The Sunday Ishmael: 31/08/2025

The Simpleton Classes

Mmm - turns out I was wrong in thinking the Flagsters are upholding the values of Olde Englande, standing up for English culture and espousing Christian ethics and values. Seems they are racist scum, just wanting a ruck. Who'd have thought it? How could I fall for such populist propaganda? Why did I let myself get carried away into thinking that 2025's 10,358 illegal immigrants, sorry, undocumented persons seeking asylum in our great country, fleeing from great harms in their countries of birth, wanting to join our secular liberal democracy, where gay people and women are accorded respect, property and voting rights; are any sort of a problem? I must have been reading the wrong sort of newspapers. I found myself on Nigel Farage's side of history. Whoops - how the fuck did I get there?

No, seriously, its complicated. I'm the daughter of a legal migrant, spoke a foreign language before I went to school and had that nonsense knocked out of me. A colleague's mum was German, a friend has a Spanish daughter-in-law, a murderer I knew shot his Ukrainian wife in the head, before engaging in a pen pal correspondence with a Russian lady looking for a husband, an acquaintance has a Thai wife, a chum has an Indonesian daughter-in-law.... I'm fairly sure that we can all come up with a similar list of foreigners who have married in (ok, maybe not the murderer). Then there's all the foreign workers, professionals and tradespeople we interact with on a regular basis. Mongrel race, we English. Of course, these instances are of legal migration - which is pretty hard to achieve these days - it was easier back in the day when my dad fell in love with my mum. 

The issue is not legal migration, although there's a lot of head shaking about the Boriswave, designed to replace the flow of cheap labour from Europe with cheap labour from Nigeria, India and Pakistan following Brexit. The issue is that of the daily invasion in small boats of young men of fighting age, young men not culturally aligned with our great nation's secularity, stupid but brave and intrepid followers of a stone-age religion who immediately set about predating upon the host nation. Silly fourteen year old girls feeling sorry for a newly arrived migrant who "looked hungry" so they offered him a piece of the pizza they were eating, and, in his gratitude, he invited two back to his hotel room and offered to make a baby with them.  But I'm only 14, one replied, aghast, to which he grandly responded, age doesn't matter. No, but, seriously, but. It does. Matter, that is. And immediately propositioning a chance-met new acquaintance in the park is just not the done thing.

Caused a bit of a fuss. Protests outside the Bell Hotel in which Ethiopian illegal migrant asylum seeker, Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu, had hoped to make babies, resulted in the arrests of some protesters and prompted the local Conservative Council to seek legal protection by the issuing of a temporary injunction to prevent the hotel from being used to house illegal immigrants. The High Court ruled last week that asylum seekers must be moved out of the Bell Hotel in Epping by September 12, after a challenge from the Conservative council. The Labour Government moved swiftly against the Epping Forest Council by expediting the appeal against that injunction by the hotel owners, Somani Hotels Limited.This is owned by Somani Holdings Ltd., a mid-sized holding company  focusing on hotels, care homes, and related hospitality services. It plays a central role in the Somani group's UK operations. The Somani family maintains close governance and significant ownership control (notably through Hassanali Somani).

As we are aware, the doctrine of the Separation of Powers means that the government should not influence the decisions of the judiciary. Therefore, the fact that the Court of Appeal overturned the injunction must just have been a coincidence. Lord Justice Bean, leading a panel of three judges, found the previous High Court decision relied on a number of errors - including ignoring the "obvious consequence" with regarding to asylum seeker accommodation capacity more widely.  Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said it "puts the rights of illegal immigrants above the rights of the British people". Reform UK leader Nigel Farage criticised the judges’ decision, claiming the Government had “used ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights) against the people of Epping”. 

I suppose Sir Keir Starmer is pretty happy about his victory - but he may regret allowing his Home Secretary to declare war on the people - as he does still rely on them for voting purposes and he is the most unpopular prime minister in living memory. Labour long since cut ties with the working class of Britain - although still happy to take Trade Union funding; and has come to fear them, calling them racist and far right, with no attempt to understand their position. Basically, they regard the working class - a term that is no longer used - as the Simpleton Class.

