I don’t like to let a Sunday pass without so much as a gentle grumble but as I’m still surfacing from a vile 48 hour bug a fevered croak may be all I can manage.

The subject I’d like to be writing about but can’t quite get it together is the bored passivity with which Britain is subscribing to multiculturalism as an axiomatically Good Thing. I’d like to be writing about the astonishing (to me) indifference of the British public to the spread of the most hateful brand of Islam and the scorn of young British Muslims for everything Britain stood for 60 years ago. But I’m not up for it today. Today I’m going to give you a video link, take a Lemsip and have a restorative nap.

A little of Noel Coward goes a long way but I do think this might be neatly updated to reflect our current national pussyfooting tendency. I realise this is the blogger’s equivalent of chucking a TV dinner in the microwave, but that’s all you’re getting today. Take it or leave it.

I have absolutely no personal experience of politics unless you count two years when I clerked for a parish council, and all that taught me was how long it could take five councillors to decide not to make a decision. So I find myself wondering at what stage in a politician’s career he starts to lose the plot. Because just about all of them do.

Is it when he’s risen to a sufficiently senior position that he stops riding on buses, or sitting in his GP’s waiting room, or hanging out at the school gate? Otherwise you’d expect a politician, especially a Conservative, who did any of those things to understand how his voters think and to recognise A Monumentally Stupid Idea when he saw one. 

‘A pilot scheme offering free vouchers for parenting classes?’ he’d say. ‘Sounds like a typically inefficient Lefty scheme for wasting money. Why not cut to the chase and just throw 500,000 tenners on a bonfire?’

Parenting classes. How did civilised society ever get to be a going concern without them? There used to be people called Pudding Ladies, a kind of informal forerunner of the Health Visitor, who’d go into the homes of the clueless and try to give them a few friendly pointers. Then came Health Visitors, who also targeted the mouth-breathing sludge dwellers (for they are always with us, from generation unto generation) and left the rest of us to get on with raising our children, competently, even if not perfectly, and in peace. But now parents are deemed to require £100′s worth of tuition. How else are they to know not to give Red Bull to a three year old?

I’m wondering whose idea this voucher thing was. David Cameron’s all for it, apparently. When it was discussed, wasn’t there any right-minded person in the room? Not one voice to say, ‘You know, Dave, this is going to make us look really dumb.’?

It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. I don’t imagine there’ll be much of a secondary market  – how many temazepams will a never-used, slightly dog-eared voucher for parenting classes buy you? So I’m predicting a low take-up. After all, if you’re the kind of parent who can’t be bothered to toilet train your children and feed them properly, you’re hardly going to be arsed to walk down to Boots to pick up your voucher. Are you?

You think I’m through growling? I’m not through growling. There’s been a bit of tsk-ing this week from Nelson devotees because HMS Victory has ventured into the business of event venues. You can now hire the admiral’s Great Cabin for a seated dinner, £1500 a head, (I’m not sure that includes the vintage port.)  I raise no objection. Maintaining a historic ship costs a lot of money and I see no harm in the old girl paying her way. But I do object to what St Paul’s cathedral is up to: hiring out the crypt for dinners or, worse still, the chamber around Nelson’s tomb for a drinks’ reception (250 people max). You can also rent the churchyard for a barbie.

That’s the Church of England for you. Pick’n'Mix theology but at least it’s clear where it stands on corporate entertaining.

That’s it. I’m done.

Plenty to growl about today, and I’m barely going to touch on why Jeremy Clarkson’s most recent verdict on the Immigration queues at Heathrow is being described as ‘another gaffe’. As far as I can see he’s only saying what others would like to say but, not having his financial independence, dare not for fear of losing their jobs.

But anyway, Clarkson can defend himself and will no doubt do so. My theme today is charitable giving. On Sundays there are often  tin chuggers stationed at the door of my local supermarket and today was no exception. I could see them eyeing me as I did the old Bag-Purse-Loyalty Card Shuffle. Did I look like I was good for a couple of Euro?

I asked what they were collecting for.

