Hugo Rifkind

If you’ve ever wondered what it will look like when we colonise Mars, the answer is ‘Dubai’. I was there the other week. Bloody hell, what a place. You sit there on your unabashedly fake beach on your un-abashedly fake island, perhaps basking in the shade of a palm tree that plainly wasn’t there a decade ago, because this used to be the sea. And across the bay, which is of course a fake bay, you can see skyscrapers. Pleasure zone, business zone, shopping zone. You half expect to find Richard O’Brien prancing around in a leopardskin top hat, urging you to collect crystals. It’s a great place for a holiday, for all its glaring moral flaws, but I don’t think you’d want to live there. And indeed hardly anybody truly does.

Way back in the late 1990s, I spent a lot of time in court. What happened, see, was that in the wee small hours of a drunken Edinburgh morning, my friend Jonny and I took a shortcut home through the disused railway tunnel that runs under Holyrood Park. I’d been through it many times, being enraptured with the magic of abandoned urban spaces and, perhaps more to the point, stupid, but never before had it contained a gang of pissed-up youths on a rampage. This time it did, and they put us in hospital. Various arrests followed pretty swiftly.

It’s surprisingly boring, legalising weed. In Colorado, where recreational doobie has been utterly without censure for, ooh, about a week and a half now, the Department of Revenue (Marijuana Enforcement Division) has published Permanent Rules Related to the Colorado Retail Marijuana Code, which is 136 pages long and no fun at all. Were I actually in Colorado, I suppose I could always spark something up to help me get to the end. ‘The statutory authority for this rule is found at subsections 12-43.4-202(2)(b), 12-43.4-202(3)(b)(II), 12-43.4-202(3)(b)(III), and 12-43.3-301(1), C.R.S,’ it drones, at the top of the final page. If you like, imagine that read out by a posh girl in a breathy voice over a drum beat, like they used to do in the Orb.

So what I’ve found myself wondering over the festive period, again and again, is whether it would ever be OK to have sex with a sheep. I mean, jeez, don’t take this the wrong way. I am not thinking of a particular sheep. There is not one in my shed right now, emitting worried, stricken bleats. Nor indeed am I thinking — that way — of any sheep at all. I’d be lying if I said sheep never crossed my mind at all, in the small hours of a cold and lonely night, but when they do I can only swear it is in a manner both chaste and numerological. And yet this — sex with sheep — is where my thoughts repeatedly have ended up. Because it’s not OK, is it? Not, really, ever. And yet eating them is.

The worst thing about going on University Challenge, I now know, is when you interrupt a question and get the answer wrong. This is bad, not only because you lose five points, but also because it can mess up the general filming of everything, somehow, which means they make you do it again. And sometimes again. And while it’s one thing to say something quite stupid in the white panic of contest, with Jeremy Paxman glaring at you over his cue cards, it’s quite another to have to say it repeatedly, like an actor playing the imbecile you’ve just been. With Paxman repeating the same question, and you repeating the same, hopeless answer. Sort of like Michael Howard, I suppose. Although I get ahead of myself. Yes! I did University Challenge!

What people don’t seem to realise is that the geeks are winning. Actually, scratch that. They’ve all but won. The world just hasn’t realised yet. So, when the likes of David Cameron talk of, say, blocking regular porn, or eradicating child porn, people take him seriously, as though this might actually be a thing in his power to do. Rather than what it truly is, which is something between a cynical gimmick and a last, desperate, deluded grasp at a dissolving straw. I mean, look, it might work a bit. Aspiring nonces, I suppose, will be set back by a week or two. People who just stumble upon kiddie porn while searching for somebody else — a kipper pan, say — will, indeed, be warned off going any further.

Since I was a child, pretty much everybody I have ever met has asked me if I want to be a politician. The answer has always been no. Once, at university, I dimly remember giving this answer with so much vigour and conviction that I was escorted from the room, and the guy I’d given it to — an almost perfect stranger — came back to find me the next day, to apologise for asking in the first place. Even these days, the phrase ‘follow in your father’s footsteps’ drifting across the table at a dinner party can cause my wife to shoot me a warning look. My point here being, it’s never been ‘maybe’.