Conference season is almost upon us and it is expected that Farage and Badenoch will both make a commitment to leaving the ECHR, which is widely regarded as being used to block the Home Office from removing failed asylum seekers and foreign criminals.

There's a vacancy in the top Anglican job, unfilled since Justin Welby resigned, disgraced, in January this year, following public disgust with his failure to control his paedophile priests. Doubtless, Fatty Cottrell, Archbishop of York, would like a promotion, judging by his willingness to weigh into the whole illegal migrant row. He paraded his stuff to Trevor Phillips on the Sky Sunday morning political show, attacking Nigel Farage's hugely popular plan to deport 600,000 illegal migrants through his "Operation Restoring Justice" should he win the next election. Pretty much in the bag, Nigel. Chubby Cottrell told the Sky audience, smugly, that Farage's proposals are "isolationist, short-term and knee-jerk". Yes, and what's your objection, Chubby? You are not going to get the top job by coming over all Christian, forgiving and understanding. Your dodgy decision to allow alleged paedophile and sexual enthusiast, David Tudor,  to remain in post as Team Rector for the parish of Canvey when you were Bishop of Chelmsford before getting the York archbishopric gig was just not cool. Maybe you should not allow this latitude to sexual offenders colour your approach to the Epping Forrest cluster fuck.

These archbishops, what are they like?

mr ishmael had Views on recent incumbents:

Anglican Archbishop Emeritus Beard has decided that we are no longer a Christian country.  

He has always disappointed me, Rowan Williams, firstly, by being Canterbury in the first place and then by being such a wimp at it; he is a Stringy, you see, like me,  a knower of the Riffs, Reels and Ragas captured from our common musicality and all writ down by the Incredible String Band, how could he still be a prelate, an Establishment toady, how could he be Vice's functionary, as, in his collusion in ecclesiatical beasting, he is.  Beardy, though, the most showily thoughtful of recent Canterburys, has now resolved  that C of E primaries must be outlawed, that King Brian must crown-ed be by Hindi and Muslem and Jewish clergypersons.  
Beardy, wedded for life  to the glaring preposterous contradiction that is ecumenism, serves none of the Abrahamic religions and betrays them all with his limp homogeneity, speed-blending imam and rabbi and vicar in some pseudo-spiritual NutriBullet, producing a universal person of Faith,  a GodlessHeathenBastard  for all seasons.

 Despite, however, diluting to  pointlessness the idea of Faith he now wants imams and rabbis to sit in the House of Lords, presumably on the Vaguely Good benches, bringing fresh, mad superstitions to the already corrupt, unaccountable and anti-democratic criminal institution. 
 Any rational person would see the Lords for what it is, a place of organised crime, rotten beyond remedy, peopled with sneering degenerates.  Jesus'd fire a round of fucks into them,  Beardy wants to make  them  a fully-representative, multi-faith LGBT knocking shop.
But bugger Beardy, we can all repudiate the church and abhor churchpersons  - his own gig, servant to degenerate, parasitic royalty, cost the hideous martyrdoms of his co-religionists, is rooted in lust and arrogance and like an American president with the Constitution, tramples upon its own founding document. One need not be a churchgoer, indeed, one need not even believe in God - Fuck me, I certainly don't  - to  despise the likes of Rowan Williams, contorted, as he is, in knots of cowardice, terrified that he might accidentally Stand Up! Stand Up for Jesus, snivelling and creepy-crawlying about, doing anything bar preaching the Gospel. But bugger him, he doesn't matter, save to those who hiss and simper and backstab at the Synod of  Depravity, who seethe and slander and see the  Church of England as a deliciously spiteful game of bridge, the faith it purports to safeguard no more than a moveable feast, laid to sate Debauchery's appetites.

How came we here, a place where we are taught to deride who we are and instead elevate some ragbag of meaningless, aspirational, inclusive, pluralist isms? How is it that somewhere along Ruin's  dark highway it was decided, without debate, that the very thing which attracts foreigners to Britain - its Britishness -  must be decried, degraded  and abolished and that those who still suffer from Britishness must be cured of it, must become healthily, sneeringly secular, which means, as far as can be deduced, that anything goes:  same-sex marriage; religious cruelty to animals, the explicit or implicit suppression of women and children by religious patriarchs; the refusal of even senior health service professionals to learn English;  the sprouting of alien places of  contrary and hostile and violent worship;  the farming of young British girls by alien men and the multiple bogus claiming of welfare benefits and  the utterly fatuous proclamation that any number of people may come and live here, without even let or hindrance, just because it's kind-of right.

