Flopping your baps out on the 18th

I DON’T play golf. I’ve worked for too many bosses who were always missing from the office in their silly trousers to inflict the same thing upon my colleagues. But I can see the attraction. The male clubbishness, the escape from day-to-day drudgery, the absence of nagging women, the fact that the appalling Charlie off Big Brother wouldn’t get within a mile of the place …

Aye, and there’s the rub. Thanks to Ruth Kelly - she of the barbed wire knickers and husky voice who reminds me of a fag I used to beat at school – nine new laws are heading our way which will give women equality in all sorts of unnecessary ways. For instance, not only will a woman be able to wander into any golf club willy-nilly (if that’s not an inappropriate phrase) she’ll even be able to flop her baps out on the 18th green and do a spot of breast-feeding while you’re lining up that difficult Alan Sugar (a short and nasty five-footer).

Is such Draconian legislation really necessary? Agreed, some golf clubs are virtually anti-women, only allowing them to play after 4pm during the months of October to February for instance, but there are often good reasons for what might seem at first sight to be simple discrimination. Take the restrictions on playing times. You can argue until you’re blue in the face, but no-one can deny that by the time a woman has made the breakfast, washed up and got the kids off to school, there’s no way on earth she’s going to be able to tee off before 10am.

And then there are the clubs that ban women from certain rooms. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but these men-only sanctuaries almost always house a snooker or pool table. There’s a reason for that. The committee, fine fellows that they are, have learned to their cost that the female of the species simply can’t chew gum, smoke a Marlborough Lite, gossip about her three doors down with her gentleman callers and hold a glass of Babycham at the same time without spilling it on the green baize, and that cloth doesn’t come cheap. And would you give the dimwit twins off Big Brother a sharpened stick to wave around?

(As a sideline, where would we be without committees? Who would organise Saturday’s bingo and the meat raffle? Who would book those awful tribute bands on a Friday night? Who would arrange for the cheese and pineapple hedgehog on the bar every Sunday lunchtime? Who would recruit the seafood man with his wicker basket, little jars of whelks, and a surprisingly full range of stolen goods available to order?)

So if these new equality laws are to be fair and unbiased, does this mean that women-only sessions in swimming pools and gyms will be banned? And where does that leave the WI? Will men in silly trousers infiltrate their meetings and win all the Victoria sponge prizes?

Luckily Ruth has thought of that. Establishments that have always been single-sex, male or female, will be allowed to continue with their recidivist ways. It’s only those enlightened clubs and organisations that have tried in some way to accommodate the opposite sex (“Ladies allowed in the bar after 9pm on Sundays only”) that will suffer. Hardly seems fair, does it?

I SEE we’ve had another outbreak of False Hero Syndrome. This is the attribution of bogus ulterior motives to a pilot whose plane is plummeting to the ground. The media always portrays them as heroes because “they steered away” from a school or village and into open countryside.
Think about it. What would you rather crash into – bricks and mortar or a nice, soft green field? It’s fairly bloody obvious.

This time the so-called “hero” is the driver of the coach that smashed into a Belgian cottage with 35 elderly British tourists on board, injuring 19, four seriously. His boss, swiftly covering his backside in anticipation of the compo claims, declares: “There is no doubt this terrible accident would have been far worse if it hadn’t been for his quick actions.”

Well let’s examine the evidence. The driver had just pulled out of a junction when a car came across him. He had two choices – reduce what was probably an antique Citroen 2CV and its occupants to Meccano and mince, or smash his coach into the side of a solid stone house. He chose the house. Hero? Idiot, more like.

FOR ONCE I find myself entirely in agreement with Mr Blair when he argues that the British media has behaved badly in recent years.

He’s quite right. The way our newspapers and broadcasters have swallowed lie after lie from his spinning, disingenuous, deceitful government is nothing short of a disgrace. We should have been much harder on this fraudulent administration from Day One.

Let us not forget the 45-minute warning; the Dr Kelly dossier; the Bristol flats that were definitely not bought by a con-man, oh no; the carrying-the-coffin role demanded at the Queen Mother’s funeral; the heart condition consistently denied right up to the hospital door; the good day to bury bad news; the cash for peerages scandal … the list of lies goes on and on.

Remember this: when Mr Blair insists that the Press has got worse during his tenure, what he really means is that his press has got worse during his tenure. He’ll not be allowed to ride off into the sunset like the hero he wanted to be. Shooting at the messenger is his last desperate act.