PROMISES OF PARADISE.

I went to see the doctor. 
Hmmm, she greeted me, heart, neck, you bin in the wars. 
Got me thinking.

 My Mum used to say it, soothingly, sympatico, coddling an infant graze or a bruise, wee ishmael's been in the wars. The wars, not the war. 

Must be a saying, I thought, brought-forward  from the Sharpe Wars,  the Peninsular Wars, the Raj wars, the Hornblower wars -  events which  were maybe folkloric reality to her parents.

After finishing with the 'doc - replenishing a stock of GlobaPharm  opiate prescriptions I'll never fill  - I was puzzled enough to googleseek  and it turns out that he's been in the wars dates from the fourteenth century, hacking and chopping Crusader Wars, a time pre-Poppy, pre-Help4Heroes, pre-military pensions, from a time before PrinceHarry'sLeglessFinest  dragging themselves to icy celebrity at the North Pole; he's been in the wars dates from a time far worse than that of the Haig PoppyMakers being set to fund their own artificial limbs and white sticks and be jolly well grateful.

Oh, he's been in the wars originated  when limbless ex-servicemen, home from the Holy Wasted Land, were abandoned by monarch, lord and prelate to begging through the cesspit streets and brutish lanes, their existence explained to the curious by that phrase, Oh, he's been in the wars.

I guess that, one way and another, generally at the will of some vicious, inbred pope or prince, the wars have always been a frightful backdrop, as regular as the seasons.

What's been niggling me about those vermin, the ones extolling Bremain - funny, that, how those preferring democracy, of sorts, are christened with a baby-name, a made-up,  nursery word, Brexiteers, faintly ridiculous, while no such linguistic mockery is applied to GlobaCrime's servants, nobody calls them Bremainers, nobody but me - is their insistence that we owe recent, relative peace in Europe to the likes of Fatty Soames, Chris Patten,  Leon Brittan, Roy Jenkins, Pete Mandelstein and Mr'n'Mrs Kinnock,  our own EuroSluts, stuffing their faces,  lining their grubby pockets and greasing their poxy rectums with stolen money, aggrandising themselves with commissions and secretariats, their scabby heads going like fiddlers' elbows, furiously blow-jobbing organised crime.  This obnoxious shower of filth, singly or collectively, are the very, very worst of a very bad lot, not only unspeakably corrupt but breathtakingly incompetent, good, as the poet, stasnislav,  has it, for fuck all; greedy, idle, impudent, shameless, brazenly insolent, fraudulent, treacherous, unctuous, thieving fucking bastards, child molesters, pimps, drunks, blackmailers, extortionists and degenerates of every stripe. These people would eat bucketsful of lepershit if there was a pension at the end of it, a bauble, a sinecure. Any bastard come around here telling me that this gang have made the world a safer place, well, he better have a good dental surgeon on stand-by.

Anyone still remember Bob The Cunt Ainsworth, 

or Des The Cunt  Browne 


or Geoff The Cunt  Hoon, 


crooks, slags, pimps; war criminals, squaddy-killers, child incinerators  and war ministers to Tony Blair, Gordon Snot and the CIA?  Or Mad John Reid,  the pisshead Jock dwarf bullyboy,  who masterminded the Afghanistan fuck-up, the one which would see no dead Tommies, unless you count the five hundred dead, the useless, drunken, cock-waving Glaswegian fuckpig?  

 
There won't even be a shot fired, opined Wee John McClausewitz, self-styled BigMan of Labour, as he rolled-up his shirt sleeves to destroy one ministry after another, sending Tommy off to 21st century irregular warfare, in plywood-clad WW2 LandRovers, with battlefield radios that would only receive Radio 2. Fuck me, he must be the patron saint of Wootton Fucking Bassett, that drunken, murdering git, Reid.  The NewLabour front bench was spectacularly corrupt and inept and grew moreso under Snotty's insecure, raging and drooling,  psychotic imperium, worthless twins and brothers and married couples appointed to high office, the more likely to form a mutually protective bodyguard around  the mad, snot-eating lunatic. These worthless crazies, they   would've declared war on anyone they were told to, still would, given half a chance and a few quid.

