Rod Liddle: What do you call travellers when they are no longer travelling? 

How should we describe the people who allegedly abducted that little girl in Greece, after a neighbour claimed that they actually paid £850 for her to a passing Bulgarian? It is a minefield we are entering now, having asked this question. Clearly the terms which hitherto some of us may have employed, not always affectionately — pikey, gyppo, tinker — are likely to get you into trouble with the police these days. Probably more trouble than if you, for example, dug up the road to remove a few hundred yards of fibre optic cable, or declined year upon year to pay your taxes. So those three are out.

Gypsy, we are told, is also a pejorative term, although the Travellers’ Times — an online site which you probably help to pay for somewhere down the line — uses the word happily enough. However, the delicious chocolate- and coconut-flavoured biscuits Gypsy Creams have long since disappeared from the shelves of our supermarkets, lest they in some way give offence. Then, of course, there is ‘traveller’, which seems to be the politically correct gentilic here — certainly this is what Vanessa Redgrave uses on the occasions when this immensely caring and committed actress spends a few hours away from Hampstead campaigning upon their behalf, to the irritation of swaths of rural ratepayers.

The problem then, though, is what to call them when they no longer wish to travel anywhere: you would surely not care to lump together a group of people under what amounts to a living denial. Our hospitals and education services have got around this with the thrillingly oxymoronic description ‘static travellers’, which at best suggests that these people — like Carlos Castaneda after swigging a few cups of peyote tea — travel only in their minds.