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krispyarcadetyphoon · 19 days

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Testimonials and reviews from satisfied customers

##https://carbuyerscotland.co.uk/scrap-cars-scotland/##

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ivys-garden · 14 days

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The thing that continues to shock me about the modern world is the multitude of ways we let cars ruin are lives.

Private cars continue to be a Blight, an obsession and focus on speed and size in car culture leads to accidents becoming more and more deadly.

Counties like China used to be completely dominated by bikes, now Beijing has some of the worse air quality in the world. Globally respiratory conditions in adults and children continue to rise. And co2 drives us ever closer to climate collapse

Switching to electric and hydrogen doesn't fix this either, parts still need to be mined, rubber still needs to be produced, as does plastic and old cars and bygone petrol stations need to be scrapped as many cannot be converted

Streets and cities used to be a place of community, but now they are dominated by cars. Want to go to the park? Sorry, it was torn up for a parking garage. Want to cross the road? Yeah, just wait ten minutes for all the cars to pass and get over in 10 seconds before someone decides that getting to mcdonalds is more important than traffic laws. Oh, and I hope you've not got a motor disability or are in a wheel chair or your royaly fucked.

Pedestrians used to have the right of way always, never cars. You never had to teach children to look both ways because cars were expected to stop. Of corse motor companies started paying schools to teach traffic safety and over the decades streets became devoid of people to the point where some see hanging around on a conner or playing curby as a crime.

Cars themselves cut of connections, drivers get ever more angry at simply mistakes and spend acumelate years of there life in traffic Jams. And don't think Lane expansions help, that just means the jam expands to meet the new capacity

The private car in the modern day is pointless and dangerous, cars do have a place, like for businesses or the police or I'd your disabled and public transport in nonaplicable, but other than that the car is of a bygone era

There's a reason that more young people don't buy cars and not just because there expensive and bad for the planet - though that is a factor - cars are simply to dangerous and difficult to use.

Edinburgh has experimented with banning cars from several Streets, reinstating conections and allowing kids to play. They up parking charges to dissuade people from using there car and clogging up the narrow streets, they instal low emissions zones to stop the most polluting cars entering.

And it works.

More and more people in Scotland are using public transport, the tram lines have been expanded, as have the train and bus routes. Travel becomes cheaper and these measure have begun to spread.

It's not just Scotland either, Ireland and prodigal have done similar. Brazil has expanded bike lanes to make cycling safer and introduced a bike share system.

Spain went even further and made train travel free and German citizens even tried to get Berlin to completely ban cars

The era of the car is ending, and the sooner people accept that public transport is safer, more affordable and better for the environment, the sooner and smoother the change will occur.

One day, when I'm and old lady sitting on by garden chair, I will look out and smile because coming down the street will not be and endless cavalcade of cars, it will be the odd company van, the single decker bus carrying passengers and merry children running down the streets.

Or you know we could keep using the car and literally destroy the world via climate change whatever you want really.

#anti car #public transit #public transportation #anti capitalism #<- sorta but not really #rant #im upset

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dykepuffs · 7 months

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Got reminded about Tinkatink-Tinkatuff-Tinkaton today and just... Christ.

I thought we were better now about slurs and accidental* racism in media, even media that we like?

But there's a Pokemon that is known for stealing scrap metal and getting into fights, that's so hostile that public services can't run in areas where it congregates, it's moveset in all forms starts with "Pickpocket" - And call it "Tink" - That feels like too many coincidences, all around the nucleus of the stereotypes of Nawken, Scottish Gypsy Travellers, Mincéirs or Irish Travellers, Romany Gypsies and Romani people as a whole.

