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.

What I did on my Holidays

 I have a slight - a very slight - hardly noticeable - quite insignificant, really - hearing loss. And very expensive hearing aids. And subtitles on the telly. 

I live in a Coonty where they talk like this:

Depressing as hell, isn't it? And the god-awful music. And the pillock emphatically stating how safe Orkney is. For god's sake, doesn't he read the Criminal Court pages in the Orcadian? Note that - pages - not half a page, not a paragraph, but at least two solid pages reporting on the Kirkwall Sheriff Court. Higher percentage of offenders on the Sex Offender Register than Glasgow, adjusted for population size. Drugs, Booze, Domestic Violence, Rape, Murder - just like anywhere else, really, where humans cluster and abuse each other.

Orkney's week of agricultural shows has just concluded, with the County show last Saturday. As the blurb says: "Orkney's shows are more than a day out for the farmers. They are a huge draw for families who enjoy seeing the animals, catching up with friends, and browsing at stalls selling locally produced crafts and goods, food produce, and country clothing or chatting at the fundraising tents and entering their competitions and raffles, or viewing the latest farm implements for sale."

"You'll normally find showjumping, dog trials, a fun fair, entertainment and food outlets at the shows too. All in all, a great day out!"

Yeah, right. 

I don't actually go to any of the shows - East Mainland, Shapinsay, Dounby, or the Coonty Show. I've been in the past and really don't feel the need to go again. I don't like beer, mud or coos. Not keen on people, either. But I do listen to Radio Orkney, which was breathless with excitement, reporting on the marvellous exhibitions of shampooed and blow-dried goats and precocious children over-the-mooning about sitting on a pony or leading the family dog around the ring. It was all the usual stuff the other morning, when I, morosely spooning in Live Greek Yoghurt for my micro-biome, heard the presenter announcing the next category - the Poetry Section.

Wow, thought I, performance poetry. 

Would it be in Orcadian dialect, like Harry Josephine Giles?

Harry, an alumni of St. Andrew's University.

Cameron Stout, the Radio Orkney presenter, informed the listenership that he was takkin the microphone inta the mar-quee. Would the poets be in booths, I wondered? Would they get rosettes?

But, no. 

The airwaves were melodious with clucking, crowing and squawking.

For this relief, much thanks.

Not Poetry.

Poultry.

I blame Cameron Stoot and his diction. Nothing to do with my insignificant, really slight, hardly noticeable, hearing loss.

So, no, mrs narcolept, I didn't go anywhere lovely on my hols, thank you for the kind thought. I had family visiting, escaping the ferocious heat South to enjoy the wind, rain and fog of an Orkney Summer. 

Summer Recess

 

mrs ishmael is on holiday again.

The Sunday Ishmael: 20/07/2025

“I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room at 10, Downing Street.

This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11.00 a.m. that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany."

 Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister, 11.15 on September 3rd 1939 addressing the nation via radio.

They did things differently then, the past being a foreign country. I've been thinking about this war business recently - specifically, how do the ordinary people - not those employed at GCHQ or the Ministry of Magic Defence, or the Government, know that a state of war exists, if they are not told?  Told as firmly as Neville Chamberlain told his people on that Sunday morning 86 years ago. As you know, I am fairly convinced that Britain is at war - which is why I found the sabotage of two of our fighter jets at RAF Brize Norton by Palestine Action to be treasonous and the action of a Fifth Column representing the interests of a foreign conglomeration of nations opposed to Britain's interests. I'm rather pleased that the perpetrators are being prosecuted and that their organisation is proscribed as a terrorist organisation. If you go on their website, you will read this: "Palestine Action is proscribed in Britain. For that reason, the website has been transferred to others in the global movement who are not active in Britain or British nationals."

Note that. Global Movement. A movement opposed to the stated  foreign policy aims of Britain.

The useful idiots, of course, who combine their anti-Semitism with a set of woke liberal-left, Metropolitan elite, middle-class ideologies, are still turning out at weekends to protest against the proscription, and being arrested in droves. 

A minor performer at the Royal Opera House staging his own protest last night during the curtain call while management shouted at him from the wings. Hope that's his career fucked.

