The Sunday Ishmael: the controversial edit.

 Editor verge said, no, no, mrs. ishmael, "you can't do that. Careful, now". 

 "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.  For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face." 

1 Corinthians 13:11-12 New King James Version

"If you’re not a leftist or socialist before you’re 25, you have no heart; if you are one after 25 you have no brain." 

variously attributed - Burke and Churchill amongst others

Which is why, of course, the amazingly unpopular Sir Starmer is proposing the enfranchisement of 16 year olds, from whom, he believes, he can con a second term. 

My own lefty liberal beliefs, as a child, when I thought as a child and spake as a child are pretty embarrassing these days: do not confront me with my failures, I have not forgotten them. For example, I believed that babies are tabula rasa 

and environment alone shapes the growing child, echoing Aristotle and St Ignatius Loyola, whose maxim was, ‘Give me a child till he’s seven, and I will show you the man’. Adolf Hitler believed the same, stating baldly, "He alone who owns the youth, gains the future", thereby providing an object lesson in attempting to manipulate and impose control. Starmer Youth, perhaps?

I was a child of my times, before the Genome Project, and since then we have learned that the tabula rasa model of the mind was a load of bollocks. Behavioural genetics, especially twin and adoption studies indicate strong genetic influences on personal characteristics such as IQ and alcoholism. Multivariate studies have shown that the distinct faculties of the mind, such as memory and reason, fractionate along genetic boundaries. This is not something to talk about at polite dinner parties, unless you relish being called a eugenicist and told to get out, we're keeping the bottle of wine you brought and if you're hungry, buy your own chips on the way home. 

Here's something else that's deeply disturbing. Ultrasound studies of twin babies in utero over time show the foetuses interacting in the womb, starting from the 14th week of gestation. They plan and execute movements specifically aimed at the co-twin. So when one twin is born fat and healthy and the other is thin and wizened, we know what's been going on. 

And here's another thing: during pregnancy, cells from the foetus cross the placenta and enter the mother's body, where they invade her tissues. This means that mothers carry unique genetic material from their children’s bodies, creating a microchimera, which affects the mother, from better wound healing to a higher risk of cancer.

 Over evolutionary time, the foetus has evolved to manipulate the mother's physiology and increase the transfer of resources like nutrition and heat to the developing foetus. The mother's body has evolved countermeasures to prevent excessive resource flow. Although the mother's immune system  removes unchanged foetal cells from the blood after pregnancy, the ones that have already integrated with maternal tissues escape detection and remain in the mother's body. When she gets pregnant again, she accumulates cells from each baby, and cells are transferred from the older sibling into the younger one, which, it seems, can cause the miscarriage of the rivalrous younger sibling, so that the first child gets to keep more resources. 

“I think one promising area for further research concerns unexplained pregnancy losses, and whether older siblings, as genetic individuals, can play a role in delaying the birth of younger siblings,” says David Haig, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University.

Based on evolutionary reasoning, the hypothesis is that foetal cells should be found primarily in the tissues that play a role in transferring resources to the foetus. That includes the breast, where they may impact milk production; the thyroid, where they can affect metabolism and heat transfer to the baby; and the brain, where they may influence neural circuitry and maternal attachment to the child.

Which validates that old wives' tale that a baby brings its own love with it. Sure - by manipulating the mother's brain. That may explain the reluctance of some mothers to abort the foetuses of rapists.

So, the conclusion forms itself - there are no innocent babes and the ancient Romans had the right idea when deposing the latest Caesar - kill his babes, too.

Throwing off the veil of lefty liberally wokey sentimentality, I was having a little think about Cincinnati.

The US is a very big place when you include Alaska and Hawaii. The United States is almost joined onto Russia. Looks closer than Orkney is to the Scottish mainland.  Made sense for Trump and Putin to have their meeting in Alaska and it also makes geopolitical sense for Trump to pall up with Putin and freeze out China.

It is all a question of perspective, and the Mercator projection doesn't really help in understanding where places are in relation to each other.

So when I read about Cincinnatti, I went looking for Ohio on a map and was kind of surprised to see it is not down there in the stone-mad southern states, nor is it over there near the stone-mad California fruitcake state - it is fairly near the civilised bit.  So why, as the Ohioans and Buckeyes say themselves, do they not have a race problem, but a problem race? Honest, not invent. I read it. 

Are you up to speed with what happened in Cincinatti on the 26th July?