  The detestable, money-grubbing bandits of the race relations industry have long since diversified into a multiplicity of shouty, blaming enterprises, damning the rest of us for our every waking decision, inventing  caricatures of disthinking and disfeeling, we are deniers of this or that, phobists of the other, they upend traditional, modest self-restraint and bawl abuse at those who see Pride  as unseemly at best;

Sisters of Mercy, the women-haters, the sex-haters; such a joyless bunch of tossers.

 who see cock-waving as immodest and improper, who resist the idea of family as purchaseable commodity  and who refute the desirability or possibility of trans-genderisation - butchering and inverting a man's penis does not him a her make - creating a lunatic, hyper-ethical, witch-hunting climate wherein, so long as they say the right words, mouth the right cliches,  the sharp operators, like Volkswagen, by pressing the right judgemental jargon buttons can delude us, extort from us  and fuck the entire planet at the same time.  Merely by paying lip service to the blame-babble of  poorly educated  lobbyists for Grievance and Pluralism and Renewables the very ground  - spiritual, educational and geo-fucking-logical - can be ripped from beneath us. Screeching, spiteful  queens or rapacious energy carpetbaggers,  they want to frack everybody, everybody's beliefs, everybody's values and they have devised the language by which to accomplish Ruin. Pluralism, this negligent, unsustainable, thoughtless and facetious doctrine is voiced  not only cynically and opportunistically by the predator but also as though 'twere a  wedding vow, by  the empty-headed. 

Founded for absolutely no other spiritual  or temporal reason than to facilitate the anger, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy and gluttony  of syphilitic, headchopping monster, 'Enery the  the Aighf, the C of E, now in its dying days, aptly  represents  and promotes - the Gospels having been, like so much, hijacked by Ruin's highwaymen - frocked'n'collared, unbridled licentiousness; belligerent and  impertinent Sapphism  and doesn't even try to do God, just buggery and whatever is its Sapphic equivalent. Don't tell me, I don't want to know. Really, I don't. 
 That the C of E's mission statement is now a catechism of the sexually aberrant and bizarre - in Christian terms, at least - that its Moving with the Times  agenda - as we now call bad intentions - negates everything for which it once vaguely claimed to stand; that its most strident voices sing not Hymns Ancient and Modern but  Perversion's Praises, instead, well, it's all quite comedic, really,  the Established Church revealing itself as the overbearing, hissy freakshow its most powerful always knew it to be.

 I have personal reasons for asserting - insisting - that all clergypersons are  beasts, unrecognised nonces, either by deed or by omission, by collusion, denial and obfuscation.  If you think about it even for a minute or two - the costumes, the ritual, the incense, the falsetto chanting, the pseudo-solemnity, the intrusive power over the vulnerable - Vicaring, like showbusiness proper,  is just the sort of gig sought by the flashy, showy predator;  rubber-stamping for God the souls of the young, the bereaved, the hospital patient, the homeless and the hungry. Zoning-in, like a heat-seeking missile on Grief's inevitability, your whoreson vicar/chaplain/priest/padre can sniff out your sorrow and stick his cock in it. Pack up your sorrows, he'll simper, and give them all to me. But he'll minister, especially,  bless, to  the young.  Suffer the little children to come unto me. 

 Choirmasters and vicars, how many thousands of the fuckers were exposed by the old News of the World,  week after week, year after year?  And yet, still, as though we were mediaeval serfs, bishop-nonces and archbishop-nonces hiss and glide and simper among us,  lording it up  in palaces - y'ever see the Bishop's Palace at Bath and Wells?  FuckMeJesus, they have the cheek of the Devil, the churchly princes - and, all dragged-up, sitting even in our legislature, the cheeky cunts.  Fuck 'em, up against the wall with them.  Take our  money and property back from them, give it to the poor. 

