How you feel about unpaid blogging rather depends, I suppose, on whether you think that someone who is blogging for free is doing something a journalist could, or should, be paid to do. Most blogs at the HP are updated weekly and not particularly in-depth. You could say, then, that they are not particularly time-consuming and so wouldn’t warrant any pay. They are also voluntary. There are, of course, a number of journalists out there who are paid to submit weekly columns. There are megastar columnists who are trading on their name and can be published pretty much anywhere, charging huge amounts – think Julie Burchill and her ex Tony Parsons to name just a couple – and there are also the scribes who are lesser-known and contribute to a variety of publications alongside a day job and very much rely on every bit of income. Is blogging killing off their revenue stream?

For years, the creative industry has encouraged a culture of working for free. Whether it’s an intern writing all the copy for a corporate site because the company can’t be bothered to hire a content expert, a runner on a TV production fetching endless cups of tea in the hope they’ll be noticed by someone important, or a designer sending speculative work in the hope of exposure, getting something for nothing isn’t a new phenomenon. The reason it continues largely unchallenged is the sheer amount of competition out there for creative jobs – everyone’s a designer, a writer or a film-maker. In the confused, overcrowded market, only the lucky few manage to rise to the top, an ascendance not always based on talent. Connections and an ability to make yourself noticed, by any means necessary in some cases, can triumph over being good at something any day of the week.

Interns are on the increase. At least 50% of the job ads I see are for unpaid interns, or work placements. I’m sure that a few years ago, these placements would gave had set timeframes, perhaps of a few weeks, but these internships are now indefinite, with no guarantee of a ‘proper job’ at the end of them, whatever a proper job now means – one where you actually get paid, I imagine.

It’s true to say that the existence of amateurs in any field doesn’t have to mean the professional side suffers. Thousands of amateur football matches take place every weekend, but nobody is claiming that they harm the professional game, or reduce anyone’s chances of becoming a paid footballer. In fact, they are known to feed into it, with scouts standing on the sidelines looking for new talent. But what if league football teams started taking on unpaid intern players, players who would work for free for the first year or so. What would happen to the game then? Would the demographic of both players and spectators change a great deal?

The bloggers on HuffPo aren’t being forced to blog. Nobody’s ripping them off, they retain copyright and can republish their work anywhere they want. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement. It has always been their content model and they are very transparent about what they do. iI’s merely another outlet for talented people – as some of them are – to get the exposure and recognition they deserve. There can be no denying that the inclusion of being a HuffPo contributor in your portfolio could open doors for you – if you were any good of course. Hell, I’d do it.

It only becomes a concern for me when this model becomes the norm – established publishing outlets following suit, having seen the success of HuffPo balancing user contributions and paid-for journalism. Will amateur writers become more abundant on national newspapers, with paid contributors restricted to merely reporting news and facts, while any opinions or deeper analysis are handed over to the bloggers? Are we already on the way there with the Guardian’s Comment Is Free articles? One of Britain’s biggest newspapers has taken to hiring interns to do its blogging for it. What does this mean for future generations of journalists, and indeed those hunting for jobs today?

Everyone has an opinion, after all – should we expect to hold our hand out for a fiver every time we tell a friend what we think of their outfit? How much is your opinion worth?

This week, because she simply wasn’t getting enough publicity, I’m sure, Mensch revealed that she had been contacted by email by someone who claimed to have photographic evidence of her “on drugs” on a night out with her former colleague from EMI Music Nigel Kennedy at Ronnie Scott’s in Birmingham. The emailer, clearly revelling in his or her new role as spiteful bitch at the back of the school bus, then went on to flatly claim that she had been sacked from her job at EMI for writing her first novel Career Girls in work hours, an allegation she denies. There was also another bizarre accusation that she had named characters after former colleagues and friends, which is no big deal, really; I once had a character in a book named after me – a reality TV contestant who came SECOND; oh the inhumanity – but it’s quite flattering, really.

