OK, that was yesterday, but it seemed in appalling taste to post on the 31st of August itself, the anniversary of Jack the Ripper’s first official victim.

An event marked by true-crime nutjobs around the world. In Whitechapel, there are themed street parties and cheery singalongs in Ripper pubs like The Ten Bells and The White Hart, although the numerous local mosques complain the events are ‘Islamophobic’.

Isn’t everything that’s worthwhile?

Anyway, the case was long ago solved by a Mr. Sherlock Holmes, much to the relief of rival serial killers such as Fred Shipman and ‘Sir’ Keir Starmer:

SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE AUTUMN OF TERROR

In truth, I’ve long been a Ripperologist. One if its fascinations is how we regularly get - as with Lord Lucan or the Loch Ness Monster - articles finally revealing the truth. Finally… until the next candidate emerges blinking from the East End miasma:

JACK THE RIPPER CASE FINALLY SOLVED!

On a serious note, this is all most unconvincing. He seems no better a candidate than George Chapman, and a less likely one than my choice, the enigmatic Charles Cross aka Charles Lechmere. Or perhaps it was The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town? That would explain the links with various fruits.

The Telegraph article - as with most Ripper stuff, however grim - has comedy gold: The ‘compelling evidence’ is that this suspect ‘lived in an area at the centre of the murders and, as a cigar-maker, knew how to use a knife.’

Bang to rights! Not many lived in the most densely-packed area of London - then the world’s largest city - and very few ‘knew how to use a knife.’ How on earth did Old Bill not ‘buckle’ him?

What I do know for sure is that Jack the Ripper - ‘Saucy Jack’ to his chums - is one of the few famous people who attended my old Oxford college. The others were Lawrence of Arabia, Harold Wilson, Frank Butcher and Fred West.

I should also mention the unfortunate Percival Rodrick, the last Englishman to be completely devoured by a wolf. There’s a striking depiction of this in the Rodrick Room, venue for the annual Lupine Day Feast. A chap I knew was rusticated, for attending dressed as Little Red Riding Hood.

Since it’s the Welsh college, I suspect we dodged a bullet with Huw Edwards.

And I in fact solved the case during my college days. Here’s my account, cruelly ignored by the online Ripper community. One even threatened me with a ‘leather-aproning’ (worth checking the term) for my perceived mockery:

MY BOY JACK

I.

My first visit to the Jack the Ripper
conference; in a shivery suit, shiny
yet pasty faced. I could have been
some pallid clerk, a spring-heeled
escapee from the Abyss.

How naïve not to realise
that others do the same;
proposing an ancestor
as the latest suspect.

My great-uncle’s disgraceful papers.

Some motorway service station.

(Impossible not to love them,
their invocation of oblivion;
a linear fast-food heaven.

My record was five hours
spent eating and defecating.)

Underneath an abandoned mop.
His old journal, sealed in pig fat.

II.

(from The Journal of Mutatis Mutandis)

Fuck me, I’m tired.

Spent.

Like a ginger beer bottle, exploding at some daft street fair.

Now my sons, look at that photograph of me in whiskers.

My ramrod cock hidden.

An iron stare.

Clearly a cunt – and you only know the half.

Too easy avoiding the ‘rozzers’.

I used an electric moped – though scarcely invented then – working as a pizza delivery boy.

No one suspected a thing!

My blood-spotted uniform
taken as some new topping.

The area was gentrifying
from days of plague dogs
and leper chips.

Opportunities overflowing.

Why these immigrants –
to chronicle the rain?

I now explain my actions in terms of diversification.
Providing a safe environment, where creative types
can network and rediscover squalor – at a distance.

III.

“Preposterous.

Monstrous.

Tedious.”

(A letter, from the Psychogeographic Poets.)

“Sinclairian rehash! Another rip-off
bike-seat sniffer on Saucy Jack riff.”

Many poets moved to Spitalfields.
Drinking wheatbeer where his
‘Unfortunates’ slugged gin.

Leylines, ranting tracts,
recycled toe rags from
forgotten antiquarians.

Ridiculous – our true country
is pure retail park, B & Q.

God knows why Wetherspoons is sneered at.
It’s the equivalent of a Victorian chophouse.

More genuine than identikit gastropubs –
infinite goatees, gorging on brick or slate.

Let’s admit to it, the English
have always scoffed anything.

I can trace my history
through such disasters.

Did you try Elizabethan
“offal and hoof quickbits”
on the dizzy South Bank?

Or the “chipped potatoes”
on Whitechapel Road?

Boiled cabbage greens,
the grease on the cobbles,
a trudge to the next house.

It wasn’t much.

IV.

I am now convinced that my old Cambridge tutor – Maxwell Otto Cornelius – was Jack the Ripper.

Item 1:

A sperm stained copy of Newton’s Principia.

Purloined from Trinity library,
endpapers removed,
passages redacted.

Repetitive marginalia:

“Exterminate the brutes!”

Item 2:

A complex amalgam of hieroglyphs, pentagrams, ostrich feathers and fast food napkins.

Specific links to Poussin’s A Dance to the Music of Time – erroneous Latin motto, wrongly attributed to George Formby.

Item 3:

Space prohibits a fuller explanation of my methods.

Viz:

DNA testing on seagull carcass remains, with cross-referencing to filial genomes and mutant Subway chicken wraps, matches 92% hypochondriacal material to a towering Latvian lady, now working in Nandos.

Cornelius obsessed with her – proposing marriage.

Rejection spawning incipient misogyny and insanity.

A fast train to Kings Cross – then underground to Aldgate East.

I myself espied him
in a Brick Lane Tandori;
ruddy stains on fingers and wrists.

Engaged in diversionary assault on poppadoms –
numerous lurid dips – one of bright Carnelian Red.

Perfect trace element match re.
ink in Dear Boss letter.

MY BOY JACK

I had an email from a long-drowned man

to say: “You’ve lost everything, run from those

who’ve made fair fields deserts and on the sand,

gang-raped children from poor pale powerless

families whose anguished stories were banned.

