Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle says that celebrity adoption has become an unsavoury game of Top Trumps, and that the Ukraine would be right to turn down Elton John’s bid for a baby The world may indeed be shrinking and its people becoming an undifferentiated morass, but east of the Oder-Neisse line they are not quite the same as us just yet. There is a certain infelicity when dealing with sensitive social issues, the sort of thing you hear over here only when no one is listening. Take the response from a senior Ukrainian politician to Elton John’s request to adopt a 14-month-old Ukrainian baby called Lev. ‘You won’t be allowed because you’re too old and you’re a poof,’ is what Sir Elton was told, pretty much in those words.

I haven’t seen much of my wife this week — she’s been camped out on the sofa, filling her boots with 9/11 porn. She loves it, can’t get enough of it, gagging for it. Sits there with a glass of pinot noir, shaking her head, knees tucked up into her chest. People falling from the windows, scary men on aeroplanes shouting in Arabic and waving box-cutters around, firemen covered in concrete dust; whole programmes about 9/11 text messages, doomed people telling their loved ones that everybody’s calm. And then a very long film culled exclusively from amateur footage — the double XX-rated Debbie Does Dallas of 9/11 porn; you got all the money shots — those planes hitting the towers, people jumping out, towers falling down, the lot.

Rod Liddle reflects on a recent poll which says that Russians are the world’s worst holidaymakers. Brits are just as bad, he says, leaving a trail of blood and vomit from Biarritz to Dolman Who are the worst people in the world, do you suppose, based upon your first-person contact with them? I always assumed it would be nigh on impossible to get any worse than a Somali — until, that is, I met a Saudi: woah, as they say. I ask the question because there was an opinion poll in the newspapers last week suggesting that Russians were the worst people in the world, or at least the worst people you meet while on holiday. They have evicted the Germans from the coveted number one position on account of their chav clothes, greed and appalling manners, it was reported.

Not so long ago, the National Consumer Council decided that some shops on railway stations were selling chocolate bars too cheaply and that the public should, for its own protection, pay more for them. This occurred at about the same time as the RSPB mulled over the possibility that it might start shooting or gassing or strangling parakeets (it has since denied it ever intended such a thing). All we needed was a short statement from the NSPCC to the effect that it was entirely in favour of the occasional child sacrifice from time to time and we would have been in an almost perfect upside-down world. But instead the NSPCC insisted that one in five children suffered from abuse, while one of the main disability lobby groups argued that one in three British people was disabled.

Rod Liddle says that the Equality and Human Rights Commission has been well led by Trevor Phillips — all the more reason to play straight with figures about the treatment of immigrant applicants for housing There was a report out recently which said that men who marry much younger women tend to live rather longer than men who don’t. This cheered me up no end. I’ve always had the vague suspicion that I might be immortal, beyond the reach of the Reaper’s scythe, and I regularly scour the newspapers for scientific evidence that this suspicion of mine is indeed well founded. And there it was. I married a woman who was much younger than me, you see, so, as they say — get in there, back of the net.

I wonder what Stephen Fry would write on Twitter shortly after he’d been hit very hard on the top of the head with a large spanner? Most likely nothing: the dead don’t Twitter — they probably use Facebook instead. But what if the blow didn’t quite kill? Give him a couple of hours and he’d be back. ‘Head hurts. Strange viscous fluid leaking onto the carpet out of my ears. Can’t see anything. Hey ho, Stephen! The dinner gong has sounded! Must soldier on.’ Or something like that; certainly a sentence where he refers to himself in the third person and some whimsical exclamation or exhortation last used when Hilaire Belloc was in his prime.