Virginia Blackburn
WHO knows where we will all be 30 years from now? If I’m still around I’ll be too old to care, which is just as well, for my prediction is this: we will be governed by a bunch of ninnying, cosseted idiots. I refer to the student body of today, with their safe spaces and their obsession with gender (namely, that you’re not born with it, you choose it) and their intolerance of anyone who doesn’t share their world views and their call for the past to be censored, especially if it involved old white men.
Every time you think this bunch of sensitive, shivering flowers could not possibly seem even more ridiculous, you are proved wrong. The latest news is that university students are to be reminded to wash their hands. Admittedly the actual perpetrator of this nannying behaviour is the NHS, not the student body, but still.
When are they going to learn that they are not giant toddlers and will have to stand up for themselves in the world?
This is a world in which Oxford – Oxford! – law students are given “trigger warnings” that lectures on sexual violence may be upsetting and that they will be allowed to leave. I pity their future clients.
A world in which, with no sense of irony whatsoever, a Rhodes Scholar (Oxford again) demands that a statue of Cecil Rhodes be pulled down. A world in which students are “protected” from the content in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, not on the entirely reasonable grounds that it is tedious beyond belief but because it contains veiled references to suicide.
I recently heard of a case in which a US student was so upset by a book’s content that she took to her bed for a week. No idea if it’s true but the fact that it even sounds
SIBLINGS GROW ON US
A NEW report frets that many children prefer their pets to their siblings. Worry not: it will pass. When you are growing up you are learning to fight for your position in the world and that involves constant conflict with those closest to you, whereas your pet is furry and cute and doesn’t answer back.
Fast forward 40 years and your parents are old and failing and the only person who can help you deal with the situation and understand how you are feeling is your companion from the nursery. Believe me, it makes you see your siblings in a very different light. ST CLARE’S School in Handsworth is caught up in a row after they banned a four-year-old Muslim girl from wearing a headscarf.
There’s only one thing – the school is a Catholic institution. Just what did her parents expect?