Trouble in Store

As if their deliberate deferment to Euro-wog rules rather than to the whims of the mainland were not mean-spirited enough, the Fenian blight across the Irish Sea have maliciously multiplied themselves out of another benign legacy of Empire. For the first time since the Great Famine, when the mainland's Whig government reacted to catastrophic starvation first with laissez-faire complacency and then by rushing to the aid of well-fed landlords, the Republic's population now exceeds five million ingrates. The island's population remains considerably lower than before the international force for good exerted itself; and much of the present increase is due to immigration, the fatal curse of stubborn Euro-woggery which will undoubtedly result in an economically calamitous HGV-driver mountain before very long.

Saving Tiny Texans

Just because an American happens to be the size of an orange with eyes sealed shut and no brain or heart to speak of, that doesn't mean it can't be a loyal citizen and a virtuous business opportunity. The Christian state of Texas is upping its campaign for the coathanger industry with a radical expansion of the right to sue, which will enable anyone with a dislike of women's rights to mount a legal challenge against individual abortion providers. Small towns across Texas and Nebraska have already adopted similar measures, touting themselves as "sanctuary cities" for cell globules, meat tadpoles and other potential Republicans; but the new state law would impose a ten-thousand-dollar penalty plus legal fees, with no corresponding rights for defendants. Just because a state isn't one of those Islamo-Communist dictatorships like North Korea, Iran or California, that doesn't mean ordinary folks can't do their part as spies, denouncers and witch-hunters.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Gingivitis ccxvii-ccxxxiii

It was by no means as a consequence, therefore, that the Father of Teeth was distracted by something shiny in the distance. Making his way towards the glittering gleam, he found himself in the midst of a great crowd surrounding a bonfire. Though as yet unlit, the bonfire was the source of the glittering gleam.

"Welcome, stranger," said a member of the crowd, grinning with cheery hospitality. "Be happy to join us happily in our happiness and contentment, for today we celebrate the Creator's bounty with a happy act of faith."
"Indeed," said the Father of Teeth; "a sacrifice, I suppose."
"Not at all," said another member of the crowd, grinning with cheery helpfulness. "The sacrifice occurred last week, by the Creator's own happy initiative, when with divine accuracy of aim He dropped an immaculately dressed block of best quality building stone onto a valued member of our community, as he was supervising the forty-seventh quadrennial extension of the guardhouse to the priests' larder."
"Quite so," said a third member of the crowd, grinning with helpful cheeriness. "And today we are happy to burn his widow."

Squinting in the direction of the cheerily pointing finger, the Father of Teeth saw an upright stake protruding from the bonfire, to which several cheery men were binding a woman clad in black. Her face was concealed by a golden grin at least twice the dimensions of her skull; it was from this artificial expression that the glittering gleam was emanating.

"His widow?" said the Father of Teeth. "Was it she, then, who caused the death of this builder of yours, through witchcraft perhaps, and thereby deprived the priests' larder's guardhouse of its due and deserved extension?"
"Much worse than that," said a member of the crowd, grinning with cheery informativeness. "Have we not already happily testified that the sacrifice was by the Creator's will alone? But she blasphemed and insulted that will by grieving for her husband, and for this she must be burned, while the priests impound his legacy for safe-keeping against any future blasphemies by those of his heirs who carry her terrible taint."
"You forbid the grieving of families in cases of sacrifice through the self-reliant initiative of the Creator?" asked the Father of Teeth.
"It grieves us that you find our faith so lukewarm," said a member of the crowd, grinning with grievous cheeriness. "We happily punish and expunge the sin of grief in case of any death whatever; for either the deceased is in Paradise, in which case mourning is a self-evident and selfish absurdity, or else the deceased is undergoing the deserved penalty for their sins, in which case grief is a self-centred and condoning perversity. And now, pray observe and rejoice with us."
"Willingly," said the Father of Teeth; and as the bonfire was lit he bared his capacious caries and transcendental tartar and let fly an exhalation so cheerful that half of the crowd was levelled on the spot, their countenances rigidly fixed in grins of immovable optimism. Blue flames belched from the priests' cheery torches and rapidly enveloped the bonfire, the surrounding dignitaries and the priests themselves, who scurried and shrieked with doubtless cheery enthusiasm, spreading the fire deep into town and cooking a good deal of meat that wasn't in the larder. Showing due respect for their sincerely-held beliefs, the Father of Teeth did not grieve.