Two black men ambushed a white man on the street in the early hours of the morning, initiating an attack which immediately gained popularity with many other black people enthusiastically joining in, punching and kicking the victim. A white woman attempted to shield the victim, whereupon she was punched and knocked unconscious. A hundred or so people were present, but no-one else attempted to intervene and only one person called the police, as most people were either taking their turn in kicking and punching the victim, or filming the assault. 

The truly disturbing thing is that black community leaders and ministers are calling for the victim to be charged with inciting a riot.

Cecil Thomas, Democrat and Ohio State Rep.

Thomas, a former police officer, said the lack of charges for the white victim in the white shirt who allegedly “incited” the mob violence “raises serious questions on whether there is bias involved in the investigation. It also brings into question the possibility of lack of integrity and whether there’s something else to hide. The Black community of this city demands to be respected and until justice is fully served, this city can not and will not move forward.” 
The "incitement" consisted of the victim having "words" with a black guy in the pub. When he left, he was followed outside and vigorously beaten unconscious.

Slavery and War are part of the human condition. Probably because of Eve eating that apple and getting her and Adam slung out of the Garden of Eden. Bound to be the woman's fault. We might wish that War and Slavery were not intrinsically part of the human condition - but tough. They are. When you win a war you get to keep your defeated enemies' goods, chattels, territory, women and children and execute the blokes. The victor can have sex with the women and children and sell them to enrich himself. Yeah, all women's fault.

Every empire had slaves. Greek, Roman, Mongol, Viking - all of them. All of our ancestors.  The Arabs were pretty efficient slave takers, not just in War, but in coastal raids, scooping up people from handy villages and selling them on. The sub-Saharan Africans  were particularly wedded to the slave economy and their slave traders enthusiastically provided enslaved Africans  to the European slave trade, which provided labour to the Americas, beginning in the 

16th century and lasting to the 19th century, when Britain abolished it and went to some trouble to end the trade at sea. The vast majority of those who were transported in the transatlantic slave trade were from Central and West Africa and had been sold by West African slave traders to European slave traders, while others had been captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids. As the National Museums Liverpool explains: "European traders captured some Africans in raids along the coast, but bought most of them from local African or African-European dealers."  The majority of the slaves worked in the rural economy. Slavery ended in the United Slaves in 1865, with the end of the Civil War. That is not very long ago - only 160 years, and the aftermath of having a slave economy is by no means resolved - as the Cincinnati incident, and other similar incidents, demonstrates, with mutual suspicion and hostility between two peoples who are essentially segregated from each other. 

In 1860 there were 4.4 million African Americans living in the U.S. In 2023, 48.3 million people in the U.S. self-identified as Black, making up 14.4% of the population.

As a social experiment, it is a massive mess - the movement of a population to another continent. And nobody is grateful. Nor does the formerly enslaved West and Central African population wish to be repatriated. It doesn't look like they wish to be integrated, either. Civil War?

No wonder Trump is freeing America from its former role as the global policeman - he has enough trouble attempting to make America Great Again.

We don't have quite that problem in Britain. The alien population that we have been importing with the connivance of politicians of all political parties against the expressed will of the British people (Brexit and the election of Labour with an overwhelming majority) are not enslaved, nor are they reluctant. Indeed, they are eager to come to Britain - paying thousands of pounds to people smugglers, who must be very rich indeed, as 50,000 illegal immigrants have invaded Britain during Labour's term of office. Around a year, I believe. That's two divisions in the British Army. The Army currently consists of  approximately 74,296 soldiers. Just saying.

Despite paying through the nose and enduring hardship to invade Britain, they are not grateful. They rather despise the culture.

If the political establishment refuses to deal with the situation while they can, this country is likely to become as segregated, hostile and dangerous as America.

Feel free to call me a racist. Everyone is a racist. It is as human as War and Slavery. Get over it.

To happier matters: The Genital Café 

This was the Genital Café, just up the road from Shearer's Magnificent Emporium. A Social Enterprise scheme, it was part of Orkney Blide* Trust, a mental health charity. Cooking, serving and cleaning up created training and employment opportunities to people with experience of mental ill health. Its unique selling point was its accessibility for wheeled humans - the lowered counter did not present a barrier to folk in wheelchairs, who therefore enjoyed full frontal views of staff genitalia enrobed in stretch denim and navel rings embellishing protruding pasty bellies. For fuck's sake, exploded mr ishmael after his sole visit to the establishment, I'm not so disabled that I can gaze with equanimity on buttocks and bollocks being scratched by their owners who do not scruple to rest said arses, sought after as they may be, on the counter where my food is prepared. Are you ma-a-ad? Are you trying to kill me? 

