Rod Liddle

So, that’s it for petting farms, then. In today’s Daily Mail it is reported that some of the parents of the kids who became ill having contracted E.coli from (presumably) Godstone petting farm intend to sue for negligence. Whether they win or lose – and you have no idea how much I hope they lose – the mere existence of such an action will whack up the insurance premiums at every such institution in the country.

I remember being required to attend a meeting a decade or so back at the BBC, a meeting of “The News and Current Affairs Cigarette Working Party” (NCACWP). I asked in advance if cigarettes were provided or should we bring our own, but the organizers of the thing - Human Resources, natch – weren’t amused. Shortly after, smoking was banned in the BBC. I suppose there is not the remotest chance of David Cameron reversing the anti-smoking legislation, despite the havoc it has caused in the pub trade and the infringement of personal liberty and the cost to local councils of having beady eyed little men, with the deathly grey pallor of perpetual masturbators, poking their noses into any and every public premise on the lookout for evil smokers.

Much though I like and respect the chap, isn’t Jonathan Freedland slightly overstating the case? The headline to his Guardian article read: “If Obama can’t defeat the Republican headbangers our planet is doomed.” Later in the piece, Jonny admitted that some might see this assertion as “hyperbolic” or “deranged”. Maybe. My definition of it is high-camp leftist infantilism, for what it’s worth. Freedland’s point was that if Obama can’t push through a few harmless changes to US healthcare without being branded as “an amalgam of Stalin, Hitler and Big Brother” (sic), then what chance does he have of breathing life into Kyoto?

The headlines in this morning’s newspapers, and indeed on the BBC last night, were: “Israel found guilty of war-crimes”. This followed the publication of Richard Goldstone’s 600-page report which, forgive me, I haven’t read yet. I wonder, though, if those reporting the findings are not guilty of a little unconscious racism. Goldstone found both Israel AND Hamas guilty of war crimes which might also be crimes against humanity – but the culpability of Hamas was only a secondary feature of the reportage, and scarcely mentioned at all in some reports. It seems to me that, in news terms, it was assumed that it was a better story that Israel copped half of the blame because, after all, 'what does one expect from a bunch of murderous fundamentalist ragheads?

So, spite, then: is there anybody in Britain with a more exalted opinion of themselves than George Monbiot?  His entire column in today’s Guardian deals exclusively with the one subject which has obsessed the man for many years, and bored the rest of us: himself. In particular, he is outraged that the scientist Ian Plimer has apparently failed to rise to the challenge and debate the certainty of man-made climate change with the world’s acknowledged expert on the subject, George Monbiot. Plimer’s views were published in The Spectator recently: he is, according to Monbiot, a “climate-change denier” (a typically loaded phrase which deliberately echoes the accusation of “holocaust denier”).

I’ve become obsessed with a woman. I think she is going to crop up in this blog quite often because I can’t get her out of my mind. She is the last thing I think about before I sleep at night. I wake with her name on my lips. I feel shivery and bereft when others mention her name. She’s a nurse, of course – they always are. Her name is Mary Seacole. My two boys, aged 10 and 11, have been learning about the Victorian era. They enjoy history, believing it to be a sort of competition. I once saw them fighting over who was “better”, the Romans or the Tudors. “It’s the Romans, you fucking spastic” my eldest screamed before punching his bro. I sort of agree with that analysis. So, the Victorians, then.