This country used to be good in a crisis. Now everything’s a disaster. Have you noticed? And not even real disasters, like parts of the NHS, or the trains. Grey squirrels: disaster! Smartphones: disaster! My Fair Lady: disaster! Small exotic birds: disaster, disaster, disaster!
Head for the hills, because hoopoes are coming. Due to global warming, naturally. Hoopoes, a distant relative of kingfishers, are heading here from Africa and southern Europe, we are warned. Why is this disastrous? Because they stink, apparently. Like “the back of a bin lorry”, according to one report, the result of a liquid secreted in their tail glands.
Sounds nasty, as invasive species often are. Grey squirrels, for instance, evicting all our wonderful red squirrels that resided in abundance, except I’ve never seen one and I was born the same month the Beatles released A Hard Day’s Night. Anyway, I looked up these troublesome hoopoes and they turned out to be the little birds that are everywhere in Tenerife. Long thin beak, orange quiff, with black and white tips, black and white feathers — like Newcastle United have worn their home and away strip at the same time. We’d be lazing by the pool, they’d be hunting insects on the grass. Small flocks, with no discernible smell of rubbish at all. We were more perturbed by the couple that kept using our garden as a short cut from the main pool, emerging through the flower beds and making us jump. Them, I would have chased off with a stick. The hoopoes, no problem at all. Brighten up your garden no end, a hoopoe. We make such a fuss.
Class clowns
And over the daftest things. There’s a trigger warning on a Leeds Playhouse production of My Fair Lady. Tickets are being sold with a cautionary notice that the musical contains “depictions of high society and classism”. And that’s triggering? Just about every play in the English language deals with class in one form or another. What are the easily triggered going to do if confronted by the works of John Osborne, Oscar Wilde or Sarah Kane? Imagine Blasted. “This production contains scenes of cannibalism, infanticide, rape, extreme violence and classism. Probably. Look, we’re sure it’s in there somewhere. Everything else is.” What are those triggered by high society going to do if ever faced with a production of, er, High Society? Maybe, if you’re genuinely unsettled by My Fair Lady, theatre’s not for you. Although one might say the same of life.
Ono she isn’t
Some find the Duke and Duchess of Sussex very triggering too. Not me, although I was triggered by an article from a youthful person describing Meghan as “Yoko for my generation”.
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I’m sorry, but no. Just no. For a start that makes Harry the John Lennon and the royal family the Beatles, and I’m not having working-class geniuses put on a pedestal beside that lot. And Yoko Ono? Yoko is an artist. Genuine artist. Literal artist. Exhibition in London right now and everything. Also, she wrote Listen, the Snow Is Falling which is certainly up there among the greatest Christmas songs. A personal preference is for the version by Takako Minekawa and if that leads you to her song Fantastic Cat, you don’t even have to thank me. Meghan couldn’t be Yoko if she tried.
Smart move?
Also, it’s been quite the week for uninvention. We used to invent, now we attempt uninventing. We’d like to uninvent the car. We wish to uninvent the smartphone. Just for kids, of course. Adults are fine. No adult ever sent an abusive message, or was inappropriate, threatening, disruptive, dishonest or simply despicable on their smartphone. It’s the children that can’t be trusted; not us.
The irony is that for all the grandstanding now being done over mobile phones in schools, most classrooms banned them long ago. And there must always be exceptions. Many Type 1 diabetics — so that’s 28,000 kids — will have their blood sugar monitored using a sensor linked to their phone. You can’t confiscate that. It would spell disaster. A real one.