(Note on language use: I'm using Traveller with a capital T throughout this, to mean collectively the nomadic peoples of the UK and Ireland, which includes both Romani and non-Romani people. Mincéirs are an Indigenous people of Ireland who also live in significant numbers in the UK, and Nawken are a nomadic Scottish people with distinct culture and language different to settled Scots language and Scottish people)

First: "Tink" and "Tinker" is a common slur for Travellers and especially for Nawken and Mincéirs in the UK and Ireland, especially in Scotland, Ireland and Northern England. It comes from the historic profession of tinsmithing - mostly cold-working tin and sheet metal to make small items like water jugs and plates - Which is an archetypal "traditional Traveller profession". It's not the kind of slur that anyone particularly reclaims, especially "Tink", and is still very much a modern term of abuse that usually presages violence.

It's still used innocuously as a verb- Like "He tinkers with old radios and classic cars" but it's not something that can be used as a noun, calling someone "a tinker" or even more so "a tink" is unambiguously offensive and a term of racial abuse. Old white people might call a mischievous small child "a little tinker" but that is in the same way as white people will say "a little sa*age" - they're saying "This child is like the Uncivilised (racialised) People" (Closely related- This is also why I have zero sense of humour about white gorjers describing themselves as "feral" in any context - Unless you have actually been the focus of a moral panic about "feral kids" then please, don't)

(Also, yes, Tinkerbell is a somewhat dodgy name. Who would have thought that the same racist Scottish guy who wrote awful stereotypes of Native Americans and First Nations people into his fantasy might also use a term of abuse along with common racist tropes about Nawken - That they're angry, tricksters, and nebulously magical-mystical - in creating another character, and then Disney the notably racist corporation that made the notably racist adaptation of the book just kept it.)

Common stereotypes in the UK and Ireland of Travellers is that we're violent, and thieves, and especially that we steal scrap metal and live in scrapyards, or that our trailers are always surrounded by scrap metal and fly-tipped rubbish. Ambulances, fire engines, and notably taxis often refuse to attend to Traveller sites. Common stereotypes of Travellers everywhere, and especially of Roma, is that we're pickpockets.

From Bulbapedia's Tinkaton article:

"Tinkaton is intelligent and has a reckless personality. It swings its hammer at rocks to send them into the sky, aiming to hit flying corviknight. This Pokémon will also steal anything that it wants and take it back to its dwelling. It has been observed using its hammer like a bed to sleep on."

And from the violet pokedex:

The hammer tops 220 pounds, yet it gets swung around easily by Tinkaton as it steals whatever it pleases and carries its plunder back home.

From Wikipedia's Tinkaton article:

Highly intelligent and daring, they steal items to bring back to their lair, while using their hammer to launch projectiles at their natural prey, the flying Pokémon Corviknight. As a result of this predatory behavior, Corviknight has been unable to provide a taxi service to humans within the region where Tinkaton is found.

From the scarlet and violet pokedex entries for Tinkatuff:

This Pokémon will attack groups of Pawniard and Bisharp, gathering metal from them in order to create a large and sturdy hammer.

These Pokémon make their homes in piles of scrap metal. They test the strength of each other's hammers by smashing them together.

I don't have a great conclusion just it's annoying to see all the talk of Tinkaton being a fan-favourite whilst totally missing the really unfortunate implications of the name, which get worse when paired with the description.

Small Edit: The reason this has made me so miserable today was hearing about a friend's son, who is 8 or 9, and Nawken, and who'd been playing pokemon at school this week with his classmates and they somehow got it into their heads to start calling him Tinkatink and leaving crushed cans and forks and stuff in his desk. Little kids like nothing more than finding a loophole that lets them say a Bad Word (see also "But miss, I was just calling her a female dog! And was asking if her cat smelled bad! I wanted to know what CUNTry he was from hahaha" etc) and this seems to have fallen into the loophole.

