Status Anxiety | 29 October 2011

I’ve finally arrived. No, I’m not talking about being in Who’s Who or going on Desert Island Discs. I’m talking about a stalker.

Okay, ‘stalker’ is a slight exaggeration. The woman in question hasn’t actually started going through my bins. She’s more of a cyber-stalker. For the past week or so, she’s sent me a message on Twitter roughly once an hour and, oh boy, are they abusive. I’m a ‘racist’, apparently, not to mention a ‘meeja tart’, a ‘half-rate novelist’ and ‘a joke’. And that’s just the stuff I can repeat in public. The extraordinary thing is, she writes for the Guardian and the New Statesman.

The whole saga started when the Evening Standard ran a story saying that the West London Free School had sent home an African-Caribbean boy because he turned up at school with an inappropriate haircut. He’d had a ‘number one’, which is explicitly forbidden by the school rules, just as it is in hundreds of schools up and down the country.