The doorbell rang,
it doesn't often ring and when it does it heralds strangers, everybody else just walks in.
I've been expecting a plumber, several different plumbers, for over seven months - I really should learn plumbing, I have done a bit, recently, thinking, well, if they can do it I can fucking do it and probably a bit better but I can't service a boiler - I almost ran to the door in my haste to get the boiler serviced and an external stop-cock replaced.
When I opened the front door there was no plumber's van and no plumbers, just a worthy-looking couple in their late thirties, she grinning with her hand outstretched, to be shaken and him just looking worthy, a bit shuffly.
Fuck me, I thought, it's the Jovas or the Mormons but instantly realised that they only hunt in male pairs, those types, rubber-stamping for God their daily quota of souls, the impertinent bastards.
Last time they came, the Mormons, I said, Look, lads, no offence to you or Uncle Sam or the fine state of Utah but I live in fucking Paradise, look around, everywhere is the hand of wondrous, inexplicable Creation; the fragile skies, the metronoming tides, wound by the moon, just exactly the right distance away, warmed by the Sun, just exactly the right distance away; the shores a-teem with life under every rock; the hand of Time's industry in every grain of sand; the birds and bees.
Last time they came, the Mormons, I said, Look, lads, no offence to you or Uncle Sam or the fine state of Utah but I live in fucking Paradise, look around, everywhere is the hand of wondrous, inexplicable Creation; the fragile skies, the metronoming tides, wound by the moon, just exactly the right distance away, warmed by the Sun, just exactly the right distance away; the shores a-teem with life under every rock; the hand of Time's industry in every grain of sand; the birds and bees.
Consider, lads, the lilies of the field, they toil not neither do they spin; all good things around us, they really are sent from Heav'n above, just not yours; we really are stardust, do you think I live here and not know Creation, do you think I need your nasty, guilt-ridden appreciation of it, when I have my own?
They went away, I would like to think like Coleridge's wedding guest, sadder and wiser men but I doubt if they did.
My mind was whirring, they're not Godly, these two, and its long past the election, they're not politicos and so, ignoring Missy's outstretched paw and winning smile I just said Who're you?
It has become normal for people not to introduce themselves but demand first your self-identification to them; we get calls all fucking day which open, Are you ishmael smith to which I reply, perfectly reasonably, that's not the question, the question is Who the fuck are you? You called me, never mind who I am, who are you, you got no fucking manners?
If you were a friend and had my number legitimately you'd know who I was, wouldn't you?
Often, you can tell by the delay and the background noise that this call is coming from a criminal call centre in Islamabad or whatever they call Delhi, these days.
I have a formula, now, for these cunts. He or she says Good morning, Sir, how are you, I am Keith or Sally, calling from Microsoft about your computer. Ah, Keith, I say, how is your mother? My mother? Yes, I saw your mother on the internet, last night, fucking a herd of pigs, sucking their curly cocks. But your mother, Keith, she may be a fat, poxy old whore but at least she's honest, whereas you're just a thieving black cunt, aren't you ? You're not Keith, you're Ahmed or something. If it's Sally on the phone I say, Ah, Sally, you sound like a nice girl. Why don't you go and do proper prostitution, instead of trying to rob people in foreign countries, you worthless cunt.
People are quite shocked when they hear this, gasping the R word, you can't say that, ishmael. But these people are trying to steal money from us, they are not really from Microsoft, they bought our 'phone number and they call people like us all day long, hoping to get the bank details of some poor soul and rob them; racism be damned, they're thieving black cunts, that's what they are, they're the racists, trying to rob well-mannered British people who are soft and polite, conditioned to be nice to vermin. They have declared race war, declared that they want to rob me of what little we have. I've been here getting-on for twenty years and the most black people I have ever seen have been in my house, friends, visiting me; honest, not invent. That wouldn't wash, though, with the Virtuous, to whom it is the pious word which counts more than the deed.
There's no fucking end to this tele-banditry. I had a recorded one a couple of weeks back. Some cunt saying he was from HMRC, it was about my tax and if I didn't call him back immediately I risked imprisonment. Now, this obviously works sometimes or they wouldn't do it and one wonders why the government doesn't do something but the government, of course, will be in the pay of the companies that organise it all, the government, in fact the parliament, are consigliere to Organised Crime, of which 'phone terrorism is just a small branch. When it comes to the unwonted approach of strangers, therefore, I shoot first.
She was a pleasant enough woman but she was doorstepping me and I just looked at her, like I was Zeus or Thor or Jehovah and was a heartbeat away from incinerating her on the spot, fiery-fingering both her and ShufflyMan.
Who. Are. You?
Oh, we're here about the stoats, she stammered.
The stoats?
Yes, we were wondering if we could use your land.
What, to raise stoats?
There's a big problem at the moment, with stoats.
They're not native here, they've been introduced.
And they have no predators.
Bit like us, you mean.
Sorry?
We don't have any predators, humankind, do we?
