- Most pernicious
- Be careful what you wish for...
- New Page
- New Page
- Homeric hymn to Pan
- New Page
- Home
- What the hell. I have nothing to lose
- My Adventures
- My Story
-
Essentials
- The earth is not flat
- The abolition of mind
- Things that only need saying once-one e tel
- Manners makyth man
- Coal in the bath and the victim culture
- The withdrawal of love and forcing oneself on others
- So some guys had the really freaky idea that we should love one another
- Jesus!
- 'Judge not that ye be not judged'
- Goo
- The way we were: Anglican England
- 'Avatars of living grace'
- Ditching the theology of love
- Reality >
- PANTHER: the argument
- Moi
- The new Marxism
- Dill's World (blog)
- New Page
- The collapse of education
- The Anile Heir
- For Katie: Harry Secombe: 'The Lord is my Shepherd'
- For Katie: He who would valiant be
-
'And now Amanda is seriously ill.'
- Otting
- THAT AM I >
- Medicine: the joke
- It's like this, Doc >
- Medicine: the continuing joke
- 'By Tummel and Loch Rannoch'
- The laughing-stock of the civilized world
- And be damned to you
- In the garden with Mummy
- Transforming the Na-Mhoram's Grim
- Blair: the icing on the cake
- Expecto patronam
- Scarlet battalions
- My family: any colour so long as it's red
- Back to the freaking juniper-tree (1)
- Back to the freaking juniper-tree (2)
- Our grandfather who art in heaven (though I doubt it), Howard be thy name
- So you have a problem with my family, fucker?
- 'Jew-Communists'
- Margaret, my great-grandmother, an Irish tart
- The FUQs
- Dear Wannabe Nemesis
- Shall we try again, Bobbles my sweet?
- Evil
- Dixi (that's Latin, you know, Father)
- The cultural use of the lamp-post
- A home from home
- All times are now (1)
- All times are now (2)
- For Katie: All times are now (3)
- For Katie: All times are now (4)
- For Katie; All times are now (5)
- For Katie: All times are now (6)
- Non serviam
- This colour doesn't run
- The balance
- Civilization - the balance
-
Gallery
- And be damned to you
- Catholic Encyclopaedia 1912: Obedience
- Voltaire and Jesus
- Tertullian, Women in Canon Law (1912) and Mulieris Dignitatem (1988)
- Padding through the Vatican archives
- The Vatican State
- Extra ecclesiam nulla salus: go to hell, go directly to hell, do not pass 'Go'
- A short history lesson
- A phrase-book for monkey-nuts
- Summary: the abode of the loon
-
Translations from Voltaire (mine): Concerning the Church of England
>
- Bukharin and Preobrazhensky: Communism and Religion
- Translations from Voltaire (mine): Freedom of Thought
- Translations from Voltaire (mine): Transubstantiation
- Thomas Paine: The Age of Reason
- Lenin: Socialism and Religion
- Marx: 'So much for the social principles of Christianity'
- The Horcruxes and the illusion of power
- 'And death shall have no dominion'
- Led Zep: Kashmir
- Buddhist meditation music: Zen Garden
- Karula
- Summary: the love way or the power way
- Flashtest
- The worst university in the country
- Just finishing off, Dolores
- Miss Smila's feeling for snow
- Death of an expert witness
- Interesting, those trips to Moscow
- 'His single hand portrayed it'
- Of course no-one pays any attention to poets
- The desire of the moth for the flame
- The Hospital
- The ghost in the machine was riled
- I am the very model of a medical practitioner
- I am the very model of a modern faith apologist: reprise
- I am of course reminded of a little list (of a little list)
- In the garden with Mummy when the Nine turned up
- Grow the fuck up, comrades
- Thin red line
- 'The Party', 'The Regiment'
- Once upon a time there was a big red giant
- Britain's not very secret weapon
- The headlines
- The waning of the age of aquarium
- Letter to MI5: Playing The Patriot Game
- Those in peril on the sea
- The Patriot Game (song)
- Country matters: 'Elf and Safety
- The Matter of Britain
- Marianne
- Riders on the storm with soundtrack
- The rat-catchers
- 'And gentleman in England, now a-bed, shall think themselves accurs'd...'
- The evidence no-one asks for
- England
- My father when young 2
- A few of my books
- The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism
- Barry's book-plate (evil grin)
- Barry: 'demob' if only from the MOI and redeployment at JWT
- Barry: publishing contracts with Curtis Brown
- Barry's funeral service
- Family album
- Barbara's 100th birthday
- And Nigel's funeral: read by Saul on the whale-backed Downs
- Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
- Class mum lives in a field with Dinge: the intellectual Left
- Within you, without you
- Because the world is round, it turns me on
- More Lattic and other incredibly cool stuff
- Hass and Venga
- The Lover of Jalaluddin Rumi and some things you never wanted to know about translation
- Love IS the law
- Shahriar's sites for sore eyes
- Islamic art and civilization
- Abu Nuwas
- Fisking Warsi
- Harry's Place v. Scumbag College
- Henrietta wondered if HP was too soft on Sparte-Smythe
- Koorosh Modarresi of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran
- Rumy Hasan of the Birmingham Socialist Alliance
- Sharia socialists
- ComSymp, ShariaSymp: plus ca change....
- Illustrations of the Rubaiyat
- Hell, objectively speaking: St Catherine of Genoa
- Joe Stote
- Katy Kianush
- 'Brothers, if you hear...'
- L'Internationale
- A Lioness's Quest
- The Battle of Evermore
- Rosa Luxemburg
- Love in a time of cholera
- TEKEL: Religious, guys? Doesn't that mean shit?
- Please do not feed the god. He really doesn't appreciate it.
- Instead of God eating people, people eat God. Seems a good swap
- Herstory
- Ultramontanism
- Multiverse defined by the sexual equipment of the human male
- Civis romana sum?
- Sunday School, 1913: 'THE GATES WILL BE OPEN TO ALL MANKIND'
- Huxley
- Consciousness 101
- Jesus Christ the apple-tree
- WE DO NOT KNOW
- Trial before Pilate
- 'For the sake of the nation, this Jesus must die!'
- Much how I feel about doctors and other forms of intellectual pollution in the University, really
- Jesus, a human being
- By all means get us wrong, Father
- 'They turned to Rome to sentence Nazareth'
- Buddhism: frightful threat to the Church, you know
- Dharma the Cat and the Barefoot Doctor
- Non-duality
- Exo, eso, balance, Balrogs et le Parti Communiste Francais 1939-1945
- ComSymp, ShariaSymp: Fit the Second
- Printing and the Reformation
- Glossary
- Early chess: more, er, gentlemen (and ladies)
- The Crusades: it's good to look at dates
- Richard and Saladin: perspectives
- Richard and Saladin: perspectives
- Nathan the Wise
- Portly and the Piper at the Gates of Dawn
- Otters return to Thames (maybe)
- The Ottery, TW9
- Spring: rain and shine
- Problems with numeracy: cardinals, generals and rock 'n' roll
- Franny and Zooey
- The tail does not wag the dog
- Try again? I think not: finale
- How many deaths does it take till they know that too many British Muslim women have died
- Who killed Banaz
- Sexism, racism, Islamophobia, Marxophobia and a rather interesting school
- Aaargh! The Terrible Tonge-Monster!
- Just hammering the stake a little further in
- A second English Civil War: women against women
- The vorpal sword goes snicker-snack
- You were saying...
- Of course I've slain the bloody Jabberwock
- Chapter One - Stalinism is just so yesterday
- The rightful heir, the usurper and the usurper's bloody wife
- Wiping excrement off the sole of one's boo
- Fascism victorious, gloating and spurious - for the moment, certainly
- Six counties (sob, the horror of it) lie under John Bull's tyranny
- Calling Lord Haw-Haw
- Cool Britannia
- 'Hell is just as properly proper as Greenwich or as Bath or Joppa'
- 'Any old iron, any old iron, any, any old iron...'
- The Front Line
- Taking it from the top...
- Happy birthday to m
- Extract from The Anile Heir including Lattic
- My body my self
- Culluket, Kastanessen and of course Coulter
- The Girl Who Talked to Otters
- Notes, some of which are Caroline's
- Our revels now are ended
- Pallas Athene
- More notes
- Pan pipes - conclusions - allegory
- Shit, man, they won't even state their problem in the Agora
- Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad
- Poetry in motion
- Ain't no use in looking down!/Ain't no discharge on the ground!
- Queen - We will rock you!
- Queen - Killer Queen
- The wrong shaped body, inferior product
- What a friend they have in evil, all their sins and griefs to bear
- In sum
- 'Building a remedy for Kruschev and Kennedy'
- Classic Islamoballs (and of course pure Stalinism)
- Deja vu
- Really, there are more important things to think about....
- Sleeping Pan by InertiaK
- Hymn to Pan by Faun
- Pan pipes
- Dirty old men
- For Katie: 'And death shall have no dominion'
- The Stone Table cracked
- 10 intellectual frauds of the orthodox religious and their slaves
- A Miracle of Exmoor: a Christmas masque
- WE DO NOT KNOW
- Intelligent women
- 'Tales of brave Ulysses'
- Coursera
- Free
- Milburn
- A fifth column
- Ain't there nuffink wrong with my back, apes?
- Gunfight at OK Corral
- Gunfight at OK Corral: the movie
- Harmonica and Frank
- Captain's Log: Star-Date Whatever
- Women, the US election, the President of the United States and other cool stuf
- The fury of a woman who has been raped
- "Are all American officers so ill-mannered?"
- The grand-daughter of not-quite-the-founder of the Labour Party
- Meanwhile...the lamp-post
- 'Sarat's little joke': the Economic Liaison Officer to the Anile Throne
- Where have all the SovSymps gone, long time passing...
- Roots and reductionism
- 'At anchor here I ride...'
- 'Against all things ending'
- New Page
- Verstehen Sie?
- Memoirs of London medicine
- 28th August 2010
- Irreducible evil
- Irreducible evil
- Just for you: Anthea Turner - and the python
- Goose-stepping morons should try reading books not burning them
- Just call me Serafina Pekkala, or possibly Lady Godiva
- A few reminders
- More? You want more?
- Grand finale
- It even has a pretty cover
- Bambi
- C'est nous qu'on ose mediter/De rendre a l'antique esclavage!
- A reminder of who is Marianne
- Voici Noel!
- Vicar of Bray
- Spanish Ladies
- Meanwhile back in Scilly....Song of the Western Men
- Twenty years behind enemy lines
- Family tree
- Pavarotti: Little Drummer Boy
- Walking in the air
- 'So you think you can love me and spit in my eye/So you think you can love me and leave me to die'
- Aw, come on, Doc, you're such an academic
- Je suis allee voir dans sa tete
- 16 chants de Noel
- 16 chants de Noel
- Talking of sheep...
- The distancing of Jesus from the churches
- So this is how it is to be
- And....And Stafford....And
- A limp prick and no balls
- Excuse me while I dress my hair with vine leaves
- Excuse me while I dress my hair with vine leaves
- Other notes
- Other notes
- Blair
- No?
- 'Are you still laughing, Sarat?' Pt One
- 'Are you still laughing, Sarat?' Pt Two
- If you're going to Acton Vale, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair
- The truth about medicine
- Getting nowhere fast
- Bird in the bloody wilderness
- As I have so tiresomely repetitively said
- Untitled
- That which sustains
- Therefore, Vice-Chancellor
- The lies they tell and the drivel they spout
- Rising above the evil reptilian kitten-eaters
- We too do not do cowering
- What the papers say
- The closed (sealed/wounded/stunted/practically non-existent) mind
- Dust and sparkles: child of Dust and Light and Lenin
- Just screaming
- More ridiculous womanish screaming
- Look, children, do look, it's a Five-Year Plan
- Fictionally speaking...The House that Keir built
- The heavy mob moves in: "We're Ancient Greeks. We do reason. And of course democracy."
- What did New Labour achieve?
- Apollo speaks
- Physician, heal thyself - or not
- Wholly unnecessary footnote
- Ah, the dirty underbelly of medicine
- Artemis' arrows
- Dear Apollo, I think the mind-itch needs to be stronger
- A few hymns
- Rhinoceros!
- Begging them to sue me for 15 years
- 'Now that I lie here/My body all holes/I think of the traitors/Who bargained and sold'
- Of course, if anyone has a spare atom bomb
- Whatever it takes
- Shit on the sole of my boot
- Shit on the sole of my boot
- You will see me dead rather than support me
- Vultures waiting for the flesh that dies
- Would you like to see the state of my mattress?
- 'When you've shouted "Rule, Britannia!"...
- 'I vow to thee, my country...' Aw, come on, you know it makes your skin crawl
- The Fixers
- The prince, the cardinal, the duke, the politician and the professor
- The Enforcers
- Me charm. You just strange
- So what exactly am I saying here?
- Pussy Riot: Yet another day in the destruction of Ivana Denisovich
- Untitled
- Pussy Riot (2): no pasaran
- Just smile for the camera, fuckers
- PANTHER: the animations, though not yet the videos
- Theme music
- So-o-o
- Just a stupid woman screaming
- Just a reminder of the Miracle of Exmoor
- Mess with the best. Die like the rest
- The essential paradigm
- No-one wants me to survive. No-one wants me to succeed
- "Are you still laughing, Sarat?"
- You have heard of the University, Doctor?
- PANTHER: The Manual, out now on Scribd
- Going back to work tomorrow
- The gift of speech
- Point counterpoint
- To cut a long story short, therefore
- To cut a long story even shorter
- A few things you need to note
- Death rather than dishonour
- In brief, therefore
- Start of first draft - what do you think of it so far?
- Let me tell you a story, Jackanory, Jackanory...
- Phase II
- Thus we see the great esteem in which London medicine holds the University
- Washed down the drain
- Raped, butchered, destroyed means what?
- "I invoke Artemis"
- I invoke Artemis (II)
- The closing-down sale. Everything must go
- Murder by remote control
- Insufferable
- Befehl ist Befehl
- Order of play
- The Broadmoor annexe
- I say, don't they shoot collaborators?
- You pay them
- Dear British Public
- Graphically speaking.....
- I have taken a lead
- Endsum
- The good news and the bad news
- The education suitable to the masses prescribed by the C19th industrialist, therefore
- 'Are you still laughing, Sarat?/Medicine: the joke
- I shit on you daily
- It is fact
- A new continuum...Watch this space not
- Lady Sybil's swamp-dragons (footnote to the above)
- The Age of Aquarius
- But of course your usual Christmas present, little sick-bags
- 'Sing as you raise your bow, shoot straighter than before'
- There's just one huge and enormous difference, isn't there
- Shall we just highlight that bit?
- Untitled
- Untitled
- Off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz
- Untitled
- 'Don despicable, don of death' Could I leave it out?
- Finish with a summary of the facts
- Roll bloody up for the greatest show on earth
- Just thought to start to make a couple of videos
- Killer Queen
- It is concluded
- A short note
- I need help
- Get out of my university, animals
- Bluestockings
- Oh, when is this going to end?
- Go for it, fuckers, go for it
- Fnords, Jesus and the gerund
- Corsin and coradium
- TAH: Chapter One
- The cancer that is medicine
- The Petri dish
- Hanging them is good. Exposing them is better
- Lattic....
- Female = non-person
- That which sustains reprise
- Faun: Unda. To that which sustains, we can add...
- Non, c'est pas ca
- Quod erat demonstrandum
- To move on, therefore
- So there you have it
- The script
- Ars longa vita brevis
- PANTHER: the movie
- Animal Farm: the midden
- The word is psychopath
- If you prefer, a septic tank
- And the rest
- Twin cores
- Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit
- Here the matter rests at present
- So just what is this bloody nonsense?
- My knowledge of Photoshop has increased by leaps and bounds
- Question One
- Words and pictures
- Etched in acid
- Dear fucking world
- More
- Caniba and Hokabi
- I think - class (Lancashire A, puh-lease, rhymes with gas)
- What is the point of what you are saying? What is it intended to achieve?
- PANTHER was created in 2008
- Happy Samhain
- Profound concern
- The Road to the Isles
- And of course Andy Stewart
- 'Banks on every finger'
- Don't tread on me
- A Miracle of Exmoor: a Christmas masque
- Untitled
- Pretty much a classic, wouldn't you say
- Goose-stepping morons should try reading books not burning them (2)
- There is no reasoning with them
- A little give and take
- Extraordinary irresistible find
- Music
- So there it is, part solution, mostly not
- Reprise: 'Are you still laughing, Sarat?'/Medicine: the joke
- Mireille
- Espèce de pute!
- Etched in stone
- Hate Fal the most?
- Or Shav?
- Or is it Dill?
- Or is it Dill?
- Reminder: Ars longa vita brevis
- Reminder: PANTHER: the movie
- 'If you cannot make up rhymes/There are always the columns of The Times'
- Jarring blast: letter to my father 19th February 2012
- Vermin made simple
- You were saying
- And so, dear MI5, dear Labour Party, dear University...
- I who might as well be fucking dead
- Death rather than dishonour
- Strands
- Dolls on music-boxes wound up by a key
- Beyond death
- You can fit a lot into a five-minute video
- Je suis Charlie
- Marble Arch? The Brandenburg Gate? The Colosseum?
