It has been an unusually busy week, even for me, and not helped by evil Sluice Nurse persuading me to go the Festival Hall.  Not to see a concert; I should be most surprised to discover that she is aware that it is actually a performance venue, but to drink in their Skylon bar.  This was to gaze on the flowing waters of the Thames as we sipped a little glass of rose.  Unfortunately, due to the angle of the setting sun, the blinds were down so we had no option but to drown our disappointment in industrial quantities of gin. I hope she got home in one piece but let me know if you stumble across a ‘Body of elderly woman discovered in water after three weeks’ story in your local press.

I have also been parading my thespian skills in a film, playing the part of a judge (Obvious casting decision) but discovering too late to cancel that there was no 40 foot Winnebago for me in the car park and the costume/hair/make-up budget was not even a gleam in the producer’s eye.  There was, by way of a little consolation,  a great deal of cake.  Let me know ASAP if you want tickets for the premiere.

A lost evening of inebriation was required to offset the increasingly gloomy and hysterical stories about B*****.  People, stop it.  The sun will still rise but all we hear is despond.  ‘There will be no lettuce, no medicine, no daylight’ shriek the Remoaners ever more shrilly.  Why, oh why, are there so few interviews with the 52% who thought it would be a Good Thing?  I have written to the ‘Today’ programme with that very question but have yet to receive a reply.  I did hear Ian Duncan Smith on the World Service when he got quite shirty with the negativity of the interviewer and only used the word ‘Poppycock’ to dismiss the horror stories, displaying a far greater level of self-restraint than I could have managed.

There are two sides to most stories but increasingly a given view takes precedence and no other opinion is tolerated.  B***** is bad, Remain is the only way forward.  All rich people are thieves and exploiters and everyone poor is an angel.  All refugees are fleeing from desperate oppression and no economic migrant has every landed here with the sole intention of exploiting the system.  Meat eaters are monsters and no sentence can be uttered or printed that does not contain the word ‘vegan’.

Tolerance, reader, is a two way street.  You cannot berate people for holding right wing views and imagine yourself to be a liberal.  If someone wants to smoke, eat only steak or send their child to a private school then it is none of your business.  None of these things are illegal and until they are don’t presume to tell other people that their preferred way of living is wrong.  I bet they don’t do it to you.

I personally am a great fan of the Flat Earth Society, White sugar in my coffee and don’t think that my recycling of paper and glass is going to make one jot of difference to the life span of baby whales.  You may well disagree.  Just have the good manners not to tell me so.  The sermon for today.