Rod Liddle

I see that the famous midget cook, Antony Worrall Thompson, has been cautioned for having nicked some wine and cheese from the Henley branch of Tesco. Indeed, it seems he was filmed tucking some Cathedral City Cheddar or something inside his bag on new fewer than five separate occasions. It’s been a tough few years for Worrall Thompson’s businesses, on account of the recession, and some of his restaurants have closed down. I have no great animus against AWT, and am of course steadfastly behind his work for FOREST. But there is a marked difference between the sort of treatment a well-known Tory-supporting chef gets from the legal system and that which is afforded to others who nick stuff from shops.

Here’s another one, part of an occasional series in these parts, of people from the newspapers who are, for often undefinable reasons, really, really annoying. Not always undefinable, mind. This is from a feature in the Guardian’s weekend magazine about what people got their kids for Christmas. First they speak to the parent, then to the kid. It takes a suspension of disbelief to accept that Matilda is a real person and was not instead created by Viz magazine in one of its more spiteful moments. If there is hope for the world, it surely lies with Dimitri. I have the suspicion that when he unwraps his cooking class, he might well punch mum, in a sustainable way. Matilda Lee, Dimitri's mother Being ethical informs my whole worldview.

Christmas is all about enjoying the look on the face of a loved one as he or she opens something which you know will fill them with great emotion. And so Christmas day came a couple of days early for me as I watched my wife open the Oftsed report on our daughter’s school and shriek with fury to see that it had been downgraded from ‘good’ to ‘satisfactory’ (or, as the word is better understood, ‘utter sh*t’). The accompanying letter from the headmistress was one of the most disingenuous and dishonest pieces of literature I have ever read. The rest of the day was spent watching the missus text her fellow mums, transfixed with rage. Anyway, I hope you all have a lovely Christmas and I wish you the best for the new year.

Usually at this time of year my family decamps for a weekend to some lovely city in what used to be called eastern Europe — Bratislava, Krakow, Vienna or, best of all, Budapest — for the Christmas fairs. The air tickets to these places are dead cheap, usually about twenty quid, and the hotels good value. A family of five — as ours is — can cover flights and accommodation for rather less than £200 all in. As I say, Budapest is my favourite, but Vienna is a good compromise (as indeed it was, geopolitically, for fifty years after WW2) for the kids, because of the fabulously tatty and agreeable city centre amusement park, Praterpark (with its creaking Ferris wheel famous from The Third Man).

I think this is my favourite seasonal story so far, aside from that Korean bloke popping his clogs. Toddlers at a playgroup in York have been banned from doing the hand motions to a nursery rhyme in case it inadvertently offends any deaf people who might, or might not, be watching. The rhyme in question is “Twinkle, twinkle, little star” and the problem has arisen because the gesture the kiddies use for “twinkling star” is very similar to the Makaton sign for a very rude word indeed, referring to a lady’s furry cup of sin. The sort of word one doesn’t expect young children to bandy about.

Christmas is a particularly horrible time of the year to lose a loved one, so our sympathies go out to the people of North Korea who have lost their beloved leader, Kim Jong-il. Apparently he had a heart attack on a train. As Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez has already commented, Kim was a ‘comrade’ in the struggle against oppression. A similar valediction has arrived from another progressive democracy, Iran. Elsewhere, Britain has said that it hopes his death will prove a ‘turning point’, which seems a bit callous when the poor chap isn’t even stiff yet. The successor is his younger son, Kim Jong-un, whose older brother was passed over because it was feared he was a screaming homosexual.

So, not only are school examinations so easy these days that they could be passed with some comfort by a plate of processed cheese, but the exam board people give the kids the answers as well. This is but one reason why our school leavers are, in the main, pig ignorant. When the Education Secretary Michael Gove angrily insists that there will be a full inquiry and that he intends to ‘maintain’ British exams as being the ‘best in the world’, he is presumably speaking from a rift in the space-time continuum which has transported him back to 1957. English education is, these days, a joke. However, one way to stop exam boards from revealing the answers in advance to schools is to end, immediately, all competition between exam boards.

I’ve always found it a little hard to put into words why I don’t like London. It’s an inchoate thing, really, and something which is difficult to express. But I don’t like the place and resent having to go there every so often. I suppose, at root, it’s because there are very few people like me living there. But then there are very few people like me living in Kuala Lumpur, and I like that city. I tried to write down, methodically, the things about London that annoy me; it was taking ages. And then I read this, in the “Good Deed Feed” of the Metro newspaper: “Thank you to my boyfriend, Fay, for picking me up after my first Zumba class on Monday. I still can’t feel my legs.” – Ash, London.

Ah, so this time Jimmy Carr has fallen foul of the increasingly vociferous Down’s Syndrome lobby. A few weeks back it was Gervais, who used the word ‘mong’, provoking fury among the god-awful bien pensant and the pressure groups. Now Carr has told a joke about those Variety Club Sunshine Coaches used to take Down’s Syndrome kiddies on trips. ‘Why do they call them variety when the kids all look the same,’ he said. Not a very good joke at all (but then I don’t find Carr very funny in general). But the response it elicited was funny. Some grandstanding idiot from the Variety Club said Carr should ‘apologise to every disabled child in the country’ and also buy them another coach.