There was a surprising omission in The Guardian’s birthdays column on Saturday, which failed to note that JK Rowling had turned 56. Some wondered if this was to do with the author’s belief that women don’t have penises, which has upset some Guardian readers. Has she been cancelled? The section’s editor was less than convincing in his response. Space was tight, he said. “Choices have to be made.” And so they dropped the most successful author on the planet. Still, at least they found room for Dean Cain, the 1990s Superman actor, Victoria Azarenka, world No 15 in tennis, and the jazz guitarist Kenny Burrell.
THE OLD NORMAL
The Duchess of York is a funny sort. Talking (or just thinking out loud) to Woman magazine, Sarah Ferguson says she recently saw a row of mushrooms. “Have you seen the fairies have put their umbrellas up?” the royals’ Madeline Bassett asked her ex-husband. “Yes, I have,” the duke replied. “Isn’t it funny,” Fergie added, “that after all this time, you don’t think I’m mad?” “It’s normal,” he said. “For you.”
With the Premier League saying yesterday that footballers can continue to genuflect against racism in the new season, the children’s author Michael Rosen says he will not go down in solidarity. “I do have one big problem with taking the knee,” the 75-year-old socialist says. “If I were to do it, I doubt whether I’d be able to get up again without help.”
THE WRONG BROTHER
Tony Benn liked being in opposition, as he wrote in his diary in 1979, but for many Labour MPs losing the 2010 election was the beginning of a long misery with no end in sight. Tom Harris, a former minister, is handling his catharsis via a podcast, in which he recalls the day Ed Miliband became their leader. Michael McCann, an MP, had the most extreme reaction, screaming: “We’ve elected Fredo,” a reference to the hapless Corleone brother, right, not the chocolate frog. “Godfather references were always popular in the PLP [parliamentary party],” Harris says. Unfortunately for Fredo, he made the country an offer it could all too easily refuse.
With Henley regatta next week, I had an email from Michael Gaine, whose father rowed for Leander and would often make up a guard of honour at crewmates’ weddings. At one, a boy saw the arch of blades they had formed outside the church and was heard to say: “Eh, mum, look at them oars.” To which she replied: “Them’s not ’ores, them’s bridesmaids.”
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SACRED AND PROFANE
The writer and clergyman Fergus Butler-Gallie was asked by Literary Review to give his celestial opinion on Nine Nasty Words, a book on the history of swearing by John McWhorter. Butler-Gallie knew the erroneous etymology of the word said to be an acronym for “Fornicating Under Consent of King”, but was delighted to learn that the first written usage of the F word came from a monk who used it as a marginal comment in 1528 to refer to his abbot. “The letters page of Church Times would be improved by such plain speaking,” Butler-Gallie says, “as opposed to the usual roundabout passive-aggression.”