Mensch’s response to the email was relatively swift but not entirely direct. She admitted working on Career Girls at her work computer, but said this was after hours. So far, so good. More interesting was her reply to the allegation of being drunk and on drugs on the night out in Birmingham. Mensch, who writes under her maiden name Louise Bagshawe, proved her worth as a politician by admitting it, but not actually, really, definitively saying whether she’d done it or not. The papers lauded her for her honesty but, in actual fact, she swerves the question, saying she “couldn’t remember” the night in question but that it was “probable” she had taken drugs in her 20s, but essentially ‘so what?’. Chapeau, indeed.

She’s right, of course, that getting off your head in your 20s doesn’t mean you’re a bad person or not fit to be an MP. Scratch the shiny surface of the exemplary public and private profile of most people and you will soon see the smear of shit beneath. “We all do stupid things when young” was Mensch’s final word on the matter, and how right she is. We do. Imagine living your life ever-conscious that you might one day become well-known, and so do nothing for fear of it being cast up against you in the future. Imagine never making mistakes, never taking a risk, never kissing someone you shouldn’t or fucking over someone who’s asking for it. That’s not a life, is it?

So full marks to Mensch for kind of not being afraid to say “Yes I got fucked out of my brains in a nightclub – deal with it”. I hope, however, that this is not the first in a long line of amnesties by politicians or public figures looking for a little bit of exposure. Most of us don’t care what you do or who you do it with, and I don’t want to hear you say you regret it or it was “stupid” just because you were young and didn’t think it through.

You’ve lived. That’s what you’re supposed to do.

In all the hysteria and the oft-repeated line about Amy’s “struggle with drugs and alcohol” it’s very easy to forget what a talent Amy was.

My first introduction to her was late one night, as I was sitting up half-watching TV after my then-boyfriend had gone to bed. A music show was on and the very last video was Amy’s ‘Fuck Me Pumps’ song. I had heard of her before, but never heard her music. I watched the video and laughed at the lyrics and thought “Wow, I have got to get that album”, which I did. And the rest is history; I was smitten from that moment on.

About a year later, I met her, before the release of her second album Back To Black, which would catapult her to the levels of fame which would eventually be her downfall. I was with a friend at a dreadful showcase event at the now-closed Hippodrome in central London, and my friend said Amy was there. We were standing in the VIP area – a very loose term for what was in fact a bar area piled high with Big Brother contestants – and my friend said she’d go get Amy and bring her in. When my friend retrieved Amy and tried to bring her into the VIP bar, the security staff refused to let her in, as they had no idea who Amy was. That was all about to change. Instead, then, I went out to talk to her. I’m never really in thrall of famous people, and at that point nobody had a clue who she was, but I was tongue-tied. She asked me if I was having a good night and I said I kind of was and told her I loved her album. I don’t know whether I was starstruck by her presence or what but I just got a brilliant vibe from her, an awesome sense of her personality. She was chatty and friendly and pretty and after burbling another couple of sentences at her and asking when her new stuff was out, I left her to her friends.

I would see her again a couple of times in the following years, in pubs, of course. She was now in full-beehive ultra-famous mode, and seemed utterly normal and just like an ordinary girl having an OK time. I say an OK time because, as well know thanks to the tabloids, she was “struggling with demons” and all that. She quickly became a pity figure for all the newspapers and magazines; barely a day would go by without a picture of her looking pissed and distraught on the arm of a friend or the man who would become her husband and her ex within the space of a couple of years.

She would often get press because of her “shambolic” live appearances. I never saw her live, but watched her on video and she had gone on record saying she hated performing live and preferred to be in the studio. At one performance for the BBC, she introduced her song ‘Back To Black’ by explaining that “You write these songs when you’re fucked up, and then when you have to sing them all in a row… it’s soooo depressing” and then she mimed the drinking motion and asked her band to “Run it” with a defiant hiss, as if she really didn’t want to do it, but would, because everyone had turned up and expected her to sing. She sang the song well, altering the delivery style a little, as was her wont, probably because singing them the same way every time just wasn’t her style.

