- 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
So what d’you have in mind, priests, especially priests? Patting me on the head and telling me not to be a silly little girl? I’m being emotional, hysterical. I expect I’m being unreasonable too, when I am the only person not displaying total contempt for reason. You generate these mad sick monster child-women and think all women can be treated like children.
I have been CRIPPLED. I HAVE BEEN ASSAULTED SUCH THAT I CAN NO LONGER WALK PROPERLY OR RUN.
This is a DEMOCRACY. POWER IS ACCOUNTABLE.
It means absolutely nothing to any of them. It still won’t mean anything to their twisted vile sick animal brains when there are banner headlines: VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN: IT’S WHAT YOU PAY YOUR TAXES FOR. They might, however, just cotton on the fact that they've got something wrong.
Oh and that in the absence of a First Amendment meaning no-one has to pay any attention to your filthy freak slaves these women present a danger to civilized female life.
Oh and decisive action by civilized human beings could have prevented all this, a demand for the facts, an insistence on reason, a concern for medical ethics. There weren't any as there aren't any.
[Vive la France! Vive M. Macron! I don't know that he'll be terribly good at it, but anything is better than.]
I should still be able to walk, had I not been totally at the mercy of the scum of the earth. At any point people could have intervened. They wanted and want the triumph of evil.
Oh and the obvious, that I am an Honours graduate of the University of London and both write and think rather successfully and I was treated like a naughty child, everything I said completely ignored, because no-one need feel obliged to pay any attention to anything said by a woman, because women only understand being hit, and not once has anyone acknowledged any of this has happened, I'm just a woman and readily flushed away.
You do not treat me like this, you do not bloody treat me like this. Of course your egos are such, so bloated, so diseased, that that means nothing to you, either. You just laugh, don't you, so sick are you, so mad that you are convinced you are set on high, a superior order of humanity, that people are your property. Belong in zoos. Utterly and completely insane. I am a separate equal human being. Except I'm not, I'm an extension of them, theirs to do with as they wish. I have no independent existence. Sexism of course is a complete non-issue to them, from the dirty animal women to the doctors, a silly joke. We shall just have to see what the University thinks about the willingness of Linch and Goldstone to destroy a woman.
When you have quite finished sucking their cocks, Blair and so many countless others, when you have quite finished agreeing with them about the wonders of religion and the moral superiority of the religious, when you have quite finished criminalizing civilized rational people who differ, when you have quite finished affirming that they are free to treat adult women like children, when you have quite finished affirming that they are quite free to attempt to break a woman's spine, when you have quite finished affirming they are quite free to attempt to destroy a woman, well, it's all for the best, isn't it.
All for the best. Just say nothing. Whose bloody best? Who gains from this, the sexist vermin of religion and slum, now assured they are free to butcher women, the average medical psychopath who thinks himself or herself a superior order of humanity, to decree the world, the many many enemies of the free world delighting in the abandoning of democracy and freedom, whose bloody best while I evidently got older and older, more and more disabled, more and more desperate. Who gains from the destruction of a free, democratic, educated Left-Wing Englishwoman, from affirming total contempt for fact and reason, from affirming language and reason are not essential tools of discourse, it's fine to keep quiet and butcher? Not England. From the creation of a fake professional class, ignorant, unable to analyse ideas? Not England. Who gains from a society in which all that matters is to blindly obey, in which there is no argument, no debate? Not England. Who gains from this is demagogic filth who want to wave their red, green or black books around and rule unchallenged, who want to destroy a free country and replace it with fascism, for some a Muslim shit-hole, for some a Catholic shit-hole, for some a Marxist shit-hole, and they all go along with it.
Who also gains - has anyone looked at these shits' bank-accounts? Investigated research funding? And of course the Cancer Centre?
So we shall just have to see what the Great British Public has to say about you, shan't we.
I'm writing more than one novel, you know
Oh, but what will the title be? I did think of The Rise and Fall of the Fourth Reich but others have used it. The Hospital has possibilities. True, it is reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward but then isn't it pretty much a sequel?
ARTEMIS' ARROWS
Professor Pallas is something of a dark horse, a rank outsider appointed, a visiting Professor, she was, well, you know what that means, see them about once a year, to a Chair more commonly held by those whose reputations have considerably preceded them. Nonetheless the publications history is exemplary, the lecture at the Symposium ground-breaking, the performance at interview over one of the great conundrums that has faced philosophy since the days of Plato quite shattering. An obscure college in the Peleponnese, I understand. An Oxford accent, nonetheless: not short of a bob or two, one concludes. One must not be insular (good to know standards haven't collapsed everywhere!) The one lingering doubt is that she may be well, a little old-fashioned, a little conservative for our – consumers but no, she clearly likes intelligent young people and shows herself as willing to learn from them as to teach them. She clearly likes intelligent older people too; fools, not. Much like Mrs Thatcher as she then was, the new professor quickly makes lifelong enemies, but in her case these are vastly outnumbered by lifelong friends.
Of course this has nothing whatever to do with her gender.
Pal quickly assesses which of her colleagues has a vestigial tail. One such is Bob Phelps, a small pink man, a Professor of Biochemistry, who reminds her of a small rubber ball and tempts her to bounce it. On the science side, Phelps is regarded as a dangerous man to cross, the biological sciences side at least; the chemists and physicists have little time for him. Certain administrative duties accompany Pal's post, mostly for the profoundly intellectual reason that the newbie gets the dodos, and she finds she has to attend the monthly meeting of the Information Governance Committee. Two students have been outspoken on social media sites and this, Phelps says, is unacceptable. The University's reputation! Pal raises her eyebrows. For concealment of lechery? Surely only if they have lied? Phelps is quite sure Dr Murgatroyd is incapable of such behaviour. Why? asks Pal. The students should have in the first instance reported the matter to their Head of Department. Not, thinks Pal, if he is anything like you. There can be no automatic assumption of guilt or innocence. The monthly meetings of the Information Governance Committee begin to gain a reputation all their own.
“He doesn't like women?” asks Pal of her fellow-philosophers.
“Doesn't like people! Probably doesn't like cats. Anything with the temerity to be independent of Bob Phelps.”
“One of the worst,” sighs another, “biology's riddled with them.”
“Worst what?”
“A primitive materialist. A hundred years of physics has passed them by! If it's not in a test-tube, it doesn't exist.”
“I think he applies that to people. Solipsist may be a better word. Since nothing and no-one with the possible exception of certain amino acids has independent existence, existence outside Bob's great mind, everything and everyone is at his disposal.”
“Entertainment lies in attempting any kind of intelligent conversation with him, opinion so trite it's painful.”
“He does not waste his time reading books. The physicists have the most fun with him. He crucifies himself implying they're not real scientists.”
“A popular man, then,” said Pal.
A friend she finds in Bill Foromonovic, Senior Lecturer in Greek. Bill describes himself as a lapsed Catholic.
“Your background is Greek Orthodox?” he hazards.
“I have learned in Northern Europe not to refer to myself as pagan. It has such silly connotations.”
“Hellenismos?”
“That does not precisely describe – what shall I call it? A realm of belief which has neither intellectual foundation nor external ritual and which has never entirely been annihilated. The gods are there. Perhaps you talk to them Perhaps you pray to them. Perhaps you half-pray, half-talk. They are part of your life.”
“Well, well, well!” said Bill. Pause. “You know that's pretty much how I feel about Jesus.”
“But lapsed.”
“Definitely.” He laughed. “I had a good priest – I mean he's a good priest and a morally good man, still a friend. He practically begged me to stay.” He laughed again. “He said the Church needs Greek scholars! Meaning Greek scholars with their feet planted firmly in the C21st, more than enough of the other kind. I did and do see the point but I said no. They go backwards. Disappear up their own into a world that never existed because you cannot combine the mind of Augustine with quantum physics. They need to lose Europe.” He gave a wry smile. “After all, a split has been tried already. I really don't see myself as Luther nailing my theses, all of course in perfect Attic Greek, to the door of Westminster Cathedral. They think themselves the fount of western civilization. That is worse than false. They think themselves synonymous with Jesus and most of them would have buried him – idiomatically - as readily as the orthodox of his day crucified him, a trouble-maker, disobedient, as they bury all attempt at reform. Through them his teachings survived. Despite them, we have freedom, democracy, medicine, quantum theory. What do you make of the Vatican?”
“A dinosaur that doesn't know it's dead?”
Bill snorted.
“Horribly true! My own analogy – the chalice thinks it's the wine, the cup-bearer thinks he's the cup. It survives because it represents – because it holds something so vastly greater than itself.”
“I was about to say,” said Pal, “but yes, I think you are right. About to say it survives on mass ignorance, gullibility, irrationality, but if all the intelligent, informed, rational leave, then the mask is stripped, an empty shell. The wine does not require the chalice?”
Bill smiled.
“The wine is rather special wine. It can stand up on its own.”
I lay in the long grass, my head resting on Apollo's chest, a scene readily misunderstood. He is my brother. We are very close - not that close. When I say I am a virgin goddess, I mean it, Got that, mother-fucker? How badly do you want to die? I'll say this for C21st England. It is – for the moment – easier for a girl to go out in very little. But really Daddy can't you modify the climate just a teensy bit.
You will perhaps find that unfashionable and also – not fitting your stereotype, I suspect. What's the expression? At it like rabbits. Well, Aphrodite, of course, not to mention Pan. Apollo indeed. Athena and I, we see things differently. It was and is an expression of independence. We are immaculate. We were not of course remotely feminist as the modern world understands the term but – of course – the modern world understands ancient Greece almost entirely through the public words of men, not the private prayers of women. O Artemis, in my dreams at least let me run free in the forest with you. Athena got the more cerebral ones. It was not the case that every man regarded his lady simply as a housekeeper-cum-foot-stool; some actually talked to their women and even listened. There was that suitable and that un- and naturally it has never been entirely possible to erase women from the structure of a society so we have to be allocated a position in that structure and that position has to be firmly publicly maintained for the cohesion of the society but you're probably quite thick if you think that what any public figure says on camera a is exactly what he or she says when he or she gets into bed with his or her partner. What is known to be fluid must be affirmed as fixed. Thus Aristotle could write fluently of 'the nature of the slave' while being married to the niece of not only a freed slave but now a ruler in his own right. That slaves in Rome could be freed and become citizens with the right to vote was read with one half of the brain, that slavery is an immovable human condition, with the other. It has been well said (by Athena) that men generally write on any subject impinging on male hegemony with their eyes tight shut. Aspasia of course forced those sealed lids open and they squeaked and wailed and squawked quite as wildly as any silly hysterical little woman. Of course she cried sometimes. She cried to me. Smashing a glass ceiling is a painful business.
It has of course been observed - reading about ourselves is awfully jolly - that we were not the embodiments of the perfect citizen-wife, except perhaps for dear Hestia tending the hearth. Indeed, it has been noted, drily, if anyone came across us in vacuo, he or she might assume us a modern construct, an imposition of more modern values on an ancient culture, obviously phoney, standing out like blackbirds on a snow-field. Neither anxious little Mary nor great earth mother, we embodied in fact female possibility, the capacity for more than reproduction, nurture and making sure dinner was on the table, but that we had to work out for ourselves.
“Perhaps they should all murder their fathers,” I murmur.
I feel him laughing.
“Exterminate all men!”
“If the majority of those in power were women, this would not be happening.”
“Have they lost their minds/Over the future of womankind! It will take more than rock lyrics.”
“They must be made objects of ridicule, the stranglehold broken”
Yes, of course I am the goddess of hunting. I am also the patroness of young girls.
Hephaistos grumbled. I'm a smith not a mason!
But can you do it? asked Apollo.
Of course I can do it!
Ah, the University, the Quad, the Rectangle, the Square and the Octagon - not only are these verbal people; clearly they know something of mathematics. It is the start of the academic year, unusually hot for October. The grass has had time to recover from summer trampling and welcomes excited freshers.. In the midst of the gently buzzing crowd appears a quite startlingly good looking young man in black jeans with a black bandana around his long curly hair and a black T-shirt, and some kind of a wooden choker. Girls do not look at his choker, but if they had they probably wouldn't have recognized it as a little phorminx. The young man is apparently oblivious and wanders off to get a coffee.
Apollo spends a long time casing the joint. Having found the Department of Greek, he traces it to its furthest extent which is a south-facing courtyard of irregular shape – how dare they - across half of which runs a crumbling brick wall of apparently no purpose, separating one patch of grass from another. Nonetheless, the courtyard is sheltered and clearly tended, a few late roses and chrysanthemums Around the grass, runs a path On the path are a couple of benches. On one of them is a girl failing to organize a coffee, a lunch-box, a small pile of books and a lap-top. To save the lap-top the books must fall. She swears fluently, spills the coffee on her leg and makes a sort of fouch! noise, for the coffee is hot.. Apollo picks up the books for her. The Duchess of Malfi?
“Not a student of Greek?”
“'Grief, no! I like it here. Not many people know about this place.”
“How true.”
He goes on his way and vanishes off through the swing-door.
The corridor is brightly lit and lined with posters, timetables, reading lists suggestive of life, but there appear to be no humans. He is looking for the office of Dr Bill Foromonovic. Ah! And the light is on.
He knocks firmly on the door.
“Enter!”
He smiles warmly at Dr Foromonovic, much like an interviewer greeting a particularly nervous candidate.
“Do excuse me. I found this. Strange thing, some kind of paperweight? I thought I'd better hand it in.”
“Good of you,” murmurs Bill, concealing his surprise at confronting a youth closely resembling the Apollo Belvedere. “I must apologize, don't know everyone yet. Are you one of our freshers?”
