Here is a reminder, Dad’s Army started in 1968 and is 50 years old!

Hello – here is the sludge from the bottom of the culture wars bin. I did have to wash my hands three times afterwards, but there you go.

Among the miasmic waste is news that public service broadcasters in the UK will have a legal requirement to produce “distinctively British” programmes. Ministers, who in general don’t watch television, are said to be drawing plans for the sort of programmes the rest of us should watch in Batshit Brexit Britain.

Fleabag, Derry Girls and Only Fools And Horses have been cited as “distinctively British” programmes that would meet this obligation.

According to a report in the i newspaper, “Ofcom will be asked to draw up a workable definition of the concept.” Good luck with that, Ofcom.

Media minister John Whittingdale told a Royal Television Society conference that Dr Who, Downton Abbey, Great British Bake Off and Bodyguard were international hits that also reflected British values. Choosing a time-travelling intersex person, some posh-and-understairs semi-historical fluff, and a programme about cakes seems random, but then this whole idea is mad and a little sinister.

Somewhere along the way someone mentions Dad’s Army because they always do. Somewhere along the way someone mentions Carry On films because they always do.

Here is a reminder, Dad’s Army started in 1968 and is 50 years old!

How right-wing governments love to tip into this controlling behaviour, stirring up a milky tea British version of China banning reality talent shows and ordering broadcasters not to promote “sissy” feminine men on television.

Here’s are some suggestions for old TV shows that could be remade…

It Ain’t Half Woke Mum, featuring unfunny stereotypes as they bungle through life, armed only with puny puns.

Don’t Love Thy Neighbour Especially If They Are In Desperate Straits And Are Willing To Paddle Across A Dangerous Channel To Get Here (not a snappy title, I’ll admit).

Dad’s Brexit Army – those Europeans don’t like it up them, whatever it might be.

And so wearily on.

It’s almost impossible to define Britishness in this context. One argument put forward by Mr Whittingdale is that streaming services such as Netflix produce generic programmes designed to sell everywhere. Up to a point, but look at the lovely Sex Education, back any day soon for a third series. That Netflix hit is both British and international (a bit like sex, really).

My own leftfield pick for a wonderful British series would be this year’s Channel 4 comedy We Are Lady Parts, about a Muslim punk band, which is modern and multicultural, and funny and sweet.

From that sludge in the culture wars bin also is to be found news that Boris Johnson is to announce the return of imperial weights and measures. This would make it legal for market stalls, shops and supermarkets to sell their goods using only Britain’s traditional weighing system.

Wow, what an achievement in appeasing one or two recalcitrant market stall holders who object to using “foreign measurements”.

I am 64 and have lived most of my life using sensible metric measurements rather than complicated imperial measures.

@BorisJohnson Hello Boris. Weights and Measures Inspector here. Sorry to dispel your latest bit of kite flying.

1. The UK transferring to metric measures had bugger all to do with our EU membership. (1)

— Pippa Musgrave (@PippaMusgrave1) September 16, 2021

Thanks to the weights and measures inspector Pippa Musgrave for pointing out on Twitter that: “The UK agreed, when it signed the OIML treaty in 1856 to move to a single system of measurement (S.I. units). Metric measures have been lawful in the UK since 1875…”

So, it’s nothing to do with Brexit.

Also in that bin are reports that our British pint glasses can once again carry the Crown stamp. Wow, what a freedom that is. A pint glass is and always was a pint glass, but now it can have a little Crown on it again.

A Brexit triumph, according to the increasingly potty Daily Express. Frankly my Brexit dears, I don’t give a damn what’s etched on the glass, so long as it contains good beer (British, continental, American – not fussed if it’s decent).

Once again, in looking forward we gaze over our shoulders, turning nostalgic about gallons and ounces and proper British potatoes sold by the muddy pound.

What a weird country. Still, at least grumbling about it all is thoroughly British.

