ON A MATTER OF SEMANTICS...

Did you know that “overpopulation” is actually viewed as a judgmental word? A word that has become “racially, religiously and ethnically sticky, and thus totally uncool.”

Well, I only learned this recently.

But it is apparently a fact that for decades no one in the demographic field has touched the word “overpopulation” with a bargepole. Instead, a genre was emerging: semantic escape from verbal commitment. Another way of putting this is to say that 'semantics' are a means used to elude the properties of a gist that are essential to it being it. And political correctness, thus understood, is an extremely agile conviction, an amalgam of lingua franca, pig-headedness and wishful thinking; but astonishingly, it is a conviction - indeed a doctrine - that remains a central tenet of urban cosmopolitanism in the West.

Indeed, it is hard to run against a movement. And I’m being sensible here.

Converting “queer” into “gay,” was the antidote to arguably the most notorious and certainly the most ambiguous sex-related phenomenon of the last century. As Raymond Chandler said in The Long Goodbye: "The queer is the artistic arbiter of the age. The pervert is the top guy now." Or you can turn a blatant miscarriage of justice into a politically correct comedy featuring O. J. Simpson as a saint. One ought to realize, of course, what kind of havoc can be wreaked with this sort of story by a director with an ability to believe his own fantasies and the requisite measure of hidden contempt. So instead of using the term “overpopulation” why not refer to it as “Non-invasive Consensual Acknowledgement Of Global Demographic Surplus Bounty (NCARGDS)?

Well, I am afraid the answer isn't that simple; and let’s cut to the chase on this, shall we?

Humanism is an ancient philosophy based on the idea that human existence may be bettered through reason. So when, in the deteriorating relationship between the global economy and the earth's ecosystem, the sun disappears in a gritty haze and traffic crawls through a noontime gloom with headlights ablaze on a planet swept by hate, xenophobia and toxic industrial effluents, there is, so far as I am concerned, no such semantic support structure. In fact, my thinking is not only “correct” - it is visionary. And like all visionary nightmares, I’m compulsively and horrifyingly attracted to it.

(Alternatively, of course, you can always try and solve a problem by pretending it doesn’t exist!)

Written in my own hand on 28 May in the year of grace 2008.

Dreamy

THE McCABISM INADEQUACY...

"Supervenience holds that any change in the higher level properties, states and
processes of a composite system, must correspond to a change in the lower level
properties, states and processes. All functionalist accounts accept that the
mind supervenes on the brain, but they reject the idea that the higher-level
structure can be defined in terms of the lower-level structure."

Readers of this startling piece of information may wish to know that it originated with the current post of a blog entitled: The Duality of the Universe. Thinkers with very large brains, let alone with a verifiable education, sometimes struggle to distinguish concepts of mathematical category theory from the mathematical concept of a dual but - call me unrefined - in the very opening minutes of looking at those concepts, I had an experience reminiscent of my very first overdose of a very large amount, of very potent moonshine.

I took one fearful look and fled!

The tone is very much that of an obituary. Indeed, I am reluctant to quarrel with Gordon’s mournful thesis, but that is because I've never heard of the representational theory of the mind (RTM), so my reservations about the mind-brain relationship which falls under the umbrella of functionalism. are wholly untarnished by familiarity. Indeed, among the various epistemological propositions that Dr McCabe offers the reader, one decisively rejects the removal of an entire discipline: plain human understanding. Nor can the phenomenon of inaccessible ideas be explained by physiological changes in the cortex, let alone be “reduced to any of the structures which characterise the brain.” For whereas Freud spent some considerable time on the subliminal impulses of the human mind, the very esteemed Gordon McCabe devotes this particular lecture to the elaboration of the physical universe as an instance of a mathematical structure.

Something, one feels, is going on here. But what?

Gordon, no doubt, understands exactly the mathematical quality the subject requires and, with impeccable academic analysis, reproduces the corresponding duality both epistemologically and metaphysically (- or so I gather). But like Jung, who purged Freud's doctrines of their obscene preoccupation with the hysterical manifestations of unconscious mental states - and unless, which cannot be proved, all experience is ultimately mathematical - I, too, would suggest that Gordon’s Supervenience somewhat overstates its own intellectual contribution to the wisdom of our time and may in fact prove to be a far more hypothetical field than the natural sciences of which it claims to be a part.

But then, this is physics, not philosophy!

Philosophy always has a discernible meaning, and may strictly be called a motive-force. Its articles alert its readers to the dangers of abstraction, and of overestimating the conjectural components of the human quest for knowledge at the expense of the common instincts. This may, indeed, involve intellectual salvation, for my own emphasis is on the peace and harmony that enlightenment may bring to all who strive for it, and - on a much more personal level - on the ardent hope that a sensuous woman in need of awakening is not the kind of challenge that Gordon is going to ignore.

Dreamy

ON FEMALE SEXUAL DYSFUNCTION...

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

ECCE HOMO:

“The Blog Post In Which I Try To Pick A Fight With Will Self“.

This - the above - is a powerful and fast-paced post, a clean prose style and a vibrant vocabulary. It may just go down in blogger history as the post in which Richard Madeley elevated the Appreciation Society from its long accepted and somewhat repetitive status as the ever dependable, to being the leading male star of the A and topmost brackets.

His is pulsating, protean language; toyed with, reinvigorated and creatively distorted by someone who speaks it every day.

So what is it about Madeley that retains such loquacity in an age when “the way an author rumbles and tussles with synonyms, and the élan with which he executes any series of clauses” has been overtaken by the disjointed staccato of the internet blogger?

