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Sir: Reading Charles Moore (Notes,
14 July) on the wives of men who ran off with their secretaries (‘they could always comfort themselves with the idea that the Other Woman was an airhead, or a submissive slave’), one assumes there are no secretaries on the staff of The Spectator.
Anne Carey
London W8
Sir: There is another way Alexander Fiske-Harrison could risk his life rather than running among the bulls of Pamplona (‘A good run’, 14 July), and cheaper too. For instance, the roads around here at school opening times provide no end of excitement. Parents in monster four-wheel-drive vehicles brook no opposition as they rid themselves of their charges. Bulls or mums? I’d chance the former.
Robert Vincent
Wildhern
Sir: How lucky for Alexander Fiske-Harrison to have escaped with his life because he was able to run away from the bulls in the streets of Pamplona.
Unfortunately the bulls get no such chance. They will be locked inside a bullring where, confused and bewildered by blaring music and a baying crowd, they will be tortured to death. After being stabbed with lances wielded by men on blindfolded horses, having their neck muscles broken and having lost a huge quantity of blood, they meet their sad death. As a final insult they may get their ears cut off as a trophy for their killer, before being dragged away like a useless bloodstained rag.
Aart van Kruiselbergen
By email
Sir: Matthew Parris (14 July) quotes Robert Frost — ‘Something there is that does not like a wall’ — in support of his dislike of dry-stone walling. He must surely also have been taught the last line of the same poem: ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’
Alan Doyle
Middlesex
Sir: I enjoy no regular contributor to The Spectator more than Rod Liddle, whose well-argued vitriol is invariably thought-provoking and usually, in my view, correct. But he becomes rather wearisome when he feels obliged to pretend, as on 14 July, that he’s a lefty. He cannot really believe that the decreasing number of those of us paying for the increasing number of the idle and criminal should not require that the beneficiaries of our largesse are subject to modest restraint in these straitened times.
Paul Goodson
Plaxtol, Kent
Sir: Ed Cumming (Letters, 14 July) declares that feisty, a word connoting excitable dogs and the breaking of wind, has to his ear ‘a sexual undertone’ that he wanted to avoid when writing about a woman. This sexual undertone, he assures us, is absent in the word ballsy. I find this judgment baffling.
Mr Cumming is mistaken in thinking I wish to encourage the use of feisty, but, since he habitually writes well, he might be warned of the consequences of an obsession with balls by the example of Tina Brown, also once regarded as an admirable writer. By 2007, in her book The Diana Chronicles, she was happy with sentences like this: ‘The girl who’d been picked to be the Royal Mouse of Windsor had turned into a hellacious ball breaker.’
Dot Wordsworth
London SW1
Sir: Surely ballsy has more sexual connotations than the word feisty? Ballsy, one assumes, refers to that part of the male anatomy never found in ladies and therefore is not appropriate in this context.
Peggy Carlaw
By email
A GOOD RUN
Last week’s Spectator misidentified the author of the article ‘A good run’. He is Alexander Fiske-Harrison, author of Into the Arena: the World of the Spanish Bullfight. Apologies.Also in Society
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