James Delingpole

My grandmother, Nanny Nancy, is 99 and going strong. But it can’t be denied that while she’s all there mentally, physically she’s not the lithe young thing she was in her 1920s adolescence. I mean no disrespect to my beloved grandmother, but if we’re honest, when Michael Bay is casting his next blockbuster and it’s a choice between her and Megan Fox for the female lead, well… . It’s not just me who has noticed this: the kids have even more so. When they were younger, especially, and I asked them to kiss their great-grandmother they’d react — as so many children do when confronting their older relatives’ decrepitude — as if I’d invited them to snog a bird-eating spider.

Here’s a thought to kindle a lovely warm glow of smugness and schadenfreude as we enter a new year: you didn’t lose your fortune in the great bitcoin bubble of 2013. The reason I know you didn’t is because few Speccie-reading types of my acquaintance even understand what a bitcoin is, let alone how you might go about buying one, or why it might be important for the future of everything. So let me try to explain from the perspective of a fellow Luddite and techno-phobe. You think about bitcoin, if at all, as one of those newfangled things that young people and child pornographers and hackers and other unsavoury types indulge in.

‘Is anyone here even remotely shocked that Nigella Lawson has done cocaine?’ I asked. Everyone shook their heads. Well of course they did: it was the after-show drinks in the green room at a BBC studio. ‘So why is it being reported in the media as if it were some amazingly big deal?’ No one knew the answer to that one. Everyone present had either tried Class As or been to numerous parties where they were about the only ones there who hadn’t taken Class As. Yet here we were, gossiping about the latest revelations from the Nigella court case for all the world as if they mattered. ‘One Direction are infatuated with Nigella Lawson and paid her a million pounds to have a six-some with her, in a giant tub of her How To Eat classic pea risotto.

When I was a child — in the days before it became illegal under Schedule 5 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act (1981) and Schedule 2 of the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations (2010) — I was an unlicensed handler of great crested newts. I loved them for the same reasons, I imagine, Ken Livingstone does: the gorgeous contrast between their rough, matt black bodies and their flame-orange and black-speckled bellies; the way they float in mid-pond as if in suspended animation; watching them develop from their larval stage into efts and then adults; Beatrix Potter’s Sir Isaac Newton...

‘Dad, it’s three hours long,’ says Boy, worriedly. ‘Yeah. And whose bloody fault is it we’re going?’ I want to reply but don’t because I know, as a dad, you’re not supposed to say discouraging things when your child has asked you to take him to see his first ever Shakespeare play at the RSC. Still, I can’t pretend I’m happy with the arrangement. Partly it’s the cost of the tickets: £50-plus each, with no student discount for Boy because the show has long since sold out and you don’t get special deals on last-minute returns. Partly it’s just that, well, it’s the theatre and I’m not that keen on going to the theatre.

I’ve been racking my brains to think what I might have in common with Kim Jong Un and Piers Morgan. But apart from owning a spectacularly tiny penis, I simply cannot think. Certainly, when Kim is getting it in the neck for having one of his ex-girlfriends executed by firing squad to please his wife, or whenever Morgan is being criticised for being just the worst thing ever, I never find myself seized with some sudden hormonal urge to rush to their defence on account of the fact that we’re all part of the Brotherhood. Maybe, though, we’re missing a trick. Maybe we chaps of the world could enjoy so much more leeway if only we showed a bit more male solidarity. ‘Of course I had to nuke Seoul.

The RSPB has come out against fracking and urged the government to ‘rethink its shale gas policies’. And of course the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds would know. After all when your skill set ranges from identifying Little Brown Jobs through your binoculars at 10,000 yards all the way to differentiating a Greater Spotted Woodpecker from a Lesser Spotted Woodpecker merely by the sound of its drumming beak, clearly it goes without saying that your insights into the merits of hydraulic fracturing and the minutiae of Britain’s energy economy deserve to be taken very seriously indeed. No, no I jest. About the first bit, anyway.