The weblog has all the properties of a world gone wrong. Its characters live in a bestiary. They have all the facts and all the answers, but they are little people who have forgotten how to dream. Indeed, what is surprising is the high proportion of those without a marked aptitude for any particular vocation who think of blogging as a panacea. Occasionally dandified or sinuous, often debilitating and tasteless, sometimes overblown or purple, or just downright badly conceived and overwritten. And if they do have some useful propositions now and then, they do not rest until they have asphyxiated them in torrents of pointless sophistry and adolescent cleverness.

Then there is that section without past and without purpose. A generation that has no dreams left to offer, who admire the art of creative writing itself rather than writing about things that have actual significance, and who are embarrassed by any sentiment other than disenchantment. And now take The Lumber Room. Here's contradistinction. Commendably terse, illustrative, and just this side of reiterative, Elberry’s problems are much deeper than literary exertion. For what both his purposeful prose and his satirical diatribes display is a commendable absence of cant and sentimentality.

The Moonshine Memoranda are commendable only in the personal sense, and intelligent perhaps only in the sense of a constant and breathless effort to find significance in things than other people have ignored. In truth, Selena’s problems are far too distanced and uninvolved to be of popular concern. Everything happens by proxy. Unless, of course, one determines that Miss Dreamy tends to swamp a palatable topic with turgid, sinuous prose. Which, purportedly, happened when I reviewed Baroque in Hackney. Miss Baroque’s weblog experiments with socio-political themes, albeit that the experimentation remains parenthetical, and never succeeds in redeeming its topic in any significant way. Her criticism of unpopular personalities is not based on the sort of research that could ever legitimise a critical expose.

Bryan & Nige at Thought Experiments are best acknowledged, perhaps, as an example of their own indefatigable skill in locating and satisfying a topical demand. And thus they massage the paws and the fawning admiration of their trophy sycophants. McCabism? Physics, yes! But philosophy, you feel, has never really been Gordon’s first love. In Abstentia Out is at worst intellectually insecure, at best by someone who has said too much and thought too little. Nourishing Obscurity? A general, all-purpose primer for people who don't like to read; a designer’s triumph of photographic content over literary style.

Mutleythedog? He’s my nomination for comedian of the cyber-year - and for Crufts! Admittedly, for anyone concerned with general mental health, the growth of smutty fiction is alarming. No doubt. But Mutley is in no sense of the word an intentional pornographer, he’s just got a dirty mind. And that's the difference between a champ and a chump.

So am I a philistine? The answer is yes, of course I am. I’m still into Wordsworth and Milton. But you’ve been a gracious audience, and I am going clubbing. Thank God for that...

Dreamy

MISS DREAMY'S PRIVATE & PUBLIC PERSONAS...

Richard Madeley: You have such a panoramic vision, Dreamy. It amazes me that you
can predict these large historical shifts from the top of such finely pointed stilettos...
Mutleythedog: Whoever would have thought that a night club hostess would have time for such insights ...
All shook up: Only our consciousness will live on. That and our libidos.

Your libidos, gentlemen, arise because you have mistaken the persona I have created for the woman I am. You insist, after a few grunts of tactful compromise, on seeing me more as a character in chick-lit than as a real individual. And I do know that you have built up in your own emotions a person that does not exist.

Men often have these mistaken notions, and place far too much emphasis on the importance of their libidos. This faculty is predominant in men; they seem to be created with a special aptitude for sex. Indeed, men might pride themselves on their sophistication, but it seems as if the notion of the sexually dynamic woman is as utterly profligate to the emancipated male, as it is in far more fundamentalist realms. Nor am I bound by the old rules of decorum that have traditionally constrained the female. But while Selena the Hostess represents perhaps the most substantive and provocative fusion of Miss Dreamy’s private and public personas, she is a brilliantly intelligent - and my autopsy would confirm this - and highly creative women known less for her time in front of the mirror than for her distinctive social personality. Nor would I want you to think that, because women are seldom noted for great Hegelian constructions, the person Selena does not exist except as the alter ego of one who conceals her identity behind promotional images portraying her in stilettos.

And yet Selena’s persona enchants my mind and my spirit builds her up into something that battles with my real identity. One day I am erotic, libidinous, predatory, a lascivious vixen - the next I am a mysterious female a thousand years old, knowing everything in the cosmos; a combination of Madame Blavatsky, Gertrude Stein and Indira Gandhi, a space-time singularity formed some five thousand million years ago out of a cloud of swirling gas, an extravagant, wildly cerebral woman with exquisite taste in everything except the right man.

Meanwhile, I feel perfectly justified in asking questions and interpreting answers with that part of my brain that makes me different from ordinary humans. Nor can, or will, I see anything except in a millennial perspective. For while it may be difficult to resist the conclusion that there have been few periods in the long history of human endeavours which have offered a greater variety of apocalyptic possibilities than ours has, it lies at the heart of what I see as my responsibility, my mission in cyberspace: to educate, to inform, and to fundamentally alter perceptions.

“The present and the past upon earth,” said Nietzsche, “that is my most intolerable burden; and I should not know how to live, if I were not a seer of that which must come.” Some may not look too far for evidence of this; for others, this blog may be a sorry - and I fully expect temporary - use of an extraterrestrial brain. But then, if a blog doesn't make its readers reflect, it has no real vitality.

Dreamy

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST...