There has been no need, however, of  a war in Europe, although there's been the odd flare-up, Srebrenica comes to mind, in which our indispensible European allies, the Dutch, so distinguished themselves, by running like fuck from the massacre of 7,000, back, no doubt, to their cheese and pornography.  There has been no need  for war in Europe because fortunes have been made,  weapons fired and re-purchased, new weapons trialled, troops trained - but mainly fortunes made - since WW2 in Indo-China, Iraq, Afghanistan and with any luck, soon, in Syria.   Those pesky ISILites, eh, if not for them Winston Cameron could even now,  be seen worshipped  by grateful Syrians.

Fortunes have similarly been made in the supply and maintainance of what we call NATO, a huge force, controlled by Uncle Sam, the operational boundaries and territorial ambitions of which are infinitely elastic.  Should, of course, Mr Putin and his crazed oligarchy rock the Ukraine boat too much, then war will once again flare in Europe, even though the Ukraine, as far as I know, is not traditionally part of Europe, no moreso than is Turkey but hey, what do I know, now that my betters tell me that gender is not specific but a spectrum, a continuum, and that any person is whatever gender it feels like being, may soon even marry its dog, and take it into whichever toilet it feels to be in accordance with its gender d'jour, heedless of outdated, oppressive and unjust concepts of  fixed genderalityism.  Yeah, you bitches in here, all prissy because you claim you was born women and you got more right to piss in here, well, lemme tell you, I chose to be a woman, so legally,  I got more rights in here than you do. AND you gotta swear on a stack of Bibles or any other book of faith, such as this week's LGBT Times,  that I actually, am more woman than you lot, else you are dissin' the whole concept of human rights. Or more man, actually if I was a woman, standing in the khazi next door but thinking I was a man, I'd be more man than the men.  'slike that Hamlet said, one of my great heroines, for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Forgive me, I know I've mentioned this before but the more I think about it the crazier it seems, although perfectly emblematic of the times. It's like there's a parallel universe of complete Absurdity, flowing into ours, from some ruinously diseased  black arsehole.

I thought I'd better make-up a word for it - polyfecalmorphy - everything turning into shit.

I had a drug vision, a few years back. 

I was briefly on OxyCodon, and like some damn fool with an over-developed hospitality gland I was at the dinner table with a trio of guests; they came up here for a free holiday most years because I kinda liked him, his folks were Windrush Jamaicans although Peter had become very white and civilised.  They were two nitwit, pushy parents with their ghastly brat of, I dunno, six, seven.  

Mum, I've mentioned previously, she was the HR graduate who thought that coal was made in a TESCO factory, Oh, in West Bromwich, somewhere like that, isn't that where the Black Country is, with all the factories that make coal? 

When I told her what coal was, where and when it came from - stored-up sunshine - she looked at me as though I was stark-raving mad, a lunatic, unhinged.  What?  They invented coal, hundreds of millions of years ago?

Anyway, at every dinner, the brat had to be the centre of attention. No question of her having her tea at five or six o'clock and going to bed, no, she had to join us and dominate the entire evening from eight o'clock onwards, beaming at her own every witticism, applauded, literally applauded by Mum and Dad.

On this occasion I had just recently had surgery and was - unusually - doped-up to my eyeballs and I only had to squint to see this trio as sitting inside a cocoon of shiny, self-generated spit, they were all speaking insect language to each other, inside the cocoon, hands waving like mandibles, 

in time to high-pitched squeaks, the child being the group leader, everything flashed-by-eye to her, for her approval, Mummybug and Daddybug, vying for her attention. It was all revolting.

