Society

‘Sorry sir, the rules clearly state that all single men must be accompanied by a woman.’ As the frustrated guest is ushered off the premises, my female companion and I are welcomed into a grand reception room where the organised sex party is being held. A barmaid offers us some complimentary condoms and a handful of Quality Street, along with some fluorescent orange punch served in plastic cups. Should we be engaging in small talk or ripping each other’s clothes off? No one seems to know The organisers of tonight’s paid event claim they cater for the world’s ‘sexual elite’ but there’s something disarmingly ordinary about the snaggle-toothed mid-lifers trooping in behind us – hardly the glamour models I’d been expecting.

Have you been to a ‘divorce party’ yet this season? If you haven’t, not to worry, there’s still time. Divorce season lasts for the whole of January, I’m told, so there’s a couple of weeks left to celebrate. And if perhaps the details of your own nasty separation aren’t yet finalised, or if your lawyer and your ex have between them drained the champagne fund, then why not simply nip into town and crash someone else’s? You’re bound to find one. Perhaps in the future there will be un-wedding lists, allowing guests to repurchase things the ex took Divorce parties have become so popular here in London that several of the savvier venues have started to offer special divorce-party deals, just as they do for weddings: balloons, cakes, music.

‘What’s it to do with me if your boyfriend wants to break up with you? Or if you cried, or had a fight, these are not things that I as a supervisor care about. I’m not your mother. All I care about is results. Our relationship is just employee-employer.’ In a series of videos posted on Douyin (China’s version of TikTok), Chinese tech executive Qu Jing was a little too candid about her management style. Sharply dressed and with hair cut formidably short, she said she expected her staff to be on call 24 hours a day, including at weekends, even at the cost of their personal relationships. If Qu thought these videos would give her a ‘girlboss’ image, she was wrong. They went viral and she became a national hate figure.

Iwas once asked by a colleague to sponsor him on an undertaking designed, he said, to raise money for a very good charitable cause. I can’t remember what the cause was – cancer, maybe, or mental kids – but I do remember the nature of the undertaking. He intended to walk a number of miles down the Great Rift Valley in Kenya. Why not, I suggested, just donate the enormous amount of money such a trek would cost direct to the charity? It would easily outweigh the amount raised, not least because miserable bastards like me would probably decide it was not a charitable act at all but first-world grandstanding with a smug hubris masquerading as kindness.

Home The Hate Crime and Public Order Act came into effect in Scotland, making it a crime to communicate or behave in a manner ‘that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive’, with the intention of stirring up hatred based on age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex. The Scottish government offered online training to 500 Police Scotland ‘Hate Crime Champions’. The author J.K. Rowling named ten people who call themselves women that she called men. Police Scotland said complaints had been received about her, but that but no action would be taken. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, said: ‘We should not be criminalising people saying common sense things about biological sex.

My husband devotes his decreasing hours of daytime wakefulness to looking at Twitter, as he still calls it. He shouted out, ‘Look at this’, just as I was putting the potatoes in the oven to roast. It was a post criticising the ENO for saying 2021 was ‘a year spent slowly returning to normalcy’. The author said, ‘Brits don’t use the word normalcy’. Is that true? In 1899, on leaving Eton at the age of 17, Evelyn Wrench was well on his way to making a fortune from selling picture postcards at tourist spots. Then he overstretched himself and went bust in 1904. Instead he turned his energies to promoting the British Empire. In 1922 he began writing for The Spectator, becoming its editor from 1925.

A brand new ‘robust’ framework was being woven and nailed together, so the Prime Minister announced at the end of last week. It’s barely a year since he presented the UK with a similar kind of structure, which he called the Windsor Framework. I imagined it to resemble in some way a Windsor chair. In 1766, the newspaper Jackson’s Oxford Journal (which still had more than a century of success ahead of it) declared that ‘the Bodleian Library has most confessedly been very much improved by the Introduction of Windsor-Chairs, so admirably calculated for Ornament and Repose’. The Windsor framework didn’t prove quite so reposeful. There is no agreement on what a framework should look like.

I was shocked to read about the behaviour of Joe Biden’s dog, Commander. According to a CNN report based on freedom of information requests, he bit US Secret Service agents on 24 separate occasions between October 2022 and July 2023. There were also numerous other incidents involving the White House staff. These were not playful nips, either. The agents reported being bitten on the wrist, forearm, elbow, waist, chest, thigh and shoulder, with at least two bites requiring stitches. On one occasion, an agent was bitten so badly that tours of the White House had to be suspended for 20 minutes while a janitor mopped up the blood.

The explosion of hatred and extremism prompted by the October 7 massacre was never going to limit itself to the Jewish state. Even as early reports were filtering in, the news that Palestinian terrorists had infiltrated Israel and slaughtered its citizens appeared to kickstart a dynamo of Jew-hatred in the West. Since then, we have had only news reports and anecdotes to go on, but the trends were evident. Now we have the numbers. A report from the Community Security Trust (CST) finds there were more antisemitic incidents in the UK over the past 12 months than in any previous year, with October 7 pinpointed as the most significant factor. The CST recorded 4,103 cases of attacks, threats and abuse directed at British Jews, a 147 per cent increase on the previous year.

In Chekhov’s The Seagull Dr Dorn is asked which is his favourite foreign city. Genoa, he replies: in the evening the streets are full of strolling people and you became part of the crowd, body and soul. ‘You start to think there really might be a universal spirit,’ he says. I remembered Dr Dorn when I was discovering Genoa in October. Then it suddenly came to me that I had been to the city before. Genoa was where my family embarked for the Far East, when I was 18 months old, fleeing the Nazis. I don’t know about the universal spirit, though. I’m reading Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017 by Ian Black. I had reached 1953 when at midnight a text pinged in from an old friend: ‘Who will cross the street when we pass?