I won’t add another bleeding heart tribute and talk about how “tragic” her death is. Nor will I accept that her death at 27 was inevitable or to be expected because of her drug problems. She had an addiction, a disease, and it would have been great if she’d got better, but it was just beyond her capability to do that. And that makes me feel all the more sad for her. The irrelevant talking heads will come and go but very few of the ones I’ve seen so far catch the true essence of her. To get that, you have to head to YouTube, and watch her perform, or listen to her songs, or watch her on Popworld having a riot in a Nissan Micro with Simon Amstell and throwing stones at a poster of Dido.

No more music, no more live performances, no more appearances on TV, no more jokes, no more drinks. No more Amy.

It has been an equally tough week or so to be taking part in any social media. Just the other day, I read this in my Facebook news feed:

“So it’s official now- 
The Press: Cunts. (Including the Guardian & Indy)
Politicians: Cunts. (Particularly the Conservatives and Labour, but yes, all of them)
The Police: Cunts. (The force as a whole, not every individual lug-head, some of them are just stupid.)”

Oh dear, I thought. I can’t speak for the police and politicians, as I’m not one, but I have worked on a national newspaper and in broadcasting, so I felt compelled to reply, very simply, that journalists were not cunts. In retrospect, I truly wish I hadn’t bothered or, at the very most, left my response at that. Sadly, my response gave rise to other, more passionate responses, and before I knew it I was embroiled in a Facebook slanging match. It has taught me such a valuable lesson that I am going to reproduce most of it here, as a stark reminder never to do it again.

Me, is, well, me. OP is the original poster of the status update (a friend I have known for almost a decade) and Mr X is someone I’ve never heard of or met before, but is a friend of my friend, it would appear. Let’s start from the reply which preceded, and indeed instigated, my first post:

Mr X: Nicely put my friend … although if we were to produce merchandise to spread the word I feel the above statement is too wordy! Something like ‘Journalists, Cops & Politicians are a bunch a Cunts’ would lend itself better to t-shirt prints, kids pencil cases and coffee mugs!

Me: Hello. Journalists are not cunts. Thank you.

Mr X: Hello, as a father myself I would say digging up medical info on a sick child is as low as it gets … you don’t get more cunt than that! If this is deemed acceptable to get a story then a more vile word is needed to describe the cretins! Saying that, we hear about this crap from the same people who are behind the allegations so who knows what’s true, best just to take all journalism with a pinch of salt … after all … they are only ‘following orders’. Thank you!

The “as a father” argument is one I just can’t get behind. The idea that being a parent makes your opinion or disgust any more valid is something I find distasteful. It’s just emotive bullshit.

Me: I am in no way condoning any illegal activity, but saying all journalists are cunts is like saying that all people who post reactionary, sweeping comments on Facebook are utter morons – but we know that not to be true, right?

OP: I dont think anyone said all journalists are cunts (they kind of did though, in my view). But anyway, the press are by far the worst of the 3. Without real journalism we cant have a real democracy and nothing gets done in the interests of the people. Instead we get hundreds of thousands of deaths across the world, payed for by us, which could have been avoided (one example among many – imagine if the papers had not meekly supported the government line on WMD in Iraq and had actually done some er, journalism)

Me: Long answer: Without the word ‘some’ to quantify the statement, “journalists are cunts” means “all journalists are cunts”. The accused are a tiny minority of tabloid journalists and do not represent the industry. 

I really regret the pedantry of that last one one. Ah well. It’s done now.

Me: Short answer: shut up or I’ll hack you.

This was an attempt to bring the debate back on the side of humour. It failed spectacularly, as you’ll see.

Mr X: Journalists write about people, upsetting them in the process, chastising children who wear hooded tops, using the term ‘chav’ as a cloak to socially bash those less fortunate than themselves. Now they are the scumbags of the moment they should stand up … be men or women … and take it on the chin! If they can’t then who are they to attack others? Nobody said ‘all’ journos are cunts … but if people think that is the case then no one will change their mind … especially not the journalists!

More emotive hand-wringing. Nobody is condoning the above acts, but a very small number of journalists commit them.

Me: Again, Mr X, you are talking about a small minority of journalists. And within that small minority, an even tinier one which consists of unscrupulous tabloid hacks. If you think journalists are bad, take a look at any national paper online and have a look at the comments underneath from the dear readers. That’s where you’ll find the real bile you talk about. Journalists don’t set the agenda; they follow their readers’ lead. You are what you hate.

