I’m Not Going To Turn Into Tolstoy On Page 200

Writing a newspaper column is a bit like doing stand-up comedy, except that for newspaper columns on both sides of the political divide have an annoying tendency to substitute jokes with outrage.

Writing a blog is a bit like writing a newspaper column too, albeit one with no rules and that hardly anyone reads. This is a good thing because no newspaper would print this what with my writing

PRICKFUDGE

in large letters right in the middle of it all. And that just about sums up my maturity level, I’m sure you’ll agree.

With blogs, newspaper columns and stand-up people prefer to find someone who reinforces their prejudices: “they say what normal people are thinking”, “their skewed view on life” and so on.

That’s why there’s a group on facebook, 69 strong, who think Richard Littlejohn should be Prime Minister.

That’s why I can read the Telegraph and forget about the scary people who read it until I read something by AN Wilson about how Gay Bishops have changed his mind.

As the question of homosexuality and the Anglican Communion seems to be in the air, I read two books to enlighten me. They have had the disconcerting effect of making me revise my judgment about the whole matter.

I used to think that it was intolerable for anti-gay bigots to use their repellent prejudices to blackmail the harmless Anglican homosexuals, many of whom have enriched the Church with their many gifts. But these two American books have made doubt shimmer through me.

Okay… *backs away*

The other side of this can be evidences by my reading of Charlie Brooker, a man clearly on my wavelength, at least I like to think so, writes about how much he hates hats, with particular reference to Ascot.

Every year it’s the same thing: a 200-year-old countess you’ve never heard of, who closely resembles a Cruella De Vil mannequin assembled entirely from heavily wrinkled scrotal tissue that’s been soaked in tea for the past eight decades, attempts to draw attention away from her sagging neck – a droopy curtain of skin that hangs so low she has to repeatedly kick it out of her path as she crosses the royal compound – by balancing the millinery equivalent of Bilbao’s Guggenheim museum on her head, and winds up forming the centrepiece of a light-hearted photomontage in the centre of whatever newspaper you happen to be reading that day, accompanied by a picture of Princess Eugenie in a headdress, and some milky underfed heiress with the physique of a violin-playing mantis, wearing nothing but a diamante cornflake on each nipple and a hat made out of second-hand dentures or something equally avant-garde.

I too have a funny shaped head and hate hats but in some perverse way I like putting them on. Hey, if you’re not doing anything this weekend why don’t we go down Marks & Sparks Marble Arch and I’ll try on all the panamas. I’ll buy you a mocha if you come along.

Who’s up for it?