The rightwing press is entering its sixth consecutive year of frothing at the mouth over the nebulous concept of wokeness – ie, anyone showing a shred of concern for people other than themselves, or trying to make those who are in any way different from others feel more included, whether it’s refugees or menopausal women.
This year’s entries on the Mail on Sunday’s “Woke List” include the usual suspects: renowned radicals Emily Maitlis and Gary Lineker, as well as the archbishop of Canterbury, who virtue-signalled his way on to the list by pointing out the destruction that the climate crisis is wreaking on our planet.
Is that really the best they’ve got? Clearly there is a cost of living crisis for readers to be distracted from, but have they still not moved on from an alleged insult that broadly just means “progressive”? Originally used in the American civil rights movement and added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017, this blameless word is now so overused it has become almost meaningless.
Even the most fervent Mail reader must be starting to suspect that perhaps the primary problem in the world today is not, in fact, an excess of empathy. Most people were delighted to appear on the list, with many others upset they didn’t make the cut. Top marks to David Olusoga, who tweeted: “In the hope that it helps me get on to next year’s list, can I just point out the lack of diversity in this year’s Daily Mail [sic] Woke List.”
Paradise ignored
How depressing to come back from three wonderful weeks in Colombia to Channel 4’s macho, sensationalist Our Guy in Colombia. Guy Martin is a likeable and extremely game host (getting “kidnapped”, shot and waterboarded in the service of… it is not clear exactly), but although he begins the show by stating he wishes to counteract the country’s reputation for narcotrafficking, the ensuing two hours focus on that subject alone.
No pristine Caribbean beaches, unspoilt expanses of verdant rainforest, rock formations covered in breathtaking prehistoric paintings. Just a lazy fixation on Pablo Escobar’s blood-soaked legacy, taking a country’s very recent collective trauma and glamorising its worst aspects.
Following the 2016 peace agreement and with a new leftwing government, it is difficult to imagine a more welcoming, beautiful country to visit than Colombia: my prevailing memories of it will include 24/7 reggaeton, phenomenally friendly dogs, and the national sport, tejo – essentially, exploding boules, lubricated by beer and the local spirit, aguardiente (“firewater”).
Stairway to hell
Everyone from the New York Times to Mumsnet was perplexed by the news that an entrepreneur has spent £25,000 on a disused staircase, attached but not connected to a block of flats in Twickenham, south-west London. Simon Squibb, who was homeless at 15 before going on to become a multimillionaire, plans to have a different pop-up business on each floor. As a publicity stunt, it’s imaginative and fairly cost-effective, considering the amount of press it has generated (enabling a succession of publications to deploy the phrase “property ladder”).
But I can’t help envisioning an even more hellish future for London’s housing market, where people sublet their bedrooms when they’re on holiday and terraces are sold for £50K. Soon you won’t be able to get through your morning commute without dodging pop-up juice bars in lifts, biodynamic wine counters at traffic lights, street food courts on Tube platforms. We’ll miss those empty stairwells when they’re gone.
• Kathryn Bromwich is a commissioning editor and writer on the Observer New Review
