Jodie buys super pub

Supermodel Jodie Kidd has taken over a country pub.

She bought The Hal f Moon, a Grade II- listed venue in her local village of Kirdford, near Petworth, Sussex.

Jodie, 38, decided to move into the business af ter quitting her fashion career last year.

She said: “We’re doing a few upgrades and hopefully open in a month.”

But then you’ll see another picture of one of the victims, someone the same age as your son or daughter, your niece or nephew, and the mind will do what it does and you’ll be imagining the whole thing all over again. What are we meant to do with such thoughts?

One place they lead very naturally to is blind rage. To hell with Islamic fundamentalism, you think. Lock up and deport anyone associated with it. Anyone who even gives it headspace. It produces no art, no music, no literature. It wants to kill gay people and make women second-class citizens. What good has it brought the civilised world? Wipe it from the face of the earth.

You have to force yourself to remember that the overwhelming majority of Muslims condemn such fundamentalism as much as you do. That the Manchester bomber had been reported to the authorities FIVE times by friends and family members. That, statistically, you are in less danger now than you were in the 70s, at the height of the Red Brigade, IRA and Baader Meinhof.

Because to give into blind rage is to set yourself on the same path as Katie Hopkins, who called on Twitter for a “final solution”, directly referencing the genocide of the Holocaust. (As of writing, Hopkins has been sacked by the London radio station she worked for.)

It is to head down the same road as the American InfoWars “journalist” Alex Jones, who described the Manchester bombing victims as “liberal trendies” and implied that they had somehow brought their deaths upon themselves by liking pop music. (As a sign of how much worse things are in America, Jones was not sacked – instead, the Trump administration gave the company he works for official White House press credentials.)

It is to side with Morrissey’s vitriolic, borderline racist ranting. (And who’d have thought that, eh Linda? All those years ago, when we were standing there in awe, watching them do ‘How Soon is Now?’)

It is to go down the road of the feral. And you can feel that happening now, you can feel things getting more ragged and atavistic every day.

Where are we when the Republican politician Greg Gianforte can physically attack a Guardian reporter for having the temerity to ask him a difficult question and still win his election race?

Or where a BBC journalist is mocked and abused by a room full of Ukip members for having the temerity to ask their leader a question. Or you look at the video footage of the human disgrace that is Trump, brutally shoving the PM of Montenegro out of his way to get to the front of a photocall and then standing there, his jaw jutting like Mussolini as he preens and poses like a baboon.

Of course, these things are not in the same league as a terrorist attack but they are evidence of where we are headed: The place of Trump, Hopkins and Jones.

A place where decency and restraint are off the menu. Where views different to your own are met with physical violence. A place of bullying, pushing, shoving, zero-tolerance fundamentalism.

Ironically, it is exactly the same place where animals like the Manchester bomber are trying to take us.

Let’s not press down on the accelerator for them.