The British Empire’s despicable treatment of mermaids

I may have broken the law this week, without having intended to, so great was my rush to return home. I forgot to put on my seat belt and may have exceeded the speed limit on more than one occasion. The cause of my intemperate haste was, of course, a desire to be back at my house in time to listen to BBC Radio 4’s daily evening arts magazine programme, Front Row.

I live in a part of the world where the radio reception in cars is thinnish to non-existent, you see. Looking around me, as I depressed the accelerator further than I should, I noticed that everybody else was driving with similar fury, presumably for the same reason: haring back to catch Front Row. The shops were all closed and we travellers envied those inside, work over for the day, huddled around their wirelesses ready for the show.

I screeched into my drive at 7.20, so missed part of the first item on African music. This was enraging as, like most people in the country, I am a massive fan of African music and think it far superior to that white fossilised Beethoven crap. But luckily I was in time to catch the entirety of the next item, a long discussion about a new book called 100 Queer Poems, with excerpts from several read aloud. I had not known that ‘queer’ now encompasses everybody who is not white, regardless of whether or not they bat for the other side, but apparently it does, according to a slightly deranged woman on the programme.

My favourite of these ‘queer poems’ – i.e., an anthology compiled not on account of their literary value but simply because of the author’s sexual preference (or perhaps colour) – was one by a man who suggested that the British Empire had ‘forced us to live in a world lacking in mermaids’.