Flee from the progressives’ deceitful spin,

hiding that this country’s been a pigsty

festering away since Blair’s sickly grin.

His pious aim, via Burnham, he’s shared:

‘For a viable solution, see my

son’s compulsory identity card.’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay,

boundless zombies wear a rainbow lanyard -

their control-level thoughts stretch far away.”

It’s the greens, the infinite shades

dragging me to 1978 playing fields.

The heat at midday seems tropical,

the girls sway off to smoke under

poplar trees, as ‘Miss You’ plays.

Indoors, even more memories.

The bottled light, devastating,

the toilets for fighting.

Now joy from images,

torpor, the smell from

pavements, the risky cut-throughs

overgrown, with lurking ‘yobs’ still

wearing flares – skateboarding as

freedom risking a kerb. Who cares

but me. If that’s enough I don’t know.

It needs writing then tightening.

Almost exhausted before the urge

slackens, my grip loosens. Words

are forced into place but won’t stick.

Something was there and isn’t now.

A fifth verse for each of five lines.

Symmetry, but will anyone notice.

If I trudge uphill back to my old school,

I’ll arrive then have to leave.

I could get in my car and go there now.

(from The Poetry of Gin and Tea)

Let’s face it folks, we're kippered.

Our country is overrun with fabulists, who get Cambridge chairs then sainthood.

Meanwhile, WW2 veterans are enriched by Eritraens 'up the arris'.

Which 2026 Booker novels could possibly capture this blissful vibrancy?

I’ve found four to gustily recommend:

1. 'Fish Studies', by Luke O'Dwyden

A 'bildungsromanwhatsitcalled' set in rural Cork, chronicling a transgender youth who escapes to the University of Grimsby then enrolls for 'life before the mast' on a beached trawler.

Echoes of Ahab and Kurtz, with a peppering of Jeanette Winterson and her bleeding oranges.

'Exquisitely unreadable.' The Guardian

2. 'The arse and the arse wiper', by Sajiid Bhuna

Loosely structured around Balochi fables and nasal music, Bhuna's refulgent transliteration features a mute Indian carehome worker who befriends an incontinent codger, in post-Arday Hounslow.

'Squalid and insanitary.' The Times of India

3. 'A Closet Full of Lifted Shirts,' by Stan Grittwell

This year's most daring entry. Set in a post-Brexit Brighton run by Reform as a concentration camp for heteronormative therapy.

Grittwell's prose punches up and shatters our expectations, like Zak Polanski performing a prostatectomy on acid.

'Painful and tender.' Grinder

4. 'Shoot ya bitch in da butt cheeks' by Jules 'ACAB' Ndrangha da Fourth

Written in death rap, this stream of consciousness novel follows the gangland martyr Itchy Bigger as he navigates a London few tourists see, before enrolling at South Bank University to study Criminology.

'A chef's kiss from a mouth of rotten teeth.' Time Out

*

Who says the novel is dead?

Of course Jason Arday was scrutinised more intensely because of his colour. That’s because it became blindingly obvious his appointment was due to his colour, not his ability.

Thank DEI dogma for that.

It caused the racism. This applies throughout our public life, no part of which is free from the suspicion of racial corruption in appointments. It’s beyond obvious that DEI has allowed unsuitable people into positions they wouldn’t otherwise hold.

More broadly, the heads of many Oxbridge colleges have undistinguished academic records, and sometimes none at all. This applies across all our universities. Being part of the progressive elite is what counts.

Inevitably, all of this then points the finger at those whose positions are academically justified. That wouldn’t have happened before DEI, or the stiffling political monoculture controlling British academia.

Who knows how many other examples exist, throughout our public life? Step forward David Lammy, for starters. And look at Sadiq Khan!

What a disaster and tragedy the Arday affair represents:

1. He devalued a once great university. Yes, mostly their fault. But he also ripped off a less powerful person's PhD, albeit one that seems a joke. Somewhere, intellectual values still matter.

2. He earned over £100,000 pa. Others who got discarded, so this diversity hire was in luxury, are in badly paid endless JRFs.

3. His students got no proper supervision. His supposed job wasn't done and then...

4. He bullied students who exposed his fraud, and further corrupted the police (not difficult) to act as the DEI Gestapo, on jounalists and academics who questioned him. There’s now a sinister call for sweeping press restrictions, to ensure DEI escapes scrutiny.

5. Genuine black/ethnic scholars are tainted by his fraud.

6. His suicide is being used to create a fake DEI martyr, and whip up a lynch mob against the excellent Nathan Cofnas.

7. His fantasies finally left two children fatherless. Easily the worst effect of all this.

Like many an aging Englishman, this is a topic which worries me and of which I have first-hand experience, via my late parents. Yet successive governments have kicked the can down the dirt track.

Now at last, the King from the North - Factory Records executive Andy Burnham - has an answer.

This story shows what can be done when we open our minds, and borders, to best-practice in gerontology:

Eritraen culture in Harrow

I write this in a state of profound shock.

It’s alleged that a Professor of Bullshitology, at the University of Cambridge, has been producing bullshit. The once illustrious other place is in meltdown:

PROFESSOR ARDAY, CANTAB

This sorry tale has been much discussed. But few dared say that Arday’s chair was in a bogus subject, which has no business being taught at Cambridge. Face facts; it would degrade the University of Central Bedfordshire.

It’s beyond obvious that this scandal couldn’t have happened in Cambridge’s Mathematics or Physics departments. Nor, to be fair, in those of History, Philosophy or (touch wood) English.

With a DPhil in Physical Chemistry from Oxford, I’ll risk angering many people by arrogantly and bluntly stating that ‘social sciences’ lack intellectual credibility and aren’t sciences. The fact they claim to be says a lot.

I couldn't have plagiarised my DPhil thesis, in a rigorous physical science. I did the experiments and wrote them up, modelled the results and tried to explain them. My supervisor read through my draft and had anyway overseen my work, for three years. Then there's the gruelling two or three hour viva, which you can't cheat in.

In any case, who’d want to fool the process? The achievement would be negated and the sordid feeling would be lifelong.

