Time out

Will my friend, the writer and historian Tom Holland, get his head chopped off for the things he is saying on Islam: The Untold Story (Channel 4)? My guess is not. If I’d said them, I’m sure I would have done because I have the kind of manner which makes people want to punch my lights out even if all I’ve said is that their mum makes a really lovely apple crumble and by the way is it OK if I help with the dishes?

Holland, on the other hand, has such a fey, wispy, slightly geeky, quintessential English niceness about him that I’ll bet if he stood outside the Kaaba and declaimed to the crowds through a megaphone, ‘I say, you chaps. You do realise that your religion is a frightful farrago of nonsense? That most of it was made up on the hoof long after Mohammed,’ they’d all find it charming, droll and thoroughly unexceptionable.

But this is pure speculation. The fact is that I have not yet seen Holland’s programme because this is what happens when you move to the country. You wake up one morning and go: ‘Christ, it’s Tuesday! My TV copy was supposed to be in last Friday and I’ve seen no TV at all to speak of because Channel 4 couldn’t get the Holland DVD to me in time, my internet’s been on the blink, and anyway I’ve been too distracted with stuff like trying to kill wasps and mosquitos and coping with the fact that there’s no dishwasher and taking extra long showers to try to counteract any lurgy I might have picked up swimming in the lake with that dead sheep right next to where the water flows in…’

The other handicap at the moment is that we’re living temporarily in a cottage which, though exceedingly picturesque, is not much bigger than a well-proportioned doll’s house, so we’re all living like East Europeans and are having to share just the one TV set in a tiny living-room.