Rod Liddle

A question for those of you of a certain age. Who was the first articulate black person you ever saw or heard? My guess is that it would be Muhammad Ali or, if you are a little older, Cassius Clay. Obviously if you yourself are black the question should be a little different. Then it would be who was the first articulate black person you saw on TV? Of course there were plenty of black people in the world before Clay came along, loads of them. Back in the 1960s they impinged on the rest of us largely as entertainers, if they were famous black people, or as the unwitting cause of indigenous race riots if they were not. But they did not really speak to us; we knew nothing of them, here in England.

A long and arduous flight back from the Caucasus, but worth it nonetheless for the meaningful protest we had staged in the fragrant and lovely Georgian capital, Tbilisi. They have opened a vegan restaurant there called the Café Kiwi — an affront not just to ordinary Georgians, but to all right-thinking people, surely. A bunch of us stormed the place carrying large chunks of grilled lamb on skewers and spicy sausages, which we flung at the epicene customers, who cowered beneath their tables and were unable to fight back because their bones had been made as brittle as matchwood by a diet consisting entirely of nuts and berries.

Apologies for the lack of blogs – I’ve been on jury duty for two weeks. Hang the bastard, regardless of the evidence, was my watchword as jury foreman. Anyway, normal service will soon be resumed. In the interim, let me give the few of you who care about football my take on the England team at present, and its chances in France next month. I was of course delighted we beat the hideous, cheating, Turks – and in the end with something to spare. But what we learned was this: Playing Jamie Vardy on the wing is stupid. Put him in the centre with Harry Kane. So that means some variation of 4-4-2. Yes, de trop. But it works for us.

I got an email this week, from a chap called Harry, which began as follows: ‘I am writing to inform you that I will be carrying out the investigation on behalf of the Labour party into the circumstances that resulted in your suspension from the party.’ Harry went on to say that he will be ‘conducting interviews with witnesses’ and added: ‘I will also need a time when you are available for an interview.’ This last presumably as an afterthought: I suppose we need to hear from him. Anyway, at this interview (to be conducted in London, natch) I am allowed to bring along a ‘silent witness’ —someone who is not permitted to intervene on my behalf but can sit beside me with a consolatory expression on their face and perhaps hold my hand.

I am having terrible trouble with my hair at the moment. It is lank, flat and lifeless. There are split ends. Also, it doesn’t smell too good. What’s that appalling stench, my wife asked recently while sitting next to me on the sofa as we watched a rerun of the old racist editions of Midsomer Murders starring the excellent John Nettles. ‘Probably the dog, again,’ I replied — but I knew that was a lie. I knew it was my hair. It smelt like that rotten cheese Italians eat. I don’t know why, because I wash it frequently enough. Maybe, to adapt Orwell’s mordant observation, at the age of 56 everyone has hair which smells exactly as they deserve. In my case, Gorgonzola, with a subtle undertone of raw sewage.

Yay – Izzy Christiansen! Yay – Beth Mead! I daresay you were as thrilled as I was to see that these two women had been named as, respectively, PFA Women’s Players' Player of the Year and PFA Women’s Young Player of the Year. Izzy plays for Manchester City, Beth for Sun’lan. You have never heard of either of them. You will never see them play ever. Both are worse at football than the worst player your club has ever employed. Yes, worse than Seth Johnson. Worse than Ade Akinbiyi. And yet they were given equal billing by the BBC at the Professional Footballers' Association awards with Riyad Mahrez and Dele Alli. I have nothing against Izzy and Beth. I wish them luck. But why the pretence that they are on a level with the male players?

‘What’s in the news this week?’ I asked my wife as she browsed the first newspaper we had seen for a whole week, having hitherto been blissfully disconnected from the rest of the country, without phones or the internet. ‘Muslims, largely,’ she replied, flicking from page to page, ‘a bit on in-and-out, but mainly it’s the Muslims.’ Oh, good. A perpetual optimist, I had rather hoped that during our week away the frequently promised Islamic Reformation might have taken place and peace and enlightenment spread all those many miles from the jungles of Banda Aceh to the dilapidated terraces of Kirklees. But nope, apparently not. They were still up to their stuff, a good few of them.

I see that a small furore has been occasioned by the South Downs National Park. It has urged walkers to stop and talk to one another in a civilised and friendly manner. I do not know what business it is of a national park to enjoin us to act like human beings – these bodies get a little above themselves and part of me would like to tell them to get stuffed. That has been the general response from southerners, such as Clive Aslet, the former editor of Country Life, that magazine which still puts some skanky deb wannabe on page three every week. But still. There is not another national park in the country where such an injunction would be needed.

My favourite quote of the year so far comes from the author Fay Weldon. ‘If this were an all-woman society,’ she said, ‘we wouldn’t have television. We’d just have lots of nice cushions.’ Fay was making the point that it’s men who do all the -inventing and most of the work. She has since profusely apologised for this remark and others made during the same ‘off the cuff’ interview — almost certain proof, then, that what she said is largely true. But only largely, Fay. Without women we might not have discovered either of the unpleasant radioactive elements polonium and radium — both stumbled upon by Marie Curie, who was habituated (unwisely) to carry chunks of them around in her apron pocket.