“Post-grad,” says Apollo, “bane of my life, my youthful looks.”
Bill notes the phorminx and smiles to himself. He must know what he looks like! Bit difficult to carry a bow around London.
“Then I must apologize again! A strange thing, as you say.” A small squat arrow sits on the desk between them, arrowhead rather, only no-one ever made an arrow of what looks like translucent marble. “I shall send an email! Has anyone lost a paperweight? That will I think be comprehensible only to the owner.”
“Then I shall not disturb you further.”
Bill returns to the nightmare of timetabling a wide array of subsidiary subjects, and not only those of students of Greek for the Department worked closely with SOAS and taught both Greek language and Greek culture to students of Persian and Iranian, Sanskrit, Ancient China, and indeed there was now to be a full degree in the Ancient World, though the content was not yet fully threshed out. Philosophy with Greek and Ancient History with Greek were standards as of course was accommodating the Latinists. Study of the ancient world was thriving. He knew the opinion of the funding committees was split down the middle on this, what's the point, versus what the point is: enthusiastic, highly educated, articulate people spanning the globe who know the world began with neither Christianity nor Islam.
The paperweight or whatever it is sits on his desk. His eyes keep being drawn to it. I should have taken his name. He berates himself briefly – I should not accept being busy as an excuse in others! Ah well, I'm sure I shall see him around. The more you stare – extraordinary, quite extraordinary. It's like – the most beautiful picture you have ever seen but you can't say what it's a picture of.
Only if you keep staring you can. Surf, clouds of foaming surf and half-veiled by them the form of a woman in a short tunic with a bow. He blinks, laughs. Ridiculous! Tricks of light and texture. No, little paperweight, Aphrodite arose from the foam, not Artemis. He looks again and it seems that the woman turns into a most imposing figure of a man, broad of chest, bearded. This is really very clever. There must be a chip. A very sophisticated version of those – oh what d'you call them. Things kids used to have where you shake them and snow falls. I want one. It's delicious.
Someone is having me on? Perhaps truly it is lost property and someone is going mad looking for it. If you possess this, you do not carry it around with you as though it were a phone. How then do you come to lose it? The thing is distracting him and he truly is busy, busy, busy. He puts it in the drawer and sends the email.
There is another smaller courtyard, square, barely larger than a pocket handkerchief, off-limits, mostly decorative gravel in the midst of which on a pedestal stands an of course imitation Grecian urn. The walls which bound it are glass, letting natural light into the 'museum', a small but much loved collection as much a question of sentiment as of scholarship, photographs of 'me with my first shard', a few small relics, anything of moment having been delivered to the BM, the minute office of the Head of Department, Prof Santos, and what is dubbed the internet cafe, being the computer and reprographics room, in the corner of which is a coffee-machine, a water-dispenser, a small fridge and a couple of easy chairs. All in all a considerable number of people see a shower of golden arrows fill the urn. A third-year grins evilly. It's a show we put on for freshers. The trajectory...mutter the mathematically inclined. The trajectory, others note drily, is suggestive only of heaven. The courtyard can be accessed by anyone with a key but only Estates have a key and by the time they arrive a hundred phones are clicking. It is all most untoward and indeed disruptive. Call the Fortean Times! Student are shepherded off to wherever they ought to be, but not before some cheery soul has urged caution, could be contaminated, coated. Can't be too careful these days. Is this biological warfare! First the biochemists then the chemists are pulled in. The real problem, remarks a shaken chemist is they do appear to be pure gold. Well, we are short of funds! A rather unusual anonymous donation. But provenance. Fell off the back of a lorry, guv? Should we call the police. How can you lose 12 golden arrows! Naturally this curious incident makes the news.
Phelps of course is furious. A childish stunt! Phelps does not think the Faculty of Arts houses serious people like himself. Serious people get things done in this world. Serious people do not lounge about reading or waste public funds on discerning the nature of truth. Serious people know facts when they see them. Serious people live in the real world and do not let matters of principle get in their way. He has been astonished in the past at how many of even his own colleagues in the biological sciences fail to be serious people, the new venture being kept under wraps, what the eye don't see, the heart don't grieve over, eh, he really does not want his new Centre for Biomedical Research scuppered by adverse publicity.
How, Bill, asks himself, can you have 12 golden arrows? One would be bad enough. The cost excludes a jolly student jape. A point is being made, for the moment obscure. A stunt? What is an area of contention? The Marbles! Wrong building, guys, the BM is next door. He opens his drawer and stares just a little unnerved at the toy, paperweight, whatever, which has changed. Marble, black marble, but it's not like a lump of marble, it's like a bottomless pool of liquid marble into which you could dive, in which you could drown – were you approximately the size of a paper-clip, of course. He pauses, suffering a moment's acute data overload. Just at this moment, he really doesn't want to remember that the altar at Delphi was made of black marble
He looks into the pool, stares into pink and gold and peach and sunset and then stars, endless stars. Microsoft do that one, he mutters but the stars coalesce as galaxies, which then dissolve, scatter at the approaching sun. Uh
A very expensive trick. Who has the money? Hellenismos?
There had been a somewhat awkward incident when both the Hellenic Society and the Islamic Society had booked the same room. Two rational solutions presented themselves - one group go elsewhere or a fascinating discussion of Sufi examination of Greek thought. Neither had been taken up. The reciting of a prayer to Athena in front of a Muslim woman in a niqab could have turned quite nasty, were in not that the recitation was in Greek. Most of his students regarded Islam as a Johnny-come-lately, possibly the worst being the son of Iranian refugees whose favourite attire was a T-shirt with 'Mazda lamps stay brighter longer' on the front. Perhaps fortunately, not everyone got the allusion.
Time to teach! Afterwards, I think, a word with Jim.
Jim is on the 'phone, hold up his hand. Yes, yes, no. He cuts the call.
“Bloody arrows!”
“You ain't seen nothing yet...Someone gave me this yesterday. Said he'd found it and was handing it in. Look at it. Look into it.”
Jim looks.
“Good....gods!”
“It does not help that he looked like Apollo!”
“Beware of Greeks....If you were given this, there was presumably some purpose to it. Other than ogling Aphrodite.”
“Why?” demanded Bill. “Why should it not be ornamental? The same could be said for the arrows!”
“It could. Have you tried to find out how it works?”
“Of course not. Break it.”
“We wait, I think, for something more clearly defined.”
“Bring Them Back!” said Bill
“The gods?”
“The Marbles!”
“That occurs to me also. This Department at least does not need to be reminded of Greece.” Bill gestured at the Thing. (His mind had been tempted to call it the Oracle and he had quashed that one fast. “You keep it.”
“When things settle down - “ He laughed. “If things settle down, I'll have a real session with it.”
“A libation, at least,” said Jim.
“Any excuse will do.”
Jim called him at 8.30 the following morning.
“It seems the Medical School is in chaos.”
“Dare I ask?”
“Item: There's a rather fine statue of Lister in the lobby. It has been crowned with vine leaves and adorned with a lyre.” Bill began to pretend to sound like a staid academic suitably shocked, but Jim was continuing “Item: Behind the main reception desk has appeared a full-size portrait of a naked Apollo with a small plaque reading 'God of Medicine and Healing'. Item: on the half-landing is a full-sized portrait of Athena, fully clothed, I hasten to add – labelled of course 'Goddess of Reason' – surrounded by a rather pointed collection of books. On Liberty. The Open Society and Its Enemies. The Age of Reason.”
Bill sighed.
“And they think our kids – I don't suppose they even know where the Medical School is.”
“Item,” continued Jim, “an extraordinary creation, a (19th print of the riots marking the admission of women to the Medical School heavily Photoshopped to include Athena confronting the rioters with Medusa's head and Artemis stage right pointing her bow at them. A further full-length portrait of Artemis in her hallmark tunic bears the legend 'Mini-skirts are old-fashioned.'
Bill could not suppress a yelp of laughter.
“The students from a Hindu background express considerable enthusiasm for goddesses The students of Greek descent crawl on the floor with laughter. A Miss Shah and Miss Al-Khanoum,, in appearance quite conservative, giggle and remark the Lord Apollo is rather sexy. A Miss Mahmoud in a skirt so short as to be barely extant yowls with laughter. The usual number of Christians and Muslims are outraged. These are overwhelmingly male.” Bill sighed again. “It has been said to me, thinly – I do not like that man – no matter how diverse the backgrounds and beliefs of our female students, they have one thing in common - “
“They want to be doctors not doormats,” finished Bill for him. “The overwhelming majority recognize cause and effect?”
“Just so.
“Can't they get him on medical ethics! If he doesn't like Jews and women, how can he be fit to practise?”
“He's clever. It's not actually he who makes the remarks that have almost the entire campus fuming. He merely invites the speakers who do and sits smiling through his beastly little Himmler spectacles.”
The Treasurer of the Islamic Society is a medical student.
Jim's turn to sigh.
“The other divide of course is between first years of narrower background and those who know the context.”
“Welcome to the University! Complaints to mum and dad?”
“Almost certainly. Phelps of course.”
“Of course.”
“Breaking and entering is undoubtedly a criminal offence. I am really not sure of the status, legally or in any other way. Can one say something has been vandalized when it is unbroken? And indeed unmarked.”
“Spend hours on that one! I put up a picture. I remove it. At least there's a hook, a hole in the wall.”
“Just propped,” said Jim.
“I am trying to connect this with our arrows. Artemis' arrows could bring destruction to women. If we are being subtle here, whoever 'we' are, might we not be symbolizing destruction to women has penetrated the heart of the University?”
“They shall not pass!”
“Who's stopping them?”
“That just may be the question. Round up the usual suspects!”
The Chair of the Hellenic Society is either in bed with flu, Prof, he has a temperature of about 40! or concealing injuries sustained during felonious activity though like everyone else Jim is unable to see how both alarms and guards were circumvented. Jim is prepared to keep an open mind.
“We didn't do it. We wish we had, but we didn't.”
Bill looks at his schedule. Certainly there are many things he needs to do, ought to do and sometimes even wants to do but there is nothing he has to do for three and a half-hours.
He takes the Thing out of his desk, pockets it, and skives off to the Goat and Compasses, thinking a sequence of events – it's university business, Jim but not as we know, it.
Jim meanwhile was reading a lab report. The arrows tested negative for the full range of known deadly toxins but did appear to cause spots. Well, itchiness, like nettle-rash. Must be the alloy, some kind of metal allergy..
The Goat and Compasses has a fine beer garden He sits himself down, takes a swig of his pint, then firmly lifts it and pours about half a cupful onto the grass. Now, by the blessed gods, little paperweight tell me your secrets. Does it have to be shaped like an arrow? . And now the sun is shining on a London street lined with cheerful crowds and ambulance men, police-officers standing by and cheer goes up as a single female runner appears, apparently effortless, streaking past like the wind, running a – marathon?
'What is this thing! The word Ask comes instantly into his head. Ask what! Who are you? I am Apollo. Obviously, says Bill to himself, that is my projection. Or obviously not. Apollo Belvedere is approaching his table. Am I dressed for this!
“Twelve golden arrows are a very expensive joke.”
“No joke. May I have a crisp?”
“Is it wise to refuse?”
Apollo picked up the bag.
“I love Smoky Bacon!”
“Hmm. Charred to a cinder? Who are you?”
“I am Apollo.”
“You will forgive me if I have difficulty in believing that.”
“Oh yes.”
Bill snorted.
“Let us stick to essentials. You, whoever you are, clearly wish to converse with me,who know who I am.”
“This society has two pillars, Athens and Nazareth, love and mind, if you prefer not to be parochial. These are universal values, facets of the human animal. Both have been rotted, largely by those charged with upholding them. You are a lapsed Catholic.”
“Easy enough to find out.”
“You can't stand them. I can't stand them. Already we have much in common.”
“This is - “
“War,” said Apollo. “The arrows are hallmarked.”
Bill reached into his pocket and silently handed him a boring letter about a committee meeting and a biro.
Apollo briefly drew, a circlet of four pairs of antlers.
“Hmm! That still does not necessarily.”
“It just creates a link between me and my sister's arrows.”
“You appear to be communicating to me that England has incurred the wrath of the gods.”
“We came here because it was relatively civilized.”
Say that again slowly, thought Bill.
He said: “From the point of view of a scholar, that's a story I'd like to hear some time.”
“They threw it all away under the banner of Faith. Now they use Islam to do it again.”
Bill raised his eyebrows.
“That is my interpretation. It is not the usual one.”
“We have friends in common.”
“We do?”
“Professor Pallas.”
“Oh no,” said Bill. “I have – always thought of her as a rather special lady.”
“She is,” said Apollo.
“Agent in place?” suggested Bill. “Suppose I think of you as human plotters.”
Apollo gave the smallest shrug.
“The total destruction of their power needs those not susceptible to destruction of either body or reputation.”
“But without human support - ?”
“One cannot uphold democracy without the support of the demos. We wondered if you would care to join us for dinner.”
“Ambrosia?”
“Whatever you choose.”
“Ah. When in Greece...Olives I think will figure largely.”
“When do you finish?”
Midnight, thought Bill. The chances of my getting any work done today are slim.
“Six.”
“Pal will pick you up.”
“P- fine.” Live the dream! “May I ask – what is this thing exactly?”
“What did you call it?”
“T- oracle!”
“You ask. It answers.”