I took mrs ishmael into the kitchen,  Can you see the spit, where'd all that fucking spit come from, it's like a candy floss machine, only it's spit, 'slike  a fountain of fucking spit, and they're all inside it, squeaking and wet, it's kinda green, the spit, and it's like a force field.  I think she put me to bed.  The spit-shield was real, though, I know it was, it was just the HillBilly Heroin making it visible.

I had been at the new Birmingham Science Museum  with these people just a few months previously and Peter had dragged me into the corner of a display and spent forty minutes explaining to me how his wife was insane.  And now, here he was, encased in spit with her. All greenish. Like transluscent snot. And squeaking.

I have never seen them since, anyway, Peter,  his mad Mrs and his evil QueenBee brat, nor  ever want to, the image of the child-dominated spit bubble is always lurking there, just  behind my eyes, just  when I start thinking I have acquired an understanding of my fellows. And so it is with the Bremainers and their talk of peace, they are just waving their mandibles at us, all moistly together,  clicking and squeaking, inside  their spit palace, fooling us, in a manner  that results in us not quite being able to see what's going on. Or thinking we're mad and not them

All of these bastards start a war at the drop of a hat. How can anyone look at Mad Micky Fallon and not smell Carnage, the man's a fucking monster, an uneducated, ill-tempered, larcenous red-faced, braying Tory bully, an utter fuckpig. Sticky-Fingers Malcolm Shouty and the vile  Jack Torture, they are filth, they are seen to be, known to be, proven to be  filth.And yet they lecture us about Peace and Virtue,  they have had no need to dip their snouts in European blood for they have drenched the streets of Arabia in it, of North Africa, of South East Asia and of Northern Ireland.

I dunno upon whom Donald Trump has rained fire and shrapnel and other than being a spiv, a ponce  and a vengeful, Tory hypocrite I can find no fault in Nigel Poundland, either, yet I am told to see both as horsemen of the Apocalypse, when, in fact, Death's monsters are already stabled, fed  and exercised in Brussels and Washington and in MediaMinster.

Since the meeting with my doctor and the thought of the wars, the role of the recruiting sergeant has been buzzing around my mind, whether it be the ghastly Beatification of Saint Jo or the stridency of the Bremainers'  taunts, we are urged by liars and crooks to do the right thing for our country, when what we are driven to do is of benefit only to our masters; the same dogs which snapped at townsful of young men, the more eagerly to make them enlist for Flanders massacre, now roam the streets again, snarling;  the same  wistful lady arseholes send white feathers to those who object. The SpivLords of New Cotswoldia hector us as though they were Lord Kitchener, himself, whilst delivering us up to a junta of greed and corruption, to an unelected oligarchy of consumerisme totalitairienne nouvelle; to limitless immigration and to the iniquitouis European Arrest Warrant.

 The British folk song, once, like the pamphleteers,  a voice of resistance and satire,  has long been usurped by showbiz reptiles like Sir Billy Bragg, in his career, as a folk singer  and Filth-O-Graph  columnist. 

Rich Americans, like the sensitive diva, Ms Joan Baez and the incomparable artiste, Mr Bob Dylan, have grown hugely rich on the Childe ballads of  Scotland and Northern England and countless British musicians have corporatised the treasure house that is the Copper Family Songbook, the banks of the sweet primroses;  the sweet morning in  May; the hard times of old England.

The songs, however, own themselves and exist, still, to be applied as they were intended to be, as an antidote to MediaMinster, then and now.

This one, here, is an historic Anglo-Irish counterblast to the taking of the King's or Queen's poxy, one-shilling inducement.  The recorded song dates from the late 'seventies,  the joyful visualisation is much more recent but if you squint you can see that,  Redcoat or David Beckham, the recruiting sergeant would always see us march to a ruinous drumbeat,  whilst they march to none.

 Maestro Paul Brady is old, now, sourly marinaded in  vinegary showbusiness;  the song, however, a caustic and lyrical refutation of  vicious, mendacious  state charlatanry,

remains the same.

A song, now, for Europe.