Jeremy Clarke Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 14 September 2017

Every title seems to advance the cause of multiculturalism, feminism, puerile psychology, gender ambiguity or secularism

The army patrols at Nice airport go around three abreast, steely-eyed, fingers on the trigger. They walk slowly and scrutinise the passengers carefully, assessing each individual for minute clues to their psychology. They take the incredibly boring job incredibly seriously, or appear to do so, which must be great comfort to those with honourable intentions but a nervous disposition.

Contrast, then, these highly disciplined men with the armed pair I saw recently patrolling the floor of the departures lounge at Bristol airport. One had a comic, fall-guy, laughter-prone face, as characterful and funny to look at as George Formby’s. His boon companion looked like a great fellow to sink a few pints of cooking lager with, then go to a football match. One of them — hard to say which — had made a witticism and they were patrolling lopsidededly, corpsing with laughter. In the soullessness and anxiety of a British departure lounge, their intimacy and unaffected mirth was a kind of innocent rebuke.

I went into W.H. Smith’s ‘The Bookstore’ in the pathetic hope that I might chance on something. Over several visits to ‘The Bookstore’ at Bristol airport I have looked at every title on the shelves, sometimes desperately, and not once carried anything to the till. Call me paranoid, but every book for sale seems to have been selected to advance the cause of multiculturalism, or feminism, or equality, or puerile psychology, or gender ambiguity, or secularism, or a savage sort of capitalism, or all of the above crammed into one package. There were two blocks of shelving seven feet high dedicated to the works of David Walliams. These bore titles like The Boy in the Dress, Billionaire Boy, Gangsta Granny. The token bookshelf of black-spined ‘Classics’ — Dickens, Harper Lee, Dodie Smith, Virginia Woolf, Stella Gibbons, Jane Austen, Truman Capote — was narrow.

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