At my secondary school, a friend of mine pretended to be the confidant of the tragic Scottish child star Lena Zavaroni, maintaining that time away on family holidays was actually spent visiting the ailing singer at her home in Scotland. He even went as far as appearing to receive and engage in phone calls from Zavaroni, presumably by cutting off the call as soon as he picked up the receiver, and acting out a fake one-way conversation. It wasn’t until years after Zavaroni’s death I learned the relationship had been an elaborate, committed, and entirely pointless hoax. No one was impressed by a friendship with the former Opportunity Knocks singer anyway, just baffled. And yet my friend identified, convincingly, as a personal friend of Lena Zavaroni. For about five years. It was an act of insane genius.
For the past week, the national conversation has been dominated by the idea that a school in Rye had defended a child’s right to identify as a cat, subsequently and cynically extrapolated into the idea that woke schools all over the land were encouraging children to identify as animals. The clandestine classroom recording that sparked this moral panic revealed a put-upon teacher discussing complex gender issues with some combative children, clearly under some pressure and concerned for a distressed class member. But at no point was it clear that anyone was identifying as a cat. Or indeed as a dog. A dinosaur. Or a furry. Because at no point did anyone identify as a cat. It didn’t happen.
