The social highlight of my week

The social highlight of my week: one of my exes comes round with her husband, bringing with them a seriously good Chinese takeaway. We then watch one of the implausibly cheap videos I have tracked down while browsing through my endless list of recommendations on Amazon. Tonight’s is Borat, a fine example of exactly the sort of cruel comedy I theoretically dislike intensely, but which is so well done that it performs the rare feat of making me laugh out loud repeatedly.

My ex’s husband (not my ex-husband: an important distinction) can’t understand how Sacha Baron Cohen can get away with the film’s outrageous anti-Semitism. We explain that it is for the same reason that black people can call each other by the N-word, but we can’t.

“What N-word?” he asks, clearly genuinely puzzled.

“We can’t say it,” I explain, “because we’re not black. Walls have ears.”

Despite the risks from spy satellites and implants in our mobile phones, his wife bravely spells it out for him. He harrumphs donnishly and announces that “In all my years in Oxford, I never once came across a black man called Nigel.”