I'm not Jeremy Clarkson. Let me make that absolutely clear. In fact I care not one bit for pretty much everything he says and does and his attitude, which can be summed up as, "Shut the fuck up, hippie, I'm talking," makes me wish I was a short, black lesbian working-class aristocratic motorphobe, just to be as unlike him as possible.
I'm not going to ring in the New Year defending Jeremy Clarkson. What concerns me is that the immediacy of social networking is allowing many, otherwise clear-headed individuals to be sucked into frenzies which, if we witnessed them outside our computers, would have us slapping each others' faces to ward off hysteria.
At what point, then, did it become an appropriate forum in which to ask Jeremy Clarkson about his views on the Public Sector strikes? Irrespective of whether his remarks were in bad taste, the simple act of asking the question deviated so heinously from the One Show's magnolia-inspired modus operandi that a more poorly thought out line of solicitation would have been harder to find.
Yesterday, Jeremy Clarkson, the journalist famous for presenting the BBC's Top Gear, made a remark that has set his name trending on the web, and apparently inflamed the vast majority of the people who feel duty bound to set up their own bonfire vigils of outrage whenever they see the first sign of smoke: politicians, tweeters, and the press offices of organisations like Unison, the public sector union.