Sat 25th July 2009

I walked into the pub tonight an acquaintence who I had not seen for some time. He came up to me and asked if I had joined the Taliban. I was a little fazed by this. What possible rumours could have circled the village during my holiday to have bought upon this surreal chain of events? To my knowledge, I have not crashed into the side of any buildings using any planes. I did once crash into the side of a bus in my Nissan Micra, but that was years ago when I lived in Liverpool, and seems a tenuous connection to say the least. There was certainly no malicious or disruptive motive to the crash, and even if there were I would have been a pretty sorry terrorist. At the point of impact I had barely got into first gear so was only travelling about 2 miles an hour. There wasn’t even as much as a dent on the bus. The only damage was a scratch on my wing and the bus driver only took my insurance details for what he called “precautionary administrational procedure”. According to the letter I received a few days later I learned, “precautionary administrational procedure” actually meant “free pay-out opportunity for a bogus whiplash claim”. A further 24 letters followed suit, from each of the passengers who had seemingly sustained a similar injury. It was quite a surprise that the same 2 mile per hour collision had not given me the slightest bruise or scratch yet had caused 24 cases of whiplash. Especially since there were only about a dozen people on the bus in the first place. Like I say, it was just too hapless to be considered anywhere in the league of a Taliban atrocity. Unless helping Scousers to pilfer free-loaded money constitutes as an act of national terrorism. But even if it were, it would not be for me to perpetuate crass implications about regional stereotypes. That is for other people to do.

Astonishingly, the reason for his questioning of such dramatic ideological shifts transpired to be even more tenuous: it was because I have recently grown a goatee beard. Bin Laden has a goatee beard. Ergo, I must be a member of the Taliban. Don’t get me wrong, I do not have a problem with having my beard derided (being boorishly heckled is all part of the charm when entering an English drinking establishment, and if my beard makes me look like a twat then fair enough - it is the closest my mouth has come to one of those in quite some time). But Bin Laden also had a walking stick. Yet did the old man who hobbled with a walking stick across the very same bar on the very same night get likened to the 21st Century’s biggest perpetrator of genocide? Oh no – HE didn’t. He was somehow immune.

It is the complete lack of consistency which got on my goatee.