*Blide - (adj.) happy, pleased - The Orkney Dictionary

Gone now. Part of Old Kirkwall. Now the home of the Orcadian Turkish Barber Shop, which has re-purposed the booths and depressed maroon vinyl seating. 

Time to revisit mr ishmael and the Turkish Barber's.

"Being barbered is such a strange intimacy, all that looking-at and talking-to another bloke in the mirror, I can't be the only one made uneasy by that strange, public confessional booth, by a professional groomer telling one what would look good, hair-wise, parting-wise. 

My Dad  treated me to a barbershop shave - you know, all that fetishy palaver, a roasting  hot towel in tongs  draped over my face, a badger bristle brush soaping my face  and a stropped, cut-throat razor gliding over my Adam's apple.  Seems to me like the sort of ritual a hangman or a suicide bomber might enjoy, before going about his day job.  Once was enough. Those Al Capone blokes, in Chicago,   they must've been fucking mad, sitting in a chair with some spic fairy waving a blade around their windpipes.

I think the Ruperts used to command their batmen body servants to do it to them,  the hot, close shave; but then the Ruperts, well, TE Lawrence-Rupert, of Arabia, anyway, used to require of his manservant that he  beat  his  guilty buttocks  for him, with leather straps and God only knows what else.  A man's life, in the army, thrashing his master's arse.

I haven't  turned into Robinson Crusoe or anything, I just get mrs ishmael to tidy things up, once in a while; sometimes I do it myself, just wash it, comb it all forward and scissor a couple of inches away, job done, it's not surgery or anything.  But it's thinning  on the top now and I thought I'd better get a trained bloke to even things up a bit and so I went into the A Class Turkish Barbers, Dundee.

In the barbers,  I sat me down on the leather settee and commenced to watch Turkish Gaz shave this bloke's already closely-shaven head until he looked like a concentration camp victim and then take twenty quid off him.  In the other chair, Turkish Gaz's brother, Solly, was doing the same to another customer, only he was leaving a line, half-way up the scalp,  the kind of thing I used to do with the lawnmower, a line between mown strips that wasn't really there;  this was a neat line all the way around his head just above his ears which kind of made the almost-invisible stubble look as though it was, well I don't know what it was supposed to look like, looked fucking stupid to me, two-tone, that's what it was, a two-tone shaved head. See, bro, I 'as got yo line, innit, chortled Turkish Solly of A Class Turkish Barbers, Dundee.  'Ow many times it is I 'as done yo line now?  Issa lot anyway, I could do that line in me sleep, man, tellin' ya.

Growing concerned that this was not a gents' hairdressers in the usual sense, I had been looking along the counter for some scissors but all I could see was a vast selection of electric razors, black ones, red ones, white ones. And hair driers.  They each had a couple of hair driers, slung in holsters on the counter, like Colt .45s in the Sherriff's office. Whaddatheywant with hairdriers, I wondered, these guys have virtually fuck all hair when they come in here and none at all by the time  Gaz and Solly're done with them, what's to dry? You don't need a hairdrier for a shiny bald head with a fucking line around it. But then I saw Sol, down the other end, he had flames coming out of hands which were  frantically waving around his customer's recently shaven head.  Fuck, he's caught fire, poor bastard, mind you, paying twenty or thirty quid  to look like a nineteenth-century convict, he can't be right; probably just spontaneously combusted, Nature's way of telling him he's a waste of space, which he surely is;  happens all the time, I understand, just go up in flames and smoke, they do, only their shoes left, or in this bloke's case his lurid green and pink trainers.  I used to worry about that quite a lot, spontaneously combusting,  going so far as to mind-design a sensor-operated, shoulder-borne  fire extinguisher, with a nozzle on a tube just above the head, one wisp of smoke and a mighty deluge would flood the wearer, but these days I am less self-centred in my anxieties, more community-, more planetarily-orientated, worry myself sick, sometimes,  I do, about big fuck-off lumps of asteroid smashing into the Earth at sixty thousand miles an hour, blowing everything to fuck, roasting us all in our beds and blacking out the Sun for a hundred years;  serious climate change, that stuff, a  gazillion kilotonne nuke, turning everything all Golden Wonder.  You may mock my concern but cosmically speaking  that sort of shit happens every five minutes.

And then I understood, that what Sol was doing, down the other end of the salon,  was burning the hair out of wotsisname's, TwoToneHead's,  ears, with a lighted spill and he was waving his hand in and out of the flame, I suppose to stop the ear catching fire.  Fuck this, I thought,  for a game of soldiers, I came in here for a bit of a trim, not an Aushwitz scalping and having my ears set alight; I'm off, I'll buy a good pair of scissors and do it myself. In the hotel. No, not in the hotel, too dark, even in broad daylight, cut my ear off, I would and some whore probably bust-in, anyway, offering me a figgy shampoo or a pineapple blanquettejob a la mode. I'll give myself a trim when I get back home.  Not having some gobby Turkish git poofter set fire to my fucking head, after he's shaved it bald.