I’m no anthropologist, and I hate to make snap judgments based on nothing other than numbers, but one of the most alarming aspects of the Decline of the West is the demographic factor. Astonishingly, while “half the population growth in the United States is Hispanic, and only about 10% white,” rather less than 20% of the world’s population is actually still “white.” Nor would anyone question the fact that the various light-skinned races seem to be in terminal decline. Indeed, one senses that the global balance of power is beginning to change, that the Caucasian Millennium is all but over, and that Obama Barack’s bid for presidential power is a first - tentative but symbolic - assault upon Caucasian hubris.

In the case of the UK, with its undoubted alien loyalties, it is claimed that mixed-race Britons are poised to become the country’s largest ethnic minority within twenty-five years. Only a few groups, such as black Africans, are growing faster, while the white British population is actually shrinking by about 100,000 every three years. Which might be an unwelcome precedent for Italy, France and Germany etc., since it has a chilling, apocalyptic dimension. Based on recent statistical calculations, the German nation - unquestionably a great humanist culture, while being thoroughly unpleasant at other times - will be totally extinct in approximately 250 years.

Nor does that mean the streets of Germany are being reclaimed by vegetation.

It simply means the end of one race and the beginning of another. Although no one has seen the relevance of this, from a strictly zoological point of view, sufficient evidence exists to substantiate the claim that within the next three centuries the white Caucasian races will all but have ceased to exist.

And in those trends perhaps, we find the key to this inexorable, widely admired, and deeply significant proclivity of races and cultures to assimilate. Discriminated against and, according to his own conviction, execrated, the Negro might confidently expect to spearhead this trend. For the fact of the matter is, that the concept of “Race” has never distinguished itself as a unifying factor. And the genetic outcome of mixed marriages is hugely persuasive for that reason alone. But while anti-white diatribes are currently articulated with an abandon that would be illegitimate if the objects were black, it is difficult at the same time not to feel any regret for the demise of the purely Caucasian line.

Much would depend, of course, on the nature of the decline. Dumbed down into a service culture with no real sense of its own purpose, the emancipated West has never recovered from the scourge of political correctness which taught its youth to be ashamed of their history. Indeed, the remarkable story of Western imperial expansion, once endowed with grand and epochal meaning, is today so universally maligned as an unprincipled if highly successful history of money-grabbing, that for all its rapacity, nobody seems to want to notice anymore how decisive the pursuit of scientific and geographical discovery has been for the future of human civilization.

The pursuit of knowledge is the cornerstone of our civilization, and while American, Russian and European technologies are still engaged in a series of evolutionary research projects, especially in the fields of cosmology and planetary physics, it is understandable, perhaps, that the idea of interplanetary migration is the furthest thing from the minds of those still in the process of industrial development. But while futurists might well be excited about the prospect of a racially heterogeneous planet, I, myself, wonder sometimes if it is not part of the “white man’s burden”, to force the pace of the “perfectibility of the human race”, and light the fuse that leads into Space, rather than succumb to the law of diminishing returns and face the potential collapse of our advanced technological societies and a possible reversal of human existence, through sheer force of numbers, to the primitive subsistence level?

Dreamy

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY...

Thought Experiment: “The supreme exemplars of the relaxed cheerfulness that
makes politicians popular were Reagan and Clinton (Bill)- and Blair, having sat
at the feet of Clinton, managed much the same trick...”

Havering on: (Reagan) said, “Surround yourself with the best people you can
find, delegate authority, and don't interfere ....” It’s the total antithesis of
what Gordon Brown is about and it’s why he can’t hack it.

Reagan couldn’t tell his elbow from his ass. He was a man-of-straw. Which left the Republican political establishment free to govern. An ideal arrangement. Clinton continued the magical tradition, raising Lazarus, enjoying fellatio in the Oval Office, and walking on water. Proving again that staying power is what a scoundrel is all about. Jimmy Carter was a hopeless idealist. He never got re-elected. Pulling off the impossible is something you don't do twice. Tony Blair was an overgrown school-boy, with natural aptitudes for a sex-change: easily led astray by a series of evil characters, unable to resist temptation, presumably, because he lacked human moral conviction; indeed a soul. But his real advantage over his rivals lay in his prodigious capacity for misdirection. The bigger the lie, the more self-righteous he was in defending it. So he married Cherie - (a woman who could only love what she possessed and controlled) - and got shafted by George W.

Oooops...that hurt! And then it felt so good...awwww...so sweetly cute and devious...

In a world so mad that madness is the only response to it, Brown is the Honest George, incapable of adapting to an environment that is constitutionally preposterous. To acknowledge anything else would be to fatally undermine it. In reality, a loony bin. He came from somewhere much deeper and darker than Blair. But unlike Blair, he had no taste for conspiracy. He would proceed in silence, munificent and self-absorbed - a man apart. His was the most fatal of political conviction: that one will be rewarded in the next life for abstinence, hard work, and loyal devotion in this one. But the fact of the matter is nevertheless, that there is nothing more debilitating and draining than being a constant pain in the ass. And the great mass of the people have no morals but their own interest. This nation might have tolerated a German take-over in 1941, but they’ll never kiss the butt of a Scotsman....


Dreamy

ELECTRONIC CHECK-OUT...

“Please pay six pounds and eighty-five pence," intoned the machine, in a flat but exigent voice.
I caught the idea. "How would you like it?" I asked. “Cash or card?”

(A long pause).

"Is a bottle of Blanco Seco, a loaf of French bread and a tin of Atlantic prawns any inducement to talk?" I asked.
"Six Pounds and eighty-five pence," the machine said.