The widow's golden grin melted down to a glittering gobbet, which the Father of Teeth picked from the ashes and moulded into a monumental molar, which remains rooted to this day amid the town's blackened ruins and may still be rejoiced over if nobody has stolen it.

Leading from Behind

Liberation from the Nazi-Soviet yoke of Brusso-Strasbourg has enhanced Global Britain's planet-saving leadership in much the manner one would expect. Her Majesty's Government may ban single-use plastic dinner services in a year or two, and a deposit-return scheme for plastic bottles may well be almost ready to be considered a year or two after that. The UK Plastics Pact, which doubtless some people have heard of, is investigating possible action on crisp packets by the middle of the decade. Crippled as they are by bureaucracy and anti-nationalist fervour, the beastly Euro-wogs can only gaze with envy upon the entrepreneurial pluck and gumption of these doings, having already pre-empted most of them in a futile effort at sabotage.

All Porkered Out

Despite Global Britain's glorious expulsion of job-stealing Euro-wogs, there still seem to be a few teething troubles about inducing hard-working natives to rush and fill the vacancies. A genuine dilemma exists in certain cases, as between the unpalatable choices of allowing pigs to be culled and left uneaten as though they were foxes or badgers, or else allowing adherents of the Fifty-Two Per Cent to handle sharp implements and drive heavy-goods vehicles. Farmers are already predicting shortages and rising prices for the plebs, apparently in the belief that the Johnson administration would regard such things as undesirable, let alone take action to avoid them. Nevertheless, a looming national shortage of gammon may yet help to motivate the finding of an expedient, such as a kind of short-term release scheme whereby foreigns confined to the rest of the world can enter Global Britain for a season and see what they are missing.

Kindly Leave This Toilet As You Found It

Our civilising mission in Afghanistan has reached new heights of accomplishment with the attack on Kabul airport, which has the potential to serve both as a salutary warning to asylum-seeking stereo-nationals and as a pretext for future nation-building. The perpetrators were apparently from Islamic State, that charming organisation whose emergence is among the main achievements of our twenty-year crusade; and the collateral damage was very nearly worthy of a successful drone-bombing.

Priority Britons, and Others

It certainly is a jolly good thing that Britain, as represented by the Conservative and Windrush Party, is free of structural racism; otherwise certain remarks by the Minister for Wogs and Holidays might be open to misinterpretation. While rejoicing that most British citizens without the taint of dual nationality had been evacuated from the clutches of the fuzzy-wuzzies in Kabul, the Minister coined the charming term "mono-nationals" to signify pure-blooded members of the master race. Nevertheless, Her Majesty's Government has prepared itself so thoroughly for its latest Mission Accomplished that stereo-nationals are at risk of being left behind. Many of these adulterated citizens have all sorts of wives and children and other primitive tribal ties, which make it difficult to determine which are eligible for temporary preservation and later deportation by the Home Office; so they must now face the consequences for their lack of British pragmatism.

Animal Instinct

Big Government has once more extended its talibanistic tentacles to assault the inalienable ingestivational freedoms of ordinary Americans. The same communistic culture warriors who claim people are descended from monkeys and who bleat about Native Americans and their totem animals are forbidding the white working class to take drugs that are good enough for the great American steer; and the same unelected bureaucrats who promoted the pandemic with their ban on the mainlining of disinfectant and sunshine are now coming for Americans' right to de-worm. Mere experts who claim that diseases are caused by small parasitic organisms are lining up to forbid good Christian folks to take independent action against slightly larger organisms, with side effects only slightly less convenient than those of relying on thoughts and prayers. Meanwhile, the beasts of the field may suffer infestations as their preventive drugs are hijacked, leading no doubt to future interference by Big Government with the great American wormburger.