But in the social 'sciences', does this rigour apply? Quite likely not, if the subject is largely a fraud. So they’re inherently open to these scandals, which are probably the norm, though hidden away. Progressive ideology and groupthink are the drivers, not intellectual exactness, curiosity and joy.

Saying the ‘right thing’ is what matters. Look at the fate of Nathan Cofnas at Cambridge, hounded out for using empirical data on intelligence and race. By a delicious irony, it was Cofnas who flagged the undeniable textual overlaps, in Arday’s PhD thesis.

Sociology is at the bottom of the social ‘science’ pile - propped up by the ‘sociology of education’. These subjects exist to indoctrinate gullible students with left-liberal dogma, and enrich ‘academics’. Their foundations are flimsier than phrenology, astrology - or Islamic peace studies.

Arday’s specialism was ‘research’ into teaching methods and supposed academic progress that justifies - i.e. glorifies - DEI. The PhD thesis he allegedly copied from is itself gibberish, verbosity posing as profundity whilst stating the bleeding obvious. During my PGCE, I read much similar garbage, angered by the absurd claim that it was respectable academic work.

Such is the reality of ‘educational studies’ at our universities. A gigantic pile of rubbish. Those involved keep churning it out and getting well paid: Arday was on over £100,000 a year.

So one could - separately - argue that his position is more justifiable than the cant of those who employed him. After all, they wanted to be fooled. And he played their game. His employers were needy, for his ethnicity and ‘neurodiversity’. He expertly used this desperation.

Just pity the poor students, who reportedly complained about his teaching and were met with accusations of racism. Good preparation for life though: who isn’t accused of it, if they dare speak truth to power?

There’s something supernaturally terrifying about ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’, in how its doublespeak ideology has hounded me (and many less fortunate) down the years. Its persecutors are relentless and seemingly indestructible. They’re bindweed in British society, entangling then choking many lives and our institutions - not just uselessly but destructively.

Ask Cambridge!

Oh what a falling off was there: Newton; Byron; Coleridge; Wordsworth; Darwin; Dirac; Rutherford; Russell; Wittgenstein…Jason Arday.

Who’s next for a Cantab Professorship in DEI Dogma: Gary Lineker or David Lammy?

By a curious coincidence, Arday’s college is twinned with mine at Oxford.

I composed a poetic novoir (‘sensitivity warning’, if you read it) - The Drenching Arms - about a character hunted down by DEI, undergoing forced re-education into its banal and reductive absurdities, eventually at his old Oxford college (Jesus).

Well, I then discovered that the most propagandist teacher I worked with, at my Bicester state school - the ‘facilitator’ of the transgender indoctrination I fought against - is the DEI Officer, at Jesus College!

His write-up in the Jesus college record is beyond satire or parody. It’s an eerie feeling, discovering he’s arrived at the college, reifying my fictional nightmares. It’s awful to see the once great establishment I was fortunate to attend falling for this. I doubt any true academics left there believe in the ideology, but cowardice, fear - and self-interest - will stop them speaking out.

In truth, the college was always a fair and unprejudiced educational beacon; I’d wager the percentage of state-educated students (I was one) was higher when I matriculated in 1982 than now. Ditto for those from poorer backgrounds. It always had a proud record in being non-exclusive, as have many Oxford colleges.

But DEI is in fact the progressives’ pernicious language and ideology of privilege, division and exclusion, existing for their self-promotion and advancement. It imposes its dogmas every bit as rigidly and haughtily as the 19th-century requirements for proficiency in Latin and belief in the established church, for entry to Oxford back then.

Interestingly, this ex-colleague was a Religious Studies teacher. It goes without saying that DEI has become England’s state religion, ruthlessly enforced and tolerating no dissent, all the while claiming to promote fairness and equality. Unlike Christianity, it accepts no human failings and brooks no discussion. Above all, it has no concept of pity and believes in crushing individuals, in cruel public demonstrations of its worthiness and might.

Needless to say, I'd no idea this bloke had moved into my alma mater. It’s not as if there's any shortage of universities, colleges or public sector offices, employing such people in destructive non-jobs. Hell, there are 34 or more other Oxford colleges doing so. Every pot-hole council, LEA, Health Trust et al has one of these ideologues, attacking freedom of speech and thought.

Yet he ends up at my old college. It must mean something…

I repost this disgraceful sequence unashamedly, as I’m a sunbaked veteran of package holidays, especially all-inclusives. And a cantankerous half-Greek, off on Sunday to Parga (good rhyme with lager?).

Meanwhile, our coastal invasion continues…

MASSACRE OF THE LANE SWIMMERS

I. EUROPE

Clear Oxfordshire skies, emptied of everything.

But they'll have to do or I'll never start.

September always does this.

Extending summer just when we know it's over.

A sadness resurfacing from those back-to-school days.

The Equality Diversity and Inclusion – EDI – psychiatrist has just left me.

He suggested this sequence was in diary-form – maybe he reads Turgenev? – then ignored me for his laptop, percussively typing and glancing in my direction.

My tales are of all-inclusive resorts – not as confessions but explanations.

We go abroad for that blissful day after arriving, the optimism of our first swim.

Mostly Italians and Germans staying, but even they're yet to appear.

Much better to see the early staff – half-asleep straightening the recliners, raising the bar shutters and smoking sweet tobacco.

The Med, welcoming me with grandparents born on its shores?

A Sunday supplement fantasy worthy of Cyril Connolly or Elizabeth David!

But I'm no longer pale, my skin tan confirms Hellenic ancestry.

Foreigners are perfect, when there aren't many of them. They cope so well with boredom. Entire cultures taming it: shouting; sipping; overeating; blocking toilets. I admire how they use relatives, meals, wine, then traipses through stifling streets, to occupy their days.

All my holiday dreams are of water parks, shortly to close.

A mother and her teenager. The girl looks across then carries herself in an English way: sloping; dawdling; eyes vaguely quizzical; sullen; smirking; attitudinal - our individualism shared by millions.

The mother seems Macedonian or Moldovan, possibly Croatian.

