In which, inadvertently, I create my very own mob

Many years ago, I organised a disruptive political protest and learned something about an odd aspect of human behaviour. Perhaps I should tread carefully and write that I learned something about an aspect of human behaviour in the ‘civilised’ West and in Western cultures (there are several, though all are related and they are distinguished by ‘local’ cultural variations).

On the face of it I was the most unlikely bod to engage ‘politically’, or better, to seem to engage politically. And I must confess that my motive was ‘fun’ and my tongue was firmly in my cheek.

It was in about 1969 or 1970, and I was about 20 or 21 and knew little about politics and understood less and was even less interested. As a Roman Catholic-born – cradle-Catholic – product of the English public school system – ‘public’ as in ‘private’ in that wacky way we Brits like to confuse the world – I was expected to, or better it was assumed I would, cleave to soft-centred small C conservatism.

I didn’t, however (and as I’ve ‘grown up’ and seen a little more of the world, I find, despite what is expected of ageing gents, to be drifting to the left, though to social democracy not to all out communist fascism).

For some reason, as the child of a German mother and British father who attended German schools for four of his formative years and was in many ways more German than British, I didn’t feel particularly British when we returned to live in Britain from West Berlin in July 1963 and the whole ‘public schoolboy’ schtick just didn’t catch with me.

For three of the previous four years I had attended Das Canisius Kolleg, a Jesuit college in Berlin-Tiergarten (just over a mile through the park to the Brandenburger Tor) whose ethos was one of positivity and ‘doing your best’.

Then in September of 1963, I began life as a boarder at the Roman Catholic Oratory School in Woodcote, Oxfordshire, where it seemed to me the ethos – that is the true ethos of the boys who made up the school rather than the ‘official’ ethos the school might have thought it was inculcating – was almost nihilistic.

I must stress, though, my line about ‘it seemed to me’, as now, in later life, I am far more aware how perception is far more potent than what what might, ludicrously, be called ‘the reality’. I am not denying ‘reality’, as such I am suggesting that there is no one ‘reality’ but pretty much as many ‘realities’ as there are men, women and children on this world.

So to speak of ‘reality’ is in one sense a little pointless.

I had been looking forward to ‘going to boarding school’ because after spending my boyhood reading Billy Bunter (below) books, I anticipated it to be an enjoyable romp of jolly japes, but it was anything but. Of my year’s intake 

49 boys, 47 had attended a ‘prep school’ for at least four or five years and, to be blunt, they had already developed the shell which protects our inner selves from the world. I had not and I was miserable and homesick for what seemed like and extraordinarily long first term of fifteen weeks.

I now know that many boys and girls, men and women have a sense of alienation in one way or another. Perhaps, depending upon the situation and circumstances, such alienation is quite common.

But for me it was partly ‘not feeling English or British’ and not relating to a great deal of what the others seemed – that word again – to have in common. I hadn’t had The Wind In The Willows read to me, I had never played ‘pooh sticks’. Much, perhaps all, of my childhood had been German what with even before moving to Berlin my mother read stories to me in German.

So although when I arrived at Dundee University at the beginning of October 1968, with an impeccable ‘boarding school’ accent and no doubt many ‘public school’ behavioural tics, I did not quite fit the bill, especially in the political role into which folk were ready to give me.

. . .

Until just a year earlier, Dundee University had existed as Queen’s College, St Andrews, but then gained its independent status as part of the then Labour government’s determined expansion of university education.

This expansion meant – in fact, to achieve this was its prime reason – that the intake of colleges and universities was from a far broader social spectrum, notably of young men and women who not ten to fifteen years earlier might never have considered attending university.

Anno domini 2025, modern Britain, rather smugly, likes to see itself – perception and ‘reality’ again, you’ll notice – as classless; but as far as I am concerned, the only difference is that more than 60 years ago ‘class’ distinctions were simply more obvious (and let’s face it snobbery will never go out of fashion).

Pertinently, the 1960s – the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and always remember that these silly, though catchy, descriptions are all invented by national newspaper sub-editors (US copy editors) – became an apparent sea-change in social attitudes, though it didn’t really take off until the Labour Party under Harold Wilson won the 1964 general election.

In fact, there had previously been several such broad, though slow, changes from the mid-1950s on. I suggest they occurred as boys and girls – though it was still very much a male-dominated society – born just before World War II came into their own, found their voice and made themselves heard.

In other words, it was the same old story of a new generation demanding that the previous generation made way!

‘Deference’ went out of the window, it was the heyday of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, it was reported that ‘the working class has found a voice’ and novels, plays and films became ‘gritty’ observations of ‘how the other half lived’. That, not uncommon phrase then used, is very, very telling.

One such change was that the new young generation – who I suspect were not quite doing any more shagging then in earlier years but were certainly talking more about – also found their voice, especially those on the left.

This was 1968, the age of ‘student politics’, though if any of that gang had more than a fleeting knowledge of history, they would have known that ‘student politics’ were as old as the hills, as old as greed, altruism, incest and gullibility.

Britain’s young might, with Labour in charge, believe it had it’s ‘left-wing’ government, decried by those on the right as ‘socialists’ (which description was enough to frighten the horses in many a shire parlour), but it was not very left-wing at all and certainly not at all left-wing enough for many of the protesting firebrands.

It wasn’t that many of Labours MPs were more than nominally middle-class, many were not actually socialist but social-democrats who broadly aimed to achieve the same improvements for those at the bottom of the pile. They certainly did not sign up for the hard ideology of ‘all means of production must be nationalised and in the hands of the working man’.

That phrase gives me occasion to trot out an old joke of mine when politicians pledge to take care of the ‘hard-working’ man: ‘So what about the rest of us?

This, then politically naive, young man was well aware of the iniquity of America’s Vietnam war but couldn’t really see what all the fuss was about.

Then there were the protests about the apartheid regime in South Africa and how that nation’s, then all white, cricket team should not be allowed to come take part in a Test series in Britain. The various protests even involved

 

The Oval cricket pitch in Kennington, South London, was surrounded by barbed wire in March 1970 to try to protect it from anti-apartheid protesters intent in disrupting the South African tour by digging up the pitch

digging up a cricket pitch and grounds being defended by strands of barbed wire. But, I wondered, why couldn’t they just sit down and sort it all out. Surely to goodness, was it really that hard?

. . .

The ‘protest’ I organised was against Tony Benn, then still Anthony Wedgwood Benn, who at the time was Labour’s – if my googling is correct – minister for technology, but despite his slow drift leftwards from a ‘soft-left’ stance, he was something of a hate figure for the hard left.

For the non-lefty young he was also disliked because previously as Labour’s ‘postmaster general’ he had begun the government process of outlawing the ‘pirate radio stations’ swimming in the English channel, though by the time

the relevant bill outlawing the stations became law, he had just been promoted to technology minister.

In my book Tony Benn (right) is something of a good egg. He was born and brought up in a ‘progressive’ household (in brackets because I don’t much like the word, but I use it because most will know what I mean).

Both his grandfather and his father were Liberal MPs, but his father crossed the floor and joined the Labour government of Ramsay McDonald in 1928 (when Tony Benn was just three).

