THIS week’s lecture concerns things that might cheer you up. Some of these are called books. You may have seen them at the shops, and I can recommend them – in moderation.

We witter in the wake of learning that some psychiatrists recommend the merry, gentle novels of Edinburgh-based author Alexander McCall Smith to patients feeling down.

I don a white coat to second that prescription. In ensuing discussion of the explosive revelation, folks unsurprisingly also recommended PG Wodehouse for the same purpose. Keen to save the world, I’ve frequently made that recommendation myself to you, the people.

For the sake of my own morale, I read a little Wodehouse every day – as did my main intellectual influence, the late Queen Mother – though it’s just a few pages (the books are kept in the loo, wherein I doth not linger). Wodehouse’s genius is largely down to his astute use of language, ken? Combined with geniality, his magnificently inconsequential comic novels are guaranteed to put a smile on the most miserable face. What are you all looking at me for?

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Feeling even more downhearted than usual recently, I ordered myself to remember the things that help in this alleged life. These are all aesthetic or cultural artefacts. That is to say, films and music, as well as books.

Many of the films I love, particularly those of Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman, aren’t particularly jocular. However, Bergman’s inspiring melancholia and despondency leave you thinking: ‘At least I’m not as miserable as these sad saps.’

The world was a happier place in black and white and, in times of serious angst, I reach for classic old British films: School For Scoundrels, The Happiest Days of Your Lives, The Belles of St Trinian’s. Men wore proper jackets in those days.

Film now includes YouTube, and my heart leaps for joy when I see a dot next to Jonna Jinton’s name in my subscriptions: it means there’s a new vlog by the wholesome and talented filmmaker, who shows us life in rural northern Sweden and captures stunning footage of the Northern Lights. Millions of peeps testify how she lifts the spirits. I back that testimony.

As for music, often I throw the French impressionists past my earlobes. I ken that was painters, but it was also composers like Ravel and Debussy. Vaughan Williams’s very English, even British, stuff also soothes and consoles the disconcerted poltroon.

Now to things I don’t recommend. Don’t take pills. In my early twenties, doctors sometimes offered to medicate my gloom, which was existential and aesthetic. My response to them: “I direct a jet of micturition at your prescription. I pooh-pooh your pills.” Which was just as well, as they’re all banned now.

Lastly, do not under any circumstances read these columns. The only people benefitting from these are The Samaritans, who should be paying me a retainer.

Send us censorious

IT’S difficult to keep up with who excels most at censoring. The Left? The Right?

Generally, it’s the woke, censoring ideas and words willy-nilly but, particularly in yonder United States, it’s also conservative authorities who are it, removing “pornographic or indecent” material – some of it willy; some of it willy-nilly – from schools. Now, in the US state of Utah, the Bible has been removed from elementary and middle schools for containing “vulgarity and violence”.

This sounds reasonable. While exposure to rottenness may be fine for adults, children should be protected from the horrors of the real world until the dreadful day when they must join it.

However, it turns out the Utah ban was prompted by just one complaint, and that from a woke person ironically testing the state’s laws designed to protect minors from dubious material.

Woke peeps are obsessed with sex, and desperate to experience it one day. In the meantime, they like to see it flaunted aboot.

So, what’s in the Bible that might be deemed, like, risqué? Well, the woke wumman was exercised by these: “Incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape and even infanticide.”

I see. Must say it’s decades since I examined a Bible but, even so, while I recall the last named, all the smutty stuff passed me by at the time. Still, as a risible innocent who never got the salacious lyrics in rock songs, I don’t doubt they’re all there.

The Daily Telegraph compiled a list of lewd references for its mainly Satanist readers. “Then he drank of the wine and was drunk, and became uncovered in his tent.” Well, we’ve all been there.

“Then went Samson to Gaza, and saw there a sex worker, and went in unto her.” That’s my modern translation for the politically correct. The original says “harlot”, which seems unnecessarily brusque.

At any rate, children should not be exposed to this sort of thing. Childhood should be sacred, not profane. Adults can make up their own minds, but even they might benefit from a trigger warning: “People of a sensitive disposition should be aware that this fantasy story contains scenes of violence, murder, rape, animal cruelty, quack cures, burning foliage, big daft beardies, confusing contradictions, pettiness, nastiness, piety, warmongering and misleading claims about wine, loaves of bread and haddock.”