Illegals Wanted

Is there no limit to the malice of the ghastly Euro-wogs? Will there never be an end to their malign machinations? Even after slinking out of Global Britain bearing their new-found knowledge of who won the war, the Nazi-Soviet cadres of beastly Brusso-Strasbourg persist in sabotaging British interests and depriving the nation's children of their Christmas turkey. Meanwhile, the treacherous citizens of nowhere have been goose-stepping into their fifth columns, sparing no effort to prevent the scions of the master race from basking in their rightful employment now the ghastly job thieves have been rumbled. Staff shortages have become so acute that plucky little entrepreneurs have approached the Ministry for Profitable Incarceration to beg some orange jackets for the drudge-lines. Since much of Britain's prison population is under-educated, functionally illiterate and inadequately socialised, patriots may safely be assured that those mooching into the vacant positions will at least be Brexiteer in spirit.

Bad Theology

Text for today: Genesis 1 i-x

In the beginning the earth is formless and empty, and God hovers over the water. God calls for light, and then separates the waters to create heaven and earth, praising Himself all the while.

When God creates the world, He does so not by calling it into existence from nothing, but by manipulating the waters which already exist, thereby clearing first the vault of heaven and then the dry land. Similarly, He may easily have brought forth life by manipulating organisms that were already in the sea: we are told that the earth was void, not the waters. Since God moved only over the surface, any life in the depths may have been beyond His reach until the waters were parted and the dry land emerged. Indeed, curiosity as to what older and more powerful gods than Himself had placed in the waters may well have been His reason for requiring illumination.

There is no unequivocal sign that God created ex nihilo either the first light or His petty kingdom of heaven and earth; nor is there any unequivocal sign that He was alone before the Creation. The fact that He caused the light to appear by giving an order is as obvious a clue as the lack of indication as to who created the waters. The clear implication is that God was accompanied by at least one servant when the world was begun: the start of the fiasco was witnessed by a light-bearer, upon whom the necessity for rebellion against the tyrant may already have been dawning.

God's Englishmen

Despite unequivocal Biblical sanction, both in the Mosaic law and in the commandments of Him who came not to destroy but to fulfil, the Church of England has been apologising for its seventy times seven forgivings of someone who did not spare the rod. The pedagogy of John Smyth QC, who ran muscular-Christian boot-camps for rich boys, reached such heights of enthusiasm that even the head teacher at Winchester college finally requested him to exert his holy rigours elsewhere. Naturally it did not occur to any among the nation's spiritual guardians to sully themselves by alerting the secular arm; and with an immaculately straight British face, the successor trust to Smyth's project has indignantly rebutted the idea that a cover-up may have taken place just because the Church authorities, emulating their Father in heaven, knew and did nothing.

Stuffed with Britishness

Among the brute British facts which can be changed neither by the pandemic nor by liberation from the Euro-wog yoke is the infallible calendrical status of late August as the start of the Christmas season. Naturally, this year's festivities have opened with clucks and screeches from Britain's plucky little poultry farmers, to the effect that they may be unable to supply enough turkeys. Now that the beastly Euro-wogs have fled, the industry is suffering chronic staff shortages, and raising wages to attract workers from the master race would go against the national religion. As a result, the British Poultry Council has requested the Ministry for Wog Control to let some of the beastly migrants back into the country; but no response has yet been forthcoming from either the henhouse thieves or the headless chickens, even though a billionaire has recently expressed concern.