- Sort of cross between Athena and Artemis, really
- OK, lemme be rational
- Meanwhile...
- Meanwhile...
- As if: cui bono?
- Dark satanic mills
- Work in progress
- Welcome to sewer NHS
- Over my dead body
- Beam them up to the Great Prick in the Sky
- So there it is, part solution, mostly not
- That which sustains finale
- Messing about on the River: Lattic, Sarat and Shavli too
- Christ, it's a mad monkey
- Lots of nuffink
- Led Zep: Kashmir (2)
- The pillars of the West/By all means get us wrong, Father
- Evil reptilian kitten-eater
- Cockroach Protection League
- Happy Easter
- The very models of a medical practitioner
- The Act of Desecration
- No is the answer. What is the question? Loony alert, therefore
- The Grand Plan
- Go for it
- Waste of oxygen
- Prologue
- Intermezzo
- Just the time for a brief reminder
- Mess with the best - die like the rest
- Wailings of sick Trots not
- Heavy metal
- 'Allow me to introduce myself...'
- Freddie and Peter
- How to depict one of the most powerful men in the world
- Moog
- Anyone for tennis?
- Hair
- Hairier?
- Hairiest?
- Untitled
- Python and Allen
- Prepared for any eventuality
- Bad moon rising with soundtrack
- Riders on the storm with soundtrack
- 'Sing as you raise your bow, shoot straighter than before' encore une fois
- Not one foul animal among them will uphold freedom and democracy
- Flower power
- Meanwhile there's really only one song for Ardeshna (and Blair)
- Thin red line - the third of the set
- PANTHER: the movie - nealy there
- Do you like my channel art?
- Couple more soundbites to choke on
- Home movie
- Damaged goods
- How is Virginia these days?
- The Hunger Games
- Now on YouTube
- Second vid
- The Mutts
- The Mutt Pit
- The video I shall make
- Kindly therefore display all the wit, creaivity, intellect, education and intelligence you don't have
- The last picture show
- Faun: Unda. To that which sustains, we can add...
- Faun: Unda. To that which sustains, we can add...
- Faun: Unda. To that which sustains, we can add...
- The Last Picture Show 2: female eunuchs
- In tg
- New Page
- New Page
- New Page
- In
- In the heat of the night
- In the heat of the night
- Not a complicated image
- Vermin
- 'It is a slave's lot thou describest, to refrain from uttering what one thinks'
- Won't that be fun, Fitter?
- New Page
- Nous sommes tous P:aris
- Meanwhile back at the ranch
- You may remember the Squelch?
- DIXI
- I laugh at you daily
- The end
- Fuck your lies, your cowardice, your hypocrisy, vermin
- Got it all sewn up
- I am Dill
- PANTHER: the movie - a reminder
- And of course the manual
- They deploy
- New Page
- Traitors and would be murderers
- And the other video
- Yes, there are, aren't there.
- Zopiclone
- Hell
- No answer is a very clear answer
- For Katie: All times are now (1)
- For Katie: The Lord of the Dance
- For Katie and m: The heart will go on
- If it's the last thing I ever do, whcih I suppose it might well be
- My fine body twisted, all battered and lame
- Reflections
- For Katie: The trumpet shall sound
- For Katie: Hallelujah Chorus
- For Katie
- The service
- Reading from 'Burnt Norton'
- Going Back
- or in other words
- I need help
- Time past and time future
- Tomorrow
- How many other lives have you destroyed?
- Arundel
- After such knowledge, what forgiveness
- Let it be said - it will be said
- Information governance
- So----
- Sitting in their tin cans far above the world...
- Another shit-filled weekend
- The Cull
- Society has the right to require of avery public agent an account of his administration
- The laughing stock
- 'Sing while you raise your bow...'
- Simple questions
- For fuck's sake they're all vermin
- Functionally illiterate
- Of no significance to me whatever
- The best story
- Mess with the best. Die like the rest
- The visible difference
- Drop the dead donkey: UCH imploding
- It remains the case
- Oh, and it remains the case
- What matters
- Salvat regina!
- Nancy Wake
- Nancy Wake 2
- 2016: your annual treat - A Miracle of Exmoor
- Dunscreaming (shortly, anyhow)
- Any normal person
- Malice
- Keep your loving brother happy
- Surprised by joy
- University Challenge
- Meanwhile back at the lamp-post
- Except to speak of the absolute horror
- And in particular
- Because I screamed I needed help
- QED
- Sredni Vashtar
- The wild and wacky world of the Waffen SS
- Think I'm a bloody servant, do you
- Irrationality
- Literate, literary, educated, intellectual England
- Refinements
- Doesn't the University see the joke?
- The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
- On the whole, I think....
- Ain't taking it from a woman
- A great and mighty wonder I'm still standing
- The zenith of human possibility
- ' pilot of the storm who leaves no trace'
- 'Sing while you raise your bow. Shoot straighter than before'
- In the face of the evidence
- Watch this space
- Brennt Paris?
- 'I vow to thee, my country...' Aw, come on, you know it makes your skin crawl
- Within you, without you - especially without you
- Ain't I got no respet
- Goose-stepping morons should try reading books not burning them
- The Matter of Kadun: physics and metaphysics
- Cartoons
- Over-arching significance not
- They just wouldn't list
- 'And now that I lie here/My body all holes'
- Photoshoot
- I saved about half the books
- I just don't understand
- Fnords
- Pigs in clover
- See you in hell, fuckers
- Attempted murder
- Bog-rats
- Person or persons unknown but very guessable
- All you need is love
- One more time
- More
- Depict them in bondage
- In sum, Mr Benn's questions
- 'Arnold Lane/Had a strange/Hobby...'
- '...Doors bang/Chain-gang...'
- Etx
- Shoot straighter than before
- My moon and my wand
- My college, my university
- Inevitable and not
- painfully slow on the uptake
- This too you may stuff up your arse
- And of course this
- Pout
- TTFN
- Wiping excrement off the sole of my boot
- A West End comedy, perhaps
- Fascism
- I really don't think so, no
- For Katie: He who would valiant be
- For Katie: He who would valiant be
- For Barry: Danny Boy
- Epitaph: it's your funeral
- Yea, though I work in the Land of the Valley of the Shadow of Death
- Do learn to read, Doctor
- The crooked road the English drunkard made
- By Oak and Ash and Thorn
- Can't un read plain words of English
- I get the gist, I surely do
- The world of perversion
- The Ottery has moved to the banks of the Arun
- Snapping my claws at the foeman''s chants
- Yes, the crash of the waves on the foreshore
- The even longer march of Everywoman
- You tried so desperately hard to destroy me
- Evil reptilian kitten-eaters
- The five most evil men in England
- Love does not drown in corruption)
- Like something out of Hieronymus Bosch
- Harry Secombe: The Old Rugged Cross
- The Drivellers
- Insolence is so very vexing, is it not
- Protected by the faith of my fore-fathers
- Lost causes
- Solid Soviet steel
- 1
- Murderous vermin who jeer at disability
- Clarity
- De profundis clamavi
- Reprise: Nancy Wake 2
- Generals gather in their masses...
- Cry foul and bloody murder
- Tumour
- New Page
- Ludicrous
- I think I said get me out of there
- This is not life
- All bets off, fuckers
- New Page
- Dearest darling Katie and Barry
- You think you impress me?
- Manners, ladies and gentlemen, puh-lease
- I suppose the exact charge would be
- No-o-o I don't thik you should forget about Lattic
- Boys having a bit of a larf
- I thnk, you know, dear Artemis...
- Sttill drooling, are you
- 'Thou shallt not suffer a witch to live.;
- My YouTube channel
- Education is what is left
- New Page
- To su
- To sum up
- The endless road traversed (nearly)
- It's a mandala, stupid
- Happy New Year
- Keep your loving brother happy
- Not with a bang but a whimper
- I, however, have outstanding questions
- Feline groovy
- Suitable cases for treatment
- I have spoken
- Nothing taxing to the sane
- I have of course the utmost...
- Doctors and nurses cannot cope with quantum physics
- Addended: Etched in acid and have been for years
- The psychology of medicine
- No outcry
- A very simple question
- To which task I shall now..
- RIP the Labour Party
- First things first
- I a woman
- The Howard lion
- Lest we forget: I don't
- New Page
- Pat me on the head and tell mee not to be a silly little girl
- I a woman of over 60
- A hanging matter
- The gross falsification of history
- 'The writers by their presence...'
- One more time just for the hell of it
- Lastly...
- The answer is no
- So that was the Universiity that was
- Hey you, get off of my cloud...
- Off. off, off of my cloud...
- A right waste of make-up
- So what?
- Footnotes to the above
- So where - ?
- What is the name of - and can't they - ?
- The glorious first of June
- Why has the door not been smashed down/?
- Your professors, Vice-Chancellor
- Anti-dialogue
- Shall we finish with a quick...
- They don't want the Jabberwock slain
- ABOVE THE LAW?
- So - I think -
- "Sentence first = verdict afterwards."
- DA and TM
- Post mortem
- Everywhere I go people are collecting bloody food
- how many people are on PAYE?
- I am naturallly reminded...
- Where was I?
- Where was I (2)?
- Welcome to the NHS
- Let's play doctors and nurses
- 'Senior members of the University'
- These are {{DOCTORS}}} and {{{NURSES}}}
- The girl who talked to otters
- How you hate intelligence
- And you always get away with it, don't you
- And you always get away with it, don't you
- The Hundred Flowers Movement
- New Page
- In one line
- Belloc, Apollo and May
- While readiing The Four Men
- Golgotha, place of a skull
- Troll toes
- So go for it
- PUT-DOWN
- New Page
- The required result
- Sex and mind
- Their mommas told them...
- Greece or Rome
- The new normal
- Isn't this interesting?
- New Page
- Ruthless vicious evil old men
- The charge is atteempted murder
- The C-List
- Q&A
- Ludicrous propositions
- Chained to the oars
- Footnotes
- 1095 and all that
- The Anglican garden
- Or of course a Kabbalist
- I have some time ago...
- Cult, Death-Eaters
- Not forgetting Nathan the Wise
- Cultural exchange
- And of course not forgetting...
- In short, in my young day...
- Contemplating this Matter of Kadun
- Nearly there
- I detect, therefore
- 'That government by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth.'
- Tingle
- Follow-up
- Cave-meen
- Not ancient history
- I have indeed graphically
- 'By their deeds'
- So maybe you'll also like this bit
- Just to be exact
- Which?
- Oh, all right, just for you
- Left something out, didn't I
- Didn't quite finish that off
- Ciletij
- Ritawa
- Shav and Zik
- The party
- Spetzi
- senoki
- Punching the pixels
- Reality
- More tails from the riverbank
- The Sarat and Maya Show
- Perverts
- If we may now...
- In short
- progress
- A national joke
- The Spetzi Effect
- Quanta
- Who owns me if I do not own myself? Reprise
- Who owns me if I do not own myself? Reprise
- Boys having a bit of a larf
- You really have....
- And they all just sit there
- So exactly what - ?
- Hostile fascist foreign powers
- Personal, very
- Rubber dolly
- Essentially
- Fana
- LLLLOLLLL
- Unnatural, innit
- It's over, monkeys, over
- You might learn something but probably not
- So now Blair will tell us all
- Spetzi and Qine
- RL
- Qine and Spetzi
- Fucktards united
- Capital
- Well, didn't I just hand myself the short straw
- Do they actually understand?
- Quotable quotes
- 3D printing
- Ah, but can you print fluffy cushions?
- Taking an intelligent interest
- Vaudos 1
- Vaudos 2
- Vaudos 2.75
- New Page
- Anniversary Waltz
- Automation: ostrich land
- The Kirit and Micaela Show
- New Page
- Cookery time
- What are they like!
- Until we meet on camera...
- And just because I know you love Homeric hymns
- New Page
- Dear Artemis, Athena, Apollo and Pan
- Baz and Paw on the loose in Van-Senok
- Back to the fermions
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer
- A crude, vulgar, ugly, insolent, mad and evil little man
- RIP English Christianity
- And the outstanding question is...
- Foxes, fruit, fermions and fuck you where you breathe
- Varna's Wall
- Particularly working on
- From the Shrine to the Viledeen
- Spring
- Fisking Welby
- New Page
- And how is the great penis in the sky tonight?
- After-thoughts: don't forget Isis and her pal Sobek
- The cat I don't yet have
- The Greater and Lesser Lunacies
- To whom it may concern....
- New Page
- Frank
- Cock-suckers
- Should you not be a movie buff...
- Marked as property
- Questions, questions....
- You will publicly answer those questions
- And this was Margaret
- Reprise: Our grandfather who art in heaven (though I doubt it), Howard be thy name
- To remind you...
- England the poem
- Back to the Viledeen
- Come on, I just want you to...
- So this is the story
- New Page
- Theme from The Water Margin
- Turn off the bloody Horst Wessel Lied
- Is it -10 yet?
- Chesterton - and Belloc
- New Page
- So what have I proved?
- Mock you incessantly
- No problem, no problem at all
- They have only one interest
- Misa and ban-Razit
- Rowley and Saunders
- HARD WIRING
- Bad science
- Dereliction of duty here, comrades
- Taking it from the top..
- New Page
- Dot the i. Cross the t
- More Fal
- Maya's assassination
- So-o-o
- Well, hi there, Sar-fenan
- And the third reason
- Ysabel Belinda Felicity Jehan Howard
- 'And now that I lie here...'
- Ain't they really
- And so
- 'Of course she has to do this on her own.'
- Who the fuck are Bonnie and Clyde
- How the cards fall
- And don't forget Dill
- And Shav and Dill
- Squishy, Archchancellor: not a healthy diet
- Back to you, Sar-Fenan
- This is not a physics textbook
- e=mc2
- A NON-EVENT
- woo hoo
- Her story
- Oi, you, Sar-fenan!
- Bloody kitten-eaters
- HHGG 1
- HHGG 4
- HHGG 2
- Reprise: It reallly is...
- Dave Allen
- Some psycho schizoid freak
- So absolutely insolently irreducibly evil
- This site
- Under the block
- Do you not understand?
- Gee, it's so wonderful to know
- Parameters
- I might go so far as to say
- I might''ve finished losing my temper
- Archaeopteryx flew like a pheasant
- I am not a child. Children are under 16
- New Page
- Blair, Corbyn, WCPI
- Smile for the camera
- 'Labour'
- Nothing you won't surrender
- HTF do I hitch a lift to Betelgeuse?
- "We are the Daleks."
- Back as ever to the Viledeen
- Scream quietly or the neighbours will hear
- The products rejected out of hand
- ComSymp ShariaSymp Fit the Third
- How to defend England
- If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you...
- National Museum Wales
- Why is this continuing?
- My mission I seem to have been landed with
- Dixi
- Go it alone, suffer alone, what's new
- Deep breaths
- New Page
- Gratis
- Justt to complete the set
- About that grave
- Damn!
- About that clock
- Oh pilot of the storm that leaves no trace
- Last but by no means least
- After which
- Or in short
- Notification...
- I think perhaps tomorrow...
- C17th England
- Je suis comme je suis
- Whatever you do, take pride...
- Selfies
- There remains of course my mind
- If you failed to get the gist
- Alice's Left Hip Esquire
- Limp pricks and no balls
- New Page
- Never ask them to strip
- You, off my planet
- If they absolutely won't...
- Achilles' heel
- Oh just do begone
- No-one on Planet Normal
- Welcome to Labour's England
- Democracy...
- New Page
- Bringing back the dark
- The best story
- Is there one single point?
- To come up to date
- Evil
- The destruction of the intellectual basis of the free world
- The mad relations in the rafters
- Let this be my contentment
- Results
- None of which of course
- A purely indigenous evil
- Here the matter rests at present
- New Page
- New Page
- A toss-up
- Blair
- New Page
- Reality 105
- The wearing of the green
- Recently come to light
- Growly snarly wolf
- New Page
- Five years later...
- Bobbles
- OK, assume.
- A flight of fancy
- So long as we understand each other
- Footnote
- Fisking Warsi reprise
- Why was nothing done?
- Job well done, filth
- Being a galactic mail from me to Zaphod
- Beyond evil
- In the 61st minute of the final hour
- Doo-be, doo-be, do
- English Christianity until....
- New Page
- 'I AM KING AND GOD AND LAW#
- So I get this
- Bad mood
- Another book for you, Blair
- One should always write things down - in some form or another
- All cleared up in five minutes
- Of course I have worn such a hat
- Thus, bloody thus
- No pasaran
- I continued...
- You prefer Misa and Ban-razit
- The 3D printer in the town centre
- Labour's apotheosis
- Selling women by the pound
- Why, my own mother and father wouldn't recognize me
- And the punchline is
- Do just go and fuck yourselves
- Fruit Loop
- Only one interest
- The price of a woman's body
- Eris
- Just can't hear you
- VR
- Not as exciting as Hokabi
- 'Unfortunate'
- Oh look what they're saying about me
- Should one really not...
- I am intelligent.
- From the archives: fisking Warsi
- Do MPs entirely grasp what they're there for?