And on this basis we actually got down to a business deal of great benefit to both sides. The check-out had been done slowly and deliberately as befitted a transaction of such significance. Up to the moment, of course, when I made the grave blunder of mistaking the slot where your money goes for the one that swallows the voucher. Which voucher? To what purpose? This was getting perfectly rotten. I bent over the machine: “If I don't get that money back, it's your ass...”

“Ahh...I do like the view!”

It was the way this was said, don't you know, the tone of voice that made me perk up considerably.
“...and what a nice way to wear those panties!“

Put like that, it didn’t seem unreasonable (nor unwelcome!), but - trust me on this - it wasn’t the machine who’d said it, it was the man behind. I think he was pleased to see me.

“Those stilettos are registered as deadly weapons on at least five continents,“ he continued, “ooops...let’s see if you can touch your toes! Or would you rather I got your money back?” He was a handsome man with a remarkable presence.



“How are you going to do it?” I inquired; and, “please, keep your hands where I can see them.”



“It's quite simple.” (He also had the aspect of a distinctly determined heavy) “Clobber it.” He meant the machine. “It only requires a little resolution.”

Perhaps to avoid such punishment, the machine refused to engage in conversation of any kind. The atmosphere was electric. The queue behind me added to the euphoria.

“There's only one thing to do,” I said. “We’ll have to call an assistant.”

This was a tall, almost regal woman, dressed in a smart headscarf, with a round ruby face, and startling big brown eyes, the kind of veiled apparition you see on travel posters of desert resorts. Nobody seemed to know who she was or whence she came. Indeed, it was hard to believe she was the little precious of a pious master who prostrated himself five times a day in the direction of Mecca. And the substance of her unspoken thoughts, kindly divined by the man behind: "You stupid stuck up bitch - you should be made to crawl all the way to Afghanistan and kiss the boots of Osama bin Laden." (Only he didn’t say “boots”. He said “f****** boots”).

"I don't understand," I said.

"Precisely!" she said matter-of-factly.

She then produced a bundle of keys and deftly proceeded to take the machine apart.

“There you are," said the man. She had somehow won his argument for him.

They were right, of course! And no one should be surprised to learn that both, I and the machine felt chastened and meek when confronted with this volcanic method of dealing with a righteous task. I owe a very great deal to both of them, the man and the woman, and herewith send them my thanks and my kindest regards...



Dreamy

IS THERE INTELLIGENT LIFE ON EARTH....?

Greetings, Earthlings...Selena is back! And none the worse for it.

But honestly, folks, having safely returned from a symposium by the Galactic Centre for Terrestrial Studies (GCTS) - the Ophiuchusian equivalent of the Royal Society - I remain somewhat isolated in believing that intelligent life might actually exist on earth. And may this be last time, please God, that I am ever called upon to defend it. What’s more, many Ophiuchusians hold views on human intelligence that do not alight well with politically correct doctrine as disseminated on this planet. But since political correctness has frequently pronounced me a racist bitch, a homophobic anti-feminist, and potentially insane, it is not - in my opinion - entirely to be trusted. Nor was I deliberately trying to be provocative. Let’s face it, plain human idiocy stuffed in a closet of political correctness gets no less stultifying with being aired. But I beg you, nevertheless, fellow-aliens, to give a moment of your time to this particular post, and to try and stick with it to the end.

To begin with, I concede readily every person’s right to his own opinion on the merits of any topic they’re appraising. Needless to say. But I do reserve the right to resent very emphatically any climate change sceptic who writes from an ivory tower. Indeed, I note, that there's still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the warming trend. And I hate to call anyone a liar. Fact is, I also humbly acknowledge the intriguing scientific case that the world is in a global thaw after the last Ice Age, rather than warming to 6,5 billion people putting out 7 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere.

That’s fine by me. That and the filth...

Nor am I about to embark on an asinine harangue about buggeroff benefits of carbon capture technology. I really couldn't give a monkey's. And I don’t care tuppence either about anthropogenic chlorofluorocarbons or impending ozone depletion. That's clean over my head, if you don’t mind the pun. But what I do care about - the joy of sex apart - is not getting mugged, stabbed, run over, poisoned, asphyxiated, raped, or urinated on, the moment I step out of doors. Frankly, you don’t need chlorofluorocarbon-science to capture the true chaotic horror of the Biblical admonition “go forth and multiply.” The countryside is humanity’s scrap yard. We are in each other's faces as never before. Humans are compressing the Earth's Lebensraum with no hint of the horror to come. Gaia’s demographic bounty, certainly no less than every bit of contaminated, tarmac-fouled, urbanised, poisonous, gasoline-and-pesticide polluted countryside, richly attests to that. And what are we doing? We feature in a comedy that aims to remind people to turn off their lights?

Lord give me strength...!

There are now almost seven billion of us on this blue and fragile planet. There will be nine billion in less than forty years' time. What happens when people start arguing, not about lightbulbs but food and water? And there’s no doubt they will. What are we going to do when people start arriving on our shores fleeing not political persecution but environmental catastrophe?

Shoot them, I suppose.

There are more than 11m abandoned children in India alone, where in a growing number of vast urban slums newborn babies are being dumped anonymously in cots placed outside orphanages. Perversely - in an extraordinary subversion of UN population policy - in some Eurocountries, such as France, governments have introduced financial incentives for women to have more than two children. The Spanish government awards £ 2,000 to mothers on the birth of each child. China, by contrast - and this is where I can’t help approving, callous bitch that I am - executes more than 10,000 people a year (albeit the wrong sort). Obviously, they’ve seen too much of it to have any respect for human life. In fact, the Chinese government has moved away from economic incentives for children and awards punishment, instead. And not just punishment. Babies are snuffed out. Or abandoned at birth on rubbish heaps, doorsteps, bus stops, railway stations and hospitals.

