Columns

Enoch Powell has been in many minds this month. It’s the 50th anniversary of his famous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech and I took part in a BBC radio programme discussing this — and hearing the speech itself read superbly by the actor, Ian McDiarmid. The small campaign against the very broadcasting of the speech fizzled out — not least, I think, because the ghastly text does Mr Powell no favours, and many of us who had never read it in its entirety were shocked not only by its tone but by its careless inaccuracy and faltering logic. Yet there’s been a widespread popular view that, agree or disagree with him, the man had a fine mind, a fastidious regard for facts, and courage.

Spring has come to my local park in its usual way. First the magnolias, then the cherry blossom, then the little silver ampules which once held nitrous oxide scattered in the grass. On Sunday the kids appeared, not a gang exactly, more a swarm of teens, angry and unstable. A boy of about 14 raced a moped at breakneck speed around the toddler playground. ‘Can you stop?’ said a brave father. ‘You might run over a child.’ ‘Fuck you,’ said the boy. ‘And I’ll fuck your mother too.’ On the way home, another spring staple: a police helicopter hovering over the Essex Road and below it the remnants of a raid: five vans, six cars, 30-odd coppers in body armour and two BBC cameramen just packing up. Once I might have made fun of them.

This ought to be the perfect time for a rant about how we’ve reached peak sourdough. It’s been all the rage for three or four years now and, really, someone needs to take a stand. As annoyingly overrated foodstuffs go, it’s up there with kimchi and goji berries and organic chia seeds: obsessively prepared by people with far too much beard, raved about in the Guardian and especially big in that epicentre of global communism, San Francisco. And it doesn’t even taste like bread — more like Mongolian yak’s yoghurt. Problem is, I can’t. Because, like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I’ve been got.

It took four days to actually see the pine marten in the flesh. We caught it on a trail cam on night two of our holiday as it scampered in an agreeably gamine manner for the food we’d left out. It ate better than us that week. By night three it had a choice of eggs (its favourite), peanut butter sandwiches and chopped-up frankfurters. All it needed was a nicely chilled Chablis. We sat in the dark for hours, waiting, until my wife said: ‘Fuck the malodorous little bastard, let’s watch TV.’ She is not much of one for wildlife really. And then it appeared, up on its hind legs crunching its way through the shell of an egg, tipping the yolk down its throat. Pale golden chest, long bushy tail, perky, impish face — we’d got our man.

Twelve minutes till the train. That had seemed like quite enough time as I approached the Virgin ticket machine. Two tickets, London King’s Cross to Durham: a 40-second job, then perhaps a coffee. I had felt, as I so often don’t, like a responsible mother and wife, comfortably in charge of logistics. Screen one set me back a bit. Virgin had changed the layout. Where was Durham? On screen two I felt the first rising bubbles of panic. Where was the option to buy an open return? The minutes floated by. Nothing became clearer. I felt the sort of lonely despair the old must feel when technology overtakes them. I said to my husband: ‘You do it.’ But after a while he said: ‘I can’t!

After an essay in this month’s Prospect about literature and freedom of speech, it seems I was cited on Twitter as a ‘racist provocateur’. Now, I rather fancy being a ‘provocateur’. But as for the adjective… Someone can call you ‘stupid’, and that’s just one person’s opinion. It doesn’t seem true because a single childish naysayer has impugned your intellectual prowess. Yet hitherto, the tag ‘racist’ has tended to stick. And it’s self-verifying. Why ever would anyone call you a racist if you weren’t one? In our current climate of sensitivity about race (and everything else), finger-pointers wield enormous power.

When Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, ejected from the aeroplane he was flying solo to Scotland, he parachuted to the ground and, injured, was taken to the local police station. This was 1941 and he had come on a doomed mission to draw the United Kingdom into peace negotiations. Hess’s aim was to deliver his proposals to the 14th Duke of Hamilton, another keen aviator and the first man to fly over Mount Everest, whom he fancifully supposed might be sympathetic. Douglas Douglas-Hamilton met him, then flew straight to England to report to Churchill.