Best Of

Anyway: a drunken ramble. My algorithm has given me the once-favourite song* of a once-friend of mine and I am missing him intensely. He was the coolest kid in school, in retrospect - but unlike the stereotypical wearer of that crown, he had time for everyone. He did sub-optimally in his A Levels, went to a dubious second-tier university, took too many drugs, dropped out, and was never heard from again. He emerged briefly for the funeral of a friend 20 years ago but didn't stay for the wake. Rumours are that he has a kid, a dog, a factory job, but they are vague. He has a name frustatingly ungooglable.
We had a friendship group of 12, of whom ten are still communicating happily and the eleventh isn't hard to unearth. Sometimes we talk of the twelfth of us. It is with regret, awe, nostalgia. Nobody knows where he is. This seems improbable in the current age.
I wonder if he knew how much we loved him.

*'Pull my Strings' by the Dead Kennedys

Daniel Hannan seems to be radicalising. He's been quoting Enoch Powell and is now citing the murder of DC Stephen Oake:

https://x.com/DanielJHannan/status/2064767411455443137

Why wasn’t his death a bigger deal? Oake was a brave man who died in the line of duty. His murderer was an illegal immigrant. There was a religious radicalisation angle.

The answer, I think, is that Oake died in 2003, when our media and political leaders did not consider it quite proper to dwell on stories about white men being killed by immigrants. Making too much of a fuss was said to “stoke far-Right narratives”.

What we are seeing now is partly the result of decades of repression, deflection and dissembling, a breakdown in trust between the old media and the country at large. That is what makes it so bitter.

Radical?

https://x.com/DanielJHannan/status/2064479143287304300

We must be mad, literally mad. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.

We have the lowest homicide rate (per capita) since 1977.

Daniel Hannan seems to be radicalising. He's been quoting Enoch Powell and is now citing the murder of DC Stephen Oake:

https://x.com/DanielJHannan/status/2064767411455443137

Why wasn’t his death a bigger deal? Oake was a brave man who died in the line of duty. His murderer was an illegal immigrant. There was a religious radicalisation angle.

The answer, I think, is that Oake died in 2003, when our media and political leaders did not consider it quite proper to dwell on stories about white men being killed by immigrants. Making too much of a fuss was said to “stoke far-Right narratives”.

What we are seeing now is partly the result of decades of repression, deflection and dissembling, a breakdown in trust between the old media and the country at large. That is what makes it so bitter.

Radical?

https://x.com/DanielJHannan/status/2064479143287304300

We must be mad, literally mad. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.

I'd turned he was mad, literally mad, to think this country was so fragile and wedded to white supremacy that a small influx of black people from the Caribbean would destroy its very soul.