OP: I’m not just talking about unscrupulous acts such as phone hacking. I’m talking about the limp wristedness of the entire journalistic profession- including the bbc and other tv sources. They *should* be setting the agenda- but they don’t. They let business, governments and bile-filled readers do it for them. 

Me: You misunderstand (I suspect wilfully) the function of newspapers and journalism. It is journalism’s responsibility to report on and hold a mirror up to society, not to shape it. I wouldn’t dream of telling you how to do your job or what its purpose is – do me, and others, the same courtesy.

I should definitely, definitely, definitely left it there. The first half was a totally true statement. The second half I probably should have left out.

OP: Lost me there. I thought it was to tell the news a honestly as possible – not the easy to hear/ friendly to government/ business news. But as should be more commonly remembered, it’s the job of the press to sell their product. As many units of it as possible, at the cheapest possible cost. Most other industries are honest about that, but the press still clings on to this (knowingly false) image of public duty, playing at *balance*, and that’s what riles -it’s total and utter bull shite. By the way, if a plumber leaves a leaky pipe in your kitchen do you tell him “how to do his job” or ignore it?

I have cut out some earlier stuff OP wrote (as I assumed he was joking) about being a Guardian journalist was easy as it involved naught but churning agency copy, but it was the above reponse and the comments I’ve edited out which led me down this very dark path:

Me: I think you must have had a bump to the head. I shall now start reporting this as fact. And your plumber analogy is as leaky as your figurative pipe. I’d love to continue this battle of wits, but clearly you’re unarmed. Goodnight. x 

I really regret this one, too. It served no purpose other than a thinly-veiled attempt to pat him on the head and tell him he didn’t know what he was talking about. Not my best work, really. I was also setting myself up beautifully for the riposte:

OP: Hows about i arm myself with some recent research? UK broadsheet newspapers: At least 80% of stories are re-written (& not fact checked) copy from news wire & PR. (Source: Cardiff University – http://en.wikipedia.org/wi ki/Churnalism). Analogy comparison: We want & pay for investigative journalism/ truth (fixed pipe) – we don’t get it (leaky pipe). P.S. good way to tell when you’re winning an argument – the other side starts getting all shirty & personal. 

I suppose I deserve that one, but it appeared to me that OP’s frustration was borne out of a complete misunderstanding of what the press is for and how it operates. I decided it was for the best for me to bow out of the public debate here, especially given that Mr X then left a witless attempt to backtrack on his “cunts” stance, using the standard internet defence of it ‘being a joke all along’. Instead, I sent the OP a message to his inbox:

“Sadly, OP, everything comes down to money. Given the advent of rolling news and free online news outlets, newspapers have struggled for revenue for some time. Only the NOTW and The Sun were/are truly profitable. Did you know that swivel-eyed bastard Murdoch kept the Times alive by siphoning off profits from the NOTW? It would have folded years ago. Perhaps he should have let it do so. 

Investment in journalism is poor: sub-editors are losing their jobs due to financial issues and the pressure of producing enough online content for the search engines to notice you has meant that agency copy is used more and more – at the behest of those wanting to make a profit, the newspaper owners and shareholders. A lot of it *is* subbed – I know this first-hand – but the turnaround needs to be quick and subs have targets to hit every day, and they’re paid fuck all and have nothing to do with budget cuts or lack of investment. Agency copy is really, really terrible; you wouldn’t believe how much it is cleaned up before a reader’s eyes hit it.

You raise an interesting point about ‘the truth’. Newspapers only report things in the style their readers want to read it. For example, take Prime Minister’s Question Time. It’s likely that the Mirror will report that Miliband absolutely carpeted Cameron, yet the Sun will report that Cameron shrugged Miliband off and gave him a beasting himself. Which one is right? Which one is the truth? It’s a tricky one. There is only one truth, but many versions, which all depend on the agenda or prejudices of the observer, be they first-hand or reading about it in a newspaper. You say that newspapers should ‘set the agenda’, but that’s what Murdoch has been trying to do for 40 years, and I think we can all agree that he is a piece of shit. Setting the agenda does not equal reporting the truth. If every newspaper reported events exactly as they happened, readers wouldn’t read them and every newspaper would die until one was left. Then how would you know what was a ‘true’ version of events without another newspaper voice to compare it with?