‘Mumble mumble mumble Ghana,’ was the reply. I asked again, but they were still a bit hazy. Some kind of youth project. But definitely Ghana. 

So then I saw red, or at least the shade of pink which used to signify the reach of the British Empire and then the Commonwealth. When Ghana achieved its independence it was one of the most prosperous countries in Africa. It has oil, it has diamonds and bauxite and cocoa, and it has a legacy of British law, education and administration. But it’s now a charity case, receiving aid from the EU and America.

Of course I didn’t deliver this thumbnail sketch to the tin-shakers. I’m not completely foolhardy. All I managed was, ‘Time Ghana got its shit together.’ But I did feel better for saying it.

An hour later there was another attempt on my heart strings, and this one really got me going. Magic Breakfast is a charity that delivers free healthy breakfasts to UK schools that have a 50 percent or higher take-up of free school meals. You with me so far? Children who are getting a free school lunch are nonetheless arriving at school too faint and malnourished to concentrate in class. Some of them even have rickets. Well I think we know who they are. 

Okay, so why aren’t these children getting fed at home? Magic Breakfast cites poverty, working parents who don’t have time, and lack of nutritional awareness. Am I the only person who’s noticed that a bag of porridge oats costs very little and lasts for ever? Am I the only parent whose children were assembling their own breakfasts while they were still in junior school? And what kind of deep burrow must people be living down to escape the nannying drone of nutritional advice the rest of us are subjected to these days?

Of course I do feel sorry for neglected children, and I can see that tossing the poor little runts a bagel and an apple might give a person a rosy glow, but surely there should be consequences for the parents. Like a weekly amount subtracted from their benefits. Because, you know, how else are they ever going to get the message that their children are their responsibility? And I’ll wager you a Full Irish Fry that those homes that can’t afford to put a bunch of bananas and a pint of milk on the table still manage to afford a telly. Never was so much expected by so many and paid for by so few.

So there we are. Two charities I won’t be giving to today.

Rosy Glow would be a great name for a stripper, however.

This is Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor currently running for the Senate and listed, somewhat improbably as part-Cherokee. She’d certainly pass for Swedish.

I may as well put my own ethnic cards on the table. I’m 1/4 Yorkshire, 1/32 Welsh, 1/16 New Forest Pikey and whatever the balance is (I never was brilliant at fractions) Leicestershire and Rutland peasantry. None of which would buy me much in any positive discrimination recruitment programme, although I wonder how Oxford University is doing with its Traveller & Romany quotas. Might be worth a try.

But to get back to Professor Warren… she says she didn’t claim Cherokee blood in order to improve her chances of getting hired by Harvard, and Harvard say it’s completely coincidental that they hired her when their record of appointing Native Americans was looking a bit anaemic. And now she’s up there, clearly outlined on the ridge and getting shot at by Baddies political  opponents, her supporters have changed their tune. Now they say the only reason her detractors are questioning that Harvard appointment is because SHE’S A WOMAN. Which as we all know is a colossal handicap in life that cries out for affirmative action. For one thing we have an anatomical disability that prevents us from competing in Wall Peeing contests. 

I’m watching this story with interest. Will the Cherokee Nation clasp Elizabeth Warren to its bosom? And where’s Ward Churchill, Big Chief Bullshit himself, when a gal needs him?

Sunday was going along so swimmingly well I thought I might get through the day without needing to growl. Then I opened the Sunday Telegraph and out fell Active Living, your 16-page guide to enjoying a healthy lifestyle. Angela Rippon is its cover girl.

It is, I suppose, inevitable that as my post-war bulge generation ages we’re going to be subjected to images of silver-haired dudes who once hoped they’d die before they got old, dentures now gleaming, as they lean on the rail of a Saga cruise ship and sail off into a distant sunset. It shouldn’t annoy me. Maybe it’s the word ‘lifestyle’ that makes me reach for the sickbag.

But anyway, in the second column of her lightweight article (and I honestly don’t know why I got as far as the second column) Miss Rippon says this: As an ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Society, I’m a firm believer that the way to keep your brain cells functioning properly is to send them out to work every day.

