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 actually 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