When Tony Benn was seventeen, his father was created Viscount Stansgate and when he died in 1960, Tony inherited the title, although he had previously several times, unsuccessfully, tried to renounce his succession and as a peer could not longer sit in the Commons

Finally, in 1963 because it, too, had useful MPs who were due to inherit titles and would thus have to leave the Commons, the Conservative government passed an act allowing peers to renounce their titles. Benn did so and won a seat in a by-election the same year and remained a sitting MP for the next 38 years.

Benn’s drift to the left and to becoming something of a saint of the left began after Labour lost power to Margaret Thatcher in 1979, although he claimed it had started more than a decade earlier when he was in Wilson’s 1960s governments, partly with his impatience by how the civil service was frustrating many attempts at reform.

When I organised my ‘protest’, Benn was still regarded as just another Labour minister, and few if any thought of him as the figure of the left he would become.

. . .

My ‘protest’ began in the students’ union coffee bar on the morning when Benn was duet to give a speech in the, then still new, lecture hall of Dundee’s social science building. And I have no idea why I thought of ‘organising’.

But for some reason I suggested to those I was sitting with that we should go to the meeting and disrupt it. It was certainly not a political gesture on my part.

As I say, Benn was not a figure of the left and on the face of it, this seemed to many a good idea, so a gaggle of us, I should think about six or eight of us, possibly more, took ourselves off to the social science lecture hall and sat up far at the back.

We began, again I should imagine at my instigation, to chant ‘give peace a chance’ and bang our fists in the desks in front of us. And that, dear friends, is all I remember of the ‘protest’ itself.

Whether Benn was forced to abandon his speech, whether we finally gave up and departed and left him to it I have no idea and no recollections at all. As I say as far as I was concerned it was simply a hoot and while it went on it was certainly good-natured.

When we left, we retired to the coffee bar and sat down, talk began of staging another protest, although there was no obvious reason to do so or cause to protest. And it was then I noticed something odd and, for me, quite disturbing.

The small, good-natured group who had returned to the coffee bar had been joined by several others who had somehow heard all about it and before my eyes in a matter of minutes that small good-natured group was evolving into a small mob. It was uncanny and I was not imagining it.

As we can walk into a room and sense joy or sorrow or whatever is the mood of the room. Well, the mood of the group I as sitting with definitely changed and not for the better: it turned dark and nasty.

It was no longer a case of ‘what fun can we have doing something similar’ but more, far more, what ‘damage’ can we do now? And there was a very definite desire to cause ‘damage’ of some kind.

I had inadvertently and innocently created a mindless mob. Or better, the mob had created itself, drawing on the darker elements which, to a small or greater extent, are a part of our psyche.

It was at that point I wanted nothing more to do with whatever they were hoping to do and I never heard reports later that they had done anything. But I could not deny that I had witnessed something which I did not like at all but for which is was, though indirectly, responsible.

I am not suggesting that I don’t, in one way or another, also have a darker side and I could give several examples – but shan’t – of my behaviour of which I am not proud and would condemn. But there and then in the coffee bar, I wanted nothing to do with the small mob I had created.

It did, though, give me an insight as to how, on both the left and right violence can become almost natural, evolve from nowhere and almost seem legitimate. Very odd.

How Donny's 'big, beautiful bill' could help finance his very own 'secret police'. Paranoia? Let's hope so, but perhaps Ernst Röhm and his SA pals might have been a little more paranoid when they took off for a relaxing mid-summer weekend break in Bavaria 91 years ago . . .

Here’s a scenario which might well be filed under ‘conspiracy theory’ by all sane and decent people, and probably should be, but is actually more than a little plausible given what has occurred since January 20 this year (2025).

Donny’s bill going through the US Congress at present, and as I write it has not yet passed, but with come amendments I’m sure will, includes giving ICE another $45 billion to expand its operations and hire another 10,000 agents by 2029.

So that got me thinking . . .

ICE already has many agents who go around in masks and never identify themselves. By the beginning of November 2026 - over the next 17 months - their number will be swelled significantly and their activities widened.

The simple ICE protocol is to grab folk from the street – and they are legally allowed to do exactly that with no immediate explanation if they claim the people they are grabbing are ‘suspected illegal aliens’. There is no fuss, no bother and no comeback, except for the poor saps thus grabbed.

There are already many documented cases where ICE agents have grabbed someone who was not an ‘illegal alien’ and who they subsequently released. Others, though, were initially flown out of the country and there was no recourse to the courts as should be the case: they were out of the country in just a few short hours with very few questions asked (‘You look suspiciously dusky, pal, so come with us!’)

The ICE agents were and are legally covered at all times: they simply have to swear, on oath if need be, that at the time they grabbed someone, they sincerely believed the men, women and children they were arresting and

 detaining were ‘illegal aliens’. That’s it, and pretty much a carte blanche to do what the hell they like.

Those who do not believe ICE and think that claim is just a convenient fig-leaf – there is no way on God’s earth that they can prove that ‘I sincerely believed the dude as an illegal alien and I was simply doing my duty’ is a lot of hooey. They are stymied.

Store that particular dilemma in the file which also contains many, many instances in which a witness up before a Congressional committee has pleaded ‘sorry, I do not recall saying that’. Go on, legal superman, prove said witness is lying and that they do recall it. Go on, score a first. Then be off and drown your defeat and sorrows with a stiff drink.

That all brings me to this: we might like to consider a possible tactic by Donny on November 3, 2026, as voters gather to elect a new representative, a new senator or a new state governor, one in which ICE agents attend a polling stations and ‘arrest’ those they ‘suspect’ of being illegal aliens. And best do it while they are waiting to vote.

This might well take place mainly in purple states and red states where the GOP believes it is in danger to losing to Democratic candidates, on the assumption that all those lining up to vote who look vaguely ‘foreign’ and are thus legally ‘detainable’ in some way are likely to vote Democrat.

All the ICE agents need to do is simple: prevent them from voting by detaining them until voting has closed, then release them with a ‘sorry, but we had good grounds to believe . . .’

If ICE agents are subsequently taken to task about their actions – though that is not very likely it has to be said – they can fall back on their useful standby that ‘I was acting in good faith and simply doing my job because I sincerely did believe I was detaining someone I suspected of being an illegal alien’ with the subtext ‘so fuck off you libtard’.

This line can be passed up the chain of command: ‘All we did was to instruct our agents to attend gatherings where we suspect illegal aliens might congregate. That was their sworn duty and that is all they did.’

Game, set, match and any number of potential Democratic supporters are prevented from voting.

Donny, of course, has the ultimate Get Out Of Jail Card if – again it is possibly not very likely but . . . – the flak reaches the Oval Office: why, hasn’t SCOTUS ruled that a president cannot be accountable for any criminal acts he might have committed while acting as president? It certainly has, and that is luck Donny’s arse well and truly covered.

. . .

I am as a rule not interested in conspiracy theories and in the eternal debate of ‘Conspiracy or Cock-up’, I am a ‘Cock-up’ champion at every turn. But we should remind ourselves that what hitherto in recent history has been regarded as impossible has shown itself as often nothing of the kind.

Had anyone before January 6, 2021, suggested that an incumbent US president would resort to organising what to all intents and purposes was an insurrection when he summoned thousands of MAGA wackos to DC to prevent certification of the presidential election vote, he might well have been carted off by the men in white coats.

Had anyone suggested that an incumbent president agreed to take part in a suggested conspiracy to rig the presidential election in a US state, he, too, would have been locked up for her or his safety.

