I was at a murder trial at the Old Bailey not long ago. There were no eye-witnesses. Motive was sparse. Means was some kind of blunt instrument.

Other than that everything was murky. But there was one highly incriminating piece of evidence against the accused. He had left behind some stray microscopic trace of DNA.

‘The chances of this coming from anyone other than the accused are approximately one billion-to-one.’ The prosecuting QC paused, then added: ‘Against.’ Or it may have been 2
billion, I forget. I don’t think the jury took too long in making its mind up. I only mention this because the ‘accused’ could have been anyone of us.

I don’t mean that we are all murderers. Only that no two of us are absolutely alike. Kindred spirits, maybe. Friends, lovers, comrades – possibly. But exact Xerox copies, no.

Yevtushenko, the Russian poet, living under the Soviet regime, wrote, ‘No people are uninteresting.’ It sounds like a modest enough proposal. But I think it translates out as:
everyone is a weirdo.

In the context of repressive collectivism, the poet is a defender of radical individualism. Tetsuko Tanaka, of Tanaka-san Will Not Do Callisthenics, who every day for 25 years has picketed a Japanese electronics factory intent on assembly-line conformism, is a guitar-picking troubadour of unalikeness.

Living in New York, I have become rather conscious of people incessantly using the word like. Or should I say, ‘I’m like conscious of like people incessantly like using the word like.’

I’ve got nothing against the verb like, mind you. I like the word like. But as a conjunction or an interjection or just a way of keeping the motor running even it it's going nowhere, it can be, like, over-used.

There is a fair point in there somewhere. It is as if the speaker is saying: I can only give you a rough approximation, from my point of view. It resembles – it is like – but does not coincide perfectly with absolute truth.

But maybe also there is, concealed within the manic repetition, a hazy globalizing tendency, an underlying sense that everything is like everything else, and we are all collapsing into an undifferentiated porridge of similarity. I have a feeling that Mr Tanaka would probably decline to use the word like too often.

There is a Maya Angelou poem which concludes, ‘We are more alike than we are unalike’. On the face of it, a positive thought for the day.

She is protesting, in part, against racism. Racism seems to rest on a perception of unalikeness.

But you could equally argue that racism doesn’t push its perception of unalikeness quite far enough. It insists on seeing too much likeness on every side (‘they are all…’, ‘we are all…’) and only really allows for one very limited, dogmatic kind of unalikeness.

My father once got himself into trouble – at a trade union meeting where the speaker addressed him as ‘brother’ – by blurting out, ‘I am not your bloody brother!’ You can see how this may have been lacking in a spirit of solidarity and fraternal feeling.

But I think, to be fair, he was making a Tanaka-like (oops!) protest against regimentation and the hive mentality. Groucho Marx probably summed up the attitude when he said, ‘I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.’

If I have this right it turns out that we share 99% of our DNA with warthogs. And, with one loop of our double helix personality, we are willing to accept that, yes, I am rather like all the other warthogs out there, snuffling about in the mud.

But, then again, twisting and turning around on the other rather similar but in fact absolutely antithetical loop, we want to cry out, ‘No! I refuse to be a warthog. I am a dragon, a butterfly, an eagle, a free spirit. I am, like,… unalike.’