I suppose Neville Chamberlain could so confidently tell his people that they were now at war and it was going to be tough, because the British were pretty much united as one people, with a shared cultural identity. This allowed Churchill to confidently deliver these remarks  in the House of Commons on the declaration of War: "there is .... a feeling of thankfulness that, if these great trials were to come upon our Island, there is a generation of Britons here now ready to prove itself not unworthy of the days of yore and not unworthy of those great men, the fathers of our land, who laid the foundations of our laws and shaped the greatness of our country."

Nobody thinks like that these days, especially our Prime Minister, whose island of strangers speech was criticised but who has rebutted his initial apology, saying: "We must get control of immigration, the basic argument that we need a cohesive society, an integrated society, where we can walk towards the future together as one country, as neighbours and communities together. That does really matter to me.”

 86 years ago, there were divisions in Britain, of course, but politicians  believed that the people would pull together and endure hardship and death in support of Britain's foreign policy aims.  And they were right. But the Second World War changed that Britain. The people threw out the Conservatives who had taken them into war and the new Government created a welfare state that would care for its people from the cradle to the grave. It worked, too - average life expectancy was 60.5 years in 1939, whereas it is now 82.06. We're living ourselves out of house and home.

Something rather significant was lost during the journey from 1945 to the present day - a sense of nationhood, to the point where politicians can only hint at just how much trouble Britain is in internationally, for fear of a large section of the population cheering.

Enoch Powell, much demonised, in his 1968 speech,  warned of the "kind of action which is hardest for politicians to take, action where the difficulties lie in the present but the evils to be prevented or minimised lie several parliaments ahead." 

Short termism is the inescapable corollary of party politics, in which unpopular measures are never taken, because whichever set of politicians it is in power want to be re-elected in a handful of years' time. As mr ishmael said: "for evil to prosper, it needs only for good men to think to their careers".

So, having failed, quite predictably, to do anything to minimise future evils, we now find ourselves living in the future, alongside Bob Vylan, Palestine Action, and the useful idiots. They (the useful idiots who busied themselves knitting sunflowers and collecting old clothes and bandages to drive across Europe) seem to have forgotten about the invasion of Ukraine, which was all the go a handful of years ago. Which is comfort to President Putin, I guess. Not that he needs it, as he is winning his war, now that Ukraine is falling apart.

In a war of attrition, the side that has the most men wins. Russia is big, has lots of men and is friends with countries who are helping out by sending more men. Ukraine has full conscription of all men over 26 who are not in reserved occupations. Those men who remain in Ukraine are press-ganged on the streets - 6.8 million Ukrainians got out since the Russian invasion, to avoid war and conscription, despite men aged 18 to 60 not being allowed to leave the country since February 2022 without special permission.  8 million have been internally displaced. The war has not inspired heroic self sacrifice amongst soldiers: in the first six months of 2025 Ukraine’s Prosecutor’s Office opened 107,672 new criminal cases for desertion. Since 2022 some 230,804 such criminal cases have been instigated. 

The war is not popular: In October 2022, 88 per cent of Ukrainians believed that they would be a ‘flourishing country inside the EU’ within a decade (Bless). Now 47 per cent think that ‘Ukraine will be a depopulated country with a ruined economy’. A separate survey found that 70 per cent of Ukrainians also believe their leaders are corrupt. Minister for National Unity, Oleksiy Chernyshov and Minister for Reconstruction, Oleksandr Kubrakov, have been investigated for embezzlement and treason. Zelensky, whose term of office expired in May 2024, is rumoured to be clinging to power in order to avoid charges of corruption himself. His political enemies are sacked, charged with corruption or other criminal allegations -  Vitaliy Shabunin, one of Ukraine’s most prominent anti-corruption activists, was charged with evading military service and fraud. More than 5,000 Ukrainians have come under sanctions and had their property frozen. This device is now widely used to silence opponents of Zelensky's regime.  Sanctions have also led to the closure of three YouTube channels belonging to Zelensky’s critics in the past month.

Whatever had Ukraine to do with us? Why did Boris and subsequent Prime Ministers dive right in to support Zelensky against Putin - who did have a point, I thought, considering how appallingly ethnic Russians were being treated in Eastern Ukraine? It seemed downright offensive and interfering of Britain to make an enemy out of Putin, not to say self-destructive in the extreme. The result? Putin does now regard Britain as an enemy of Russia.

