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Whatever calamitous infelicities David Beckham did or did not email to his publicist, few will doubt that he has lived to rue the day. Nevertheless, I’ll bet teeth that he is pointing his ruing in the wrong direction: that he is tormented by the moment he pressed ‘send’ — but not similarly kicking himself for hiring a publicist in the first place. It will be left to thee and me to wonder what was the point.
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Well, of course the Assisted Dying Bill failed. It mattered not a jot that an overwhelming majority of public opinion urged its success; it was always going to fail and the only surprising thing is that anybody is surprised. I’ll bet my teeth on a few more certainties, too. Last week the required 200,000 people put down their spliffs long enough to sign a petition in favour of decriminalising cannabis and thus, in October, the matter will be debated by MPs. Proponents, however, really should not bother — they will lose, regardless.
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There’s a passage in Willy Russell’s wonderful novel, The Wrong Boy, which could almost be funny — except, wisely, Russell doesn’t play it for laughs. The book chronicles a childhood blighted by adult misunderstanding, and describes an instance of it in which zealous ‘educationalists’ observe that the Boy’s artwork is harshly, relentlessly black: echo and evidence, all agree, of a darkness in the child’s soul. The truth, had the evangelical minds been open to it, was both simpler and easier to mend. The Boy was a shrimp of a kid, easily elbowed aside. So when the school crayons were put out, the coloured ones were promptly snaffled, leaving him with the last in the box: the black pencil.
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Anybody with an ounce of compassion would have been doffing caps in recent days to Frank Maloney — as, indeed, absolutely everybody with an ounce of compassion vigorously and noisily was. His announcement that he is undergoing a sex change has been met by plaudits from far and wide, notably from within the muscularly male world of boxing in which he made his name and from where his former client, Lennox Lewis, has led the cheerleading. Quite right, too. Maloney’s appalling, sometimes suicidal misery of half a century is beyond imagination; his eventual admission to his beloved wife was heartbreaking to read and his courage, now, in going public — albeit forced by the threat of media exposure — is admirable. But... oh yes, there is a but.
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Porky, flabby, lardy? Obese — and morbidly so? Yup. That’s us. We knew already that two out of three of us weigh more than is healthy, and last week the scales of shame revealed further cause for dismay: Britain has more obese girls under 20 than anywhere else in the West. Something, as the hand-wringers say, must be done. And so the scene was set for the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) to bring out some advice. All of the guilty, they say — yes, two thirds of the population — should be sent to classes like Weight Watchers or Slimming World, with the tab of some £50 a head picked up by the NHS. Gob-smacked? Somebody should be. Even if it worked, we couldn’t afford it; and such a scheme would not and could not work.
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Coming next month to a courtroom near you: a bewildered young man, freshly convicted, trembles in the dock while awaiting his fate. But just before sentencing, a weeping widow stands, turns welling blue eyes to the bench and beseeches His Honour: ‘I cannot forgive him for his part in my husband’s death. My life is ruined. I beg you to punish him to the maximum.’ Murmurs of assent are shushed in the public gallery. ‘Well,’ says the judge, ‘I had planned leniency, in light of the coercion from older bullies and his mental age of six. However, since you ask so nicely — Officer! Take him down and throw away the darned key!’ And the gallery erupts in applause. All right... hands up to a smidge of exaggeration. But only a smidge.
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It’s a fair bet that most wives, asked to list the things they feel are jointly owned with their husbands, would tick them off in a trice: the house, the car, the furniture, the wedding gifts, Fido and Puss and that ghastly etching they both hate but it’s worth a few bob. There’s a woman in Surrey, however, who wishes to add a little extra to her list of what she calls her ‘marital assets’: her husband’s sperm. Not just the bit she wants to use for her own procreation, either. All of it. Every last tiny tadpole. The thrust of her case is roughly this. During a period when — at least according to her — her husband was going through a bonkers patch, he took himself off to a fertility clinic wherein he donated some sperm without telling her.
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Within waving distance of blessed solid ground, Susan Taylor lost her bid to swim the Channel — and, with it, her life. She was 34 years old, brainy and beautiful, gifted and giving; it is, indeed, a peculiarly bitter irony that it was the giving that killed her. For years she had been an avid fundraiser, facing all manner of challenges in charitable effort, and for this, her final swim, she even gave up her job as an accountant to train: admirable in intent, courageous in execution. What I find less admirable, however, is the general acceptance that this kind of stunt is a reasonable and even a desirable way to raise money for good causes.
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Here she comes again. Back at the top of the news, draped in the robes of the righteous, embraced by those who sanctify all things traditional: the ‘full-time mother’. As usual, she is the undeserved victim of something or other; in this instance, it’s the incoherent shake-up of the child benefit system, leading to headlines declaring that ‘full-time mothers are being penalised’, followed by an implacable wistfulness that war is once again waged against the finer values of a finer past, when women dedicated their whole lives to their children. The trouble with this lament, much as I hate to spoil the Hovis commercial, is that they did nothing of the kind; nostalgia is a notoriously unreliable witness and in this matter she surpasses herself.
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Nobody this side of the indecently callous would wish to rain upon the parade in Machynlleth on Sunday. As it slowly wound its way through the streets towards the local church, we turned away, then watched, then turned away again from the raw faces of people who had spent six days in search and hope that dwindled to despondency and despair. So here we are once again, expecting forthwith to learn more than we would ever want to know, while understanding none of it. I don’t get it and good money says you don’t get it, either. But here’s the thing. If we — reading, reasoning, thinking grown-ups — cannot make a shred of sense of these nightmares, what on earth do we imagine a child to make of them?