Whether or not you accept that Donny tried to rig the election in Georgia, remind yourself that three of his former attorneys – Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis – pleaded guilty to being a part of that conspiracy, so one did exist.

There is also overwhelming proof that Donny himself agreed to be a part of the conspiracy, although admittedly none could legally be produced in court, because Donny’s – successful – tactic was to delay as long as possible his own appearance in court in Georgia.

Oh, and consider this: if anyone suggested that a German vice-chancellor would organise the mass murder of 85 of his own supporters, they would be dismissed as being away with the fairies.

Those dismissing might, however, care to consult accounts of what happened at Bad Wiessee in Bavaria, Germany, between June 30 and. July 2, 1934, just over 91 years ago. Oh, and apart from those 85 who were murdered in the course of three days, another 700 odd Nazis and other politicians – including many on the right – were ‘liquidated’ in the subsequent weeks.

As one ostensible reason for eliminating the leadership of the SA (Sturmabteilung), led by Hitler’s former best buddy Ernst Röhm, an out-and-proud gay man (below with Hitler), was the ‘moral turpitude’ of

rampant homosexuality in the SA, any closeted MAGA men and women reading this might care take more care than they usually do.

You can be certain Donny knows all about it as he claims to have read Hitler’s Mein Kampf, although as the man is a lazy cunt who doesn’t much like reading, he probably listened to the audiobook or had Karoline Leavitt rustle up a four-minute powerpoint presentation.

All that is an extended way of saying ‘never say never’. The US is living in unprecedented times and no one can take anything for granted. For example, economic indications are that little by little the US economy is going tits up.

I really don’t think it occurred to Donny that the tariffs he imposed on imports would be paid for by American businesses big and small and that these were almost certain to pass on the extra costs to their customers.

Finally, as we are here dealing with conspiracy theories, let me mention one which is also plausible and which has been mentioned by more than one respectable economists who, one might assume, wants nothing to do with wacky conspiracy theories and who one might care to take a little more seriously than all the Q-Anon nutters with their pizza parlour paedophiles.

The claim is that Donny is not averse to crashing the US economy because he believes it would bring down the dollar and makes American goods cheaper abroad – and the US would then sell more – and also make imported goods more expensive so America would start buying fewer imported goods and start buying more domestic products.

On the face of it, that makes sense – except that, as was pointed out in Congress by representative Madeleine Dean when she was questioning secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick on June 5, 2025: why, she asked quite

reasonably, has Donny slapped a tariff on imporing bananas when American doesn’t grow bananas and imports them for that reason?
Lutnick (right), ever the sycophant, gave no answer and simply waffled about this and that.

Given that Donny gives every impression of having limited and short-term peasant cunning than involve himself in anything that might make more intellectual sense, suspecting him of ‘hoping to make the dollar cheaper by crashing the economy’ is not necessarily unlikely.

And I’ll repeat that not a few respected economists, men and women decidedly brighter than the lad from the Jamaica Estates, Queens, have suggested that might well be Donny’s intention.

There is an even more unlikely, though not at all implausible, corollary: that Donny intends to bring civil disobedience to America amid the growing economic upheaval and can use it as a justification for marshalling the national guard in various states to ‘preserve order’.

But, you might be asking, isn’t ordering in the national guard the prerogative of the state governor? Well, yes it is, and Donny knows that is the law. But he drove a coach and four through the law when he ordered the national guard into Los Angeles a few weeks ago and did so without consulting California’s governor Gavin Newsom.

In the event, there was a lot of liberal huffing and puffing and outrage and more huffing and puffing and no-holds-barred condemnation of Donny’s blatant act to undermine the constitution and then even more huffing and puffing and outrage, before the ‘news cycle’ moved on and sexier fresher outrage by Donny could be reported by the media.

But Donny got away with it.

Yes, there was court action and even for legal huffing and puffing, and Newsom is now suing Fox News for defamation for repeating Donny’s claim that he had telephoned Newsom to ask for his consent because the only call he had from Donny was three days before the national guard was (were? subs please check) and, anyway, there was no mention of the national guard at all, but . . .

. . . Donny got a way with it. I’ll repeat: Donny got a way with it.

. . .

Yer actual dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorist might then argue that sending in the national guard on that occasion was a dry run for what Donny hopes will be the real thing. And if – if – a ‘real thing’ occurs and civil  

disobedience does break in many states, patsy GOP governors will mobilise the national guard on Donny’s behalf and in blue states Donny might simply do what he did in Los Angeles a few weeks ago.

He will also be able to call upon his growing army of ICE agents, described by one commentator in all seriousness as ‘Trump’s secret police’ and who will be ready to do whatever dirty work is required of them.

Donny is adept at simply making up stuff, for example claiming against all possible evidence that his actions on deporting as many folk as he feels like deporting is legal under the ‘Alien Enemies Act’. That act is actually 227 years old and was passed while America was at war with the British. Ah, but Donny insists, America is again ‘at war’ because has been ‘invaded’ by Central and South Americans.

Complete bollocks and total shite? Yes, of course it is, but the US in 2025 is in such an odd pickle that no one, but no one knows how to deal with Donny’s lunacies. The opposition are almost like rabbits frozen in the headlights of an oncoming car that is about to run them over. In the meantime, Donny carries on rampaging like a manic toddler.

If any of this comes about, it will not be until autumn (‘fall’) by which time most economists think store prices in the US will have risen sharply, many farmers bereft of their labour force of mainly illegals will be going out of business, unemployment will be rising and folk might well be in the mood to make their feelings felt.

But will those feelings be opposed to Donny, or will many again be convinced it is all the result of ‘deep state’ machinations as ‘stealing the election in 2020’ was also engineered by the ‘deep state’?

I have been mixing with several of MAGA drones on Truthsocial who all argue that the ‘the election was stolen’ and that anyway democracy is not necessarily what it is cracked up to be. None is the brightest by any means and several make it very plain that they rather like possessing weapons of all kinds.

Unfortunately, irrationality is certainly not reserved for the right and there is any number of ‘anti-GOPs’ who might be up for a fight and who are equally enthralled by possessing and using lethal weaponry.

Pie-in-the-sky? Almost certainly, but it does sound horribly plausible.

Is Donny insane? I very much doubt it. Was Hitler insane, was Stalin insane, were or are Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, the Iranian supreme leaders, Viktor Orban, Mussolini, Franco, Lukashenko insane? I very much doubt it.

What might be Donny’s objectives? That’s hard to say, but easy to guess: it has been long accepted that he is terminally narcissistic, has no conscience or scruples and demonstrates many sociopathic symptoms, has the attention span of a bored gnat, has to be the centre of attention and has a certain peasant cunning but is really not very bright.

My personal addition to that list of characteristics is that he suffers from a huge inferiority complex and that would explain a lot: the lying about his ‘achievements’, the apparent conviction that he is an expert in a great many areas and the vindictiveness to which he resorts when he feels he has been slighted.

One final point: what I have here outline is fantastical: America eventually engaging in another civil war? Is this ’ere himself sane?

Well, I like to think I am and as evidence I shall again concede that all suggested above is fantastical.

Another, for me, encouraging point is that when fantastical, unprecedented, impossible situations are predicted and subsequently come true, the predictor – here that would be me – is hailed as a true visionary, someone with an uncanny foresight etc.