Oh, right, but what's happening is that the stoats are playing havoc with the ground-nesting birds and so we need to eradicate them.
How?
Oh, just with traps.
OK, and what happens to the stoats?
Oh, they're lethal traps, she smiled a Mother Teresa smile at me.
You kill them?
They're lethal traps, she repeated, not wanting to say the K word. Nice people don't kill things.
I walked them round the garden, her gasping at the trees and hedges, all most unusual in Orkney and very wildlife friendly, as we say, now.
What they wanted to do, themselves, in the interests of wildlife, was have a stoat-trapper come and plant his traps around my walls, they like the walls, the stoats, apparently, and then, three weeks later, come and empty and re-bait the traps. And then I could feel that I was doing my bit for nature, having poisoned stoat corpses lying around all over the shop.
Now, an ornithologist once told me that our garden was a miracle, it was the very first landing/nesting place for birds coming from the East and he'd counted a hundred or so different types
I have been pruning recently and I can't move a branch, it seems, without finding a nest.
- people don't grow trees or hedges, here, normally, well, some incomers do but the natives don't and I can understand why, it is very hard work, what with the wind and the seasalt in it,
The shore is about eighty metres distant and when the winds blow everything is salt abraded, I am sure you could strip a piece of furniture just by leaving it outside.
I might've mentioned the Great Grouse Adventure, when Harris attacked the resident male, leaving him wounded. I was much distressed, not by Harris's behaviour but by the thought that I might have to wring the creature's neck, well it was just a thought, I could never have done it. Instead, we called the SSPB and it seemed that within a few minutes she was here, uniformed and kitted-up, like a one-woman SWAT team, took charge of the grouse, treated him and then a few weeks later released him back in this area, we only saw him a couple of times, thereafter, Harrised-out, I expect. He was a lovely sight, proud and colourful. The SSPB is partly funding my doorstepping visitors; their torture and extermination of the stoats, it is an odd animal welfare posture.
There was something on the TeeVee, recently, in the background, about the Space Race of my infancy and childhood. Describing weightlessness experiments, it is always best, said the tellyhistorian presenter, pompously, to test potentially dangerous procedures on animals first.
In a flash I remembered as an infant asking my mother, What happened to that space dog they sent up?
Laika, of course, died from what they called overheating, sort of boiled alive. The whole fucking Space nonsense, mind, is built on tens of thousands of Jews and other riff-raff being worked to death by Werner von Braun, constructing his V1 and V2 missiles, projects which he completed for Uncle Sam as the Saturn rocket, where nobody ever asked Werner about all those pesky slaves
von Braun in his SS uniform, with his pal, Himmler,
and with JFK and LBJ, Freedom's last best hope.
"We chose not to ask this Nazi cunt about torture and mass murder, not because it is difficult but because it is easy. " JFK
Anyway, there it is, from the saintly horse's mouth; whole races and nations of people are evidently disposable, murderable, in pursuit of a bigger objective.
And if someone has decided that the stoats have to die, in desperate agony, alone, poisoned in a box, in order that the birds may flourish, well eradication takes on a newer, higher meaning than when Europeans decided that the Jews must be poisoned so that the Aryans may flourish.
I wish I'd asked Virtuous Missy if her stoat eradication plan was a whatchamacallit, a Final Solution.
Animals, peoples, oceans, doesn't matter; some I-Know-Bester, like today's doorstepping halfwits will shit all over Creation and say it's for the best, no, really it is.
No, mate, yer fucked, it's Zyklon B for you.
It's the birds, they need lebensraum.
Wossat? No, mate, you don't need it just as much as they do.
Listen, mate, we're the master race around here, alright, the Devil, if you like, and what we say goes. And that's why the planet is in such good shape.
Yeah, thousand-year EuroReich,
no problem.
If you were a friend and had my number legitimately you'd know who I was, wouldn't you?
Often, you can tell by the delay and the background noise that this call is coming from a criminal call centre in Islamabad or whatever they call Delhi, these days.
I have a formula, now, for these cunts. He or she says Good morning, Sir, how are you, I am Keith or Sally, calling from Microsoft about your computer. Ah, Keith, I say, how is your mother? My mother? Yes, I saw your mother on the internet, last night, fucking a herd of pigs, sucking their curly cocks. But your mother, Keith, she may be a fat, poxy old whore but at least she's honest, whereas you're just a thieving black cunt, aren't you ? You're not Keith, you're Ahmed or something. If it's Sally on the phone I say, Ah, Sally, you sound like a nice girl. Why don't you go and do proper prostitution, instead of trying to rob people in foreign countries, you worthless cunt.
People are quite shocked when they hear this, gasping the R word, you can't say that, ishmael. But these people are trying to steal money from us, they are not really from Microsoft, they bought our 'phone number and they call people like us all day long, hoping to get the bank details of some poor soul and rob them; racism be damned, they're thieving black cunts, that's what they are, they're the racists, trying to rob well-mannered British people who are soft and polite, conditioned to be nice to vermin. They have declared race war, declared that they want to rob me of what little we have. I've been here getting-on for twenty years and the most black people I have ever seen have been in my house, friends, visiting me; honest, not invent. That wouldn't wash, though, with the Virtuous, to whom it is the pious word which counts more than the deed.