I’VE never seen the point of reshuffles, which is strange as my wife likes to play that game. Mostly she reshuffles furniture and kitchen cupboards.

Blithely choosing to sit where a chair is usually to be found is no guarantee you won’t end up on the floor.

“There was a chair there yesterday,” I might complain.

“It looks better over there,” she might riposte.

My wife likes to change rooms, putting familiar things in unfamiliar places, and prime ministers like to reshuffle their cabinets, putting familiar faces in unfamiliar places.

The ins and outs always exercise the media in a lazy, routine way.  Tired old metaphors are dusted off, allowing the Daily Mail to swing the one above – “At last, Boris wields the axe.”

The Times puts an axe in his hand too. Yet some days Johnson looks as if he could barely wield a custard spoon, never mind an axe.

Meanwhile, the potty old Daily Express blusters: “PM’s ruthless cull to deliver Britain’s future.”

Ah, yes that future, those sun-lit uplands. And another brick in the slogan wall, this one embossed with: “Build back better.”

You may have heard those words fall from the mouths of hapless ministers, shuffled or unshuffled, as they talk about anything and nothing. They probably say it over breakfast, muttering that they are building back a better breakfast with their cornflakes, or something.

It’s fair to guess that Dominc Raab won’t have been impressed about being removed as foreign secretary, especially on finding that Liz Truss got the job.

“Liz Truss! Are you f****** kidding me!”

Whether or not a hole was punched through the Downing Street wall is open to speculation, but Raab does appear horribly cross nearly all the time. He always looks one twitch from fury as his frown darkens and a blood vessel in his forehead throbs like an angry worm.

After Raab went on that holiday to Greece, having been warned Afghanistan was about to fall to the Taliban, he was hauled off the beach and later pictured at his FO desk holding a phone. And when I say ‘holding’, I mean grasping it with such determination he appeared to be weighing up its potential as a murder weapon.

Gavin Williamson was sacked as education secretary, an ejection thoroughly deserved – but how come he was allowed to hang on for so long? His replacement is Nadhim Zahawi, who steps over from a short spell as vaccines minister, coupled with being the go-to minister to appear on the media and bore everyone half to death.

Oliver Dowden is out as culture wars secretary, replaced for reasons of what – mischief, spite, just for the hell of it? – by the reliably appalling Nadine Dorries, whose brief will include the BBC and privatising Channel 4 (a terrible idea she will pursue alongside slagging off snowflakes and so on).

As for Liz Truss, she seems to have been promoted for trundling around the world and bragging about post-Brexit trade deals that were there already but have had a new label slapped on.

Michael Gove, a sort of cut-price Machiavelli in an M&S suit, has been pushed sideways by his old frenemy Johnson to housing, communities and local government, and has responsibility for the “levelling up” agenda, whatever that might be.

You may have noticed, incidentally – and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in York certainly has – that levelling up doesn’t count for people on universal credit who are about to have their £20-a-week uplift removed by Boris Johnson, who seems grotesquely pleased with this cruel move.

Anyway, according to his Twitter account, the prime minister and his reassembled pieces of cabinet furniture will be working “tirelessly to unite and level up the whole country”.

Oh, and yes, they’ll be building back better too, meaningless slogan by meaningless slogan. So that’s all right.

THE spine is frayed with age and tattered shreds remain from the book it once supported, A Century Of Detective Stories, with an Introduction by GK Chesterton.

This relic of a book, brown to start with, browner still with age, otherwise features a noir-style drawing of a detective wearing a trilby and holding a gun, and the name of the publisher, Hutchinson.

The gun is a puzzle in a way, as the owner of the book, my grandfather Bill Cole, was a peaceable man, a Methodist who spent the Battle of the Somme toiling through blood and mud as a stretcher-bearer.

Quite why a religious man who survived all that would have owned  a book of detective stories adorned with a man carrying a gun is one of those little mysteries, akin perhaps to how his equally religious wife, Eunice, loved the wrestling on TV. Just because you like one thing, or live one way, doesn’t mean you cannot like another.

