Behind this mannered waffle is the weird implication that devotees of folk music are somehow, simply by existing, excluding racial minorities. Shooing them away. Though, as so often, details on this point are neither obvious nor forthcoming.

Still, perhaps we can look forward to an academic interrogation of classic car shows in Nottinghamshire as some heinous bastion of “white-centricity.” Another item on the list of Things That Must Be Decolonised And Morally Corrected.

“Our aim,” say our tearful academics, “is to break down the barriers for people to get involved in folk music. Opening up the genre to different audiences.”

Different audiences. Not the audience that folk music actually has, mind, the one it attracts and which is arrived at via choice and musical inclination. And again, no actual barriers to participation are specified. But the audience is nonetheless all wrong, apparently.

Journalists, we’re told, are “exposed to danger in the digital world” and consequently suffer high rates of “anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic distress.” As a result of being mocked or disagreed with on social media. “We don’t want our journalists to be killed,” says Catherine Tait, the president and CEO of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The term “hate” is used often and expansively – not only to cover threats and vividly abusive emails – “violent messages” – but also mockery and brusque corrections of factual and logical error. Even being referred to by the public as woke is presented as a basis for weeping, a form of psychological torture.

Indeed, almost any kind of demurral is framed as an attempt to “silence” the journalists’ self-declared heroism, to deny them their cosmic destiny. And hence, it seems, the imperative to shut down reader-comment sections on national newspaper websites, on grounds that readers are no longer content to confine their feedback to the polite correction of typos.

Throughout, the air is heavy with self-elevation, and claims of being scrupulously unbiased and “speaking truth to power” are deployed entirely without irony.

It’s not just the conceit that vandalising some random person’s car is a thing one should do, as a good person, as an act of righteousness. Bewildering as that is. It’s the idea of doing that to a make of car that’s famed for its ability to record anything that approaches. Which suggests a level of emotional dysregulation, of total impulse control failure, that’s quite hard to relate to.

Of course, Ms Prose was far from alone in her weird theatre of distress, and social media was ablaze with performative convulsion. Among the titans of the fabulist resistance was a tightly wound progressive chap, who envisioned internment camps for those like himself, i.e., tightly wound progressives, with the streets being patrolled by some Trumpian Sturmabteilung.

Oh, and let’s not forget the Ohio high-school teacher Danielle Mann, whose post-election demands, issued from her classroom, included a list of the addresses of likeminded progressives, all of them, everywhere, and the mandatory wearing of identifying bracelets. So that she would know how everyone else voted.

Readers will note the combination of meandering blather and grafted-on buzzwords, like lumps in porridge. I suppose it’s the curse for people who desperately want to seem more interesting than they actually are, or indeed ever will be, and who are compelled to refer almost any topic of conversation – even quantum mechanics – back to themselves. People who wish to become complicated and fascinating by having an “identity.”

It’s also a curse for anyone unable to escape their presence, of course.

Readers will doubtless be intrigued by the “foraged” food – i.e., carrots and leaves, served repeatedly – plus the unheated rooms, the lack of running water, and the whole shitting-in-a-barrel thing. For a mere £900 a night, one can’t expect luxuries like plumbing, protein, or the prospect of heat.

And for those inclined to squint, there may be a rustic charm to things being a loose approximation of what is claimed. And so, just as unheated fishing huts with no plumbing or sanitation are framed as “luxury,” seemingly random objects on a plate are hailed as meals, as “artisanal” and “delicious.”

A man who is referred to in the German media, somewhat surreally, as a woman, a she-person, despite being identified via the very male genetic material left at the scenes of his crimes.

A Campus & Community news bulletin – in which the word “Indigenous” is used many, many times – tells us that Ms Schenandoah will be helping students “bring forth their own potential” via “a wide range of healing modalities,” including the aforementioned tuning forks.

Those touched by Ms Schenandoah’s uncanny powers will learn that the forest is “a relative, not a resource,” and that birds “sing in the morning because they’re happy.” Quality stuff.

Armed with such arcane skills, Ms Schenandoah – whose job description is curiously vague – will provide “a safe space where Indigenous students can cope with stress and trauma.”

Yes, the trauma of attending one of the more expensive and statusful colleges in America, with its annual fees of $70,000, its 920 acres of rolling lawns, its 20 tennis courts, and a capacious ice-skating pavilion.

“I am assumed male nearly always by strangers,” says Ms Kuttner, which, frankly, seems a tad implausible. We’re also told that perceiving her as a man, not a woman, requires “effort,” an effort that is expected by Ms Kuttner – which would appear closer to the truth, if not entirely consonant with the previous claim.

