Columns

When Mary Jane Mowat remarked recently that rape conviction statistics would not improve ‘until women stop getting so drunk,’ the retired Crown Court judge knew there would be a row. It followed. The judge, knowing that only 60 per cent of rape charges that reach court end in conviction, was making a narrow point. There are big evidential difficulties in pitting the claimed recollection of someone who says she was too drunk to know what she was doing against the claimed recollection of someone who plainly wasn’t. But the row spread wider, as it keeps doing, into the moral status of taking advantage of an inebriated woman.

For my 49th birthday treat, I went to see Shakespeare in Love at the Noël Coward theatre in London. Expensive but worth it: spry, funny, uplifting and moving but also, for all the surface froth, quite a deep meditation on the creative process and the enduring power of art. What everyone secretly loves best about it, though, I suspect, is the way it so shamelessly flatters their intelligence. We’re all aware that Shakespeare wrote a sonnet that begins ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’; that Marlowe was stabbed to death in a pub brawl; that Malvolio wears yellow stockings and cross garters. This is basic, middlebrow general knowledge.

I was attacked by a swan the other day, as I walked along the bank of the River Stour in Kent. The creature climbed out of the water and lunged towards me, wings puffed up, making this guttural and hate-filled coughing noise. I kicked out at its stupid neck and told it to fuck off and the bird backed away towards the river, still making that demented hissing, like a badly maintained boiler. At first I was mystified as to how I had gained its enmity. I wasn’t near its mate and still further distant from its sallow and bedraggled idiot children. Nor had I advanced towards it, or even given it a threatening glare. And then the horrible realisation dawned on me. The swan had attacked me because it believed — mistakenly — that I was Jewish.

There’s a little bit of a fascist in all of us. For some, the tragedy of human want may provoke an impatient urge to expropriate and centralise for the more efficient use of economic resources. Others, alarmed at the world’s exploding population, may be attracted by calls for a programme of mass compulsory sterilisation. But for me it’s letter boxes and street numbering. I want order. I want consistency. I want standards. And I want eye-watering penalties for property owners who try their fellow Britons’ patience and waste our time by making their addresses impossible to find.

This is to be one of those columns that makes the writer faintly wish there wasn’t an internet. It would be one thing merely in print — ephemeral, swiftly forgotten, to be stumbled across only by like-minded individuals en route from Charles Moore to Taki — but online I fear there may be sniggering. ‘What planet is he on?’ they will be asking on Twitter, but then, I suppose, they always are. The fact is, there’s been a question preying on my mind these last few weeks and I’m going to be bold, and ask it. You may snigger, you may mock and you may sneer, but that won’t make my question any less valid. So here goes. I’ll be nearly 40 in a couple of years. And I keep being told that I live a life of relative privilege. So.

Is it ever appropriate to use the word ‘slut’? I always take my lead from the Prime Minister and he has assured the country that it is never appropriate or acceptable, so henceforth I shall desist from employing the term. If, one evening, I come home from work to find my wife, naked, cheerfully and drunkenly providing sexual gratification to the entire first team squad of a Championship-level football club — Wigan Athletic, say, or Norwich City — I would simply remark: ‘How refreshing it is to see a woman unshackled from the oppressive sexist mores of our age and able to express herself in such an uninhibited manner. Would you like a cup of tea?’ The word slut would not pass my lips.

This has been a terrible year for horseflies. It’s bad enough if you’re human: often by the time you swat them off the damage has already been wrought by their revolting, cutting mandibles and it’s not till 24 hours later, I find, that the bite reaches peak unpleasantness, swelling into a huge itchy dome which somehow never quite generates the massive sympathy you feel you deserve. But obviously it’s worse if you’ve no hands to swat them with, as Girl and I were reminded when we went out for a summer ride. Every few yards our mounts shuddered and twitched and twisted their heads back under sustained and vicious assault from the evil clegs. Sometimes, you could see the blood. ‘Kill them! Keep killing them!