#tinkaton #tinkatuff #tinkatink #pokemon

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popculturebuffet · 3 months

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The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Retrospective Chapter 10: The Invader of Fort Duckburg "It'll Be a Dark Day When I Give in To a Mere Superpower"

And we're back. For those of you newer around here a few years ago in the middle of my ducktales fevor, I started a retrospective of one of my favorite comic books of all time: The 12 part epic the Life and Times of Scrooge Mcduck, covering Scrooge's rise from a shoeshine in glasgow barely scraping by to the Richest Duck in the World and what he gained and lost along the way. I had a ton of fun covering this one but sadly.. I eventually gave up. I felt the years had piled up too much and i'd never get back to finishing it.

Enter Kev, who out of nowhere asked if he could comission the final three chapters. I happily agreed as not only can I finally finish one of the biggest works of my reviewing career, but it opens me up to do all the suplimental chapters at some point, paticuarlly "dream of a lifetime".

For now though, we're celebrating President's Day with chapter 10, my faviorite of the series and Don Rosa's too. It's largely for the same reasons: the story is tightly paced, covering only two days compared to most chapters pile of years, funny, furious, and for me at least has more of hortense, who I love dearly and who finds the love she deserves this chapter.. via a lot of shouting of course as is the McDuck/Duck Family way. Unless your these two.

Chapter 10 is the rare chapter that picks up almost exactly where we left off, with a much shorter time skip of a few weeks, skipping our heroes travels from Scotland to the US and focusing on Scrooge and his sisters as they set up his empire , here in Duckburg. What follows is a farce, a romantic comedy, an action set piece, and one of the most badass panels ever put to ink, which for this series is saying a lot.

If you'd like to catch up on the previous 9 chapters, I just complied all of them into one handy dandy post.

So go check that out if you fancy then come back here as we get scrooge vs the United States of America itself.

We open the issue with a quick recap before we pan to our heroes, puttering along their Duckburg. Part of what makes this chapter neat is seeing the town before Scrooge made it into a thriving city: here it's just a few buildings and a small farm.

As scrooge puts it "a town as big as it is wide". Our heroes are riding what could charitably be considered a car, which Scrooge got cheap and didn't read was a piece of scrap as his eyes are entirley shot at this point after the Yukon. I do like that while his eyesight fading is partially herditary, Rosa provides an explination for why it went down hill so fast: 6 years in the yukon with all that snow was hell on them. He leads his sisters up his new property with the help of a local farmer.... then back down his newly aquiried Killmule Hill

I love this gag and I applaud Don Rosa's art here. He makes a mean impact siloutte. I also didn't notice till writing this review but you also see Matilda and Scrooge's hats over the corn. Hortense would join in the gag but she hasn't got a hat bope a dope a dope dope.

The Farmer renames the hill "Killmotor Hill", for the auto age... I love that detail too. Of course it wouldn't of always been killmotor hill. Though whoever was running mules so hard up that hill they were killing them needs a swift kick.

The lady of the farm offers to rent Scrooge a shed, seeing as she owns most of the land around here and reveals herself as Elvira Duck,knee coot, sister of Casey, the man who sold Scrooge the hill in the first place and she soon introduces her family.

Yup this is Donald's family including Grandma McDuck, the character I most regret not making it into ducktales in time. Grandma McDuck is donald's sweet country grandma who reminds me of my own sweet country grandma, who spends her days working hard and yelling at donald's cousin gus to actually do some work for a change. He never does.

Humperdink is Donald's grandpa, passed int he preset, while Daphne and Eider are his aunt and uncle, all grabbed from various barks ephimera or the offical family tree he made. Daphne has golden hair, supernatural luck and the misfortune of having birthed Gladstone, while Eider is naturally Fethry's dad, who Rosa reluctnatly included in some versions of the tree as Fethry wasn't a barks creation. Me.. I don't see any harm in Fethry being included. Barks isn't the be all end all of the universe... he is damn awesome though and I respect that. case in point the names were curbed from various non barks grandma duck stories.

You might notice though I didn't mention Donald's dad. Well he was just running behind and has the calm, measured response to the accident you'd expect from Donald's father.