As the week progresses, I become obsessed with Teutonic lane swimmers and nocturnal volley-ballers. Our room has a pool view and balcony, disturbed by their feral yelping.

My national characteristic is to feel violence being provoked, wherever as an Englishman I stay on the continent. Every facet of life there, however cultured, is best set in stark relief by our love of things 'kicking off'.

I was determined to maintain this tradition.

II. THOUSAND BOMBER RAID

Lane swimmers in particular need action, those managerialists of the piscine world.

You arrive at a pool excited, your early rising instilling virtue and purpose. Only to be greeted by turbulence, thrashing, ceaseless traversing – preferable to dive into the penguin pool at Cotswold Wildlife Park.

A tiny area for the infirm is roped off, filled by floating geriatrics and submerged perverts.

I plan the violence from my balcony, smiling at the cleaners' aubade choruses of ‘buongiorno’.

The pool below is within projectile range, the area still deserted enough to hurl a recliner unseen over the balcony then slip into my room.

It crashes onto the shoulders of a company director from Essen.

That Anglo-Balkan couple stare up at my now empty balcony, the girl grinning.

I film the ensuing mayhem.

To my delight, one of the elderly cleaners dives in and drags out the dazed, mostly unharmed, but infuriated ex-lane swimmer.

III. BOURGEOIS BLITZ

A significant joy of all-inclusives is the instinctive dislike felt for them, by our horrendous middle classes.

I wonder: does this snobbery also affect bourgeois Europeans? My evidence is empirical; it seems an English phenomenon.

They feel the abundant luxuries on offer shouldn't be available to our lower orders, better suited to the concentration camp featured in Holiday On the Buses.

Many is the morning coffee I've sipped, chronicling the nauseating spectacle of these wretches. I particularly enjoy the incipient signs of marital breakdown, eating disorders and long-Covid. Most wear surgical masks, even on the beach.

Their rooms are especially good for my break-ins. But I'm not class conscious – any British tourist is of interest.

This occupies much of my time. To be clear, no break-in actually occurred in that Praia da Luz apartment. Whatever happened, the secret is to be found in the Leicestershire countryside

The subject is a recurrent one over pre-dinner drinks. One Essex family perform nightly reconstructions, the parents bearing a vague resemblance to Kate and Gerry McCann. Members of their extended group play the Tapas Seven. A lugubrious Bulgarian bus driver takes the part of the Judiciary Police's paunchy Portuguese detective.

If should be obvious how I use this as a chance to ransack their rooms, leaving copies of Goncalo Amaral's outrageous book on each coffee table. Some I enter discretely, others have the doors joyously booted in.

To my surprise, the group seems to welcome my unofficial role. The desiccated old soak heading the family beckons me to join them, beaming and waving a copy of Amaral's libellous text.

IV. THE LEGENDARY BLUE LAGOON TAVERNA

My first all-inclusive resort was Sani, Greece, 2016 – just as an English civil war erupted, following our June referendum.

It was obvious that result wouldn't be accepted, progressives preferring denial of democracy for those they disagreed with – misinformed, duped, uneducated fodder, whose thinking they had 100% access to.

Their outrage was comical and sinister, confirming the ghastliness of our middle classes and my exile from their ranks. I got notification of this on the very day of our departure, waking to find my Jaguar doused with blue and gold paint and an EU flag fluttering on my lawn.

I returned to the birthplace of both democracy and my maternal grandparents.

My constant drinking companion was Geoffrey Jefferson, a desiccated veteran of the Mediterranean.

An old hand at such places. Geoff knew all the restaurants in the vast Sani resort, all of them sadly inferior to the legendary 'Blue Lagoon Taverna', Calymidia Resort, Crete.

'Think this is good? You should see The Blue Lagoon Taverna. A second-home to me, EVERYTHING FREE!'

'An all-inclusive?'

'Blue sea, sky, drinks, curtains, carpets, cutlery, napkins, uniforms, tiles…guess what colour the plates are?'

'You got me…blue?'

Geoff nodded sagely, tapping his leathery proboscis.

'It's the small touches.'

V. OUR GRAND INQUISITORS

Middle-class readers may want me skewered.

Roasted over a firepit at Billy Bragg's 'establishment-approved protest singer' festival.

Convicted of racism, homophobia, sexism, trans-genocide, global warming, rabies, galloping dysentery, road-rage flattening of centrist cyclists.

'Your comments aren't helpful. Can't you be kind?'

Progressives would have seen Salem judges as such.

On our Sardinian all-inclusive, the temperature reached 44 degrees.

I overheard a febrile table of NHS managers, discussing best-practice procedure for inclusively supporting serial killers working in their hospitals.

A pro-forma letter to the killer – signed by consultants questioning this diversity – was drafted. A grovelling apology from them for behaving unprofessionally, with a promise to reflect on their need to promote EDI in the workplace and retrain.

A full-scale enquiry was then role-played, so that lessons could be learned.

VI. MY INTENTION IS MORE THAN COMICAL

My intention is more than comical,

though humour is a balm to ease the pain.

I write to chronicle collapse – my own

and the truest thing we all ever know –

scientific and other knowledge, ripped

to shreds by madmen and us sat alone

sipping away somewhere, remembering

a past where education was something,

not just this sickening sanctimony.

VII: MY COLLECTION OF PURLOINED ART

Enough of such maudlin nonsense.

There's money to be made.

I watch Botley's falling rain, cataloguing my stash of museum goodies.

Swiped from the British Museum in Bloomsbury and sold to me in a car-boot sale.

The country's finished, elites preparing for Dubai or Brussels (which is worse?).

I took my pick of the Benin Bronzes, jostling with ‘tribal leaders’ carting the clobber off to seven-bed Summertown houses.

You work – so they don't have to.

I'm retired, so you can fund me too (all-inclusives aren't cheap).

Next up, a Canaries cruise - £10k - including Ricky Hatton/Tony Adams dinner date.

VIII: LOOKY LOOKY

Speaking of African clobber, I must mention beach vendors in colourful garb, braving the heat to offer balloons, hair braids, trinkets, headscarves, leather bracelets and flimsy gold necklaces.