When my grandmother died, we were asked by my aunt if we would like to take something from the house in Southampton.

We chose a rose from the front garden, successfully transplanted to York but long since withered and died, two small and roughly carved wooden figures of a man and a woman, bought by my grandparents on a holiday to somewhere, Switzerland or Austria perhaps, and still on a shelf, and that old book.

Many of the writers are forgotten to time, although some are indelible: Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Wallace, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, and Chesterton himself.

The titles are great: The Avenging Chance, Superfluous Murder, The Case Of The White Footprints, The Other Hangman. A story entitled A Lesson In Crime is by a couple called Cole – GDH & M Cole. GDH is described as a writer of economics “who has produced many novels and short stories in the detective vein. He is also a poet and a contributor to a number of important journals”.

Of his wife no other mention is made.

Still, it is pleasing that a man called Cole owned a book containing a story written by a man called Cole, and that his grandson called Cole would grow up to publish a couple of novels featuring detectives too.

I’ve owned this now spineless book for years but haven’t read all or any of the stories. Maybe I did but forgot, and it is past time to do something about that.

Our daughter has left home again and has her own house now, so we’ve been having a sort out (or my wife has, with variably able assistance). Now she has her own studio, I have my own study, and on the wall before me is the spine of that book. I’d been meaning for years to do something with that fragment, then my wife found a frame and popped it in.

The important things we keep from previous generations are often not the ones you imagine, the old furniture or whatever, and never mind what Alan Clark once damningly said of his fellow Conservative Michael Heseltine, that he was the sort of man who “bought his own furniture”. Don’t we all? Better that than inherit mouldy old furniture.

An online search of second-hand bookshops suggests this book is a 1935 edition which, if in good condition, is worth £37, and contains 45 stories of mystery and intrigue by the foremost mystery writers of the period.

My time-weathered copy is worth everything and nothing, and anyway it’s not for sale.

FEELING cross about Boris Johnson is a waste of angry breath, but don’t let that stop you.

We are used now to his chicanery, charlatanism and his carefully cultivated clownish image, the hair mussed up, the suit ill-fitting, and his posh, barking intonation, where the words crash into each other like cars parked without a care on a steep hill.

And then there are the lies, the cheap bricks on which he stands and bellows. Johnson was sacked from The Times in the late 1980s for making up a quote. Rather than act as a deterrence, that dismissal seems only to have emboldened him.

Sometimes it seems deliberate; sometimes he just can’t be arsed remembering whatever damn thing it was he said last time. It’s as if he exists in a continuous dishonest present, in which nothing he has said, or ever will say, really matters so long as he continues to shuffle down that corridor. Either he is lying, or he has weaponised forgetfulness, or a mash-up of both.

Thanks to the Health Service Journal, we now have evidence that this habit appears to be written into government communications policy.

You may recall that last week the health secretary, Sajid Javid, boasted about opening a new hospital in Carlisle. He faced much online criticism for this, as it wasn’t a new hospital at all but a new cancer centre in the Cumberland Infirmary.

As he headed north for the opening ceremony, Javid tweeted that he was “Looking forward to opening one of the new 48 hospitals today” – pledging to open that number of new hospitals by the end of the decade being a Johnsonian wheeze.

What the HSJ has uncovered suggests that telling such whoppers is now official policy. The journal has discovered a communications ‘playbook’ for the government’s NHS building programme. This orders health trusts that major refurbishments and new wings or units which are part of the scheme “must always be referred to as a new hospital”.

This is astonishing, or it would be under any other administration, but this tatty lot regard telling the truth with the disdain that their boss holds for his comb.

The HSJ prints this telling paragraph from the comms policy: “The schemes named in the announcement are not all identical and vary across a number of factors. However, they do all satisfy the criteria we set of what a new hospital is and so must always be referred to as a new hospital.”