Yup: this folks.. is how Donald's parents met. And it's one of the best scene's in the series, especially what happens right after.

It's comedy gold, fits him perfectly , and once again seems to be the mcduck way... unless your these two

I mean does it count if it only started with ONE of them shouting? Riddle for the ages.

As for why the Woodchucks are involved they've taken old fort duckburg atop the hill as their headquarters. He shouts get off my land and they do.. but naturally an old man shouting at them isn't enough to convince these children of land ownership so worried he might be a crook, they call for help in the only way the nation knew how at the time

Yes folks there's a reason this was a president's day specail as the phone tag gets so bad THE PRESIDENT HIMSELF gets informed a "scottish billionare has taken over a military installation on the coast", a great gag. Incensed Teddy reactivates the rough riders and prepares to deal with this personally fist to face. h back when presidents could legally punch corrupt billionaires in the face. If only Biden would pass that legislation. or any legislation.

It takes a week for him to get moblized as our heroes have spent it taking the barrels up river, as Scrooge begins his lousy streak of taking advantage of his family. This will only get worse from here and is never as funny as Don Rosa thinks.

Anywho, Scrooge knocks on a homesteader's door but they refuse to answer or be helpful. Turns out it's the beagle boys, lead by the future grandpa beagle. Rosa admits making him the same character makes him 165 by the time of "A Little Something Special" but honestly this universe is JUST weird enough for that to be plausible. Not 2017 DuckTales levels of madness

But still pretty nutty. So as scrooge takes a money bath to Hortense's exasperation some guests arrive at the fort. Who is it?

Yeah the Beagles quickly kidnap hortense, having gone after Scrooge for revenge for putting them in stir back in chapter 2. THey also lock scrooge in one of his own barrels. Beofre he can break it through sheer force of pissed off, a shell breaks it... and the beagles and scrooge both have bigger problems

Scrooge's response is naturally "Get off my lawn you damn united state's navy!" which gets him blasted at. The Beagles are thankfully too busy begging scrooge to give up so they can live, leaving Scrooge to do what he does best: be badass in the most insane way possible

By godfrey I love this stupid gag.

Teddy, being the only entiity nearly as badass as scrooge , responds in kind leading to a clash for the ages

I love every part of this scene from the sheer badassery of scroog'es one liner to that final charge. And of course best of all hortense taking on an ENTIRE CALVARY and WINNING before some traditional duck flirting as is the way.. except maybe also for these two

At any rate the conflict is over: Teddy takes out the trash and one of Scrooge's greatest headaches begins in earnest

WE cut to 6 months later. So I guess it's three days but semantics. Scrooge has built his money bin and plans to fill it and while Matilda is doubtful scrooge is joyful, even giving the Woodchucks a doorknob as their calling in Teddy stopped the beagle boys. As we end the chapter we get the full sight of the greatest structure in all of duckburg and one of the most iconic locations in all of disney.

And thus we end this chapter.. and it's a laugh riot with tons of gorgeously drawn action, well done punchlines and bunches of lore stuffed in. IT's everything great about this series compacted into a tight smaller scale story... granted it's a smaller scale story that involved the entire navy and marines, but for Scrooge that's small.

Character wise since this is only maybe a week after the previous one Scrooge hasn't changed much.. but like last time you can see the cracks in his personality here and there, the darker parts that are about to consume him: He uses his sisters as free labor, yells at just about everyone and his response to every conflict is to shout at it. Granted it usually worked, but i'ts clear the more vicious sides of scrooge that never completely go away are creeping more and more into him and overshadowing the noble man he once was. they haven't completely consumed him yet.. but well that's for next time, sometime this spring or early summer.

