The burning of effigies is one of those things that I’m only aware of through news stories. I’ve never done it myself, or seen it done, but it seems to go on somewhere out there. I don’t really dislike anyone enough to want to burn a 3D representation of them. To be honest the people that seem to inspire my fiercest hatred, are the people that I tend to have the most fleeting contact with – drivers who don’t give the courtesy thank-you wave, or people who walk in front of me and then stop – and I rarely get a very good look these people. So even if I knew where to get effigies from, there would be the worry that the effigy wasn’t a good likeness of the person that I hated so much. I mean I’m not sure how much burning a very accurate effigy would really assuage my feelings of anger and contempt, but I’d imagine burning a bad one – basically a big anonymous doll – could possibly make me feel even angrier at the hopelessness of the world and my place in it.

Anyway I see it’s been happening in India this week, with demonstrators in Mumbai setting light to effigies of Richard Gere. But I wonder about the accuracy of the BBC news report. Were they really effigies of Richard Gere? The realities of the effigy vending business make me sceptical. I could just about imagine a 24 hour turnaround on your key range product (I’m thinking back to my days as a buyer at HMV here) – Bush, Blair, Uncle Sam etc – but surely Richard Gere – outspoken though he can be about Tibet – would not be in your core range. I like the idea of a vast warehouse somewhere in the middle of a desert with miles and miles of shelving and every single person in the public eye represented in effigy form. The staff constantly fearing that Michael Palin will insult the followers of some major world religion and thus expose their perilously low stock of the one man they thought was a safe bet. That’s how it should be, and that’s how lazy BBC journalism tries to fool me into thinking it might be, but I bet it’s not. I bet the effigy was just some crudely contorted pillow – with not even the gender, let alone the distinctive Derek Hattonesque ratty features of Mr Gere – clearly defined. I bet it was so bad that the men burning it had to keep saying things like ‘Down with Richard Gere.’ Maybe even resorting to scrawling ‘Richard Gere’ on the malformed head of the doll. Another beautiful dream bites the dust.