Zoe Strimpel

My friend recently told me about a young Chinese woman who was staying with them and kept tittering to herself. Asked what she was finding so funny, the answers were telling. In one case, it was because she had seen so many people lounging in parks that she had assumed the working day had been cancelled from on high – and was amused to find out it was a normal weekday. Then there was the way that all the shops and cafés were shut by 9 p.m. Again, the private merriment. ‘Nobody works here!’ she exclaimed gleefully. In a sense, she’s right. Of course some people work – those in manual and service-sector jobs, for instance.

When I lived in Berlin a decade ago, I was struck by the contrast between the dullness of young Germans and the incredible weirdness of everything else. Only in German could the word for ‘gums’ (Zahnfleisch) mean ‘toothflesh’. And only in fleisch-mad Germany (the word for ‘meat’ is the same as ‘flesh’, which is somehow incredibly disgusting) would people snack on raw pork, a dish known as mett. Mett, also known, rather curiously, as Hackepeter, is sometimes offered at buffets in the shape of a hedgehog (what else?) with raw onion spines. It simply doesn’t get stranger.

Any sane proponent of Britain’s liberal democratic values should be angry. We are facing an apparent crackdown on our once-robust freedoms in the form of a ban on banter. A tweaked clause in Angela Rayner’s Employment Rights Bill, currently making its way through parliament, says that employers must take ‘all reasonable steps’ to prevent harassment of their staff by third parties. It is intended to relieve ‘anxious’ staff of the fear of going to work and being upset by colleagues or punters, and has caused a total meltdown on the free speech right. Rightly so. The bill could indeed equate to a clampdown on normal back-and-forth between human beings. There are fears that pubs could be sued if their employees are offended when overhearing customers’ conversations.

Like many teenage girls, I was a committed boy-sniffer. By which I mean a Lynx-sniffer, since this delightfully cheap but heady deodorant was synonymous with all the raging hormones – and the promise that went with them. Even the geekiest, ugliest, runtiest of the litter could be transformed into an object of mystique and allure by the waft of Lynx – perhaps Apollo or Voodoo, the two late nineties variants I remember best. Even today, I can’t entirely shake my soft spot for male cologne, and I’m embarrassed to say that when it’s plastered on some vulgarian on the Tube sporting a gallon of hair gel and one of those puzzlingly horrid moustaches bleeding into beard, I fail to recoil.

At last, somebody has said it. Busking is akin to psychological torture, especially for those who have to live or work within earshot. This damning comparison came from no less than a judge at the City of London magistrates’ court, following a suit brought by Global Radio, the Leicester Square-based owner of LBC and Classic FM. The judge noted ‘the use of repetitive sounds is a well-publicised feature of unlawful but effective psychological torture techniques’. He found that the ‘volume’ of the buskers’ music was ‘the principal mischief’ but also delivered a damning assessment of the way out-of-tune pop songs are offensive to the human spirit. ‘It is clear that the nuisance is exacerbated by the repetition and poor quality of some of the performances,’ said the judge.

Dubai is the new black: it’s everywhere and apparently for everyone. The steady trickle of first-person tell-alls about starting over in the Emirate has, since the Labour government moved in, built to a tsunami. ‘How I became a Labour school-fee exile in Dubai,’ written by Isabel Oakeshott, partner of Reform’s Richard Tice, was one that scored particularly highly among readers. ‘We moved from Aberdeen to Dubai – it is hugely expensive to have a family here,’ reads another headline. ‘Low tax might sound affordable, but life in the glitziest emirate is anything but cheap.’ James Vince, the cricketer, is another recent high-profile Brit to relocate there.

Could it be? Could the world’s sexiest, coolest woman be turning... basic? It has come to feel as if that effervescent, mercurial quality that kept her aloof from the cut and thrust of the celebrity rabble – the endorsement-chasers, the tell-all-interview mongers – has evaporated. Kate Moss is turning into the very thing she had always been at pains to shun. Moss once called an EasyJet pilot a ‘basic bitch’ after being escorted off the plane for swigging vodka from her carry-on after Sadie Frost’s 50th birthday. Now she is becoming a basic bitch (to say nothing of her daughter Lila, whose bare nipples at London Fashion Week have been the talk of the internet town). It began when she embraced Topshop as its designer, launching in 2007.

I have always marvelled at the attitude of cat owners who point to bloodied arms or dramatic scratches and explain – with docile, almost apologetic acceptance – that Jasper or Bella just got a bit annoyed. It was all the human’s fault for patting them in the first place. Violent animals are a form of domestic abuser and should be treated as such. Why would anyone allow something to attack them – or their children – rather than simply removing the animal from their home? Sure, they are unlikely to maul you to death, unlike the technically banned XL Bullys, but it’s a different story for wildlife. Domestic cats, the wily rotters, are thought to kill around 270 million birds, mammals and reptiles per year across the UK. They’re the nukes of the animal kingdom.

As a girl, and later a woman, prone to barbs and punchy elocutions, I have encountered a great many repercussions for my words. My re-education began in primary school when the mother of a classmate angrily rang my mum to tell her that I had said this or that outrageous thing to her daughter. (A daughter who was herself tough as nails and a crafty little madame; I never picked on those weaker than me.) Over time, the pain of fallouts with school friends became the stress of getting communication wrong in the workplace, which carries its own, more formal and sinister consequences. Now I try to pause and be polite and ‘reasonable’ (one must be ‘reasonable’!) no matter how angry, anxious or upset I feel in the face of blatant foul play, falsity or injustice.