In Britain they live in a fool's paradise

An English mum was aiming for her eighth child last year. Set to become the most prolific surrogate mother in the UK by carrying other couple's babies. A number of British mothers have even frozen their eggs so their infertile daughters can use them to give birth. Others are selling them. And not only eggs. The government is to sanction fatherless families by giving single women and lesbian couples an entitlement to fertility treatment. Dozens of gay British men - who for fear of a libel action I hesitate to call parasitic - have paid about £33,000 to create a child of their chosen sex on an IVF programme for two-father (sic) families. Eureka: a 67-year-old woman became the world’s oldest mother when she gave birth to twins after having travelled to America for IVF.

We are an astonishing nation!

Here we have an advanced technological species failing under the weight of idiotic affirmative action, bogus equal opportunity, endemic kleptocracy, escalating traffic congestion, and chaotic maladministration, while trying to save the world with low-energy light bulbs, solar panels, windmills, and compulsory loft-insulations. No wonder, the Galactic Centre for Terrestrial Studies showed no particular interest in what, clearly, it assumes to be a superannuated and elusive fragment of a declining terrestrial race, switching off the lights with a feeling of foreboding in their hearts, though obviously no brains in their heads.

Truth to tell, I myself have few virtues - my incurable passion for adorable fat little babies apart - but I do know that population management, not carbon manipulation, is our only shot at survival.

What this pathetic, mendacious effort in carbon capture technology leads to is simply a decline in futuristic and scientific imagination, and perceptions of a coming new dark age rather than visions of the conquest of space. The introduction of mediaeval windmill machinery instead of nuclear fusion technology, brutalised fossil expertise, and an atrophy of cosmic creativity, while lacking the elegance and conditional structures essential for evolutionary thinking, to say nothing of the failure to build highly optimised conceptual frameworks in space - the whole point of evolution and the basis of a higher-order human identity.

‘Ever fewer climb with me up ever higher mountains,’ Nietzsche once wrote, but for God‘s sake, homo sapiens, turn on the lights...

Dreamy

GONE TO OPHIUCHUS...

...back in about two weeks' time. Be good - Dreamy.

CLOSE ENCOUNTER OF AN UNKNOWN KIND...

What actually happened that day in County Powys in South Wales may well remain a subject for debate, but it was all eerily unreal, and the details remain unexplained to this day. The unnerving part of this recollection is, that everything is based on the facts of that day and my very own experience of them.

I occasionally, on a spontaneous impulse, take a drive up on the M4 and across the Severn Bridge, past Tintern Abbey into the heart of Breconshire, or just beyond into County Powys. The Welsh National Park in the vicinity of Tregaron, just across from the great Elan Valley, is where I usually secret my car and grab my binoculars. You can hear the bleating of sheep and the raucous konk of carrion crows. On sunny July days, I may roam the hillsides, foraging for blueberries, or be watching the superb circles of the Red Kite. There’s not a day without the ubiquitous rooks on the rocky crevices abandoning themselves to the balmy caresses of a glorious upward drift, nor without the solitary sky-lark rising in ascending circles.

And at night there is an intensity of stars....

It’s like my idea of fairyland. A dreamy, soulful, poetic landscape with windswept clouds over green valleys. And that day was magical. For the sedentary townie, physical exhaustion is the rarest of experiences. For me it’s central to the pleasure. Accordingly, I was trekking across the high moors, in a great, sweeping detour, skirting cairns and forging brooks, when, at some point in the fading light of the late afternoon, something quite extraordinary happened. I stumbled across a giant boulder of a rock, the size perhaps of a ten-ton truck - freshly disturbed in the soil.

There it stood, silent, dark, and unfathomable, brooding dully in the long shadows of the fading afternoon.
I was greatly mystified in not being able to find any tracks in the soft ground, even though the blessed thing had been violently stirred in the mossy earth. No human could have exerted that kind of force. No animal, not horse nor elephant. There were no footprints and no tire tracks.

And yet, the rock had moved.

That was the haunting part. That and the feeling which emanated from it.I stood mute with doubt and incomprehension. The disturbance was no more than a few hours old, at best, and County Powys is not known for its earthquakes. Suddenly I found myself wishing I had not had come. The air was motionless. The silence so intense it seemed to invade my mind. In fact, I began to feel incredibly alone. Truth to tell, at this point I was beginning to worry about lots of things, but I was also getting the feeling that I was being watched. Wisely, perhaps, I turned and walked away.

And that might have been the end of it.

If my experience of hiking has taught me anything, it is this: Never lose your means of survival. I always take precautions. Without fail. Imagine my surprise, then, when all of a sudden I became aware of the fact that my keys had vanished. The entire bundle. Car keys and all. Lock, stock and barrel. How did this happen? I would now be stranded on a totally moonless night in a lonely, rock-encrusted valley of the Welsh National Park.

One of the strangest of all synchronicities then occurred - was this real. I still ponder on it. Once again, that mystic feeling was present. I almost seemed to be in a trance, it was as if I had switched over to the unconscious. It may sound extravagant or even melodramatic, but I felt I was dreaming with my eyes open. Regardless of diminishing visibility I remembered every stalk I'd ever stepped on, every pebble, every twig, every boulder, every ledge, like the pages of a cryptograph - to use an bizarre analogy. It was touch and go, a wing and a prayer - until, in one of those so strange and still so inexplicable effects, I stumbled across it, like a needle in a haystack: my bundle of keys, tidily secreted in the long, coarse grass.

