the gamekeeper a sum far higher than would be the norm for traditional country folk. Indeed, in a ritual of trumping one another they often double the going rate. The shoot owner rarely intervenes since he is obviously keen for his keeper to receive as much as possible. It leaves someone like me (I am 20 and without a City salary) in an awkward situation. Either I put myself very much out of pocket or I reject the demands and risk seeming tight in front of the rest of the party. Which should I do? — Name and address withheld A.

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 22 September 2016

From our UK edition

Q. How can I tactfully request that well-meaning old friends stop toasting my (new) husband’s hospitality? It seems ungrateful but, during a week’s stay at our new house in France, these much loved friends did it at least once a day, to the point that the other members of the house-party became irritated. I admit they were slightly out of their depth socially and had obviously read some sort of misinformation that this behaviour was required. My husband tells me he likes them but that I shouldn’t ask them again unless they stop the toasting. I hesitate to tell them this as I know they are insecure enough to take umbrage and may refuse to come again if they fear they may make other gaffes. — J d L., Bordeaux A. Why not invent a local superstition about toasting?

Laura Freeman

The Victoria and Albert

From our UK edition

Thomas Hardy, while still married to his first wife Emma, but arranging assignations in London with Florence, his second-wife-to-be, used to ask her to meet him at the Victoria and Albert Museum by the great, towering plaster cast of Trajan’s column. Really, Thomas? Trajan’s column? How obvious can a man be? Knowing what I know about Hardy’s column, and with the added burlesque of the modesty fig leaf that was cast for Michelangelo’s plaster David, I cannot now keep a straight face in the Cast Courts at the V&A and have to take myself off upstairs to look at silver salt-shakers the minute I get the sniggers. What a lot of things the Victorians had.

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Not much to smile about

From our UK edition

CBeebies Land is a small dystopia inside Alton Towers, a theme park where people sometimes get their legs chopped off by a rollercoaster called The Smiler. There is a gothic mansion by Augustus Pugin, the Nietzsche of cushions, which has been allowed to fall into ruin, because it is less important than the Runaway Mine Train and a ‘ride’ covered in plastic frogs. It broods like Manderley; around it, people play with water cannon and eat sugar until their eyes are dead. I was going to suggest that parliament convene at Alton Towers while the Palace of Westminster is repaired, so they could feel the Pugin; but they might be maimed by The Smiler.