“So does my tablet,” said Bill. He picked up the Thing. “What was the location of the debate between Anaxagoras and Plato?” Trick question. Apollo smiled but Bill was muttering to himself no, a computer could compare the dates (Plato was born in the year before Anaxagoras's death) even as the Thing showed him Zeus laughing. “Screen-saver,” said Doubting William.
“You could call her Sibyl,” said Apollo. “If I briefly transform, you will say it is something slipped in your drink.”
Bill spluttered.
“That may be worth it!”
There seemed to be a lot of golden light.
When he gets back to his office, a copy of the lab report is on his desk. Of course there could have been something slipped in my beer. I think I shall wait a little before making it generally known we have attracted the attention of the gods.
Pal knocked on Bill's half-open door, entered without waiting
He smiled.
“Well, lady Athena, I seem to have gone up in the world. You are, you know, going to have to explain to me how it works. Goddesses can get away with silence. Not Professors of Philosophy.”
“Laters.”
Bill looked around. He wasn't entirely sure how he'd got here or maybe the rational part of his mind was screening it out. There are limits!
“A veritable home from home.”
Olympus? Yeah, it's like it is on the film-sets, a tasteful mixture of white gold inlaid with silver and the curious translucent white marble of the Thing, full of palest peach, palest blue, palest primrose, like a particularly stunning sunset.. All the soft furnishings were silver fleece. The light was befitting a mountain-top. He wandered over to the window, expecting to see – what? The foothills of Olympus, celestial towers? What he got was the view from Richmond Hill.
“Charming,” he murmured. You are having me on.
World-famous rock idol Stavros Santinides appeared.
Bill's eyes widened. He was about to say you got dragged in too but Stavros held out his hand in a business-like fashion and said, “Pan. Tends to unnerve humans, my actual appearance.”
“Yes, it would”
Pan waved at the surroundings with a wicked grin.
“Have to keep up appearances! If you went to Balmoral, you would have certain expectations, which would not include minimalist design and op-art.”
“That is true,” said Bill.
Pal appeared/re-appeared/manifested.
“Making friends, good, good.”
She wore standard upper-class female Athenian dress.
“Glad to see you take the helmet off occasionally - “ Words failed him as he turned into a soppy mass of adoring babble.
“Turn it down, sweetie,” said Pan.
Aphrodite became normally devastating instead of abnormally.
“Madam,” said Bill, recollecting himself. “you can only be.”
“Just don't ask who is the fairest,” hissed Pan.
“Trouble-maker!”
What Bill instantly described to himself as a little wide-eyed poppet appeared.
“I'm Eris.”
“All hail Discordia!” replied Bill promptly, then paused “You are not – and this may be just about the biggest faux pas since ever – all Olympians.”
“We're those who like it here,” said Pan promptly. “Shall we – I mean personally marble bores the shit out of me.
“Me, too, darling,” said Aphrodite.
“Design has really moved on,” said Pan.
“The Garden Room,” said Aphrodite. “Don't you just love Peter Jones!”
“I love,” said Bill instantly, “the Garden Room. It may be just slightly doing my head in, but I love it anyway.” It may be the scent of the hibiscus. I have walked through a door into a room, not a garden, not even a walled garden, though it has walls. How then do I define it as a room? It has an immeasurably high ceiling of, I suppose, glass. It also, and this is the catch, appears to stretch to infinity, as though – as though you can just see the boundaries, immeasurably – what else – distant. It has a stream and a little wooden bridge over the stream, a clearing in a grove – presumably sacred – and in the clearing small tables of intricate metal work and by them – he snorted – couches, the kline as interpreted by modern designers, of the same delicate and intricate metal work but upholstered like a chaise-longue, and a central long low table of the same design laden with food and drink.
“Pad Thai,” said Pal enthusiastically.
“Yummy,” said Aphrodite. “It really pays to get out more.”
“You are not - “ said Bill cautiously, “ - yours is not the only pantheon - ?”
“My point exactly,” said Pan.
“The Jade Emperor,” said Pal, “is a good friend.”.
“We think we've got problems!” said Pan.
“We have problems,” said Pal. “Late again! The twins.”
“I think you do not mean Castor and Pollux.”
The deer chariot hove into view, high-stepping hinds apparently skilled in dressage.
Apollo stepped out.
“The traffic,” he murmured airily.
Artemis released the hinds from their harnesses and they wandered off to graze.
“Well?” she demanded.
“Everything's cool, babe,” said Pan..
Artemis glowered at him then turned to Bill
“Are my arrows safe?”
Bill grinned.
“You tell me! They seem to cause itches.”
“Obviously we didn't want to start with a plague,” she said briskly.
“The target of nettle-rash is unclear to me,” said Bill.
She giggled.
“It's not exactly nettle-rash.”
“He's been playing in the lab again,” said Pal
“It is not widely known,” said Apollo,”that my remit includes pharmacology. A psychotropic substance known to the ancients which has still not been clearly identified. Its common name is mind-itch. It's a test.”
“It's inhaled,” said Pal. “The effect depends on the victim.”
“Victim?”
'”Trippy,” said Pan.
“I think of it,” said Apollo, “as a mind-irritant. It is liable to attack, at unexpected moments, those parts of a mind that are sealed shut and cause the victim to have what to him or her are impossible and perhaps even intolerable thoughts, with which he or she must then deal.”
“The pictures too?” asked Bill.
“Oh yes,” said Apollo.
Some hours later, Bill is saying, “A society that wouldn't let a woman within ten miles of fighting its wars venerated a woman in full battle-dress! What is your explanation?”
“Virginity,” said Artemis promptly. “If we start from the paradigm that man is perfection and woman defective, we must then ask what is the defect? A woman could be a man if only we poor silly things could control our urges - “
“Both control our desires and not fall sway to the desires of others,” said Pal. “A virgin demonstrates controlling reason.”
Bill hooted.
“Not what I learned in Catholic school.”
Some hours later, many things have happened. Bill became slowly aware the garden was alive. It wasn't just the adorable little brown tortoise that nuzzled his feet.
“He's hungry,” Pan had said anxiously.
“Lettuce?” suggested Bill
The others laughed.
“Don't start him off!”
“There is so much misinformation about the diet of tortoises,” tutted Pan. “Point him towards the hibiscus. They're sweet little things but they're not, you know, terribly bright. I think it's because we're eating. A confusion of odours. So many pet tortoises die just because they're fed the wrong things.” Just at this moment, thought Bill, the great god Pan reminds me of nothing so much as an anxious twelve-year-old. “I've started a public education campaign.”
“Is it all right to pick him up?” asked Bill.
“Scoop him up from underneath,” said the nerdy bespectacled twelve-year-old. “Never pick them up by their shells.”
Beyond the dazzle of the hibiscus lie the trees. I am aware, Bill thought, that though they do not step out of the trees, though they are at the same time of the trees, which is of course impossible, but what isn't, there are dryads watching, laughing, talking to each other, even flower-nymphs. The tortoise was nibbling enthusiastically and Pan still holding forth upon tortoise nutrition. The nymph of the hibiscus seemed to be dancing. Not sure about that, thought Bill. Does she like being eaten? Is she distinct from the leaf being nibbled? I have questions!
Pal began to expound her plan for SPQR, the Society for the Protection of Question and Reason. With just a little difficulty Bill began to think, hard.
THE PRINCE, THE CARDINAL, THE DUKE, THE POLITICIAN AND THE PROFESSOR
The prince, the cardinal and the duke expect obedience. The politican and the professor duly obey: there's money in it, a lot of money
The prince flies in regularly to desecrate a chunk of Nash Terrace . The cardinal currently hangs from the rafters in Hill Street, on loan from an obscure South American state, the chief claim to fame of which is the refuge it gave to former members of the Waffen SS. The duke has estates in Plaza-toro; still has estates in Plaza-toro, though his grandfather, his great-uncle and sundry loyal helots were massacred by the brigadistas. He really doesn't like the niece of a Jewish Communist who fought in the Spanish Civil War. He expresses his detestation by creeping around behind closed doors to achieve injury to her body. People are impressed. You can tell he's a real gentleman
The politician pretends to represent the oppressed working-class (this despite being a key figure in New Labour). The professor pretends to be human.
The prince, the cardinal, the duke, the politican and the professor have in common sexual practices not for the squeamish.
The other thing they have in common is commitment to the destruction of the free world.
See the distress this 'freedom' causes to the little people of sincere belief. That the education provided by the prince, the cardinal and indeed the duke through his various charitable foundations has failed to develop either the hearts or the minds of the little people, such that they remain helpless slaves, slaves of their masters, slaves to themselves, intellectually and emotionally incapable, goes unremarked. They are victims!
The politician likes victims. Victims are critical. Anything that distresses victims is clearly evil and must be abolished instantly.
The professor of course provides the intellectual rationale
Since mind does not exist, democracy is unnecessary.
There is no human capacity to over-ride the hard-wiring, therefore there is no liberty. Where there is no liberty, there is no responsibility - if you are not free to choose you cannot fairly be held to account for your actions: you cannot choose if you have nothing to choose with and so clearly the notion of elected government is puerile in the extreme.
This is merely the quasi-scientific formulation of the world according to prehistoric religion, where independent function of heart and mind is self-will. When you have abolished or condemned all that makes us human, we are the product of our instincts and of what is taught us, empty vessels to be told what and who to be, what to say, what to think, what to do. The mediaeval popes understood that as readily as did Hitler and Stalin: just believe.
Like the religious zombie, the medical zombie functions intellectually working within a given frame of reference, regards it as frightening, evil and perhaps impossible to smash through the walls of this cage, question the frame of reference. Propositions are not considered objectively, on their merits if any, but regarded as good or evil, sane or mad, depending on whether or not they mesh with the assumptions that constitute the walls of the cage.
In vain do those of us with opinions of our own claim they actually are our own. The claim is dismissed. We are the products of our external circumstances. Freedom of conscience is not an issue because there is no conscience to be free. Having been imbued with false consciousness or possessed by the Devil, as you prefer, you must be reprogrammed to right thinking. Biological fundies such as Phelps deconstruct the West with their 'practical man's' contempt for all that makes us human. Can you synthesize a word? Can you grow an idea? Arf, arf, we are all good practical men here. Man is the tool-making ape. Education consists in learning to wield tools, a technical training. No training of the mind can take place because the mind does not exist. Since mind doesn't exist, 6000 years of its coping with the illusorily complex business of being human are meaningless. The only reality is the PPO and the particular head of your monkey-troop. Our new high priests are endowed with understanding of the entirety of the human condition via a grasp of cell biology. Those who have received a technical training are superior to those who can think, because learning to think, to analyse arguments, doesn't actually exist. There are no internal differences between individuals in ability (or volition, desire to learn). Some have had tool-wielding pasted onto their exteriors, others not.
Alcibiades. Please, Pericles, can you teach me what a law is?
Pericles. To be sure I can.
Alcibiades. I should be so much obliged if you would do so. One so often hears the epithet "law-abiding" applied in a complimentary sense; yet, it strikes me, one hardly deserves the compliment, if one does not know what a law is.
Pericles. Fortunately there is a ready answer to your difficulty. You wish to know what a law is? Well, those are laws which the majority, being met together in conclave, approve and enact as to what it is right to do, and what it is right to abstain from doing.
Alcibiades. Enact on the hypothesis that it is right to do what is good? or to do what is bad?
Pericles. What is good, to be sure, young sir, not what is bad.
Alcibiades. Supposing it is not the majority, but, as in the case of an oligarchy, the minority, who meet and enact the rules of conduct, what are these?
Pericles. Whatever the ruling power of the state after deliberation enacts as our duty to do, goes by the name of laws.
Alcibiades. Then if a tyrant, holding the chief power in the state, enacts rules of conduct for the citizens, are these enactments law?
Pericles. Yes, anything which a tyrant as head of the state enacts, also goes by the name of law.
Alcibiades. But, Pericles, violence and lawlessness--how do we define them? Is it not when a stronger man forces a weaker to do what seems right to him--not by persuasion but by compulsion?
Pericles. I should say so.
Alcibiades. It would seem to follow that if a tyrant, without persuading the citizens, drives them by enactment to do certain things--that is lawlessness?
Pericles. You are right; and I retract the statement that measures passed by a tyrant without persuasion of the citizens are law.
Alcibiades. And what of measures passed by a minority, not by persuasion of the majority, but in the exercise of its power only? Are we, or are we not, to apply the term violence to these?
Pericles. I think that anything which any one forces another to do without persuasion, whether by enactment or not, is violence rather than law.
Alcibiades. It would seem that everything which the majority, in the exercise of its power over the possessors of wealth, and without persuading them, chooses to enact, is of the nature of violence rather than of law?
To be sure (answered Pericles), adding: At your age we were clever hands at such quibbles ourselves. It was just such subtleties which we used to practise our wits upon; as you do now, if I mistake not.
Xenophon, The Memorabilia (trad. HG Dakyns)
Of course everyone knows a classical education is irrelevant to the modern world.
In this world where everyone is non-human, it is hard to be precise about the particular category of sub-humanity in which belong women. Women are irrational. His Grace's grasp of reason is tenuous to say the least. He commands. Others obey. The rationale for that obedience is that he was born to rule. Women are emotional. His Highness is merely psychotic. People are property, pawns on his chessboard. It is a mistake to say he is emotionally dead. Naturally the exterior is suave, sophisticated. You will not see His Grace screaming the hate he feels for those who refuse to accord with his wishes, nor the cardinal, nor the prince. Only the wilful and rebellious must suffer, torment, pain unending. Especially if they are women. It is given. It is the divine order
The word is consensual. Most practitioners of BDSM are sane they recognize they practise a fantasy, even if that fantasy is 24/7; both parties are free to walk away.
