If you are going to normalise society there's a great opportunity to set the bar with a little more freedom: 'I officially declare it is now normal to stop working for a living, and take a drum up a mountain with some peyote and hang loose a while'.

Strange then that people who do the normalising always come up with something really boring. Apparently Jan babes was concerned the press were committing crimes against the definition of natural death, as if he had:

'...keeled over at the age of 90 in the grounds of the Bide-a-Wee rest home while hoeing the sweet pea patch'. *

There's nothing necessarily natural about trying to live a life from the 1930's which didn't actually exist even in the 1930's. Read a book which heralded strong women's voices at the advent of Modernism: The Life and Death of Harriett Frean, by May Sinclair. Repressing individuality and desire on account of perceived gender constraints, by doing the garden all the time, does not create a normal or natural mind. And you need one to identify the flaws in your arguments as you try and move through life with social skills.

For example: the fact that civil partnerships may involve as many arguments in Ikea as a heterosexual marriage agreements, does not indicate that being gay within marriage leads to promiscuity or dilutes that union. It just means people can't put shelves up. Having a drink in your own house with someone you got on with at a night club doesn't prove it either - not unless you live in some Nazi world where freedom of thought is a sin. (I think its somewhere in the Cotswolds stockbroker belt).

But let's not jump the gun. For the sake of fairness we should keyword Jan Moir's own article:�@

• sordid
• gay
• strange
• lonely (he can't have been that lonely, if, as suggested by Jan Moir, he had two guys on the go at once)
• Private vice - (sorry Jan but it was just a bit of cannabis. The worst risks of which are usually spending too much time in your own living room, talking crap. No chance of that happening to Jan Moir, then)?
• George Michael
• mysterious stranger (just to back up the cottaging sub-text hinted at by the George Michael reference)
• the rented cottage (she just has to get 'em in).
• sleazy
• happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships
• ooze
• seeped out)*

• only puts washing on a half load
• always puts ketchup on the left sausage
• you know; 'them'.

Okay so we made up the last section. But then again so did Jan Moir:

"For once again, under the carapace of glittering, hedonistic celebrity, the ooze of a very different and more dangerous lifestyle has seeped out for all to see".*

For partner, friends and relatives, the occasion is obviously immense. But in terms of breaking news let us remind ourselves that nothing happened. That's really why the Daily Mail columnists find it so terrible that somebody held down a job and a marriage while being gay: there's just no news in it anymore.

*http://www.daily

mail.co.uk/femail/article-1220756/A-strange-lonely-troubling-death--.html