Why are businesses so terrified of idiots?

I am boycotting Center Parcs. Admittedly, this is not going to have an enormous impact upon my life. It’s a bit like announcing with great pride and fervour that I am boycotting Clare Balding or Pakistan or goat’s cheese. All of those things I am perfectly able to live without and already do so. I will never eat goat’s cheese, visit Pakistan or watch Clare Balding.

I did once visit Center Parcs, mind — about ten years ago. It was excruciatingly awful — the kids hated it as much as we did. Extortionately expensive, restrictive, boring and full of who I can only describe as ‘tossers’ cycling along tarmacked lanes through scrubby faux-woodland with their awful children shrieking in kind-of hanging baskets affixed to the back wheels. A place for middle-class people possessed of no imagination and too much money. The awful chain-food slop in the overpriced restaurants, the supposed attractions which resembled the stuff in the brochure in much the same way as Theresa May resembles Margaret Thatcher. The enforced jollity and the petty little niggling rules, designed to screw as much money out of you as possible. A confected simulacrum of nature and wildness for people who really hate both of those things.

So, no loss then. As a political activist, I yearn for the day when I am forced to boycott something I actually care about and would miss. Such as cigarettes or toad in the hole. Or indeed Virgin East Coast trains — which I did in fact boycott for a week when it announced it would no longer sell or give out copies of the Daily Mail on its dreadful, deteriorating, bankrupt service from London to the north-east. This was a real problem, as my only alternative to get up to Teesside was Grand Central, which has far fewer services and takes longer.