Columns

True, one of the earliest school shooters, Brenda Spencer, who shot up a playground in San Diego in 1979, was a girl – famously providing the peg for the Boomtown Rats’ hit ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’. But that was a long time ago. Since, American mass shooters have been overwhelmingly male. One would expect, then, that when the culprit in a high-profile attack on young children is a woman, that anomaly would merit journalistic remark. After all, following these baffling bursts of nihilistic animosity, there’s little enough to say. Yet after ‘Robin’ Westman opened fire on kids at mass in a Catholic school in Minneapolis last week, segments of the media were conspicuously incurious about how ‘she’ came to be consumed by such commonly masculine rage.

I used to volunteer at a wildlife sanctuary, counting sheep and goats on an agreeable patch of chalk downland in Kent. On hot days the goats would hide in the dense, cool woodland and it could take a long time to find them. Occasionally they broke out of the reserve because our gates were of poor quality, so I was delighted to see one morning that new gates had been installed, shiny metal ones. When I got up close, though, there was a surprise in store. All of the new gates were adorned with a picture of a woman in a burka and an injunction to abide by the Countryside Code. This struck me as peculiar, not to say borderline Islamophobic. We had never experienced trouble with Muslim women ignoring the Countryside Code.

In 1620, in the Staffordshire market town of Bilston, a teenage boy decided he didn’t much fancy going to school. Rather than resort to conventional methods, 13-year-old William Perry claimed that he was possessed by a demon. His symptoms included reacting with spasms to the reading of the first verse of St John’s Gospel and peeing blue urine. Thousands flocked to Bilston to witness his supposed possession. King James I, who wrote a book on necromancy and black magic, took a personal interest in the case. It was only when the Bishop of Coventry had the bright idea of reading him the equivalent scriptural passage in Greek – a language the boy didn’t speak but the Devil presumably could – and drew no reaction that suspicions were aroused.

On reflection, a tradition of shelving many desirable goods within ready reach is extraordinary – especially because the premises in which these wares are invitingly presented provide unfettered access to every passerby. By and large, it’s dead easy to pick up one of these desirable objects – or dozens, should forethought ensure the possession of a bag – and walk out. What would possess anyone to organise such elaborate, unprotected arrays of stuff – altruism? Idiocy? A nationwide honour system, that’s what. Urbanites are astonished by unmanned farm stands that leave cartons of eggs for the taking beside a little sign and a jar. Yet offline retail is also dependent on a little sign (the price on the shelf) and a jar (the checkout counter).

I don’t quite see the point of flying Union flags in Tower Hamlets, or complaining about it when the council takes them down. This squalid little fiefdom run by the deeply corrupt Lutfur Rahman is not part of the UK: it is a suburb of Sylhet, with all that such a location might entail. This would include the mayor himself, who once rigged the votes and used imams to intimidate voters. Of course it is true that London is headed the same way as Tower Hamlets and will get there depressingly soon, an upheaval aided by the self-flagellating liberals who still choose to live in the capital and whose yearning for self-annihilation is close to absolute. The temptation is to write off our first city, and maybe others, too, come to that.