When none of it comes true, the prediction is very much forgotten. Let’s hope we can all forget all that I have outlined above.

Happy birthday, Donny!

 

A little more inconsequential bollocks and a one-off in as far as it is semi-personal, about writing and disguising art (and I trust that won’t put you off)

A while ago, I started a second blog so that I could keep it private and where I could post stuff I would not want to make public, such as my wife’s - - - - - - - when she - - - - - during the - - - -, and my brother’s - - - - - - - -, my sister’s - - - - - -, that kind of thing.

It was to be ‘my space’ for letting my hair down – the quote marks indicate that ‘my space’ is a ‘new’ expression for us over 70 in that it evolved and became current in the past twenty years rather than last week, and that I’m not overly fond of it as in I’m not accustomed to it.

It wasn’t to be: somehow it was also listed on ‘my other blogs’ with this one, so it was not at all private. Worse the ‘stats’ indicated that he had been read several times.

Well, I couldn’t have that, could I! How would I be able to call my best friend a - - - - - who doesn’t - - - - - - - - - - - - on a good day when he’s sober in a month of Sundays knowing that he might well, solely by chance, come across my second blog and realise that I am not the nice, affable guy he first met in - - - - when we were both working on the - - - - - - but essentially just another two-faced - - - -?

You see my dilemma, but then in a way it got worse: I realised it was my fault that the third ‘private’ blog had been listed and thus accessible to all and not in the lightest bit ‘private’.

So I de-listed it, but, in a sense, that created another problem: as an ‘aspiring writer’ – yes, even at 75 – 76 on November 21 next, sadly – and like all other ‘aspiring writers’ I am more or less convinced that Fate will be kind and that my genius will, it time, be acknowledged and that legions or PhD students and ambitious academics and – well, why not! – biographers will be trawling for details of my life, my work and my thoughts. And where else to trawl, now that writing long letters is a thing of the past, than in a blog.

Yet by keeping my thoughts and all the other crap that sustains biographies private in their own separate blog would – will not only would their job be far harder, but I will be running the risk that would-be biographers finding the tasks of digging out ‘telling details’ so tiresome that they might conclude ‘what the fuck, think I’ll biographise someone else’.

To cut to the chase: I’ve decided to get a little cute and post the occasional ‘private’ blog here in public and in full view of the word, which, of course, will not make it in the slightest ‘private’.

NB I’ve long known that I sharpen my ideas best in conversation and by getting them down in words. Mere ‘thinking’ doesn’t cut it for me. Of those two, in conversation is best as whoever you are talking with will, as an outsider, spot flaws in your thinking which were not apparent to your.

As for writing down my thoughts, I worked as a newspaper sub for 37 years and I’m accustomed to re-writing in order to clarify what I’m writing. That doesn’t necessarily mean it is perfect, but in the reading and rephrasing I, myself, do get more clarity.

It is always quite surprising how badly phrased a passage might be when you read it the first time around. I don’t know where I first came across this observation, but it is most certainly true: ‘Confused writing betrays confused thought’. Remember that the next time you read something and ask yourself ‘what the fuck is he / she / it on about!’ It might not be your fault.

Sorting through my ideas, in this case by writing this blog entry it the purpose of this and previous and subsequent posts on my private blog. I hope all that isn’t too longwinded and that your are still with me.

. . .

Those who have dipped into this blog before might know that I am shameless enough to plug what I have previously written. Those books – a novel, five volumes of short stories, three volumes of verse and a non-fiction opus looking at why Ernest Hemingway, in my opinion really not a great writer at all got to be so bloody famous. But rather than clog up this bit of the post, I have listed them and links on Amazon at the end.

I conceived of what I am obliged to call ‘my second novel’ quite a few years ago and have been thinking about it ever since, but that thinking was not ‘what the story would be’. Ironically although there is ‘a story’ of sorts – and I have now written just under 45,000 words – telling that story is not at all the purpose of this new work.

As far as I can see ‘telling a story’ as in ‘things happening’ is useful in as far as it might serve to hold the reader’s interest while you – that is I in this case – gets on with attempting something else.

I shan’t say what the ‘something else’ I have in mind and will eventually be – or better am – attempting is because if I don’t pull it off, I shall look a little silly, not to say a tad big-headed. But it does relate to the notion, which I find attractive of ‘art that conceals art’. To sound a little more impressive, not to say pretentious, here is the original Latin – ars est celare artem.

I’ve been beavering away at it for a few months now and although progress has been slow in as far as I, like all other would-be writers, will pretty much do anything rather than sit down and fucking writer, though not that I find writing difficulty.

Frankly, I now regard what I am doing as a learning process and I am learning a little more about writing as I go along. And talking of ‘writing’, as far as I can see there are as many different kinds of ‘writing’ as there are writers. Then there’s the fact that different writers will be trying to do different things.

At its most basic some might be hoping to write romance, other murder mystery, others still might be hoping to ‘save the planet’ by pointing out the dangers of ‘global warming’. Some might hope for money and fame, some might purport not to give a fig about money and fame, some might be persuading themselves that they want ‘to create literature’ and so on and on an on (and I have read some real guff from supposedly ‘serious writers’ but no names, no pack drill.

Me, I’m doing it for only two reasons: that I enjoy it and because ever since I was sixteen I’ve persuaded myself that I was ‘a writer’. I shan’t tell the story here as to why I came to believe that, but I shall confess that I more or less did fuck all writing until I sat down and wrote what became Love: A fiction. Essentially, I want to prove to myself that I am not just another of life’s bullshitters, though now it does go just a little deeper than that.

One thing I keep in mind is that nothing, but nothing is perfect from the off and ‘my plan’ is to get it all down, then ‘shape’. The trouble is every time I sit down to write – and see above about procrastination – I am for ever doing a little re-writing when strictly I should not bother with that until the first draft is finished.

NB (the second so far) The other day I looked up the history of pens, mainly those used in the 16th, 17th, 18th and early 19th century.

For much of that time writers of every kind were using quill pens, dipping them in ink. ‘Re-writing’, composing drafts was all done by hand and it must have been a bloody pain like no other.

For example, Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1789, is estimated to be about 1,105,000 words long. And I am certain that Gibbon made many changes to what he was writing as he went along.

Apart from juvenilia, Jane Austen wrote six novels before she died at the age of 42 in 1817 and all were written with a quill pen.

Later came the metal nib pen but writing was still only done by hand, and although typewriters became common in the last decades of the 19th century, I have no idea how many writers used them in preference to writing by hand. Finally, word processing software such as Microsoft Word (and Bean which I use on my Macs) took over from typewriters.

To get to the point, because of all the re-writing I do, I would find it a real pain to write on a typewriter. Yes, it’s possible, what with crossings out and such, and I did write stories in the early 1990s on a little portable typewriter (and still have them somewhere, though I doubt any would shake much fruit from the trees).

Originally a word processor was a kind of digital typewriter and in 1993 I bought one made by Panasonic, a WL50 or a WL55 according to the picture of one I have just found in the net. This was a halfway house

and certainly not as good as a laptop as it had a limited memory and once you got to a certain point, you had to save what you have written to a floppy disk (look them up, kids) which as a pain. But I am now vastly off track by writing all the semi-irrelevant bullshit.

In fact, I’m going to end this post here. Sorry. I’m sure you are all panting for more, but . . . (I’m tired, so nothing more today, not even another NB).