Johnson made this barmy pledge, and now the comms policy is being wrestled into a shape that fits his narrative, if not the poor, downtrodden truth.

Part of this is just crazy. I don’t know if the government has realised, but people live locally and tend to notice things. They’d certainly clock if a new hospital was being built, as hospitals are often huge and employ many people.

It’s not as if you wander around your area and suddenly notice a new hospital that wasn’t there before. People will notice and they should call out this nonsense when they see it.

The odd thing is, the new units or whatever that are being built are a good thing, so there is no need to wrap them in Brexit-style whopper-tape.

Incidentally, Brexit seems to be collapsing all around us, causing food shortages and other forms of pre-told misery, only hardly anyone at the BBC has noticed.

Perhaps a memo has gone out about that too – “The sunny uplands of this new arrangement satisfy the criteria we set of what getting Brexit done is and so must always be referred to as a great British success story.”

How delightful that John Cleese will present a series for Channel 4 about cancel culture. You can never get enough of grumpy old comedians grouching on about stuff.

According to a report in the Guardian, John Cleese: Cancel Me will explore “why a new ‘woke’ general is trying to rewrite the rules of what can and can’t be said”.

There are a few problems with the notion of ‘cancel culture’, but before we put a toe in that stagnant pool, here’s a WhatsApp exchange with my mother …

“We have been wondering what woke means. Can you tell us!”

“It started in the US as a way of describing liberal people who are sensitive about how others feel. Now it’s been turned around as an insult for liberals. It’s basically become a lazy shorthand used by right-wingers to be rude about anyone who disagrees with them.”

I hope that’s roughly right, as it can be hard to keep up.

My mother isn’t alone in being in the dark. According to a YouGov poll in May, most Britons (59%) don’t know what woke means. And yet the media is obsessed with something their readers half understand at best.

Such phrases are a cultural tic and can be horribly addictive. Just think of how ‘political correctness’ put on big boots and stomped all over the world, before finding its life partner, “gone mad”.

You could put a cigarette paper between ‘political correctness gone mad’ and ‘wokeness’. Or you could if you could find one. Perhaps we need a new measure of ideological thinness.

As you will recall, to be politically correct suggests using words that avoid insulting or offending people who belong to oppressed groups. A decent desire, you might have thought, but soon everyone was chuntering about ‘political correctness gone mad’ before they tired of that and switched to droning on about ‘wokeness’.

Such responses become a reflex, so instead of pausing to think about something, you just hit the buzz-phrase of the moment. Trouble is, these phrases – could we allow the neologism ‘tongue-jerk’ phrases? ­– take on a life of their own to the point where what they are complaining about becomes more myth than reality.

And that’s the problem with ‘cancel culture’. That and the possible double meaning in those two words. Is this an instruction to ‘cancel culture’ or a description of an alleged movement that wishes to cancel all debate?

Well, it’s the second, in theory. But cancel culture, along with its fellow under the tangled bedclothes ‘culture wars’, seems to be mentioned all the time with few actual examples of what is happening.

There is a weird victim culture wrapped up in this, whereby the Conservative Party (nearly always in power) and their friends in the media play-act being poor, defenceless waifs in the face of a mighty left-wing gale. Only it’s more of a breeze at best.

Also, this government seems keen on cancelling those who disagree with them, by pushing anyone presumed to be left-wing from museum bodies (as banged on about here previously more than once), while packing institutions such as the BBC with its own supporters. Richard Sharp, the multi-millionaire who says he has donated around £400,000 to the Tories, was Boris Johnson’s choice as chairman of the BBC.

Sir Robbie Gibb, a member of the BBC’s governing board and formerly director of communications to Theresa May, seems to be behind attempts to block Huffington Post UK editor Jess Brammar from taking up a senior editorial role at BBC News.

This has led to hysterical reporting in the Mail and elsewhere about why such an alleged left-winger shouldn’t be allowed to have such a role.