To recline lazily, contemplating the teal seascape, then feel the hovering presence of a smiling Somalian or Ivorian, burdened by their load.

It produces feelings of unease, admiration, guilt – and wonder.

The methodical effort and detailed organization become apparent, from close observation and conversation.

Various 'boss men' distantly check the workforce, their presence indicated by nervous glances up the beach – especially from the women.

Of course, discreet enquiry could procure hashish, and no doubt more.

A phone call was made, Francophone jabbering into an Apple device then prompt delivery.

Also interesting were the differing European reactions.

Mostly the Italian security guards were tolerant, though sudden hand flaps dismissed any overeager sellers.

Apart from me, almost no one talks to these people.

It should be obvious that I neither wish to appear – nor in fact was – virtuous, for my fascination with this other world, lurking on the edge of week-long trips to paradise.

I was interested in the gemstones – especially fancy-colour diamonds – with which West Africa is blessed.

IX: FISTICUFFS AT MY EXIT INTERVIEW

I'm a believer in – and doughty practitioner of – the dramatic job exit.

Teachers anyway get bundled off under prison blankets, so this is now ‘best practice’.

The simmering resentments distil over many years, even decades.

But when that final drop of product rolls down the Liebig condenser, leg it.

The elixir is vital for anal irrigation, removal of ear wax – and optical cleansing.

I was stunned to find that I'd been pursued to Puglia by my appalling ex-manager, shithead husband in tow

Violence was my only option.

Verbal for her; steam-hammer attack by unknown swimmer for him; chicken war-dance walloping at the adults' disco for both.

I performed in a full-body Lycra suit, the sort worn by that GCHQ nut who zipped himself up in a holdall.

The entertainment manager mistook all this for party fun, posting pictures on the TUI website…

X: BOX-SET FINALE

At a college gaudy, I was surprised to discover how many of my year had emigrated, not just to escape from me.

It certainly contrasted with my not leaving the city.

Not for the first time, I reflected on failure.

Like boredom, this taboo haunts middle-class life.

A serial killer known only to his victims, though we all witness the stalking.

Nothing to be scared of – the lengthy process is interesting.

It's obvious Jack the Ripper wasn't Aaron Kosminski; Montague Druitt; 'Bonkers' Clarence; Charles Cross; Frances Tumblety.

It's vaguely possible Jack was George Chapman – Seweryn Klosowski – who worked in hairdressing amateur surgery.

But my candidate is Cornelius Edward Griswald, a dealer in stolen workhouse linen.

As to living abroad, being half-Greek, I always carried the foreignness with me.

And I've a horror of living with decent weather, surrounded by optimism.

My youth was wrecked by The Waltons.

How I'd pay to see John-Boy shotgun blasted then forest buried, courtesy of an Ozark wolf straying over to Jefferson County.

Just think what the Mexicans would do to the rest of the family.

EPILOGUE: BACK IN BLIGHTY

All day the weather rolled in and by nightfall, summer was replaced with autumn then winter.

Since childhood, this change had appalled and pleased him.

There's much to be said for days spent watching the same thing – how many of us do it?

Coastal towns are entry and exit wounds for the trivial and vital – personal and national.

One small group had this entire beach.

Perhaps they'd crossed the channel, arriving to claim a hotel room.

They moved slowly and painfully up its expanse, towards his hut.

He knew how difficult that journey was – it took him at least twenty minutes.

Every step pulled you into pebbles and shingle, your tottering progress comical and sinister.

A last line of defence.

The coast and its hinterland willing you back to the waves.

I booked this place assuming it was an Italian, since its website boasts of a “buon giorno gourmet experience”. I was in this grim area area visiting my Cambridge tutor - Cedric Archy Griswald - now confined in a local lunatic asylum, following the trans-scandal at Emmanuel College. As one of England’s foremost gourmets, I now offer my frank review as ‘a warning to the curious’.

It soon becomes obvious that this is a Turkish joint, akin to some ‘all-inclusive’ lager location in Marmaris. Still, I was hungry after an alarming hour with the wretched Griswald (sectioned for ‘fornicating with a firehose’) and loaded up on the ‘bottomless buffet’:

1. Traditional ‘Tuscan moussaka’ - unbelievably greasy, with stout pubic hairs swimming beneath rock-hard aubergine.

2. Capri prawns - crab sticks, clumsily carved to resemble prawns. Smothered in catering tomato sauce, garnished with Twiglets and Monster Munch.

3. Bulgarian potato salad - bits of glass at the bottom, and what looked like fish gravel.

4. Lady’s fingers okra fritters, served on a bed of seasonal turnip. Possibly the most disgusting dish I’ve ever eaten. I felt obliged to, as the chef was standing behind me with a kebab cleaver. Although vegetarian, it looked like an A34 roadkill.

5. ‘Homo Humous’ - a rainbow flag next to it on the menu. Cucumber dips, carved into enormous phalluses.

6. Macedonian tiramisu - a squashed Cadbury’s Cream Egg with Nescafe sprinkled on top.

   ---

   To my amazement, this place is given five stars in Time Out and has pictures of local celebrities like James O’Brien, Jeremy Corbyn, Alistair Campbell and David Lammy chowing-down. I complained about the food and was chased from the premises, my axe-wielding pursuer promising ‘an ISIL all-inclusive’.

   ---

   Who says multiculturalism has failed?

This track always moves me to tears. Without doubt one of the greatest songs ever written. This live performance is mesmerising:

IT'S MY LIFE

I listened to the song endlessly, in the Jesus College bar of summer 1984, then on an Interrail month, around baking Spain and Portugal. Travelling with three Oxford chums, and some pretty girls we’d met in Santiago - from Durham University, I think.

It’s one of those perfect songs which never gets stale or dates. Somehow seems to hold a mystery and, well, never ends…

Honestly, I didn’t realise how brilliant it - and the time - truly was. So many say that, about 80s music, and the 1980s. Of that decade’s English bands, Talk Talk were at the very top. Only The Smiths were their equals.