For some a reciprocal satisfaction of need can never be enough nor is submission fantasy, merely execution of the divine order. Slaves do not walk away.
Self-will is evil. Will must be broken. The unwilling slave must become compliant, surrender, become a creature of her master's will, yearn, beg to please. Become the tireless servant of Truth.
'War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.'
Mr Orwell would have understood perfectly. Dezzi too understands.
Mr Rushdie or Sir Salman, as he now is, would understand something further: the particular threat posed to an ideology by those who were born into it and have now matured.
The prince is a Muslim, the duke a Catholic, the politician a new Stalinist and the professor merely an undifferentiated fascist. Zere aim is vorld domination. A reasonable person might say OK, for the moment they are united by a hatred of Jews, women, gays and freedom, but the New World Order has to have a dominant ideology and they can't all be top dog. Actually, since the new Stalinists are second to none in upholding the rights of capital and of property, they can; time is not of significance to Allah and demographics wiill ensure the eventual Caliphate. For the moment we are all going to live happily ever after in the Fourth Reich. They have of course in common also being raving mad. Nonetheless, for reasons we shall go into later, they have seized the citadels of bourgeois power; not only do they believe the free world will fall to them, but they have a lot of other people believing it too.
There is no point in fighting. Ford Prefect would understand.
Consequently Dezzi is being thrown out of a Vogon air-lock.
This is merely the first time. Just don't mention petunias.
THE FIXERS
The Hospital is convulsed with horror. The proposition that England is a free and democratic society has been voiced. Most don't believe it. Everyone respects the Church! A few doctors and nurses know which country they're in, but they are much the minority. Sure, she'll do what she's told. Our decisions are not to be questioned. And you are who? In this particular caase his name is O'Hanlon, and he's well past 16, an eminent surgeon. It is all nonsense There can be no question of permitting insult to the Holy Church. The politician nods understandingly, the new Stalinist, you will recall. If there is a single concrete measure of the divorce from reality of our little nest of cockroaches, who would of course as any good cockroach does, freeze if the lights were turned on, it is the number of Marxist cockroaches adamant criticism, derision, abuse of religion are not only unacceptable but unheard of. She is of course a Jew. It is understandable. It is
not acceptable. She must be punished. She is evil.
In this world in which democracy is unknown, freedom unknown, reality regarded as an unfortunate contagion to be kept at bay by rigorous hand-washing protocols, enforced of course by the nurses, who are so terribly good at enforcing, twelve men run medicine. Naturally they are known as the Apostles. You can sometimes work round them, but you do not cross them.
Dezzi's boss is the first female Apostle.
Peter is primus inter pares, the first of the Apostles. He sits in his lab in Oxford. 98% of our DNA is shared with the chimp. Not only that: we brachiate! It really obsesses them. Clearly the goal of biological evolution is strap-hanging on the Victoria Line. It beats in his brain there is no god but DNA and Dawkins is his prophet. He looks at his god and his god is all and all are equal, all are identical, and there are no love, sex, pain, death and the whole damn‘ thing, there is no ‘human‘, there is only biochemistry, and we must all react in the same way and feel the same thing and cannot question what we think and what we feel and cannot change it, and if we do not react in the same way and feel the same thing that is false consciousness and bourgeois conditioning, and if we say we do not react in the same way and feel the same thing and we can change how we react and how we feel and each of us is different, that is bourgeois conditioning, because we are all equal, we are all the same, and the humanities terrify the little monkey by reflecting on love, sex, pain, death and the whole damn‘ thing, and our current ills are not the fault of liberty but the fault of failing to encourage people to exercise their hearts and minds because their hearts and minds don‘t exist and people who are emotionally whole do not break up their housing-estates and their fellow-humans who live there and people who do are not exercising their freedom but being slaves of the god but the confused little monkey knows better. The confused little monkey isn’t capable of taking into account the pain of people at seeing things smashed up, the distress of people at not being able to use the ‘phone box, the pain of people who are bruised and bleeding. The confused little monkey knows that bourgeois law exists solely to perpetuate the economic status quo. There is no activity of heart or mind in the confused little monkey’s world.
But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will, whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class.
Marx and Engels: The Manifesto of the Communist Party
Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.
Marx and Engels: The Manifesto of the Communist Party
The London teaching-hospitals far from the dreaming spires, what used to be called the Big Five and are now no-one's quite sure what, are the parishes, as it were, where the servants of the Apostles toil tirelessly for well, something or other, the witless public thinking it the greater good. You might have heard it described as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Naturally we do our best for those referred to as pay-shunts.
The chief problem of the NHS is that no-one has told it Stalin is dead. Everything is confidentshal. If NHS employees felt free to spread its internal workings over the front-pages of every newspaper in the country, there would be quite the wrong sort of revolution.
She's making it all up. Sure, Herr Sturmbahnfuhrer, sure, the entire history of the free world her own personal invention. Doctors are docile creatures, as brutally ignorant as the nurses and on the whole as easily led, but one or two dare to find this a little implausible. The CEO is kind but firm.
Career-suicide. Besides, obedience is well rewarded; money floods into medical research.
As our story gets ever nastier, we should not omit the Jewish and gay Sonderkommando who think to evade the more dubious desires of our new masters by being their most faithful and obedient slaves. We must note that Tel Aviv's marked aversion to those who call Jews apes is exceeded only by its marked aversion to Jews who behave like apes, as we must note that the many responses Outrage and Stonewall have to the Vatican do not include crippling women on its behalf. Consequently when a pair of gay pricks scream Dezzi is homophobic because she objects to their crippling her, Outrage will demonstrate a severe hearing deficit. Perhaps they should see a doctor.
Professor Sonderstein thinks himself not a faithful and obedient slave but as a spider at the centre of the web. He will fix things. Nothing must be said. His actual game is playing both ends against the middle. The gullibility, stupdity and ignorance of nurses is critical to this and so must not be threatened. Certainly he has contacts, but they do not include half the Israeli High Command, nor does having once attended a dinner in Haifa at which at which a general was present make one privy to the inner workings of Mossad. Nonetheless he spins a yarn to the IDF, a very silly little Jewish lass shooting her mouth off, Catholics desperately upset. Naturally, like any British Jew, the rise in anti-Semitism disturbs him, but that is not how to fight. What is? wonders the general to himself. Behind Sonderstein's babble, he detects that to which he has a knee-jerk reaction: if Jews are lucky, they may be seen, but they must not be heard. Never again will Jews appease.
It is not that which will scupper Sonderstein, but an accidental crossing of paths of which, since he has no real idea who and what Dezzi is, he could not have conceived. Dezzi went to an international school. That doesn't mean that she knows one of her former class-mates is now an Israeli general, though she'd recognize the name if anyone said it. Similarly, having gone to an international school doesn't mean that you know that one of your former class-mates is currently marked for throwing out of Vogon air-locks, but Sachi Rentz recognizes the name when he hears it. Consequently Rentz believes Sonderstein negative. The IDF takes up residence on Dezzi's computer. Shalom, guys, shalom. What is this, Shiksa Central? Surrounded by lunatics pretending nothing untoward is happening, Dezzi finds the IDF whatever it is, entity in her network drive a reassuring piece of evidence that something very untoward indeed is going down. They're bored, you know, they have nothing to do, they choose at random the computers of middle-aged English modern languages graduates to curl up on, put their feet up, have a nap. She takes a screenshot. Not that anyone is remotely interested in evidence, but maybe one day.
Unlike having her computer nuked from the People's Republic of China, it was soothing. What the hell, take a screenshot of that too, at least preserve the Norton logs.
Sonderstein's actual concerns tend rather to the drop in private patient income that would follow if rich Arabs learned the Trust upheld intellectual freedom and of course to Phelps' baby, the Centre for Biomedical Research. A great many people don't like him. The people who actively hate him are mostly Jews who think he shames Jewry, but of course they are not serious people and so don't count.
He is not of course alone in these concerns. O'Hanlon too spins a good yarn and counts many eminent Catholics among his patients, to whom he spins it. Every leading physician in London is convinced of the necessity of the CBR. It remains only to convince them that the destruction of England is not the price and since freedom and democracy are part of an alien tongue they are readily persuaded. Besides, there is the Trust! The Trust is God. The Trust is mother, father, brother, sister, food and water in a desert. There is no truth but the Trust, there is no reality but the Trust. The Trust must not be brought into disrepute.
As the ancients desperately consulted the innards of chickens, or even Sibyl, some seek guidance from the conduct of fruit-flies. Alas, even in an environment as putrid as the Hospital, fruit-flies are not to be seen. While the mostly normal might read books or start arguments, especially people who have actually been to universities, might reason, might even assay an independent confirmation of the facts, doctors seek Authority. Authority will calm them. Authority will tell them what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is false. .
They are not sane but then of course they are not actually human.
All those years in Medical School being told they share 98%% of their DNA with the chimpanzee have rendered medicine terminally ill. Most doctors think they're chimpanzees. The rest are baboons. Reason, morality, these mean nothing, doctors being in fact divided into those who dictate reality and those who imbibe it. Truth is whatever our masters say it is. The Good is whatever our masters say it is. Doctors think lies repeated behind closed doors must constitute fact. There is therefore no need to question, no need to argue and of course no need for transparency. How can the truth be exposed when it is already known!
In this case Truth comes from the Prime Minister himself, who had it from the politician, who had it from the professor, who had it from the Apostles. Of course the Prime Minister also had it from his advisers on matters of faith, who had it from the cardinal
Shit, man, they won't even say what their problem is in the Agora.
As Socrates said...
but if any man says that he ever learned or heard anything privately from me, which all the others did not, be assured that he is lying. . Apology: 33b
Even if they count themselves good Catholics:
John 18:20 Jesus answered him, I spake openly to the world; I ever taught in the synagogue, and in the temple, whither the Jews always resort; and in secret have I said nothing.
Doctors are many things. One of them is totally unfit for any position of authority in any university worthy of the name.
THE ENFORCERS
The pig snuffles and is short of breath, more than a few paces of propelling its rolls of lard forward a torment. Clearly it is not a well pig. Its hair is patchy and where hair is missing are suppurating boils. Its little trotters are painted a refained pink. This scarcely shows against the mottled bone but then the mottled bone scarcely shows beneath the wobbling mounds of diseased flesh. It is unconcerned lest pay-shunts be perturbed by its appearance for its business is not with the care of the sick but with the terrorizing of the well, and indeed making them less well, should they fail to be terrorized. Most of its head is empty, but somewhere under the frontal bone just behind the nose lurks a brain the size of a pea. This rattles around in the skull cavity, sometimes blocking the nose, hence the snuffles.
The fixers profess to be impressed by Nurse's searing intellect. Clearly nothing can be done unless Nurse's fine mind acknowledges the rationale for doing them..
Nurse's fine mind fails utterly to grasp that public sector managers are free neither to cripple staff who distress their masters nor to abolish democracy as an inconvenience to those masters. Rules must be obeyed. Which rules would those be, Nurse, the ones made by traitors for slaves?
In our new heavenly hierarchy directly below the Apostles are of course the Saints. That which does not occur to Nurse does not exist. After all Nurse is one of the leading intellects of the country. Nurse has a degree. Indeed people do find Nurse's mind quite terrifying.
Women do as they're told or get beaten. Nurse is very good at beating women. From time to time of course Nurse makes the headlines, whether in NHS scandals or in older ones as survivors of homes for fallen women finally dare speak out, or laundry women, of course. Here on the Kilburn border, there are no prizes for guessing Nurse's background. Like Doctor, she is wholly devoid of any scrap of intellectual or moral education: the most elementary facts of English history are unknown to her. How can any of it matter? If you do not like what someone says, you hit her. Like Doctor, she believes the mores of the hole in the ground out of which she crawled are those of the wider world.
One of the many things that does not occur to Nurse is that the public regarded nurses as angels for doing a job few are prepared to do, for endless patience and tenderness shown to the demented, the soiled, the frightened, the dying. Nurse too is no longer prepared to do that job, but thinks, so far as she can be said to think at all, that 'angels' is a statement of her innate value. Nurse, as she slowly drags the bloat of her self-importance as well as the more obvious bloat from one desk to another, one meeting to another, finds it inconceivable the public would not think her holy.
A fake professional class of the intellectually and morally derelict and mentally defective has been created and that's just the doctors, equally understanding of the virtue of obedience and the errors of liberalism, modernism and feminism. Nursing is so suitable for a woman, don't you think, possibly medicine if the girl is bright (at least by the standards of medicine and nursing), but really for a woman to claim to have an intellect, to think she can pit that intellect against medicine, against His Eminence himself, that is absurd.
Professor Sonderstein has assured his colleagues our lovely nurses are looking after Dezzi. What a silly little woman she is, her mind a joke, her body property, a naughty little girl trying it on, objecting to having been crippled. Nurse will not tolerate disobedience. Nurse has power. Nurse will crush her. Dezzi used to go hiking, climb large hills if not small mountains. She can read a map and use a compass. She thinks it unnecessary to be a pig. She is obviously a very sick woman, one of those who think she's as good a man. Worse, she thinks mindless illiterate animals do not have degrees, whether doctors or nurses. If Dezzi were in a cage, they would throw stones at her and prod her through the bars. As it is, she is in an open office in a London hospital and our lovely nurses have to restrict themselves to smirking and sniggering. She is treated like a leper, exhibited as a freak for the crimes of freedom, democracy, intelligence, education, literacy, honesty, principle and coirage.