And you could call that cancel culture.

As for John Cleese, maybe he will discover something interesting as he sets out to meet those who claim to have been ‘cancelled’ for their actions and statements. The show’s not even been made yet, so we should give him a chance.

But I can’t help worrying it will be a dreadful exercise that could have been more interesting with another presenter. But the choice of Cleese got everybody talking, I suppose.

Are we really a “big-hearted country”? Foreign secretary Dominic Raab made this claim while addressing the Afghan refugee crisis.

Rumour has it he’d just been hauled back from Greece, to where he’d fled days before Afghanistan was about to fall to the Taliban.

No one saw that coming, apart from everyone not called Raab. And apart from the civil servants who told him to unpack the swimming trunks and stay at home.

Anyway, the papers are divided on the size of our heart. The loyal, never less than slobbering Daily Express has the front-page headline: “Big-hearted Britain to take 20,000 refugees.”

More sceptical, the Daily Mirror says this isn’t enough as only 5,000 will be admitted this year – “SAVE THEM” its headline pleads.

I’m with the Mirror on this one, but let’s rewind a moment.

Yesterday, Raab said that he and home secretary Priti Patel know from experience that Britain is a “big-hearted country”.

In his case, this refers to his Jewish father who came to Britain from Czechoslovakia in 1938, aged, six. For Patel, this dates to 1972, when Idi Amin expelled all Ugandan Asians, and Britain accepted 28,000 refugees displaced in this cruel fashion, including her parents.

Raab and Patel, then, both have family reasons to admire Britain’s openness, although only when it suits them.

Patel’s family background has, for whatever reason, made her mean-spirited towards refugees. She has been happy to out-Farage Farage by exaggerating the problem and following his nasty pointing.

Now the unrolling mess of Afghanistan has forced Patel, Raab and Johnson to don the T-shirt of quick compassion. Much like that time the clown who isn’t really called Boris dragged an England top over his shirt and tie when football was fleetingly his thing.

Pretending to care about football, pretending to care about refugees – it’s hard to keep up.

In interviews, Priti Patel has said “we cannot accommodate 20,000 people all in one go”.

Funny, that – perhaps she should check in with 1972.

Patel also declined to say when the first refugees would be rescued: “I’m not going to give a date, to pluck one out of thin air.”

Funny, that – as thin air is what she relies on for most of her opinions on refugees.

Not all Tories agree with the government’s approach. Former Cabinet minister David Davis, always the maverick’s maverick, said we should accept “north of 50,000” Afghan refugees. Tobias Ellwood, a former Army captain, told the Daily Mirror: “This is a woefully inadequate response given the scale of the refugee crisis we are about to face as a direct response to our withdrawal from Afghanistan.”

Those of us who celebrated Joe Biden not being Donald Trump are now left scratching our heads. Was the sound of banging doors in Afghanistan as the US scrambled out and the Taliban rushed in what we’d hoped to see? All right, it was Trump’s plan, but did Biden have to adopt it so wholeheartedly?

Parliament has been recalled as I write, so that the size of Britain’s heart can be examined. Johnson & Co are left in a bind by this situation, as the number of Afghan refugees we are prepared to accept is determined not so much by compassion as by what Tory backbenchers will tolerate.

Still, let’s end on a positive view of Britain, taken from Bill Bryson’s Notes From A Small Island. A lovely, hilarious, grumpy and wise book which I have just read again.

This comes towards the end…

“Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realised what it was that I loved about Britain – which is to say, all of it. Every last bit of it, good and bad – Marmite, village fetes, country lanes, people saying ‘mustn’t grumble’ and ‘I’m terribly sorry but’, people apologising to me when I conk them with a nameless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, stinging nettles, seaside piers, Ordnance Survey maps, crumpets, hot-water bottles as a necessity, drizzly Sundays – every bit of it.”