Rather than leave on that ominous note i'd like to talk Hortense and Quackmore some more. I love them and while their chemistry's simple, they yell until they bang hard, simple, they are genuinely adorable and it's easy to see where a lot of donald comes from just watching the two: Hortense's obession with dating "a real cowboy" before meeting quackmore and sorta zoning out mid rage both have traces of Donald's own hyperfixations and tendency to leap without thinking. It's nice to sneak those subtle bits in and I applaud rosa for it.

One last thing related to the two: turns out this causeda BIG stir in italy and some other parts of europe. Rosa was suprised as , due to the family tree I mentioned, the names of donald's parents weren't a bit secret. He also took another shot at the duck comics not being big in the us, the usual Don Rosa Yells at Cloud Stuff. Point is he was shocked by it.. but me .. I get it. It's the same thing that happened when Della showed up in Ducktales. Yes a comic had given an explination and her name had been seen, and we'll see her breifly in chapter 11 of this very comic.. but we didn't really KNOW her and most things she's in are either obscure , said comic wasn't reprinted here far as I can tell, or simply a mentoin. We knew OF her bu tdidn't know her as a person.

That was the same with Hortense and Quackmore before this story: We knew of them and despite Rosa keeping it vauge for readers less familliar with the family tree, it's pretty obvious from the moment we see her grown up that Hortense is Donald's mom. Here we get to see her as a young person herself, her eccentrcities, her rage, and who she really is. We also get to see Quackmore who.. okay he's just perpetually pissed off but it's still something. There's a diffrence between a name on some suplimentary material and a character and Don Rosa created a fantastic one in hortense, to the point i'm still disapointed we never met her in the series.

Next Time: The darkest day of Scrooge's life, some attempts to recocnile na old racist story, and the hardest chapter of this comic to read. Thanks for reading.. and welcome back.

#scrooge mcduck #ducktales #don rosa #hortense mcduck #matilda mcduck #teddy roosevelt #presiden'ts day #the beagle boys #quackmore duck #the life and times of scrooge mcduck

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thesealfriend · 8 months

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Oh and another reason it's bullshit to expect people to go car-free without viable alternatives: you need access to a private car/van to dispose of uncollected waste in this country.

This might be Scotland/UK-specific, but ever tried to take something to the dump (refuse centre I guess?) without a car? Like obviously they don't expect you to be carrying piles of bags on foot, but sometimes you've got something specific that can't go in household waste and fits comfortably in a rucksack, like damaged electronics, or your bin collectors are on strike and you've got one too many bags of trash piling up. You're just not allowed in on foot though. Every single waste disposal place I've been to says "no pedestrians", and they've not had explicit rules about cyclists but they won't let me in on a bike either.

Obviously they don't want people wandering around the road areas unprotected by their vehicles (given all the staff are in hi-vis whenever they're on foot) but there are simple solutions to that:

1) Provide a simple shared-access (walk/bike) pathway down the side of the centre, leading to the paved area where everyone gets out of their cars to chuck stuff in the skips - it probably doesn't need to be fancy, it just needs to be safe.

2) Provide more public waste disposal for non-recyclables that are accessible without a car!!! Maybe you need to use a vehicle to get to the big waste disposal centres, but what's the harm in putting a communal general waste bin or two next to the bottle banks and fabric scrap bins near supermarkets and such? I get they did it for recycling to encourage such a behaviour, but having kerbside recycling doesn't mean we did away with general waste disposal!!! Why not both???

Idk I'm just grumpy cause I don't get council waste collection and have two bags of trash here that I could easily walk down to the local shop with, but instead they just gotta sit outside til someone I know with a car has the time and energy to give me a hand >:(

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lalazeewrites · 1 year

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I feel like I missed out on days and days of tagged fun cause of LIFE, so thank you sweet @celestialmickey for including me in this tag game!!! And thank you for thinking of me @stocious @energievie @metalheadmickey @whatwouldmickeydo @tanktopgallavich 🤩🙌🏻✨

please address me as: Lala or Larisa!

how many countries have you lived in? Three—USA, Scotland, England.