For every lying twat like [well-known journalist], or every phone hacking piece of shit at the NOTW, there are 100 honest journalists performing to tight timelines, budgetary pressures and, most importantly, a demanding audience in search of speedy gratification.

And that, OP, is why journalists aren’t cunts.”

Am I right? Am I wrong? Or am I somewhere in between, like most of us? Either way, I should have left well enough alone. Nobody wins in an internet argument, let alone one as futile as this.

“Who’s Judy Murray?” the three people who read this may well ask. Well, let me tell you. She’s mother to that sulky, hulky volley machine that is the British number one Andy Murray. I’d never heard of her before, but this year coverage of 50-year-old Mrs Murray has ramped up – possibly because she’s quite vocal and enthusiastic about her son’s ability. She’s been known up until now as a ‘Tiger Mother’, a description which isn’t exactly endearing but makes her sound more like a protective, encouraging kind of ma rather than the type of woman who’d rip your head off for pushing in front of her in a bus queue. Mrs Murray, then, was off my radar until yesterday, when I saw a short piece about her in the Evening Standard, London’s newspaper which dropped its cover price a couple of years ago to absolutely zero, and saws a huge rise in circulation. All I can say is that I’m glad I didn’t pay for it.

The piece on Judy Murray was penned by Melanie McDonagh, a woman whose work I was blissfully unaware of until now. Having had a quick look into her previous output for the Standard, she seems to be merely an occasional contributor to the paper, her oeuvre ranging from Christmas cookbooks to Serbian war crimes. A Jill-of-all-trades, perhaps, but she’s certainly revealed herself as a master of cattiness when it comes to Judy Murray. The main thrust of the article relates to Mrs Murray’s supposed ‘crush’ on another tennis player – the frankly hot Feliciano Lopez. Mrs Murray has apparently nicknamed Lopez ‘Deliciano’, much to the embarrassment of her racquet-toting sons Andy and Jamie. Lopez is 29, Judy is 50. McDonagh has no problem with Murray when she’s cheering on Andy from the sidelines, displaying an unusual amount of testerone-charged energy for a lady in her fifties, but, as she puts it: “Judy Murray as a sexual being is another matter altogether”. Andy Murray has referred to his mother’s ‘pash’ on his mate Lopez a few times, joking that it makes him want to throw up, and of course it probably kind of does, but McDonagh has taken this offhand comment and run with it, all the way to the top of Tena Lady Mountain, where women who are past their mid-thirties may as well sew shut their vagina and settle down with the knitting, or, in Judy Murray’s case, keep cheering on the sidelines. McDonagh goes on to explain that Judy has said “unconvincingly” that her crush is a family joke, but McDonagh thinks that there’s more to this than meets the eye, and that Mrs Murray shouldn’t feel a little harmless embarrassment, but a whole heap of dirty shame – and she owes it to Britain to feel that way.

“[Mrs Murray's crush on Lopez] confuses Britain. If you’ve made your son the pivot of your very existence, as Mrs Murray has, well, it’s hard to square that image with a cougar-style crush on his rival. The nation is used to Mrs Murray as the quintessence of the shouty, pushy mother, and many people rather admire her for it. But if you add to that narrative, to use the fashionable term, Mrs Murray’s schoolgirl infatuation on a man rather more handsome than her boy, where does that leave us?”