God, I remember singing along to it on an evening train, crossing the parched plain outside Madrid. Swigging cheap wine and waking up hungover, with the Pyrenees shimmering in the distance. What simple freedoms then, age twenty.

Mark Hollis (RIP) had the voice to equal any great singer, but one that’s somehow incomparable. So powerful but human, understated, then soaring.

I get the same effect only from Stevie Nicks, who sounds so different, and Karen Carpenter.

A sort of pure truth, at once both simple and complex. The famous video is also a thing of beauty, especially the whale diving in a sparkling sea:

IT'S MY LIFE - VIDEO

I know now that your days

and last words say as much as

poems, prayers or symphonies

heard to sunset on the drive back.

A life made in the light doesn't go dark.

You asked the doctor if a window

was open then just vanished out,

off somewhere with those tough

brave old girls who forged us -

this place - moaning not one jot.

London felt for you throughout.

Your lost dad at Clapham Junction,

unseen in years; ten minutes to talk

until he took his train.

In some ways you’ll always meet them blown

in staggering along the streets you’ve known

criss-crossed in anger and fear or lonelier

than some trivial star tossed between

the clouds so that was how I met him.

Just his voice awake all the wild night

every night flicking through my hours

till his next dose if you call them drugs

when in the end it made his verse on

being chased and loving his chaser.

I’ve surely seen him under the bridges

and crazed arches of this city he trudged.

Even its river was the same and the bells

he’d have known striking down his days.

It’s not the same to have only dawdled along

lost from what one could ever become but

still that dog of his is running somewhere

in this town or any other never looking either

side though those who can keep going further

then find they stop and meet him there.

But all the ends of my run-away days

are now lost in the offset gaze of

the next pub and the next where

I drink alone and am gone before

whoever I once was wherever

they are guesses I stood there.

He chases me down the empty

ways to the sound of rushing

and nothing laughter but though

I stopped he ran until I escaped

over rails and under roadworks or

was that him I saw from my window

lurking alongside the canal this

shadow on my path moving in

through a gap in the curtain.

I’ll need to show what I mean

by suicidal multiculturalism.

My dad believed in the crackhead plan.

Our liberal saint who greedily breathed

the blind pieties and cant sermons from

this crushing faith - me aged less than

ten alone in a children’s home beseiged

by numb absence, existing as an atom.

‘Diversity is our true strength,’ began

the lie from fools, progressives indeed.

Soon they had my town and me.

Cruel strangers with obscene

ways and no one counting.

Now it’s too late. Unseen

as a shadow-flitting teen,

rival gangs ravaging me

with sweets, drug wraps

falling over my tiny feet.

I’ll live here connecting

nothing with nothing,

hiding in Brighton.

I love local papers, especially from my hometown! Their earnest hyperbole is comedy gold. Typical headlines:

‘POLICE URGENTLY SEEK LOCAL MAN AFTER KEBAB THROWN’

‘FEROCIOUS ATTACK ON SCOUT HUT CONDEMNED BY LIB DEMS’

‘COURAGEOUS AMESBURY MUM TAKES ON VAPING GANG’

Here’s a sorry tale, of Trowbridge’s lost nocturnal haunt. A devastating indictment of Starmer’s misrule:

THE DEATH OF A DISCO DANCER

I went to this nightspot, Zinc, decades ago. Then it was full of pissed squaddies reeking of Old Spice or Brut 33, groping shirewomen to ‘The Lady in Red’ before a cheerful shirts-off ruck in the taxi rank.

Good days! Just imagine explaining that opinion to some sniffy Guardian reader - or a Frenchman.

The very idea of a ‘nightclub’, in the provincial English town sense, is heartwarming but almost gone. As nostalgic as Saucy Jack, Hovis ads or pubs with flat roofs.

And wonderfully naff names. Downtown Manhattan, Boogie Sunderland, Bacchus, Dandruff Danny’s, Gaylord’s, The Cairo Khazi, Ebolas, Shipman’s.

Imagine seeing Starmer chased out of one:

‘Not the face please! Not the face!’

My sorry tale needs

this poem to start.

The banished knight bleeds,

dagger through his heart.

Something survives enough,

so his faithful old mount

stoops then shuffles him off,

past our dead beyond count.

To a city that doesn’t know the country’s occupied. Progressives gorging in their anxiety-drenched hideouts.

Redoubts against the coming wars. Privilege disguised as activism, tuts asserting fragile status whilst outcasts join the masses.

This elite traipses back to an enclave hosting its own collapse. Rainbows on managerialists; self-combusting artisans; slogans for distant lands.

Elsewhere, the retail centre is thronged with babarians - myself included - and yelling mendicants. Its emporia offer such limited relief that shoppers return to the city’s poorer quarters then torch their stuff, rushing back for replacements.

Immolation provides shared culture. Biscuits no longer give social context.

Throughout, our invaders make clicking noises and open authentic barbers, wizarding outlets, other laundering rackets.

Rumours abound of combined mosques and teenage dancing clubs, fostering vibrant encounters between tribal elders and English girls.

Luckily, my western half of the city is barricaded off, accessible only to relief vehicles and mobility scooters.

RECORD 1

How to slow an idea - work at its pace of replacement - now that layering occurs as you cross the street.

He’d write a story where someone stays in bed a year.

Punches through the midnight revellers and runs upstairs.

Drunks and fireworks keep them awake but January descends, with its deluge of diversity.

A public-sector manager, they’ll spend one morning scheduling labyrinthine meetings and courses, posting the pdfs setting that year’s nonsense.

Then ‘raise grievances’ against ten layers of management above, informing HR they’ve vapourised through stress and won’t be condensing until 23:59, 31st December.

To baffle the experts, phase diagrams of azeotropic mixtures, and a reference to Boltzmann’s suicide, accompany the GP’s sign-off.

Curtains are the problem though.

Will opening them send a message - interpreted as ‘a desire to work in retail’?

Surveillance embraces us everywhere.

Whatever wars and rumours of wars.

RECORD 2

You can wreck ideas by writing them.

Through boredom I’ve been febrile, careering around, crushing my subtle flowers.