Those of us fortunate enough to have been born here should remember that our presence on this small island was a matter of luck. Never forget that when thinking of those in trouble who need shelter here, stinging nettles, Marmite and all.

Dolly Parton and James Patterson Photograph: Courtesy of Dolly Parton

Country singer Dolly Parton is writing a novel, news to dampen the soul of struggling writers everywhere.

Yet publishing is an industry whose product happens to be books. And if you want to shift books, getting Dolly Parton to write one is a smart move.

Getting her to write one with James Patterson is an even smarter move.

Patterson is a one-man publishing industry, a mega-selling thriller writer who seems to enjoy these collaborations. Among many such side projects he has co-written two political thrillers with former president Bill Clinton.

Parton is a debut novelist, although she has written several memoirs, including Songteller: My Life In Lyrics. The many country-pop songs she has ‘told’ include Jolene and 9 to 5.

Her novel is called Run, Rose, Run and is said to concern a young woman who moves to Nashville to pursue her music-making dreams. Barely a skip from reality, but same goes for the Clinton/Patterson show.

Easy to feel sour about this, but pointless. Besides, Parton seems to be an admirable person, from what you can tell. She donated $1 million to the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine. That makes her a modern heroine, although anti-vaxxers may disagree, as they like doing that.

Other causes she has supported include her own Dollywood Foundation, which aims to cut high school drop-out rates. Under the same umbrella, probably a frilly one with a cowboy-boots motif, she set up the Imagination Library to send one book per month to every child in Sevier County, Tennessee, from birth until their first year of school.

The list of her good deeds is too long to tote up further, but literacy is a common thread, inspired by her father, who could not read. A woman who wishes to use her power, influence and money to help tackle illiteracy is hard not to love.

Parton grew up “dirt poor”, as she has put it, and ended up a multimillionaire singer. It’s quite a tale (not a ‘journey’, for God’s sake, not one of those). As she is doing good with what she has squeezed from life, it’s hard to quibble.

She is knowing about the self-creation that is Dolly, a cheap and gloriously tawdry creature who enjoys her own brashness, while being astutely aware of what she is doing under that persona.

This self-awareness is clear from one of her best-known quotes – “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” If her book contains lines like that, perhaps it will be worth a read.

There is a trend for famous people writing books, with the publishers knowing they are likely to be on to a good thing. Richard Osman shows that, with The Thursday Murder Club.

I’ve not read his novel, a crime book at the cosy end of the spectrum. It’s super-successful, there’s a sequel (The Man Who Died Twice), and the publisher who had that idea hit gold.

Osman seems to be a witty and likeable man, so it’s hard to resent his success too. But if you wished to pucker your mouth, you could say he’s had all this laid on a plate.

My wife read The Thursday Murder Club and wasn’t that impressed, feeling it was only published because of the writer’s name and fame. A book-mad friend of sound judgment told me she enjoyed Osman’s novel. That isn’t enough to make me want to read it, but I heartily thank this same friend for also recommending Slow Horses, the first book in Mick Herron’s series of novels about a bunch of disgraced spies. It’s wonderful.

I had two crime novels published a while ago, and ever since have toiled on without a deal, happy to write, sad to see no printed book afterwards.

If Dolly and Richard have the world sewn up, maybe I should give up. Then again, no. Always writing, always hoping. Two novels are being written now in tandem. Perhaps one – or both! –will come to something.

Here is my favourite Dolly story. This concerns how she wrote two big hits in one day, Jolene and I Will Always Love You. Search online and you will find many people quoting this story. It’s a good tale, after all. But is it true?

One ‘fact-finding’ site gives the story a big tick, yet in a fans’ interview Dolly herself said she couldn’t remember. Years after the songs were released, she found the demos on the same cassette tape in her basement or somewhere. She thought it might have been the same day, week, or month. She couldn’t say for sure.

That story will probably stick around anyway, whatever Dolly remembers or doesn’t.

