My hope for the new year is that everyone will become a little thicker-skinned. When so many casual remarks nowadays provoke public fury, relaxed discourse becomes all but impossible. Diane Abbott's tweet yesterday about how "white people love to play 'divide and rule'" with black people was, as Nick Clegg said, "stupid", but hardly worth making a fuss about. White people (dare I generalise?) are presumably confident enough to survive this mild aspersion without resort to racial violence. It was as absurd for a Tory MP to demand Abbott's resignation from the shadow cabinet on account of this remark as it was for Ed Miliband to tell her pompously "in no uncertain terms" that it had been "unacceptable".

You might think Jeremy Clarkson went a little far by suggesting that civil service union leaders be executed "in front of their families" when a straightforward shooting would be sufficient; but it was only a rather galumphing kind of joke. And how can anyone be outraged when a man who makes his living by trying to appear outrageous has another shot at doing just that? Then there was the storm that engulfed the BBC when it included Edinburgh Zoo's giant panda among its 12 "Women of the Year" in 2011. Thousands of women tweeted that this was "sexist" because Sweetie hadn't achieved anything significant and, anyway, pandas weren't women.

Fortunately, the BBC did not include among its "Men of the Year" the chimpanzee Cheetah, who died last month aged 80 after having once co-starred with Johnny Weissmuller in the Tarzan films; for that would doubtless have also caused great offence among the nation's male population. Cheetah, on the other hand, never once complained when Maureen O'Sullivan, who played Jane in several Tarzan films, referred to him always as "that bastard".

To live in fear because of the colour of your skin



I can still remember the horror with which I read in the 1970s about the "Zebra Murders" in San Francisco. This largely forgotten spate of killings took 71 lives between October 1973 and May 1974, creating panic in the city. The most chilling thing about them was that, like the murder of Stephen Lawrence, they were motivated by nothing more than hatred of the colour of someone's skin. Five members of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, known as the "Death Angels", went around knifing and shooting people, sometimes in the back in broad daylight, simply because they were white. Their loathing of white people was based on a belief that the white race had been created 3,000 years earlier by a mad black scientist called Yacub who had wanted a race of inferior people to rule over. The "Death Angels" believed they had a better chance of getting to heaven if they killed some of these "grafted snakes" and "blue-eyed devils".

What appalled white San Franciscans was, of course, the craziness and random nature of the killings. If being white was on its own a good enough reason for somebody to murder you, there could be no security for anyone. And to recall the fear and bewilderment then prevalent among the white people of San Francisco is to understand better the horror and misery felt by black people in Britain over the killing of Stephen Lawrence as he waited innocently at his Eltham bus stop all those years ago.

One unusual thing about the Zebra Murders was that they were perpetrated by members of an ethnic minority against members of the ethnic majority. It is normally the other way round, as it is from the majority that racial hate killings usually come.

Now even a heavy cold can take you over the limit



While driving around England during the holidays I was careful to be stone-cold sober. But now I read that I might just as well have drunk four double whiskies before each car journey for all the difference it would have made. I had a heavy cold for much of the time, and research by an insurance company has found that drivers with colds are just as dangerous as those who have been drinking heavily. Another hope for the new year is that there will be some sort of curb on all research likely to cause consternation and distress.

Farewell, my dear readers. Hello, my darling ducks



As Jane Austen's Mr Bennet might put it, I have delighted you long enough. I have been writing a weekly column for the Guardian for more than 15 years, but this is the last one. This can't have anything to do with the fact that I was 72 the day before yesterday, for, as everyone knows, 70 is the new 50, or whatever. But I have to admit confidentially that my mind, or at least my memory, doesn't work quite as well as it used to, and that my reliance on Google is growing. So perhaps this is as good a moment as any to take my leave, and it doesn't make me feel any younger to find myself described in one gossip column as a "scribe" who is laying down his "quill". So my thanks to the Guardian for its hospitality and to its readers for their generally genial and encouraging responses to my witterings. Now I will be spending more time with my ducks.