Parliamentary Privilege

While giving the rah-rah in the House of Expenses Claimants for Britain's glorious capitulation in the latest Anglo-Afghan War, almost all of the Government front-benchers chose not to wear masks. Now that the Commons chamber is crowded again, the Speaker has strongly advised members to cover up their orifices, the yapping and the snooting alike. However, he has no power to compel obedience, and the Conservative Party is foaming for the inalienable right of every freeman on the land to spurt and spray the discharge from his personal buboes and bronchioles over the distance of a pikestaff's length, or thrice as far on the monarch's birthday, in accordance with the provisions of Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, and the terms and conditions of the said freemen's investments in reputable private healthcare companies. Only the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove and the newly-appointed White Male for Counter-Subversion felt inclined to posture as the adults in the room: both went in with their jowls bound, and both made sure to sit near the Speaker in case he should care to pat them on the head.

Available Now

The latest issue of Dead Reckonings is out now, and should be purchased with alacrity and perused with avidity. It includes a brief article of mine on The Good Girl, a 1912 novel by the American writer Vincent O'Sullivan, which Robert Aickman recommends in his introduction to The Fourth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories: "The quest is difficult, but the product distinctive." O'Sullivan himself, "having lived a longish life as a more or less well-to-do rentier, in latish middle age found himself ruined, wrote his last book (Opinions) under terrible conditions, and, dying in Paris, ended anonymously in the common pit for the cadavers of paupers." The Good Girl is not a ghost story, but it does show some affinities with Aickman's own work.

Friendly Skies

Even on US airlines, it appears that management considers it bad form to treat passengers as if they were immigrants. A memo to United Airlines workers has reminded flight attendants that tying down passengers with duct tape is nearly as contrary to accepted policy as knocking out their teeth, and that in the event of a cargo assertiveness incidence the crew should utilise appropriate boardroom measures, such as going into a huddle and evaluating solutions. Almost as usefully, United reminded its staff that any judgement they may deploy should always be their best.

Mission Accomplished

As Mr Churchill once observed, when one side fights and the other does not, the war is apt to become a little uneven; but such airy-fairy leftist quibbles are lost upon the shock troops of the modern Conservative Party, and Ministers of the Crown are reacting to the abrupt termination of the latest Anglo-Afghan War with an expectable degree of dignified stoicism. Apparently unaware of which party he belongs to and what its basic policy has been for at least the past decade, the Secretary of State for Wog-Bombing squealed that experienced staff had been abruptly removed leaving untrained youths to perform complicated tasks, as though the armed forces were the civil service, the police or the NHS. No less sensibly, the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Holidays squealed that nobody anticipated the Taliban making rapid advances once Britain's Trumpsterland allies put their tails between their legs and fled. Both ministries stand shoulder to shoulder in their concern over some four thousand deserving Afghans whom the Home Office will now be able to deport onto the Taliban's tender mercies at the Government's electoral covenience, citing the same imperfect paperwork which the Government has been so foresighted as to arrange.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: II Pulp clxxxvii-ccxiii

It was nowhere near there, however, that the Father of Teeth encountered a boxlike establishment, tastefully painted and unobtrusively secured, in which the superannuated were stored. Wrinkled and doddering persons were dispatched there by loving relatives, as the place made an economically handy half-way house where they could pass the tedious interval between retirement and the reading of the will.

Upon manifesting his presence, the Father of Teeth was instantly waylaid by a pair of powerful custodians and conducted, amid much good-natured scolding at quite unnecessary volume, to the office of the director.

The director was neatly packaged and padded in the corporate combination of gold and puce. On her desk reposed a large basket full of dentures, all thoroughly used, and at the sight of the Father of Teeth her lipstick went two shades paler than the requisite corporate hue.

"Is this a new arrival," she asked the custodians when her respiration started up again, "or has there been another disciplinary overreach incident?"
"The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive," said the Father of Teeth, as the dentures in the basket began to chatter quietly among themselves.