It doesn’t actually leave us anywhere, Melanie. Before you started your mean-spirited rant about a 50-year-old woman having a light-hearted schoolgirl crush on a man 21 years her junior, I doubt anyone actually cared. ‘We’ probably still don’t. The quote segues into an utterly irrelevant point that Mrs Murray left the ‘family home’ in 1996, following her divorce, and that tennis was likely an outlet for Andy Murray’s anger at the separation. This is puzzling. Should we now thank the flighty Judy for ditching her marriage and thus helping to provide the UK with a world-class tennis player? Or should we blame her for her son’s sulky demeanour on the court? Judy Murray may be 50, but her son is 24. He’s a grown man, and unlikely to be seriously troubled by his mother having her own personality and desires – desires which she is unlikely to act upon. According to McDonagh, this “new development adds an amusing, if slightly alarming twist to the image of the Murrays as a joint mother-and-son act” but in fact it does nothing of the sort. Mothers embarrass their sons all the time, be it by wiping down their cheek with a hanky or being over-familiar with their friends. To suggest that Murray might be a bit of a misery because of his mother, who has been nothing but an encouraging and supportive influence in his life, is really a criticism of mothers everywhere who dare not to check their own needs and humour into the cloakroom and slavishly live for their children. Perhaps if it does bother him so, he should grow up and be a man about it, and let his mum be a woman, although I doubt this is a conundrum Murray will be facing right now. I rather think his tennis performance hugely outweighs any worries that his mum blushes a shade of crimson whenever she hears Lopez’s name mentioned.

Women bashing other women in newspaper columns is nothing new, but if McDonagh has something to say about other women who divorce their partners and pursue their own happiness, all the while still being a rock to their offspring, she should perhaps be more direct, rather than quietly allowing the bile to rise to the top of her writing. She isn’t fooling anyone. Regardless of Judy Murray’s “infatuation” and her son’s success at Wimbledon, she’s pretty much won already. Perhaps Melanie McDonagh should take her axe to another tall poppy; there’s nothing to see here.

The praise culture is on the rise. Human beings are at risk of turning into performing dogs desperate for a rub on the belly with the constamt need to be validated. It’s nice to be acknowledged for things you’ve done that are of great importance or significance, but making a shepherds’ pie after a 12-hour day, which isn’t even up there with ‘doing a favour’? What do you want? A bouquet?

Or how about a delicious cupcake as a token of goodwill? It’s increasingly difficult to move without encountering a cupcake of some description. Almost every bakery that isn’t Greggs is giving over shelf after shelf to the not-so-dainty, over-decorated behemoths of sugar and icing. Cupcake businesses are springing up faster than Starbucks and McDonald’s, as starting your own customised cupcake-to-your-door company replaces f*cking the tennis coach as a pastime for moneyed, bored housewives. To feed this new obsession, bookshops are flooded with cupcake recipe tomes and guides on how to decorate them so that they look pretty despute the fact they don’t fit into your mouth because of the small construction site going on atop all the sponge. And now, hell has finally frozen over and the cupcake monsters have all but taken over the world – a well-known deal-a-day discount website now features an offer for a series of lessons in cupcake decorating.

The main issue with cupcakes is that, well, they don’t actually taste very nice at all. Once you have got through the mound of oddly-coloured icing, and have managed to avoid being poked in the eye by whatever sparkler, firework or leg of lamb is adorning the top of it, you’re left with a rather ordinary little bit of sponge in a brightly-coloured, eco-hostile box and a price tag that equates to a three-course meal at your local Harvester. See you at the salad bar.

But I’ve started to come round to the tourists. I’m on their side. I never thought it would happen, but after experiencing London’s idea of customer service over the last two bank holiday weekends, I feel like I should stand at the departure gates at Heathrow, handing out rosettes or small trophies to any tourist who has made it back to the airport without wanting to kill one of us.

London’s been busy, what with Easter and the Royal Wedding. It’s like the world had a good grope down the back of the sofa to find inhabitants it didn’t even know it had, just to send them onto us here in London. Eateries and shops in the West End have been rubbing their hands in glee at this, knowing full well that most tightfisted, miserable Londoners will avoid town like the plague during this period, meaning that their patrons will be the poor hapless tourists – wallets on legs, with leaky pockets and a high tolerance for being treated like shit.

