A Cure for Calmness

I shouldn't do it, I really shouldn't. Not on a Monday, at least, when my mood is already as it's lowest. Yet I still check out the bilge Peter Hitchens has knocked out for the Mail on Sunday.

It's much like the way you always pick at a scab when you know you shouldn't. No good can come of it. Actually, that's unfair on a scab: at least it serves a purpose. No, reading a Peter Hitchens article is like squeezing a huge spot on the tip of your nose. It causes nothing but pain, mess and leaves you feeling dirty and stupid afterwards. Yet it also feels somehow necessary.

Handsome Pete must be something of a pin-up in Mail World. He's from a proper middle-class background, for one thing. Better still, he used to be a card-carrying Trotskyist before he turned back to the side of light and right. Chuck in a heavy dose of traditional Christianity into the mix, and leave to cool.

Now, all this is fair enough - he's allowed to be a right-wing Christian as much as I'm allowed to be a left-wing atheist. Perhaps I even enjoy the process of getting slightly miffed by his rantings, in the same way the narrator of 'Notes From The Underground' enjoyed his toothache.

This morning, however, I felt an urge to skip work, take the next train to Chez Hitchens, tie him to a chair and spend a day screaming "what the fuck are you thinking, man?" until my vocal chords are shredded. Then I'd use a tape loop of the mantra fed into earphones until I could leave him a quivering wreck. And even that would be too good for him.

See, the Hitch has seen fit to comment on what happened in West Cumbria last week. This much isn't a surprise. But where most people would accept the events as the kind of random tragedy that could (and does) happen anywhere at anytime, our man reckons he knows better. He wonders whether Derrick Bird was on prescription anti-depressants and reels off a short list of some other perpetrators of gun-related massacres, all of whom were on medication.

That's right: the sinister link between anti-depressants and waking up one day wanting to shoot as many people as possible has finally been unearthed. Honestly, it's like watching Mr Monk at work. Mind you, he doesn't actually know whether Bird had been treated for any mental illnesses. It's just a theory, an assumption. Still, no harm in using your column in a national newspaper to test it out. Maybe Harold Shipman was writing himself prescriptions for industrial amounts of prozac:

He also suggests that: "It’s possible an old-fashioned village constable, on the spot, might have done something to halt Derrick Bird, or have realised something bad was going to happen before it did". Which is a good point, as your standard member of the police is fully trained in psychoanalysis these days and can use their Derren Brown-esque mind skills to spot in seconds whether you're even going to litter, let alone go insane with firearms.

Perhaps I'm wrong on all this. Perhaps Peter Hitchens doesn't actually believe all this and he's enjoying a good laugh at mugs like me working ourselves in a frenzy over a column he knocks together 20 minutes before the deadline. Perhaps he just loves causing a stir. I really hope so, because the idea that a supposed intelligent human being can believe the kind of shit Hitchens writes is enough, to steal a quote, to make me pray for nuclear holocaust in the next five minutes.