- Our servants not our masters
- New Page
- Or you could say the reverse
- The problem is that there is no problem
- Irrelevant
- From the archives: who killed Banaz
- From the archives: ooh, we are so sensitive
- From the archives: wondrous multiculturalism
- From the archives: Banaz' sister spoke out
- Neither right nor honourable nor gentlemen
- The carrion chorus
- And so
- New Page
- Can hear you from here, animal
- Forgot it at Christmas
- 'Blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain'
- So golly gosh
- And I laugh (2)
- What else can we talk about
- Thus
- Spare ribs
- Mene mene tekel upharsin
- And of course...
- Matthew 7: 3
- Blair
- This exchange
- Because it's a horrible way to die
- Peter
- Those convictions
- A purely pernicious twist
- The open mind
- They took away the post-its
- First part of Fal 2
- Sarat at the Shrine 1
- Sarat at the Shrine 2
- To continue...
- Contemplating this Matter of Kadun 1
- 2. Contemplating this Matter of Kadun 2
- Shav, Petrush and this Matter of Kadun
- Shav, Petrush and this Matter of Kadun
- Dill and this Matter of Kadun
- Of course
- Ridiculous and viie
- From the archives: obedience (1912)
- I should imagine...
- From the archives: And who kept this bubbling?
- From the archives: Voltaire on the CofE
- From the archives: Extra ecclesiam nulla salus
- From the archives: The Vatican archives 1
- From the archives: the Vatian archives 2
- From the archives: The Vatican archives 3
- 2000 years making most of it up
- Proud Archbishop of York conducts his own daughter's wedding ceremony
- New Page
- Nothing may be said. Nothing may be done.
- It seemed a good idea at th e time
- Sarat, Maya, Cioulis, Spetzi,Ritawa reprise
- Aren't they gorgeous?
- A precedent has been set
- Something else for the animals to gloat over
- Let's play doctors and nurses
- Women beware women
- How best may we accommodate you, o master
- The Agora
- New Page
- Violence power coercion desecration
- BOURGEOIS MORALITY
- New Page
- Once more from the top
- So what do I think?
- First part of Fal
- Fal 2 2021
- Fal and Tet
- To conclude: to whom it may concern
- Sarat and Hass
- THis is what I look like, Vice-Chancellor
- Sonderkommando
- The balance of probability
- Can I keep this up for ever?
- How you hate intelligence 2
- Et freaking cetera
- Honestly, darling, that mantilla
- The prince, the duke, the cardinal, the politician and the professor
- The Fixers
- The Enforcers
- By the balls of Apollo!
- Cernunnos
- Burunda
- Solidarity
- About that new sofa I printed...
- A position it is entirely easy to understand
- Yes. Yes, you are ridiculous
- Yes. Yes, everything I have said about you is an understatement
- Meanwhile back at the ottery
- The flawed concept of Islamophobia
- Oh rats!
- The revolving door
- Ah yes, my future
- Explicit liber
- So now....
- Deep breaths
- Thanks awfully for the suggestion, old boy
- A list, therefore
- Previous reflections
- Ah, culture
- Ah, here you have the nub
- New Page
- Tropes
- Letter to my dead parents
- New Page
- These they left me
- Don't forget Lattic
- Is it a bird? Is it a plane?
- Song of the Western Men
- The new national anthem
- Wanna see the Deeds
- New Page
- Another very fine song
- Shamima Begum
- The perfect citizens of a fascist state
- Grease
- Love, Serafina Pekkala
- To whom it may concern
- First part of Fal
- Fal 2
- Also to whom it may concern
- So what happened then?
- New Page
- New Page
- Who has no authority in England
- I shall now potter off
- La trahison des clercs
- 'Those who cannot remember the past...'
- A little intellectual exercise...
- The view of the Labour leadership
- Take it from the top, Karl
- Is Abbott a feminist? We shall see
- Ooh, we are so sensitive
- Death before dishonour
- Listen very carefully. I shall say this only once
- Of course certain lines here
- Hide the Secret. Hide the Weakness
- The very model of a modern faith apologist
- Models of modern health practitioners
- Meanderings
- Negation
- Bloody certifiable
- Convert, comrades, convert!
- Found the articles
- Dangerous animals
- I name you the Duke of Plaza-Toro
- New Page
- New Page
- Christchurch 1
- New Page
- New Page
- To May, whom it concerns
- Shouts and whispers
- Hic jacet
- Hyde Park, London, England
- Condition of the Working-Class in England 1845
- Thus ComSymp ShariaSymp
- Ooh, you guessed
- You are so obvious
- In detail
- Hard wiring
- If mind does not exist., democracy is unnecessary
- Th Age of Reason, 1794
- Fisking Cantuar
- Danger: profoundly esoteric image
- The seer and that which he sees are one.
- Meanwhile hats off to the Guardian
- Letter to MI5 in case you missed it.
- Fucking Pollyanna
- The Greta Garbo Home for Wayward Boys and Girls
- Perhaps in five year old English
- Non serviam
- The 7 principles of public life. Pix too
- Tor and Tonge
- Barking moonbats
- Herr Hitler, I presume
- A rich joke, Blair
- Eire in the 1950s?
- Cold shower
- By definition 'God' has to know what a lepton is
- Ah, the Yorkshire Ripper
- Parallel government
- New Page
- You will not look at them
- The magic migraine
- From about a year ago
- La nausee
- Yes, it's Operation Mindfuck
- Book review
- Happy bloody Easter
- A little quiet attempted murder
- Fal 2
- The curse of the killer zombies
- So the next logical step would be...
- Don't my silly little arts degree mean nuffink?
- Oh dear I have upset someone(s)
- New Page
- A few questions
- There are no great ones
- Gets so horribly in the way
- Violence against women, it's what you pay your taxes for
- 'Bring me the head of Alfreddo Garcia'
- Just don't forget Lattic
- The House of the Rising Sun
- The initiation of force
- Yes, that's right, I said Bentley
- Turning now to this Matter of Kadun I
- Shav, Petrush and this Matter of Kadun
- Shav, Petrush and the Matter of Kadun 2
- Do admire your handiwork
- Marche funebre
- Misogyny
- On this 75th anniversary...
- The Enchanted Forest
- If you should confront these filth
- Encore une fois
- Impertinent evil filth
- A successful outcome
- Therefore...
- Which end is up
- I shall create it
- PANTHER: The Manual, out now on Scribd
- Sarat, Maya, Cioulis, Spetzi,Ritawa
- First part of Fal
- Fal 2
- Indeed there are many interesting people to talk to in my mind
- Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof
- To dig a little deeper
- Of food-banks and reprographics
- No dark
- Just remembered another spectacular waste of money
- More about Tories
- And more...
- This and that and some of the other
- Or in short
- Don't forget The House That Keir Built
- Memo to the Senate of the University of London
- Turning now to this Matter of Kadun I
- Shav, Petrush and this Matter of Kadun
- The fur does settle...
- Models of medical practitioners
- HARD WIRING 2
- Strange things happen in the quantum universe
- Strange things happen in the quantum world
- "Are you still laughing, Sarat?"
- Falsity
- Je ne regrette rien
- Of course you could always check the facts
- 'Do you recall what was the deal/The day the music died.'
- The family handbook
- Goose-stepping morons
- Riidiculous
- Welcome to the diverse and plural real world
- Does it not sound sweet?
- This half-wit waving her degree...
- O tempora! O mores! O mayhem!
- Sexism is a crime
- ''I can't be treated like this.'
- And here the matter rests at present
- J'ai vecu
- Extreme unction
- The free movement of peoples
- The rules
- The witch must burn in hell, he trumpeted,
- You can always ask Google
- Monsters
- Just think, then you can add murder to your CVs
- New Page
- No dark
- In sum
- Give them everything they ask for
- Good for a laugh
- The end. Full stop.
- Just grow a pair
- Bad moon rose
- To whom it may concern
- And?
- And don't forget Lattic
- The Hall of Mirrors
- Because of course
- How to murder a woman
- Bwahaha
- They gave them time
- My big brown eyes
- A n all-party statement from the House of Commons
- Fat pig
- Always remember...
- Always remember...
- The whole lot of them
- Clear and present danger
- Note to Jackson, Hughes and Ardeshna
- So...
- Oy, you
- They did not like the New Marxism at all
- Irritable Owl Syndrome
- The drivel show
- Oh, you know, Woodstock
- Aqiuarius
- One more time and once again...
- Anglican England
- Since I feel bloody annoying
- At cock crow
- Civilized behaviour
- New Page
- 'Thirty pieces of silver'
- 'I look for truth and find that I get damned'
- Found the quote
- Carrion
- Books
- Singer to my clan in that dim red dawn of man
- Five Prime Ministers
- The victory of the Tuatha de Danaan
- A briefer response
- Bonfire Night
- Conjecture
- Or as I said more lucidly...
- They really didn't like my poems at all
- Denis Diderot
- The Age of Reason
- Some years later...
- We the people
- Side-dishes
- So do tell
- Facts
- Reality
- Because I know you hate it even more
- So perhaps
- Termites
- So you go right on..
- I even told them about the SOE
- Transforming the Na-Mhoram's Grim
- Oh and this
- I think Hafiz would have liked Bunyan's hymn
- Fisking Warsi
- Welcome to Brighton, a plural and diverse community
- An 'All Party Parliamentary Group'
- Oh, when will this end?
- QEbloodyD
- To return to civilization.
- Fal continued
- Fal and Tet
- Dill and this Matter of Kadun
- Shav, Petrush and this Matter of Kadun
- Maya's assassination
- They stripped
- For monkey-nuts: dixi
- Fisking Malik: Preamble
- Melodrama
- Fisking Malik: Part One
- The end is Nye
- Aberfan
- New York Mining Disaster 1941
- Resonances
- Don't talk to me about the law
- And so...
- And the other thing...
- you so love lies, don't you
- Writing things down
- I am the very model of a medical practitioner
- PAINLESS BUT PERMANENT
- Love from Serafina Pekkala
- A difference of opinion
- Just a theory
- What the hell do you think I am, you ridiculous little pieces of shit
- This will do for the time being
- This colour doesn't run
- The desired result
- No balls, 'Frank', just no balls
- Just call me Harmonica
- Hokabi
- In his tin can, far above the world
- Bloody psychopaths, in short
- Berchtesgaden, 1935
- You are so obvious, Blair
- So what happens next?
- So what is the matter with you
- End of the road
- Happy New Year
- Meaningless
- Kinky boys
- A sick joke
- So:
- Bottom-feeders
- New Page
- So why are you here?
- There, isn't that just so cute
- The Lizard of Oz
- And stuff this...
- And they have never heard of...
- Of course I'm a fucking witch
- Just getting out my tunic of skins
- Erudite, that's me
- In short...
- First part of Fal
- Fal 2
- So, as ever
- It is a slave's lot thou describest
- Shav, Petrush and this Matter of Kadun
- Medicine: the joke
- Are you five-year-olds?
- The Directorate
- Murderers and traitors
- Books....
- Books, filth, books
- Since I have no intention...
- Oh, how they stripped.
- Indeed, it is like this, Doc
- Thus...
- And the fuss is about what?
- This and that
- And don't forget Lattic
- Lemme set the scene
- Diversity
- This matter of Kadun: (inner and eso) 1
- The matter of Kadun (inner and eso) 2
- They are the Daleks. They are Masters of the Universe
- I however do not remotely think that
- 'See how I die. Just watch me die.'
- A simple case of attempted murder
- The final act
- Our story
- So why did they not support PANTHER?
- Love drowned in Corruption
- All times are now (1)
- Transforming the Na-Mhoram's Grim
- 'The Father took from him the Keys and the Sword'
- 'That government by the people....'
- Ir's a fucking doddle
- The smoking gun
- Read all abaht it
- Woo-hoo, it's a full moon.
- Carrion
- 'All you need is love'
- Just not macho
- So what precisely - ?
- so when England's answer to Indiana Jones...
- And you filth at UCH
- 'When Julius Fabricius, Sub-Prefect of the Weald...'
- More history (after a bit)
- Exodus 32 (well, loosely)
- A 99% confidence rating
- Something of the kind..
- Come to my funeral, Blair?
- Do anything for them, anything to feed them
- Forgot to repeat the Bobbles letters
- England in the C21st and the C12th
- In the event of.
- My head held firmly under water
- The most basic standards
- Miscellany
- The primate pecking order
- Cancer Ward
- Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, is there anyone they didn't ban
- Farce
- The Tories' own quest for ideological purity
- 'opium of the people'
- Blair's New Model England
- In English not Latin or Arabic
- Because no-one stops them
- The thin end of the wedge
- Intellectually sickening
- And don't forget Lattic
- Sickboy
- From the Shrine to the Viledeen
- The company of civilized people
- The care of the penis
- So you're happy now
- Unlikely
- I hope...
- So very much more interesting
- Astronomy for Kids of all ages
- Dill and this Matter of Kadun
- In sum....
- Shit
- And I laugh
- Feeesh
- And be damned to you.
- Avatars of perfection
- New Page
- Marked for extermination from the start
- i'm helpless and desperate and alone so just fuck you
- So just go and
- Wouldn't it be lovely to be in hospital
- Alice's adventure in hospital
- The NHS does not live by bread alone
- Just say cheese
- Clear and present danger to women
- There are those who despise being able to spell....
- I remain, yours sincerely
- Do you think I don't know what you are
- Thus troll toes
- Achilles
- Complete barbarians
- Bloody rings of power
- Lady Sybil's exploding dragons
- Mesdames, messieurs, faites vos jeux
- A societal archetype....
- Sascha doing his renowned impression of a baby zebra
- Pog ma thoin!
- The continuum
- Good to see the young people out in the fresh air enjoying themselves
- Look once again at spite-ridden lower-middle-class women
- So the hell with you
- Mr Morgan, Mr Paxman
- Ah, you're going to sue me?
- Or perhaps
- So which particular set of ludicrous and obscene lies?
- The opium of the people
- Throw them my body, throw them my life. Can't do enough for them
- The hell with all of you
- First part of Fal
- Fal 2
- Fal and Tet
- All any of them want, my destruction, the destruction of democracy, destruction of the University
- Maya's assassination
- Sarat, Maya, Cioulis, Spetzi,Ritawa
- Vultures
- They had one chance
- Monsters
- So the fuss is about what?
- Unrectifiable harm done with malice aforethought
- There was, you will recall, a bad moon rising
- Cool stuff
- Just what is your fucking problem?
- So now Emglishwomen are destroyed at the command of sadists
- Aggravating factors: adding insult to injury
- Selfies
- Evidence
- Bonnie and Clyde
- Chinese whispers
- Beyond evil
- Evidence
- They jumped from 40,000 feet without a parachute
- Kindle and things
- Bloody Operation Mindfuck
- What to do when they push Chinese writing under the door
- The word you seek is brainwashed
- The bloody cosmic laughter.
- I thought you might like to see...
- Women's bodies break easily
- They were told and they were told and they were told
- Not on the whole given to Schadenfreude
- Do they actually have IQs or do they flatline?
- Wouldn;'t it be funny if Bobbles were Francis
- All times are now, yet again
- Shame
- What you need to do...
- So all of it a right bloody waste of make-up
- 'There is nothing you can't buy'
- And of course I told them what would happen
- The sub-species woman
- Le quatorze juillet
- Oh and this bit, comrades
- 'Tell all the boys I'm back in the city...'
- Time for a wash and brush-up
- And, and, and
- Verse 5 of the Red Flag and don't forget Lattic
- New Page
- But of course
- Fill in a few gaps
- Merit
- Homo sapiens sapiens stands erect
- Bunch of boobs
- The required result
- Lower than vermin, much lower
- And another one
- The Wizard of Oz
- And the only outstanding question
- Cooking the books
- so come on....
- Hell and tarnation
- You did go to school, Blair?
- New Page
- New Page
- Sick-boys
- Pscyho-sexual cripples
- Understanding
- Oh and because I know you're thick...
- Another scalp for the sick-boys
- So, pig-bitch
- Pig-bitch 2
- Pig-bitch 3
- Functionally illiterate
- How you hate human
- The ghost in the machine was riled
- Dear MI5 person
- Or perhaps Linch and Goldstone prefer...
- Yes
- First part of Fal
- Fal 2
- Fal and Tet
- You, Blair
- This site will self-destruct...
- Left out repeating the juicy bit
- Hi to the University of Witwatersrand or wherever
- You are really very funny
- You are really very funny
- How very funny
- As if
- If...
- Can it be more obvious>
- Conclusion
- The initiation of force
- A busted flush
- Shall we have that again?
- The sum of the ravings
- This meanwhile
- But of course
- Point-blank rejection of the governing system of the country
- What part of fuck off does the Vatican not understand?
- Please save the crackling
- Happy Hallowe'en
- This bit's fun too
- Time it was
- Oh you know, like this
- Screw you....
- As if
- NHS bureaucracy strikes again
- More asses
- Show's over
- My body, my self
- New Page
- Hate intelligence, hate better
- The Library at Alexandria (and things)
- HARD WIRING A
- Hard wiring B
- Hard wiring C
- And of course they ain't fucking illitrit
- Index Librorum Prohibitorum and things
- New Page
- Jesus, look at them!