There's no fucking end to this tele-banditry. I had a recorded one a couple of weeks back. Some cunt saying he was from HMRC, it was about my tax and if I didn't call him back immediately I risked imprisonment. Now, this obviously works sometimes or they wouldn't do it and one wonders why the government doesn't do something but the government, of course, will be in the pay of the companies that organise it all, the government, in fact the parliament, are consigliere to Organised Crime, of which 'phone terrorism is just a small branch. When it comes to the unwonted approach of strangers, therefore, I shoot first.
She was a pleasant enough woman but she was doorstepping me and I just looked at her, like I was Zeus or Thor or Jehovah and was a heartbeat away from incinerating her on the spot, fiery-fingering both her and ShufflyMan.
Who. Are. You?
Oh, we're here about the stoats, she stammered.
The stoats?
Yes, we were wondering if we could use your land.
What, to raise stoats?
There's a big problem at the moment, with stoats.
They're not native here, they've been introduced.
And they have no predators.
Bit like us, you mean.
Sorry?
We don't have any predators, humankind, do we?
Oh, right, but what's happening is that the stoats are playing havoc with the ground-nesting birds and so we need to eradicate them.
How?
Oh, just with traps.
OK, and what happens to the stoats?
Oh, they're lethal traps, she smiled a Mother Teresa smile at me.
You kill them?
They're lethal traps, she repeated, not wanting to say the K word. Nice people don't kill things.
I walked them round the garden, her gasping at the trees and hedges, all most unusual in Orkney and very wildlife friendly, as we say, now.
What they wanted to do, themselves, in the interests of wildlife, was have a stoat-trapper come and plant his traps around my walls, they like the walls, the stoats, apparently, and then, three weeks later, come and empty and re-bait the traps. And then I could feel that I was doing my bit for nature, having poisoned stoat corpses lying around all over the shop.
Now, an ornithologist once told me that our garden was a miracle, it was the very first landing/nesting place for birds coming from the East and he'd counted a hundred or so different types
- people don't grow trees or hedges, here, normally, well, some incomers do but the natives don't and I can understand why, it is very hard work, what with the wind and the seasalt in it,
I might've mentioned the Great Grouse Adventure, when Harris attacked the resident male, leaving him wounded. I was much distressed, not by Harris's behaviour but by the thought that I might have to wring the creature's neck, well it was just a thought, I could never have done it. Instead, we called the SSPB and it seemed that within a few minutes she was here, uniformed and kitted-up, like a one-woman SWAT team, took charge of the grouse, treated him and then a few weeks later released him back in this area, we only saw him a couple of times, thereafter, Harrised-out, I expect. He was a lovely sight, proud and colourful. The SSPB is partly funding my doorstepping visitors; their torture and extermination of the stoats, it is an odd animal welfare posture.
There was something on the TeeVee, recently, in the background, about the Space Race of my infancy and childhood. Describing weightlessness experiments, it is always best, said the tellyhistorian presenter, pompously, to test potentially dangerous procedures on animals first.
In a flash I remembered as an infant asking my mother, What happened to that space dog they sent up?
Laika, of course, died from what they called overheating, sort of boiled alive. The whole fucking Space nonsense, mind, is built on tens of thousands of Jews and other riff-raff being worked to death by Werner von Braun, constructing his V1 and V2 missiles, projects which he completed for Uncle Sam as the Saturn rocket, where nobody ever asked Werner about all those pesky slaves
von Braun in his SS uniform, with his pal, Himmler,
and with JFK and LBJ, Freedom's last best hope.
"We chose not to ask this Nazi cunt about torture and mass murder, not because it is difficult but because it is easy. " JFK
Anyway, there it is, from the saintly horse's mouth; whole races and nations of people are evidently disposable, murderable, in pursuit of a bigger objective.
And if someone has decided that the stoats have to die, in desperate agony, alone, poisoned in a box, in order that the birds may flourish, well eradication takes on a newer, higher meaning than when Europeans decided that the Jews must be poisoned so that the Aryans may flourish.
I wish I'd asked Virtuous Missy if her stoat eradication plan was a whatchamacallit, a Final Solution.
Animals, peoples, oceans, doesn't matter; some I-Know-Bester, like today's doorstepping halfwits will shit all over Creation and say it's for the best, no, really it is.
No, mate, yer fucked, it's Zyklon B for you.
It's the birds, they need lebensraum.
Wossat? No, mate, you don't need it just as much as they do.
Listen, mate, we're the master race around here, alright, the Devil, if you like, and what we say goes. And that's why the planet is in such good shape.
Yeah, thousand-year EuroReich,
no problem.
