Keys, wallet, phone, gun...i’m always bound to forget one
Maybe it’s just me. But I feel sorry for David Cameron’s bodyguard. According to reports, he accidentally left his gun in an aeroplane loo. All right, it’s a bit of a blunder. But let’s not be hard on him. There but for the grace of God, and all that.
Because let’s be honest: we all get a bit forgetful as we grow older.
I’m coming up to 40 this year, and I’m sure most men my age know what it’s like. You’re about to leave the house in the morning, when suddenly you’re struck by this strange feeling you’ve forgotten something. Anxiously you check your pockets. Is it your keys? No, got those. Your wallet? No, got that. Phone? No, got that.
And then you realise. Of course. It’s the gun you use to protect the former prime minister.
So you go back into the living room, and ask your wife. “Darling, have you seen the gun I use to protect the former prime minister?” She rolls her eyes, and says: “Not again. Where did you have it last?” You frown and scratch your head. Maybe it was when you were watching TV last night. Has the gun you use to protect the former prime minister fallen down the back of the sofa?
Nope, not there. So you go upstairs and try the children’s bedroom, just in case they’ve been playing with it. But of course their room is a complete tip, as usual. If there’s a 9mm Glock 17 pistol in there, you’re never going to find it.
By this point, you’re already late for work, and you still can’t find the gun you use to protect the former prime minister. But eventually, after turning the house upside down, you find it somewhere daft: the laundry basket, or the recycling bin, or the cereal cupboard. Or maybe you’ve tucked it behind your ear and somehow forgotten it’s there.
Embarrassing. But we’ve all done it.
In a way, guns are a lot like pens: you can never find one when you need it. So my advice for Mr Cameron’s bodyguard is this. Next time you go gun-shopping, buy a multipack. Say, 10 or 20 guns, just cheap ones, which you can leave in various places about the house. That way you’ll always have a gun handy. A gun on the kitchen table, a gun next to the phone, and so on. My mother used to keep a mug full of them inside her writing bureau.
It just gives you peace of mind. After all, you don’t want to be going up to people in the street and saying: “Sorry, mate – you got a gun I can borrow? It’s just that I’m meant to be protecting the former prime minister, and I can’t think where I’ve put mine.
“Yeah, cheers mate. I’ll bring it back in a moment.”
I couldn’t believe it. But according to yesterday’s papers, it’s true. Last year, pupils who speak English as a second language got better marks at GCSE English than pupils who speak it as their native language. In other words: immigrant children are better at English than English children are.
Well, I’m sorry. I know this is bound to offend the woke PC brigade. But it’s time someone said it.
If the English can’t be bothered to learn English, then they shouldn’t be here.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not racist. Some of my best friends are English. If a daughter of mine wanted to marry an Englishman, I’d have no problem with it. I’d welcome him into the family. I’m a modern man. Open-minded.
All I’m saying is: the English have got to make more of an effort to integrate into English society. And that means learning the local language.
Now, we’re a very tolerant country. We’re proud of that, and rightly so. But we’ve got to draw the line somewhere. According to a poll by Yougov the other day, 26 per cent of people in this country feel uncomfortable when they hear a language other than English being spoken in public. I know exactly how they feel. If I’m in a bus full of Polish schoolchildren, that’s great, because they all speak good English. But if the children are English, sometimes you’ve got no idea what they’re saying.
No doubt the usual do-gooders and easily triggered snowflakes will accuse me of being culturally insensitive. But I’m not anti-english. I recognise the contribution that the English have made to England. They work hard. They enrich our culture. Our NHS would be nothing without them.
All I ask is that they learn the language. Otherwise we’re going to end up with ghettoes and no-go zones, where no one speaks a word of English.
I suppose it happens to us all eventually. But I never thought it would happen to me. Put it like this.
In my teens, I was a pop music know-all. An indie obsessive. I reviewed gigs and albums for Melody Maker, the weekly rival to NME.
Yet today, in all seriousness, my main source of information about trends in contemporary music is a five-year-old boy who wants a song to dance to while he’s in the bath.
“Dada,” my son will say. “Do you know a song called Bad Guy?”
“No.”
“It’s a song called Bad Guy. Just type
‘bad guy’.”
So, dutifully, I open Youtube, and type “bad guy”, and find it’s a song by someone called Billie Eilish. Who I then learn is the biggest pop star in the world today, and has just won some record-breaking number of Grammy awards, and was recently commissioned to sing the theme for the next James Bond film.
Until that moment: never heard of her.
Here it is, then. Middle age. Any day now, I’ll be hammering on the door of my son’s room, and shouting, “Turn that racket down. Honestly, they don’t write songs like they used to. Why can’t you listen to something more tuneful, like Slipknot, or Marilyn Manson, or Extreme Noise Terror?” follow Michael Deacon on Twitter @Michaelpdeacon; read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion