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

The Friday Polemic

Wes Streeting launches plot to make British people go to work. 

But it is unBritish! cry critics. For 75 years our people have become accustomed to being financially supported by the State, just like Saudi Arabians. We want a Citizen's Account, too, which Saudi gives its citizens (maybe not its non-citizens, numbering a third of the population), as a basic income, to avoid burdening lower income families with high prices for oil, fuel and energy and VAT. Our British families have high prices for those things. We have VAT, too, and we are having to fill in forms spelling out how sick we are and how we need a car because we have explosive diarrhoea so can't travel on public transport. And it would be cheaper, with no pesky form-filling and petty official-dom assessing truth and lies and doctors (god bless them) being intimidated into handing out sick notes. After all, Saudi's Citizen Account has cost Saudi a mere £400,000,000 since 2021 and supports 3.7 million households, whereas our health and welfare expenditure is £48,000,000,000. That's more, in case all the noughts are causing a bit of cross-eye syndrome, like me - quick, issue that woman with a car, she's got strabismus. So, Wes, here's my plot: free money for all low-income Citizens, standard rate, no extras for having diarrhoea. And a car. And you keep all the free money when you get a job, up to the income level of junior resident, doctors, who, as we all know are bloody cheeky bastards, already earning way in excess of Britain's average wage of £37,430. In their first year, they earn basic £33,000, with another 10 grand for extras, and when they reach core training, they are on £67,000. And now they are blackmailing us again, We're going on strike again, unless we get another 29% - on top of last year's 22% and stuff your poor, your old and your sick. Hippocratic oath? Hypocrisy oath, more like. I never did get over watching Medics "relaxing" in Birmingham University's Student Union bar. Medics and Mech. Eng. That's where I learned my rugby songs. You just can't respect them any more. Yes, doctor, you say, sniggering.

Right, back to my plot for Welfare reform. In addition to everyone under the junior resident doctor paygrade getting the Citizen Account free money, they get a Motability car per household. If there's another car in the household, they don't get it. We'll rely on neighbours grassing them up - that's what neighbours are for.

We'll rename it the Citizen's Account car, which name will be proudly displayed along the sides. Here's the rub - the cars available will only be British cars, made in Britain, by a British work force and painted in a nice British racing green. And to placate Ed Milliband, they will be electric, until he gives in. 

Win, win, huh? Support British industry. Give British people jobs. No more Motability scheme issuing foreign cars to people in exchange for part of their disability benefit at a cost of £33.7 million a year to the Government - that's me, that is, tax payer, right? This cost to the government schtick is crap, really - the Government has already given the disabled people the money, and they are just taking some back - crooked thinking. If you don't want disabled people to have things, don't give them the money in the first place. 

So, how does my Welfare Reform Plot differ from Gorgeous, Pouting Wes Streeting's Welfare Reform Plot? ( mrs ishmael, Wes is spelling that P-I-L-O-T)

Wes, bless his beautiful blue eyes,

believes "we simply can't afford to keep writing people off". He's already told us we can get Ozempic free from our GP (my chum, who needs an operation to replace her knees with robocop knees, but won't get the operation until she has lost weight, was told by her GP that she's not fat enough to qualify for the free injections, so she is paying for the injections herself. She blames her parents for her genetic profile and her mum for giving her food as a child. Maybe she should just buy the knees and "go private", as we common people say. The Ozempic has turned out not to be a magic bullet. But it is expensive.)

So, in order not to write people off by their GPs issuing sick notes - the NHS issued more than 11 million notes last year, 90% of which declared the patient "not fit for work", instead, they have to write prescriptions for job coaches or the gym. His plot is being trialled in 15 regions. Best of luck with that one. You'll remember that one of my former careers was as a Probation Officer in England? One posting had me managing a Community Service scheme for offenders - you know, instead of going to prison, you have to agree to do a number of hours of unpaid work in the community. Agreement by the offender is necessary because we don't have slavery in this country, unlike in some Arabian countries. So, when the offender complains: Miss, this is slave labour, you can chortle back at them and say, Why, not so, young man, there is no slavery in this country. You agreed." Having agreed, they cannot then retract their agreement without me taking them back to Court and inviting the magistrates to send them to prison for their original offence. Michael Howard,

Is he dead yet?

