To defend this charming feminine skill of mine against the masculine wit of some of our virile readers, I would like to point out the cognitive benefits of my little bouts of lateral thinking. Just remember those illuminating moments in the past couple of years when I merrily married vicious dogs and boring contemporary fiction, Jacques Derrida and a well-known Swedish furniture outlet and Jacques Demy and Charles Darwin. You did enjoy those, didn't you?
Not to mention the never published post on "Gordon Brown, the
Yes, he does look a little like Terry Jones's long lost fraternal twin.
And since I'm clearly not the only one who violently yokes random ideas together on a regular basis, I refuse point blank to kick this habit of mine.
For instance, in his fetid rant space in the miasmic depths of tabloid Britain, Peter Hitchens elegantly hopped from private loss - the recent death of David Cameron's handicapped son Ivan at the age of six - to death in action - three British soldiers killed in Afghanistan the week before - in order to gripe about the government's lack of patriotism. Because, you know, whinge, whinge, the Commons cancelled Prime Minister's Question Time out of respect for the former, but didn't do so for the latter.
While in London, we watched Channel 4's mildly interesting programme about the crazy cold snap that paralysed Albion earlier this year, Britain's Big Freeze. The show compared, with Tourettish regularity, the heroism displayed by ordinary British bus drivers, alchemists and stock market analysts in the face of A FEW DAYS OF SNOW with that of ordinary milkmen, pantry boys and market gardeners during ... wait for it ... you sure won't guess what's coming next .... The Blitz.
Why is it that whenever the UK has to paper over embarrassing facts - such as that the country only owns three rusty snowploughs and a couple of bags of kitty litter for grit - with references to their glory days?
Meanwhile, in Germany, Walter Mixa, bishop of the Bavarian city of Augsburg, has reiterated the Catholic oldie-but-goldie that abortion is like the Holocaust.
And today’s Guardian is shocked at the proposed use of Berlin's Tempelhof airfield for a rock concert. Undertaking one of those great mental leaps so beloved by the Great British Press, Sean Michaels opens his piece not with a whimper, but - hey - with one hell of a bang: "If 2009 is to have a Summer of Love, the season's biggest event may take place at a former Nazi airfield."
Well folks, if you want a Nazi analogy, how about taking on Paris "Valium" Hilton? During our sojourn in London I had the dubious pleasure to watch a couple of instalments of that perfectly useless waste of time called Paris Hilton's Best British Friend - a show in which a bunch of fake-baked wannabes are bundled together in a claustrophobic space to compete for the privilege to "chill out in LA" with a dim anorexic heiress (wearing what seem to be whole minks for fake eyelashes) by a strategic combination of obsequious arse-licking, devious backstabbing and voluntary auto-humiliation.
Life's all smiles, "sweethearts" and touchy-feely camaraderie in the house until the next symbolic liquidation. The Big Brother banality is regularly broken up by show trials that inevitably lead to the "eviction" of members of the group for failing to "click" with
And you know what: They all dig the psychological cruelty of and absolute submission to their passive-aggressive, all-American dominatrix.
Yes, it would take a brave cultural analyst to discover the underlying totalitarian structures of this show, investigate their subtle fascism and then elucidate what this all tells us about contemporary Britain.
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