She’s still in her room.

By now we’ve spoken - almost a confessional.

I got in through the curtains.

On the brutal core of man - a parade of fabulist derangement in her fear bank:

‘Armies are massing.

January’s appraisals cannot wait.

None of my team met their stretch targets.

Online root-canal work through negligent interdental brushing.

Zionist fracking versus abundant free energy from landfills of nativists.’

I dumped her stuff by the bed.

RECORD 3

My next delivery

I left on her drive,

posting this advice

through the letterbox:

“Your fears are ridiculous.

‘Other people’s houses,

moving to one on the ringroad.’”

“Either recognised or ignored,

cultural exhaustion is nothing.”

“Symptoms aren’t so much

misunderstood as nonsense.”

“A spreadsheet of roadkills,

recited at lethal

reading groups.”

“Remember, this is your success:

indexed; fully funded; various

offspring propagated.

Every volume published

then highly praised.”

“And a sabbatical, your year-long

sojourn: January into spring,

then summer collapsing

to some teacher’s autumn,

futility then resignation.”

*

She isn’t a teacher

of course - the

public sector,

all the same.

RECORD 4

I wouldn’t be telling this story

if there wasn’t so much of me.

Not the pictures but stairs,

in the gaps and silences.

Dare I risk interstices,

or even charge-transfer centres

in wrecked lattices,

energy dissipating?

I won’t do politics, only class,

insoluble differences.

Me an exile from hers, an enemy,

though we talked of children,

dispossessed or surviving.

She heard not a word on

mine, safely hidden.

The building shook as we spoke,

the screaming metaphors

from collapse, tiptoeing

inside, foundations gone.

Me and mine won’t be in the ruin.

I took her pointless backstory

and excused myself pity.

She’d allocated crimes

to newborns and our dead.

The problem is simple:

such houses and their people.

RECORD 5

Any religion except trees inside,

once a year? I can't remember,

words I'll have to leave to find.

It isn't repeating 'to' which worries me,

just exhaustion, replacing everything

except their sacred certainty. Rotten

bastards in truth, cunts in fact.

Nothing wrong with saying that.

None of this matters, then does.

Why aren't any of them locked up?

They've closed asylums, so I'll

offer her my random shed.

Not in Summertown, thank God,

but views to the dream city,

pylons, industrial units, sanity.

One social outlet got tapped,

reflex depression, which I'd

gladly burn. The rest perfect.

*

Of course, I didn't escape attention.

Her career in management 

entitled me to oversight.

Dubious entries in databases

tracking my visits: excesses;

destructions; imperfections. 

Maybe she saw me as a pauper,

offspring of workhouse fodder.

A charity case she'd try to adopt.

Or a pointless graduate,

plotting to inherit her house.

No doubt the thought occurred.

Tom Ripley found it easy - the act, 

not its consequences. Why does 

my hand shake as I write this?

I scatter anger on memories.

The point is none had rights

to an electron of my existence. 

Often I dream of redoing Finals.

All of my chemistry forgotten,

unable to start revising.

AND THEN THE WAR BEGAN

She was lead prosecutor

at my first hearing.

A year in her room

until she was reborn.

Organizing my arrest

on infinite charges.

To every conversation

she’d complete access.

What confused me

and no one else

were historical crimes

to which I’d been party.

And how kindness

was extolled - posters

polluting our souls.

Analysis was hopeless,

more pointless than

a Pakistani on a pub crawl,

his degree in Criminology

and doctorate on replacement.

If you lean on the

last London bridge

listening for missiles

(like George Bowling

in ‘Coming Up For Air’)

the sound is shattering.

Difficult to recall those

open gardens of childhood.

Warm grass, sandpits underfoot,

then scampering unconcerned.

In dreams I walk a year through fallen snow.

Head back to a lost land I somehow know.

Taxis through rain streets.

You cannot just move here.

Nothing makes sense since

this place started vanishing

becoming more beautiful.

Tiny details to a dying man

on buildings unseen when

you assume bigger worries.

A redbrick island on the Thames.

Half castle, half a jutting boat.

Any of it seems prelapsarian if

surviving aloof, welcoming me

as I find sunken bits washed up.

It's never flooded. Anglo-Saxons

dropping their broken axes?

Let’s not mention them.

We lived in leaky huts

till invaders built London.

Then Khan’s father drove buses

and the last King of Scotland

taught us Tudor history from

the colours of English cheese.

Didn’t you know that the

Arabs invented gravity?

No one speaks truthfully.

Those who do lose their

tongues, torn out weeping

roots which won’t regrow

since what we had inside was

given away to a stifling mass.

Slowly first through sacred diversity

unstoppable now you cannot ask why.

OK, no one likes a smartarse. But then no one likes Keir Starmer, our most disgusting PM ever. I’m pleased so much of what the article below predicted - a week before the 2024 vote - came true. Especially on how key Trump would be. It got the Tories wrong - they haven’t split - but not how important Farage would become:

PREDICTIONS FOR KEIR STARMER'S PREMIERSHIP

29th June, 2024

Brace yourself for the stormy weather that's coming.

I’ve a strong suspicion that my 14-year-old daughter is unusual for her age-group, in her political fascination. She’s no interest in the ideological mono-culture spoon-fed to her generation at school but is exceptionally aware of the actual process and its personalities. We talk endlessly about the grotesque figures who currently hold the stage, none of whom she has much respect for. Needless to say, I’m intensely proud of her approach. I know from my time teaching how most of her contemporaries discuss politics by regurgitating indoctrination they’ve received on: Net-zero; ‘trans-phobia’; Gaza; Ukraine; you name it.

We were discussing what would happen to the Conservatives and Labour, after the election. A warning. Though we once analysed the various possible trajectories of Truss’ doomed premiership, neither of us got close to predicting her fate, the swift but under-discussed coup which dumped her. But then, which genuine pundits did?

So this is our forecast!

Much as the Tory party is in disarray, their two characteristics - utter ruthlessness and utter idiocy - mean those who do survive will be the blockheads who've thrown away the 2019 result: the Cameron 'one-nation' liberal democrats. They've been put in the safest seats.