. . .

Here is the work I have so far had printed – I put it that way because although, strictly, they have been published, it was me who published them, and claiming ‘they are published’ might be a tad misleading. In fairness to myself, I haven’t even tried to interest a publisher (and getting one interested in publishing short stories is just a little harder these days than squeezing blood from a stone.

Although all these are available to be bought, I am not interested in ‘making money’ (and would be deluded if I thought I might, frankly), but I would just like the different works to be read. I mean surely that’s at heart all that most writers want? No? OK, I did try.

Short stories:

Stories – Volume one

Short stories – Volume 2,

Once upon a time: Stories – Volume 3

Arte? È solo un’abile fregatura. Sempre: Stories – Volume 4

Chess avenna’ laff: Stories – Volume 5

Verse:

Oh muse! Where the fuck are you! 

My life, the early years – Poems volume 2 

I know where you live – Poems volume 3

Novel:

Love: A fiction – A romantic mystery in five parts 

Non-fiction:

The Hemingway enigma: How did a middling writer achieve such global literary fame? 

Trump and his gang of no-hopers are still cretins, but here is the first post this year that is not about the Desperate Don and his stupidity, but about short trip of Canterbury to see an old friend and two more recent friends

Canterbury, May 17-19

I have rather neglected this blog and have post only five times since the turn of the year, four times in February and just once in January. Furthermore, all four posts were about what a cretin Donald Trump is and the fifth on the related question of wondering why the far-right in Germany is making a comeback.

None of those posts will have been popular with supporters of he Desperate Don and Germany’s Afd (Alternative für Deutschland) party. Those who happen upon this ‘ere blog might also be wondering ‘can’t the old chap bang on about something else for a change?’

Well, of course, he can and so here and now I shall bang on about a tripette I’ve just made to Canterbury and from where I am returning home to North Cornwall as I sit on the 12.35pm from London Paddington to Exeter St Davids, then to driver the final 60 miles home. And if that topic, most certainly not about morons around the world, including Donald Trump and his assortment of cabinet deadbeats – Rubio, Hegseth, Bondi, Noem, Kennedy, Burgum, Duffy et al – doesn’t shake your tree, piss off and read someone else’s blog and consider yourselves banned from reading mine for a month.

The occasion of my trip was a reunion of sorts with a very good old college friend – ‘old’ as in ‘longstanding’, although neither of us will see 70 again – and two more recently acquired friends, the former drummer in the band they were both in in the 1970s and his wife.

The former drummer was born in Barnard Castle, on the County Durham / Yorkshire border, but has lived in the US for more than forty years and now has American citizenship. His wife is fully American, born in New Jersey.

We chose to meet in Canterbury because our mutual friend lives in Deal on the Kent coast and it was easy for him to drive to Canterbury for Sunday lunch at The Old Weavers in Canterbury old town, built in 1500 

although dated on its sign as 1500, much of the structure of the building is earlier with the foundation having been laid in the 12th century. The fabric of the street frontage is 15th century with 16th to 20th century alterations and additions. The external river frontage has been much altered and extended from three to five gables, disguises the original 15th century fabric. In the interior of the building much of the original Tudor structure has survived with Jacobean, Georgian and later additions.

This was our second such reunion, and although I had been in touch with the Americans over then net, only the second time I had met them face-to-face. (For those interested, they – all three – had roast lamb but I stuck to chicken Kiev as I am not much of a meat eater these days).

The Americans and I stayed Canterbury’s Cathedral Gate Hotel, sitting in Butter Market and, as the more astute reader will gather, right next to the gate leading to Canterbury Cathedral. The cathedral was literally as stone’s throw away and either backed on to our hotel or our hotel backed on to the cathedral. That’s up to you.

The hotel was as old as the cathedral itself built for monks. Quirky does not even begin to describe it, and the quirks delight most foreign visitors, especially Germans and most Americans, though, the owner assured me, it does get some guests with a vanilla outlook who far prefer very bland, very straight lines and somewhere with as little character as possible. This, I suspect, are wholesome, God-fearing folk from the American Mid-west who can’t be doing with fiddle-faddle of any kind however ‘charming’.

There are no straight lines in the Cathedral Gate Hotel, none at all. Everything is at an angle, uneven and leaning over. I assume the health and safety bods have been over it with a tooth-comb to ensure it is safe to live in, but we can only go on the promise.

Stairs are steep and narrow and uneven. Corridors lead here, there and everywhere. I had a reasonably simple trip to my room on the fourth floor overlooking the Butter Market (which I could not see, however, as the – quite modern – window ‘curtain’ refused to be raised).

My American friends, however, had a more adventurous trip to their room from the reception area. This took them down one narrow corridor, into another off to the left, then up a few stairs to a door leading on a roof. This they had to cross along a short gangway which did have a rubberised floor to avoid slipping in the rain and a guardrail on the sides, but did not have a roof to keep guests on their way to their room dry on their brief crossing from one part of the hotel to another.

Inconvenient? No, not really, just a charming quirk that amused guests (except those from Kansas, Wyoming, Oklahoma and Nebraska).

The weather forecast for Canterbury when I looked at it on Saturday morning just before leaving home promised quite warm temperatures and sun, sun, sun and the more sun for the weekend. And that’s what we got throughout Saturday. We did not on Sunday or this morning. Sunday was distinctly chilly.

Because of that forecast I decided to set off with in just a T-shirt and shirt and dispense with a jacket. Come Sunday I wish I had taken a jacked of some kind, or a hoody. Just after nine when the streets were pretty much deserted and did not fill up with tourists as they did later in the day, I went for a walk around the cathedral and got

colder and colder. Finally, my hour of sightseeing over I decided to find a local Asda or Tesco to get some kind of cheap pullover or hoody. And here in medieval Canterbury old town, of course, there was nothing of the kind.

So I went into one of the – very many – touristy shops to ask where I might find an Asda or Tesco (think Walmart or similar – I was not looking for anything fashionable just something a tad warmer than a thin cotton T-shirt and a thin cotton shirt).

There an extremely helpful shopowner told me there was a Primark in ‘the high street (and the Asda and Tesco superstores) were some distance away for a walker). He checked and told me it would be opening in and hour at 11am. Then he did something quite touching: he insisted that I borrow his jacket (something like a North Face item) while I found my way to the Primark branch. I refused. But he kept insisting until I could no longer refuse, and I then set off

As it turned out a branch of Sports Direct was already open and I bought a hoody for a very reasonably £16 (after having to ask whether they had anything cheaper than the £59.99 hoodies more prominently on display). Then it was back to the shop to return the jacket, and this led to a long conversation.

The owner, a man from Uzbekistan, was a former sociology lecturer at the University of Kent. I discovered this when I asked where he was from as his kind of generosity, though not unknown in Britain, was unusual. We then talked bout this and that for the next hour and a half.

He explained that since Brexit – remember Brexit? Funding for universities, much of it dependent on European Union money, and the number for European students had fallen alarmingly, his department staff of 60 had reduced to 13 and fearing the worst he and his wife and decided to open their shop (though why that kind of shop was not clear and nor did I think of asking).

After that lunch at The Old Weavers followed by a trip to pub showing Sky sports and see Arsenal beat Newcastle, secure its participation in next season’s Champions League.

That’s it really. A little break in routine which has been welcome.

