Society

I’ve always loved English swimming pools. I can’t help it – I am a pool-fancier. The lumpy feel of the blue lining beneath pale feet; the peculiar, chlorinated smell of the pool hut where you do the knicker trick; the scratchy pool towel, the near-collapsing deckchair by its side; the greying sky overhead. There’s the swimming, too, but that’s not what gets me. No, the English pool is a particular social idea, a knowing nod to vulgarity, a paradis artificiel in our rainy climes. Chips Channon, an early adopter, knew it when he insisted on putting in a pool at Kelvedon in 1937, as did Viscount Astor when he went

I know an astonishing 89-year-old who climbs mountains, uses a chainsaw and has the muscular, vice-like grip of a gym-built thirtysomething. He refuses pills and painkillers and considers it vital to embrace life’s most horrifying experiences. Last week the astonishing 89-year-old tore his Achilles tendon (leaping into a moving car), was driven to A&E and referred for an ultrasound. On the way to the scanning room, helped along by a male nurse, he put his injured leg down by mistake and yelled: ‘FUCK!’ At this, the nurse turned on his heel and walked off, saying: ‘I don’t have to put up with this.’ This is the 89-year-old’s version of events,

‘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

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

‘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

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

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

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.

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