The bien pensants seem to have abandoned Ukraine in favour of getting upset about Gaza. One day they were knitting sunflowers, the next they were stitching Palestinian banners. Quite apart from the injustice and inconsistency of supporting one country invaded by its  neighbour whilst supporting the invaders of another country,  a country, moreover, aligned with and allied with Britain, the question asks itself - whatever has that got to do with us?

Now if Scotland invaded England or vice versa, I could see the sense in knitting a few roses and stitching the cross of St. George.

Then there's the whole Afghan resettlement debacle and the super injunction to suppress the truth of the incompetent data leak by a junior official (the take-away from this is to make sure you check your emails before sending them out, particularly when hitting the reply to all button). That was a bit of a mess. The operating principle here seems to be the deep fear by Government of the mob. Hide the truth as long and deep and far as possible, because we don't want the French revolution played out in Birmingham. Rest easy, political elites - because, in factional Britain, nobody can agree on who the enemy is. 

Ukrainian Borscht

Russian Borscht

Marinate chicken thighs, peel potatoes, make a chocolate cake, whip up a crab sauce, vacuum, dust, cloth up, get out the good china, set the table – why on earth did I invite them round? Going out would have been so much easier and would have supported the local high street. Entertaining isn’t a hobby for single people living alone – it takes at least two people to host a dinner party. There's the cooking, serving, keeping the chat going, steering a course between not getting falling down drunk and yet being sufficiently lubricated to present a few anecdotes and opinions whilst not courting controversy. However, social obligations require one to reciprocate hospitality, despite all experience and foreboding to the contrary. 

When my first husband (we'll call him Jeremy) ran off with an optician's assistant from Bromsgrove, I continued going to Marriage Guidance. Why not? He'd never accompanied me to the sessions anyway. I was getting lots of positive unconditional affirmation and my Marriage Guidance Counsellor had taken the view that I was better off rid. Newly single,  my counsellor suggested a divorce party would celebrate my new reality. I hosted a dinner party for 8 – all people I thought were my friends and supporters. As usual, my menu was over ambitious, and kicked off with Borscht. This rendered the teetotaller drunk and invited the opprobrium of his friend upon me. The reformed teetotaller called for more and more Borscht, which was running low. His ravenous cries, like a baby bird demanding more worms, prompted me to throw a bottle of red wine into the Borscht pan, to eke it out. As there wasn't time to boil the alcohol off, it came to resemble warm, beetroot-flavoured wine. This was followed by pirozhki, salads, cheeses and a fancy pudding. Everything got out of hand, what with too much red wine and the reformed tee-totaller, me not producing the food promptly and not clearing away quickly on account of being pissed. So, Trisha, who was always a difficult kind of friend, collared me in the kitchen and told me that things were so much better when Jeremy was with me. So much for a divorce-celebration party. I’m not in touch with any of those people now. I think the reformed tee-totaller is dead.

Right, on with the motley -

Borscht - as prepared by me back in the past, which is a foreign country, where we did things differently, so don't complain to me about authenticity, for fuck's sake.

Ingredients

1 pound of beef - sirloin steak is good

1 tablespoon olive oil

2 big onions thinly sliced

2 bulbs of garlic, squeezed through a garlic press

1 large carrot - grated

2 beefsteak tomatoes  cut into small cubes

1 red bell pepper cut in 1/4 inch squares

1 tsp sugar 

2 cooked beetroots, peeled, quartered and sliced

2 large potatoes cubed

2 tsp salt

Loads of black pepper 

2 teaspoons of paprika

1 teaspoon of flakes of chili 

2 tsp tomato paste

1 bottle red wine and another one to make your Borscht go further (not recommended)

2 Bay leaves

To Serve

sour cream or Greek yoghurt

spring onion or chives

freshly ground black pepper

Method

Take your Big fuck-off knife and cube the meat

Throw the beef into a huge pot, together with the first bottle of red wine. 

Let the pot simmer over medium heat for 1 to 1.5 hours. 

If the meat pot starts boiling, reduce the heat and add water, so that  the meat remains covered.

keep skimming the broth.

