Rod Liddle

We are considering privatising or selling off our dog, Jessie. She seemed a rather wonderful idea when we got her nine years ago. But since then she has become a hideously bloated, entitled creature who almost by herself determines how we live our lives. In winter she is particularly tyrannical — she has three walks a day, and with darkness falling at four o’clock that means almost every hour of daylight is spent servicing her needs. We cannot go out by ourselves without ensuring she will not be unduly inconvenienced, and as she has grown older so the costs of keeping her have spiralled — and will continue to spiral. Is she grateful? Not a bit of it. The food and treats we give her are never sufficient and so she follows us around demanding more, outraged.

We're closing the year by republishing our ten most popular articles in 2021. Here's number one: Rod Liddle writing in March on Harry and Meghan.  Caroline Rose Giuliani, the daughter of the former mayor of New York, Rudy, has been talking to the press about one of her hobbies. Apparently she likes nothing more than playing the role of a ‘unicorn’ — the third partner in a sexual liaison. She explained: ‘Finding the strength to explore these more complicated, passionate aspects of my personality became the key to harnessing my voice and creative spark, which in turn helped me better cope with depression, anxiety, and the lingering cognitive effects of adolescent anorexia.’ This is a fascinating approach to curing eating disorders, I think.

I have been reading 39 Ways To Save The Planet by the BBC journalist Tom Heap, which includes such ingenious suggestions as capturing refrigerant gases in a large box and then destroying the large box. It is an interesting book. I would like to suggest to Tom a 40th way in which we might help to save the planet, as well as saving the country a lot of money: raise the minimum age at which a person can drive a car from 17 years to 25 years. This would immediately reduce our motor vehicle emissions by a little over 5 per cent — no small contribution. It would also reduce the number of accidents on our roads by 18 per cent, consequently saving the taxpayer an estimated £2.9 billion per year, which we could spend on planting trees or building attractive igloos for polar bears.

Exciting news from Durham University, which is helping its students to become ‘sex workers’. This noble institution is offering two courses in the various forms of harlotry. My only concern is that at present they do not actually offer an academic qualification in these subjects — at the very least an undergraduate degree in, say, Practical Whoring. Perhaps followed by an MA in Deconstructing the Topless Hand-Shandy1897-1913. Such courses would probably result in more lucrative career opportunities than many of the more traditional subjects which students pay through the nose to study. I am attending a dinner at Durham University next month and fervently hope that some of the ambitious young ladies on these courses will be in attendance.

I was intrigued to learn that Kamala Harris, the Vice President of the US, is worried about racist trees. I have always held trees in the deepest suspicion: it is their long-abiding silences which worry me. As we know from Black Lives Matter, ‘Silence is violence’ — and trees, for literally aeons, have been conspicuously silent on the matter of white privilege and racism. To follow this logic, then, trees are inherently violent. Nasty, leafy bastards. This certainly seems to be what Ms Harris thinks. During a visit to Nasa, instead of asking those space boys how to reverse park a shuttle, she instead became obsessed with keeping an eye on trees.

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is giving local residents £25,000 grants to enable them to change the names of the roads in which they live. Some Londoners, I believe, find it uncomfortable to live in a street which has a name redolent of colonialism. Fair enough. I hope, though, that Sadiq will also give grants to right-wing white neighbourhoods of the capital so that the residents there can change the names of roads to make them more redolent of colonialism — such as Cecil Rhodes Avenue, or Zulus 0 British Army 5 Crescent. Or perhaps install a name which commemorates the mayor himself, such as Vacuous Dwarf Close. This war on history, tradition, rationality, logic and complexity (known in short as ‘woke’) continues apace.

On the wooden jetty from which the ferry used to depart for the little island of Utoya, there stood for a while a small obelisk around which people deposited flowers. ‘If one man can show this much hate, imagine how much love we can show together’ was the marvellously trite inscription on the obelisk: vapid and close to meaningless, in either Norwegian or English. Utoya lies in the Tyrifjorden Lake about 45 minutes north of Oslo and it is where the Labour party’s ‘Workers’ Youth League’ once held its summer camps — until one afternoon in July 2011 when a man called Anders Breivik turned up, heavily armed. Breivik murdered 69 people on Utoya, 33 of them under the age of 18.

I have not watched the BBC’s new period drama Ridley Road because I knew it would be impossible for the corporation to commission any series about anything without grafting onto it facile and usually pig-ignorant observations which suggest that history always reveals that the BBC left-liberal mindset is right about everything. So it seems to be from reviews I have seen from the likes of Melanie Phillips and one or two others. Ridley Road concerns the 62 Group’s struggles against fascism and anti-Semitism in east London in the 1960s, and especially Colin Jordan’s National Socialist Movement (NSM).

We can suffer a lethal pandemic with lockdowns, petrol shortages and supermarket shelves almost entirely denuded of sausages. But when Facebook and its various ahellspawn offspring go down for seven hours, the country is sent into a tailspin of misery and confusion. On Monday, Facebook users could be seen out on the streets of our towns and cities accosting strangers and explaining to them exactly what they had for supper the night before, or showing photographs of themselves with a couple of friends enjoying a night out in a pub in Ruabon. All they wanted, these people, was a thumbs up from those strangers, or a warm hug or a kiss.