Columns

I’m a convert to shoe-throwing, and its power. But I bet they ban shoes in public pretty soon Where do we stand, then, on shoe-throwing? Me, I’m in two minds. Muntadhar al-Zaidi, I dunno, I think he carried it off. At least he threw both, and at least he was in the Middle East. Whatever happened next, is my point, at least he didn’t have to hop. At least he didn’t have a clammy sock. I do not yet know the name of the 27-year-old man who lobbed a shoe at Wen Jiabao on Monday, but I do know, from the pictures, that he only threw the one. And, more pertinently, he was in Cambridge. It can’t have been nice in Cambridge on Monday. It wasn’t nice anywhere on Monday. Did he bring a spare shoe? Was he expecting the Chinese Premier to throw his shoe back?

I was walking along Limehouse Causeway, a narrow street running close to the Thames in East London. It was about half past eight in the morning, I was short of sleep and feeling temporarily annoyed with, oh, nothing in particular — just everything. Approaching a junction I saw from some distance that the pedestrian railings hugging this corner were a mass of flowers and paper. That irritated me. Presumably a memorial to somebody who had died nearby. Sad, no doubt, but we never used to make roadside shrines like this in England and the habit has always struck me as mawkish and somehow pagan. Getting closer, it became clear that the whole corner had been turned into a crematorium-style display, with masses of blossoms, trinkets, letters, soft toys and the like.

What are we to make of the disquieting information that Ehud Barak’s favoured pastime, when not waging war, politicking or dressing as a woman, is the dismantling and reassembling of clocks? ‘That’s really creepy,’ I said to the wife, when somebody on Newsnight mentioned it while we were watching it in bed. ‘It makes him sound like Sylar.’ Sylar, of course, is the super-powered serial killer from the hit US series Heroes. Prior to discovering his powers, he was a watch repairman. These days, he can fling you across a room with a twitch of his hand, shoot flames from his palms, and use a finger to open your skull like a can of soup. ‘Not so,’ said the wife, who was reading a book, but had heard enough. ‘Sylar is a professional.

Judging the Threadneedle/Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year awards is far from an onerous task. There are two splendid lunches, plenty of wine, first-rate gossip and more than a little argument. The deliberations are secret, but I can perhaps share with you an unexpected debate that took place when we were deciding who to name as Politician of the Year. Boris Johnson emerged a clear and deserving winner. But en route, as we pondered our options, another candidate, nominated for serious consideration, was Gordon Brown. There were a few objections around the table, to put it mildly, mainly along the lines that Mr Brown is a deplorable villain. It is safe to say that the PM would have struggled to command a consensus on the panel. Yet the case for him was irritatingly strong.

I dread to think why a Liberal Democrat would want to impersonate a traffic warden. It wouldn’t just be to get free parking. Not with them. It would have to be a sex thing. Some kind of NCP-themed bondage dungeon; an underground den kitted out to look like an underground car park. ‘You’ve been a very naughty motorist.’ Yes, traffic mistress. ‘You’ve been feeding your meter, haven’t you?’ Yes, traffic mistress. ‘So what is to be your punishment? The double-yellow, or a clamp on your red route?’ Both, traffic mistress... Gaaaargh. Gaaargh and aaaaargh. But hold. Because you probably don’t actually know what I’m talking about, do you? At least, not if you live in Britain. Elsewhere in the world, you might.

To understand the true nature of history, let us start with the question of Napoleon’s piles Cometh the hour, cometh the piles? Well, Wellington called Waterloo ‘the closest run thing you ever saw in your life’, and on the morning of battle, Napoleon was too exhausted and distracted by pain from his haemorrhoids to focus or to ride out. So did piles cost Napoleon that winning edge? Is Alaska part of the United States because in 1867 Tsar Alexander II had overspent on a big naval expedition and was temporarily but acutely short of cash? Is our belief in the potency of spinach due entirely to the misplacing of a decimal point when in 1870 a German scientist assessed the vegetable’s iron content?

If there really is a secret Zionist brotherhood running the world, why aren’t I a member? I know that the Iranian regime is famously confused about quite a lot of things, but if they are right about David Miliband being a member of a shadowy Zionist conspiracy, I’ll be absolutely livid. That bloody man has all the luck, doesn’t he? I’ve been waiting to be invited into the secret brotherhood of Jews who rule the world for years now. Nothing. Not a kosher sausage. Not a big-nosed sniff. Although I did once have a very weird conversation with Vanessa Feltz. It was at the party after a premiere of some sort at the London Film Festival a few years ago, and I found myself next to her in the coat queue.

Very long flights — flights like mine, to and from Australia, for instance — offer such an opportunity to think that you can tease a thought almost to the point of madness. What follows may read like that, and if you don’t wish to perform mental gymnastics on a nerdish pinhead until you’re intellectually giddy, quit now. But I’ve been turning over in my mind a recurrent problem in human reasoning that in real life irritates and trips us all, leading to endless misunderstandings — and I may have cracked it.

I’m not saying these are bad people. Just that they are fat They say that Eskimos have 50 words for ‘snow’. Like a lot of the things they say, this isn’t true, but should be. Right now, I’m a good few thousand miles from both Eskimos and snow, on holiday down in the sun-drenched dogleg of Florida. I’m wondering, these Americans, can they really only have a handful of words for ‘fat’? Forgive the predictable observation, but there are just so many different types. I can see many from the window of my hotel room, down there on the shore watching the startlingly noisy, don’t-book-a-room-next-door, annual Key West World Championship Power Boat race. Arse fat, neck fat, hip fat, thigh fat.

Kookaburras don’t really laugh, but I can see why the old song suggests it: a weird, taunting call, which does have a kind of dark comicality about it. And this is one of the sounds that wake me each morning in Hunters Hill — where I find that The Spectator now has an Australian edition. I’m staying in a lovely Victorian house in Sydney, built from huge blocks of the warm yellow sandstone that characterises many of the older residences here. This house dates from the 1880s and, apart from its size and generosity and the extent of its garden tumbling down towards the Harbour, it is almost indistinguishable from the grander sort of detached suburban houses that were being built in Britain, in places like Edinburgh, Cheltenham or Leamington Spa, around the same time.