An English teacher of mine once devoted an entire lesson to expounding his fervently held thesis that Pakistanis were devious, smelt bad and should be kicked out of the country. As none of us liked this particular teacher, thinking him a lazy oaf, we naturally assumed that precisely the reverse was true, and resolved to make friends with the first Pakistanis we came across.

This was an excellent example of political propaganda in the classroom falling at the first hurdle. Thirty years later, I hope today’s kids react with similar perverse disdain when subjected to the government’s attempts to wash their brains. They should do what we did: snigger, heckle, make obscene up-and-down gestures with their hands to the teacher and then forget it the moment the bell sounds.

A paper commissioned by Alan Johnson, the education secretary, has recommended children be taught the immense benefits of multiculturalism and diversity in every subject they study. The paper, written by some superannuated educational panjandrum called Sir Keith Ajegbo, suggests, for example, that during maths lessons children should be told that Muslims invented nothing. By which I mean that they invented the concept of zero. So when a quadratic equation resolves to zero, the kids should be reminded that, in effect, Allah (PBUH) provided us with this wonderful conclusion.

In history the kids should be told that they’re all from immigrant communities, and in English classes study literature that explores “experiences of migration”, such as tedious stuff by Zadie Smith and Monica Ali (but I expect not by VS Naipaul. I wonder why that is?). In citizenship classes, compulsory since 2002, the children will be taught about Britain’s appalling imperialism and connivance in the slave trade — but not, one suspects, Africa’s longer-standing connivance in the slave trade, or, indeed, its appalling record of self-governance.

At every point kids are to be instructed in the benefits of immigration and multiculturalism — of which there have indeed been a great many. But not the deficits, of which arguably there have also been many. There is a clear political line and the children will not be allowed to deviate from it. They will be judged not by their understanding of acquired knowledge, but by their attitudes — their conformity to a contentious political opinion held by the secretary of state for education and Sir Keith Ajegbo, whoever the hell he is.

There will not even be an optional module to consider the controversial proposition that Ajegbo is a self-serving, politically motivated idiot whose views about the national curriculum should be scrunched up and thrown in the wastepaper bin. Instead of being taken seriously and rammed down the throat of every child in the country.

- A man likely to die before he is 30 has succeeded in persuading the Anglican nuns who run the hospice in which he lives to procure him a prostitute, so that he can experience the joys of carnal lust just once, before he shuffles off this mortal coil.

Nick Wallis, 22, who suffers from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, apparently presented the nuns of the Douglas House hospice in Oxford with a considerable moral dilemma. The church has not, throughout its long and noble existence, been terribly keen on whoring; but, in the end, the nuns decided that compassion and humanity were more important than religious dogma — and so Nick got his girl, and with a rather winning smile, pronounced her performance “satisfactory”.

Well done, all concerned: the tart, the nuns and Nick. An uplifting story for all of us. It makes you hope that those Roman Catholics in charge of adoption agencies may feel similarly smitten by compassion and will forget religious dogma when a gay couple turn up wishing to adopt.

Weighing heavy on women’s minds

How do you like your women to look? Call me heartless, but I’ve always rather appreciated the current “Birkenau chic” adopted by our top models and apparently supported by the entire British fashion industry. I like girls who appear to have eaten nothing but sawdust for five years and whose bones threaten to poke through their skin.

I suppose this says something horrible about me, rather than them. But now various self-appointed spokesharridans, most of them a bit on the porky side, are angry that the fashion industry will not ban size 0 women from the catwalks.

We seem to have got ourselves in a terrible confusion over how heavy women should be. At one and the same time, we wish to stop them being horribly obese but also we want to stop people stigmatising them for being horribly obese. Fat is nothing to be ashamed of but you shouldn’t be fat, we seem to be saying. The risk of being called a hideous fat cow in school is, however, a useful disincentive to pigging out every evening on barbecue Pringles, KFC party buckets and vats of Coca-Cola.

Remove the stigmatising and girls get fatter. Now we worry women might be too thin. No wonder they look terrified every time they step on the scales of a morning.

Don’t shed a tear for the moaning corner shop

One morning, probably quite soon, you will traipse downstairs for a cup of coffee to discover that your kitchen has been taken over by Tesco.

There will be fluorescent lights and racks of cod’n’prawn ready meals, colourful displays of weirdly perfect fruit that never goes off, and single mums standing like mutant zombie creatures in front of the doit-yourself check-out tills, wondering when to swipe in their loyalty cards and whether the cheese dippy things they’ve bought for little Chardonnay and Lembit contain asbestos or tritium.

You may complain, in strident tones — “Go away, this is my kitchen!” — but it will do no good. You’ll just be escorted from the premises by a uniformed retard and be forced to hang around by your front gate, collecting trolleys and ranting like a madman.

At this point — I estimate August 2008 — every home will have its own Tesco. There are already six in the small Oxfordshire town of Bicester (population 14); they’re getting there. Every little helps, as they say.

Like all good green-fearing leftie middle-class hacks, I cannot abide supermarkets and whenever I’m in one guiltily insist to fellow shoppers that this is the last time I’ll come here, etc. However, while I would rather buy most of my food from greengrocers, butchers and fishmongers, I will not mourn the passing of the good ol’ all-purpose corner shop, which sells bad food expensively and, when you get it home, you discover that the sell-by date was about the time of the Salisbury Agreement.

And which never has the very thing you want; no decent filter coffee, the only fresh bread has been manufactured from carpet underlay and the white wine hails from Tajikistan or Kent. These, though, are the shops clamouring most loudly about the wickedness of Tesco, et al. For once, I’m on the side of the billionaires.

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