In a separate pan, gently fry the vegetables in olive oil, then add them, together with seasoning, tomato paste and spices, to the meat pot.

Simmer it all up until the potatoes are soft.

Serve in individual, warmed, bowls, topped with sour cream/Greek yoghurt, a sprinkle of green chopped spring onions or chives, maybe a chive flower, and black pepper.

If your guests demand more - which they probably will, resist the temptation to throw the second bottle of red wine into the pan, serve it separately and get the cabbage rolls out of the oven. That will shut them up.

Here's some more cooking tips from Stanislav: 

Go in garden, taking dog, Buster, for piss at same time, have to go on lead because naughty old dog is and run back in house for piss instead of do in garden, like good boy does; is only sometimes but pain in arse is. Old bloke now, Buster, and gets confused.

Go down in garden admiring last of Lupin and Highland daisy, pulled up from A9 and spread now, like fear and loathing in Cabinet.

Locate some garlic among weeds and maverick potato and not worry, is not so bad as it looks

Pull up garlic from ground. n.b. is easy thing to grow garlic, just break big bulb in little clove and stuff in raised-up bed and forget about while writing blog and doing plumbing, come back in few months and pull up by neck. Can leave longer and bigger will be, but nice and young is sweetest and best, like this.

Take up in house, chop from stem with big fuck off knife and wash off from dirt, taking good care to put waste bits in compost bin.

Split in cloves and crush a little with big fuck off knife and drop precisely good handful in bottle of olive oil, any sort will do and leave for ten days, infusing to do.

Rosemary infused oil and garlic one, too

Can do exact same process – Go down garden, pull-up from ground etc with Thyme, for frying or roasting chicken and stanislav favouritest of all is Rosemary, just do exact same with handful of fresh picked Rosemary and is good for Roast Potato a la Cardiac Arrest, Roast Lamb and almost any white or oily fish, only not smoked, can use any herb-infuse oil for oil-an-bread -  Oh, fuck me, do try some oils and breads, is very sophisticated. And cheap, too, for miserable jumped-up dinner partying sonsoffuckingbitches. Have some bread and dip in oil and for dressing-up salad leaf, either alone or in combination with other stuff. Can pour in mashed potato and fry up cabbage and stuff like that, cover with black pepper, ground up in mill, like Dago waiter does and say Enjoy, cheeky fucking bastard, get punch in fucking mouth off stanislav, enjoy or not enjoy is stanislav business and not oily fucking Dago in apron.

If not garden has just buy stuff from TESCO and make up as before. But garden is best and anyone herbs can grow, on windowsill even, only not hemp or Old Bill come in will bashing down fucking door and retrieve few grammes of weed with street value of ten billion pounds. All that shit. Fucking wankers.

Anyway good happy cooking from stanislav. Herbs taste good, are best medicine, look good, taste good and by Golly, does you good. Granma’s pharmacy was hedgerow, innit.

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

There are four splendid anthologies of the writings of stanislav and mr ishmael, compiled by his friend, 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.

You Want it Darker

 mr bungalow bill said: "Gosh, Mrs I, if we were ever minded to co-opt religious notions on here then we might call it (the whole shit show) Original Sin. Perhaps better, though, just to acknowledge that we're no good."

I don't know if Ishmaelites picked up on my reference to the "knit your own sex offender kit." Why would you? mr ishmael used to be deeply disturbed by the sight of older Orcadian men, in blue boiler suits, talking to each other on the street, out of the corner of their mouths. He imagined them all as beasts. He had an instinct, his hackles rising. He had worked with enough sex offenders to recognise the secrecy, the surreptitious mutual recognition, keeping secrets even from themselves, but sharing them with those of a like mind. As, so often happened, he was right. The incidence of sex offending is surprisingly high in these islands, so frequently portrayed as a safe place. That the dark streak is persistently denied goes to the wish that these things simply don't happen. One of my colleagues once described Orkney to me as a liminal place - and so it seems on a misty night, or when a moon shadow chases you across the Harray plain in cold, clear December, imagination filled with the thoughts of the murdered Harray babies, their soft bones intermingled beneath the flagstones of an isolated cottage.

Maybe it is a thin place, where dark extrusions from somewhere else influence the suggestible and lonely. Maybe it is just a shit show. 