Over the first bank holiday weekend, I found myself in town with a friend, buying stuff for a holiday I’m about to go on. Town was less horrible than it usually is every Saturday, as the weather was baking hot and most people had stayed at home, save for the aforementioned tourists who were taking pictures of Niketown wit such enthusiasm that I had to check Princess Diana hadn’t been resurrected and plonked atop the store. Shop assistants are a funny old breed at the best of times, but it’s during the summer when they excel themselves, becoming a new race altogether. I know; I was one, once. Come the first rays of sunshine and all a shop assistant can think about is what time they finish work, how long it will take them to do their hair and how many drinks or wraps of drug it’s going to take before they’re grinding flesh with another shop assistant/DJ/promoter (all fairly interchangeable roles). They they’re working in a shop with a view to serving customers is an inconvenience, something they barely give a second thought. When you do approach them and ask them for help, their head tilts involuntarily to one side, as if observing a mouse being ripped to shreds by a cat, and with their slackened jaw they’ll start to tell you that “all stock is out” or that “this fitting room is closed” or they’ll just hold their hand out for your card or cash without telling you how much your purchase costs. But at least as a Londoner you can call them out on their rudeness and threaten to complain. They still won’t care whether you live or die, but at least for the rest of your transaction, they’ll drop the attitude. For tourists, however, with the language barrier and lack of confidence which goes with it, there is no mercy. If the shop assistant is feeling particularly sadistic, they’ll get the hapless tourist to repeat what he’s trying to say over and over and over, like a Rosetta Stone language tape, until the tourist gives up and finds and ‘authentic London pub’ to drown his sorrows in, whereupon he’ll get charged a ludicrous amount for a pie which probably dates from Nell Gwynne’s era.

Waiting staff are also similarly gripped by “don’t give a fuck” fever in high season. While in town with my friend, I ‘enjoyed’ an excruciating bite to eat in a well-known bar chain behind Regent Street. The place was empty inside, as everyone else in the pub had thought “skin cancer be damned!” and was sitting outside, cooking much faster than our pitiful meal eventually would.It’s always great to walk into a place, ready to spend money, and to be met with what I would call indifference, but that seems too nice a word for it. Perhaps contempt would be better. After being served flat prosecco, a cold meal and being charged a service levy for going up to the bar and ordering ourselves, we weren’t having a good time. Then, as if by magic, the waiting staff started having a huge, sweary argument with each other about a missing tip. We complained and got part of the meal refunded, but the manager didn’t seem to care that we had had a dreadful experience and was more concerned with ignoring all the tourists desperately trying to catch here eye so they could pay the bill. She was, of course, hoping they’d give up waiting and just leave some kind of cash sum that would be way over what was necessary. Given that the tip being argued over by the staff was £40, it’s clearly a great racket.

And so pity the poor tourists. Ripped off, spoken to like they are shit, given hopeless directions by Londoners who can’t be arsed explaining the difference between The Mall and Pall Mall.

As my good mood deflated at the speed of light, hundreds and thousands of thoughts were running through my head. What was it about me that made him assume – correctly, of course – that I was gay? Why had he looked at me like I was something he had stepped in? And more importantly, what planet are we on that makes it OK to vocalise your disgust for someone’s sexual orientation completely unprovoked.? I wanted to run after him and run these questions by him, as if having the answers would somehow make everything all right and teach me something I didn’t already know about society. I didn’t want to walk in the sunny street any more. I suddenly felt self-conscious and ridiculous, like I’d turned up at a funeral dressed as a clown. I turned sharply and headed into the tube station, my mind going into overdrive.

As I waited for the train, I assessed what I was wearing that day. A grey blazer, a light, smart shirt, dark jeans, brogues, aviator sunglasses. If anything, I looked like a straight Sloaney. I was carrying a man bag, yes, but it was black and from one of the most heterosexual shops on the planet. I started to feel angry and resentful. I was bilious at the thought of this unfair, heterosexual world, where you can’t be a man if you don’t like sport and you have to fancy women and look at tits in the newspaper and talk to your girlfriend like she’s shit. I know not all straight men do this or think this, but it’s not usually a problem if that’s how you do choose to behave. The new man of the 1980s gave way to the new lad in the ’90s, transforming into the new bloke of the Noughties. Even gay men want to be blokey now, with more effeminate men shunted to the sidelines, the forgotten strain of homosexuality, while gay magazines publish photo shoots with straight celebrities, muddied up in football shorts to pander to this increasing need for masculinity. I envied and pitied those millions of people on Earth who didn’t know what it was like to grow up gay, to not fit in, to feel as if the world and its opportunities were somehow unavailable to you because of who you went to bed with.

