Interconnect

In Competition No. 2669 you were invited to take one of Shakespeare’s soliloquies and recast it in the style of the author of your choice. This was an exceptionally strong field, with winners enough to fill several columns. Honourable mentions to G.M. Davis, Mary Holtby, Laura Garratt and Margaret Howell, and £30 each to those printed below. Catherine Tufariello bags the extra fiver. Miss Juliet Capulet, you are the sun, With that sheen on your skin and your braids half     undone! I’m a fool on a cliff, and you give me a shove— Is it any surprise that I’ve fallen in love?

The late Alan Watkins, in whose ­memory we enjoyed a commemorative lunch at the Garrick Club the other day, was for a spell the wine correspondent of the Observer. He wrote almost exclusively about French wines. I used to chide him gently, pointing out that there were marvellous wines from the New World. He would shake his head, and say that, yes, some were all very well, even quite good. But you couldn’t drink them every day. And in the case of some, you couldn’t drink more than a single glass at a time. French wines, he implied, had a finesse, a degree of class, a touch of steel. To extrapolate, Aussie wines, for instance, were like a new acquaintance who seems incredibly friendly but quickly becomes wearing.

Natasha Stott Despoja opens up her diary We celebrate my husband Ian’s 45th birthday at our beach kiosk, Joe’s. Our Adelaide western suburbs community rocks up (long after the kiosk has closed) with BYO bottle and plate. We are such a close neighbourhood that we holiday together, babysit each others’ children and mow each others’ lawns. We meet for coffee at Joe’s every weekend. Friends from out of state think it is a Home and Away set, such is the camaraderie and familiarity. Joe knows everyone’s name. We are a mix of different professions, incomes, family status: cops; a judge, council workers; retirees, former and current MPs, a sign-writer, a yoga teacher, home-makers, businesspeople.

Richard Glover opens up his diary I’ve never been considered a manly man, but this week I had my chance. A spider was spotted high up on a wall at work; the office manager was doing the full damsel-in-distress routine. She turned to a younger fellow who will remain nameless — well, OK, it was Robbie Buck — and Buck declared himself unwilling to kill the beast. To the rescue: your correspondent. I grabbed a Tupperware from beneath the sink and clambered perilously onto a window sill. I held the open vessel beneath the spider and flicked downwards with the lid. To my enormous surprise, it worked. The spider found itself imprisoned, to be released later into the shrubbery outside the ABC. I now pause each day at the damsel’s desk. ‘Any problems today?

I’ve always found the 19th-century phrasebook English as She is Spoke irresistibly funny, but I had only ever seen the version without the Portuguese original. I’ve always found the 19th-century phrasebook English as She is Spoke irresistibly funny, but I had only ever seen the version without the Portuguese original. It was first published in 1855 as The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English by Jose da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino. The presumption was that they used a Portuguese-French phrasebook and a French-English dictionary. The book I knew until this week was the ‘fourth edition’ published in 1884 by Field and Tuer at the Leadenhall Presse, as an intentionally funny exercise.

Elliot Wilson in Reykjavik Mike, a commodities trader from Chicago, leans over the table in Reykjavik’s Prikid bar and almost whispers: ‘What’s the deal here? Where are the breadlines?’ Our group looks befuddled. An Icelandic playwright mock-whispers back: ‘What breadlines? Did you expect Reykjavik to be full of bakeries?’ No, retorts Mike, but didn’t Iceland declare bankruptcy a year ago? So why isn’t everyone sleeping on the streets? It’s not an unreasonable question. Iceland’s 300,000 citizens have just struggled through their worst annus horribilis since Ingólfur Arnarson built his homestead in Reykjavik in ad 874.

The pledges many countries will make on greenhouse gas emissions in Copenhagen are pure fantasy, says Bjørn Lomborg. We must pursue other options Judging by the opinion polls, those gathering at the Copenhagen climate change summit have a lot of persuading to do. Just two in five Brits think that global warming is taking place and is man-made. Only one third of Americans think that humans are responsible for climate change. The number of Australians who deem global warming a ‘serious and pressing problem’ has dropped sharply. The urgency which grips politicians around the world seems not to be shared by the general public — to the frustration of people like David Miliband, Britain’s Foreign Secretary.

In Competition No. 2620 you were invited to submit an argument, in verse, for the superiority of one vegetable over another. It was Pablo Neruda’s ‘Ode to the artichoke’ that got me thinking about the pecking order in the vegetable kingdom. Here’s a snippet: ‘The cabbage/ Dedicated itself/ To trying on skirts,/ The oregano/ To perfuming the world,/ And the sweet/ Artichoke/ There in the garden,/ Dressed like a warrior,/ Burnished/ Like a proud/ Pomegranate...’ In a bumper crop of entries Martin Parker impressed, as did Frank Osen, David Mackie, Ray Kelley, Robert Schechter and Juliet Walker. In fact, you were all on sparkling form. But there’s room for only six winners, who are rewarded with £25 each. W.J Webster gets £30.

Big Ben strikes eleven, and time is running out for you to nominate a politician for The Spectator/Threadneedle Readers’ Representative Award. Big Ben strikes eleven, and time is running out for you to nominate a politician for The Spectator/Threadneedle Readers’ Representative Award. We’ve had an enthusiastic response so far, which just goes to show that our parliamentarians can’t be all bad. Look beyond the venal faces that are dominating newspaper coverage at the moment and you’ll find quieter, more hard-working, conscientious sorts. Our job is to celebrate them.