Here's a story from the crime pages of the weekly newspaper, The Orcadian, Thursday, July 10th, 2025.

Man claims "desensitisation" to legal pornography led to images of child and dog abuse.   

Kirkwall Sheriff Court heard on Wednesday, July 2nd, that 55 year-old Gary James C.- was sexually attracted to children and had become "desensitised" to legal pornography. He appeared on indictment and admitted to taking or permitting to be taken indecent images of children in 2022. He also admitted possessing extreme pornography depicting explicit images of acts involving his dog. He further admitted threatening or abusive behaviour by permitting and encouraging his dog to act as it did and filming it.

Procurator Fiscal Sue Foard said police received intelligence that C.- was uploading child sex material. Shortly after, a search warrant was executed on the house where he lived with his partner and his dog, D.-

He told police "To save you a lot of time, it's me and my mobile phone. That is where you'll find the stuff."

He later admitted that he was sexually attracted to male and female children from a year old and upwards. He initially denied being involved in sexual activity with animals, but when presented with the material extracted from his phone, he admitted his interaction with his dog. He said it had occurred on several occasions.

Indecent images of child sex abuse  were recovered from his phone, together with a further 11 images and 3 video clips of him abusing his dog. Sentence has been deferred for a criminal justice social work report. His name has been placed on the Sex Offender Register.

You Want It Darker

Song by

Leonard Cohen

If you are the dealer, I'm out of the game
If you are the healer, it means I'm broken and lame
If thine is the glory, then mine must be the shame
You want it darker
We kill the flame

Magnified, sanctified
Be the holy name
Vilified, crucified
In the human frame
A million candles burning
For the help that never came
You want it darker

Hineni, hineni
I'm ready, my Lord

There's a lover in the story
But the story's still the same
There's a lullaby for suffering
And a paradox to blame
But it's written in the scriptures
And it's not some idol claim
You want it darker
We kill the flame

They're lining up the prisoners
And the guards are taking aim
I struggle with some demons
They were middle class and tame
I didn't know I had permission
To murder and to maim
You want it darker

Hineni, hineni
I'm ready, my Lord

Magnified, sanctified
Be the holy name
Vilified, crucified
In the human frame
A million candles burning
For the love that never came
You want it darker
We kill the flame

If you are the dealer, let me out of the game
If you are the healer, I'm broken and lame
If thine is the glory, mine must be the shame
You want it darker

Hineni, hineni
Hineni, hineni
I'm ready, my Lord.

The Sunday Ishmael: 13/07/2025

 

I was chums with a dominatrix once. We palled up at the Proudfoot School of Clinical Hypnosis and Psychotherapy in Scarborough, studying to be Master Hypnotists. The course was not cheap and, on registration day, while I fumbled out my credit card, the woman ahead in the queue unzipped her leather bumbag and took out wads of cash, which took some time to count into the cash box. During the ice-breaker getting-to-know-you session, she said she was an I.T. technician but wanted to retrain as a therapist. Most people on the course were practising therapists, me included, together with a handful of dilettantes and a driving instructor. He was middle-aged, white, suited, sweaty and lascivious, as those unfortunate women paired with him for the trust exercises quickly discovered. He wanted to be a hypnotherapist, he asserted, to help his driving students to relax before their test. Wilf Proudfoot saw through it and failed him. Wilf didn't smoke out my new chum though. The dominatrix.

She was clever, witty, sarcastic and lean. She had perfect purple hair,

which caused my fellow students, middle-class professionals, to be very wary of her. Well, it was the last century and self-expression was not usual amongst the salaried classes.

So we would often find ourselves having coffee together. She was intrigued by me being a Probation Officer and I expressed polite interest in her duties as an I.T. technician, until she told me she knew nothing about I.T. but had adopted it as a cover identity as no-one would enquire into an occupation so boring. And she offered me a job. Well, I was young and beautiful then, with, as Julie Birchill used to claim of herself, a splendid rack. I declined - I didn't like the uniform, the working conditions were uncertain and possibly dangerous, and I didn't think women should exploit men. "Au contraire, mrs ishmael", she riposted. "We're not talking street-corner whoring here, I offer a therapeutic service to men who, in the main, just want to talk to a sympathetic woman who understands them." 