- So take a walk on the wild side
- But your Achilles' heel remains
- Addressing an empty crisp packet
- Empty crisp packets
- So here's to you, criminal vermin
- Only 4000 variants
- So they sat there jerking themselves off
- And on no account forget Lattic
- So, Mr Benn's questions
- The contents of the septic tank
- Lizard men
- Playing with my dolls
- Ah, yes, the funny farm
- Hic jacet 2
- New Page
- This was Anglican England
- I really understand
- First part of Fal 2021
- Fal 2 2021
- Fal and Tet 2021
- Trash
- The horoor
- The Reformation
- Uncle Joe and the Na-Mhoram's Grim
- Dixi@ I have spokwn
- And govenment is for what?
- And here is picture of Jesus with his beloved pet ferret
- Your Christmas favourite
- Peter
- And this is what happened
- Les Eleutheromanes
- I repeat, just for the hell of it.
- So I'll just go on thinking my own thoughts
- All times are now (1)
- All times are now (3)
- 'Be careful with that axe, Eugene'
- La Ballade des Pendus
- We do not know
- Banal
- The wrong kind of snow
- Oy, monkey-nuts
- Lizard-men
- And of course they all know too
- Fiver in the Death Warren
- And lo it came to pass
- One way to deal with sexual fuxk-ups
- Dill and this Matter of Kadun 2021
- Frauds
- Complications
- Yes, but I know who I am
- Today satirized as
- Dill, the bit in the middle
- Question
- Ah, but
- What can be wrong with that?
- So what have I done
- And this is the state of my body
- Absolutely insolent, absolutely evil, absolutely degenerate
- Dangerous wild beasts
- Cowardly, contemptible cock=suckers
- Farce
- Thus, m'lud, it is clearly demonstrated
- An offence against law, fact, reason, sanity
- So we go through it all again
- The empty swimming-pool
- So I have questions
- One more bloody time
- It remains the best way
- Get real
- Two to the power of 75000 to one against and falling
- Along with Oolon Colluphid
- Head honcho
- So why - ?
- Civilized behaviour
- 'Be careful with that axe,Eugene' (2)
- Deep Thought
- England in the C21st
- So what's next?
- I do understand
- Right bloody waste of make-up
- An aggressive cancer
- A question of degree (not the academic kind)
- McDonnell's little friends in Iran
- Ah, yes, McDonnell
- Everything was perfectly normal
- Blog
- So when did you hear - ?
- Time for a wash and brush-up
- Time for a wash and brush-up (2)
- So calming
- The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
- Google Images search
- Am enthusiastic amateur classicist
- It only remains therefore
- Aum mani padme hum
- New Page
- WHen everything fails
- Jackson
- Thus
- Tsk, tsk, tsk
- If I may translate...
- Perhaps you prefer - ?
- Roast aurochs
- Totally synbolic, totally not
- Just doesn't matter, does it
- Base details
- History, should there be any
- Libro de los juegos
- Yuck! Kitten-eaters!
- Sea-changes: writing the 60s out of history
- So do just tell
- The end of the world is nigh
- New Page
- The party of law and order
- Thank you, Prime Minister, that will be all
- Fit for human habitation
- Aw, Dimitri!
- Yes? And?
- Ah, bon, les putes
- Indicting Tories
- Poor Mr Sunak
- Falsity
- RL
- Untitled
- The D-word
- Nye, wouldst that thou wert living at this hour!
- Sp gp fpr ot
- Fortunately there are more elevated things to do than contemplate infected shit
- The parable of the respirator
- Arbeit macht frei
- Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
- It's the grapes that come from Chile
- Untitled
- The actual social principles of Christianity
- The social principles of Christianity as observed by Marx
- Bananas and eggs with your polio
- The hallmarks of the age
- Gilead
- Spinal tap
- Purr
- An atypical population
- New Page
- Leche-culs
- The Woman with the Book and the Woman with the Bow
- RTFM
- The ceding of democratic control
- I shit on you daily
- The ceding of democratic control pt 2
- Fortunately there are civilized people to talk to
- This is how to deal with pervert monkeys
- Pink stars and burquas
- Ditching the theology of love: reprise
- A happy communist life
- Or you prefer Nigel?
- Our papa
- My turf, bubba
- Guarding the pigs
- Just a little obvious
- New Page
- BDSM
- The deeds, Naylor, the deeds
- So Sarat, Maya, Cioulis, Spetzi,Ritawa
- And the hunt continues
- Jesus!
- Question for those with daughters
- So what has happened to Jesus?
- New Page
- All on prime-time television
- Lest we forget: I don't
- You know, like at Hokabi and Caniba and so on
- Until they learn
- Vaudos 1: so it's a walking fence
- Vaudos 2
- Vaudos 2.75
- First part of Fal
- Fal 2 2021
- Fal and Tet
- New Page
- Don't forget they ain't fucking illitrit
- There when it gets shitty
- Luke 23:46
- Of course he argued with himself about it.
- Democracy: a system devised to cage and contain power
- If there are any future historians
- What to, the Higgs boson?
- Maya's assassination
- Dill and this Matter of Kadun 2021
- 1. Shav, Petrush and this Matter of Kadun
- Astronomy for Kids of all ages
- 1. Contemplating this Matter of Kadun 1
- 2. Contemplating this Matter of Kadun 2
- 2. Shav, Petrush and the Matter of Kadun 2
- Who are pensioners?
- Party political broadcast...
- Look at all the little lungfish
- Unfit to govern
- Protozoa capering in the primeval soup
- Have you managed to be human?
- Life in a fact-free world
- And of course our dear friends the anti-vaxxers
- The wrong kind of Muggle
- Just put this on Twitter too
- Precisely how - ?
- Aroint thee, Muse!
- Death by government
- Cruel and unusual punishment
- It is, I think, the creation of Vernon and Marge
- Gee, isn't it just the market?
- There would not therefore seem to be an real difference
- The goose that laid the golden eggs
- The gifts that kept on giving
- Only 37.9 million tourists a year
- The Big Squeeze
- All the same gig
- Lolling insolent evil
- So now I walk with a rollator
- So, I deem
- Terror-tactics against a medically vulnerable woman
- New Page
- There is no dark
- Me
- The issues facing my grand-parents
- Don't forget the house that Keir built
- The desire of the moth for the flame
- The way through the woods
- Bit late for me and my steed...
- Art is individualism
- Magdalene laundries
- I told you not to put all the stars out
- Indeed the animals have a big problem with my family
- In the garden with Mummy
- ComSymp
- Chanctonbury Ring
- Doubtless too busy
- Light reading
- Reality 102: reprise
- Reality 103: reprise
- Reality 103a: reprise
- Reality 104: reprise
- Religious census of 1851
- Mortal sin
- If Twitter is anything to go by...
- The 1945 Labour landslide
- So just look at them all, Vice-Chancellor
- And of course an offence to UCL
- Time for a wash and brush-up
- The new Marxism
- Coal in the bath and the victim culture (2)
- Nice bit of bedtime reading
- Christ, you are so boring!
- First part of Fal
- Fal 2 2021
- And of course this
- Just don't forget Lattic
- Thus Bobbles
- Fal and Tet
- Mr Benn's questions.
- Mr Benn's questions. A good clear message. The IRA
- Just so - so - so
- None of this of course is subject to discussion
- Therefore, ain't I got no respect
- Nor do I tug my forelock
- Book of Common Prayer
- 'I know that my Redeemer liveth'
- Meanwhile an offal-fest on Twitter'
- Spine
- This is what they expected me to push
- What? Oh, the picture Jesus mentioned
- Our servants not our masters (2)
- His Majesty's the model of a modern major-general
- The withdrawal of love and forcing oneself on others (2)
- Sarat, Maya, Cioulis, Spetzi,Ritawa reprise
- Journey to the edge of the universe
- Oh they do get so antsy
- I am the very model of a medical practitioner: reprise
- I am the very model of a modern faith apologist: reprise
- Quid agas
- Balrogs
- C10th architects
- Truss and Braverman
- Imbeciles
- As for the rest of it...
- So:
- Totally ordinary Brits
- The corruption of history
- 'Imagination has seized power!'
- So, you, Blair
- Without fear or favour
- So a special round of applause for
- The Anglican garden: reprise
- It is remarkably tedious
- All times are now (1) reprise
- All times are now (2) reprise
- All times are now (3): reprise
- All times are now (4): reprise
- All times are now (5): reprise
- All times are now (6)
- Maya's assassination: reprise
- Lizard-men: reprise
- Doth it not say in the Book of Pious Crap
- That government by the corrupt and inane for the corrupt and inane shall not perish from this earth
- And answer Mr Benn's questions
- Thus the dirty shit-filled hierarchical fascist brains
- PANTHER...
- 'And now Amanda is seriously ill.'
- You might also enjoy Sredni Vashtar
- Girls. You were saying? About girls?
- 'And gentlemen in England, now a-bed, shall think themselves accurs'd...'
- This happened in RL
- Ooh
- HMQ
- How to lose operations other than war
- There, isn't that just so cute:reprise
- Ah, the sub-species woman
- How do you dare?
- Oh look what they're saying about me: reprise
- 'Blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain': reprise
- A lemur speaks!
- Welcome to London, Mr President
- HMQ (2)
- Gee, guys, what might have happened
- Neither benefiting from nor obsesssed by
- In sum, then
- The succession that matters
- In sum, therefore
- It has therefore been established
- And be damned to you: reprise
- Who did impose on a subject of Her Britannic Majesty
- How the cards fell
- Prefer high crimes and misdeameanours
- Time for something else
- Couldn't finish without your favourite song
- The Abbey
- The end of the world is nigh: reprise
- Men don't get it
- 'In order to rightly judge these efforts known as the "woman movement"'
- I'm sure Mr Kwarteng believes in equality
- Get real fast
- Roast aurochs: reprise
- It didn't work last time, peeps
- Doctors
- Ants
- Bellatrix
- Vaudos 1: so it's a walking fence
- Vaudos 2
- Vaudos 2.75
- It's like this, Nurses
- Letter to MI5: reprise
- And you do not make me into a porter
- I do so understand
- How you hate intelligence
- How you hate intelligence; reprise
- So how many people has Medicine destroyed?
- Don't you like my DNA?
- So you're going to sue me?
- I understand
- Hmm, so I guess...
- Yes I understand
- This is how it should be? Reallyy?
- Special mentions
- The wayside
- My country. Took seizin
- To whom it may concern
- Do tell
- A blank wall
- Democracy is so yesterday
- Nothing is too low
- https://www.coursera.org/learn/our-earth?
- No interest to me, old boy. No interest whatever
- Burn the witch at the stake! How much money we shall make!
- One quick question
- And something for Bobbles
- If...
- 'MI5's mission is to keep the country safe.'
- Reality reprise
- Reality reprise 2
- Your life in their hands, Episode 923452
- New Page
- New Page
- Never trust, never assume sanity will prevail
- New Page
- So in short
- The University in its death throes
- Narrow focus
- The absolute insolence, therefore
- In shorter
- Same old
- Same old (2)
- So there it is
- So they just couldn't possibly
- Ringleaders
- Encore une fois the manual
- Butchers and would-be murderers
- Nor of course response to my vid
- Or the second one
- The closed (sealed/wounded/stunted/practically non-existent) mind (20
- Please don't forget The House That Keir Built
- Sarat, Maya, Cioulis, Spetzi,Ritawa
- First part of Fal
- Fal 2 2021
- Fal and Tet
- So who knows
- As if I were capable of caring
- Above the law
- Depict them therefore in bondage
- Money talking
- Pure BDSM
- Please don't forget Lattic
- Meeee
- 'There is no dark'
- Hellenismos, tau-neutrinos, hanging
- Vita brevis ars longa
- True targets
- I a woman
- Boring
- Therefore, Vice-Chancellor
- Thus I refer you to...
- Break the stupid cunt's back
- So there it is
- irreducible evil
- Oversight
- Mock, yes, crawl, no
- All the things you haven't changed
- Cute family picture
- You can check it out on the DTIC site
- Eagles are rare in WC1
- High crimes and midemeanour
It's the invention of this strange bourgeois corruption called writing. If you write things down, you don't need to struggle to remember them clearly 10, 20, 30 years later.
PANTHER -> Site news -> The Hospital
by Ysabel Howard - Saturday, 2 July 2011, 07:17 PM
To this community which is fundamentally illiterate at the level of virtually no-one reading let alone writing books containing ideas, where words are threats to be severely controlled, it does not of course occur that one can write a novel about them, or rather around them. It's fascinating: it simply does not occur to them words can appear describing them and those words may be publicly disseminated.
One should not even scream quietly: it ain't allowed, it's against proseedyures and regulayshuns.
Dez had acquired a workload that had previously been shared between two-and-a-half people. She won a technical victory: her new assistant turned out to be the ghoul. The ghoul was given the room that had been Dezzi's and Dez now shared a room with the photocopier and the kettle in the clinic-area, where it was assumed she was clinic-receptionist. The slug had the room next door but preferred lounging at Dezzi's desk. When Dezzi returned from the loo she had to ask to sit down. Why was there a pornographic magazine in her room? she was asked. It turned out to be a Vanity Fair. Really, one expects some degree of sophistication - she wished it had been the Tatler with a naked Anthea Turner draped in a large python on the cover. When she tried to proof-read, insipid morons interrupted her about every five words with questions of shattering inanity. She was told she was thought to be mad because she didn't respect doctors but she had long grasped that questions of shattering inanity were de rigueur, as were insipid morons.
Come one, come all, and gather round
A new philosophy’s been found
If at the start of each new day
A person pale and podgy, grey
(A sort that’s mercifully rare)
Is poured upon your desk and chair
That you must meekly ask she rise
(A thought she greets with some surprise)
And spends succeeding hours drear
In vapid chat with colleagues dear…
At all cost you must strong resist
The urge to ask them to desist
Remark upon their lack of grace
Or ask one to her silly face
Why is she not in her damn space
That is to be both vile and base!
We are on the far side of reality here, beyond the white picket fence of the asylum. You might call it Eden. You might call it Charles Clarke’s Vision of Utopia. Worst of all, you might call it by its true name, an academic department of the University of London (Dezzi’s own university) from which she will be driven, ostensibly by a nurse and a typist. Goodness separates the inmates from the common horde. Here we sit twanging our harps and polishing our wings. Vast improvement on work. We are the good. Any who oppose or criticize us are the bad. We are an academic and social elite, therefore any who mock us (us and our ludicrous pretensions) are insane. We are the real thing. Or not of course. It works until someone comes along to burst the bubble. But we fight. There is no corruption of fact to which we will not sink to annul the threat.
Guess who was the threat.
What we shall not call this abode of the half-formed is The Hospital. Dez has yet to reach rock-bottom. She is merely employed in a hospital.
....
At the western extremity of Oxford Street stands Marble Arch. I am assuming that you have heard at least of Oxford Street, one of the main arteries of Central London and where most of the major department stores are, although you may not be British. Marble Arch, c'est comme l'Arc de Triomphe, mais personne - but the street-plan is such that no grand parade can pass under it, for it stands at a cross-roads, on a neatly turfed island. Park Lane takes you south, a six-lane highway separated by islands with flower-beds. The symmetry of this part of London indicates it might have been planned, as Paris and New York were planned, Park Lane running neatly down one side of Hyde Park, the Bayswater Road along the north side, Kensington Gore along the south. Edgware Road runs north from Marble Arch, Watling Street as was in Roman times, but the legions have not yet returned. These are busy, traffic-laden thoroughfares, bright with the famous red buses, though never of course the bus you want.
At the eastern end, Oxford Street becomes New Oxford Street. Here we get cultural, Bloomsbury, where formerly the Woolf-pack roamed, the British Museum, that strange piece of Art Deco that is Senate House, the administrative centre of the University. Like Oxford and Cambridge, the University of London is a federation of constituent colleges. London is much bigger than Oxford and Cambridge, the colleges spread far and wide, but so far as there is an academic hub it is here, where University College London dominates Gower Street running north from New Oxford Street and behind UCL is a network of elegant squares, every town-house an Institute of This or a Centre for That. Tottenham Court Road, at best seedy, a street of cut-price mobiles and best-buy printers, lies parallel to Gower Street. Separating Tottenham Court Road from Gower Street (separating Town from Gown) is The Hospital.
Mortem vincimus! (We conquer death!) claims the battered shield. We don't, of course. Death stalks the corridors, swinging his scythe as he goes. A skirmish lost here and there? No matter: he wins the war. We delay Death; if you're the patient, the difference matters. Here we are at the cutting-edge of advances in medical science, here our reputations (well, those of some of us) echo round the world. The Lift, for instance, those of our American cousins who have had the Lift Experience relate it trembling for months after. The building is imposing, equal in stature to any of the University buildings opposite challenging its importance. Gee, say the American cousins, you have history! Management frowns. That is a discriminatory term. The correct terminology is 'the past'. You have past! say the American cousins meekly. Passed what? asked Professor Rudolph. Beyond would be nice, mused his friend, gone to that great sanatorium in the sky, the ideal of which all earthly structures are but feeble replicas. Possibly there they fix computers. That, said Professor Rudolph, is idealism gone mad. He pressed the lift button once more.
