The many drawbacks of being loved by a truly unattractive species

ANOTHER summer gone by without me swimming with dolphins. All I can ever boast is swimming with jellyfish.

It was an unplanned experiment which accidentally ascertained that wasps and jellyfish are both species given to display in much the same way as Cheryl Cole and they hate everything else in the world. Being on the physical receiving end of that hatred makes being pursued by Twitter trolls seem like a picnic.

I’ve been on the sea in a boat at the same time as dolphins were swimming close by. None of them did Flipper’s walking backwards trick, but apparently dolphins in the wild don’t do that crowd-pleasing stuff. The backward walk is the prerogative of the happy slave. In common with other slave-owners, humans tend to interpret learned obsequiousness, whether it take the form of minstrel songs in the Deep South or bribe-bought tricks on the part of cute mammals as natural, inborn demonstrations of their happiness with their respective lot: they love us and want to show it at the drop of — well, at the drop of a trainer’s signal.