The disturbing madness of the modern world!

We live in very strange times.

For example, when did it become acceptable for people to shout abuse at an MP in the street, even if she is Tory MP Anna Soubry? Disagreeing with someone’s views does not mean you can subject that person to harassment in the street, or anywhere else for that matter. When did our responses become so violent? And when did being pro-Europe begin to mean you are a Nazi? Weird and strange!

Less seriously, there is the fashion industry and the price of stuff. In the weekend paper was a picture of Gillian Anderson, looking sleek and stylish as ever. The caption read:

“Actor Gillian Anderson has turned fashion designer, with a capsule collection for British label Winsor London. Key pieces include rain macs, knitwear and tailored trousers. Prices start at £250 for the knitwear.” Actresses (I refuse to call females actors.) used to be trendsetters. Fine. Now they are designers as well. Which I suppose means that Gillian Anderson had some ideas of things that would look nice to wear and someone with training in producing clothes made the idea reality. Or maybe I am misjudging her completely and she has absolutely excellent drawing skills as well as her other talents.

The other thing that springs to mind is the possibility that you might pay £250 for a piece of knitwear and then it accidentally gets in the wrong cycle in the washing machine and comes out as a felted piece of very small knitwear. All you could do then would be to put it in a frame and claim it was a piece of Gillian Anderson designer artwork!

And I came across a thing about lip balm. Lip balm is, in my opinion, an essential thingin life. Nobody wants chapped lips. But there is lip balm and lip balm. You can get very reasonably-priced lip balms in any chemist’s or supermarket: a whole range - from repair lip balms for those who have neglected their lips to more specialised ones for going out in the hot sun. Or there is the lip balm I read about, made by a company called The Lipstick Lobby. It is a clear vitamin E lip balm and markets for £15.

Really? Who pays such prices.

And, once again, there is the washing machine problem. You leave your very expensive vitamin E lip balm in your trouser pocket when your trousers go in the wash and it dissolves, leaving you with an expensive empty case!

There seems to have been a bit of a furore about Greggs, the bakers, producing a vegan sausage roll. Various people, notably Piers Morgan, got a bit agitated and tweeted about it and I really can’t think why. There seems to be a sort of class element in there. Here’s an extract from a report about it:

“Set against the prevailing line on obesity – people who eat cheap, processed food are a burden on the NHS and should be ashamed of themselves – and you have the perfect storm of a divided nation. On one side is a company that still cares; on the other a faceless, finger-wagging elite who don’t understand anything about people’s lives or how delicious those sausage rolls really are. Every meaty controversy, from George Osborne’s pasty tax to David Cameron’s pretend-pasty eating, from the cancer scares of bacon to the blanket meat tax proposed by Oxford University at the end of last year, has a bead of this conflict in it: “Why don’t you poor people take better care of yourselves?” v “Why don’t you rich people just get permanently out of my face?” Then some rightwing antihero – Morgan, or Nigel Farage – rides to the rescue, saying: “We don’t judge! We’re team mind-your-own-business,” when in fact it was their wealth-supremacist worldview that created the division in the first place.”

It’s all a lot of nonsense.

(Grammatical aside: in the middle of that report I spotted a punctuation error. When you read “David Cameron’s pretend-pasty eating”, it sounds for all the world as if David Cameron was eating an imitation pasty. A misplaced hyphen, if ever there was one! Surely they mean “David Cameron’s pretend pasty-eating”. Oh, my goodness! I’ll be writing another version of “Eats, shoots and leaves” before you know it!)

Along with vegan sausage rolls and tofu meat substitutes, I have been reading about pretend-salmon, made from carrots and other stuff. Surely if you are truly vegetarian or vegan, why do you need to eat pretend-non-veggie stuff?

It’s all part of the silliness!