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It’s unwise to treat victims of tragedy as universal sages It really is no surprise to learn that Sara Payne favours restrictions to keep online pornography away from children. There cannot, after all, be a sentient adult who would not prefer our babies to spend more time with Peppa Pig than with Swedish Dolls. But although you and I might think that internet service providers should stick their greed where the sign don’t shine, our thoughts would not make headlines like last week’s: ‘Sara Payne backs call to block online porn’ — headlines which, given a moment’s thought, can only invite the question, well, so what? This is a woman who knows a great deal more than we do about things that we must pray we never know better.
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OK, we get it. We’re scum. Lowest of the low. If nothing else comes from the Leveson inquiry, at least the British public may be assured that its views of the press were right all along: as poll after poll has shown, I and my comrades in ink enjoy a social standing somewhere south of traffic wardens, tax collectors and dumpers of cats into wheelie bins. We have lived with it for so long that, frankly, a few intercepted phone messages will not make much difference. So be it. Nevertheless, I would embrace my stigma a little more readily without the hypocrisy of that same British public, so widely in thrall to ‘the scoop’ that most of them will play dirtier than I ever have, simply to be part of it.
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Lord Winston must have known he placed a puss among the pigeons when he aired his view, a couple of weeks ago, that nurses from Eastern Europe are putting NHS patients in danger. Citing Romanians in particular, he remarked upon their limited communication skills and told the House of Lords that they had been trained ‘in a completely different way’ from British nurses. Predictably, since then, there has been a flurry of concern about his first point; it is obviously troubling if medical professionals cannot speak adequate English, and it will continue to be troubling as long as the difference between a microgram and a milligram is a coffin.
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Becoming a dad past retirement age isn’t miraculous, it’s just selfish He isn’t the first and he won’t be the last. But lack of originality was clearly the least of Donald Trelford’s concerns as he commandeered acres of Sunday newsprint to boast of the arrival of his baby son, Ben. Mr Trelford is, if you please, a strapping 73 years of age and joins a motley club including Des O’Connor (a father at 72), Luciano Pavarotti (67), Clint Eastwood (67), Rupert Murdoch (72), Rod Stewart (66 — his eighth) with no shortage, I fear, to follow. Most of them, if pushed, will put up a stout defence to justify their little miracles, and while few are blessed with Trelford’s fluency, the gist is always much the same.
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If a drunken woman and a drunken man have sex, our legal system treats the man as a rapist. That’s wrong — and patronising Imagine, for a moment, that you’ve had a few sherries. Perhaps, even, more than a few; perhaps you have enjoyed that most pernicious of doses: the one that leaves you on the right side of consciousness but the wrong side of common sense. In which demonically stupid state, you do things that you would never do when sober: you prang a car, smash a window, break a nose, bare a backside, betray a confidence, dish an insult or, more generally, just bore for England.
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More women than ever are having their babies by Caesarian section. Not the old last-resort emergency type, either; the ones where mothers howl for days, to the point of peril for self or child, until mercy descends in a scalpel — life-saving, but adding to existing trauma. No. This marked increase, by as much as 40 per cent in one year at the Liverpool Women’s Hospital, has been among women who elect a Caesarian; those who plan, often months in advance, to be delivered calmly, swiftly and relatively free of pain in a modern, controlled, 21st-century environment. In short: an increase in women who are aware that there is a choice and are happy to exercise it. So good news all round then.
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The great debate about the full-face Muslim veil is usually cast in terms of religious rights, says Carol Sarler. But what about my right to see who I’m talking to? So we’re all agreed then. The great burka debate has enthusiastically consumed recent weeks, even though its conclusion was never in doubt: nobody actually intends to ban the thing. Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman was correctly smacked for gushing that the garment ‘empowered’ women, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown raged against it as ‘a perversion of our faith’, while on these pages last week Hugo Rifkind more calmly disparaged the robe as ‘rude’. Nevertheless, all would prefer that the sledgehammer of legislation not be used.
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Why must government be ‘representative’, asks Carol Sarler. It makes no sense. We must fight back against this pernicious new orthodoxy Only a week ago, as Julia Gillard was sworn in as Prime Minister of Australia, the sheilahood could scarcely believe its luck. A woman, no less! And not just any woman, either: Miss Gillard ticked all the righteous boxes as an avowed feminist, a pro-choice campaigner and a proud member of Emily’s List, an organisation founded — there as here — to promote sex equality in all things, especially in governance. By Monday this week, the most fervent of fans didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
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In Ireland, some 2,000 adults who gave evidence of assault at the hands of Roman Catholic priests and nuns are, probably correctly, spitting tacks. The inquiry into their treatment when in children’s institutions has ruled that, although they did indeed suffer, no charges may be brought, no names shamed and, for what it’s worth, no bank balances swollen by damages sucked from the Vatican’s already depleted coffers. The decision might not seem just; on the other hand, it was all a very long time ago — so why, do we think, in recent weeks has this been one of the few stories to knock duck islands off their moats at the top of the news?
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In the week that John Suchet made his wife’s dementia public, Carol Sarler questions this revelatory trend. Is it really what the sufferers would have wanted? Her end, when it came, was beyond ghastly. Iris Murdoch, one of our doughtier literary intellects, was reduced to screaming, drooling delirium at one end of her frail body and to defecation without any sense of suitable time or place at the other. All of this we know because, exactly 10 years ago, her husband told us, when he wrote of ‘the lady whom I sat on the loo this morning, wiped her bottom and scrubbed her hands and her brown fingernails’.