Go away!

I once challenged a Staffordshire Terrier owner whose dog had jumped up at one of my kids at the entrance to a playground. I asked her to control her dog. She said that he was quite friendly and wouldn’t hurt them. I pointed out that, however friendly her dog, my and others' kids might not like it jumping at them in that way. The woman and her male companion’s response was to repeat the words “Go away, go away” again and again in a rising crescendo of anger.

In the end I was grateful for my children’s presence. Not only were my fellow adult citizens public-spirited enough to modify the words “fuck off” which would otherwise have leapt to their lips as their preferred means of continuing the debate, but I didn’t have to take the three of them on armed with nothing but a large cuddly toy. And come to think of it, had my children not been there I wouldn’t even have had that.

There are plans afoot to train UK citizens how to deal with "challenging situations" like this. You know: people who are recreationally damaging things or who can't control their kids in public and - by extension, because these are the ones that are most likely to hospitalise me - people who throw litter everywhere or let their dogs defecate indiscriminately. Among the things to be taught are 'conflict resolution techniques' and 'negotiation skills'.

Leaving aside the question of whether the state should mind its own business, what fascinates me is the fact that we have let individual sovereignty over society go so far that the non-negotiable no longer exists. How many ways are there of negotiating someone out of letting their dog shit where the bus queue stands? You just don't let your dog do it, and you clean it up if it does, and if you can't work that out on your own I am not going to waste my time chewing the fat with you.

I'm going to tell you this just this once.

God Save The Dream

I spent much of yesterday evening and already an hour this morning dabbing my eyes at the joyful and deeply eloquent speechlessness of all of the GB Olympic athletes, rowers and cyclists who did so well yesterday. I am sure this is replicated in the other teams.

Such was the spirit between the heptathletes after Jessica Ennis crossed the final finishing line to win gold that I half expected them all to lift her up and chair her on a lap of honour.

In the end it's only sport, and in the big scheme of things sport is probably rather silly, but to see such distilled human joy amid this gentlest and most generous patriotism transcends that essential daftness, suggests that all is not indeed lost for humanity, and has me reaching for the hankies every time.

The Mass Psychology of Fashion or There's No Smoke Without Ire.

Why are smokers folk-devils? Why has an understandable concern about smoking become so personal?

It's one thing to disapprove of smoking. I do myself. I dislike the smell, I wouldn't date a smoker or live with one, and I’d do my best, without being impolite, to get out of accepting a lift from one. I'd hate my kids to take it up . And I admit that my Sunday morning hangover, incurred after consuming large amounts of what, if it were discovered or invented tomorrow, would be designated a Class A drug, is a little more bearable these days because my hair and clothes don't reek of smoke from the pub last night.

But it’s quite another thing for people to jog along behind moralistic state-sponsored banning-and-ostracising campaigns and call it civic virtue while being indifferent or celebratory about God-knows how many human activities that aren’t under the selective gaze of public opprobrium right now.

I know, I know: the passive smoking argument.  But careful: don't take it too far unless you're prepared to allow the state to legislate that any private home with dependant children should be a smoke-free zone. It's curious how people who happily tell adults how to to behave in places where they and others can choose not to go are indifferent to the very people who can't. So what'll it be?

Tolerance requires dislike or disapproval (which is why so many supposedly liberal and ostentatiously non-judgmental people, er, dislike it).  But it allows for the exercise of discrimination, for debate and for compromise. And it doesn't - because it can't - require laws to make it real and active.

On 'plastic Brits'

On the Today Programme this morning there was a dispiriting debate between a Daily Mail journalist and Sunder Katwala, the director of a think tank called 'British Future'. The subject was so-called 'plastic Brits' representing Great Britain at the Olympics.

The Mail man was saying - quite reasonably, I thought - that sporting mercenaries who apply for a UK passport because they wouldn't make the Olympic squad in their own country are not really British.

Katwala, who throughout was less intent on having an intelligent discussion than on attacking the Mail for its hypocrisy given, for example, its campaign to get the white South African Zola Budd a UK passport in time for the 1984 Olympics, said that anyone who gets a UK passport, including people who do so for mercenary reasons, is by legal definition a Brit so we should welcome and get behind them, and there's an end on it.

That bothered me.

Firstly, the Mail’s sins may or may not be real, but they’re irrelevant to the debate: returning to them again and again was a dishonest debating ploy that shed no light on the matter of ‘plastic Brits'.

Secondly, British Future’s website states that it’s keen to “engage those who are anxious about cultural identity”, though to what end it doesn’t say. One of its main aims is "building a modern British identity which helps us to build [two builds there, guys!] an inclusive citizenship, where we can all be confident about who we are, and which recognises the national and local identities we hold in Britain today too." I’d like to know how conflating, as Katwala did, formal legal identity with the deep, complex, shifting, culture- and time-bound elements of personal and collective identities serves either of those purposes.

I don't think it does. British Future could be building not a broad church but a house of straw. Which could burn easily.