Matthew Parris

Should ‘gay-hate’ be a crime? Stonewall, the gay lobbying group of which I remain a solid supporter, has just sent me a briefing paper urging members to support Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, in his proposals to make inciting hatred of homosexuals a criminal offence. The government is proposing new amendments to its Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill, adding ‘Hatred on the Grounds of Sexual Orientation’ to the offences of incitement to hatred on the grounds of race or religion. I’m not convinced. I was equally unconvinced it was appropriate to prosecute incitement to religious hatred. My doubts about that (relatively recent) arrival on the statute book were various, but among them was the suspicion that this would prove the edge of a slippery slope.

Ted Heath was not always easy to love, but his grumpiness could be endearing. I remember him once inveighing against badges. Badges, he said, lapel-stickers, medals, tags, ribbons, bumper-stickers, rosettes, even T-shirts with writing on them — they all added up to the same thing: using yourself as a human billboard to advertise your convictions or good works. He detested the practice, he said. This diatribe had been prompted by a request to attach some perfectly harmless sticker — Save the Whale or whatever — to his coat. The young man who had asked him to do it was rather winded by the tirade. But I agreed with Ted. I still do.

Last Sunday a group from Winster, a lovely nearby village in Derbyshire, had invited me to open their roadshow at 11 a.m. The group, Sustainable Winster, had organised a Climate Change Awareness Day. The area climate-change bus had arrived for the occasion, there were displays, posters, free linen bags containing packs of expandable chips to put in the cistern of your loo so it uses less water, a Morris Man, two rangers from the Peak District National Park, bright sunshine and an atmosphere of friendly evangelism.

This did not come entirely as a surprise. As a graduate student at Yale I experimented with LSD. Why anyone ever thought this drug would sweep the world and reduce the youth of the West to a state of gibbering addiction I cannot imagine because it was no fun at all, just weird. Among a number of temporary alterations to my perception there were two of a paranoid nature: walking the streets of New Haven, Connecticut, I kept hearing, in the indistinct conversations of strangers, my own name. Realising this was probably the result of eating two little pieces of blotting paper, I kept my nerve, told myself the perception was unreal, and waited for it to fade. The second mind alteration, though, never entirely did fade.

A friend twisted his knee badly playing football last week. In considerable pain next morning and able to bend the knee only with difficulty he contemplated going to an Accident and Emergency unit at a London hospital. The alternative was to assume his injury was what he took it to be — a twisted knee, no more — and that there was no point in queuing for many hours only to be told to bandage it up, take a painkiller and anti-inflammatory tablets, borrow a pair of crutches and try to rest the knee as much as possible. Such things he could organise without specialist advice. But he opted to go to A&E after work. For two reasons. First, what if it were more serious than it looked?