“Wow no cow!” as it says on the carton. And yet still a whiff of what a dairy-consuming sceptic might call bullshit.

Yesterday, Oatly lost a court case against a family-run farm in Cambridgeshire. Founded in the 1990s, Oatly produces a milk substitute made from oats – enhanced porridge water, if you like.

The firm sent the legal heavies after Glebe Farm Foods, saying their PureOaty plant milk took “unfair advantage”. A High Court judge disagreed, and Oatly was left with oat milk on its face.

Oatly make a big deal of being right-on and non-mainstream. If you look at what goes into their multimillion-selling ‘Oat Drink Barista Edition’, you may be surprised to find  sanctimony unlisted among the ingredients (“water, oats 10%, rapeseed oil…” – plus assorted minerals and vitamins found naturally in cows’ milk).

We have three types of milk in this house, milk-milk, soya milk and oat milk. The two that aren’t milk-milk are not allowed to call themselves milk, hence ‘oat drink’ and ‘soya squirt’ or something.

As the main consumer of milk-milk, being the family relic, I have one foot in a field of cows.

The barista oat not-milk is good in coffee, rich and creamy. I know this because I’ve tried it, before going back to milk-milk. What puts me off is not the taste but that sanctimony.

I have an empty cartoon before me now. “Shake me!” it invites, in the anthropomorphic way of modern advertising, where a thing becomes a person.

“Wow no cow!” it also says, as mentioned a moment ago.

Above those ingredients are the – frankly annoying – words: “The boring (but very important) side.” If this bores you, “flip the carton around and have a wonderful day”. It does and I did.

Then there is an extended joke about the carton being “upgraded to include the latest face-recognition software technology in order to upgrade user security…”

Gosh, I was chuckling over that for seconds.

“Powered by plants” it says on the other side – “What a cool thing to say…” There is more of this holy script, but you get the drift.

There is nothing wrong with all this. If you wish or need to spurn dairy, that’s fine (“Totally vegan,” the carton also says). It’s just that companies like Oatly pretend to be alternative and friendly, when they are just another massive corporation, prepared to bully smaller firms who edge into their shadow. They cash in on our conscience and adopt a “little-old-us” mateyness while churning out millions of those cartoon cartons.

During an earlier hearing in June, the court heard that Oatly had shifted more than £38m worth of that ‘barista edition’ oat milk, alongside £13m worth of other varieties of ‘not-milk’.

Clearly, they guard their trademarks carefully, but Judge Nicholas Caddick QC said it was hard “to see how any relevant confusion would arise” and dismissed Oatly’s case.

Philip Rayner of Glebe Farm Foods said it was “enormously gratifying… to see that smaller independent companies can fight back and win”.

On the BBC website report of the case, a spokesperson for Oatly wished Glebe Farm Foods “total success… moving forward” – funny, that, as the company had just failed in its bid to make the smaller firm move backwards. “We just think they should do so in their own unique voice, just like we do.”

And there was me thinking that it was only Boris Johnson’s spokespeople who are required to spout the most outrageous nonsense.

Right, I’m off to make a coffee using the stove-top espresso pot bought in Paris in the 1980s,  an age long before the words ‘oat’ and ‘milk’ ever snuggled up together.

Nigel Farage on Twitter

I HAVE never seen the point of Nigel Farage, that pimple on the bum of British life. Like the papule in that image, Farage is a painful presence.

Yet nothing seems to shake this awful man. If you must admire anything about him, and it really isn’t mandatory, you may concede that his self-belief is remarkable.

That and his way of diverting British life down narrow and nasty alleyways, like a pinstriped thug. Or standing on the cliffs at Dover and shouting at migrants, while dressed like a male model from the duller sort of leisurewear catalogue.

Still, I was clearly wrong in thinking those unkind thoughts about Nigel. Turns out that the point of Nigel Farage is as a fundraiser for the RNLI. Donations rose by a reported 3,000% thanks to his efforts.