In The Hospital the Hatchery flourished, the curtains were flung wide (though not of course cleaned), the little chickadees chirruped eagerly to each other, showing off new clothes and talking excitedly of the holidays to come, while the sunlight imparted a dull sinister glow to the filthy windows and generously illuminated the peeling paintwork, torn carpet and splintered desks of creeping decay. The Hospital had a single purpose and it wasn't care of the sick. The Hospital was a place of nurture - it nurtured unskilled labour taken from the North London slums and forced them to the top of the tree. Clearly there was a vast untapped pool of talent there; some senior managers could even manage joined-up writing. Once, public servants had been selected by open competitive examination, but that had been dismissed as unfair, discriminatory, indeed, for it barred the barely literate, grossly incompetent, bone-idle and pig-ignorant. Not only that, it had brought in outsiders who owed nothing to patronage. Only ward-clerks and porters could possess that true mystic understanding of how The Hospital worked, being authentic, unspoiled, the troublesome world of ideas or principle representing an unnecessary veneer of suspect sophistication. It was a question of the legitimate aspirations of the working-people of this contry. [Most people when contemplating the nation in this age of inanity considered it was rather the 'o' that was superfluous.] These aspirations naturally included being catapulted to positions of authority without any independent assessment to confirm or refute the presence of a brain.
Liberty protects the right to say, 'Lor', what a plonker.' Democracy makes plonkers accountable. Meritocracy tries to eliminate plonkers. This unhealthy trio is thus absent from The Hospital.
Cut to David Attenborough voice-over, ebullient with delight at the curiosities of nature. And here we have yet again an example of a parallel universe, The Hospital in its bubble, life sustained by the pink froth around it, thinking itself self-sustaining. Those of you who saw my last series will remember the remarkable events surrounding UDI when The Hospital cut loose from the fabric of the nation. Looking at it under the microscope, you can see the tiny amphibians that populate it. No out-dated notions of accountability hamper them here, where staff are warned that contacting their MPs may be a disciplinary offence. Contact with the Press is of course similarly frowned upon. Here is the final proof that dinosaurs did not in fact die out, merely mutated. In these tiny amphibians we have the direct descendants of tyrannosaurus stalinus.
The Program ran The Hospital, in fact a suite of programs. Doctors.com had given the software engineers the biggest headache, that part of the Program attempting to dominate the medical profession. Doctors were educated. Doctors could be trouble, 'specially in a place like this where they were the bright ones. Didn't matter so much in some seedy DGH. 'Course, some doctors were all right. Take Jay, the mad professor, they called her. She understood. Some said she'd even helped write the software. Such a pretty lady, she was, and powerful with it. Coo! It was rumoured, 'course it was all a bit hush-hush, know what I mean, there was a better program being developed for doctors. Docilizer.com - doc-ilizer, gerrit. They said the mad professor was testing it. There was no trouble from her Department, that much was true. That funny old Irish guy, the surgeon, he was another good 'un, knew which side his bread was buttered. The Program beeped: any reference to persons by their nationality or allusion to ethnicity was suspect.
Secrecy.exe and Paranoia.exe were key files throughout the Program. So long as open communication is forbidden, different versions of events may be told to different people. Risk to the Program lay in the possibility of crash, were informed persons to bombard the controllers with unpleasant and offensive questions, outsiders who could not be silenced. For the awkward squad, Punish.exe usually sufficed. People could be cowed. They could learn it was unwise to argue. The controllers were unaccountable. There was no requirement to answer questions. Nothing must interfere with the Program.
Outside the tremulous walls of The Hospital, the Jarrow March was daily enacted, Wall Street crashed, the New York air heavy with the squelchy plopping kersplat of stockbrokers hurling themselves to their doom from skyscrapers. People didn't have Opportunity. Any achievement was the fell consequence of Privilij. One hundred and twenty years of compulsory free education had passed The Hospital by, a century of the precious gift of a childhood and adolescence in which one could learn without the demands of the production-line and the call of the factory-hooter. It was easier to squeak hysterically about Privilij than to attack a culture which saw no purpose in education, which disrupted those who wished to learn, had no interest in critical thinking and especially did not wish to be exposed to anything that might upset it by challenging its prejudices and preconceptions. Being intelligent was Privilij, wanting to learn was Privilij (but perhaps after all there is no difference, what we call stupidity simply mental inertia), above all coming from homes, no matter how financially straitened, where books were valued, ideas discussed, art created, this was a particularly malign form of Privilij. One day Privilij would be defeated. Meanwhile, it was unfair to make demands on the under-privilijed. Employers should show them that someone cared. Why should work interfere with their social lives?
We must be blunt about this (if not Philby): Dezzi said her colleagues were lazy, pretentious, egotistical, dishonest incompetents, whited sepulchres, Pharisees, fundamentally corrupt. Devoid of taste, of style, of education, of culture, of integrity, of mind, they flaunted their supposed superiority, before which she was supposed to genuflect. Who asked for it? Her attack was misconstrued, of course. Undoubtedly people of merit should advance, her point (unbelievable!) that people of little merit should not be permitted to think themselves remarkable, carried by those who actually possess talent. Senior staff wrote the grant applications. Senior staff wrote the ensuing publications. What talent was displayed in between, one for reading the instructions on assay-kits?
Later, Dez said a lot of things. They were what Dr Greer meant by female eunuchs, cases of arrested development, walking corpses. She tried to understand, and that of course made it worse, because that was class or its cousin, background. They came from homes without books, without ideas, without debate. No-one appeared to have told them that people differed widely in their views and argued about it. None of them would last two minutes with her old tutor. Faced with an alien proposition they burst into tears. Particularly they burst into tears faced with the alien proposition that not everyone takes six months to produce six pages summarizing what the research charity's grant had enabled, and a few sensible lines of discussion and conclusion. Later, she was to meet those so stunningly illiterate that they formed the plurals of common nouns with apostrophe-s and had no idea what a sentence was, but this was a more sophisticated illiteracy, born of an inability to order data and determine relevance.
An ego-saver I must be
Shoring up the fantasy
These droops are in reality
Jewels of the academy.
This half-wit waving her degree
Has not a better one than me
But thinks that MB ChB
Must confer divinity
What is truth? asked Doubting P
At least he asked! It seems to me
A place that from debate is free
Is not a university.
Finally, no, not finally, but critically, there was the waif, employed to analyse milk-yield, but the waif had said insufficient data were available. Strange that, there were the cows, but no-one questioned. Guess who did the work. Of course she did her own job as well. It worried no-one except Dez that the waif was paid full-time to do the project. Dez worked over the Christmas and New Year break, and then it seemed to her she was getting flu. She bought patent remedies and retreated to bed. The next day she could barely get up to go to the lavatory, but it was a Sunday. On the Monday she forced herself onto a train, one of the benefits of hospital employment being on-tap doctors. Chest x-ray revealed pneumonia. She collected her prescription and retreated to bed. After a couple of days she felt fine but then those wonderful drugs you can nowadays which happened to be the wrong wonderful drugs began to give up an unequal struggle. Death stood in the doorway. No! she said. Death shrugged. Not yet. Hell, you mean not yet. Death has a taste. This is it. You may think you have never tasted anything so virulently revolting in your life. Unfortunately, if you don’t taste it, you don’t have a life. When consolidation has nothing better to do, it deconsolidates and floods your lungs. Drowning is not a viable option. Dezzi learned terror. Terror is not closing your eyes in case you don't wake up again. Terror is the inexorable closing of the wind-pipe, as though someone has pulled the plug on your life. This is significant for what follows: after you have nearly died, you are remarkably hard to frighten. They decided she had cancer. It was easier than finding out what she did have or changing the drugs. She was admitted to the Royal Brompton, put on intravenous antibiotics, and got better.
There are evil doctors and heroic ones. You can't tell by looking. Nursey, on the other hand, sticks out a mile, a worm at the heart of an otherwise admirable body of men and women. Ourwonderfulnurses.com differs from other parts of the Program in its high profile, but it is a naïve media error to think it exists to praise our wonderful nurses. Ourwonderfulnurses.com exists to protect Nursey.
Nursey slowly chewed a thin strand of dirty hair, the days long gone when hair must be up, off the face, off the collar, tightly secured by a pristine cap. She hobbled slowly down the corridor, dragging the bloat of her self-importance, frowning. The fascistic Tory press had insinuated nurses couldn't be trusted with extended powers of diagnosis and prescribing. It was speeshus, that's what it was. Nursey prided herself on her wide vocabulary. Thirty years ago Nursey had had to restrict herself to tying down psychiatric patients. Sixty years ago, she had been a concentration-camp guard. Ourwonderfulnurses.com let Nursey out of her cage and allowed her to flourish. There were few limits to the venomous stupidity that shone in those pale piggy eyes and Nursey was especially good at a frothy self-righteousness. Her pigling cheeks would redden. Nursey was a profeshnal. Nursey had a degree. She understood what was what. Standards had to be maintained. It was not acceptable. Something had to be done. (Sometimes. When your old mum rings for a nurse and the Nurses’ Station is deserted, it’s because Nursey is far too important these days to attend to the bodily needs of old ladies.) When really distressed she would screw the little eyes up, the whiskers would twitch. I am fewurious. The little eyes would water. She would dab at them gently and try to be brave. Everyone understood. Nursey was a good person, so caring.
Nursey had many roles and a host of helpers. Dezzi had many roles, amongst which helping.On the far side of the white picket fence you harness a championship filly to a milk-cart while the milk-cart pony waddles ahead crowing. Of course finally the filly rears up on her hind-legs and batters the pony. Justifiable equicide I calls it. They had other words. It was the egos that did it, the putrescent smear over the walls, the floors, a spreading stain of mustard yellow and purple, so Dez saw it. That’s what artists do, poor bastards, see, then everyone jumps down their throats because they don’t like the pictures.
We're all perfickly normal people here. Turning-points in history are rarely noted until later. Universities were for abnormal people, the academic, the bookish, the reflective, the inquisitive, the very bright. Then they weren't. Sometimes they were for the earnest and well-meaning. In this case they were for the thick and greedy.
Idiot Cathy’s damned study
Which bloody nearly murdered me
Failed to show what means there be
To survive Rheumatology
When once again required of me
To do the work of two or three
So that mediocrity
Might enjoy serenity…
It was a long poem and, while Dez was fairly sure they busily portrayed her as a burnt-out wreck who hadn’t been able to hack it, that she conspicuously failed to be. Physically of course she was exhausted. Fools make the mental synonymous with the physical.
Dez knew what she had said, though she hadn't yet grasped the extent to which it was a threat. Something about babies and bath-water, having thrown out mind along with religion. It was only later she realized the bit about the College of Cardinals had been so deeply wounding (there are intelligent people who argue for determinism just as there are intelligent people who thresh out Catholic theology; the average technician or physician has the in-depth comprehension of the Sicilian peasant).
Exit, pursued by a bear (or a dragon). It was ridiculous. How ridiculous? They were the wrong kind of snow. At first she had no more idea what she meant than Railtrack. At second and third she had no more idea, but remember the infant Dezzi had been dandled on the knees of future leading Maoists. The Stepford Wives Left was alien and she – she had reacted like Fiver in the Death Warren. Senior academics of the University of London do not recognize the value of a University of London degree. They are therefore raving bloody mad. Medics are not supposed to destroy health. Clearly they are raving bloody mad. They are straights, they are uneducated, they are stupid, oh God how stupid they all are. It's a one-off. She didn't see her way to being driven out of her own university by the stupidity of a nurse and a typist. Nothing computed: she’d already been desperately ill and they deliberately… She got pneumonia. Again. After some days of pretending she didn’t, staggering into work with a cough they would have found disturbing in Spikey’s Row, because she couldn’t have, it was unbearable. With it came £67.35 in sickness benefit for two weeks without pay. After it, her carefree temping career and all the things she’d been going to explore were destroyed by the energy levels of a dead cat. She settled to earning 5p an hour in a local corporate events firm. Ask her about it some time. They were a jolly set of wide-boys. After her second attack of pneumonia, she was vaccinated and subsequently merely suffered not-pneumonia, often, a series of repulsive and exhausting chest infections. She deduced the existence of the swamp, a puddle at the bottom of the lung, right at the bottom, from where she coughed. Infections went not to her chest but to her waist. When the infections depart, there is an itching sensation, irresistibly reminiscent of a scab, and so a healing, but who wants a scabby lung.
Dezzi furious, Dezzi emotionally and physically bruised, Dezzi hopping along trailing a broken wing, trying to tell herself all this was chance, to which the only possible response was that it was and it wasn’t. If people set on you intending to wreck your health, your health gets wrecked. They don’t inject you with pneumonia. They don’t have to.
They had said that she was obsessed with class, but she hadn't been. It was rather that class was convenient shorthand for what was happening. Is all history not the history of the class struggle? It was hardly her idea, but then they had no ideas, how would they know?
Dear MI5-person, It's a bad idea to be bright in the University of London today.' It was a strange letter she composed to the agents of the fascist bourgeois imperialist state. No, she didn't expect them to do anything. Someone should know. When she reviewed the letter later, she realized how deeply she had assumed that the relevant names were known already. After all, if one wishes to make a splash in the Lambeth Palace Road, presumably cosying up to the Soviet Union and accommodating a penniless Chinese postgraduate in a Kensington apartment is how to go about it.
Trust the University? You’re kidding. Who else was there?
Feedback: none. She hadn't expected any. She did one other thing. She commented on her new Website. Feedback: none. Slowly she regenerated. She didn't yet understand she was unhomed, deemed an offence that may not be allowed to exist. She found herself temping at The Hospital. There were real academics. She was offered a PA job and she stayed.
The Great Squid screamed in fury at the site and screamed anew at the news Dez had a nice job. There are Panther-Pink, Paper-Pink, supping-with-the-devil pink, and of course there are carnations. There are shocking pink, dusky pink and rose. There is even the world of the Electric Monk, in which everything is pink, though Mr Adams does not tell us whether this is the pink of elephants or the pink of gin. There is the not-pink of hunting pink. There are candy-floss pink and sugar-mouse pink. The Squid was mole-rat pink, naked rat-tail pink, new-born mouse pink, a slithery, shiny pink, a hairless pink, a mucosal pink, the pink of the not fully-formed, something in a kidney-bowl pink and of course there is concomitant blood and slime. Bit like something from Dez’s lungs.
As if not-pneumonia and MRSA weren’t enough, Dezzi now acquired a particularly virulent bout of the Trots, her manager not the civilized medics with whom the job had been negotiated but a gingery little nurse. She was turned into a porter and a filing-clerk and stashed in a shabby leaking attic with a woman who did little and was frequently visited by a friend who did even less. Both happened to be black, and so, it was thought, Dezzi wouldn't dare comment. The attic was on the sixth floor of one building. The clinics she was to type were on the fourth floor of a building on the other side of the road. Cancer patients have multiple volumes of heavy hospital notes. She had to collect and return all the notes in a large supermarket trolley. Someone from her former place of work had, she guessed, come a-whingeing to her new employers. She was running on one kidney, one whole lung and one with a hole in it and a spine held in place by an alloy rod. She was 45. Of course no-one asked if she was up to heavy physical labour; everyone knew she was not. It is frightening to know that malice is on your back and no-one will do anything about it.
She called him Fury after the persona in the Julian May books, it being shorter than you depressing, limited and essentially evil stinking lousy c*** of a cephalopod, you. Besides, c*** is hard to pronounce.
She got very upset and complained about everything in sight to everyone in sight. A new manager had been appointed, a jewel of dynamism and probity known as the Vicious Queen. It was said his partner beat him up and he dealt with it by bullying the women under him. Who could wish for a more perfect boss. He asked her how she felt able to criticize a senior nurse-manager and she did not answer because he’s a moronic criminal. When she had refused to shut up, she had been summoned to a kangaroo court. A vampire emerged from its office. Clearly this creature, pasty-faced, thin-lipped never saw the light of day. Where was the nearest cemetery, out of which tomb had it crawled? Dezzi wondered where they were recruited from, the exit-gates of Holloway and the Scrubbs? The interrogation proceeded. The room swirled. We are in Moscow. The year is 1917. The apparatchik speaks coldly. "Your attitude has been noted, comrade." I do hope so, she thought, I do hope so. As with all show trials, the verdict was a foregone conclusion. She had made unfounded allegations. She was guilty of improper use of e-mail. Her grading was not an issue. What was interesting about them, she decided, was that they appeared not to know what shit they were. Foregone conclusion or not, when she received the letter from the Kuomintang, she lost her temper, publicly, and when some little sniveller reported her the VQ rang her up to lecture her - lecture her on confidentiality forsooth for it is given that no-one should know how vermin behave - and at lunchtime on Christmas Eve he had had delivered by hand to her a threatening letter. It failed to ruin her Christmas.
If ever again there should be in my life
So much as a hint of you guys you’ll wish
That you had never ever been born
The sword does not defeat the pen
If there is anything I despise
It’s fat little cowards who deal in lies
Dealers in innuendo will find
Innuendo of another kind.