But I was too late, Turkish Gaz was extending to me a plastic cape and saying Your turn, sir, sorry to keep you an' 'ow is you today, an' 'ow you want yo' hair?

Before I sat down I said to him, struggling for an idiom, and regretting it immediately,  You do old-fashioned? Cutting?  With scissors?  Only me not wanna shave, like other blokes, certainly no shavez-vous  mon tete, comprenez? 

No, is OK, can scissors do. 

 And me not wanna catchee fire, in ear hole. 

 I didn't think he would, put the fire in my ear, not unless I let him shave my head clean, like a boiled egg, which I wouldn't. Be like Galipoli all over again if Gaz and Sol tried that. But I could see the grim logic of it, now, the fire, what's the point of  removing every trace of hair from the cranium, if there's strands hanging out from the earhole? Look fucking rubbish, that would. It was actually quite sensible, in the world of NewPeople's convict chic coiffure, to set fire to your ears.  Crazy fucking bastards.  Although, if we set fire to the Pampas grass - you can't cut the fucking stuff, not without a nuclear-powered, laser chainsaw - it just grows back bigger and tougher.  Maybe there's former customers of A Class Turkish Barbers, Dundee, walking around the town, tripping over their ear-hair, smashing their dumb faces on the pavement. Serve 'em right.

You want hair cut to ear, like this, Gaz enquired of me in the mirror, or above  ear,  like this?

Maybe just below ear a bit.

Like so?

Yeah, like so, just make a  bit tidy, make even-out. OK? 

OK.

I can put myself in trance, almost at the drop of a hat; no, I can, really, I can, just drop my chin on my chest, close my eyes, drop my hands in my lap, breathe-out and I'm gone;  I dunno if it would see me through an asteroid colliding with  John O' Groats and dumping a trillion tons of super-heated water on my house but it works for things like epidurals and that's what I did as Gaz snipped away, doing that folding-between-the-fingers and stretching and snipping thing that proper barbers do. I shut my eyes and lost myself.

You wan' some nice spray?

OK, whatever you think.

I wish I hadn't said that because I soon smelt like what I imagine a Balkans Bond villain to smell like, sweet and heavy and a bit unwholesome but as sixteen-yearly haircuts go it wasn't too bad. And I found out what the hairdriers were for.  Barbers in ancient days used to brush you down with soft-bristle brushes, pull your collar away and brush all that scratchy stuff the fuck out of it,  then they'd sweep your hair from around the floor  using a cheap, nylon sweeping broom and a dustpan. Every minute or so, during my trim, Gaz would blast me with a hairdrier, to get rid of the clippings and when he had finished he half-crouched, half-scampered, half-ran after the hair on the floor, coralling it, at hairdrier point, little bits of stubble - apart from mine, which could be measured in inches -  in a pile in the corner of the shop, like mouse droppings. 

He only charged me a tenner. Wasn't too bad an experience at all, once I had determined to take some Turkish heads, like we used to, if they came near me with scalp-arson in their eyes. I wondered if they knew of or were bothered by the number of inns and coaching houses in England named The Turk's Head or The Saracen's Head;  I mean, if we, not that we would, went to Turkey on holiday and found, in every street - do they have streets? - a coffee shop called the Brummy's Head, the Scousers Entrails or heard one Turk say to another, see you later, Ahmed my brother, for a coffee, down the Geordie's Giblets, salaam eleikum, and it's your turn to pay, I wonder how we'd feel.  But fuck 'em, anyway, Turkish barbers, not as though they're important to proper people, not like my young friend, stanislav, was, a Polish plumber. "

.................................................................

This, and many other articles: tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited may be found in the four splendid anthologies of the writings of stanislav and mr ishmael, compiled by his friend and editor, mr verge, the house filthster. You can buy them from Amazon or Lulu. Here's how:

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

IIshmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps 

please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.

Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr

Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux

https://www.lulu.com/shop/ishmael-smith/flush-test/paperback/product-9yjvn7.html?q=Flush+Test&page=1&pageSize=4

At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.

With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.

This graceful, dainty little lady stayed with me for a few weeks this summer. A big city girl, she loved the sea-side. Here she is exploring the waterfall that cascades onto Scapa Beach below the Distillery.

And this is her, pretending to be the figure head on a paddle board out at sea.