A FEW DAYS ago a young man just a yard away from me on the pavement suddenly lashed out and kicked a shop window, breaking it and cutting his toe on the glass. It would have been bizarre not to comment. “That was really stupid,” I said. “Why on earth did you do it?” “They won’t let me in,” he answered, adding pathetically, “I’ve hurt my foot.” I took it upon myself to lecture him for a minute or two about the consequences of certain actions. I’d like to think he won’t be kicking in any more windows. But he’s probably just learnt not to do it in flip-flops.

I find myself dangerously messianic on the issue of personal responsibility at the moment. As readers of my column in the Saturday Magazine will know, because I’ve been boring on about it for weeks, I recently had a motorbike accident. I was riding around a dirt track, got cocky, went over a jump far too fast and fell off, breaking my collarbone and a few ribs. The reason I am inflicting this misfortune on a whole new audience is because I have been amazed by the number of people who, commiserations dealt with, ask how much I’ll be getting by way of compensation.

Compensation from whom? I say. (No other rider or vehicle was involved.) From the owners of the track, they reply. But why should they give me money for something that was my own stupid fault? I say. So then these people suggest that The Times (I was riding the motorbike in order to write about the experience; that part worked out rather well) should stump up some cash. That’d be nice, I reply, but again, there wasn’t a News Corp bigshot on the pillion, ordering me to rip the throttle open at precisely the wrong moment. The mistake, I repeat, was mine alone. At this my interlocutor gives me a sympathetic, head-cocked-to-one-side funny look, as if I’m being weirdly masochistic.

Well, what about Kawasaki then, they suggest, surely they owe you something? Oh come on, I say, voice rising, that’d be like suing Toyota or GMC every time you dented your bumper. Well, quite, they say, looking smug. But, I shout, it was my own fault! Just as when I got knocked off my bicycle, that was my fault too, I’d illegally undertaken a lorry and gone into the driver’s blind spot. And when I almost fell out of a tree in the spring, that would have been my fault too, had I not grabbed another branch in time, because I’d climbed too high in inadequate footwear on a windy day. It wasn’t the tree’s fault, or the owner of the tree’s fault, or the wind’s fault, or the maker of my trainers’ fault. It was mine.

What’s more, I say heatedly, not only would it be simply mistaken for me to go around blaming someone else for these incidents, and greedy to try to profit from them, it would also be a negation of me as an individual. Say I hadn’t crashed on that motocross jump. Say I’d come back safely to earth like Evel Knievel on one of his better days, wouldn’t that have meant I’d negotiated a tricky situation? And thus felt able to congratulate myself? Not by the logic of these hair-trigger litigants, no. If you can never take individual responsibility for doing something badly, neither can you take it for doing something well.

And then I get really steamed up, and say I’m not 7 years old, I’m almost 42, and the definition of being an adult is taking responsibility for your own actions, and not always to blame other people, or corporations, governments, “They”, The System and History with a capital H. Oh Robert, these people then say, letting the ball roll away and charging instead into the man, you really have got very right-wing in your old age haven’t you? And I reply, no I haven’t, I’m actually moving closer to a classically anarchist position.

That shuts them up, giving me the chance to add, slightly pompously perhaps, that it is sad that at the very moment free will is becoming a reality for many of us, or at least for those of us living in Western democracies, the prevailing left-wing orthodoxy has become to condemn those who accept the consequences of that freedom.

It’s peculiar, the right-wing accusation. I can tell people imagine it to be their final, unanswerable, bone-shattering argument. I’ve been hearing it a lot recently. First I came out in favour of selection by ability in education. Then I did a piece arguing patriotism was a healthy human emotion. And now I’ve fallen off a motorbike and assumed responsibility for something that was, in fact, my responsibility. And this, it turns out, is sufficient to condemn you as a 21st-century Genghis Khan. Or worse than Genghis, Jeremy Clarkson. Only without the fat contracts and the royalties. So be it.

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