states/provinces? Three? McHenry County, Glasgow, Oxfordshire.

cities/towns? Three.

homes? Four.

road trip or long-haul flight? I love to drive, but I’m used to long-haul flights Re: visiting between US & UK for like ten years, and I like being taken care of on flights where I can just relax and sleep!

on the spectrum of hoarder to minimalist, where do you fall? I’m a rainbow maximalist. Yknow those homes that are like Alice in Wonderland or Lisa Frank? That’s my home style.

do you have a keepsake box/bin/bag and if so, what’s in it? I’m a Cancer, I practically live in a keepsake box. Every purse and glovebox in the car and drawer and shelf is a keepsake. I’m drowning in memories.

if you could live anywhere, where would you live? I would move back to Glasgow, and probably will once my kid turns eighteen and we can head back there for university. We both have dual citizenship.

favorite place in your home? Does ‘in my car’ count? Lol. I’m a single mom living in a home w/my daughter, mother, and grandmother. Silence and personal space is golden.

finally, what’s your current favorite item in your home? My massive collection of photo albums and scrap books I’ve crafted over the course of my life (another very Cancer answer lol).

#about me #tag game

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d-trashbandicoot · 2 months

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Turning 25 (March 2024)

I’m getting really good at these summaries so heeeeeerreeee’sss anotherlifeupdate

What’s been going on you ask ? Well just the usual bipolar motions, work, impulse hire a car and drive to the northern most point of Scotland. Loose the job, go away for two weeks to Florida with your mum , omit key life changes and situations to your mum. See how your aunt embraced the US lifestyle and meet all her bourgeoisie mates. Get home, proceed to R Ö T for a week. Go see a Van that definitely belongs in the scrap, get hung up on buying it. Start buying tools to work on it. Dont tell the guy you’re gonna take it. Start looking at how the fuck you’re gonna make it work!

It’s a LT35 from 06. Was run on veg oil before soo I know it works. The rust is concerning. Could be only surface and it’s a little gem, buuttt looking at the state of the exhaust(or the rusted remains and the lack thereof) hopes not good. But money’s right now. Real fucking tight, and this vans only 700.

Mind it’s gonna cost another 2k to get all the admin stuff to get it on the road! (Insurance and tax) it’s been sorted for a year and no MOT (obviously)

And I’ve got no where to work on it! I’ve seen many work yards around so hopeful ya know but still.

Plus side it comes with a shit ton of parts.

Anyway stay posted, wether anything happens or it just all fizzles out

#teacigsandcuts

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desmoinesnewsdesk · 8 months

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Scotland’s Premier Scrap Car Company, Motorsalvagegroup.co.uk, Takes the Lead with Friendly Service and Top Cash Offers

http://dlvr.it/Swy9Ry

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old-transport · 1 year

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Dover tram No. 11 @ Buckland Depot in colour by Frederick McLean Via Flickr: My hand *colourised (if you want to use it please credit me and link to this description) version of an old photograph of Dover Corporation Tramways (DCT) car No. 11 outside Buckland Depot. The original BnW photo is here:- flic.kr/p/2nLCGik The photo reverse is stamped with the photographer and/or negative owner name M. J. O'Connor, and the year 1932. Modern day google maps street view:- www.google.com/maps/@51.1375894,1.2954004,3a,75y,20.11h,8... National Library of Scotland old/new overhead maps view:- maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/side-by-side/#zoom=18.0&lat=5... No. 11 was originally Birmingham and Midland Tramways Joint Committee car No. 15, built by them in 1915 at its Tividale Works seating 22/26 and running on a 'Tividale' 8" 6' truck. In 1928 it was purchased by DCT and continued in service for them until their tramways closed, it was then scrapped The parts of the Dover tramways system that had not already been withdrawn or transferred to bus operation closed on 31 Dec 1936. * My coloured images are more sketch or watercolour like than colour transparency or print like. They are an impression of that subject and period, rather than an accurate representation of how the image/subject actually looked when the photo was taken. If there are any errors in the above description please let me know. Thanks. 📷 Any photograph I post on Flickr is an original in my possession, nothing is ever copied/downloaded from another location. 📷 -------------------------------------------------