"I understand them all too well," I said, "I could write a book entitled Murderers, Rapists and Prostitutes I have had coffee and a fag with".

"You saw my leather bumbag? We're talking serious money here. So much money I can't spend it."

Wilf passed her as a Master Hypnotist and, after a little difficulty concerning the name she wanted on her certificate - not the name she had enrolled under, but the name she wanted on her dungeon wall, she graduated with a handshake and a scroll. I don't know what happened to her in the ensuing years, as I was firm in my resolve not to change my profession.

Other prostitutes who smoked my cigarettes while I attempted to rehabilitate them, fulfilling my duty to advise, assist and befriend, as the Probation Service's mission statement had it back then, included one woman vastily pregnant, who would drop into my office on her way out to work. "Please don't go out tonight," I would plead, naively, "You are eight months pregnant, and the baby might be harmed". "Girl's got to make a living, mrs ishmael, thanks for the fag."

"I'm going to have to refer you to Social Services".

"They're going to take the baby, anyway, like they did with the others. I'll just get knocked up again."

"Can't you use condoms?"

"mrs ishmael, my punters won't use them. And I have clients that prefer fucking a pregnant woman. Bigger the better, really."

Then there was the rent boy, who actively solicited on train stations, and whose punter was brought to Court by the Transport Police. Evidence produced included the size of the boy's spontaneous anal dilation which caused the judge to comment that even though he was an experienced prostitute, adults have a duty of care not to exploit children. Or the older rent boy, whose speciality was defecating onto the faces of his punters, and becoming very concerned at the commencement of the AIDS epidemic that he had been infected, took himself to A&E and kicked up such a fuss at reception when he wasn't seen immediately, that the receptionist called the police who promptly broke his arm whilst forcing his arms behind his back, and when he complained that they had broken his arm, said, oh no we haven't, exerted a little more force and then said, "Now we have".

All this was before the internet - no, kids, you didn't invent sex and porn. 

It wasn't surprising that lads arriving in Britain from less sophisticated cultures got into trouble for misinterpreting sexual norms. One defendant was brought before Solihull Magistrates Court after flying in from Pakistan and immediately following a woman into the toilet and raping her. Speaking for him, his interpreter said that he was a stupid virginal boy from a backwards hill village, who spoke a dialect so rare that only he, the educated, intelligent and linguistically gifted spokesman, understood it. The defendant's cousins who had already settled in Birmingham, had written to him to tell him that he should join them immediately as white women all wanted sex all the time. That defence didn't spare him a prison sentence.

Since then, progress has given us the technological miracle of the internet: porn in your pocket, new careers for students on Only Fans and sexathon athlete Lily Phillips. 

If I don't understand the nuances of the West's sexual mores, then how can we expect men from a culture in which the privacy of women is respected, to begin to understand it?

Or

These thoughts were triggered by an article by Andy Jones in the Spectator this morning. He recalls how he visited the Calais migrant jungle as a journalist in 2015 and the subsequent year, describing "the grim, rubbish-strewn site of 4,000 people, almost all young men. A sort of desperate Glastonbury of rows of tents and mud, with miserable groups hunched among bramble bushes". These men  were eldest sons from patriarchal societies, sending home their fictitious success stories, prompting more sons to be sent on this new pilgrim route to the promised land. Men from tiny, poor villages in undeveloped countries, all coming to Britain to make better life. All with the appetites and desires of young men, mixed in with a great deal of misinformation about the West, filtered through the perceptions of a mad, stone-age, misogynistic religion. Back then, the migrants smuggled themselves on board lorries. Drivers opened their trucks to find their loads written off because of soilage by the illegal migrants, in there for days with no access to toilets. Around that time my daughter had some casual work in a warehouse, picking out customer orders. She told me always to wash new clothes and sheets, towels, etc., before using them. Why so, daughter, I enquired? For exactly the reason Andy Jones spells out. Much stock is discarded, but much gets through, perhaps only slightly contaminated by the migrants’ bodily fluids, or, as we rough people say, piss and shit. The warehouse workers would go home, strip, throw their clothes in the washing machine and shower at the end of every shift. The lorry drivers would hose out their lorries.