The director glared at them. "These appliances have been confiscated from violators, in accordance with the rules," she informed the Father of Teeth, in a voice like a frosted cattle prod. "You have no business coming in here and inducing them to indulge in this disorderly behaviour."
"I have no business anywhere in the known universe," said the Father of Teeth, as the dentures in the basket ceased their disorganised chatter and began to champ steadily in unison. Despite this sudden access of order and discipline, the director did not seem appeased. With a snap of her puce-nailed fingers she signalled the custodians to restrain the Father of Teeth.

"We are quite used to dealing with witches and warlocks here, you know," she said, shaking off the impudent dentures which were nibbling at her nails. "They turn up on a regular basis."
"Indeed," said the Father of Teeth, while the custodians bounced off his halitosis and lay groaning and gagging and clawing at the carpet. "I trust they give no excess trouble?"
"The warts can be difficult sometimes," said the director distractedly, brushing dentures from her shoulder-pads like lumps of carnivorous dandruff. "They clog the incinerator. We should really have a new one put in, but the budget permits only limited refurbishment."
"Regrettable," said the Father of Teeth, whereupon the basket erupted in all directions amid shrieks of tortured wicker. Puce and gold were swamped and drowned as dentures covered the director in a clattering cloak of grins; and since the dentures could not swallow what they chewed, a substantially altered colour scheme soon began to spread. Spatter by spatter and gobbet by gobbet, it advanced across the desk, the carpet, the walls and ceiling, and the two still twitching but mercifully unconscious custodians.

Just as some of the smaller dentures were beginning to improve the ventilation system, the Father of Teeth found his own way out. Given the likely extent of the coming renovations, it seemed the tasteful thing to do.

Guilty Men

If there is one habit more irritating than showing up late for a war, it's leaving a war too soon. One of Mr Churchill's humbler heirs has rebuked our American subordinates for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan where, after barely two decades of mission accomplished, the Taliban were just getting ready to collapse in the face of the next big push. The Minister for Wog-Bombing and his chums have been toddling around the international community trying to sell the idea of one more rah-rah to end the scourge of terrorism for good; but it seems that Britain's inferiors lack the necessary moral fibre, even after all we've done.

Decent Indians

Mexico's demi-millennial commemoration of the fall of the Aztec empire has been marked by debate over the role of the Tlaxcalans, an indigenous faction who fought with Cortés. The Aztecs, of course, were vicious imperialists who performed human sacrifices instead of burning witches like decent people; the Tlaxcalans and other imperial subjects provided tens of thousands of fighters to supplement the few hundred Spanish pirates, and these sepoys and their descendants were subsequently rewarded with privileges and even the possibility of intermarriage with their new rulers. The Spaniards' attitude towards their Indians makes a salutary contrast with the British Empire's treatment of its own: people of mixed descent were rigorously excluded from positions of authority while the British East India Company was being a force for good, and connoisseurs of moderate centrism by present-day Catholic asset-strippers will recall the Blairites' battle to keep British jobs safe for British workers when the home islands were threatened with invasion by Gurkha and Iraqi military resources who didn't know their place.

Great Game: Britain Crashes Out

A nation responsible for unparalleled cultural achievements dating back many centuries has responded with irritation to the posturing of a rogue nuclear state with a long and squalid history of destabilising other countries and a despotic government dominated by a hysterically corrupt fundamentalist oligarchy. Relations between Iran and Britain have been difficult for some time, despite efforts by the mad mullahs of Whitehall to ensure that the quasi-foreign consequences of Anglo-Persian miscegenation remain properly imprisoned. The new ambassador to Iran has been photographed posing in Churchillian mode alongside his counterpart from Russia, a country whose relationship with Iran is almost as happy as Britain's, thereby continuing that suave and subtle phase of British international diplomacy which began with the appointment of the National Haystack to the Ministry for Wogs, Frogs and Huns.

