Peter Rhodes: Farewell, 2015
Over the past 12 months this column has recorded elections, migration, daft things on telly and supersized crumpets. Here are some highlights, month by month.
JANUARY: Sorry folks, but after much consideration (following the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris), Je ne suis pas Charlie. I will march against terrorism. But I will not march to defend the absolute right to freedom of expression. There is no such right, and nor should there be.
FEBRUARY: John Prescott's promotion to become Ed Miliband's climate-change boss reinforces my hunch that Labour is aiming to win the General Election with the votes of people who can't remember anything that happened more than five years ago.
MARCH: Vote Ukip, get Labour. This is turning into the General Election of Dark Warnings, the threat of unintended consequences. Most chilling so far is the prospect raised by the Prime Minister's offhand suggestion of potential successors. Vote Dave, get Boris.
APRIL: Have you at last twigged the one essentially Cornish ingredient missing from 18th century Cornwall, as depicted in the BBC's latest blockbuster? The answer is, of course, torrential rain. What do you call Cornwall without a cagoule in sight? Poldark.
MAY: To judge from the torrents of Leftist bile (after the General Election result) , you would think Whitehall had fallen under the power of the Dark Lord and the orcs were already gassing the poor.
JUNE: Don't you get a bit weary about people exclaiming: "Ours is a peaceful religion"? The lesson of history is that all religions are religions of peace – or will be, just as soon as they've slaughtered all the infidels.
JULY: If women's football is intended to prove the female of the species can play the beautiful game just as well as the men, why were the England team known as lionesses? Lions, surely.
AUGUST: Amnesty International declares that the scandal of refugees dying en route is "a tragic indictment of Europe's failures to provide alternative routes." Really? Is it not an indictment of Syrians, Somalis, Eritreans and Libyans being unspeakably evil toward their own kind?
SEPTEMBER: The Archbishop of Canterbury is offering a cottage at Lambeth Palace to a family from Syria. Only a curmudgeon would point out that London already has about 1,000 folk sleeping rough who might have appreciated a warm room in Lambeth.
OCTOBER: Anachronism Abbey. Thanks for your suggestions of unlikely things to have been said in 1925 in Downton. Two front-runners are the discussion about a man who "brings something to the table" and the notion that the expensive old mansion "doesn't wash its face."
NOVEMBER: One of the major bakers has just announced it is making bigger crumpets. I bet that is "in response to public demand." In lardarse Britain, would anyone ask for smaller crumpets?
DECEMBER: Anyone surprised that scrapping the vehicle tax disc has been followed by a doubling in the number of untaxed cars on the road to more than half a million? If you make it easy to get away with tax dodging, people will dodge taxes. Does anyone in Whitehall have a brain?