What, for the love of God, is so special about Britain that it caused young men to smuggle themselves aboard lorries, cooped up for days in stifling conditions with no access to sanitation? And now to risk the North Sea in blow-up rubber dinghies?

Andy Jones' conclusion is that it is football and sex. They are all keen on football and see England as the capitol of football. As you know, we in Ishmaelia don't do football. Or sport, really. mr mongoose and mr mike like cricket, but football is a bit of a closed book to us - a book whose pages are written with violence, tribal affiliation, intimidation, comradely violation of football groupies and breathless, stupid-bint commentators. If it is pulling in illegal migrants, that's another sin to set against it.

As for sex as the pull factor - that makes sense, especially when you consider the Solihull Magistrates Court case detailed above. Andy Jones describes hearing Afghan migrants saying they want "an English girlfriend". When he questioned that, the migrants "just burst into fits of giggles". You can be sure that they do not want an English girlfriend with whom to form a loving relationship based on equality, respect, mutual enjoyment and a shared desire to form a stable household in which to bring up their children. Shit, no. They want a free prostitute. They've seen them on social media, in porn, in consumer advertising, in "influencing".  Tales of Ruin.  

But, to be fair, not many young English men, either, want a loving, committed relationship in which to produce babies and bring them up into stable, happy, productive adults. Hell, no. They, too, want football and sex. Have you seen those sludge programs churned out by trash television? Love Island, Married at First Sight, Naked Attraction? No, me neither. But you know the sort of thing. And I did watch Naked Attraction once, in a horrified trance. And young English women seem okay with the demise of the nuclear family of mum, dad and 2.4 kids. It is now down to 1.44 children per woman.

In 2021, the proportion of one-person households ranged from 25.8% in London to 36.0% in Scotland. Which is telling us something about the relative insignificance of family life in Britain. Other European countries have an even greater proportion of single households:

45.8% Norway.
44.1% Denmark.
43.0% Finland.
42.5% Sweden.
41.7% Germany.
40.3% Estonia.

I could say "Lily Phillips, you and your soeurs consumeristes, you have reduced England to the porn capitol of Europe, drawing in young Arab men like wasps to the uncovered lollipop." 

But, really, I should start with the generation which came of age in the Sixties and Seventies, to whom sex was nothing special, nothing to get hung about, to whom the family was a strait jacket, the generation that threw out deference, shame, religion  and patriotism. 

It's all our fault. 

We've made our bed, and now we must lie in it, as they say. But surely, we can change the sheets? Surely we must change the sheets, when they are getting grubby? They are looking pretty grubby at present. Like those textiles in lorries highjacked by illegal migrants.

Since 2018, more than 170,000 men have illegally crossed the Channel in small boats. Around 95 per cent apply for asylum. The UK is projected to spend £15.3 billion in housing asylum seekers, triple the amount the Conservative government predicted in 2019. 

This is not the consequence of a managed migration policy. The key word is illegal. It is a very nice, liberal value to welcome the dispossessed homeless, those in need of asylum. 

The Merriam Webster dictionary gives definitions for asylum the following:

1. an inviolable place of refuge and protection giving shelter to        criminals and debtors

2. a place of retreat and security : shelter
3 (a) the protection or security afforded by an asylum : refuge
   (b) protection from arrest and extradition given especially to political refugees.

Commenting on the Starmer-Macron deal to shuffle the illegal migrants about between Britain and France,  mr mongoose said in the last thread: " the country is full of an entire industry of lawyers and bien pensant half-wits committed to obstruct removal of folk. So it seems to me that the trickle of deported people will be replaced by a similar trickle of French supplied folk. Net result: not zero - indeed barely a dent. The French will send the vermin they do not want, the ones with families so in need of human rights-driven safe haven that I hereby predict that the numbers will rise."

Given that it now seems impossible for any government of any political colour to end illegal migration under the current set of values, law and regulation, I could suggest that it is now time to toss those grubby sheets out, and close Britain to asylum-seekers. The doctrine of the supremacy of Parliament means that Parliament is not bound by its predecessors and can make up any old law that it can pass through the Commons and the Lords. Remember the Covid restrictions?