Pip, pip.

A new American civil war? Can it happen? Will it happen? Who knows, but it ain't looking encouraging for the Yanks. Mind they were stupid enough to elect a rapist fraudulent felon who paints his face orange every morning

Just posted this on Twitter (‘X’), and it has finally sunk in that Trump (and Musk) in his extremely addled way really does want to do away with democracy in the US and become ‘a dictator’.

Unlikely? Well, as unlikely as a convicted felon, proven fraudster and ajudged rapist being elected US President.

That happened, so frankly all bets are off.

Face it, ALL of us here might be outraged and predict the worst, but in our - I’ll say it! - complacent liberal way, there’s a corner of us which keeps whispering ‘don’t fret, it won’t come to that’ and, guiltily, we take a quiet solace in that ‘well, this is America, this kind of thing doesn’t happen!’

Well, what HAS happened is that SCOTUS has declared that ‘a president is immune from criminal prosecution for any presidential acts’, and that will in time certainly open a can of worms.

What is so piss-poor about that ruling is not what is says, which is dubious enough, but far worse: how utterly vague and supremely debatable the phrase ‘presidential acts’ is! It can mean anything depending upon who is being asked. And, of course, it bloody will!

So while we outraged angel-souled liberals get our lawyers to complain to the federal courts that this and that can certainly NOT be construed as a ‘presidential act’, La Trumpa and his organ grinders (of whom I suspect there are several and La Trumpa is to dumb to realise he is fundamentally a patsy) are already having the lawyers argue the toss in court in the standard delaying tactic will also committing more ‘presidential acts’.

Result: total bloody legal logjam and it will be one which really will divide the nation. It’s the old and very useful political tactic to neutralise opposition: ‘send it to committee’.

It’s even worse than that, however. What if, say, one of La Trumpa’s ‘presidential acts’ is not necessarily to murder opponents - though we are now assured ‘he could in the course of doing his duty’– but far simpler: to detain under house arrest as many Democrat lawmakers as he need as well as potential Republican ‘trouble-makers’.

More democratic outrage and thundering editorials in the Washington Post, New York Times and even the Wall Stree Journal ‘that this is wholly unacceptable!

Then, after a federal judge has put a temporary stay on the relevant presidential order and ruled that the deatainees must be released - sparking more confusion about ‘judges overreaching their authority’ – what then? Simple, La Trumpa and his mobster, simply ignore the judicial rulings.

There, in a nutshell, is the simple liberal democratic dilemma: WE ‘play by the rules’ and are stymied when other simply don’t do so.

And the first such two-fingers (US middle finger) to the judiciary makes subsequent two-fingered salutes ever easier and they come thick and fast.

You Yanks have guns and aren’t afraid to use them (and we Brits are perpetually baffled by the bullshit about ‘it’s every Americans right to bear arms’ – yes, in the frontier days 240 years ago, but in 2025 when it is now something of a weekend sport to take out as many elementary school kids and students as you can before lunch.

So how soon might it be that someone takes up arms to make a ‘democratic’ point about La Trumpa and MAGA pissing all over American democracy, then getting an armed response.

Lord, what a fucking bloody mess you guys have allowed to evolve. Seems you took your eye off the ball.

East and West and never the twain shall meet – the Romans cottoned on fast, so what’s the future for a country so divided and with a rising far-right party scoring well in a federal election?

There’s a very good overview of the 2,000 years of the part of central Europe which we now know as German and Austria called The Shortest History Of Germany (by a James Hawes). I stress that it is an overview and is not a detailed, academic history. But, like me. you might initially want and overview and later go on little by little to refine what you have learnt little by little and fill in the cracks.

One of Hawes’ central contentions is that since the Roman occupation of part of Germany, the part of the world has been quite radically divided into two quite distinct spheres, along a line which runs more or less as the same course of the river Elbe.

Hawes contends that when the Roman empire came to expand into that part of the continent, they had so much trouble first conquering the tribes east of the Rhine, then holding on to the territory they had conquered, that they eventually decided that trying to do so really wasn’t worth the hassle.

The worst encounter with those tribes was in the first decade AD when an estimated 20/25,000 Roman soldiers of three of its best legions were wiped out in the Teutoburg Forest by a Teuton tribe under the leadership of Armin / Herman.

So, Rome decided, that’s it – let those savages stew in their own juice.

OK, the Elbe is further east than the Rhine, but the course of the Elbe was a very good line to draw. The divide was not hard and fast. The Romans did allow trading to carry on across the Rhine into the area west of the Elbe, but they never bothered with the territory to the east of the Elbe.

Hawes fleshes out his notion by contending that from the Middle Ages and until unification ‘West Germany’ – and I mean the term in a geographical sense, not a national or political sense – looked west for its alliances, cultural links

 

and trade, and regarded itself as ‘belonging’ to western Europe.

Conversely, ‘East Germany’ and its people felt far greater kinship with the Slavic peoples to their east, and made their alliances and cultural and trading with them. And frankly both sides of Germany had rather less to do with each other than we might think.

Hawes also contends – and research, archives and documentation of different kinds could well bear this out – that there was also a notable religious and political divide between ‘West’ and ‘East’ Germany.

The west was, largely, Roman Catholic and the East was largely Lutheran. And the values of both the parts of Germany reflected the values we (perhaps generalising a little) associate with Catholics and Prots.

That is a plausible notion and if nothing else might explain some things. But as far as the map here is concerned, Hawes writes that support for the National Socialists was rather lukewarm west of the Elbe but enthusiastic to the east.

Again this suggestion might well be tested by looking up voting patterns etc (although not by me). As a ‘half-German’, I do get a little pissed of by ‘traditional’ lazy Brit stereotyping of the Nazi era that ‘the Germans were all Nazis’ – bollocks!

There most certainly was resistance to the Nazis from the start, but as you could end up dying and eventually dead in a concentration camp for opposing the thugs in charge, it is not surprising that many kept their heads down and opted for a quiet life. And Brits better not try to persuade themselves that the vast majority would not have done the same.

And that brings me to the map here: except for a part of East Berlin and a tiny part of ‘East’ Germany, ALL of ‘East’ Germany Germany voted solidly AfD. On the other hand in ‘West’ Germany the Afd only scored in a small part of the Rhineland Palatine and apart from isolated and small areas which went the social-democrats, the CDU/CSU held sway.

And that fits in rather neatly with Hawes’ contentions.

Q: What is the difference between a clueless, cack-handed twat and Donald Trump? A: There isn't one

Proving again that he has van Gogh’s ear for music, Donald Trump has once more shot himself in the foot: piss of the Democrats if you like, Donny - but DON’T piss off your own side! But you are!

American conservatives don’t like Russia and Putin IS Russia. And they want nothing at all to do with that ‘Evil Empire’ (© Ronnie Reagan) and are pissed off with Donny is crawling up Putin’s bum.

 
The Murdoch-owned Post has the fourth largest circulation in the US and has been staunchly conservative since it was founded 224 years ago. Very conservative as are its readers!

With his usual cack-handed skill Donny has - all on his own - landed himself in a terrible fix: carry on sucking up to Putin and lose the support of your own. About-turn and take against Putin, and you will

1) look very, VERY weak and silly, and,

2) Putin will take against you with a vengeance.