I fumed and clenched my teeth at the thought of those two men who had seen me coming and decided they simply had to say something about me. To me. It wasn’t enough to think that I looked like a poofter; I had to be told. I wonder what they expected my reaction to be. They would have known I wouldn’t confront them. There were two of them, one of me, and gay men can’t fight, right? Would it have had to come to blows? That I hadn’t even had the courage to blast a quick “Fuck you!” in their direction made me seethe. It was too late; they had had their moment. Their day would continue and they wouldn’t give me a second thought. But the pair of them remained imprinted on my day, casting a dark shadow over it, like a lone cloud in a clear, bright sky.

So I had to let it go. I figured I should move on. But something will have changed in me next time I leave the house. I might not wear those sunglasses again, or I might decide not to walk down that street for a while, or I’ll put the shoes I was wearing to the back of the wardrobe. A word is all it takes.

I merely glanced at it as I was leaving the shop, but as my brain processed what I’d actually seen, I found myself going back to it to take it all in. I get that it’s a quote and all that, but what does this actually mean? At the risk of sounding like an over-zealous, militant PC warrior, why does a shop think it’s OK to use this quote, when there are a million more romantic and more ambiguous quotes out there that would do just as well?

It was with some interest – and indeed a state of mild depression – that I read this piece by Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail, which raises concerns that aspects of gay life could be introduced into schools’ curriculums. The examples given are fairly innocuous: students could learn about statistics referring to gay people as a percentage of the population  or in geography consider why homosexual people leave rural areas for the city, but to read this somewhat pointless diatribe, one would think that schools are being encouraged to ask little boys to kiss each other open-mouthed or handing out dildoes to teenage girls. One ludicrous example even lambasts the possibility that science students could be taught about male animal species who take care of their young rather than females, which doesn’t seem quite like a gay trait to me, unless human widowers left to look after a family following their wife’s death instantly acquire a predilection for penis.

The main issue with all this hullaballoo over gay lifestyles being spoken about in schools, that the popular press likes to say this is ‘promotion’ rather than information or education. Children aren’t learning about homosexuality in an effort to understand it, apparently – they are instead being ‘bombarded’ with gay promotion to such a degree that young boys immediately go home and ask their mother if they can have a Barbie doll for Christmas and start crying to Judy Garland records. Homosexuality can’t be promoted; it doesn’t have room among all the propaganda about heterosexuality we have to deal with.

The thing is, I would fully expect for a few years that any class given homosexual examples in questions like the ones set out above to laugh and giggle at the prospect of same-sex couples. There will probably be a ripple of disgust among some members of the class. That such a thing is inevitable is sad and the only way to make sure that it doesn’t carry on through future generations is to make sure that non-conventional lifestyles can be openly discussed so that in turn they do become conventional. Nobody saying that being gay is amazing and the best path to go down. But if it is the only path available to you, which it is to most gay children, then you should be reassured that it’s OK and that society will accept you. We’re a long way away from that at the moment.

The wilful misunderstanding of the press to interpret any mention of gay in an educational context as being a huge celebration of ‘gay is great; try it today!’ is a very unfortunate one. The people who believe in this want to stop any conversation about being gay, in the hope that refusing to normalise it and make it relatable will somehow make it disappear. If only that really worked; I’d never talk about Melanie Phillips again if it made her vanish into thin air. Sadly, she’s still around and as long as she is, her behaviour needs to be challenged.

The thing you hear most from these newspapers and the ‘bottom half of the internet’ who leave comments underneath articles is that gay issues are being ‘rammed down their throats’. This reinforces the idea that all gay people are militants who go on marches and scream oppression if they don’t get their own way, subjecting poor Joe Public to witnessing their unspeakable acts. Strange isn’t it that while nobody wants it rammed down their throat, so many of them keep stirring and provoking anger. It’s almost as if they like it.