I have just read a column by Sarah Vine in the Daily Mail, so that you don’t have to. You can thank me later.

It didn’t seem very good but was a useful reminder of what pustulant whiffle looks like. Slap the envy tag on me if you wish, but I couldn’t write that stuff – whatever they paid.

Vine’s column was heralded on the front page with a typical bit of Mail handwringing: “Does anyone give a fig about all of us hard-working taxpayers whose lives are being wrecked by strikes?”

I’m guessing that the Amalgamated Union of Flatulent Grumblers And Mutterers is not coming out today.

That “does anyone give a fig” line is used to portray strikers as some sort of other. Incidentally, the phrase is “care a fig”, with the fig being something of little value, a slip that spoils Vine’s woman-on-the-street moan.

The false idea being pushed here is that strikers are not themselves “hard-working taxpayers”, whereas of course they are hard working and pay taxes, just like everyone else.

Teachers are on strike today alongside civil servants, train and bus drivers, and university lecturers – the highest number of workers on strike on a single day since 2011.

Many may justifiably resent being pushed this far by a government that refuses to either raise pay properly or to negotiate. And many teachers feel it is their duty to highlight how everything is falling apart, thanks to austerity (with more to come).

For cynical reasons, Rishi Sunak has decided that being tough with the unions  summons up the spirt of Thatcher versus the miners. Yet the mood now is different, with many opinion polls indicating  support for strikers remains surprisingly high.

For a spot of context in all this, the newly ejected Tory party chairman Nadhim Zahawi reportedly just paid as much as £5 million to settle his tax affairs with HMRC.

Nurses, teachers and others going on strike will be lucky to earn that much in a lifetime of work.

 

Body shaming…

In the changing rooms at the university, a young man with a gym-honed body stands before a mirror and lifts up his vest to show off his muscle-toned chest to his friend.

“Look at that,” he says, or words to that effect.

Across the room, sweaty and somewhat older, a man who has just lost at squash again is regretting standing too near to a full-length mirror that shows off his 66-year-old body in rather more detail than is strictly necessary.

You start there and end up here. Not that I recall ever having a chest worth the flashing.

 

Remembering Donald Trelford…

Donald Trelford, the former editor of the Observer, has died, aged 85.

A warm tribute in his old newspaper ran last Sunday, noting that Trelford ran “a classy stable of some of Britain’s most distinguished feature writers and columnists. These included Neal Ascherson, Robert Harris, Clive James, Katharine Whitehorn and Hugh McIlvanney”.

Unaccountably absent from that paragraph is any mention of a young journalist from the South East London Mercury who did casual shifts from 1985-88.

Those shifts came about after an interview with the poet Blake Morrison, the paper’s literary editor at the time. He put my name forward and I turned up one Saturday, not knowing if it was for a subbing shift or a reporting shift. Turned out to be the former.

I didn’t have much to do with Trelford, acclaimed as a consummate journalist, layout man, writer and liberal.

But thanks to smart footwork by an older sub-editor, the two of us used to sneak into the editor’s lunches, where cheese and wine was served – an old-school indulgence that eventually stopped. Among those present was the political editor Harris, later a best-selling writer of thrillers.

On the short side, like many good people, Trelford was, I seem to recall, referred to as “small but perfectly formed” in Private Eye.

I remember him quite fondly, although he wouldn’t have remembered me at all.