It will make one hell of a story
Chinese post-doc in Prof’s property
Forging links with the Soviets
Repeated employment of lame ducks
I am going to rock you!
Rock and roll has come of age when it is to prove essential to the defence of the realm.Dear me, the purge of the intellectuals has begun in earnest. Some people might think the first duty of management to seize upon talent as an asset to the organization. Dez shakes her head violently. Don’t wanna be purged.
She had taken the precaution of establishing that heavy manual work presented a threat to her spinal fusion. When this penetrated the unicellular organism that constituted the brain of management, she was moved to an area the width of a chair, hemmed in by desk-units and beset by manual handling hazards. The office was not merely shabby; it was squalid. Dark stains spread across the carpet. Obsolete and broken equipment festered in the corners. Somewhere in a parallel universe the mass consultative exercise was taking place. Tell us what YOU think about the NHS! Here management had circulated the Health Service Circular on the Disclosure in the Public Interest Act, and helpfully appended Guidelines. She considered their words carefully. The only legitimate court of appeal against those who are beating you up is their colleagues, approaching even the House of Commons a breach of confidentiality for which one may be disciplined. Their supreme confidence in the dominance of norms other than those of liberal democracy underwhelmed her. Here it was one minute to midnight and outside the fascist bourgeois imperialist state apparently went about the business of liberal democracy largely unimpeded by the carrion voices and so she dwelt in two worlds. In fact of course there were three.
Once Britain had been famous for her literature. Nowadays she was to accrue an international reputation for trying to smash up writers for the parallel with poor Mr Rushdie was evident to Dez, if to no-one else. People who come from thinking homes and grow out of their family religions are appallingly troublesome. Though she hissed spectacularly on her site about going to the Tory press, the sense this was a family affair was why she did not actually go immediately to the Mail. If you juggle hot potatoes, you get your fingers burnt. Dezzi put her hot potatoes in the hearth to cut her heating-bill. They glowed cheerfully up her. The cost of the NHS, the willingness or otherwise of the tax-payer to pay up, there were some basic questions here. Not only do we have to pay for these obscene louts, ever more money is demanded from us. Beating-up the bright, once the hallmark of the sink school, has now become the norm.
The Great Squid extended its tentacles. It still wasn't sure. It seemed she posed a threat, but after all, she was only a Womble. Great-Uncle Bulgaria awakes with a start from his rocking-chair, spectacles falling into his lap. He gropes for them, reaches for his stick. "Hmm-ha, did I hear correctly? 'Only a Womble'?"
If she was supposed to be a threat, to whom was she supposed to be a threat, and why was she supposed to be a threat? Later this too became simplified. I’d better be a threat then.
About a year ago it challenged me
Just the possibility
Stupidity, spite, naivety
Shielded a harsher history
Might it not interest HMG
Corruption in the university
And so I wrote a little letter
At least it made me feel better
The matter then was off my mind
And now I am not pleased to find
Once again there is strife
You wankers appear to be back in my life
And I am going to rock you!
So I’ve died and gone to Trot Paradise. What am I going to do about it? Their confidence, she thought, came, had to come, from certainty that the acolytes of the little red god abounded in the corridors of power. She wondered what would happen if she shook the tree and wrote to her MP with a copy of the summary to the Secretary of State. After all, New Labour hates Trots.
I have been bullied according to the Trust's own criteria (removal of areas of responsibility and giving menial tasks), victimized, reprimanded for telling Consultants management's cavortings ('improper use of e-mail') and threatened with disciplinary action if I again told the truth ('unfounded allegations'); my spinal fusion has been jeopardized by routinely pushing a supermarket trolley full of notes between two sites, work that ceased only after a letter from RNOH indicated the risk and was replaced by being put in a space barely more than the width of a chair, hemmed in by desk-units and manual handling hazards, part of a larger office easily altered, in which I have been for six months without a connection to PAS or the network, so impairing my ability to do my job.
Many vivid accounts have been written about being buried alive, faces contorted by terror, bleeding fingertips, though presumably one has to awaken pdq after the last clod has settled, for if not dead to start with one must be after some hours in a heavy wooden box from which oxygen is absent. Nonetheless these accounts support the new eco-friendly cardboard coffins and perhaps six feet under is excessive. The question arises of the urban fox. Priorities must be balanced. Is the possible rescue of one thought lost sufficient compensation for the scattered remnants of hundreds of others? We have forgotten satin-pink, tarts'-boudoir pink, coffin-lining pink and of course ballet-shoes pink. The Squid owes much to Miss Piggy.
There was little else the worms could do to Dezzi's body bar open criminal assault, as her anger threatened to tear her apart. She wanted to stand in the middle of the room and scream 'fuck you!' but somehow didn't think that would do any good. She had somehow to channel the energy. Perhaps when everyone had finished palpating reason would prevail. She didn't really believe that, which was just as well because it didn't happen.
Worms, like humans, are good and bad. Dezzi befriended nice worms, Worminmould and Wormingum. They tried valiantly to sheer away the edges of the coffin but there is only so much a worm can do. Dezzi thought of chain-saws and wasn't sure it was the desk she had in mind. Channel the energy. Mice, prisoners ought to have mice to feed. She could leave, couldn't she. She applied for a couple of jobs and realized she couldn't. One's reputation precedes one. Bastards!
It irritated her that they thought she could be cowed. It irritated her that they thought they could shut her up. It irritated her that they were leading lights in a free country. An irritated poet is dangerous.
‘In Plymouth Town there lives a maid/And she is mistress of her trade…’ The signifiers in the iconography of popular culture that had influenced the young Dezzi were Lady Penelope, Purdey and Mrs Peel. She went on to play the patriot game, even without microfilm in tampons. In the Century of the Fruitcake damsels in distress do not collapse if men do not rescue them. Cry goddess! for Henrietta, England, and St Georgina. St Georgina of course was the petite one who concealed a dagger and an aqualung in her bodice, walked into the dragon’s maw, slit its jugular and swam to the surface. ‘And gentlemen in England, now a-bed, shall think themselves accurs’d.’ A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a Steed? When Steed did appear, he looked remarkably like Puck. There’s just no romance in life today, but the main problem with taking up late in life a career in psy-ops was that no-one was paying her for it and so she had to trudge to work too.
By this time the VQ had outraged all the secretaries and a collective grievance had been taken out against him. Sometimes proseedyures are illuminating. A response is expected within a given time-scale. Weeks turned into months. All but the youngest of the secretaries concerned reckoned they’d be drawing their pensions before resolution was reached, Brothers, before some word trickled down from above. On the bright side, our Dez were obviously supposed to be some stupid little Tory. When everyone has decided (not only without consulting you but in direct contravention of anything you have said about yourself) that you are some little Tory tart from the shires, probably racist, because you talk posh, stand up for England and have criticized black girls, you can take your time over killing when the only regiment remotely likely to claim you as its daughter is the International Brigade.
Where did all the SovSymps go, long time passing….
Naturally those persons who sold technical and military secrets to Stasi and the KGB were devoted to liberal democracy and after the Berlin Wall fell remained fervent in their efforts to extend individual liberty and of course there is no such place as Beijing. Naturally. Naturally every ComSymp in the academic world became a dedicated free-marketeer. Treason gurgled to himself through his swollen throat and rattled his chains, though feebly, since he had been not only hanged but also drawn and quartered and the segmental find whole-body movement difficult. He was a reflective spectre. He wondered when the mincing machine had been invented, after his time, he supposed or he'd have been dog-meat. Of course nobody hangs traitors any more, far more satisfying to leave them to the packs of feral writers that prowl sinisterly around the parapets (the architects of the Hospital had had a taste for the pseudo-Gothic - perhaps precognition of the vampires that would later inhabit it) but Treason was good on the special effects. The shadow of the scaffold filled the sky. The lightning turned blood red then reformed in the shape of the executioner's axe. There was a pause. The axe solidified and landed with a plop in the middle of Out-Patients. The charge nurse frowned. Some new surgical implement, he supposed. He tidied it away.
Now that I lie here
My body all holes
I think of the traitors
Who bargained and sold
(The Patriot Game)
Framed. This site uses JavaScript, or maybe that's a bit too far to the south. Why did everyone assume, how could anyone think for ten seconds that she would put up with it? Framed. What could she do? That she had walked into professional England-haters was clear, that there was a trend among them towards Roman Catholicism, that they were Irish. That her support for Rushdie had gone down like a lead balloon. None of this amounted to very much, or at any rate not motive for her attempted destruction, until later when she’d done some research, except the last thing on her mind, that she was supposedly racist to that part of newtdom that considers it racist to attack fascists who happen to be brown. Now she had attacked blacks and gays! Clearly that proved – nothing.
It was obviously far better in this situation not to think, but Dezzi wasn’t very good at not thinking.
They thought they were - representational. The strange word hung there and looked quizzically back at her. She was distracted by the difference if any between it and 'representative'. Representational - what echoes - ? Yes, representational art, that was it. They were 2-D. Hmm. Not what they meant. And she realized there were two nations, everyone said there were two nations, hell, Disraeli had said there were two nations, but this was not what they meant. The wrong kind of snow.
Let me offer to you, babies, alternative realities
I have dealt with you mildly
I know you do not easily
Grasp that world from which I come
One dominated by the pen
But if you wish to argue with me
Have the guts to do it openly
If you cannot make up rhymes
There are always the columns of The Times
The Washington Post, the Jo’burg Mail
Then nobody can possibly fail
To grasp the great lucidity
With which you defend what happened to me
I am going to rock you!
Since neither of the two representatives of the people thought to communicate with Dezzi, apart from a brief acknowledgement from the MP, it is not possible to say whether they thought they had achieved anything on her behalf, whether they accepted any lies they were fed, whether they merely did nothing, liked watching newts self-destruct and encouraged good writing or whether the more negative judgement on Mr Mildew Dez was to arrive at when he later bounced back into office best described the matter, but the consequences were that for a while the secretaries were left alone, then given a new manager, promised that they would not be messed about, but immediately after came a report on the collective grievance, exonerating management and promising a new review. It is one thing to be reviewed by intelligent and impartial folk and another to be reviewed by those hell-bent on making the secretaries fall-guys while their own inadequacies remain unchecked, their own abuses of public office. The secretaries proclaimed themselves unsatisfied and the union disappeared back down the rabbit-hole. Dezzi knew they liked to talk about 'bringing the Trust into disrepute', another of their impertinent mechanisms to attempt to evade public scrutiny. Dezzi had said she expected the Grade 5 contract she had been promised, an apology, and an end to molestation. It was faintly amusing to muse on those culpable of and colluding with bullying trying to silence her. No change of course had been wrought to the working environment. She had wondered what would happen if she shook the tree and now she knew, supposed she had always known, known and refused to know, that their insolence stemmed from support in the very heart of government. Well, it was no big deal, no great shock-horror to learn that there were Stalinists in the Labour Party. The wolfworm has been there since the start and 'Are you now or have you ever been?' is not a particularly useful question in the context of British politics, particularly when your ancestral home is the Communist Party.
There is a moment in which you realize you are expendable. In order that corruption goes unchecked, in order that face be saved, in order that nothing has happened, except the attempted destruction of your life, and that is nothing. Careers must continue untrammelled, reputations must be preserved. Dezzi thought she should now demand rather more, for instance ten thousand words on each of why her CV could be dismissed; why use of public office to further one's political kinks is acceptable; why a degree from the Faculty of Arts of the University of London is of less value than no academic qualifications at all; why we don't need no education and it is self-evident and thus not open to question that those with the least education should be promoted to senior management; why the public can just fuck off out of the running of the NHS, it ain't none of their business, all right.
Sheen Common was first enclosed in 1154. Gnarled roots reach out to trip the unwary. As dusk falls, mother-squirrels quickly round up their young. Night is best though naturally a well-meaning constabulary would have a fit at a female wandering there alone. Dez sat under an oak and let rip.
"They're in love with death! They want to turn the whole country into a bloody mausoleum, no damned spark of life, anything non-standard, non-uniform, anything not comprehensible to the lowest common denominator. So some drivelling little bitch of a typist doesn't understand me. Do I care! Let them come up to my level or leave me alone! I will not care what some bloody vacuous thug of a nurse thinks. I will not be made to care. He tried to cripple me. Nothing untoward has happened. It's pure Kafka! Some bloody baboon beats his chest. Oh I am so petrified. All the little monkeys start baring their arses. I do not bare my arse! I do not bloody crawl! There is no energy in humans, there is no life, there is no spark, there is only a machine, a void. It isn't capable of transcendence or any other bloody thing. I suppose it's projection. Why does it upset them that humans are different? Just because they're unimaginative, uncreative, brain-dead inadequates everyone else has to be."
"Stupid," said someone helpfully.
Sorry? Dezzi blinked and looked around, of course suddenly tense, ‘though it had not been the comment of a potential rapist.
"We've been reading your site."
"Good!" said Dezzi viciously. Puck stood in front of her. "O-o—h.”
“You’ve seen pictures of me.”
“What is it, I can't quite remember - " By Oak and Ash and Thorn, thought Puck. "Every time a child says I don't believe in fairies - "
Puck laughed.
"A lickle fairwy dies. What we like about you is that you up the ante."
"Yes," said Dezzi.
They talked on.
"You stayed, of course, to hear the end of story."
She knew it was true. Always exhausted, always stressed, too tired to leave, one does not bounce into a new job thus, but beyond that lay the unfinished paragraph. "I stayed until I knew I couldn't win. It was the University."
"Until you knew they'd kill you," said Puck.
"I felt - I felt it sounded crazy to them. Who am I to stop the University self-destructing! It wasn't the University, it was The University. Sodding Plato!"
"I think you might have lost me a bit there," said Puck cautiously. He didn't think so, but wanted to be sure.
"Sodding ideals. Absolutes. Temple of Reason and all that. It all came out wrong. I am a poet. I can't not be. It came to absolutes. I'm not even sure I know how. If there is neither rhyme nor reason - so there I am, spitting blood - literally - swearing like a trooper, crying with sheer fury and I'm representing Poetry with a capital P, defending Mind with a capital M against senior academics of the University of London and it even seemed crazy to me."
"It's a dirty job," said Puck. "Someone has to do it."
"I just wanted to write poems about unicorns!"
"Belonging," said Puck.
Dezzi winced.
"Eeuh. Yes. That's what it came down to. Who belonged."
Humour, we are told censoriously, is a method of control. You bet. It is extremely difficult to strut around in jack-boots, to get properly into the spirit of torturing and murdering people, when others are standing by howling with laughter and commenting what a preposterous prat you are.
Extracts from The Matter of Britain
I, Ysabel Jehan Howard, hereby assert and give notice of my right under s.77 of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this book
PANTHER -> Site news -> The Hospital
by Ysabel Howard - Saturday, 2 July 2011, 07:17 PM
To this community which is fundamentally illiterate at the level of virtually no-one reading let alone writing books containing ideas, where words are threats to be severely controlled, it does not of course occur that one can write a novel about them, or rather around them. It's fascinating: it simply does not occur to them words can appear describing them and those words may be publicly disseminated.
One should not even scream quietly: it ain't allowed, it's against proseedyures and regulayshuns.
Dez had acquired a workload that had previously been shared between two-and-a-half people. She won a technical victory: her new assistant turned out to be the ghoul. The ghoul was given the room that had been Dezzi's and Dez now shared a room with the photocopier and the kettle in the clinic-area, where it was assumed she was clinic-receptionist. The slug had the room next door but preferred lounging at Dezzi's desk. When Dezzi returned from the loo she had to ask to sit down. Why was there a pornographic magazine in her room? she was asked. It turned out to be a Vanity Fair. Really, one expects some degree of sophistication - she wished it had been the Tatler with a naked Anthea Turner draped in a large python on the cover. When she tried to proof-read, insipid morons interrupted her about every five words with questions of shattering inanity. She was told she was thought to be mad because she didn't respect doctors but she had long grasped that questions of shattering inanity were de rigueur, as were insipid morons.
Come one, come all, and gather round
A new philosophy’s been found
If at the start of each new day
A person pale and podgy, grey
(A sort that’s mercifully rare)
Is poured upon your desk and chair
That you must meekly ask she rise
(A thought she greets with some surprise)
And spends succeeding hours drear
In vapid chat with colleagues dear…
At all cost you must strong resist
The urge to ask them to desist
Remark upon their lack of grace
Or ask one to her silly face
Why is she not in her damn space
That is to be both vile and base!
We are on the far side of reality here, beyond the white picket fence of the asylum. You might call it Eden. You might call it Charles Clarke’s Vision of Utopia. Worst of all, you might call it by its true name, an academic department of the University of London (Dezzi’s own university) from which she will be driven, ostensibly by a nurse and a typist. Goodness separates the inmates from the common horde. Here we sit twanging our harps and polishing our wings. Vast improvement on work. We are the good. Any who oppose or criticize us are the bad. We are an academic and social elite, therefore any who mock us (us and our ludicrous pretensions) are insane. We are the real thing. Or not of course. It works until someone comes along to burst the bubble. But we fight. There is no corruption of fact to which we will not sink to annul the threat.