Well. What I say, as the carer of someone whose brilliant and lively mind has been destroyed by early-onset dementia, is that Angela Rippon doesn’t know what the feck she’s talking about. Crosswords don’t keep dementia at bay, nor does running a business, taking up Morris dancing or eating blueberries by the ton. Dementia is complicated, random and cruel, and anyone who suggests otherwise is a smug ignoramus.

Okay, I do have an axe to grind. Let me use it to cut Angela a bit of slack here. Maybe what she really meant to say was, ‘So, you’re getting up in years. Then do the things you’ve always wanted to do, enjoy your health while you have it and fill each shining hour. Because you just never know. You know?’ 

Yeah. That’s better. We can all drink to that.

I don’t really know why I’m rising to this wispy scrap of bait but it caught my eye so here we go. A company called Paradone are selling a range of novelty dishwashing brushes that includes one called The Diana Ross. You can buy it now on Amazon but hurry, because Unite Against Fascism is trying to get it banned. UAF claims that the golliwog-style black spongey head reinforces negative racial stereotyping, to which I predict my mixed race step-daughter (and probably Diana Ross too) will respond, ‘Get a life.’

Whatever happened to a sense of proportion? Am I allowed to suggest that people lighten up a little? I dunno. ‘Lighten’ could now be one of those loaded words. I never quite understood why golliwogs suddenly became unacceptable. Every child who grew up before 1960 had a golliwog and we no more associated them with black people than we associated Andy Pandy with any kind of real human life form. Enid Blyton was a woman of her time. Okay, when there was trouble in Toy Town and somebody tried to nick Noddy’s car it was perhaps tactless of her to finger the Gollies.  I mean, where was Mr Milko between the hours of 2 and 3am? But hold on….   

And now I find myself wondering if Debussy’s G-word Cake Walk has been banished from the repertoire, or perhaps renamed? Of course the Cake Walk was a black parody of white folk. Then the white folk blacked up and parodied the black folk parodying the white folk. And then the Ebony and Ivory Touchie Feelies ordered everyone to stop. Now we all have to sing a rainbow, or else.  And don’t even think about scrubbing that pan with Diana Ross’s big Afro hair. 

Time to ferret out my enamelled Robinson’s Golly pin.

I’m always full of admiration when I hear of some Joe Citizen finding the cojones to protest against overbearing regulation and this week’s award goes to John Brennan who got his kit off in Portland International airport. Not only did Mr Brennan find his cojones, he put them on display.

John Brennan flies a lot and he’s had it with the TSA’s rude, intrusive and unwarranted searches of law-abiding people. Me too, and European security checks aren’t nearly as obnoxious as those in the US. Every time I fly, which is quite often, a new rule seems to have been slipped in. Last month it was lipstick. At London City I got bawled out for not having placed my lipstick in the see-through bag.

This week mascara was mentioned in the zombie-voiced announcement at Stansted airport. Frankly I was already struggling with enough proscriptions  – handcream had to be out of my bag for security, Ryanair said my handbag had to be placed inside my carry-on, and the security agent wasn’t sure where a Kindle should be. So when I heard the mascara thing I thought ‘ah feck, let them confiscate it. It’s nearly empty anyway.’ But of course they didn’t, because they didn’t notice it. Good thing it wasn’t packed with Semtex, eh?

The reactions to John Brennan’s striptease at Portland airport were interesting. Some horrified passengers covered their children’s eyes. I’m not sure why. Don’t they start sex education in First Grade these days? Other passengers stepped out of line to take pictures. Stepped out of line! Suspicious behaviour, surely? The kind of dodgy move liable to get you hauled off to a windowless room for questioning? But no, the only person who got hauled off was Mr Brennan. He was charged with indecent exposure and disorderly conduct. Also, he missed his flight to San Jose. 