Listen up MAGA and other conservatives: this is the cretin you have put back in the White House. End the Ukraine war ‘in a day’? Yeah, right! Bring down inflation? It’s going up! Bring down prices? Er, they are still going up.

But what Donny IS good up is screwing up - he did it in the 1990s but was rescued by NBC, he did it between 2020 and 2024 and was on his way to jail, but was rescued by the voters electing him again. Now, though, he is doing his best to make sure they will withdraw their support. 

Nice going, Donny!

America, your country is now a fucking mess so do something – we don’t want the rest of the world to be dragged into your lunacy!

I have no idea whether you now reading this are from Asia, Europe, Africa, an Aussie or an American. And if you are American, I have not idea whether you support Trump and voted for him last November or whether you think not only does he have several screws loose but is worse than clever and dangerous – as Stalin was: Trump is stupid and dangerous (as the man with the funny moustache was whose ‘Empire of a thousand days’ – das tausendjähriges Reich – lasted just 12 years). Ironically, as far as that is concerned it doesn’t matter either way.

I have already posted several blog entries making it clear that I think Donald J Trump is a $9 bill who should not get the time of day from anyone and who is bad news all round, and not least the millions who voted for him, so there seems little point in repeating all that.

But what I haven’t written about is the odd situation that – as far as I can see – in America there is an elephant in the room which everyone is ignoring. And that – the head in the sand – is far more troubling than even the fat orange fraud occupying the White House and the damage he will do to his own country. Patriot? Really?

The elephant in the room is this: the United States now has as its president – it’s legitimately elected president, and that feature of the matter is pertinent – a man who is a convicted felon, whose sexual assault on magazine journalist E Jean Carroll has been adjudged to be tantamount to rape, a man who, most probably knowingly, inspired insurrection and so on. But none of that is new.

The question is, and I’m sure it is being debated in some parts, not least in the US, but which oddly seems to get no public showing: how on earth did such a ridiculous situation come about? How on earth did such an apology for a man get within 1,000 miles of the White House, a man who, for example when he was first president, had to be told that ‘the Balkans’ were not the same as ‘the Baltics’?

And you don’t have to be a Democrat to think that: the GOP is full of staunch conservatives who are in despair at what Trump is doing and think he is a ‘fucking moron’ (© Rex Tillerson).

If, of course, you are one of those who ‘like what Trump says, he gives it too us straight’ and that ‘he will make America great again’ and don’t believe, as I do, that he us full of 24-carat bullshit, I am the one you will insist is ‘an apology for a man’.

Well, that’s as maybe, but I certainly fancy my chances of coming out way ahead of Trump in any morality beauty parade.

. . .

The essence of the problem facing America – and I suggest it is not at all too dramatic or pretentious to describe it as an existential problem – is that Trump has tens of millions of supporters, tens of millions of folk who we can only assume are as straight-up as everyone else. So he does have a lot of folk backing him, although despite Dumpy Trump’s crowing and bragging, he did not enjoy a ‘landslide election’ of any kind last November. And that claim needs some unpacking.

In terms of ‘electoral college’ votes, a case might be made – as does Trump – that his election was ‘landslide’: because then the votes were tallied up in different states and the different state electors were divvied up, at the finish line he won 312 of the electoral college votes, 86 more than his opponent, Kamala Harris.

But hold on: the crucial detail here is ‘the electoral college’ and in terms of how many of the popular votes he won, it was a very narrow victory if not close run, though given the electoral college set-up pretty much every US election in recent times has been close run on the popular votes metric.

Nationwide Trump won 77,303,573 votes with Harris taking 75,019,257 of the popular vote on a turnout of 63.9% of those eligible to vote). That is certainly not a landslide in anyone’s book, unless you are state-registered fantasist

 

like Trump of which, apparently, in MAGA land there seem to be quite a few. The bottom line is that Trump won the White House because of America’s decidedly wacky electoral college system

That 238-year-old electoral college system is archaic, hugely flawed and as the man once said ‘not fit for purpose’. You can even hear it creaking every four years from this side of the Atlantic, in cosy Old Blighty. But although that is not news to anyone and many – though not all – Americans agree the electoral college needs root-and-branch reform, it would be easier to establish total harmony in the Middle East in perpetuity than get agreement on how – even whether – to reform: getting the 50 US states, all intensely jealous of many aspects of their autonomy is seemingly impossible.

. . .

In the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia it was at first proposed that Americans should elect their leader (i.e. the President) by a direct popular vote. This was rejected, partly because the mover and shakers in Philadelphia writing the constitution were not keen on the ordinary man in the street (or as then was the ordinary man in the field).

There was also additional concern from the southern, slave-owning states where almost 90% of the five states population was black and didn’t have a vote. Thus the number of voters they had would be far fewer than in those states in the north which was equal in population size and so the north would always dominate the union.

So the compromise was the electoral college system whereby each state was allocated a certain number of electors and the five southern states were allocated a disproportionate number of electors given the size of their population.

Whether or not it was noticed that under that arrangement the boot was very much on the other foot and the south would dominate the union does not seem to be recorded. And unsurprisingly, for the next fifty-odd years the US president came from the southern states given that part of America’s electoral clout

Since then there have been two constitutional amendments to sort out this and that, but the number of proposed reforms – more than 700 over the past 250 years – highlights how dissatisfied many Americans are with the system.

In brief, Donald Trump can stick his ‘landslide election victory’ where the sun don’t shine: it is 24-carat nonsense.

. . .

All that, though, is a side issue to the problem which dare not speak its name: that even were Trump to die tomorrow or otherwise leave the stage and perhaps deflate the MAGA movement, the political sentiments in America which sustained the rise to power of a man who is akin to a lunatic would still be be present.

And as eggs is eggs another similar cynical character – and quite possibly far cleverer man or woman than Trump – would step up to tap into those feelings.

Thus the elephant in the room is that American men and women in their tens of millions are happy to condone rule by a man who is a contradiction from every angle.

So how did that situation arise? I ask because I am certainly not suggesting that all those tens of millions are terminally stupid or plain evil: a great many will want the best for their country as the next voter.

They pledges their allegiance to Trump and gave him their vote because he said the right things: he promised ‘to beat inflation and bring down prices on day one’, but now (as I write) we are on day sixteen of his regim and the signs are his ill-advised tariffs will push up inflation and prices.

However vacuous and insincere his slogan Make America Great Again might be, it did and still does resonate with a great many Americans, though frankly, given America’s economic clout I’m at a loss to call to mind a time when America, more or less, was not great. But that is beside the point.

Similarly with the angst he is stirring up about immigrants: yes, there are a great many immigrants living in the US who did not enter the country legally, apparently as many as eleven million. Unfortunately, a vast number of them are so well-integrated that in many industries they have become crucial and those industries would be in a jam if they were no longer available. This is particularly true in the agricultural industry in the states to the west and southwest.

Just days ago I read a report – the usual caveat, of course, that we should not necessarily believe everything we read in the papers – that when in California and at Trump’s instigation Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers set about rounding up whatever illegal immigrants they could find, on orange farms where the picking was done my illegal immigrants on the first day 25% of pickers did not show up for work, and on the following day the figure rose to 75%.

They are scared to be caught. Meanwhile, the orange grove farmers are going spare because their fruit is remaining unpicked.