was Home Secretary at the time, under John Major (altogether now, a rousing chorus of the John Major Song, to the tune of the Ash Grove - it goes like this, as invented by mr ishmael, when high on Briwax, having just polished the inside of a Victorian Compactum: John Major, John Major, John Major, Jo-ohhn Mayjor...John Major John Major, John John John John John.) So, Michael Howard went off to The US on a fact finding trip and came back with this whizzo idea - for the first failure to show up to do your slave labour, you get a yellow card. For your second failure, you get a red card. The Home Office issued templates to all the Probation Offices, which my secretary had to fill in with relevant details, then print off on Home Office supplied paper which had the word red or yellow printed across it in the colour appropriate to the level of warning. Waste of fucking time and ink, of course, but kept us in work. The crim responded by saying, But I was sick, Miss and couldn't come in. So I had to ask for a medical certificate. This was after self-certification had come in, but Michael Howard didn't believe the crims, but would believe a doctor - obviously hadn't had my Student's Union bar experience and laboured under the delusion that these middle-class professionals would do the right thing, tell the truth and not issue the sick note. Really? Really? I talked to one of the regular sick-note issuers, who said to me - Look, mrs ishmael, I've got a hulking great vicious crim in my surgery - and you expect me to refuse him his sick note? I have a lively sense of self-preservation.

I rather think that lively sense of self-preservation is going to kick in with the 15 trial GP practices and the doctors will issue not fit for work, gym or job coach certificates.

Vote mrs ishmael for free money and a free car. You know it makes sense.

Hmmm. Aren't politicians short? I used to be quite tall, but I think I'm short enough to be a politician now. I think I'm missing the point of this "deal" that these two shortarses have struck. Exactly in what way does "one in, one out" reduce the burden of illegal migrant numbers? Or deter them from wanting to come here in the first place? If the deal involves swapping out a big, hairy man of fighting age holding values unaligned with Britain's for a charming child unaccountably separated from her parents in the chaos of cross-continental illegal travel - why the fuck would Macron agree to it? He doesn't want this army of homeless, desperate men in his country, any more than we do. The streets of Paris reek of urine and are crowded with pop-up tents. And if he hopes to move these chaps onwards into his European  neighbours under the policy of returning them to the country they first entered on their journey to the promised land of milk, honey and free Motability cars (exaggerating for comic effect - I've already explained the logical flaw in all that), then he has sadly underestimated the hissy fits that Greece and Italy will pull. Mind you - Germany, which doesn't have a relevant border, will say - Go, yeay, Macron.

Nope, the Dwarves Macron and Starmer, are attempting to pull our collective legs. I think Macron just enjoys getting out of France, which doesn't like him anymore and thinks he's married to a very short GILF (Grandad I'd like to fuck). No, not Jeremy Corbyn. For god's sake, no, not Jeremy Corbyn. Some people are saying he's starting up a new political party. With that scary woman, Zarah Sultana. But have they told the Magic Grandpa yet?

Special extended edition of Radio Orkney this morning, drooling about the weather being perfect for the games and how it couldn’t be better and the Princess Royal will have a lovely time opening the games and how the streets will be filled with gaiety and laughter. Orkney College is now closed to the public because they’ve made an Olympic village in there to contain the athletes who are beginning to arrive – there was an outside broadcast from the airport, where the volunteers in orange uniforms are waiting to greet the teams from far-flung islands by saying Welcome and giving them an Orkney goody bag containing a knit your own sex offender from North Ronaldsey wool kit, a taster kit of street drugs and miniatures of Orkney whiskey, gin, rhubarb vinegar and cheeses. The bunting is going up, Bignold Park has had its Edwardian massive gates painted and is now closed to the public while they set up the Park for the commencement ceremony. 

What a shame you are having to miss it. 

Actually, quite a few residents are missing it. On purpose. Flooding onto the ferries to the mainland.  One chap was up early, packing his family into his car and off for a long weekend to their second home on one of the Isles which is not hosting a sporting fixture. 

Stringent taxes for second home and Games Dodgers, Rachel, jump to it.

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

The Sunday Ishmael: 06/07/2025

Oh, good, they are arresting silly old lady vicars now.

83-year-old Reverend Sue Parfitt, being gently arrested by the Met.