Guess who was the threat.
What we shall not call this abode of the half-formed is The Hospital. Dez has yet to reach rock-bottom. She is merely employed in a hospital.
....
At the western extremity of Oxford Street stands Marble Arch. I am assuming that you have heard at least of Oxford Street, one of the main arteries of Central London and where most of the major department stores are, although you may not be British. Marble Arch, c'est comme l'Arc de Triomphe, mais personne - but the street-plan is such that no grand parade can pass under it, for it stands at a cross-roads, on a neatly turfed island. Park Lane takes you south, a six-lane highway separated by islands with flower-beds. The symmetry of this part of London indicates it might have been planned, as Paris and New York were planned, Park Lane running neatly down one side of Hyde Park, the Bayswater Road along the north side, Kensington Gore along the south. Edgware Road runs north from Marble Arch, Watling Street as was in Roman times, but the legions have not yet returned. These are busy, traffic-laden thoroughfares, bright with the famous red buses, though never of course the bus you want.
At the eastern end, Oxford Street becomes New Oxford Street. Here we get cultural, Bloomsbury, where formerly the Woolf-pack roamed, the British Museum, that strange piece of Art Deco that is Senate House, the administrative centre of the University. Like Oxford and Cambridge, the University of London is a federation of constituent colleges. London is much bigger than Oxford and Cambridge, the colleges spread far and wide, but so far as there is an academic hub it is here, where University College London dominates Gower Street running north from New Oxford Street and behind UCL is a network of elegant squares, every town-house an Institute of This or a Centre for That. Tottenham Court Road, at best seedy, a street of cut-price mobiles and best-buy printers, lies parallel to Gower Street. Separating Tottenham Court Road from Gower Street (separating Town from Gown) is The Hospital.
Mortem vincimus! (We conquer death!) claims the battered shield. We don't, of course. Death stalks the corridors, swinging his scythe as he goes. A skirmish lost here and there? No matter: he wins the war. We delay Death; if you're the patient, the difference matters. Here we are at the cutting-edge of advances in medical science, here our reputations (well, those of some of us) echo round the world. The Lift, for instance, those of our American cousins who have had the Lift Experience relate it trembling for months after. The building is imposing, equal in stature to any of the University buildings opposite challenging its importance. Gee, say the American cousins, you have history! Management frowns. That is a discriminatory term. The correct terminology is 'the past'. You have past! say the American cousins meekly. Passed what? asked Professor Rudolph. Beyond would be nice, mused his friend, gone to that great sanatorium in the sky, the ideal of which all earthly structures are but feeble replicas. Possibly there they fix computers. That, said Professor Rudolph, is idealism gone mad. He pressed the lift button once more.
In The Hospital the Hatchery flourished, the curtains were flung wide (though not of course cleaned), the little chickadees chirruped eagerly to each other, showing off new clothes and talking excitedly of the holidays to come, while the sunlight imparted a dull sinister glow to the filthy windows and generously illuminated the peeling paintwork, torn carpet and splintered desks of creeping decay. The Hospital had a single purpose and it wasn't care of the sick. The Hospital was a place of nurture - it nurtured unskilled labour taken from the North London slums and forced them to the top of the tree. Clearly there was a vast untapped pool of talent there; some senior managers could even manage joined-up writing. Once, public servants had been selected by open competitive examination, but that had been dismissed as unfair, discriminatory, indeed, for it barred the barely literate, grossly incompetent, bone-idle and pig-ignorant. Not only that, it had brought in outsiders who owed nothing to patronage. Only ward-clerks and porters could possess that true mystic understanding of how The Hospital worked, being authentic, unspoiled, the troublesome world of ideas or principle representing an unnecessary veneer of suspect sophistication. It was a question of the legitimate aspirations of the working-people of this contry. [Most people when contemplating the nation in this age of inanity considered it was rather the 'o' that was superfluous.] These aspirations naturally included being catapulted to positions of authority without any independent assessment to confirm or refute the presence of a brain.
Liberty protects the right to say, 'Lor', what a plonker.' Democracy makes plonkers accountable. Meritocracy tries to eliminate plonkers. This unhealthy trio is thus absent from The Hospital.
Cut to David Attenborough voice-over, ebullient with delight at the curiosities of nature. And here we have yet again an example of a parallel universe, The Hospital in its bubble, life sustained by the pink froth around it, thinking itself self-sustaining. Those of you who saw my last series will remember the remarkable events surrounding UDI when The Hospital cut loose from the fabric of the nation. Looking at it under the microscope, you can see the tiny amphibians that populate it. No out-dated notions of accountability hamper them here, where staff are warned that contacting their MPs may be a disciplinary offence. Contact with the Press is of course similarly frowned upon. Here is the final proof that dinosaurs did not in fact die out, merely mutated. In these tiny amphibians we have the direct descendants of tyrannosaurus stalinus.
The Program ran The Hospital, in fact a suite of programs. Doctors.com had given the software engineers the biggest headache, that part of the Program attempting to dominate the medical profession. Doctors were educated. Doctors could be trouble, 'specially in a place like this where they were the bright ones. Didn't matter so much in some seedy DGH. 'Course, some doctors were all right. Take Jay, the mad professor, they called her. She understood. Some said she'd even helped write the software. Such a pretty lady, she was, and powerful with it. Coo! It was rumoured, 'course it was all a bit hush-hush, know what I mean, there was a better program being developed for doctors. Docilizer.com - doc-ilizer, gerrit. They said the mad professor was testing it. There was no trouble from her Department, that much was true. That funny old Irish guy, the surgeon, he was another good 'un, knew which side his bread was buttered. The Program beeped: any reference to persons by their nationality or allusion to ethnicity was suspect.
Secrecy.exe and Paranoia.exe were key files throughout the Program. So long as open communication is forbidden, different versions of events may be told to different people. Risk to the Program lay in the possibility of crash, were informed persons to bombard the controllers with unpleasant and offensive questions, outsiders who could not be silenced. For the awkward squad, Punish.exe usually sufficed. People could be cowed. They could learn it was unwise to argue. The controllers were unaccountable. There was no requirement to answer questions. Nothing must interfere with the Program.
Outside the tremulous walls of The Hospital, the Jarrow March was daily enacted, Wall Street crashed, the New York air heavy with the squelchy plopping kersplat of stockbrokers hurling themselves to their doom from skyscrapers. People didn't have Opportunity. Any achievement was the fell consequence of Privilij. One hundred and twenty years of compulsory free education had passed The Hospital by, a century of the precious gift of a childhood and adolescence in which one could learn without the demands of the production-line and the call of the factory-hooter. It was easier to squeak hysterically about Privilij than to attack a culture which saw no purpose in education, which disrupted those who wished to learn, had no interest in critical thinking and especially did not wish to be exposed to anything that might upset it by challenging its prejudices and preconceptions. Being intelligent was Privilij, wanting to learn was Privilij (but perhaps after all there is no difference, what we call stupidity simply mental inertia), above all coming from homes, no matter how financially straitened, where books were valued, ideas discussed, art created, this was a particularly malign form of Privilij. One day Privilij would be defeated. Meanwhile, it was unfair to make demands on the under-privilijed. Employers should show them that someone cared. Why should work interfere with their social lives?
We must be blunt about this (if not Philby): Dezzi said her colleagues were lazy, pretentious, egotistical, dishonest incompetents, whited sepulchres, Pharisees, fundamentally corrupt. Devoid of taste, of style, of education, of culture, of integrity, of mind, they flaunted their supposed superiority, before which she was supposed to genuflect. Who asked for it? Her attack was misconstrued, of course. Undoubtedly people of merit should advance, her point (unbelievable!) that people of little merit should not be permitted to think themselves remarkable, carried by those who actually possess talent. Senior staff wrote the grant applications. Senior staff wrote the ensuing publications. What talent was displayed in between, one for reading the instructions on assay-kits?
Later, Dez said a lot of things. They were what Dr Greer meant by female eunuchs, cases of arrested development, walking corpses. She tried to understand, and that of course made it worse, because that was class or its cousin, background. They came from homes without books, without ideas, without debate. No-one appeared to have told them that people differed widely in their views and argued about it. None of them would last two minutes with her old tutor. Faced with an alien proposition they burst into tears. Particularly they burst into tears faced with the alien proposition that not everyone takes six months to produce six pages summarizing what the research charity's grant had enabled, and a few sensible lines of discussion and conclusion. Later, she was to meet those so stunningly illiterate that they formed the plurals of common nouns with apostrophe-s and had no idea what a sentence was, but this was a more sophisticated illiteracy, born of an inability to order data and determine relevance.
An ego-saver I must be
Shoring up the fantasy
These droops are in reality
Jewels of the academy.
This half-wit waving her degree
Has not a better one than me
But thinks that MB ChB
Must confer divinity
What is truth? asked Doubting P
At least he asked! It seems to me
A place that from debate is free
Is not a university.
Finally, no, not finally, but critically, there was the waif, employed to analyse milk-yield, but the waif had said insufficient data were available. Strange that, there were the cows, but no-one questioned. Guess who did the work. Of course she did her own job as well. It worried no-one except Dez that the waif was paid full-time to do the project. Dez worked over the Christmas and New Year break, and then it seemed to her she was getting flu. She bought patent remedies and retreated to bed. The next day she could barely get up to go to the lavatory, but it was a Sunday. On the Monday she forced herself onto a train, one of the benefits of hospital employment being on-tap doctors. Chest x-ray revealed pneumonia. She collected her prescription and retreated to bed. After a couple of days she felt fine but then those wonderful drugs you can nowadays which happened to be the wrong wonderful drugs began to give up an unequal struggle. Death stood in the doorway. No! she said. Death shrugged. Not yet. Hell, you mean not yet. Death has a taste. This is it. You may think you have never tasted anything so virulently revolting in your life. Unfortunately, if you don’t taste it, you don’t have a life. When consolidation has nothing better to do, it deconsolidates and floods your lungs. Drowning is not a viable option. Dezzi learned terror. Terror is not closing your eyes in case you don't wake up again. Terror is the inexorable closing of the wind-pipe, as though someone has pulled the plug on your life. This is significant for what follows: after you have nearly died, you are remarkably hard to frighten. They decided she had cancer. It was easier than finding out what she did have or changing the drugs. She was admitted to the Royal Brompton, put on intravenous antibiotics, and got better.
There are evil doctors and heroic ones. You can't tell by looking. Nursey, on the other hand, sticks out a mile, a worm at the heart of an otherwise admirable body of men and women. Ourwonderfulnurses.com differs from other parts of the Program in its high profile, but it is a naïve media error to think it exists to praise our wonderful nurses. Ourwonderfulnurses.com exists to protect Nursey.
Nursey slowly chewed a thin strand of dirty hair, the days long gone when hair must be up, off the face, off the collar, tightly secured by a pristine cap. She hobbled slowly down the corridor, dragging the bloat of her self-importance, frowning. The fascistic Tory press had insinuated nurses couldn't be trusted with extended powers of diagnosis and prescribing. It was speeshus, that's what it was. Nursey prided herself on her wide vocabulary. Thirty years ago Nursey had had to restrict herself to tying down psychiatric patients. Sixty years ago, she had been a concentration-camp guard. Ourwonderfulnurses.com let Nursey out of her cage and allowed her to flourish. There were few limits to the venomous stupidity that shone in those pale piggy eyes and Nursey was especially good at a frothy self-righteousness. Her pigling cheeks would redden. Nursey was a profeshnal. Nursey had a degree. She understood what was what. Standards had to be maintained. It was not acceptable. Something had to be done. (Sometimes. When your old mum rings for a nurse and the Nurses’ Station is deserted, it’s because Nursey is far too important these days to attend to the bodily needs of old ladies.) When really distressed she would screw the little eyes up, the whiskers would twitch. I am fewurious. The little eyes would water. She would dab at them gently and try to be brave. Everyone understood. Nursey was a good person, so caring.
Nursey had many roles and a host of helpers. Dezzi had many roles, amongst which helping.On the far side of the white picket fence you harness a championship filly to a milk-cart while the milk-cart pony waddles ahead crowing. Of course finally the filly rears up on her hind-legs and batters the pony. Justifiable equicide I calls it. They had other words. It was the egos that did it, the putrescent smear over the walls, the floors, a spreading stain of mustard yellow and purple, so Dez saw it. That’s what artists do, poor bastards, see, then everyone jumps down their throats because they don’t like the pictures.
We're all perfickly normal people here. Turning-points in history are rarely noted until later. Universities were for abnormal people, the academic, the bookish, the reflective, the inquisitive, the very bright. Then they weren't. Sometimes they were for the earnest and well-meaning. In this case they were for the thick and greedy.
Idiot Cathy’s damned study
Which bloody nearly murdered me
Failed to show what means there be
To survive Rheumatology
When once again required of me
To do the work of two or three
So that mediocrity
Might enjoy serenity…
It was a long poem and, while Dez was fairly sure they busily portrayed her as a burnt-out wreck who hadn’t been able to hack it, that she conspicuously failed to be. Physically of course she was exhausted. Fools make the mental synonymous with the physical.
Dez knew what she had said, though she hadn't yet grasped the extent to which it was a threat. Something about babies and bath-water, having thrown out mind along with religion. It was only later she realized the bit about the College of Cardinals had been so deeply wounding (there are intelligent people who argue for determinism just as there are intelligent people who thresh out Catholic theology; the average technician or physician has the in-depth comprehension of the Sicilian peasant).
Exit, pursued by a bear (or a dragon). It was ridiculous. How ridiculous? They were the wrong kind of snow. At first she had no more idea what she meant than Railtrack. At second and third she had no more idea, but remember the infant Dezzi had been dandled on the knees of future leading Maoists. The Stepford Wives Left was alien and she – she had reacted like Fiver in the Death Warren. Senior academics of the University of London do not recognize the value of a University of London degree. They are therefore raving bloody mad. Medics are not supposed to destroy health. Clearly they are raving bloody mad. They are straights, they are uneducated, they are stupid, oh God how stupid they all are. It's a one-off. She didn't see her way to being driven out of her own university by the stupidity of a nurse and a typist. Nothing computed: she’d already been desperately ill and they deliberately… She got pneumonia. Again. After some days of pretending she didn’t, staggering into work with a cough they would have found disturbing in Spikey’s Row, because she couldn’t have, it was unbearable. With it came £67.35 in sickness benefit for two weeks without pay. After it, her carefree temping career and all the things she’d been going to explore were destroyed by the energy levels of a dead cat. She settled to earning 5p an hour in a local corporate events firm. Ask her about it some time. They were a jolly set of wide-boys. After her second attack of pneumonia, she was vaccinated and subsequently merely suffered not-pneumonia, often, a series of repulsive and exhausting chest infections. She deduced the existence of the swamp, a puddle at the bottom of the lung, right at the bottom, from where she coughed. Infections went not to her chest but to her waist. When the infections depart, there is an itching sensation, irresistibly reminiscent of a scab, and so a healing, but who wants a scabby lung.
Dezzi furious, Dezzi emotionally and physically bruised, Dezzi hopping along trailing a broken wing, trying to tell herself all this was chance, to which the only possible response was that it was and it wasn’t. If people set on you intending to wreck your health, your health gets wrecked. They don’t inject you with pneumonia. They don’t have to.
They had said that she was obsessed with class, but she hadn't been. It was rather that class was convenient shorthand for what was happening. Is all history not the history of the class struggle? It was hardly her idea, but then they had no ideas, how would they know?
Dear MI5-person, It's a bad idea to be bright in the University of London today.' It was a strange letter she composed to the agents of the fascist bourgeois imperialist state. No, she didn't expect them to do anything. Someone should know. When she reviewed the letter later, she realized how deeply she had assumed that the relevant names were known already. After all, if one wishes to make a splash in the Lambeth Palace Road, presumably cosying up to the Soviet Union and accommodating a penniless Chinese postgraduate in a Kensington apartment is how to go about it.
Trust the University? You’re kidding. Who else was there?
Feedback: none. She hadn't expected any. She did one other thing. She commented on her new Website. Feedback: none. Slowly she regenerated. She didn't yet understand she was unhomed, deemed an offence that may not be allowed to exist. She found herself temping at The Hospital. There were real academics. She was offered a PA job and she stayed.
The Great Squid screamed in fury at the site and screamed anew at the news Dez had a nice job. There are Panther-Pink, Paper-Pink, supping-with-the-devil pink, and of course there are carnations. There are shocking pink, dusky pink and rose. There is even the world of the Electric Monk, in which everything is pink, though Mr Adams does not tell us whether this is the pink of elephants or the pink of gin. There is the not-pink of hunting pink. There are candy-floss pink and sugar-mouse pink. The Squid was mole-rat pink, naked rat-tail pink, new-born mouse pink, a slithery, shiny pink, a hairless pink, a mucosal pink, the pink of the not fully-formed, something in a kidney-bowl pink and of course there is concomitant blood and slime. Bit like something from Dez’s lungs.