Dezzi is in Jurassic Park and there are no herbivores.. It does not take her long to conclude that the only successful means of dealing with doctors and nurses would be a Kalashnikov, but she valiantly perserveres with despised reason.
I have been CRIPPLED. I HAVE BEEN ASSAULTED SUCH THAT I CAN NO LONGER WALK PROPERLY OR RUN.
This is a DEMOCRACY. POWER IS ACCOUNTABLE.
It means absolutely nothing to any of them. It still won’t mean anything to their twisted vile sick animal brains when there are banner headlines: VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN: IT’S WHAT YOU PAY YOUR TAXES FOR. They might, however, just cotton on the fact that they've got something wrong.
Oh and that in the absence of a First Amendment meaning no-one has to pay any attention to your filthy freak slaves these women present a danger to civilized female life.
Oh and decisive action by civilized human beings could have prevented all this, a demand for the facts, an insistence on reason, a concern for medical ethics. There weren't any as there aren't any.
[Vive la France! Vive M. Macron! I don't know that he'll be terribly good at it, but anything is better than.]
I should still be able to walk, had I not been totally at the mercy of the scum of the earth. At any point people could have intervened. They wanted and want the triumph of evil.
Oh and the obvious, that I am an Honours graduate of the University of London and both write and think rather successfully and I was treated like a naughty child, everything I said completely ignored, because no-one need feel obliged to pay any attention to anything said by a woman, because women only understand being hit, and not once has anyone acknowledged any of this has happened, I'm just a woman and readily flushed away.
You do not treat me like this, you do not bloody treat me like this. Of course your egos are such, so bloated, so diseased, that that means nothing to you, either. You just laugh, don't you, so sick are you, so mad that you are convinced you are set on high, a superior order of humanity, that people are your property. Belong in zoos. Utterly and completely insane. I am a separate equal human being. Except I'm not, I'm an extension of them, theirs to do with as they wish. I have no independent existence. Sexism of course is a complete non-issue to them, from the dirty animal women to the doctors, a silly joke. We shall just have to see what the University thinks about the willingness of Linch and Goldstone to destroy a woman.
When you have quite finished sucking their cocks, Blair and so many countless others, when you have quite finished agreeing with them about the wonders of religion and the moral superiority of the religious, when you have quite finished criminalizing civilized rational people who differ, when you have quite finished affirming that they are free to treat adult women like children, when you have quite finished affirming that they are quite free to attempt to break a woman's spine, when you have quite finished affirming they are quite free to attempt to destroy a woman, well, it's all for the best, isn't it.
All for the best. Just say nothing. Whose bloody best? Who gains from this, the sexist vermin of religion and slum, now assured they are free to butcher women, the average medical psychopath who thinks himself or herself a superior order of humanity, to decree the world, the many many enemies of the free world delighting in the abandoning of democracy and freedom, whose bloody best while I evidently got older and older, more and more disabled, more and more desperate. Who gains from the destruction of a free, democratic, educated Left-Wing Englishwoman, from affirming total contempt for fact and reason, from affirming language and reason are not essential tools of discourse, it's fine to keep quiet and butcher? Not England. From the creation of a fake professional class, ignorant, unable to analyse ideas? Not England. Who gains from a society in which all that matters is to blindly obey, in which there is no argument, no debate? Not England. Who gains from this is demagogic filth who want to wave their red, green or black books around and rule unchallenged, who want to destroy a free country and replace it with fascism, for some a Muslim shit-hole, for some a Catholic shit-hole, for some a Marxist shit-hole, and they all go along with it.
Who also gains - has anyone looked at these shits' bank-accounts? Investigated research funding? And of course the Cancer Centre?
So we shall just have to see what the Great British Public has to say about you, shan't we.
I'm writing more than one novel, you know
Oh, but what will the title be? I did think of The Rise and Fall of the Fourth Reich but others have used it. The Hospital has possibilities. True, it is reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward but then isn't it pretty much a sequel?
ARTEMIS' ARROWS
Professor Pallas is something of a dark horse, a rank outsider appointed, a visiting Professor, she was, well, you know what that means, see them about once a year, to a Chair more commonly held by those whose reputations have considerably preceded them. Nonetheless the publications history is exemplary, the lecture at the Symposium ground-breaking, the performance at interview over one of the great conundrums that has faced philosophy since the days of Plato quite shattering. An obscure college in the Peleponnese, I understand. An Oxford accent, nonetheless: not short of a bob or two, one concludes. One must not be insular (good to know standards haven't collapsed everywhere!) The one lingering doubt is that she may be well, a little old-fashioned, a little conservative for our – consumers but no, she clearly likes intelligent young people and shows herself as willing to learn from them as to teach them. She clearly likes intelligent older people too; fools, not. Much like Mrs Thatcher as she then was, the new professor quickly makes lifelong enemies, but in her case these are vastly outnumbered by lifelong friends.
Of course this has nothing whatever to do with her gender.
Pal quickly assesses which of her colleagues has a vestigial tail. One such is Bob Phelps, a small pink man, a Professor of Biochemistry, who reminds her of a small rubber ball and tempts her to bounce it. On the science side, Phelps is regarded as a dangerous man to cross, the biological sciences side at least; the chemists and physicists have little time for him. Certain administrative duties accompany Pal's post, mostly for the profoundly intellectual reason that the newbie gets the dodos, and she finds she has to attend the monthly meeting of the Information Governance Committee. Two students have been outspoken on social media sites and this, Phelps says, is unacceptable. The University's reputation! Pal raises her eyebrows. For concealment of lechery? Surely only if they have lied? Phelps is quite sure Dr Murgatroyd is incapable of such behaviour. Why? asks Pal. The students should have in the first instance reported the matter to their Head of Department. Not, thinks Pal, if he is anything like you. There can be no automatic assumption of guilt or innocence. The monthly meetings of the Information Governance Committee begin to gain a reputation all their own.
“He doesn't like women?” asks Pal of her fellow-philosophers.
“Doesn't like people! Probably doesn't like cats. Anything with the temerity to be independent of Bob Phelps.”
“One of the worst,” sighs another, “biology's riddled with them.”
“Worst what?”
“A primitive materialist. A hundred years of physics has passed them by! If it's not in a test-tube, it doesn't exist.”
“I think he applies that to people. Solipsist may be a better word. Since nothing and no-one with the possible exception of certain amino acids has independent existence, existence outside Bob's great mind, everything and everyone is at his disposal.”
“Entertainment lies in attempting any kind of intelligent conversation with him, opinion so trite it's painful.”
“He does not waste his time reading books. The physicists have the most fun with him. He crucifies himself implying they're not real scientists.”
“A popular man, then,” said Pal.
A friend she finds in Bill Foromonovic, Senior Lecturer in Greek. Bill describes himself as a lapsed Catholic.
“Your background is Greek Orthodox?” he hazards.
“I have learned in Northern Europe not to refer to myself as pagan. It has such silly connotations.”
“Hellenismos?”
“That does not precisely describe – what shall I call it? A realm of belief which has neither intellectual foundation nor external ritual and which has never entirely been annihilated. The gods are there. Perhaps you talk to them Perhaps you pray to them. Perhaps you half-pray, half-talk. They are part of your life.”
“Well, well, well!” said Bill. Pause. “You know that's pretty much how I feel about Jesus.”
“But lapsed.”
“Definitely.” He laughed. “I had a good priest – I mean he's a good priest and a morally good man, still a friend. He practically begged me to stay.” He laughed again. “He said the Church needs Greek scholars! Meaning Greek scholars with their feet planted firmly in the C21st, more than enough of the other kind. I did and do see the point but I said no. They go backwards. Disappear up their own into a world that never existed because you cannot combine the mind of Augustine with quantum physics. They need to lose Europe.” He gave a wry smile. “After all, a split has been tried already. I really don't see myself as Luther nailing my theses, all of course in perfect Attic Greek, to the door of Westminster Cathedral. They think themselves the fount of western civilization. That is worse than false. They think themselves synonymous with Jesus and most of them would have buried him – idiomatically - as readily as the orthodox of his day crucified him, a trouble-maker, disobedient, as they bury all attempt at reform. Through them his teachings survived. Despite them, we have freedom, democracy, medicine, quantum theory. What do you make of the Vatican?”
“A dinosaur that doesn't know it's dead?”
Bill snorted.
“Horribly true! My own analogy – the chalice thinks it's the wine, the cup-bearer thinks he's the cup. It survives because it represents – because it holds something so vastly greater than itself.”
“I was about to say,” said Pal, “but yes, I think you are right. About to say it survives on mass ignorance, gullibility, irrationality, but if all the intelligent, informed, rational leave, then the mask is stripped, an empty shell. The wine does not require the chalice?”
Bill smiled.
“The wine is rather special wine. It can stand up on its own.”
I lay in the long grass, my head resting on Apollo's chest, a scene readily misunderstood. He is my brother. We are very close - not that close. When I say I am a virgin goddess, I mean it, Got that, mother-fucker? How badly do you want to die? I'll say this for C21st England. It is – for the moment – easier for a girl to go out in very little. But really Daddy can't you modify the climate just a teensy bit.
You will perhaps find that unfashionable and also – not fitting your stereotype, I suspect. What's the expression? At it like rabbits. Well, Aphrodite, of course, not to mention Pan. Apollo indeed. Athena and I, we see things differently. It was and is an expression of independence. We are immaculate. We were not of course remotely feminist as the modern world understands the term but – of course – the modern world understands ancient Greece almost entirely through the public words of men, not the private prayers of women. O Artemis, in my dreams at least let me run free in the forest with you. Athena got the more cerebral ones. It was not the case that every man regarded his lady simply as a housekeeper-cum-foot-stool; some actually talked to their women and even listened. There was that suitable and that un- and naturally it has never been entirely possible to erase women from the structure of a society so we have to be allocated a position in that structure and that position has to be firmly publicly maintained for the cohesion of the society but you're probably quite thick if you think that what any public figure says on camera a is exactly what he or she says when he or she gets into bed with his or her partner. What is known to be fluid must be affirmed as fixed. Thus Aristotle could write fluently of 'the nature of the slave' while being married to the niece of not only a freed slave but now a ruler in his own right. That slaves in Rome could be freed and become citizens with the right to vote was read with one half of the brain, that slavery is an immovable human condition, with the other. It has been well said (by Athena) that men generally write on any subject impinging on male hegemony with their eyes tight shut. Aspasia of course forced those sealed lids open and they squeaked and wailed and squawked quite as wildly as any silly hysterical little woman. Of course she cried sometimes. She cried to me. Smashing a glass ceiling is a painful business.
It has of course been observed - reading about ourselves is awfully jolly - that we were not the embodiments of the perfect citizen-wife, except perhaps for dear Hestia tending the hearth. Indeed, it has been noted, drily, if anyone came across us in vacuo, he or she might assume us a modern construct, an imposition of more modern values on an ancient culture, obviously phoney, standing out like blackbirds on a snow-field. Neither anxious little Mary nor great earth mother, we embodied in fact female possibility, the capacity for more than reproduction, nurture and making sure dinner was on the table, but that we had to work out for ourselves.
“Perhaps they should all murder their fathers,” I murmur.
I feel him laughing.
“Exterminate all men!”
“If the majority of those in power were women, this would not be happening.”
“Have they lost their minds/Over the future of womankind! It will take more than rock lyrics.”
“They must be made objects of ridicule, the stranglehold broken”
Yes, of course I am the goddess of hunting. I am also the patroness of young girls.
Hephaistos grumbled. I'm a smith not a mason!
But can you do it? asked Apollo.
Of course I can do it!
Ah, the University, the Quad, the Rectangle, the Square and the Octagon - not only are these verbal people; clearly they know something of mathematics. It is the start of the academic year, unusually hot for October. The grass has had time to recover from summer trampling and welcomes excited freshers.. In the midst of the gently buzzing crowd appears a quite startlingly good looking young man in black jeans with a black bandana around his long curly hair and a black T-shirt, and some kind of a wooden choker. Girls do not look at his choker, but if they had they probably wouldn't have recognized it as a little phorminx. The young man is apparently oblivious and wanders off to get a coffee.
Apollo spends a long time casing the joint. Having found the Department of Greek, he traces it to its furthest extent which is a south-facing courtyard of irregular shape – how dare they - across half of which runs a crumbling brick wall of apparently no purpose, separating one patch of grass from another. Nonetheless, the courtyard is sheltered and clearly tended, a few late roses and chrysanthemums Around the grass, runs a path On the path are a couple of benches. On one of them is a girl failing to organize a coffee, a lunch-box, a small pile of books and a lap-top. To save the lap-top the books must fall. She swears fluently, spills the coffee on her leg and makes a sort of fouch! noise, for the coffee is hot.. Apollo picks up the books for her. The Duchess of Malfi?
“Not a student of Greek?”
“'Grief, no! I like it here. Not many people know about this place.”
“How true.”
He goes on his way and vanishes off through the swing-door.
The corridor is brightly lit and lined with posters, timetables, reading lists suggestive of life, but there appear to be no humans. He is looking for the office of Dr Bill Foromonovic. Ah! And the light is on.
He knocks firmly on the door.
“Enter!”
He smiles warmly at Dr Foromonovic, much like an interviewer greeting a particularly nervous candidate.
“Do excuse me. I found this. Strange thing, some kind of paperweight? I thought I'd better hand it in.”
“Good of you,” murmurs Bill, concealing his surprise at confronting a youth closely resembling the Apollo Belvedere. “I must apologize, don't know everyone yet. Are you one of our freshers?”
“Post-grad,” says Apollo, “bane of my life, my youthful looks.”