 I do not believe  that homosexuality and noncing are the same thing, I do feel that the Anglican church's loving embrace of all things evolutionarily and scripturally aberrant must make it a hotbed of unnatural carnality, the sort of environment which sees paedophilia as part of God's rich tapestry, for Him to chastise or forgive and for the rest of us to meekly accept.

This newest gabshite, the old Etonian evangelical,  will be entertaining in a brisk, clean-shaven sort of way but his - or anyone's - capacity to reconcile the louche, sybaritic,  amoral, white, western Anglicanism with the diehard, punitive, reactionary, black  African  Church of England/Christ the Cannibal is so limited as to be irrelevant. The Church  of Christ Sodomite  and ChristCarpetMuncher is fucked, like Woolworths. 

Don't ask me, Chief, I'm outta here. Cannibals, arse bandits, surplice-clad, dildo-wielding dykes in the rectory. Fuck that shit. Amen

 It will matter fuck all to Justin, of course; he will have reached the second-highest position in the God-serving career ladder - woe unto ye, ye who see contradiction in such Godless,  heathenbastard,  hierarchical horseshit - and that, for a gobby alpha male like Justin, is the main thing;  the poor ye have with ye always, innit.

I was in York Minster on Easter Sunday and his grace, Archbishop John, was glad-handing the pilgrims on their way out. Acting in my capacity as a member of the counter-press, I asked him if he was sticking to his pledge of not changing his underpants until Bob Mugabe had been lynched, boiled-up and eaten. Bless you, my son, he grinned.  I couldn't smell his underpants, even though it was a hot day and he was well wrapped up in archbishop clothes, so who knows, him and his Saviour, I guess. I wouldn't be at all surprised if he was wearing underpants made of cloth of gold, handsewn by some scrubbed and shrivelled Anglican nuns, especially for him, fringed with diamonds, and had been bullshitting the Faithful all along, about him and Uncle Bob and his self-denial of bodily hygiene.  I mean, being an archbishop, he wouldn't expect to be walking around York, all greasy and shitty in the down below department. He certainly didn't look as though he hadn't changed his underpants for five years.  I missed his sermon but saw, instead, right afterwards, the Choral Matins, locked behind iron gates in the  Quire;  there were only about a hundred of us, virtually outnumbered by choristers and deans and precentors and crippled, old sidesmen demanding money.  I gave them a tenner, what his late revoltingness, the phoney reverend, Ian Syphilis Paisley, used to call a silent donation, and was glad to get out of there alive.  But the music was fantastic, I had never heard any of it, psalms and anthems in settings by Victorian devouts, as it was happening in the beginning, is happening now and will carry on happening, alleluia, amen. And there were only a couple of readings by the dean and some other dude, short and to the point - Do as God fucking tells you. That'll do until Christmas, save to reflect that a life ordered by the Church calendar obviously has its leisurely attractions, its comforts, especially when the regular rituals are performed in such a setting, glass and wood and stone, its shapers' hands long coffin dust, its restoration and repair as constant as Time.

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Amuse-Bouche

I was rather disgusted by the day's special offering on the blackboard, but my companions perked up no end and recommended that I order the Partan Toes. 

I didn't want to eat toes, but, you know, when in Rome - well, you've just got to eat the boiled sheep's eyeball. Or, in this case, Partan Toes. 

In the context of Orkney and Scottish seafood, "partan toes" refers to the claw meat of the edible crab (partan). These crab claws are sometimes served as a specialty dish in restaurants in Kirkwall. Jollys of Orkney, Shearer's and The Brig Larder sell them, alongside other fresh seafood such as hand-dived scallops. The Brig once had Cod Tusks on its A-board outside the shop. Well, I never knew that Cod has tusks, I exclaimed to my friend, who was momentarily puzzled before carefully explaining that Cod is one sort of fish and Tusk is another sort of fish.  Partan toes are prized for their delicate, sweet taste, are bloody expensive and are enjoyed as they are or used in recipes such as Partan Bree:

Ingredients:
1 large cooked crab
2 oz rice
1 pint milk
1 pint liquor from boiling the crab (or water, if you bought in the crab pre-cooked - recommended method - screaming crab is distressing)
¼ pint single cream
Salt and pepper
Chives (pull up from garden, discard weeds and snails, chop up with big fuck off knife)

Method:
Remove all the meat from the crab, keeping the claw meat separate. Cook the rice in a pan with the milk and water until tender. Liquidise this with the brown body meat from the crab. Add the white meat and cream and reheat. Add salt and pepper to taste. If the partan bree is too thick, you can add some more milk if required. Serve garnished with fresh, green, finely chopped chives. And a Partan Toe, if feeling generous.