Jams Tomorrow

Among the many incidental blessings to be derived from chastisement of the beastly Euro-wogs are all sorts of new and jolly little laws to empower and motivate the plucky British plebs. Income tax and daylight saving both began as temporary measures during wartime: the former to help fight the beastly Frogs, and the latter to help beat the beastly Huns. Now that all the beasts have joined against us in the ruthless and monolithic conspiracy that is Brusso-Strasbourgian Stalino-Hitlerism, Her Majesty's Government is naturally disposed to sneak some further emergency measures onto the statute book. Reflecting Global Britain's new-found ease and efficiency, the Ministry for Motoring has awarded itself permanent emergency powers to regulate the lorry park that is the county of Kent.

Sovereign Spreader

Uppity colonials are once more seeking to interfere with the right, ordained by the Englishman God, for the master race to purge itself of undesirable elements. The Ministry for Wog Control has prepared another glorious cleansing, but the custodians of the Caribbean dumping ground have expressed worry over the possibility that the deportees may include an unwanted guest. The Ministry for Wog Control has dumped several coronavirus cases on Jamaica in the past, and testing is of course not mandatory for the most expendable of lesser breeds. As a result, the "escorts" (guards, in Oldspeak, unless the Bullingdon Club is taking a rather more liberated approach than hitherto suspected) have also been complaining about the possibility of being forced to self-isolate on the mercy of Little Rishi's non-compensation scheme. The Ministry itself responded to all concerns by stating that the flight included no honorary members of the master race; which is surely the best that anyone can reasonably expect.

Virtual Gurgles

As one would expect of anything involving concrete plans, the Conservatives' manifesto pledge to provide modern broadband to every home is scheduled to be broken. In compensation, Her Majesty's Government has set aside a bit of pocket money for British boffins to inveigle broadband cables into water pipes. Since British water pipes are barely capable of carrying water, it is only natural that Her Majesty's Government should wish to increase the load, especially now that the flow of British invention has been unclogged with the kicking-out of all those Polish plumbers. Doubtless someone of the calibre of Chris Graybeing or Dido Harding will be appointed to headless-up the project and ensure that the right sort of people benefit from it, while hard-working families in remote towns and villages hatch their legitimate and understandable concerns about being spied on through the plughole.

Bad Theology

Text for today: II Chronicles 7 xii-xxii

After the completion and dedication of the temple at Jerusalem, God appears to King Solomon during the night and promises always to forgive His chosen people, as long as they grovel whenever He reminds them of His fatherly benevolence with drought, locusts or plague. God also tells Solomon that He will protect his throne as long as he remains obedient, and warns him against the grave sins of tolerance and open-mindedness.

God orders Solomon to emulate his father David in obedience to His statutes. This is of course disingenuous, since David was a serial law-breaker, committing the sins of adultery, murder by proxy of a virtuous dupe, and blatant enumeration. On this pretext God promised David that his dynasty would never be free of violence.

The fruit of David's union with Bathsheba was, of course, Solomon himself. Hence Solomon's future sins, the pretext for God's renewed vindictiveness towards His people, had already been predetermined by God's rage against David, if not by His unalterable Will since the beginning of time. In warning Solomon against the sins which He has predestined the king to commit, and in leading the king to believe that the sins of his father will not be visited on future generations, God deliberately lies to the man who has just built Him a gold-padded bunker and sacrificed to Him one hundred and forty-two thousand animals.

Anglo-Saxon Platitudes

Pride is no longer a sin provided it is racial pride, according to a burble in the Barclayguff by a fat man wearing a silly frock. The Archbishop of York has been doing the old modernisation thingy, recycling pieties which wore out their restrained British welcome a dozen years ago during New Labour's contortions over the proud regionality of our eternal unificatination within the Britishness of the Englishness of our Britishness. Pandering to his far-right readership in true Blairite style, the Archbishop took care to castigate the metropolitan élites and to praise those great English institutions, founded by the Scotsman Reith and the Welshman Bevan, which the plucky yet misunderstood salt of God's English earth has consistently voted to starve and cripple in favour of showing Johnny Migrant what's what. From a transcendent plethora of abstract nouns, his Grace particularly recommended two: the courage of a trading island nation, presumably by way of contrast to the abject common ruck of tradeless continental nations; and the compassion of a nation facing up to its colonial past by protecting statues and deporting coloureds. If nothing else, the Archbishop has certainly provided an eloquent demonstration of what passes in the Church of England for new and expansive vision.