Contact with my vehicle was resumed at 10 pm local time on a Friday, in the pitch darkness of a moonless night, eight hours after departure. Locals say there is a ghostly presence encamped on the slopes of the Brecon Beacons, watching with eternal vigilance over their terrain. And I’m not sure I want to go there. But all our acts have consequences. And if the universe has engineered, not just its own awareness, but its own comprehension, where does coincidence end and personal synchronicity begin?

Thus, my close encounter of an unknown kind began and ended in a mythical space, a garden of ambiguity. And my only option was to shrug my shoulders and to admit that certainty had no future here...

Dreamy

RICHARD’S DILEMMA

"The local University runs a creative writing course," says Richard Madeley in his latest bulletin. “I’m tempted to apply for it.”

All my life, I’ve been the idealist type, believing that the driving force of literature is essentially one of inspiration. I rather thought that you had to have a devouring passion for writing, as others have for gambling (after all, the odds are the same).

But perhaps I am simply out of touch.

There are, apparently, alternative ways to learn how to write: one is to sit in a creative writing bubble and live in a time warp - a region whose boundary shrinks to zero if you have nothing else to add - and the other is to set off at a blistering pace, hoping one’s temporal lobes don’t shear off under the sheer thrust of adrenalin. Which is like landing and take-off at the edge of a precipice. Way to go. A kind of literary re-enactment of downfall and salvation, involving a season in hell and a vision of death and rebirth. But it’s the torments of catharsis rather than hours spent with S & W’s Elements of Style that reveal the inner life (even though I’ve always been trying my best to view it as a challenge). Of course, you can always go to the public library and take out The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing Fiction. The inspired sense of the art of the possible which has characterized all the greatest literary movements - the sanguine, the melancholy, the choleric and the phlegmatic - then becomes the limited longing for the literal lust of the language. No thought could be further removed from the notion of catharsis, but it helps to be artless. It could make your fortune.

So here I am, attempting to present myself as an inspiring muse while commiserating on my own experience as an accomplished failure. Alice reckons that if I keep climbing the pole at the Spearmint Rhino, I’d sooner or later catch the eye of a nifty and resourceful fixer calling himself a literary agent. That’s typical of people who are all about instant gratification. Alice, of course is the protagonist of my latest book, and has opinions as to the pros and cons of literary procedure that no amount of logic can dispel. Quite unlike Richard Madeley who, much like myself, is at heart a humorist, and who very kindly suggested that I should start this blog. That took me by surprise. I doubted anyone was interested. But if I were to return a well-intended piece of advice, that would be to look beyond the agents of today to the agents of tomorrow. You are, commercially speaking, strategically placed, and literary internment is not a desirable condition. Nor is staggering aimlessly around the literary circuit in search of representation, with little more than creative writing seminars or workshops on synopses as your literary heritage.

"Don't loaf and invite inspiration.
"Light out after it with a club." -

Jack London

THE LARK ASCENDING...

“Listen Sweety,” Alice said - she says this frequently - “let me read you something from this wonderful book:
‘There is one dimension common to us all,’” she mouthed the words delicately, “‘a dimension which all humans, without exception, may enter and leave at their leisure. This dimension is called hope. Precious as life itself, this hope is our redemption and it is entirely up to us to preserve it untarnished by doubt or anxiety. Nurse it as you would the apple of your eye.’

Isn’t that beautiful?” She heaved visibly

“Beautiful?” I said. “I repudiate it with contempt. Fool’s gold, if you want to know. More innocent than obtuse, but no less irritating. No substance and all glitter. Any suggestion of entering or leaving the realm of hope at your leisure is simply grotesque. When the world comes crashing down on you, and you are peering into the dwindling prism of the last ray of light reaching you down through dust and rubble, that’s your final court of appeal, honey. Hope is what you cling to, like a pinprick in the sky.”

“Gosh.” Alice said.

“Nursing it as the apple of your eye is not my idea of hope.” I was working myself into a frenzy. “Nor are silly books about nothing that people read habitually and without apparent discomfort.”

“Sheesh.” Alice said.

“Sounds suspiciously like the purple patch of a twenty-something saccharine, cloud-hopping poet,” I was out of limits.

“Of an octogenarian Rabbi, actually.” Alice came back peevishly.

End of conversation. She saw no reason to be emollient. I felt singularly unmoved.

So how about you, folks?

Hope is not about mental, nor physical, preference. As I have found many times in my own life, hope is the most vital life force after hunger. Hope is religion in its most profound and mysterious sense; and nobody knows that better than God himself. Hope is...

.. the thing with feathers,
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune--
without the words,
And never stops at all ...

It’s got to be - because every time I look at this verse, my tears are welling up - thanks to Emily Dickinson who, by all accounts, was a tall, bony, American spinster, with an unhappy life and a difficult character. And thanks, too, to the immensely enlightened person whose name presently escapes me, but who posted this verse for Nige on Bryan Appleyard’s excellent blog - (to which I am unable to link or access at the moment of this posting, since it appears to have crashed).

All is not lost though, there’s HOPE!