“I don’t like when politics is focussed on identity,” says Ms Kuttner. While informing the nation, via YouTube videos, about her own list of identities, her pansexual appetites, her PTSD, her variable pronouns, and the need to “look at pretty much every piece of policy from a gender-diverse lens.”

This “indigenous knowledge,” the particulars of which are elusive and treated rather coyly, will, we’re told, be “elevated” – presumably, above its station – while “Eurocentric western science” – or, you know, science – will be “de-centred and scrutinised” for any residual wickedness. Any oppressive taint. And hey, what better use could there be of other people’s time and money?

Apparently, we’re to be told what reality is by people who think they’re witches.

As these are terribly modern, immensely caring witches, Ms Howard was banned from the organisation’s Facebook page and from the website of the British Druid Order on grounds of being “unequivocally transphobic.”

Thereby denying Ms Howard access to the arcane knowledge of “seers and healers,” along with the opportunity to purchase oracle cards, audio recordings of spells and invocations, and “hymns to the divine feminine.” Oh, and guides to coping with stress by wrapping a thick blanket around your head.

When asked by his wife whether this behaviour is a fetish, he replied, somewhat coyly, “Maybe so.” Our facilitator of sensitivity also tells us that he feels “a lot of excitement” when buying himself ladies’ shoes, particularly “shoes with high heels.” Indeed, Mr Alme boasts an extensive collection.

Because wheelchair and heels, obviously.

The idea that one’s bizarre and rather elaborate sexual kinks – including wheelchairs and cross-dressing – probably shouldn’t be inflicted on random strangers, on work colleagues, and on one’s own children, of which he is the father of two, appears to have escaped him.

Stripped of contrivance, I’m assuming the above is a roundabout admission that, on average, people who find marriage an alien concept and much too demanding, and who opt instead for transient partners, fatherless children, and unstable relationship trash fires, tend to do less well in life, along with their offspring. Though I’m not sure why the response should be to blame those who get their shit together, marry, and raise children more successfully.

If little Don’t-Know-Who-My-Dad-Is is starting fires at school and looks destined for a life of delinquency and crime, this is not obviously the fault of the happily married Mr and Mrs Jefferson and their two non-fire-starting children. And no amount of chest-puffing about “heteropatriarchy,” “unequal power relations” and “white supremacy” seems likely to alter that fact.

While Dr Strouse is revelling in how exotic and ethnic his classroom sounds, are his students narrowing their options in the job market? Unless it turns out that in the real world every employer wants their company’s memos and public literature, and their customer interactions, to include lots of double negatives, unfinished words, mispronunciation, and mangled tenses. Oh, and aks instead of ask. That always looks professional.

And let’s not forget this farce at the Writing Centre at the University of Washington, Tacoma, the stated goal of which is to “help writers write and succeed in a racist society” – a feat to be accomplished by dismissing spelling and grammar as “racist” and “an unjust language structure.” And whose director, Dr Asao Inoue, took over a year to write a simple, 500-word press release.

Apparently, students with brown skin needn’t be articulate, verbally self-possessed, or precise in their thoughts. And that ungrammatical job application, the one enlivened with incomprehensible sentences and lots of inventive spelling, will do just fine. And by the time the real-world consequences of this “social justice” posturing become difficult to avoid, Dr Inoue will have been paid – and will be merrily exploiting the next batch of suckers.

And so we arrive at a familiar question: If you wanted to harm the prospects of minority students, to diminish their chances in life, while congratulating yourself and being applauded by your peers, what would you do differently?

I wonder if dear Nora has ever paused to consider what stolen cars are very often used for – besides, say, joyriding and endangering other road users. And whether those doing the stealing might often belong to criminal gangs, whose anti-social activities spill over into other areas. Say, smash-and-grabs, and forms of liveliness requiring a getaway car.

Or, as Michael Rothe of the Canadian Finance and Leasing Association points out, “A large majority of thefts are actually being orchestrated by organised crime rings, who use the profits to finance illegal activities like drug and gun trafficking, and human smuggling.”

But hey, no biggie.

Perhaps it would be ungentlemanly to wish on dear Nora some first-hand experience of the crimes she so merrily diminishes when inflicted on someone else, someone who isn’t her. Though it is, I think, tempting.

It’s perhaps worth noting that Transport For London has a staff training centre, complete with fake station and platform, and “suicide pits,” where employees learn how to manage what are euphemistically referred to as “passengers taken unwell” or “disruptions to the tube service.” Events that occur on average once or twice a week.

As someone who’s experienced first-hand the soul-withering properties of attempts to travel in London – and would not care to repeat it – there is, I think, an unhappy irony. It’s also worth noting that TfL, supported by London’s leftist mayor, Sadiq Khan, has been quite eager to forbid adverts on the tube for foods deemed insufficiently healthy and life-affirming, including artisanal cheeses.