Rod Liddle

When I awoke the other morning and switched on my radio, the airwaves were alive with the sound of furious, transgressed women. Nobody else got a look in. What have we done to get their goat this time, I wondered, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. Nothing, it transpired. It was all in the USA, where a Supreme Court decision removed the constitutional right for women to have abortions and left it to the 50 states to decide instead. This last part was largely overlooked, incidentally: in essence the women were howling about decentralised democracy and what an awful thing it is. Democracy is sexist. Democracy is especially sexist in those southern states which might impose (or have already imposed) restrictions on terminations.

There’s a left-wing internet advocacy group called 38 Degrees which suggests to its followers that all they have to do is click a button and all the bad things in the world will be outlawed. It is a pleasant conceit. Its name derives from the angle at which snowflakes come together to form an avalanche, which is nicely self-deprecating of it. The problem is that so few people believe in its drivel that the closest it gets is about six degrees, which is the angle at which snowflakes remain exactly where they are until it thaws and they melt. Still, it is a useful simile and I think we may be in a 38 Degrees moment with transgenderism. The avalanche seems to be happening.

The former comedian Sir Lenny Henry has questioned why there seem to be so few black people at rock festivals such as Glastonbury. He might equally have asked why there are so few young people. Or just concluded that the festival was a convocation of smug airheaded middle-aged white liberal kidults and that black people were, by and large, well advised to steer clear of it. Sir Lenny and I are engaged in the same sort of research work at the moment. Lenny’s job is to look at various British institutions and to point out that there are too few black people present; mine is to look at British institutions and point out that there are far too many of them.

I may have broken the law this week, without having intended to, so great was my rush to return home. I forgot to put on my seat belt and may have exceeded the speed limit on more than one occasion. The cause of my intemperate haste was, of course, a desire to be back at my house in time to listen to BBC Radio 4’s daily evening arts magazine programme, Front Row. I live in a part of the world where the radio reception in cars is thinnish to non-existent, you see. Looking around me, as I depressed the accelerator further than I should, I noticed that everybody else was driving with similar fury, presumably for the same reason: haring back to catch Front Row.

I have just posted a score of 1,625,000 on Bubbleshooter, my best yet. Bubbleshooter is a game where you fire different coloured bubbles at other different coloured bubbles in order, in the end, to make all the different coloured bubbles disappear. It is an elderly game, in its uplifting nihilism, and almost certainly dates me precisely. My latest attempt took slightly over one hour. I had intended to spend the afternoon finishing the book I’ve been reading, but having logged in on my laptop became momentarily and later endlessly distracted. First I did the Times and Telegraph cryptic and ‘toughie’ crosswords, then I did Wordle, of course – identifying the word ‘album’ in three goes, which the website assured me was ‘impressive’.

At long last the state of Oregon has got around to installing tampon machines in the male lavatories of its many schools. I have campaigned long and hard on this issue. It has always seemed to me grossly unfair that girls should be provided with this facility but the poor boys utterly ignored. The sense of shame that these young men must have felt when their monthly cycles arrived unexpectedly – and remember that many of them will be victims of ‘period poverty’. Now, though, thanks to the state’s chirpily named Menstrual Dignity Act, equality has been achieved and I will therefore turn my attention to another consequence of social injustice – the continued proliferation of parking spaces which are not designated solely for disabled persons.

More exciting news arrives from Britain’s dimmest university, Durham, which is embarking on a programme to ‘decolonise’ mathematics. About time. For too long the subject has been dominated by racist stuff like adding things up or multiplying etc. Hopefully soon there will be room for students, when faced with a question such as ‘what is four plus four?’ to eschew the didacticism of white supremacy by answering ‘eight’ and suggest instead a number which they think feels intuitively right, such as 7,231. (Or indeed any number: it is not for me, as a privileged white straight male, to suggest to people who have been the victims of structural racism an alternative answer to the question ‘what is four plus four?

I see that on the issue of gay conversion therapy, the Prime Minister has been floating around all over the place, like a giant albino blimp which has suddenly come adrift from its moorings. I believe Boris is now of a mind to ban conversion therapy for gay people but not for trans-gendered people, having already flip-flopped twice. This decision seems to have enraged many more people than it placated and lots of LGBTQI etc groups are shrieking with despair. Could I suggest, then, that the Prime Minister flip-flops again? Rather than banning gay conversion therapy, the government should examine the benefits of making it compulsory. I realise that for many people this would be a controversial move, but that fact alone should not dissuade ministers from going ahead.

Delighted though we all are that Benedict Cumberbatch has decided to allow a Ukrainian family to live in one of his houses, did he have to trumpet this to the entire population of the country? Surely these sorts of decision are best kept to oneself, no? But then, they’re always doing it, the luvvies – proclaiming their saintliness in order to protect and advance the brand, one supposes. Benedict should know that there are more than 100,000 ordinary people in this country, people who have never received a Bafta, who have offered their homes to Ukrainian refugees and they don’t go bragging about it on national media. People such as myself, for example. I have applied to take refugees in, to do my little bit, but it would not occur to me to advertise the fact publicly.