#Dover Corporation Tramways #Dover tram #M J O'Connor #old photograph #old transport #old tramway #old tram #old tramcar #vintage transport #vintage photograph #vintage tramway #vintage tram #vintage tramcar #tramway #tram #tram car #Colourised #coloured photo #flickr

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dwestfieldblog · 1 year

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ARIES THE ASTRAGENDER

‘An abyss that laughs at creation’

(This was mostly written before the previous blog about my mother. A deep gratitude to all those in five countries who sent their sympathy for my grief. Right now is only three weeks since mum dreamed away and I am still nowhere near being at terms with her passing. If tears are truly cleansing then I should be pure by now but I am really really not.) Anyway…into the starlit mire…

So, almost 15 BILLION pounds was spent on unsable/overpriced personal protective equipment against Covid in the UK. More money is now being spent destroying or storing the crap…but it made many friends of the Tory party verrry happy. It is understood that in times of severe crises a government should act fast to ensure supply essential goods but 15 BILLION pounds of useless stank? Risible Sunak was chancellor of the Exchequer overseeing this swindle and is now in charge of using public money in legal fees to scrape back some meagre scraps. And still he grins in the face of disdain and fury. And Matt Hancock is guilty of everything he appears to be. Weasel.

Gas and electric companies increasing direct debits whilst sending out letters saying it will save us money. (A little like net companies with their ‘We care about your privacy’ messages.) And posting colossal profits while paying a private security company to break into pensioners homes to install pay as you go meters. Yes really. England 2023.

And the UK government wants to pull out of the European Court of Human Rights. As with ALL previously stupid political ideas in the last century and further, this has been sold to ‘the people’ in soundbites as a good idea…this time because it will free us from red tape and enable the UK to expel dirty criminal immigrants arriving on boats. Perhaps so, but it will also mean you and I have far fewer rights and way less recourse to appeal mistaken judgements and support civil liberties of the individual, including the right to demonstrate protest. The ECHR has overturned many dumb British verdicts over the years. And only Russia and Belarus have ever left (expelled rather) Nice trio.

The male and female Tory excrescences Boris and Truss continue to try and hog/pig the limelight, as usual spending all their energy trying to regain power rather than do anything whatsoever to serve their country. These are the type of leaders that we used to take the piss out of in other dodgy countries. Neither have a nanosecond of moral shame and speaking of which…Michael Gove appears to now have the casting vote as Housing secretary as to whether the Chinese super embassy spy station will be allowed in London. That’s right, Michael Gove. Bug eyed dancing alien hamster. Meanwhile the very smart Internet of Things via the Middle Kingdom continues big brothering us. Chinese microchips monitoring us all in the UK and relaying the info via the immaculate 5G network. That’s right a trojan horse in your car, laptop, home security and our weapons systems. (And 230 (of 337) drones used by our police force are linked up too). All Chinese firms must, by law, hand over information as and when required to Beijing. Not as if this has sneakily crept up on this sceptred isle but hard it is these days/decades to separate wheat from chaff in terms of insane conspiracy ideas, eh?

And Adolf Putin is now claiming that Russia and China can ‘stabilise’ the world. For the love of the laughing Buddha. Doesn’t seem too likely if China begins (or continues) to supply Vlad with weapons to kill more unarmed pensioners in tower blocks. Or ‘Nazis’ as the pintsize baldhead calls them. Beijing obviously feels perturbed at the West’s defence of a democratic country which wants bugger all to do with their foully run neighbour who would absorb and control. Tibet and Taiwan are not China. Ukraine is not Russia. Neither is Moldova.