I’d never noticed that there aren’t any tits on Facebook. The place always seems brimming with right tits to me. But no. According to this week’s mumbling bien-pensant scandal, the world’s largest social network has decided to allow newsy videos of murder and beheading and all the rest, but still not tits, and this is an outrage. Strangely enough, it’s mainly regarded as an outrage by the sort of people who are normally to be found slamming publications such as men’s mags and the Sun because they minimise the proper news and have tits all over the place. Honestly. Anybody would think these people just like to be cross, or something. In fact there’s very little to get properly cross about on Facebook.

A curious lack of prominence, this week, given over to the news that Saudi Arabia has rejected the chance of a two-year seat on the UN Security Council. Mainly, the Saudis are miffed that nobody has bombed Syria yet. According to the Saudi Foreign Ministry, this inaction sanctions  “the mechanisms of action and double standards existing in the Security Council [which] prevent it from performing its duties and assuming its responsibilities towards preserving international peace and security... The failure of the Security Council to make the Middle East a free zone of all weapons of mass destruction…or to prevent any country in the region from possessing nuclear weapons is [more] irrefutable evidence and proof of its inability to carry out its duties.

Oh, but life’s easier if you’re American. Each and every last way the state meddles with your life is an outrage. Whether it’s forcing you to have health care, or denying you the right to own the gun that Al Pacino has in Scarface, or making you wear a seat belt, or taxing you, or threatening to silence your long-held and proudly defended right to put a pillowcase on your head and be a racist, Big Government is a villain. There are people, the American thinks, and then there is power, and the latter shafts the little guy every chance he gets. It’s not like that in Britain.

I’ve never met the woman that the Newsnight editor Ian Katz this week accidentally described as ‘boring, snoring Rachel Reeves’, so for all I know, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury might be an absolute riot. Although actually, writing that, it occurs to me that maybe I have and she was just too boring for me to remember. Perhaps we sat next to each other at some sort of function, and had a fun chat about, ooh, fiscal prudence in a post-OBR paradigm, which involved her talking and me going ‘Mmmm’, and left her thinking, ‘He seems nice, I wonder if we’ll be friends?

I’ve never met the woman that the Newsnight editor Ian Katz last night accidentally described as ‘boring, snoring Rachel Reeves’, so for all I know, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury might be an absolute riot. Although actually, writing that, it occurs to me that maybe I have and she was just too boring for me to remember. Perhaps we sat next to each other at some sort of function, and had a fun chat about, ooh, fiscal prudence in a post-OBR paradigm, which involved her talking and me going ‘Mmmm’, and left her thinking, ‘He seems nice, I wonder if we’ll be friends?

They’re getting the rebuttals in early, have you noticed that? You might call them a pre-emptive strikes. Here’s William Hague, speaking to BBC Radio 4 about those chemical attacks in Syria... ‘To believe that anybody else had done it, you would have to believe that the opposition in Syria would use, on a large scale, weapons that we have no evidence that they have, delivered by artillery or air power that they do not possess, killing hundreds of people in areas already under their control.’ Pretty good, that. He must have practised it beforehand. ‘Have’ and ‘possess’ mean the same thing, after all, so you need a bit of preparation there. Better, certainly, than John Kerry, who gave a press conference at the White House and said...

It’s senseless to ask how things are going to end, because things as a general rule don’t. They rumble on, they morph, and yesterday’s drama becomes tomorrow’s eyebrow-raising justification for thinking that people used to be inexplicable idiots. Nonetheless, I read these stories of house prices rising again and I cannot help but wonder. How is it going to end? How is it even supposed to end? What is Mark Carney’s golden future? Interest rates stay low, repayments stay low, house prices keep going up and then... what? How do all these people who have overextended themselves eventually underextend themselves so as not to be utterly buggered when rates finally go back up again? What is the correct verb for underextending yourself? Is there one?

This is not to be a column about Twitter. Can’t abide columns about Twitter. I’ve written a few, I know, but this is not to be another one. I promise. Time was, though, it was actually quite hard to find out what people thought, if they weren’t you. I mean, you could go out and ask them, but the process always ended with you being in a supermarket car park, and them being mental and not knowing what the Working Time Directive even was anyway. Twitter is a pipe of views coming straight to your screen. So explicitly not writing about it can feel like going out into the world with a bucket on your head, simply because you’re a bit bored of people writing about what they’ve seen with their eyes.