Writing columns: A bit more of the best bits of British breakfast reading
A few days ago I posted a column, claiming the Brits were, collectively, the best columnists in the world.
To prove my point I made a selection of five different columns, written by five different writers, which had appeared in that week’s online Times.
Today, I will go evenn further to drive my point home.
I will give you five excerpts from one and the same column, written by Times writer Rod Liddle.
Just trust me on this one – the Brits are the best:
1) Rod has a go at the Liberal Democrats and their hapless, ancient leader, Menzies ‘Ming’ Campbell:
The party keeps doing badly in by-elections and local elections, but not so badly that anyone has felt sufficiently concerned to bundle Menzies Campbell off to the glue factory and replace him with something possessed with dynamism - Nick Clegg, perhaps, or a bowl of pea and ham soup.
They deserve our sympathy, but only up to a point. There is a joke told by the American comedian, Emo Phillips. His German girlfriend told him she loved New York, especially the bagels: “They are delicious - but you just can’t get them in Germany.” And Phillips replied: “Well, whose fault is that?”
2) Government commissions are always an easy target but that’s no reason to let them get away with things – let alone slagging off TV cook Nigella Lawson:
A study commissioned by the government has criticised the pneumatic cookery writer Nigella Lawson for making her recipes too difficult by using “long sentences” and “complicated words”.
I suppose it would be going too far to say that anyone so thick that they cannot understand Lawson’s simple and elegant grammar should be left to die of rickets, as a service to mankind.
3) Rod on the British space programme and fellow journo, Richard Littlejohn:
The government is being urged by the British National Space Centre to spend more than £50m to put a man on the moon by 2020. Which man in particular they haven’t told us. Perhaps we will be allowed to vote on the issue, in which case I nominate the journalist Richard Littlejohn. He’d like it up there. Low crime levels, not too many immigrants, very few homosexuals, restrained - not to say entirely absent – atmosphere.
Littlejohn could float around the place for aeons, playing golf against himself and hectoring rocks. We could check on his progress every 25 years or so. And it would be comforting when we gazed upwards on an autumn evening, knowing that somewhere on that softly glowing yellow orb Richard was stamping around, protecting the moon from sexual perverts, abortionists, murderous Muslims and health and safety fanatics.
4) The British National Health Service (aka the financial black hole of Calcutta) is often used by columnists as a kind of easy to reach scratching post. Unlike its individual doctors (or services) it’s always there to oblige:
A builder who broke his ankle in three places will not be treated by the National Health Service for the intense pain he is suffering unless he gives up smoking. Doctors insist that John Nuttall’s recovery from an operation would be hampered by his habit. To which the answer is: never mind, why don’t you give it a go?
Nuttall contracted MRSA on a previous stay in hospital. An ankle operation seems the least the hopeless quacks might do in recompense.
It is time we started treating doctors the way they treat us. Doctors in supermarkets should be made to wait six weeks at the checkout till for an appointment and then have half their purchases thrown out of the trolley for being “unhealthy”. In off-licences they should not be served at all. In banks they should be told that they’re not getting any money until they agree to be on call at weekends and evenings and stop killing the rest of us through their incompetence.
Remember - 30,000 people a year die as a result of medical mistakes. Nuttall is probably better off hobbling around in pain.
5) And then there is the good old Church of England, and its luminous if slightly loopy leader, Rowan Williams:
The Archbishop of Canterbury has drawn an equivalence between teenagers who go around stabbing and shooting one another in gangs and middle-class kids who are urged to academic and sporting success by their parents. Both are under similar pressures in a very real sense, he pronounced, no doubt stroking his lovely ecclesiastical beard.
Rowan Williams is a charming and very erudite man. He has just completed a lengthy book on the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, whom he greatly admires. I assume he has a special regard for The Idiot.
I rest my case.
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