Should you expire from a surfeit of partans - unlikely, given the cost, the independent retailers and florists' shops will post a small notice in their windows, headed up: "An Intimation and an Invitation", exhorting all passers-by to participate in your funeral rites at St. Magnus Cathedral. It's a thing. A big thing. The woeful loss of the dearly beloved (or absolute stranger) is mitigated by the opportunity to put on your best clothes and get down and sorrowful with the citizenry.

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Politics and Geology

I am the proud possessor of an A in A level Geography, so there's no fooling me when it comes to lies, damned lies and climate change. Why is there a hose-pipe ban in Yorkshire? Because privatised water has given all its profits to its shareholders and not re-invested in the infrastructure of reservoirs and the detection and remediation of leaks from old water pipes. Britain is a wet country. No, really. Just because August has been nice and sunny does not mean that Britain is not a wet country. Gods damn it, it rains. A lot. All bloody winter. And Spring. And Autumn. And a lot of Summer. Just catch the stuff, eh? How about that for an idea?  Why is there a massive fire on Yorkshire's Langdale Moor? Why is the peat burning two foot below the surface? Well, that's the Gods having a laugh. "I'll give you hosepipe ban", they chuckle, "Start spraying that water. Line up and piss on the heather. Get out the slurry tankers and drench the moors with effluent. Send up the helicopters with water balloons and water bomb that fucker". 

Do you think the Gods are anti-capitalist? Or just like a laugh?

Anyway, that Yorkshire stuff is a little diversion - the point of introducing my enviable Geography A level is to applaud Kemi Badenoch's latest headlines:

"No more net zero – extract every drop of North Sea oil"

"Fuck Ed Zero Miliband", Kemi may say in her planned Aberdeen speech next week, "I pledge to you, my people, that I will abolish great swathes of anti fossil-fuel extraction laws. There's oil in them thar seas and we are going to get it out. We are going to make Aberdeen great again. Once more will Aberdonian taxi-drivers ply their trade in Beamers and Jagwars. Once more will house prices rival London's. We will Make Aberdeen Great Again. We will stand firm against the Norwegians nicking our oil. It is going to be burned anyway, so we might as well have it and Miliband Minor can skip off, singing hello, twees, hello, fwowers."

The thing is, the oil and gas under the North Sea doesn't know it is Britain's oil and gas and will just stay there, since it is naughty to extract it. Nope,  the clever fellows with their clever machines will  suck it out and not stop to check whether it is speaking Norwegian or English. You can believe me on this, since I have an A level in this sort of thing.

What's black and leaps out of the North Sea, yelling Knickers?

Crude Oil.

Anyway, amongst all the fuss about the ECHR and Nigel Farage (get used to him - he's the next Prime Minister. If he can be arsed)

 Matthew Pennycook, an obscure housing minister, has stuck in his two-pennyworth. Matthew Two-Pennycocks said that leaving the ECHR would align Britain with Russia and Belarus. Maybe that's a good segue into seeing how far our favourite builders have got on the house they are building at the edge of a forest in Belarus.

You'll need to turn on the subtitles (hit the yellow CC button), because they speak Belarusian. Or Russian. Anyway, they say Da. It will take an hour of your life, but you may like it. It is very ASMR. ASMR is a subjective experience of "low-grade euphoria" characterized by "a combination of positive feelings and a distinct static-like tingling sensation on the skin". The acronym stands for 

autonomous sensory meridian response. There's building, outdoor cooking, gardening and Kittens.

There are four splendid anthologies of the writings of stanislav and mr ishmael, compiled by his friend and editor, mr verge, the house filthster. You can buy them from Amazon or Lulu. Here's how:

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

IIshmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps 

please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.

Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr

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With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.