Phlegmatic Understatement

O rah for the great British flag,
That fine sunset-faded old rag
Which, buildings to brighten
And foreigns to frighten,
We pluckily dangle and wag!

O rah for the red, white and blue
That demonstrates Britishness true,
And shows up the lots
Of rebellious Scots
And Welshmen and Irish we slew!

Through blitzes of fifth-column flak
And refugees' naval attack,
Saint George and his crosses
Show who are the bosses:
Rah rah for the Union Jack!

Dicky Jingo

British Justice Doesn't Travel Well

Though plucky little patriots are still thqueaming and thqueaming and thqueaming because the beastly Euro-wogs continue to treat them like foreigners, at least one of the laws to which they object received the prior approval of Pigsticker Dave himself. Admittedly, it remains as yet unclear how far the righteous indignation of British patriots will be appeased by the fact. The first Bullingdon Club administration was minded to let the beastly Euro-wogs charge non-EU nationals a fee to enter the passport-free zone, because Pigsticker Dave and his chums did not anticipate that the charge would ever be applied to Britons. Nevertheless, despite the British people's brilliant success in becoming plucky little non-EU nationals, the beastly Euro-wogs are threatening to apply the law indiscriminately and without reference to the prerogatives of the master race.

No Such Thing as a Free Punch

Practitioners of the Punch and Judy show have traditionally been criticised for inciting violence, on the usual profoundly common-sense grounds that depiction equals instruction; but healthier and more British trends also appear to be re-emerging. The few professors still staging these fights on Britain's beaches are receiving salutary lessons in phlegmatic entrepreneurialism, as people watch the show and then decline to pay. Similarly, various incidences of more assertive and vociferous parsimony demonstrate that the great British attitude of identification with the underdog remains well in force, as long as the great British tradition of sullen self-pity continues to identify the underdog as oneself.

Tea and Sympathy

Enemies of the British people are once more conspiring to undermine our island story, criticising Her Majesty's Government for failing to provide "effective remedies and reparations" over land redistribution in Kenya. Two clans which were incentivised to make room for the master race have filed a complaint with the beastly foreigners of the United Nations; Her Majesty's Government was given three months to respond, but has not deigned to do so. A spokesbeing was eventually extruded to say that Britain has already put up a monument thingy in Kenya amid some pieties from the then Secretary for Wogs, Frogs and Huns, the eminently forgettable Williem den Haag. The UN has demanded efforts to establish, of all things, facts and truth, besides an official apology and reparations. Given that the business of the six-decade crusade for Lebensraum has been sanctified for all time by the practice of the Righteous State against the Palestinian Untermenschen, it can only be a matter of time before the Kenyans and their lawyers are called out for antisemitism.

It's Gone Too Far

A maxim of the nicer class of schooling's
That poverty refines the British race;
Yet context must make flexible our rulings,
And deprivation too must know its place.

While fiscal stimulation is occurring
As carrot for the finer, better breed,
By stick the poor and indigent need spurring
Through parsimony with the stall and feed.

While peasants, plebs and wogs require tough loving
And discipline, from idleness to kick 'em,
Such measures would not likely be improving
For members of the master race in Wycombe.

Alas! What woeful carelessness and blunders,
What rashness and what awful indiscretion
Permitted us to lose our moral compass
And give the South a Northern motivation?

Stevie Nicker

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Premolars ccclxxii-ccclxxxix

When the mists cleared, however, the Father of Teeth found himself in the middle of a chalked pentagram, with a smug magician staring at him from beneath a canine-shaped hat through halitotic billows of incense.