Dreamy

PERFIDIOUS ALBION - THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH

# 1 In Britain, one in five children - 2.2m - now live in households entirely dependent on state benefits
# 2 About one in eight children in Britain are growing up in homes with parents who are alcohol abusers or habitual drug users.
# 3 More than 20 children and teenagers are being treated in hospital every day for alcohol-related, and/or mental disorders
# 4 600 children under the age of 10 have been charged with serious offences in 2006.
# 5 The number of those under 18 found guilty of possessing an offensive weapon rose by 82%, from 648 in 1997 to 1,181 in 2004.
# 6 The number of prescriptions for anti-depressants hit a record high of more than 31 million in England in 2006
# 7 Britons drink 11 litres of pure alcohol a head each year, the equivalent of 28 bottles of vodka
# 8 One in five adults in Britain is "functionally illiterate",
# 9 Four out of ten Britons suffer from some sort of personality disorder.
# 10 There are 1.55 million untaxed vehicles in Britain.
# 11 Three out of four untaxed vehicles are used by people involved in some other criminal activity
# 12 In the 12 months to March 2007 police recorded 89,200 robberies,
#13 Britain has the highest prison population in Europe
# 14 Britain also has 4.2m public CCTV cameras, or one for every 14 people, and 8,000 automatic number-plate recognition devices
# 15 In 2004 more than 150,000 cases of harassment were reported to the police nationwide. (A 26% increase on the previous year).
# 16 One in four nurses has been attacked at work.
# 17 The number of patients in British hospitals dying from superbug infections has reached more than 10,000 per annum.
# 18 England is about to be the most overcrowded European nation. Ready to overtake Holland, leaving only the tiny island of Malta with a higher population density

No sentiment is more firmly rooted in the English national character than a distrust of foreigners. And for decades, at every socio-economic level, whites have fled their incoming non-white neighbours. People who lack a sense of community put up fences thinking they are living in safety, when actually they are living in a prison of fear, having succeeded merely in swapping one form of captivity for another. For while the indigenous birth-rate continues to fall, ethnic figures steadily increase, making them an integral and irreversible part of Britain’s racial structure. The result has been communities segregated by race, religion and culture. And here perhaps lies the real danger to the liberties of England: an increasingly divisive population among whom animosity to Albion is a sacred creed.

Once having been the arbiters of nations, grounded in a profound sense of what it meant to be homo britannicus, now but an appendage of a centralising European super-state, Britain has met the full force of an inherent schizophrenia in her domestic culture. And the statistics you’ve seen above are nothing, if not reflective of the dejected spirit of a people once infected with ideas of conquest and exploration, now marked out for the moment of their final humiliation.

Not unlike the Viking conquests, this moment will remain sculpted in the history of the moral, political and social regeneration of perfidious Albion. This migration will bury the old England, together with its civilization as it existed to date, and England will never be England again, or I am much mistaken.

Dreamy

Immigration - The Inconvenient Truth. Tonight on Channel 4, at 8 p.m.

THE AGONY OF AFRICA...

To redeem the past and to transform every ‘it was’ into an ‘I
wanted it thus!’ - that alone I call redemption!
Nietzsche, Zarathustra

Africa’s agony is far from over!

And while it is hardly an extreme position for an African statesman - such as Mugabe - to take, that it is legitimate for Africa to preserve her identity as a black continent, I am, personally, deeply disturbed by this development. And not least because it indicates a catastrophic discontinuity in what was clearly a subversion of a natural Darwinian law:

That of successive historical evolution!

It is, I believe, a mistake to say that Englishmen had a contemptuous attitude to the proprieties of global colonization. If global colonization was an Anglo-Saxon idea which might appear sinister to post-colonial minds, it was also part of the cut-and-thrust of historical evolution. And within the limits imposed by mans inhumanity to man the British Empire was well enough executed in welding over five-hundred million disparate peoples into something like a commonwealth of nations. It meant as much to have extended the frontiers of western genius, than those, indeed, of its empires. In fact, it is the peculiar distinction of England to have bequeathed a constitutional ethic which, today, covers almost the entire globe.

Moral hindsight, by contrast, is the cheapest intellectual function available to posterity.

This may seem curiously heretical, but it is worth remarking that the result of the vastly premature emancipation of sub-Saharan Africa resulted in economic disaster and human tragedy on a colossal scale. The abolition of slavery in 1834 was perhaps the greatest civilizing culmination in human history. But the sudden colonial independence movement that had its inception some six decades ago, has in fact destroyed Africa’s commercial agriculture and turned a continent which should export food to the entire world into a basket case whose main export are destitute political immigrants.

This reversal is unique in human history!

It is also based on a moral misapprehension. Upon a distortion of the terms nations use in their Declarations of Independence. Moreover, I also find that, if not legally invalid, it is in fact illegal under the Articles of International Law, that it should be more important for justice to be seen to be done than to be in any sense effective. For that is not just bad or wrong - it is deceitfully, historically disastrous. It would be an omission to describe it as anything else. In a matter of decades, three-hundred years of European settlement in Africa came to an end as tens of thousands of settlers abandoned their holdings. The Empire was closed down, on the politically correct grounds that it was considered ‘predatory’ or worse, an ‘anachronism‘. The most presumptuous part of this exercise was the presentation of Africans themselves in the role of builders and reformers, the legislators and indigenous organiser, who perceived in their freedom not just the salvation of Africa and the black race, but the basis for a great new confederate Pan-African dispensation.