Bill notes the phorminx and smiles to himself. He must know what he looks like! Bit difficult to carry a bow around London.
“Then I must apologize again! A strange thing, as you say.” A small squat arrow sits on the desk between them, arrowhead rather, only no-one ever made an arrow of what looks like translucent marble. “I shall send an email! Has anyone lost a paperweight? That will I think be comprehensible only to the owner.”
“Then I shall not disturb you further.”
Bill returns to the nightmare of timetabling a wide array of subsidiary subjects, and not only those of students of Greek for the Department worked closely with SOAS and taught both Greek language and Greek culture to students of Persian and Iranian, Sanskrit, Ancient China, and indeed there was now to be a full degree in the Ancient World, though the content was not yet fully threshed out. Philosophy with Greek and Ancient History with Greek were standards as of course was accommodating the Latinists. Study of the ancient world was thriving. He knew the opinion of the funding committees was split down the middle on this, what's the point, versus what the point is: enthusiastic, highly educated, articulate people spanning the globe who know the world began with neither Christianity nor Islam.
The paperweight or whatever it is sits on his desk. His eyes keep being drawn to it. I should have taken his name. He berates himself briefly – I should not accept being busy as an excuse in others! Ah well, I'm sure I shall see him around. The more you stare – extraordinary, quite extraordinary. It's like – the most beautiful picture you have ever seen but you can't say what it's a picture of.
Only if you keep staring you can. Surf, clouds of foaming surf and half-veiled by them the form of a woman in a short tunic with a bow. He blinks, laughs. Ridiculous! Tricks of light and texture. No, little paperweight, Aphrodite arose from the foam, not Artemis. He looks again and it seems that the woman turns into a most imposing figure of a man, broad of chest, bearded. This is really very clever. There must be a chip. A very sophisticated version of those – oh what d'you call them. Things kids used to have where you shake them and snow falls. I want one. It's delicious.
Someone is having me on? Perhaps truly it is lost property and someone is going mad looking for it. If you possess this, you do not carry it around with you as though it were a phone. How then do you come to lose it? The thing is distracting him and he truly is busy, busy, busy. He puts it in the drawer and sends the email.
There is another smaller courtyard, square, barely larger than a pocket handkerchief, off-limits, mostly decorative gravel in the midst of which on a pedestal stands an of course imitation Grecian urn. The walls which bound it are glass, letting natural light into the 'museum', a small but much loved collection as much a question of sentiment as of scholarship, photographs of 'me with my first shard', a few small relics, anything of moment having been delivered to the BM, the minute office of the Head of Department, Prof Santos, and what is dubbed the internet cafe, being the computer and reprographics room, in the corner of which is a coffee-machine, a water-dispenser, a small fridge and a couple of easy chairs. All in all a considerable number of people see a shower of golden arrows fill the urn. A third-year grins evilly. It's a show we put on for freshers. The trajectory...mutter the mathematically inclined. The trajectory, others note drily, is suggestive only of heaven. The courtyard can be accessed by anyone with a key but only Estates have a key and by the time they arrive a hundred phones are clicking. It is all most untoward and indeed disruptive. Call the Fortean Times! Student are shepherded off to wherever they ought to be, but not before some cheery soul has urged caution, could be contaminated, coated. Can't be too careful these days. Is this biological warfare! First the biochemists then the chemists are pulled in. The real problem, remarks a shaken chemist is they do appear to be pure gold. Well, we are short of funds! A rather unusual anonymous donation. But provenance. Fell off the back of a lorry, guv? Should we call the police. How can you lose 12 golden arrows! Naturally this curious incident makes the news.
Phelps of course is furious. A childish stunt! Phelps does not think the Faculty of Arts houses serious people like himself. Serious people get things done in this world. Serious people do not lounge about reading or waste public funds on discerning the nature of truth. Serious people know facts when they see them. Serious people live in the real world and do not let matters of principle get in their way. He has been astonished in the past at how many of even his own colleagues in the biological sciences fail to be serious people, the new venture being kept under wraps, what the eye don't see, the heart don't grieve over, eh, he really does not want his new Centre for Biomedical Research scuppered by adverse publicity.
How, Bill, asks himself, can you have 12 golden arrows? One would be bad enough. The cost excludes a jolly student jape. A point is being made, for the moment obscure. A stunt? What is an area of contention? The Marbles! Wrong building, guys, the BM is next door. He opens his drawer and stares just a little unnerved at the toy, paperweight, whatever, which has changed. Marble, black marble, but it's not like a lump of marble, it's like a bottomless pool of liquid marble into which you could dive, in which you could drown – were you approximately the size of a paper-clip, of course. He pauses, suffering a moment's acute data overload. Just at this moment, he really doesn't want to remember that the altar at Delphi was made of black marble
He looks into the pool, stares into pink and gold and peach and sunset and then stars, endless stars. Microsoft do that one, he mutters but the stars coalesce as galaxies, which then dissolve, scatter at the approaching sun. Uh
A very expensive trick. Who has the money? Hellenismos?
There had been a somewhat awkward incident when both the Hellenic Society and the Islamic Society had booked the same room. Two rational solutions presented themselves - one group go elsewhere or a fascinating discussion of Sufi examination of Greek thought. Neither had been taken up. The reciting of a prayer to Athena in front of a Muslim woman in a niqab could have turned quite nasty, were in not that the recitation was in Greek. Most of his students regarded Islam as a Johnny-come-lately, possibly the worst being the son of Iranian refugees whose favourite attire was a T-shirt with 'Mazda lamps stay brighter longer' on the front. Perhaps fortunately, not everyone got the allusion.
Time to teach! Afterwards, I think, a word with Jim.
Jim is on the 'phone, hold up his hand. Yes, yes, no. He cuts the call.
“Bloody arrows!”
“You ain't seen nothing yet...Someone gave me this yesterday. Said he'd found it and was handing it in. Look at it. Look into it.”
Jim looks.
“Good....gods!”
“It does not help that he looked like Apollo!”
“Beware of Greeks....If you were given this, there was presumably some purpose to it. Other than ogling Aphrodite.”
“Why?” demanded Bill. “Why should it not be ornamental? The same could be said for the arrows!”
“It could. Have you tried to find out how it works?”
“Of course not. Break it.”
“We wait, I think, for something more clearly defined.”
“Bring Them Back!” said Bill
“The gods?”
“The Marbles!”
“That occurs to me also. This Department at least does not need to be reminded of Greece.” Bill gestured at the Thing. (His mind had been tempted to call it the Oracle and he had quashed that one fast. “You keep it.”
“When things settle down - “ He laughed. “If things settle down, I'll have a real session with it.”
“A libation, at least,” said Jim.
“Any excuse will do.”
Jim called him at 8.30 the following morning.
“It seems the Medical School is in chaos.”
“Dare I ask?”
“Item: There's a rather fine statue of Lister in the lobby. It has been crowned with vine leaves and adorned with a lyre.” Bill began to pretend to sound like a staid academic suitably shocked, but Jim was continuing “Item: Behind the main reception desk has appeared a full-size portrait of a naked Apollo with a small plaque reading 'God of Medicine and Healing'. Item: on the half-landing is a full-sized portrait of Athena, fully clothed, I hasten to add – labelled of course 'Goddess of Reason' – surrounded by a rather pointed collection of books. On Liberty. The Open Society and Its Enemies. The Age of Reason.”
Bill sighed.
“And they think our kids – I don't suppose they even know where the Medical School is.”
“Item,” continued Jim, “an extraordinary creation, a (19th print of the riots marking the admission of women to the Medical School heavily Photoshopped to include Athena confronting the rioters with Medusa's head and Artemis stage right pointing her bow at them. A further full-length portrait of Artemis in her hallmark tunic bears the legend 'Mini-skirts are old-fashioned.'
Bill could not suppress a yelp of laughter.
“The students from a Hindu background express considerable enthusiasm for goddesses The students of Greek descent crawl on the floor with laughter. A Miss Shah and Miss Al-Khanoum,, in appearance quite conservative, giggle and remark the Lord Apollo is rather sexy. A Miss Mahmoud in a skirt so short as to be barely extant yowls with laughter. The usual number of Christians and Muslims are outraged. These are overwhelmingly male.” Bill sighed again. “It has been said to me, thinly – I do not like that man – no matter how diverse the backgrounds and beliefs of our female students, they have one thing in common - “
“They want to be doctors not doormats,” finished Bill for him. “The overwhelming majority recognize cause and effect?”
“Just so.
“Can't they get him on medical ethics! If he doesn't like Jews and women, how can he be fit to practise?”
“He's clever. It's not actually he who makes the remarks that have almost the entire campus fuming. He merely invites the speakers who do and sits smiling through his beastly little Himmler spectacles.”
The Treasurer of the Islamic Society is a medical student.
Jim's turn to sigh.
“The other divide of course is between first years of narrower background and those who know the context.”
“Welcome to the University! Complaints to mum and dad?”
“Almost certainly. Phelps of course.”
“Of course.”
“Breaking and entering is undoubtedly a criminal offence. I am really not sure of the status, legally or in any other way. Can one say something has been vandalized when it is unbroken? And indeed unmarked.”
“Spend hours on that one! I put up a picture. I remove it. At least there's a hook, a hole in the wall.”
“Just propped,” said Jim.
“I am trying to connect this with our arrows. Artemis' arrows could bring destruction to women. If we are being subtle here, whoever 'we' are, might we not be symbolizing destruction to women has penetrated the heart of the University?”
“They shall not pass!”
“Who's stopping them?”
“That just may be the question. Round up the usual suspects!”
The Chair of the Hellenic Society is either in bed with flu, Prof, he has a temperature of about 40! or concealing injuries sustained during felonious activity though like everyone else Jim is unable to see how both alarms and guards were circumvented. Jim is prepared to keep an open mind.
“We didn't do it. We wish we had, but we didn't.”
Bill looks at his schedule. Certainly there are many things he needs to do, ought to do and sometimes even wants to do but there is nothing he has to do for three and a half-hours.
He takes the Thing out of his desk, pockets it, and skives off to the Goat and Compasses, thinking a sequence of events – it's university business, Jim but not as we know, it.
Jim meanwhile was reading a lab report. The arrows tested negative for the full range of known deadly toxins but did appear to cause spots. Well, itchiness, like nettle-rash. Must be the alloy, some kind of metal allergy..
The Goat and Compasses has a fine beer garden He sits himself down, takes a swig of his pint, then firmly lifts it and pours about half a cupful onto the grass. Now, by the blessed gods, little paperweight tell me your secrets. Does it have to be shaped like an arrow? . And now the sun is shining on a London street lined with cheerful crowds and ambulance men, police-officers standing by and cheer goes up as a single female runner appears, apparently effortless, streaking past like the wind, running a – marathon?
'What is this thing! The word Ask comes instantly into his head. Ask what! Who are you? I am Apollo. Obviously, says Bill to himself, that is my projection. Or obviously not. Apollo Belvedere is approaching his table. Am I dressed for this!
“Twelve golden arrows are a very expensive joke.”
“No joke. May I have a crisp?”
“Is it wise to refuse?”
Apollo picked up the bag.
“I love Smoky Bacon!”
“Hmm. Charred to a cinder? Who are you?”
“I am Apollo.”
“You will forgive me if I have difficulty in believing that.”
“Oh yes.”
Bill snorted.
“Let us stick to essentials. You, whoever you are, clearly wish to converse with me,who know who I am.”
“This society has two pillars, Athens and Nazareth, love and mind, if you prefer not to be parochial. These are universal values, facets of the human animal. Both have been rotted, largely by those charged with upholding them. You are a lapsed Catholic.”
“Easy enough to find out.”
“You can't stand them. I can't stand them. Already we have much in common.”
“This is - “
“War,” said Apollo. “The arrows are hallmarked.”
Bill reached into his pocket and silently handed him a boring letter about a committee meeting and a biro.
Apollo briefly drew, a circlet of four pairs of antlers.
“Hmm! That still does not necessarily.”
“It just creates a link between me and my sister's arrows.”
“You appear to be communicating to me that England has incurred the wrath of the gods.”
“We came here because it was relatively civilized.”
Say that again slowly, thought Bill.
He said: “From the point of view of a scholar, that's a story I'd like to hear some time.”
“They threw it all away under the banner of Faith. Now they use Islam to do it again.”
Bill raised his eyebrows.
“That is my interpretation. It is not the usual one.”
“We have friends in common.”
“We do?”
“Professor Pallas.”
“Oh no,” said Bill. “I have – always thought of her as a rather special lady.”
“She is,” said Apollo.
“Agent in place?” suggested Bill. “Suppose I think of you as human plotters.”
Apollo gave the smallest shrug.
“The total destruction of their power needs those not susceptible to destruction of either body or reputation.”
“But without human support - ?”
“One cannot uphold democracy without the support of the demos. We wondered if you would care to join us for dinner.”
“Ambrosia?”
“Whatever you choose.”
“Ah. When in Greece...Olives I think will figure largely.”
“When do you finish?”
Midnight, thought Bill. The chances of my getting any work done today are slim.
“Six.”
“Pal will pick you up.”
“P- fine.” Live the dream! “May I ask – what is this thing exactly?”
“What did you call it?”
“T- oracle!”
“You ask. It answers.”
“So does my tablet,” said Bill. He picked up the Thing. “What was the location of the debate between Anaxagoras and Plato?” Trick question. Apollo smiled but Bill was muttering to himself no, a computer could compare the dates (Plato was born in the year before Anaxagoras's death) even as the Thing showed him Zeus laughing. “Screen-saver,” said Doubting William.