The big question is: will they split off - and maybe even merge with the nauseating Lib Dems - or will the actual Conservatives (Truss et al) split off and form some party with Reform types? Either way, the Conservatives are sure to split. In the country, the first group are wildly unpopular. But the second group much less so; they probably represent about 80% of Conservative support.

Farage is thinking hard about 2029 and leading some genuine party, made of the latter. It wouldn't have the 'new party' problem of Reform, with votes spread too evenly to give seats. It would have a core vote of about 20% at least - and then a lot of Labour haters could be attracted. Farage is the most effective British political figure since Thatcher - not just for the 2016 referendum result but also how he succeeded with the Brexit Party, smashing May and ensuring her departure. Despite his haters, he's without doubt the most respected political figure in the country - and the only one with any record of significant achievement.

The real electoral poison for the current Tories are the Cameron/Sunak crowd, who have very little support nationally, though are over-represented in the parliamentary party. But they can't maintain the huge disconnect with the national party followers, who'll simply leave.

As for Labour, it won’t split - much to its cost. Starmer is already being pulled all over the place and is barely more popular than the completely unelectable Sunak. He’s probably smarter but will find that events eventually bury him. Constant wars will continue and possibly coalesce. Domestically, he’ll try all the gerrymandering he can (votes to 16-year olds, votes to anyone with a pulse or postage who’ll back Labour) and outlawing of free-speech, but it won’t be enough. Not least because the global political climate is changing.

The political upheaval hitherto seen will be dwarfed by events in the next few years. As a cynical and corrupt ‘Human Rights’ lawyer, Starmer will become a menace to what civil liberties we have left - probably locking up his opponents. There’s something coldly ruthless and monomaniacal about him. He tolerated extreme antisemitism in Labour as Deputy Leader, despite being married to a Jew and having Jewish kids. All for the sake of his career. Such a man has no principles other than self-interest.

His actions over the grooming scandal, as DPP? To persecute and prosecute those who highlighted this hideous scandal. Ditto for the trans-madness, over which he raised not a finger (until the tide turned) to aid the courageous Rosie Duffield and the few others in his own party - though he now lies and says that he did.

Obviously he’ll be given a very easy ride by the BBC, et al. But that can no longer be the comfort it was to Blair, in his early years; the BBC is now widely discredited and seen as blatantly partisan.

Much will depend on who wins the US election, in November. That will be Trump, unless (not unlikely) Biden has him locked up or even killed. But if Trump does win, Starmer will be in real trouble. Not least because of the additional credibility it will give Farage. By that time, Starmer will be mired in unpopularity and facing economic problems which make any spending promises from the July election impossible. The splits within Labour - worsened by the deceptive security of their huge majority - will make his position horrendous. His only option politically will be to switch all his focus to shrill and ineffective attacks on ‘the far right’ - in an echo of Biden’s demented focus on Trump.

The chattering classes will also go mad over the ‘menace from Farage’, which will be hugely counter-productive, as seen by how demonising Trump in the USA helped him to victory. Full-scale ‘emergency’ attacks on freedom of speech will be attempted, under the guise of ‘preventing the spread of disinformation and far-right violence’. Farage will brilliantly link this to the old ‘spreading alarm and despondency’ censorship seen in many post-colonial African dictatorships, with Starmer increasingly ridiculed by the many non-left governments in the EU and beyond.

Meanwhile, the British public - now suffering full-throttle wokedom - will inexorably shift towards his new party. Younger voters - echoing the move seen across Europe - will be a significant part of this transformation. The mismatch between politics in Britain and the EU will also hopelessly fracture the residual ‘Rejoin’ chants of the Remainers, who hoped to use economic disaster in the UK as an unarguable reason for re-joining the EU - itself now a fractured mess, far from their left-liberal fantasies of yesteryear.

Well, hopefully that’s how it goes…

They tore off his lanyard,

sent Geoff reeling down

Streatham High Road.

A modern tar and feathering.

KFC detritus plus vape

spittle, encrusting a suit

bought in Ciro Citterio.

Dr Geoffrey Lovell,

the lost descendant.

Scion of Cotswold ruins

draped in willow light

by the true Windrush.

Such decay. Was it inbreeding

since Bosworth - mistletoe brides

trapped in boxes and celebrity pubs?

I swim through teal water.

Unworried by Ebola,

and tribal Africans,

housed in luxury hotels

off the A40, roasting

bushmeat for locals.

But not Geoffrey's dog.

A junkie pitbull rescued

from its family's crackden.

Jesus Christ! Glorious nights

I lived, spent in the shiremen

redoubts of rural Oxfordshire.

We funded Lovell’s relocation.

Relaunched his Coat of Arms,

then drove to Streatham,

south London's straggling

Anglo-Saxon fastness

of kebabs and biriyanis.

Geoff remains optimistic,

though Richard Crookback -

the king in the carpark -

went revenant as ‘Rachel

from Accounts’, the saint

to every Channel migrant.

When you can take things no more,

just watch birds fly - doesn't matter

which or where - maybe one

alone as you trundle home,

wondering if it’s ever gone

south for winter or wild

things are out there still.

Wait if you want till

lonely enough to walk

all night and never stop.

Pass cars on ringroads -

any of us do this -

the sane and sleepless.

Somewhere above they'll be

flying over south London’s flaking suburbs

blinking no differently on biscuit-baked

deserts or glacial lakes.

Minds are meant for

many things rarely

free - keep yours

wherever you go.

The mystery isn't anti-Islamic sentiments and riots. Given the bloodbath Islam always creates, the mystery is why there aren't more public disturbances.

And the British state implicitly agrees. So do most Muslims.

Why else do they - uniquely amongst religions - need bespoke blasphemy laws and preferential treatment?

Because all sides agree that Islam is a dangerous ideology, with a marked tendency for causing violence.

No good denying this. Indeed, most Muslims don't. Having no choice, they either sullenly accept the intimidation or revel in it.

And boy does the latter work, on the rest of us.