As if not-pneumonia and MRSA weren’t enough, Dezzi now acquired a particularly virulent bout of the Trots, her manager not the civilized medics with whom the job had been negotiated but a gingery little nurse. She was turned into a porter and a filing-clerk and stashed in a shabby leaking attic with a woman who did little and was frequently visited by a friend who did even less. Both happened to be black, and so, it was thought, Dezzi wouldn't dare comment. The attic was on the sixth floor of one building. The clinics she was to type were on the fourth floor of a building on the other side of the road. Cancer patients have multiple volumes of heavy hospital notes. She had to collect and return all the notes in a large supermarket trolley. Someone from her former place of work had, she guessed, come a-whingeing to her new employers. She was running on one kidney, one whole lung and one with a hole in it and a spine held in place by an alloy rod. She was 45. Of course no-one asked if she was up to heavy physical labour; everyone knew she was not. It is frightening to know that malice is on your back and no-one will do anything about it.
She called him Fury after the persona in the Julian May books, it being shorter than you depressing, limited and essentially evil stinking lousy c*** of a cephalopod, you. Besides, c*** is hard to pronounce.
She got very upset and complained about everything in sight to everyone in sight. A new manager had been appointed, a jewel of dynamism and probity known as the Vicious Queen. It was said his partner beat him up and he dealt with it by bullying the women under him. Who could wish for a more perfect boss. He asked her how she felt able to criticize a senior nurse-manager and she did not answer because he’s a moronic criminal. When she had refused to shut up, she had been summoned to a kangaroo court. A vampire emerged from its office. Clearly this creature, pasty-faced, thin-lipped never saw the light of day. Where was the nearest cemetery, out of which tomb had it crawled? Dezzi wondered where they were recruited from, the exit-gates of Holloway and the Scrubbs? The interrogation proceeded. The room swirled. We are in Moscow. The year is 1917. The apparatchik speaks coldly. "Your attitude has been noted, comrade." I do hope so, she thought, I do hope so. As with all show trials, the verdict was a foregone conclusion. She had made unfounded allegations. She was guilty of improper use of e-mail. Her grading was not an issue. What was interesting about them, she decided, was that they appeared not to know what shit they were. Foregone conclusion or not, when she received the letter from the Kuomintang, she lost her temper, publicly, and when some little sniveller reported her the VQ rang her up to lecture her - lecture her on confidentiality forsooth for it is given that no-one should know how vermin behave - and at lunchtime on Christmas Eve he had had delivered by hand to her a threatening letter. It failed to ruin her Christmas.
If ever again there should be in my life
So much as a hint of you guys you’ll wish
That you had never ever been born
The sword does not defeat the pen
If there is anything I despise
It’s fat little cowards who deal in lies
Dealers in innuendo will find
Innuendo of another kind.
It will make one hell of a story
Chinese post-doc in Prof’s property
Forging links with the Soviets
Repeated employment of lame ducks
I am going to rock you!
Rock and roll has come of age when it is to prove essential to the defence of the realm.Dear me, the purge of the intellectuals has begun in earnest. Some people might think the first duty of management to seize upon talent as an asset to the organization. Dez shakes her head violently. Don’t wanna be purged.
She had taken the precaution of establishing that heavy manual work presented a threat to her spinal fusion. When this penetrated the unicellular organism that constituted the brain of management, she was moved to an area the width of a chair, hemmed in by desk-units and beset by manual handling hazards. The office was not merely shabby; it was squalid. Dark stains spread across the carpet. Obsolete and broken equipment festered in the corners. Somewhere in a parallel universe the mass consultative exercise was taking place. Tell us what YOU think about the NHS! Here management had circulated the Health Service Circular on the Disclosure in the Public Interest Act, and helpfully appended Guidelines. She considered their words carefully. The only legitimate court of appeal against those who are beating you up is their colleagues, approaching even the House of Commons a breach of confidentiality for which one may be disciplined. Their supreme confidence in the dominance of norms other than those of liberal democracy underwhelmed her. Here it was one minute to midnight and outside the fascist bourgeois imperialist state apparently went about the business of liberal democracy largely unimpeded by the carrion voices and so she dwelt in two worlds. In fact of course there were three.
Once Britain had been famous for her literature. Nowadays she was to accrue an international reputation for trying to smash up writers for the parallel with poor Mr Rushdie was evident to Dez, if to no-one else. People who come from thinking homes and grow out of their family religions are appallingly troublesome. Though she hissed spectacularly on her site about going to the Tory press, the sense this was a family affair was why she did not actually go immediately to the Mail. If you juggle hot potatoes, you get your fingers burnt. Dezzi put her hot potatoes in the hearth to cut her heating-bill. They glowed cheerfully up her. The cost of the NHS, the willingness or otherwise of the tax-payer to pay up, there were some basic questions here. Not only do we have to pay for these obscene louts, ever more money is demanded from us. Beating-up the bright, once the hallmark of the sink school, has now become the norm.
The Great Squid extended its tentacles. It still wasn't sure. It seemed she posed a threat, but after all, she was only a Womble. Great-Uncle Bulgaria awakes with a start from his rocking-chair, spectacles falling into his lap. He gropes for them, reaches for his stick. "Hmm-ha, did I hear correctly? 'Only a Womble'?"
If she was supposed to be a threat, to whom was she supposed to be a threat, and why was she supposed to be a threat? Later this too became simplified. I’d better be a threat then.
About a year ago it challenged me
Just the possibility
Stupidity, spite, naivety
Shielded a harsher history
Might it not interest HMG
Corruption in the university
And so I wrote a little letter
At least it made me feel better
The matter then was off my mind
And now I am not pleased to find
Once again there is strife
You wankers appear to be back in my life
And I am going to rock you!
So I’ve died and gone to Trot Paradise. What am I going to do about it? Their confidence, she thought, came, had to come, from certainty that the acolytes of the little red god abounded in the corridors of power. She wondered what would happen if she shook the tree and wrote to her MP with a copy of the summary to the Secretary of State. After all, New Labour hates Trots.
I have been bullied according to the Trust's own criteria (removal of areas of responsibility and giving menial tasks), victimized, reprimanded for telling Consultants management's cavortings ('improper use of e-mail') and threatened with disciplinary action if I again told the truth ('unfounded allegations'); my spinal fusion has been jeopardized by routinely pushing a supermarket trolley full of notes between two sites, work that ceased only after a letter from RNOH indicated the risk and was replaced by being put in a space barely more than the width of a chair, hemmed in by desk-units and manual handling hazards, part of a larger office easily altered, in which I have been for six months without a connection to PAS or the network, so impairing my ability to do my job.
Many vivid accounts have been written about being buried alive, faces contorted by terror, bleeding fingertips, though presumably one has to awaken pdq after the last clod has settled, for if not dead to start with one must be after some hours in a heavy wooden box from which oxygen is absent. Nonetheless these accounts support the new eco-friendly cardboard coffins and perhaps six feet under is excessive. The question arises of the urban fox. Priorities must be balanced. Is the possible rescue of one thought lost sufficient compensation for the scattered remnants of hundreds of others? We have forgotten satin-pink, tarts'-boudoir pink, coffin-lining pink and of course ballet-shoes pink. The Squid owes much to Miss Piggy.
There was little else the worms could do to Dezzi's body bar open criminal assault, as her anger threatened to tear her apart. She wanted to stand in the middle of the room and scream 'fuck you!' but somehow didn't think that would do any good. She had somehow to channel the energy. Perhaps when everyone had finished palpating reason would prevail. She didn't really believe that, which was just as well because it didn't happen.
Worms, like humans, are good and bad. Dezzi befriended nice worms, Worminmould and Wormingum. They tried valiantly to sheer away the edges of the coffin but there is only so much a worm can do. Dezzi thought of chain-saws and wasn't sure it was the desk she had in mind. Channel the energy. Mice, prisoners ought to have mice to feed. She could leave, couldn't she. She applied for a couple of jobs and realized she couldn't. One's reputation precedes one. Bastards!
It irritated her that they thought she could be cowed. It irritated her that they thought they could shut her up. It irritated her that they were leading lights in a free country. An irritated poet is dangerous.
‘In Plymouth Town there lives a maid/And she is mistress of her trade…’ The signifiers in the iconography of popular culture that had influenced the young Dezzi were Lady Penelope, Purdey and Mrs Peel. She went on to play the patriot game, even without microfilm in tampons. In the Century of the Fruitcake damsels in distress do not collapse if men do not rescue them. Cry goddess! for Henrietta, England, and St Georgina. St Georgina of course was the petite one who concealed a dagger and an aqualung in her bodice, walked into the dragon’s maw, slit its jugular and swam to the surface. ‘And gentlemen in England, now a-bed, shall think themselves accurs’d.’ A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a Steed? When Steed did appear, he looked remarkably like Puck. There’s just no romance in life today, but the main problem with taking up late in life a career in psy-ops was that no-one was paying her for it and so she had to trudge to work too.
By this time the VQ had outraged all the secretaries and a collective grievance had been taken out against him. Sometimes proseedyures are illuminating. A response is expected within a given time-scale. Weeks turned into months. All but the youngest of the secretaries concerned reckoned they’d be drawing their pensions before resolution was reached, Brothers, before some word trickled down from above. On the bright side, our Dez were obviously supposed to be some stupid little Tory. When everyone has decided (not only without consulting you but in direct contravention of anything you have said about yourself) that you are some little Tory tart from the shires, probably racist, because you talk posh, stand up for England and have criticized black girls, you can take your time over killing when the only regiment remotely likely to claim you as its daughter is the International Brigade.
Where did all the SovSymps go, long time passing….
Naturally those persons who sold technical and military secrets to Stasi and the KGB were devoted to liberal democracy and after the Berlin Wall fell remained fervent in their efforts to extend individual liberty and of course there is no such place as Beijing. Naturally. Naturally every ComSymp in the academic world became a dedicated free-marketeer. Treason gurgled to himself through his swollen throat and rattled his chains, though feebly, since he had been not only hanged but also drawn and quartered and the segmental find whole-body movement difficult. He was a reflective spectre. He wondered when the mincing machine had been invented, after his time, he supposed or he'd have been dog-meat. Of course nobody hangs traitors any more, far more satisfying to leave them to the packs of feral writers that prowl sinisterly around the parapets (the architects of the Hospital had had a taste for the pseudo-Gothic - perhaps precognition of the vampires that would later inhabit it) but Treason was good on the special effects. The shadow of the scaffold filled the sky. The lightning turned blood red then reformed in the shape of the executioner's axe. There was a pause. The axe solidified and landed with a plop in the middle of Out-Patients. The charge nurse frowned. Some new surgical implement, he supposed. He tidied it away.
Now that I lie here
My body all holes
I think of the traitors
Who bargained and sold
(The Patriot Game)
Framed. This site uses JavaScript, or maybe that's a bit too far to the south. Why did everyone assume, how could anyone think for ten seconds that she would put up with it? Framed. What could she do? That she had walked into professional England-haters was clear, that there was a trend among them towards Roman Catholicism, that they were Irish. That her support for Rushdie had gone down like a lead balloon. None of this amounted to very much, or at any rate not motive for her attempted destruction, until later when she’d done some research, except the last thing on her mind, that she was supposedly racist to that part of newtdom that considers it racist to attack fascists who happen to be brown. Now she had attacked blacks and gays! Clearly that proved – nothing.
It was obviously far better in this situation not to think, but Dezzi wasn’t very good at not thinking.
They thought they were - representational. The strange word hung there and looked quizzically back at her. She was distracted by the difference if any between it and 'representative'. Representational - what echoes - ? Yes, representational art, that was it. They were 2-D. Hmm. Not what they meant. And she realized there were two nations, everyone said there were two nations, hell, Disraeli had said there were two nations, but this was not what they meant. The wrong kind of snow.
Let me offer to you, babies, alternative realities
I have dealt with you mildly
I know you do not easily
Grasp that world from which I come
One dominated by the pen
But if you wish to argue with me
Have the guts to do it openly
If you cannot make up rhymes
There are always the columns of The Times
The Washington Post, the Jo’burg Mail
Then nobody can possibly fail
To grasp the great lucidity
With which you defend what happened to me
I am going to rock you!
Since neither of the two representatives of the people thought to communicate with Dezzi, apart from a brief acknowledgement from the MP, it is not possible to say whether they thought they had achieved anything on her behalf, whether they accepted any lies they were fed, whether they merely did nothing, liked watching newts self-destruct and encouraged good writing or whether the more negative judgement on Mr Mildew Dez was to arrive at when he later bounced back into office best described the matter, but the consequences were that for a while the secretaries were left alone, then given a new manager, promised that they would not be messed about, but immediately after came a report on the collective grievance, exonerating management and promising a new review. It is one thing to be reviewed by intelligent and impartial folk and another to be reviewed by those hell-bent on making the secretaries fall-guys while their own inadequacies remain unchecked, their own abuses of public office. The secretaries proclaimed themselves unsatisfied and the union disappeared back down the rabbit-hole. Dezzi knew they liked to talk about 'bringing the Trust into disrepute', another of their impertinent mechanisms to attempt to evade public scrutiny. Dezzi had said she expected the Grade 5 contract she had been promised, an apology, and an end to molestation. It was faintly amusing to muse on those culpable of and colluding with bullying trying to silence her. No change of course had been wrought to the working environment. She had wondered what would happen if she shook the tree and now she knew, supposed she had always known, known and refused to know, that their insolence stemmed from support in the very heart of government. Well, it was no big deal, no great shock-horror to learn that there were Stalinists in the Labour Party. The wolfworm has been there since the start and 'Are you now or have you ever been?' is not a particularly useful question in the context of British politics, particularly when your ancestral home is the Communist Party.
There is a moment in which you realize you are expendable. In order that corruption goes unchecked, in order that face be saved, in order that nothing has happened, except the attempted destruction of your life, and that is nothing. Careers must continue untrammelled, reputations must be preserved. Dezzi thought she should now demand rather more, for instance ten thousand words on each of why her CV could be dismissed; why use of public office to further one's political kinks is acceptable; why a degree from the Faculty of Arts of the University of London is of less value than no academic qualifications at all; why we don't need no education and it is self-evident and thus not open to question that those with the least education should be promoted to senior management; why the public can just fuck off out of the running of the NHS, it ain't none of their business, all right.
Sheen Common was first enclosed in 1154. Gnarled roots reach out to trip the unwary. As dusk falls, mother-squirrels quickly round up their young. Night is best though naturally a well-meaning constabulary would have a fit at a female wandering there alone. Dez sat under an oak and let rip.
"They're in love with death! They want to turn the whole country into a bloody mausoleum, no damned spark of life, anything non-standard, non-uniform, anything not comprehensible to the lowest common denominator. So some drivelling little bitch of a typist doesn't understand me. Do I care! Let them come up to my level or leave me alone! I will not care what some bloody vacuous thug of a nurse thinks. I will not be made to care. He tried to cripple me. Nothing untoward has happened. It's pure Kafka! Some bloody baboon beats his chest. Oh I am so petrified. All the little monkeys start baring their arses. I do not bare my arse! I do not bloody crawl! There is no energy in humans, there is no life, there is no spark, there is only a machine, a void. It isn't capable of transcendence or any other bloody thing. I suppose it's projection. Why does it upset them that humans are different? Just because they're unimaginative, uncreative, brain-dead inadequates everyone else has to be."
"Stupid," said someone helpfully.
Sorry? Dezzi blinked and looked around, of course suddenly tense, ‘though it had not been the comment of a potential rapist.
"We've been reading your site."
"Good!" said Dezzi viciously. Puck stood in front of her. "O-o—h.”
“You’ve seen pictures of me.”
“What is it, I can't quite remember - " By Oak and Ash and Thorn, thought Puck. "Every time a child says I don't believe in fairies - "
Puck laughed.
"A lickle fairwy dies. What we like about you is that you up the ante."
"Yes," said Dezzi.
They talked on.
"You stayed, of course, to hear the end of story."
She knew it was true. Always exhausted, always stressed, too tired to leave, one does not bounce into a new job thus, but beyond that lay the unfinished paragraph. "I stayed until I knew I couldn't win. It was the University."
"Until you knew they'd kill you," said Puck.
"I felt - I felt it sounded crazy to them. Who am I to stop the University self-destructing! It wasn't the University, it was The University. Sodding Plato!"
"I think you might have lost me a bit there," said Puck cautiously. He didn't think so, but wanted to be sure.
"Sodding ideals. Absolutes. Temple of Reason and all that. It all came out wrong. I am a poet. I can't not be. It came to absolutes. I'm not even sure I know how. If there is neither rhyme nor reason - so there I am, spitting blood - literally - swearing like a trooper, crying with sheer fury and I'm representing Poetry with a capital P, defending Mind with a capital M against senior academics of the University of London and it even seemed crazy to me."
"It's a dirty job," said Puck. "Someone has to do it."
"I just wanted to write poems about unicorns!"
"Belonging," said Puck.
Dezzi winced.
"Eeuh. Yes. That's what it came down to. Who belonged."
Humour, we are told censoriously, is a method of control. You bet. It is extremely difficult to strut around in jack-boots, to get properly into the spirit of torturing and murdering people, when others are standing by howling with laughter and commenting what a preposterous prat you are.
Extracts from The Matter of Britain
I, Ysabel Jehan Howard, hereby assert and give notice of my right under s.77 of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this book