“You could call her Sibyl,” said Apollo. “If I briefly transform, you will say it is something slipped in your drink.”
Bill spluttered.
“That may be worth it!”
There seemed to be a lot of golden light.
When he gets back to his office, a copy of the lab report is on his desk. Of course there could have been something slipped in my beer. I think I shall wait a little before making it generally known we have attracted the attention of the gods.
Pal knocked on Bill's half-open door, entered without waiting
He smiled.
“Well, lady Athena, I seem to have gone up in the world. You are, you know, going to have to explain to me how it works. Goddesses can get away with silence. Not Professors of Philosophy.”
“Laters.”
Bill looked around. He wasn't entirely sure how he'd got here or maybe the rational part of his mind was screening it out. There are limits!
“A veritable home from home.”
Olympus? Yeah, it's like it is on the film-sets, a tasteful mixture of white gold inlaid with silver and the curious translucent white marble of the Thing, full of palest peach, palest blue, palest primrose, like a particularly stunning sunset.. All the soft furnishings were silver fleece. The light was befitting a mountain-top. He wandered over to the window, expecting to see – what? The foothills of Olympus, celestial towers? What he got was the view from Richmond Hill.
“Charming,” he murmured. You are having me on.
World-famous rock idol Stavros Santinides appeared.
Bill's eyes widened. He was about to say you got dragged in too but Stavros held out his hand in a business-like fashion and said, “Pan. Tends to unnerve humans, my actual appearance.”
“Yes, it would”
Pan waved at the surroundings with a wicked grin.
“Have to keep up appearances! If you went to Balmoral, you would have certain expectations, which would not include minimalist design and op-art.”
“That is true,” said Bill.
Pal appeared/re-appeared/manifested.
“Making friends, good, good.”
She wore standard upper-class female Athenian dress.
“Glad to see you take the helmet off occasionally - “ Words failed him as he turned into a soppy mass of adoring babble.
“Turn it down, sweetie,” said Pan.
Aphrodite became normally devastating instead of abnormally.
“Madam,” said Bill, recollecting himself. “you can only be.”
“Just don't ask who is the fairest,” hissed Pan.
“Trouble-maker!”
What Bill instantly described to himself as a little wide-eyed poppet appeared.
“I'm Eris.”
“All hail Discordia!” replied Bill promptly, then paused “You are not – and this may be just about the biggest faux pas since ever – all Olympians.”
“We're those who like it here,” said Pan promptly. “Shall we – I mean personally marble bores the shit out of me.
“Me, too, darling,” said Aphrodite.
“Design has really moved on,” said Pan.
“The Garden Room,” said Aphrodite. “Don't you just love Peter Jones!”
“I love,” said Bill instantly, “the Garden Room. It may be just slightly doing my head in, but I love it anyway.” It may be the scent of the hibiscus. I have walked through a door into a room, not a garden, not even a walled garden, though it has walls. How then do I define it as a room? It has an immeasurably high ceiling of, I suppose, glass. It also, and this is the catch, appears to stretch to infinity, as though – as though you can just see the boundaries, immeasurably – what else – distant. It has a stream and a little wooden bridge over the stream, a clearing in a grove – presumably sacred – and in the clearing small tables of intricate metal work and by them – he snorted – couches, the kline as interpreted by modern designers, of the same delicate and intricate metal work but upholstered like a chaise-longue, and a central long low table of the same design laden with food and drink.
“Pad Thai,” said Pal enthusiastically.
“Yummy,” said Aphrodite. “It really pays to get out more.”
“You are not - “ said Bill cautiously, “ - yours is not the only pantheon - ?”
“My point exactly,” said Pan.
“The Jade Emperor,” said Pal, “is a good friend.”.
“We think we've got problems!” said Pan.
“We have problems,” said Pal. “Late again! The twins.”
“I think you do not mean Castor and Pollux.”
The deer chariot hove into view, high-stepping hinds apparently skilled in dressage.
Apollo stepped out.
“The traffic,” he murmured airily.
Artemis released the hinds from their harnesses and they wandered off to graze.
“Well?” she demanded.
“Everything's cool, babe,” said Pan..
Artemis glowered at him then turned to Bill
“Are my arrows safe?”
Bill grinned.
“You tell me! They seem to cause itches.”
“Obviously we didn't want to start with a plague,” she said briskly.
“The target of nettle-rash is unclear to me,” said Bill.
She giggled.
“It's not exactly nettle-rash.”
“He's been playing in the lab again,” said Pal
“It is not widely known,” said Apollo,”that my remit includes pharmacology. A psychotropic substance known to the ancients which has still not been clearly identified. Its common name is mind-itch. It's a test.”
“It's inhaled,” said Pal. “The effect depends on the victim.”
“Victim?”
'”Trippy,” said Pan.
“I think of it,” said Apollo, “as a mind-irritant. It is liable to attack, at unexpected moments, those parts of a mind that are sealed shut and cause the victim to have what to him or her are impossible and perhaps even intolerable thoughts, with which he or she must then deal.”
“The pictures too?” asked Bill.
“Oh yes,” said Apollo.
Some hours later, Bill is saying, “A society that wouldn't let a woman within ten miles of fighting its wars venerated a woman in full battle-dress! What is your explanation?”
“Virginity,” said Artemis promptly. “If we start from the paradigm that man is perfection and woman defective, we must then ask what is the defect? A woman could be a man if only we poor silly things could control our urges - “
“Both control our desires and not fall sway to the desires of others,” said Pal. “A virgin demonstrates controlling reason.”
Bill hooted.
“Not what I learned in Catholic school.”
Some hours later, many things have happened. Bill became slowly aware the garden was alive. It wasn't just the adorable little brown tortoise that nuzzled his feet.
“He's hungry,” Pan had said anxiously.
“Lettuce?” suggested Bill
The others laughed.
“Don't start him off!”
“There is so much misinformation about the diet of tortoises,” tutted Pan. “Point him towards the hibiscus. They're sweet little things but they're not, you know, terribly bright. I think it's because we're eating. A confusion of odours. So many pet tortoises die just because they're fed the wrong things.” Just at this moment, thought Bill, the great god Pan reminds me of nothing so much as an anxious twelve-year-old. “I've started a public education campaign.”
“Is it all right to pick him up?” asked Bill.
“Scoop him up from underneath,” said the nerdy bespectacled twelve-year-old. “Never pick them up by their shells.”
Beyond the dazzle of the hibiscus lie the trees. I am aware, Bill thought, that though they do not step out of the trees, though they are at the same time of the trees, which is of course impossible, but what isn't, there are dryads watching, laughing, talking to each other, even flower-nymphs. The tortoise was nibbling enthusiastically and Pan still holding forth upon tortoise nutrition. The nymph of the hibiscus seemed to be dancing. Not sure about that, thought Bill. Does she like being eaten? Is she distinct from the leaf being nibbled? I have questions!
Pal began to expound her plan for SPQR, the Society for the Protection of Question and Reason. With just a little difficulty Bill began to think, hard.
THE PRINCE, THE CARDINAL, THE DUKE, THE POLITICIAN AND THE PROFESSOR
The prince, the cardinal and the duke expect obedience. The politican and the professor duly obey: there's money in it, a lot of money
The prince flies in regularly to desecrate a chunk of Nash Terrace . The cardinal currently hangs from the rafters in Hill Street, on loan from an obscure South American state, the chief claim to fame of which is the refuge it gave to former members of the Waffen SS. The duke has estates in Plaza-toro; still has estates in Plaza-toro, though his grandfather, his great-uncle and sundry loyal helots were massacred by the brigadistas. He really doesn't like the niece of a Jewish Communist who fought in the Spanish Civil War. He expresses his detestation by creeping around behind closed doors to achieve injury to her body. People are impressed. You can tell he's a real gentleman
The politician pretends to represent the oppressed working-class (this despite being a key figure in New Labour). The professor pretends to be human.
The prince, the cardinal, the duke, the politican and the professor have in common sexual practices not for the squeamish.
The other thing they have in common is commitment to the destruction of the free world.
See the distress this 'freedom' causes to the little people of sincere belief. That the education provided by the prince, the cardinal and indeed the duke through his various charitable foundations has failed to develop either the hearts or the minds of the little people, such that they remain helpless slaves, slaves of their masters, slaves to themselves, intellectually and emotionally incapable, goes unremarked. They are victims!
The politician likes victims. Victims are critical. Anything that distresses victims is clearly evil and must be abolished instantly.
The professor of course provides the intellectual rationale
Since mind does not exist, democracy is unnecessary.
There is no human capacity to over-ride the hard-wiring, therefore there is no liberty. Where there is no liberty, there is no responsibility - if you are not free to choose you cannot fairly be held to account for your actions: you cannot choose if you have nothing to choose with and so clearly the notion of elected government is puerile in the extreme.
This is merely the quasi-scientific formulation of the world according to prehistoric religion, where independent function of heart and mind is self-will. When you have abolished or condemned all that makes us human, we are the product of our instincts and of what is taught us, empty vessels to be told what and who to be, what to say, what to think, what to do. The mediaeval popes understood that as readily as did Hitler and Stalin: just believe.
Like the religious zombie, the medical zombie functions intellectually working within a given frame of reference, regards it as frightening, evil and perhaps impossible to smash through the walls of this cage, question the frame of reference. Propositions are not considered objectively, on their merits if any, but regarded as good or evil, sane or mad, depending on whether or not they mesh with the assumptions that constitute the walls of the cage.
In vain do those of us with opinions of our own claim they actually are our own. The claim is dismissed. We are the products of our external circumstances. Freedom of conscience is not an issue because there is no conscience to be free. Having been imbued with false consciousness or possessed by the Devil, as you prefer, you must be reprogrammed to right thinking. Biological fundies such as Phelps deconstruct the West with their 'practical man's' contempt for all that makes us human. Can you synthesize a word? Can you grow an idea? Arf, arf, we are all good practical men here. Man is the tool-making ape. Education consists in learning to wield tools, a technical training. No training of the mind can take place because the mind does not exist. Since mind doesn't exist, 6000 years of its coping with the illusorily complex business of being human are meaningless. The only reality is the PPO and the particular head of your monkey-troop. Our new high priests are endowed with understanding of the entirety of the human condition via a grasp of cell biology. Those who have received a technical training are superior to those who can think, because learning to think, to analyse arguments, doesn't actually exist. There are no internal differences between individuals in ability (or volition, desire to learn). Some have had tool-wielding pasted onto their exteriors, others not.
Alcibiades. Please, Pericles, can you teach me what a law is?
Pericles. To be sure I can.
Alcibiades. I should be so much obliged if you would do so. One so often hears the epithet "law-abiding" applied in a complimentary sense; yet, it strikes me, one hardly deserves the compliment, if one does not know what a law is.
Pericles. Fortunately there is a ready answer to your difficulty. You wish to know what a law is? Well, those are laws which the majority, being met together in conclave, approve and enact as to what it is right to do, and what it is right to abstain from doing.
Alcibiades. Enact on the hypothesis that it is right to do what is good? or to do what is bad?
Pericles. What is good, to be sure, young sir, not what is bad.
Alcibiades. Supposing it is not the majority, but, as in the case of an oligarchy, the minority, who meet and enact the rules of conduct, what are these?
Pericles. Whatever the ruling power of the state after deliberation enacts as our duty to do, goes by the name of laws.
Alcibiades. Then if a tyrant, holding the chief power in the state, enacts rules of conduct for the citizens, are these enactments law?
Pericles. Yes, anything which a tyrant as head of the state enacts, also goes by the name of law.
Alcibiades. But, Pericles, violence and lawlessness--how do we define them? Is it not when a stronger man forces a weaker to do what seems right to him--not by persuasion but by compulsion?
Pericles. I should say so.
Alcibiades. It would seem to follow that if a tyrant, without persuading the citizens, drives them by enactment to do certain things--that is lawlessness?
Pericles. You are right; and I retract the statement that measures passed by a tyrant without persuasion of the citizens are law.
Alcibiades. And what of measures passed by a minority, not by persuasion of the majority, but in the exercise of its power only? Are we, or are we not, to apply the term violence to these?
Pericles. I think that anything which any one forces another to do without persuasion, whether by enactment or not, is violence rather than law.
Alcibiades. It would seem that everything which the majority, in the exercise of its power over the possessors of wealth, and without persuading them, chooses to enact, is of the nature of violence rather than of law?
To be sure (answered Pericles), adding: At your age we were clever hands at such quibbles ourselves. It was just such subtleties which we used to practise our wits upon; as you do now, if I mistake not.
Xenophon, The Memorabilia (trad. HG Dakyns)
Of course everyone knows a classical education is irrelevant to the modern world.
In this world where everyone is non-human, it is hard to be precise about the particular category of sub-humanity in which belong women. Women are irrational. His Grace's grasp of reason is tenuous to say the least. He commands. Others obey. The rationale for that obedience is that he was born to rule. Women are emotional. His Highness is merely psychotic. People are property, pawns on his chessboard. It is a mistake to say he is emotionally dead. Naturally the exterior is suave, sophisticated. You will not see His Grace screaming the hate he feels for those who refuse to accord with his wishes, nor the cardinal, nor the prince. Only the wilful and rebellious must suffer, torment, pain unending. Especially if they are women. It is given. It is the divine order
The word is consensual. Most practitioners of BDSM are sane they recognize they practise a fantasy, even if that fantasy is 24/7; both parties are free to walk away.
For some a reciprocal satisfaction of need can never be enough nor is submission fantasy, merely execution of the divine order. Slaves do not walk away.