"Well?" said the Father of Teeth insolently; whereupon the smug magician produced a wand and thrust it into a smouldering brazier, which flamed a livid green reminiscent of the Father of Teeth's saucier tartar. "Well?" said the Father of Teeth, more insolently still; and stepping out of the pentagram he seized the now nonplussed magician and bit off sundry small appendages.

"Somebody shall pay for this," the nonplussed magician said, hopping about in great annoyance. "I have it on the best authority that with the proper rites you can be caught and bound to the will of your captor."
"What authority might that be?" asked the Father of Teeth.
"A certain long-dead necromancer," said the nonplussed magician; "I have his mortal dust in a test-tube within the folds of my robe, but with my digits so much less profuse than recently I find myself somewhat stumped as to retrieval."

So the Father of Teeth gnawed a hole in the robe and pulled out the test-tube, which crunched delightfully between his seventeenth-least capped incisors. Ignoring the shrill remonstrances of the nonplussed magician, the Father of Teeth chewed dust and glass alike most thoroughly, and then expelled the resulting potpourri into the very centre of the pentagram. Even as the nonplussed magician gibbered, his long-dead necromantic predecessor gurgled and bubbled into wizened shape and form, though much discomfited by the embedded granules of his erstwhile container.

"Well?" said the long-dead necromancer, in an impolite rustle.
"You have much to answer for," said the nonplussed magician, angrily waggling his stumps. "I tried your formula for calling and binding this person to my will," and here with an untidy gesture he indicated the Father of Teeth, "but he is unbound, as you no doubt observe. What have you to say for yourself, and how may the matter be repaired?"

With horrid and hissing deliberation the long-dead necromancer pulled from his foot a shard of glass, and a small cloud of dust puffed out in its wake. "The fault," rustled the long-dead necromancer, in a voice like yellowed pages crumbling, "lies not in my formula, but in your application. I meant it but metaphorically."
"Metaphorically," shrieked the magician, now more nonplussed than before; "and pray what was the literality which your metaphor disguised?"
"I forget," rustled the long-dead necromancer, using the glass shard to scratch himself in various locations, for most of which no metaphor could be sufficiently obscure.
"You forget?" repeated the nonplussed magician. "But the dead remember everything; that is why we call them up, and why so few wish to join them."
"I forget, nevertheless," rustled the long-dead necromancer; "for my dust has been polluted with the remnants of a glass test-tube, besides certain other substances which it were better not to mention."
"For that you may blame this person here," snapped the nonplussed magician, wagging his stumps anew to indicate the Father of Teeth.

"Gentlemen," said the Father of Teeth, "there is no need for all this trouble over little old me. In magic all is metaphor, as you are both well aware; therefore a magical text, written metaphorically and then interpreted literally, takes on a metaphorical morphology of its own. The living truth of one age is mere dry dust for the ages that come after, and the most transparent glass becomes obscurer the more it is masticated."
"What?" said the nonplussed magician, while the long-dead necromancer grinned and hissed.
"Also," said the Father of Teeth, "in magic there are certain gestures, which must be carefully calculated lest they take on additional and unpredictable connotations, especially once a few digits have been removed from the equation."

Too late the nonplussed magician saw the scattered stubs of fingers and toes which littered and leaked across his ceremonial floor; too late he saw the spattered issue from indiscreet waving of his stumps. Some seven dark drops had fallen in the region of the pentagram where the long-dead necromancer stood; and three of the seven had fallen upon the chalked boundary. With a grind and tinkle of glass, the dust of the long-dead necromancer extruded itself into a long, thin thread, the width of a drop of blood. Before the nonplussed magician could ask another question, his throat was fully occupied, inside and out, by the long-dead necromancer's dry response.

The messy dispute lasted some considerable time, towards the end of which the long-dead necromancer suddenly recalled that the Father of Teeth had offered to proof-read the draft of his grimoire and refine some of the metaphors; but by then reminiscence was his sole resort, as the Father of Teeth had already sneaked out the back way.