Then there the question that these immigrants, partly no doubt because they are keen to keep a low profile don’t object to doing the dirty jobs good ol’ patriotic Americans feel is beneath them. Well, get rid of the immigrants and someone will have to do them. It seems ‘joined-up thinking’ is not in the Trump MAGA playbook.

Several years ago, the magazine the Economist organised a survey in Britain about ‘the number of immigrants’ and how people felt about immigration.

The odd result was that opposition to immigration and condemnation of the then government’s immigration policy was highest in areas with almost no immigrants at all. And those who did live in those – quite affluent – areas were professionals who rubbed along quite well with their neighbours. On the other hand in cities where a large number of immigrants did live, there was not a great deal of enmity to them.

At least 80 million of its people are prepared to accept the kind of violence we saw live on our TV screens on January 6, 2021; that at least 80 million people are prepared to believe that black is white, that ‘the election in was

 

An American patriot exercises his constitutional right on January 6, 2021, to smash his way into Congress to disrupt the peaceful handover of power

stolen’, that Donald Trump is ‘the victim of “lawfare” and is as innocent and pure as the driven snow’; the list would go on, but you reading this are familiar with it.

The elephant in the room which is studiously ignored by the United States of America it that this state of affairs did not develop from overnight, or from one week to the next, or from on year to the next or even from one decade to the nest.

There is something very rotten in the United States of America yet no one, but no one is prepared talk about it. Trump has been guilty of many crimes, but perhaps the most egregious because as supposed Republican who professes to champion law and order, he pardoned all those convicted of any crime committed in the January 6 invasion of Congress.

Some of the crimes were compartatively minor, rather a lot were violent. Trump pardoned them all: he had continually described those jailed as ‘hostages’ so one wonders why rather a lot of those hostages admitted violent acts on January 6.

Pertinent is that at least 78 million Americans are quite happy to accept Trump’s hypocrisy and see nothing wrong with what in less blinkered eyes was an insurrection. Yes, it is now that bad in America.There is a very long, very broad yellow streak in the US and it will only grow longer and broader if it is not addressed

I might end on a gratuitous gibe, but one which from these shores seems less fantastical than might at first appear: what else can expect in a nation where millions insist on their right ‘to bear arms’ so that shooting up a nearby elementary school and killing fifteen young children is now something of a weekend sport.

America: do something before you go the way of the dodo!

Think 2024 was bad? Breaking news: 2025 could get a lot worse if Lady Luck doesn’t smile on the world. And from what I hear Lady Luck has taken the decade off

There was a comment by someone or other in one of the Times Radio interviews (many of which are available on Youtube) which, for me, sums up why after 80 years of comparative peace, the world might now be in for a colossal and very unpleasant shake-up.

Peace? Well, the relevant word above is ‘comparative’, and certainly when we think of the Congo, Libya, Vietnam, Biafra, Malaya, Cyprus, Korea, the Gulf and so on, there has been precious little peace for those living ‘locally’ in these past 80 years.

But, ‘locally’ is the second relevant word: however awful each war was, it was always ‘local.

What the Times Radio interviewee (I think it was Phillip Ingram) pointed out was that the huge danger facing the world – except, possibly, South America which tends go its own merry way, though it, too, has its troubles – is that the current crop of ‘local’ danger hotspots might ‘merge into one global hotspot’ (though cv above South America).

What do we have? Well, as far as war is concerned there is, at present, Ukraine and the Middle East. But a growing danger is the indisputable rise of and the indisputable growing support for the the far-right in Europe: in Germany, Austria, France, Italy and, if Nige’s Reform does hi-jack the Tory Party much as a virus can hi-jack a body, contentiously even Britain.

Hungary already has it’s own – in his own cynical words – ‘illiberal democrat’ in Viktor Orban (below right with his pal Vladimir Putin). Slovakia and Georgia are heading down that road, and there is active, if as yet reasonably

dormant and ineffective, far-rightism in Italy, France, The Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Poland.

One of the attractions of those far-rightists for the many ‘ordinary voter’ is that they are vociferously against, not just immigration, but immigrants who have already settled in their countries. And like all authoritarians those far-rightists like to play on ‘people’s fears’.

I have the usual and necessary respect for my fellow individuals, but something happens to individuals when they coagulate into ever larger groups: they become very stupid.

To be blunt, I have no respect at all for ‘the people’ or as it all too often manifests itself ‘the mob’. Sadly, ‘the mob’ thinks in monochrome – if it thinks at all – and is far too easily led. Furthermore, ‘the people’ is almost wholly an artificial construct which can be used to mean pretty much whatever one likes depending one what you are selling.

More obvious are the dangers in the Middle East: Iran is domestic pressure from a younger generation fed up with the old ’uns and its stooges in Syria, Lebanon and Gaza are getting their comeuppance. We do not have a clue how matters will pan out in Syria.  None.

 

And backed into a corner, Iran might choose to act is desperate ways. It does not, we think, yet have a working nuclear bomb, but it does have the necessary for a dirty bomb.

Furthermore there is the problem of Israel or – a far better way of putting it and more to the point – of its government of right-wingers, far-right-wingers and monsters.

I have and will not make a secret of my initial admiration for how Israel stood up for itself but since October 2023 increasingly Netanyahu (below right) has completely lost it: there’s ‘standing up for yourself’ and ‘how you stand up for yourself’, and the government – which must be distinguished from the people of Israel and, most

pertinently ‘the Jews – long, long, long ago overstepped the mark. Morally it is now on the same level as Hamas.

Putin, too, is in a corner, to put it mildly. And as I’m sure we have all heard over these past few years from someone or other, when in a corner Vlad gets ever more dangerous: he does NOT like giving up and it might seem now he has very little to lose.

Even if ‘after talks’ (and why should Ukraine surrender territory?) ‘the war ends’ that will not be the end of the troubles he will face by any measure.

Finally, there is Trump: the soft-bellied, blinkered, cuddly liberals out there – of which I am usually one, by the way – like to preach that Donny ‘likes to shake things up, he ‘likes to see how others react’, he ‘won’t do most of the things he has promised to do’ and so on. Really?

That thinking is flawed if only because it assumes Trump is rational, that he has an understanding of geopolitics, that he actually does understand economics and does not really believe his own barfly bore interpretations of ‘how things work’. I suggest and fear that he does not.

Ingram (if it was he) also pointed out that if the endgame in Ukraine sees the conflict ending with Putin and Russia acquiring a sizeable chunk of the south-east of the country, there might be ‘concern’ in the West, but after a few months it will die down. As the Arabs say, the dogs will bark and the caravan will move on.

His point was that Xi Jinping (below) might make the following calculation: take Taiwan now in the aftermath of attention being on the ‘war ending in Ukraine’, settle for the resultant global uproar and possibly hit to China’s

economy but that eventually ‘the dogs will bark and the caravan will move on’.

If Xi did move on Taiwan, what would America do? Trump has vowed he does not want to get involved in any more ‘foreign wars’ and might pass as ‘well, that’s Taiwan’s problem’.

Even far brighter folk in the US than Donny might counsel caution about getting involved as they would not know what outcome they are seeking – what’s in it for America? And Xi will know that and it will be part of his calculations.

Thus 2025 might seem to be taking on a rather bleaker hue than did previous years, however bleak the hue was in previous years.

As Ingram says ‘things are bad, but they would get a damn sight worse if all those ‘local problems’ merged into on big problem, rather was happened in the 1930s.