And about time, too. It was as long ago as the 22nd June that I told the Starmer government to proscribe Palestine Action, following their sabotage of two military planes at RAF Brize Norton, but they got there in the end. Palestine Action is now designated a terrorist organisation, following the Commons voting 385 to 26, majority 359, to proscribe it on Wednesday, with the House of Lords nodding it into law without a vote on Thursday. Palestine Action lost a late-night Court of Appeal challenge on Friday (July 4), and the new  legislation came into force at midnight. The designation as a terror group means that membership of, or support for, Palestine Action is a criminal offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison. 

Of course the useful idiots were out protesting against this entirely sensible move on Saturday. One woman failed to co-operate with the police and had to be bodily lifted into a police van. Drama Queen. She stated her position: "Free Palestine, stop the genocide, I oppose genocide, I support the rights of the Palestinian people, I support freedom of speech, I support freedom of assembly." I'll be generous and say she has no fucking idea what she is talking about. She has swallowed Islamist propaganda hook, line and sinker (a fishing analogy), and does not understand that Hamas' stated intent is to kill all Jews and destroy their country. She hasn't put two and two together to realise that the genocide which she claims to oppose is the actual, stated, war aim of Hamas. I really hope that the useful idiots are not anti-Semitic - but I fear the ugly truth is that they are, that London is not safe for Jews and that hatred for Jewish people simmers beneath the skin of the fashionable, left, "Metropolitan elite". Pah (exclamation of disgust.) 

Mark Rowley, the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, was appointed to the post on 8 July 2022 after Dame Cressida Dick, his predecessor, resigned in February 2022 on account of making a pig's ear of the job, not having the right influential friends, or being a lesbian (take your pick). Challenged on the Sunday politics programmes about arresting silly old lady vicars - and 28 others, he held his ground, declaring staunchly that le loi est le loi, si vous etes Mede, Pierse ou Juif - or words to that effect, and he was acomin' to arrest your ass if you is a silly old lady terrorist, whether you is 18 or 80. (she is 83, actually, our Mark), and could he have some more money to create 12 mega forces instead of 43 mini forces (yeah, and didn't that fly well in Scotland) and make the football clubs pay the £70 million for policing football matches. Good call, Mark.

Could you now please arrest Pascal Robinson-Foster, a.k.a. Bob Vylan, he of the hate speech and incitement to murder of the Israeli Defence Forces? The Bob Vylan pop group, like Edith Piaf, have no regrets and have issued a statement saying: "The  headline of it is: don’t let the media distract you from what’s truly important. They want to control this country’s narrative to frame genocide as Israel defending itself."

I just checked out the Palestine Action website that had provided those daunting images of their sabotage of Britain's Air Force a fortnight ago. It now bears this banner statement and nothing else:

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.

Well, our legislators have done what they can to keep Britain safe from this Fifth Column and our enemies in the global movement.

Four people – Amy Gardiner-Gibson, 29, Jony Cink, 24, Daniel Jeronymides-Norie, 36, and Lewis Chiaramello, 22 – have all been charged in connection with the  sabotage at RAF Brize Norton. They appeared at Westminster Magistrates' Court on Thursday after being charged with conspiracy to enter a prohibited place knowingly for a purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the United Kingdom, and conspiracy to commit criminal damage, under the Criminal Law Act 1977.

Pulvis et umbra sumus.

 We are but dust and shadow.

Horace

This building, 59, Brick Lane, on the corner of Fournier Street in Spitalfields, London, could be read as a spiritual space dedicated to the People of the Book, over the three and a half centuries since it was built. Successively a church, a synagogue and a mosque, it reflects the waves of immigration into the area. The land on which Spitalfields was built belonged to St Mary Spital, a priory or hospital (a lodging for travellers run by a religious order) erected on the east side of the Bishopsgate thoroughfare in 1197, from which its name is thought to derive ("spital" being a corruption of the word "hospital".) The travellers that were welcomed there were Huguenots, refugees escaping religious persecution by the Roman Catholic church in France, who brought their silk weaving skills to the area. They initially prospered, but the industry went into decline in the face of cheap silk imports from abroad. Spitalfields became a byword for urban poverty and deprivation: "The low houses are all huddled together in close and dark lanes and alleys, presenting at first sight an appearance of non-habitation, so dilapidated are the doors and windows:- in every room of the houses, whole families, parents, children and aged grandfathers swarm together." Jewish refugees, escaping European persecution, with nothing but their skills set up tailoring businesses in this poorest of poor quarters. In the late 20th century Jewish homes and businesses were replaced by an influx of Bangladeshi immigrants, who also worked in the local textile industry and made Brick Lane the curry capital of London. By 1981, at least 60% of households were of minority ethnic origin. Each successive wave of migrants brought their religion with them and 59, Brick Lane catered to the spiritual needs of Christian Huguenots (Protestants), Jews and Muslims. Not at the same time, of course. The People of the Book don't get on with each other, despite worshipping the same God. 'Twas ever thus.