The life-saving charity raised £200,000 in a single day after its boss hit out at Farage’s claim that the RNLI was acting like a migrant ‘taxi service’.

The way that Farage and other rancid-trousered anti-philanthropists have turned on the RNLI for rescuing migrants in the Channel marks a new low in British life. Never mind any number of moral wrongs in our national life, all the likes of Farage want to do is pick on the most vulnerable.

The way they flaunt their lack of humanity should shame them – but it doesn’t because members of that disreputable right-wing club leave their shame at the door.

More migrants may be trying to cross the Channel, but general migration in this country is down. Farage & Co (Purveyors of Nastiness to the Nation) like to rant about how migrants in the Channel should follow ‘legal’ routes into Britain. Well, basically there aren’t any for many of those fleeing conflicts. That’s why they risk their lives in overcrowded boats.

Fortunately, Farage had not reckoned on the bullish Mark Dowie, chief executive of the RNLI.

In a series of interviews, Dowie said that it was his charity’s moral and legal duty to rescue migrants in danger in the sea, adding that he was proud of this humanitarian work. As he should be.

In one interview, Dowie said that most people in Britain and Ireland, where his charity operates, were kind and decent and respected this rescue work.

The ‘kind and decent’ people seem too often to be cowed by the shouty, woke-bashing brigade, the nasties whose views end up having too much sway. Why do we listen to the most shouty men in the room or the TV studio?

Nigel Farage recently parked his mouth in a new barking bay at GB News, where he says the RNLI is “doing the wrong thing” by rescuing migrants.

It would be a dark day indeed if rescuing poor and afflicted people who hope for a better life became the “wrong thing”.

Still, Nigel Farage is quite brilliant at raising funds for the RNLI, so he does have one use.

THE man running along the pavement is young and fit and knows it. His body is lean and sculpted, with no unwanted flesh to encumber movement.

Off the bus comes another man, older and much less fit, with the weight that masses inconsiderately when you are not paying attention. The day is uncomfortable with heat and so is he, by the looks of it, red in the face and full in the belly.

The man on the bicycle sits somewhere between the other two, older than the first, slimmer than the second, with straggly hair that trails behind as he pedals along.

These men are linked by one sorry trait: they are topless in the heat, the young runner flaunting his perfect physicality, the older man flaunting his imperfect physicality, and the third man flaunting something in between.

These men were not seen at the same time, but I have gathered them here in clammy assembly, and I do hope you’ll forgive me.

The young man ran if to say, here’s what you get if you spend hours at the gym. I wondered about lifting my T-shirt in riposte, as if to say and here’s what you’ll get in 40 years’ time. But I carried on running slowly, trying to recover from a bout of T&T Syndrome. That’ll be tummy and tendon, the one larger than it used to be, the other too taut and prone to alarming twinges.

I’ve been walking briskly and running, then walking briskly again. The longer this goes on, the more the difference between the two paces will be eroded. Is this walking or is this running, I may well ask myself.

I can  understand, but not forgive, the young man, as he was proud of his body. The weighty man coming off the bus was something else. Other passengers had been forced to sit too close to his uncovered torso, and that can’t have been congenial.

It’s a weird thing to do. I barely even take my T-shirt off in the garden these days. As for beaches, remind me – what and where are they?

Keep your tops on, guys. No one wants to see your flesh, whether it’s sculpted or looks like a slowly melting pack of butter. Sweaty, unpleasant and, in some circumstances, threatening. Keep a lid on it, why don’t you.

There was a man used to run around these streets, older than me, slim and balding, with flyaway wings of hair. He never wore his T-shirt but carried it, as he sweated to wherever he laid his hat, and that unworn T-shirt.

“That’s gross,” my daughter said once when younger, as we drove past.

She wasn’t wrong. It was and still is.

That’s got that off my chest. A chest that’s otherwise staying covered.