Thin Skins and Banana Skins.

I see that William Sitwell has been sacked as editor of that much-read organ Waitrose Food. His crime? Taking the piss out of vegans in a private email to a Ms Selene Nelson. She complained that he considered it ‘…funny to speak about vegans with hostility and anger.’

Well Ms Nelson, well done for losing Mr Sitwell his job. And shame on Waitrose for not ticking Mr Sitwell off for an ill-advised joke and letting him carry on with his life. The national obsession with taking offence has found another champion. It shouldn’t need Giles Coran to tell us that, ‘Vegans are not a race or a gender or a sexual orientation or a differently abled group. They just choose to eat plants. You should be able to take the piss and not lose your job.’

I recently visited an old university buddy of mine who is terminally ill. I drove  another friend and as we neared our destination he said, ‘I’ve told him that we’re going to take the piss out of him as usual.’ And so we did. Before we left our witty, talented, dying mate told us how good it felt to enjoy a little scurrilous plain speaking rather than pussyfooting around the vast elephant in the room.

The point is that we have become a nation of eggshell-treaders. Worse, we have stopped saying things because we don’t want the ‘woke’, right-on, PC police to raise an eyebrow and deselect us from some club or other. Worse still, our police, courts and public forums and services are afflicted by the minutiae of dealing (expensively) with the carpings of the minority who are hair-triggered for outrage. We are stymied by our thin skins. They are becoming banana skins on which we will slip time and time again as we slide into an insensitivity to what is really important. Millions are being spent on fine-tuning the semantics of what is a hate crime or pursuing an ageing pop star with no evidence. A few weeks’ ago a builder friend had his van broken into and £1500 of tools stolen. Insurance for that sort of thing is prohibitive and the police laughed when he expected them to investigate. They are snowed under with box-ticking; paranoid, like the health, education and fire-services, that the blame vigilantes will get them.

Some things really are important. As we approach this centenary Armistice Remembrance, I wonder what the great remembered  fallen would have made of the brittle and unsavoury world that we have fashioned for ourselves.