I, too, admire freedom and I believe in equity. And that the most abhorrent and devastatingly exploitative of all European acts of aggression were perpetrated against Africans, I would not even attempt to deny. But what is truly abhorrent and devastating about this freedom, is that African history not only ground to a halt but started juddering backwards. The once impressive communications infrastructure left behind by the European colonisers has been allowed to fall into almost total disrepair. It is virtually impossible to believe that Western politicians ever tolerated, much less condoned such a reversal. Instead of redeeming their empires, by creating a true commonwealth of independent nations, these spineless rascals rendered tens of millions of people dependent upon UN handhouts, and - in an irony not to be surpassed - had the temerity to apologised for past injuries, while adding insult to new-fangled ones.

We no longer have an industry to talk about,” said Callisto Jokonya, the head of the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries. “We have de-industrialised ourselves." The enormous problem of self-determination remained only partly answered with the eviction of the white man. It was too early, at least by fifty or a hundred years, even to talk of setting up purely native states as part of the process of political emancipation. It simply led to massacre, loss of freedom and greater tyrannies than those that preceded them. Fraud was rampant. Political office an invitation to plunder! Once the most affluent country in Africa, Zimbabwe now has the world's lowest life expectancy's. Leprosy and malaria are back and flourishing, along with the new kid on the block, Aids. The streets with their Mandela statues and fading colonial mansions are being reclaimed by vegetation. Once-fertile fields now lie scorched or weed-ridden. Steam trains are being re-commissioned, and ambulances are being pulled by donkeys.

Some African countries were so far from being qualified , in fact, to govern themselves, that any such efforts did little to alter the fundamentally tribal character of the hunter-gatherer communities. The conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is hugely rich in mineral resources, to this very day still exacts a monthly tally of some 45,000 lives. Indeed, we can argue about numbers, but it remains indisputable nevertheless that the murderous number of contemporary deaths in Africa is by far surpassing the levels of colonial casualties under Imperial stewardship. It may seem lacking in a sense of discretion to mention these two projects in the same breath, and yet it is amply justified, because in terms of self-inflicted African casualties there simply is no comparison.

With roadblocks made of skulls and human intestines, Africa’s physical degradation is complete. The philanthropic view of the African as a converted native is metaphorically striking, but untruthful. His belligerent tribal nature seems hard-wired, unchanged and unchangeable. Survival requires exceptional cunning, shrewdness, and a complete lack of moral scruples. Above all her catharsis is incomplete. Part of her destiny ended up in the hands of infant soldiers who became notorious for murder, rape and hacking off limbs. What’s more, a million children are dying from malnutrition. Truth to tell, children are fighting children in guerrilla wars that are entering the third decade. Rwanda’s genocide, at its peak claimed 8,000 lives a day, a rate faster than the Holocaust. Governmental forces invariably are either incompetent or implicated in the very casualties that are compounding the sectarian conflicts. And so the genocide grinds on, with no chance of victory.

But if victory is impossible and peace unimaginable, where can Africa go?

Far from having given leave to Africa, The Empire, today, stands at the receiving end of the intercontinental migration from poor to rich countries that is comparable in scale only to the great resettlement of the classical past. As the Romans themselves found out, democratic engagement with the world became an inescapable cause of their own demise. Roman identity had always been plagued by a sense of her own adulteration, and if the Babel of foreign languages in her public places, was bound to cause demographic apprehension as well as considerable cosmopolitan pride - then, Europe today, must assume the same swagger at her peril.

Dreamy

MY HOROSCOPE FOR ROBERT GABRIEL MUGABE...

Horoscope for Robert Gabriel Mugabe. President of Zimbabwe. Born February 21.1924:

Once the breadbasket of sub-Saharan Africa, Zimbabwe has experienced an economic and humanitarian melt-down of unprecedented proportions.

And since late February, when the belligerent Mars moved into the most reflective angle of your chart, you, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, have been reviewing how past political directives and concerns have ensnared you and those who plead allegiance to your cause. Indeed, this will be the eighth consecutive year of food shortages since you launched your ill-fated programme of seizing white-owned farms. Part of this was pure terror. In fact, terror has been your principal weapon.

But as Jupiter, the planet of truth and mystery is presently involved, you are forced to address the consequences.

It is a moment devoted to the ecstasy of iconoclasm, the demolition of all kinds of authoritarian hope, a time for discarding old beliefs and ushering in new ones. And if anyone tells you this time will be easy, don't believe them. Indeed, you will be plagued by the visible presence, not of spirits, but of demons from African mythological pre-history, who will show themselves in a thousand different guises, compromising your own political exit and forcing you to recommit to those solutions that are still available.

While voters have been driven away with tear-gas and batons, the World Food Programme has been distributing food aid to more than 1.5m people, nearly 10% of the population. But in the end they will be left with nothing. No obstacles, no standards, no values, no sense of continuity with the past or purpose for the future. And one night when the moon is blood - subsequently to be known as The Night of the Long Knives - rampaging mobs throughout Zimbabwe will attack Zanu-Pf affiliates in the streets, in their homes, and at their places of work. Dozens of your party cronies will be bludgeoned to death and hundreds more maimed; more than a thousand homes will be burned; almost as many businesses ransacked, cemeteries and government offices vandalized, and thousands arrested, sent to detention camps, or put before international human rights tribunals...

And with that in mind, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, when it is time to resolve whether you ought to stay in government or leave office, you should have no problem in making up your mind.

(Miss Dreamy’s astrological analyses are spontaneous and available to members of national governments worldwide).

Death is the first condition of renewal...

Behold the good and just!

Whom do they hate most?

Him who breaketh up their tables of values,

The breaker, the law-breaker:

He, however, is the creator.