^]

 I've been thinking about war lately, as you know. Being at war concentrates the mind wonderfully. I remember asking my dad, when I was a little girl, if I would be required to go and fight - he'd been telling me one of his war stories and I was terrified. He reassured me that, being a girl, I wouldn't be called up. I didn't realise then that more civilians than soldiers are killed in war. And I don't think I understood then that nobody gets out of here alive. And there was that long period we all enjoyed - in Britain, at least, when we weren't much troubled by war on the mainland. To be sure, there were the Troubles and the Cold War and the nuclear scare - actually, there hasn't been a time when we weren't at war in my life time, and those that rule over us have been spectacularly unsuccessful at making friends rather than enemies. Why on earth didn't they welcome Russia into NATO when they had the chance?

The current conflicts in which we seem to be engaged - although we are not told much about it and even when you actually experience events of a war orientation - like the Salisbury poisonings or the cable cuttings in the Northern Isles, we are gas-lighted out of understanding the significance of these things by government and media - to avoid panic, I suppose; anyway, the current conflict seems to be the West and the East lining up against each other. Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and Palestine on one side against the U.S., NATO and Israel on the other side. I know I've not covered everyone, but stay with me here. I've just read True North - Travels in Arctic Europe by Gavin Francis. The blurb says: "The stark, vast beauty of the Arctic Europe landscape has seduced explorers and adventurers for thousands of years." The big take away for me, though, from Francis' meticulously researched book, was not the sometimes laboriously-striven-for lyrical prose - he describes the ice floes on the sea as crumbs scattered on a mirror - really? wouldn't they just fall off? (mr ishmael described the Orkney Isles as seen from a plane window as "dog droppings in the sea") - but the ubiquity of war, invasion, murder, rape, theft, enslavement of captives. Humans. We're a bad lot.

We're so used to the Mercator projection that this view of the Arctic circle is a surprise. There's some big boys there, held apart by the ice. As the ice melts - which it is, it is yielding previously unattainable resources that the big boys want. War. It is what humans do.
Here's a few thoughts about War from mr ishmael:

Just  when I start thinking I have acquired an understanding of my fellows,  as with the Bremainers and their talk of peace,  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 them and not smell Carnage, the fucking monsters,  uneducated, ill-tempered, larcenous red-faced, braying bullies, utter fuckpigs. 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.
The role of the recruiting sergeant has been buzzing around my mind, 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 townfuls 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 iniquitous 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 corporatized 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.

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

I was asked about Levimus Leminius, whose diary I quoted last Sunday. He was a Dutch physician and author, living from 1505 to 1568. He studied in the Netherlands and Padua and travelled to Switzerland and to England, where he was interested in the English use of strewing herbs.  Part of the purpose of a Medieval and Early Modern garden was to provide the household with strewing herbs. Floors were carpeted with rushes, reeds or straw, for insulation and to provide bedding for members of the lower household. They also served to soak up spillages, bones, dropped food and dog droppings. However, these floor coverings were only cleaned out and replaced once or twice a year, so to counteract the accumulated odours fragrant herbs were scattered (strewn) on top of them, releasing their scents when they were walked upon. Some of these herbs also acted as insect and pest repellents.  Shakespeare references this practice in Taming of the Shrew, Act IV, Sc. 1 when the servant asks: 

“Where's the cook? is supper ready, the house

trimmed, rushes strewed, cobwebs swept.”

Thomas Tusser in his 1557 poem lists these strewing herbs: Basil, Chamomile, Costmary, Cowslips, Daisies, Fennel, 

Germander, Hyssop, Lavender, Lemon Balm, Marjoram, Maudeline, Mints, Pennyroyal, Roses, Sage, Savory, Tansy and Violets. Other herbs included Rosemary, Rue, Wormwood, Sweet Woodruff and Meadowsweet. With regards to Meadowsweet, John Gerard said that Queen Elizabeth “did more desire it than any other herb to strew her chambers withal.”

Meadowsweet

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.