I’ve found the new c-word that no one dare use: Common sense
A medieval predator. A galaxy far far away. Lesbians. The primary school curriculum. The tragic death of a care home patient. A dog in a dress.
If you're wondering whether cosy crime purveyor Richard Osman has really lost it, please rest assured – actually on second thoughts, don't ever close your eyes again because this Hieronymus Bosch phantasmagorical parade is human fact, not science fiction.
I say "fact" but we'll circle back to that much-disputed definition shortly. If ever a week convinced me that we are doomed, it was this one, in which Britain's embrace of witless stupidity far exceeded anything I could have imagined.
In no particular order, we have a school in Scotland that has acknowledged a previously unheard-of phenomenon and in so doing magicked into very existence the concept of "species dysphoria". In a bid to prove its woke credentials, it is now-ow-owwww allowing a child to identify as a wolf .
A dachshund in a Zoom meeting led to an 18-month legal battle and a huge council payout after its owner, who works with young people in the borough, insisted Pabllo was transgender and so dressed him in a frock.
This prompted two lesbian social worker colleagues to say shocking things like "your dog is male" and express wider "gender critical opinions" that deeply hurt his values. That's the owner. Not Pabllo, who most definitely doesn't look too happy in his stupid tutu.
A lot of argy-bargy, flouncing and a £63,000 payout later , it transpires that it's actually OK for women to hold strong opinions about transgenderism. Who knew?
Moving on, we have the couple who applied for a passport for their seven-year-old son and had their application initially turned down because of his ridiculous but essentially inoffensive middle name; Loki Skywalker Mowbray was construed as a breach of copyright.
Then, to a Free Speech Brighton meeting in the back room of a pub, where members were summarily evicted by bouncers because they had the temerity to speak freely: in this case, to voice their pretty bog-standard pensées that gender ideology should not be taught in schools, a sentiment with which the landlord vehemently disagreed.
Finally, and entirely unfunnily, a frail, elderly man died in Surrey care home after getting trapped in the frame of his bed. The night carer on duty heard him shouting for help but didn't open the door – because she was "frightened" of him.
To quote the finest TV philosopher-cum-scourge-of-all-bent-coppers-everywere of our age: "Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the wee donkey." Is this what we as a nation have become?
Pusillanimous. Thin-skinned. Prissily self-righteous. Monstrously self-centred. Locked into an orgiastic death spiral of taking offence, giving offence and going to such excruciating pains not to offend a minority of one that the majority of everybody else ends up being offended instead.
It is time to draw a line. No, not in the sand. Who came up with that one? If ever there were a less permanent marker, a more (literally) wishy-washy expression of ambivalence that can be erased and redrawn at will, it is a line in the ruddy sand.
Let me rephrase; here, in 2024, we must face up to a new "C" word. Yes, I know, it's a provocative word that a great many people avoid.
Some because they are too angry or too confused by the implications. Others may never have even said it aloud, not even to themselves; why would they? Far too triggering.
Generation Z, for all their punctilious journaling and slightly creepy manifesting (Dear Universe, please send me everything I ever wanted, right here, as I lie in my bed turning my brain to mush on TikToks) have never even considered it as a lifestyle choice.
But like so much else, it's a cut-and-dried case of use it or lose it. I am speaking, of course, about COMMON SENSE.
Where has it gone? What the hell have we done with it? And for the love of Her Late Great Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, can somebody reinstate common sense back to the very heart of what it means to be British?
A kid says they identify as a wolf? No you don't, you spotty show-off. Back to class.
Why is there a dachshund in a frock on my Zoom call? Just stop. If you have to dress your pet interestingly, there is something wrong with you, so get a life. Oh, and I see your transphobic accusations and I raise you coercive control. Dogs aren't supposed to be trussed up like extras from La Cage Aux Folles.
Hello? Is that the Passport Office? Any lad called Loki Skywalker has enough on his plate without some uppity jobsworth picking on him. And with a name like that he was born to fly.
And so to Free Speech, which is supposed to be free. There are only two sexes, whatever the crackpots say. Men can't become women. Children have a right not to be fed garbage about choosing from 100-plus genders. It's somewhere between laughable and sinister, so I'll brand it silly because I know that word rankles.
A care home in which lives are lost because carers (unworthy of the name or the job) are too "scared" to respond to cries for help is a shameful disgrace. There are no excuses.
Yet, this is where we find ourselves. In the grip of a mania where people are so focused on the affirmation – or condemnation – of the social media mob, they can't – or won't – exercise any sort of personal judgement.
Feelings override facts, victimhood has been elevated to the highest state of being, and the merest mention of a mental health issue sends professionals into a muddled duty-of-care tailspin.
We are all us ill-served when every last vexatious complaint from the inadequate or the mean-spirited is greeted with gullibility and investigated with reverence.
In the shrill insistence on rights, nobody ever mentions responsibilities. Common sense has become vanishingly rare — no wonder Osman's old school, spade-a-spade sleuthing novels are such a popular escape.
Out here in the real world, Britain has become a place where the clueless and the callous trip over each other to call out every shade of behaviour except the most glaringly obvious one of all – stupidity. Stupid as a dog in a dress or a wolf in child's clothing.
