Columns

Do you remember Alan Kurdi, the poor, drowned three-year-old whose photograph provoked a wave of sympathy for migrants almost exactly a year ago? Social media lit up with outrage — something must be done! — as millions shared the picture back and forth. A Facebook share is a pretty easy way of caring, but even so it was uplifting: we in the West mind about all children, not just our own. Our fellow feeling extends to fellows worldwide. So where then is the great Facebook uprising over the news that there’s been not a single successful prosecution in this country for female genital mutilation (FGM) though it’s been illegal since 1985?

I was awoken late on Monday night by a horrible nightmare, one of those dreams where you cannot be entirely sure if you are asleep or not. I dreamed I was lying exactly where I was, in my bed, and this torpedo-shaped, phantasmagorical thing was zipping about around the bedroom, diving behind the wardrobe, reappearing and hovering for a moment by the window, and then shooting off towards the landing. Then it would dive at great velocity towards where I was lying, before suddenly veering off. What was this chimeric object? I realised immediately, with a chilling clarity — it was Brooks Newmark’s penis, jubilantly detached from the rest of Brooks Newmark.

A lecturer at a reasonably well-respected northern plate-glass university was somewhat perplexed by a student who complained about her poor marks for an essay. She had a statement of Special Educational Needs. She insisted that this had not been taken into account in the marking of her paper. My acquaintance was hauled before the university authorities to explain why he had marked her so low. ‘Because it was awful work, the work of a cretin,’ he replied. Ah, perhaps, they told him. But you haven’t taken into account the fact that she has Special Educational Needs. That’s why the paper was awful. So you need to allow for that fact and mark it as if it had been better.

I went to prison last week, in Birmingham. Early start, off on a train from Euston. It was my kids’ first day back at school, as well, so I called them just before I went through the gates. ‘Daddy’s in prison?’ said my seven-year-old, incredulously. ‘Listen,’ I said to my wife. ‘She’s not allowed to turn up in her classroom and tell everybody that her daddy’s in prison.

‘One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed though right were worsted, wrong would triumph Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake.’ This comes from Robert Browning’s ‘Epilogue’. It is quoted (though not of himself) in a staggering book by an author who in my eyes holds as good a claim to exemplify its spirit as anyone in the 20th-century history of Africa. Yes, anyone, including the many brave black freedom fighters, from Nelson Mandela down, who kept their heads held high when the odds seemed all against them. Even on Robben Island, even in the winter of his discomfort, -Mandela knew that history was on his side.

What the hell is going on with Ed Balls? Back in the horrible doldrums of the last Labour government, he was the most reliable total bastard around. There was Gordon Brown himself, of course, throwing phones at people and using his special sinister voice when he spoke about children, and Damian McBride, who had a reputation for being the nastiest spin-doctor there ever was, although he only ever texted me twice and actually quite nicely. Balls, though, was the spirit animal who tied the whole thing together. So many years later, it is almost impossible to convey how weary and stale that government was by the end.

There are no roads from the Peruvian river port of Iquitos, but the rich take aeroplanes. Those who cannot pay to fly may pay the premium for the 40ft motorised express canoes that take only a day to roar to and from the upriver port of Yurimaguas with its bus station. But losers in the global race cannot afford speed. For them there are only the big, slow, hot, lumbering cargo boats: nearly four days’ journey from Iquitos to Yurimaguas. So the moment a passenger walks up the gangplank and strings their hammock between the iron rafters of the open--sided deck, we can guess he or she is not one of life’s winners. Anyone who was wouldn’t travel this way. No less than among the rich there is social stratification among the poor, and the river fast shakes people down.

I do not get out very much these days, but the glorious weekend weather persuaded me that I should spend a pleasant afternoon watching people stabbing each other at our annual celebration of stabbing, the Notting Hill Carnival. I go most years and enjoy the street food, the music and the sight of white police officers with fixed rictus grins ‘getting down’ with some vast-mammaried semi-clad mama, their helmets askew and rivulets of sweat running down each crisp white shirt. And of course the violence, the violence. I am delighted to say that in this regard 2016 did not disappoint, with more than 400 people arrested and five stabbed — and all for the very reasonable cost of just £7 million to the taxpayer.

An almost worldwide survey on penis length — the sort of thing I always read with a sense of trepidation and inadequacy — suggested that the countries boasting the largest of these flawed and devious appendages are all located in Africa. Especially West Africa, from the DRC down to the humid and still pristine jungles of Gabon. This suggests to me one of two things — either that the old racist cliché is absolutely true, or that Africans tell bigger lies than anyone else on the planet. Either or both of these explanations are likely to get me into trouble, so I suppose I’d better stop digging. Thing is, I can’t fathom another answer.