We’re all bound to lose out
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REMEMBER when wildlife documentaries made you enjoy the wonders of nature? Here at home we thought about watching David Attenborough’s Sevenworlds One Planet on BBC One but decided that it would just be another exercise in “we’re all doomed” and “it’s all your fault”. On balance we thought it would be more fun to share a cup of hemlock and flagellate ourselves with spiked thongs.
■ A LETTER from 72 female MPS to the Duchess Of Sussex deplores her treatment by the media and claims that “some of these stories have outdated colonial undertones”.which is a weaselly way of saying (with not a single example given) that they’re racist.
Now, I lap up stories about the Royals, and I’ve read masses about Meghan but I haven’t seen any stories in the mainstream media that were racist. Quite the contrary.
The presence of a mixed-race woman in the Firm was welcomed. But what has happened since is that anything that is not fulsomely pro-meghan is regarded as a sign of latent racism. And if you disagree, this is yet further evidence of your unconscious bias.
Last week Barack Obama spoke at the Obama Foundation’s annual summit in Chicago with some stern words for the “woke” generation that is forever “calling out” perceived wrongdoers. “If all you’re doing is casting stones, you are probably not going to get very far,” he said.
Let those 72 women MPS take note.
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SPECIALLY for the Metoo era – there’s a new version of the popular 1944 song Baby It’s Cold Outside. It’s been rewritten by singer John Legend for a Christmas album. In the sweet, flirtatious original a man tries to persuade his lady friend to stay because... well... there’s a blizzard outside, and she won’t be able to find a cab, and so on. Some claim this is a dangerous song that endorses date rape. Sigh.
In the new version the man piously asserts: “It’s your body and your choice.” Classic mansplaining in other words.
And they call this progress?
AS WE all must have hoped, musician Stephen Morris, pictured, has been reunited with his treasured violin – which he left on a London to Orpington train. It was handed back to him in a supermarket carpark on Friday, a little over a week after he alighted at Penge East, remembering his bike but not his 310-year-old instrument... worth £250,000. A horrible, heart-stopping moment.
Musicians seem particularly prone to leaving their instruments behind, which is odd as they have such an emotional bond with them. In 1999 the great cellist Yo-yo Ma performed at Carnegie Hall with the Newyork Philharmonic and then took a taxi back to Manhattan’s Peninsula Hotel. As the cab drove away he felt he was missing something. And then he realised he’d left his 1733 Stradivarius in the boot.
Forgetting something as big as cello is rather like forgetting a medium-sized child. Nobody has ever let David Cameron forget that he left his daughter Nancy behind in a pub after Sunday lunch. How could he?
Very easily. I’ve never had any problem understanding how absent-minded Miss Prism in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance Of Being Earnest puts the novel she was writing in a pram, and the baby she was minding in her handbag – which she then leaves at Victoria Station. It may be fiction but it’s perfectly plausible.
A survey by an insurance company found that the average person misplaces up to nine objects a day (really?) which means that by the age of 60 you’ll have lost 197,000 things. And, worse still, we spend about six months of our lives looking for them.
But why do we lose things or leave things, anything from car keys to topsecret dossiers? The scientific view is that it’s a failure of memory or attention which is why we all worry that we’re not just losing things, we’re losing our minds as well. Freud, on the other hand, says we lose things because we secretly want to get shot of them.
And also we lose things because today we have so much to lose. That’s why there are now tech aids such as Apple’s Find My iphone app. Though that still won’t do away with those queasy moments when you fish for a phone and it’s not there. That’s one of the unsung advantages of a landline – it’s always where you left it, attached to a wall. Whereas all our little electronic gizmos are a constant hostage to fortune. Losing something because you left it behind is harder to bear than when a thing simply disappears and you can blame it on some sort of cosmic disorder (the odd sock syndrome). When you leave something behind on a train or in a taxi your misery is magnified by your own guilt and the desperate hope that you will get it back.
Which is why we all felt that fiddle player’s pain... and rejoiced with relief when his beloved instrument reappeared.
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WE NEED to talk about tights. Every autumn the fashion people tell us that we will not be wearing black opaque tights this winter. Oh please, you say, pulling a pair out of your drawer on a cold dark morning. No, they say, firmly, put them away.
The tights police never approve of opaque black hosiery even though it’s flattering, cosy, long-lasting and kind of sexy in a Left-bank-beatnik way.this year they have ordained that tights should be black and sheer.the people who sit in the front row at fashion shows are wearing them.the Duchess of Cambridge has been seen with sheer legs, as has Katie Holmes (pictured) and Jodie Comer wore wispy black tights on the red carpet.
Convinced? No, me neither. Sheer black tights pucker and catch and make legs look like sausages in a nylon net. Fashion rebel I may be, but I’m sticking with opaques.
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HOORAY. My long hate campaign against the word “feisty” has a new supporter in Dame Helen Mirren. Complimented by Alex Scott of The One Show on all the “strong, feisty women” she’s played, Mirren said: “I have to say I don’t like the word feisty. I don’t know why. I think it’s because it’s always related to women.”
It’s also derived from the Middle English word meaning, ahem...flatulent.
Enough said.