Notebook
There has been yet another report on the Problem of 'baby battering', with of course the recommendation for still more social Workers to solve this problem. If 'baby battering is actually on the increase this is almost certainly because so many families have been wrenched out of their neighbourly old communities and shoved into council flats where they have no friends, relations or even good neighbours to tick them off if they mistreat their children. 'aMily doctors never now call at homes, at least not in the part of London where I live. The Police are too few and overworked to Intervene in domestic disputes as they used to do. In England, as opposed to Ireland, the priests are unable to intervene with cruel parents.
I.t Was a good joke by Quartet, the pub a good joke by Quartet, the pub I2shers, to send to the Spectator office a book entitled How to Enjoy Drinking. But I susPect we are in for a whole bombardment of books and TV programmes on what is swiftly becoming a modish 'problem' and Source of employment to thousands of s°ctal workers, academics and psychiatrists. Excessive drinking is, of course, bad for you, as has been pointed out by St Paul, Shakespeare and others. It is much less certain that excessive drinking can or should be checked by the state. Some people may be helped by medical treatment or group therapy. Others !nay find this actually harmful, as undermining the individual will-power which we all need to keep away from temptation. But alcoholism, like smoking, and indeed, babY-battering, offers a rich source of jobs 4", money. Politicians, trade union officials and IV pundits will soon be looking for quango jobs on the Alcohol Council and the Alcohol Research Board. Social workers Will scramble for posts with various Alcoholics Advisory Bureaux. Thousands °f questioners will be hired to survey what makes people drink. There will be dozens of books on Sex for Alcoholics, Slimming for Alcoholics, Jogging for Alcoholics, Gay Alcoholics and Single Parent Alcoholics. The alcoholism industry will of course broaden its market with the assertion that one in two or two out of three of the Population are alcoholics, just as we are ‘sometimes told that half the population are homosexuals or prostitutes, or both. One prediction I can make in confidence. Nothing more will be done for the genuine alcoholics, the wretched cider and meths dr, mkers whose numbers are actually on the increase. Many are Irish. Most of them are homeless because the old Rowton Houses have been abolished. The Salvation Army, Which used to do good work for these people, is under attack because its members do not wish to join a trade union. Those people who like to refer to 'Dickensian' conditions might like to know that more people nowadays sleep in the streets in London than ever did during Dickens's lifetime.
The many people who still complain of missing The Times crossword should try having a go at the Jac puzzle in the Spectator. At first they seem daunting, even impossible but after a few weeks they start to be not only soluble but most entertaining. In fact I enjoy them more than The Times puzzles, whose setters were often irritatingly facetious, and often used words in their wrong sense, e.g. 'gay' for homosexual and 'moderate' as a term of approval. The Jac crossword clues are very ingenious but at least two-thirds can be solved without resort to a giant dictionary, the various books of quotations or Brewer's Dictionary o fPhrase and Fable. (Thislast will be necessary about every sixth puzzle, when indicated by Jac.) At first I was put off by the unclued lights, the seven or eight words to which there are no clues. These unclued lights always have something in common as Jac suggests below and above the puzzle. They may be anagrams of each other. Sometimes the across lights define the down lights when in association with the same word. Sometimes the words may be, say, Caribbean islands or Nordic Gods — which is when you need Brewer. About every fifth crossword, the words in the right order form a quotation, almost invariably from the Latin. This usually makes things easier, even for those like myself with little Latin, since all foreign words are italicised in the index of the Oxford Dictio nary of Quotations. If you devote as much time each weekday to Jac, as you used to give to the daily Times crossword, you should find yourself solving about one in four. Several people together can solve the average Jac in about two hours. Can any reader tell me the origin of the legal story which goes something like this? In the early years of this century, the Irish barrister Mr Sullivan was defending a man on a sheep-stealing charge at Galway assizes. At one point the very pompous English judge peered over his spectacles at Sullivan and asked him: 'Is your client unaware of the saying: Ad quaestionem juris respondent judices ad quaestionem facti respondeant juratores?' At which Mr Sullivan rose to his feet and replied: `M'Iud, on the Connemara hill-top where my client resides, that saying forms almost the sole topic of conversation.' What was the actual Latin tag? Was the barrister called Sullivan? And if so was he the same one who backed down from defending Casement in 1916?
While in Salisbury, Rhodesia I went to see the new movie version of Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps. If not as good as the first movie version, it was certainly an improvement on the second and, like The Riddle of the Sands, it was very much helped by modern colour photography. But why is the hero Richard Hannay portrayed as a South African? Buchan made it absolutely clear that the man who in this and subsequent thrillers saved the British Empire from German militarism was a Rhodesian, a mining engineer from Bulawayo.
I hear that the aborted weekly Times published in Frankfurt was set into type by three young women who, although they were not proficient in English, produced an edition almost free of misprints. The implications of this no doubt account for the intransigence of the print unions within the Thomson group. But I cannot feel any sympathy with the Thomson management. They were among the worst culprits for driving the newspaper industry to disaster. First they pulled down the fine old building in Printing House Square and then erected the two loathsome Seifert edifices that destroyed the view from the back of the Spectator offices. During the same period the Thomson newspapers, especially the Sunday Times, embarked on a campaign of reckless over-hiring, partly to get all available talent but partly, I dare to suggest, to pinch talent from rivals. As a result the journalistic staff is as over-manned as the printing staff. Talented but frustrated journalists have turned into embittered union shop stewards. Few members of the National Union of Journalists on the Thomson newspapers understand that it is just the union that is keeping their wages down, since talented writers get no more pay than the overwhelming majority of duds.
The Observer has a page rather absurdly entitled 'Living'. Two weeks ago it contained two articles favourable to abortion. Last week it had a whole page article in favour of contraception. What will 'Living' recommend next? Euthanasia?
Richard West
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