I don’t think he really wanted to board that flight, do you? He was probably heading down there for another boring meeting, same old, same old, nothing ever gets decided and the coffee’s terrible. I reckon he had a much more satisfying day defying idiocy, plus he got interviewed for the telly. And, in the event of Alaska Airlines blacklisting him (can I say that, or has blacklist been blacklisted?), there’s always Amtrak.

I just got a new dentist. Actually, truth be told, I moved here two years ago and waited till I had a problem before I bothered to find a dentist. You get to a certain age and other things seem more urgent. Like arch-supports.

Anyway Mr New Dentist fixed what was niggling and then invited me to go back for a review of my… dental situation. Yes, for a limited run only, Laurie Graham, The Mouth!

He said, ‘You look to have gone from crisis to crisis.’ Which wasn’t my recollection at all but I thought I’d better find out what he meant. Well, I swear, it was like listening to a council official doing an inventory of Stonehenge. Crumbling, leaning, a danger to health. Even the crown that cost me a month’s earnings is now apparently leaking. And there was me thinking I had pretty good teeth.

I said, ‘You do realise there’s dentistry in there that was done before you were born?’

Sometimes you have to play the Senior card.  I should probably leave my mouth to posterity once I’ve finished with it. The Hunterian Museum sounds about right.

Anyway, out came the pen and paper and the bad news: at least six sessions of work required, so there goes my new varifocals budget. I mean, I’m sure this guy’s an honest, upright practitioner and everything. I just wish he didn’t have back copies of Which Yacht in his waiting room.

The Growler will now fall silent until next week. I’m throwing a blanket over her and going off to Cambridge for a lovely English Orthodox Pascha. Yippee!

No, no mistake. Tomorrow may be Easter for you but for us it will be Palm Sunday. I will nevertheless be conducting my usual Easter Chickadee Hunt for our Catholic grandchildren on Monday. All of which is nothing much to do with anything.

As my regular reader may recall I’ve not been particularly happy in the Orthodox church lately. It’s a cultural thing. The fact of our being neither Russian nor Greek makes it hard ever to feel part of the community, indeed we were once famously chucked out of the Paschal feast in Venice because we weren’t Greek. There have been a few other nationalistic wobbles too. So I’ve been thinking quite seriously about returning to Mother Church and I occasionally attend Vespers at St Patrick’s Cathedral, for a fix of English. Just to hear, Lighten our darkness… makes the wait at the bus stop worthwhile.

But one thing about the Church of England, you can always depend on some cleric to pull a daft Easter bunny out of his hat. This year’s award goes to the Reverend Phil Ritchie of All Saints, Hove who says he can understand why people don’t want to sit in a draughty Victorian building tomorrow morning and not to worry, the Resurrection of our Lord can equally well be celebrated by having a lie in, eating chocolate and having sex. And so, in a very real sense, I think I’ll persevere with the Russians.

Meanwhile, not to be outdone for daftness, a spokesman for the Brighton and Hove Humanist Society deplored the fact that re-enactments of the Crucifixion are performed where children might see them. No! Say it isn’t true! Because, as we all know, children these days are kept totally insulated from images of violence and death. The little innocents sit reading Noddy Does Tai Chi and biting the heads off Jelly Babies while Mummy and Daddy (Or Mummy and Mummy/Daddy and Daddy/delete as applicable) are upstairs getting it on  celebrating Easter.

Give. Me. Strength.

I hadn’t intended posting today, being in a strangely non-growly mood. Then a friend sent me this lovely picture she took of our fireside when she was visiting us last week and I thought, well, I just have to do something with that. 

And while I was faffing around, wondering what to gnash and foam about without detracting from the simple pleasure of a peat fire, I stumbled upon this admirable piece, written by a man whose son is serving in Iraq. It appeared in the Wall Street Journal  last July.  

I have no personal experience of the military. My Dad was in the Navy, but that was before I was born. Both my grandfathers were in the Army but that was practically before Methuselah was born. My son has never been in the armed forces, nor is ever likely to be. Apart from his driving, his sky-diving and his insistence on reading the Guardian he really does nothing to keep me awake at night. Dave Shiflett’s article touched me greatly. I recommend it to anyone who has a son.