Self-will is evil. Will must be broken. The unwilling slave must become compliant, surrender, become a creature of her master's will, yearn, beg to please. Become the tireless servant of Truth.
'War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.'
Mr Orwell would have understood perfectly. Dezzi too understands.
Mr Rushdie or Sir Salman, as he now is, would understand something further: the particular threat posed to an ideology by those who were born into it and have now matured.
The prince is a Muslim, the duke a Catholic, the politician a new Stalinist and the professor merely an undifferentiated fascist. Zere aim is vorld domination. A reasonable person might say OK, for the moment they are united by a hatred of Jews, women, gays and freedom, but the New World Order has to have a dominant ideology and they can't all be top dog. Actually, since the new Stalinists are second to none in upholding the rights of capital and of property, they can; time is not of significance to Allah and demographics wiill ensure the eventual Caliphate. For the moment we are all going to live happily ever after in the Fourth Reich. They have of course in common also being raving mad. Nonetheless, for reasons we shall go into later, they have seized the citadels of bourgeois power; not only do they believe the free world will fall to them, but they have a lot of other people believing it too.
There is no point in fighting. Ford Prefect would understand.
Consequently Dezzi is being thrown out of a Vogon air-lock.
This is merely the first time. Just don't mention petunias.
THE FIXERS
The Hospital is convulsed with horror. The proposition that England is a free and democratic society has been voiced. Most don't believe it. Everyone respects the Church! A few doctors and nurses know which country they're in, but they are much the minority. Sure, she'll do what she's told. Our decisions are not to be questioned. And you are who? In this particular caase his name is O'Hanlon, and he's well past 16, an eminent surgeon. It is all nonsense There can be no question of permitting insult to the Holy Church. The politician nods understandingly, the new Stalinist, you will recall. If there is a single concrete measure of the divorce from reality of our little nest of cockroaches, who would of course as any good cockroach does, freeze if the lights were turned on, it is the number of Marxist cockroaches adamant criticism, derision, abuse of religion are not only unacceptable but unheard of. She is of course a Jew. It is understandable. It is
not acceptable. She must be punished. She is evil.
In this world in which democracy is unknown, freedom unknown, reality regarded as an unfortunate contagion to be kept at bay by rigorous hand-washing protocols, enforced of course by the nurses, who are so terribly good at enforcing, twelve men run medicine. Naturally they are known as the Apostles. You can sometimes work round them, but you do not cross them.
Dezzi's boss is the first female Apostle.
Peter is primus inter pares, the first of the Apostles. He sits in his lab in Oxford. 98% of our DNA is shared with the chimp. Not only that: we brachiate! It really obsesses them. Clearly the goal of biological evolution is strap-hanging on the Victoria Line. It beats in his brain there is no god but DNA and Dawkins is his prophet. He looks at his god and his god is all and all are equal, all are identical, and there are no love, sex, pain, death and the whole damn‘ thing, there is no ‘human‘, there is only biochemistry, and we must all react in the same way and feel the same thing and cannot question what we think and what we feel and cannot change it, and if we do not react in the same way and feel the same thing that is false consciousness and bourgeois conditioning, and if we say we do not react in the same way and feel the same thing and we can change how we react and how we feel and each of us is different, that is bourgeois conditioning, because we are all equal, we are all the same, and the humanities terrify the little monkey by reflecting on love, sex, pain, death and the whole damn‘ thing, and our current ills are not the fault of liberty but the fault of failing to encourage people to exercise their hearts and minds because their hearts and minds don‘t exist and people who are emotionally whole do not break up their housing-estates and their fellow-humans who live there and people who do are not exercising their freedom but being slaves of the god but the confused little monkey knows better. The confused little monkey isn’t capable of taking into account the pain of people at seeing things smashed up, the distress of people at not being able to use the ‘phone box, the pain of people who are bruised and bleeding. The confused little monkey knows that bourgeois law exists solely to perpetuate the economic status quo. There is no activity of heart or mind in the confused little monkey’s world.
But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will, whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class.
Marx and Engels: The Manifesto of the Communist Party
Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.
Marx and Engels: The Manifesto of the Communist Party
The London teaching-hospitals far from the dreaming spires, what used to be called the Big Five and are now no-one's quite sure what, are the parishes, as it were, where the servants of the Apostles toil tirelessly for well, something or other, the witless public thinking it the greater good. You might have heard it described as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Naturally we do our best for those referred to as pay-shunts.
The chief problem of the NHS is that no-one has told it Stalin is dead. Everything is confidentshal. If NHS employees felt free to spread its internal workings over the front-pages of every newspaper in the country, there would be quite the wrong sort of revolution.
She's making it all up. Sure, Herr Sturmbahnfuhrer, sure, the entire history of the free world her own personal invention. Doctors are docile creatures, as brutally ignorant as the nurses and on the whole as easily led, but one or two dare to find this a little implausible. The CEO is kind but firm.
Career-suicide. Besides, obedience is well rewarded; money floods into medical research.
As our story gets ever nastier, we should not omit the Jewish and gay Sonderkommando who think to evade the more dubious desires of our new masters by being their most faithful and obedient slaves. We must note that Tel Aviv's marked aversion to those who call Jews apes is exceeded only by its marked aversion to Jews who behave like apes, as we must note that the many responses Outrage and Stonewall have to the Vatican do not include crippling women on its behalf. Consequently when a pair of gay pricks scream Dezzi is homophobic because she objects to their crippling her, Outrage will demonstrate a severe hearing deficit. Perhaps they should see a doctor.
Professor Sonderstein thinks himself not a faithful and obedient slave but as a spider at the centre of the web. He will fix things. Nothing must be said. His actual game is playing both ends against the middle. The gullibility, stupdity and ignorance of nurses is critical to this and so must not be threatened. Certainly he has contacts, but they do not include half the Israeli High Command, nor does having once attended a dinner in Haifa at which at which a general was present make one privy to the inner workings of Mossad. Nonetheless he spins a yarn to the IDF, a very silly little Jewish lass shooting her mouth off, Catholics desperately upset. Naturally, like any British Jew, the rise in anti-Semitism disturbs him, but that is not how to fight. What is? wonders the general to himself. Behind Sonderstein's babble, he detects that to which he has a knee-jerk reaction: if Jews are lucky, they may be seen, but they must not be heard. Never again will Jews appease.
It is not that which will scupper Sonderstein, but an accidental crossing of paths of which, since he has no real idea who and what Dezzi is, he could not have conceived. Dezzi went to an international school. That doesn't mean that she knows one of her former class-mates is now an Israeli general, though she'd recognize the name if anyone said it. Similarly, having gone to an international school doesn't mean that you know that one of your former class-mates is currently marked for throwing out of Vogon air-locks, but Sachi Rentz recognizes the name when he hears it. Consequently Rentz believes Sonderstein negative. The IDF takes up residence on Dezzi's computer. Shalom, guys, shalom. What is this, Shiksa Central? Surrounded by lunatics pretending nothing untoward is happening, Dezzi finds the IDF whatever it is, entity in her network drive a reassuring piece of evidence that something very untoward indeed is going down. They're bored, you know, they have nothing to do, they choose at random the computers of middle-aged English modern languages graduates to curl up on, put their feet up, have a nap. She takes a screenshot. Not that anyone is remotely interested in evidence, but maybe one day.
Unlike having her computer nuked from the People's Republic of China, it was soothing. What the hell, take a screenshot of that too, at least preserve the Norton logs.
Sonderstein's actual concerns tend rather to the drop in private patient income that would follow if rich Arabs learned the Trust upheld intellectual freedom and of course to Phelps' baby, the Centre for Biomedical Research. A great many people don't like him. The people who actively hate him are mostly Jews who think he shames Jewry, but of course they are not serious people and so don't count.
He is not of course alone in these concerns. O'Hanlon too spins a good yarn and counts many eminent Catholics among his patients, to whom he spins it. Every leading physician in London is convinced of the necessity of the CBR. It remains only to convince them that the destruction of England is not the price and since freedom and democracy are part of an alien tongue they are readily persuaded. Besides, there is the Trust! The Trust is God. The Trust is mother, father, brother, sister, food and water in a desert. There is no truth but the Trust, there is no reality but the Trust. The Trust must not be brought into disrepute.
As the ancients desperately consulted the innards of chickens, or even Sibyl, some seek guidance from the conduct of fruit-flies. Alas, even in an environment as putrid as the Hospital, fruit-flies are not to be seen. While the mostly normal might read books or start arguments, especially people who have actually been to universities, might reason, might even assay an independent confirmation of the facts, doctors seek Authority. Authority will calm them. Authority will tell them what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is false. .
They are not sane but then of course they are not actually human.
All those years in Medical School being told they share 98%% of their DNA with the chimpanzee have rendered medicine terminally ill. Most doctors think they're chimpanzees. The rest are baboons. Reason, morality, these mean nothing, doctors being in fact divided into those who dictate reality and those who imbibe it. Truth is whatever our masters say it is. The Good is whatever our masters say it is. Doctors think lies repeated behind closed doors must constitute fact. There is therefore no need to question, no need to argue and of course no need for transparency. How can the truth be exposed when it is already known!
In this case Truth comes from the Prime Minister himself, who had it from the politician, who had it from the professor, who had it from the Apostles. Of course the Prime Minister also had it from his advisers on matters of faith, who had it from the cardinal
Shit, man, they won't even say what their problem is in the Agora.
As Socrates said...
but if any man says that he ever learned or heard anything privately from me, which all the others did not, be assured that he is lying. . Apology: 33b
Even if they count themselves good Catholics:
John 18:20 Jesus answered him, I spake openly to the world; I ever taught in the synagogue, and in the temple, whither the Jews always resort; and in secret have I said nothing.
Doctors are many things. One of them is totally unfit for any position of authority in any university worthy of the name.
THE ENFORCERS
The pig snuffles and is short of breath, more than a few paces of propelling its rolls of lard forward a torment. Clearly it is not a well pig. Its hair is patchy and where hair is missing are suppurating boils. Its little trotters are painted a refained pink. This scarcely shows against the mottled bone but then the mottled bone scarcely shows beneath the wobbling mounds of diseased flesh. It is unconcerned lest pay-shunts be perturbed by its appearance for its business is not with the care of the sick but with the terrorizing of the well, and indeed making them less well, should they fail to be terrorized. Most of its head is empty, but somewhere under the frontal bone just behind the nose lurks a brain the size of a pea. This rattles around in the skull cavity, sometimes blocking the nose, hence the snuffles.
The fixers profess to be impressed by Nurse's searing intellect. Clearly nothing can be done unless Nurse's fine mind acknowledges the rationale for doing them..
Nurse's fine mind fails utterly to grasp that public sector managers are free neither to cripple staff who distress their masters nor to abolish democracy as an inconvenience to those masters. Rules must be obeyed. Which rules would those be, Nurse, the ones made by traitors for slaves?
In our new heavenly hierarchy directly below the Apostles are of course the Saints. That which does not occur to Nurse does not exist. After all Nurse is one of the leading intellects of the country. Nurse has a degree. Indeed people do find Nurse's mind quite terrifying.
Women do as they're told or get beaten. Nurse is very good at beating women. From time to time of course Nurse makes the headlines, whether in NHS scandals or in older ones as survivors of homes for fallen women finally dare speak out, or laundry women, of course. Here on the Kilburn border, there are no prizes for guessing Nurse's background. Like Doctor, she is wholly devoid of any scrap of intellectual or moral education: the most elementary facts of English history are unknown to her. How can any of it matter? If you do not like what someone says, you hit her. Like Doctor, she believes the mores of the hole in the ground out of which she crawled are those of the wider world.
One of the many things that does not occur to Nurse is that the public regarded nurses as angels for doing a job few are prepared to do, for endless patience and tenderness shown to the demented, the soiled, the frightened, the dying. Nurse too is no longer prepared to do that job, but thinks, so far as she can be said to think at all, that 'angels' is a statement of her innate value. Nurse, as she slowly drags the bloat of her self-importance as well as the more obvious bloat from one desk to another, one meeting to another, finds it inconceivable the public would not think her holy.
A fake professional class of the intellectually and morally derelict and mentally defective has been created and that's just the doctors, equally understanding of the virtue of obedience and the errors of liberalism, modernism and feminism. Nursing is so suitable for a woman, don't you think, possibly medicine if the girl is bright (at least by the standards of medicine and nursing), but really for a woman to claim to have an intellect, to think she can pit that intellect against medicine, against His Eminence himself, that is absurd.
Professor Sonderstein has assured his colleagues our lovely nurses are looking after Dezzi. What a silly little woman she is, her mind a joke, her body property, a naughty little girl trying it on, objecting to having been crippled. Nurse will not tolerate disobedience. Nurse has power. Nurse will crush her. Dezzi used to go hiking, climb large hills if not small mountains. She can read a map and use a compass. She thinks it unnecessary to be a pig. She is obviously a very sick woman, one of those who think she's as good a man. Worse, she thinks mindless illiterate animals do not have degrees, whether doctors or nurses. If Dezzi were in a cage, they would throw stones at her and prod her through the bars. As it is, she is in an open office in a London hospital and our lovely nurses have to restrict themselves to smirking and sniggering. She is treated like a leper, exhibited as a freak for the crimes of freedom, democracy, intelligence, education, literacy, honesty, principle and coirage.
Dezzi is in Jurassic Park and there are no herbivores.. It does not take her long to conclude that the only successful means of dealing with doctors and nurses would be a Kalashnikov, but she valiantly perserveres with despised reason.