But, really, have I just fallen for the fashionable rhetoric about illegal migrants? What's the problem? British women are not producing children in sufficient numbers to maintain Britain's population at its current, ridiculously high, level. I'm entirely fine with that. All these people are eating, breathing, excreting, putting a strain on the health services - and a deficit of new young humans will cause a transitional difficulty until the population settles down at a pre-Boomer level. This transitional difficulty is not ok for economists and politicians, though, who welcome immigration, believing it causes growth and believing that growth is a good thing. So, if they think that immigration is a good thing, then these lusty young Arabs will keep the population up and the wage bill down.

Again, what's the problem? It is to do with cultural identity, I think - not straightforward racism, although that's in the mix, but a nostalgic yearning for a prelapsarian Britain which actually never existed. For liberal values, for the spinster on her bicycle. As John Major said in 1993:  

"Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and - as George Orwell said - “old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist” and if we get our way - Shakespeare still read even in school."

Well, it's only 32 years on, John, and I think your idyll of Britain is so way off the mark it is risible. And I guess that's because we have entirely failed, as a nation, to pass that sort of Britain on to its indigenous population, let alone forge its migrant peoples - both legal and illegal - into a united country of shared culture and values. 

What is so good about warm beer, anyway? And where were the residents of the high rise blocks and inner city dwellings in your vision, alongside the invincible green suburbs? The green suburbs are becoming less green as front gardens are paved over to allow electric vehicles close to the house and its power point. Heidi Alexander, by the way, Secretary of State for Transport, has reassured the nation that she is thinking about getting an electric car, having had her fossil fuel car for 6 years and she not being the sort of girl who changes her car every year. She lives in a terrace house and is considering regulation change to allow householders to carve out pavement gutters to lay those charging cables across pavements so you can recharge outside your terrace house. Oh yeah? What about all the other cars wanting to park on that street? My chum in Brum sometimes has to park so far away from her drive-less house that she can't see it for the mounds of uncollected refuse. 

So - liberal values. We hold them dear and expect our fellow citizens, legal and illegal, to imbibe them. But what are they exactly? I'm fond of saying I'm not a liberal because 25 years in the Probation Service has taught me that people are shit and don't deserve/aren't capable of liberal values. They need tight controls. Most people I know wouldn't agree, whilst actively lobbying for censorship.

Here's a list of liberal values, as identified by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom:

• Individualism – the belief in the importance of the individual over any social group or collective body.
• Rationalism – the belief that the world has a rational structure, and that this can be disclosed through the exercise of human reason and critical inquiry.
• Freedom – the ability to think or act as one wishes in accordance with self-determination.
• Responsibility – being responsible for oneself and one’s own economic and social circumstance.
• Justice - morally justifiable distribution of rewards and punishment.
• Tolerance - forbearance, a willingness to accept views or actions that one disagrees or of which one disapproves.

The Institute for Liberal Values identifies the following:
Liberalism is a political and economic philosophy that prioritizes individual freedom, equality, and protecting individual rights and liberties. It emphasizes the importance of the rule of law, free markets, and limited government intervention in the economy and society…

Wiki offers these characteristics of the liberal philosophy:
Private property
Market economies
Individual rights (including civil rights and human rights)
Liberal democracy
Secularism
Rule of law
Economic and political freedom
Freedom of speech
Freedom of the press
Freedom of assembly
Freedom of religion
Constitutional government
Privacy rights

Yeah, okay - no wonder we are living in the days of Ruin. Have these philosophers ever actually stopped and thought about human beings as a species? About what they do, given half a chance?

As for the Online Safety Act, which this month requires platforms to stop children from accessing content that is not illegal, but is harmful or age-inappropriate, to whit: pornography, content that encourages, promotes, or provides instructions for either: self-harm,

eating disorders or suicide, bullying, abusive or hateful content,

content which depicts or encourages serious violence or injury,

content which encourages dangerous stunts and challenges; and

content which encourages the ingestion, inhalation or exposure to harmful substances.

Ian Russell, God bless him, whose 14-year-old daughter Molly tragically died in 2017, told the BBC's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg: "This should be the biggest moment in online safety since social media was invented."

That would be nice, but it's pissing in the wind, I fear.

Ruin.

There are four splendid anthologies of the writings of stanislav and mr ishmael, compiled by his friend, 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.

Island Games: Sailing 2025