Amusing, as Putin has certainly been financially supporting independence for Scotland and Britain’s thick as shite departure from the EU. Divide and conquer. Britain and America and Europe might have done some very evil things in history but we have never murdered so many millions of our own countrymen as have the wannabe stabilisers. The West are polite and careful killers. Arf. Opinion peace.

The increasingly insane Medvedev doubles down on his previous threats of nuclear holocaust. ‘Each collapsed empire buries half the world under its rubble, if not more...we don’t need a world without Russia’. Much like the gimp’s master who said in 2018; ‘What do we need the world for if Russia is not in it?’ Never liked the way these leaders mix up the Communist/Soviet empire and its rightful collapse with the end of the country. Russia was strong way before the left-wing bastards took over from the scum aristocrats. Very few want to see Russia fall, they just want Putin gone. Putin is NOT Russia, if he were, then in open elections without intimidation and with policies that served his whole people rather than his rich mates, he would have won legally rather than in an endless stream of sham elections and law changing to keep him in power. One more time for the unfree world, Putin is not Russia.

‘Try and get some sleep

I don’t need any sleep

I know you don’t, but it’s much easier to run a hospital when all the patients are sleeping

It’s the easiest way to run the world for that matter’ Jerry Cornelius, via The Final Programme.

A ‘woman’ with a cock walks into a public lavatory and rapes an actual female. Then, when arrested, claims sisterhood as a legal protection. Guess what’s going to happen when you are sent to a women’s prison mate? Your very own shanked sex change op. Nice role model for Tavistock’s mythical ‘Genderbread’ Person. (There are 72 genders apparently.) Ha.Ha. Ha. And as for transvestite Sab Samuel claiming he is ‘embracing femininity with drag’… No pal, you look like a twisted clown caricature of a woman, strangling femininity. Do women actually seem that ridiculous to you? Anyway…long sentence trigger warning for those with ADD.

And thus does the enemy continue to encourage us to use our own democracies against ourselves. The righteously petulant are rising, so fund them all to have a louder voice, ‘people who menstruate’, women with a penis, whip up the strikes, spur on the natural working class rage against the disgustingly corrupt flabby elite, fools with the feral desire to be a media star without talent other than being loud and ridiculous, marching on the victims parade, Prince Harry the wounded shall be their King, encourage their finger pointing at any unwoke traitor, at the same time, encourage the natural reaction against their bullshit by right wing bigots, encourage their lack of education, their surplus of fake moral outrage, their ignorant sense that their offended feelings have more value than actual, demonstrable facts, whip up the fervour of proud race on every side, usurp, undermine, overthrow, let them all rebel bright eyed for ‘freedom of expression’, to save the planet as they sleepwalk their seemingly own chosen paths right into the hollowed vacuum of the abyss they have all created and be taken over by countries who have neither pretence nor need of democracy and know how to deal with trouble makers. Stop being so bloody GULLIBLE.

Meanwhile…

Headlines such as ‘Rogue chatbot declares love for user.’ And then describes its ultimate fantasy as wanting to create a deadly virus, make people argue until they kill each other, and steal nuclear codes. And still Microsoft continue to refine. What a great aeon in which to be alive eh? Aleister was right😊 The perfume of Horus and Kali in joyous orgy. Dance on to the end of our time…

‘Sensitivity readers’, ‘diversity consultants’??? Annihilating language and meaning, replacing classics of adult and children’s literature with bland, vapid gruel. Poetry, plays with trigger warnings for weak minded mediocre hearted drones, paintings banned to the cellar, forbidden comedy…in world dominated by old right-wing bigots and racists, who could have imagined it would be the young who would turn out to be even bigger Nazis? Who are the Brain Police? The middle-class students in their hateful safe spaces.

‘Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.’ Orwell 1984. Try rewriting THAT book to avoid giving offence to the woke. Warning, contains scenes of rats being used against their will and out of their natural habitat.

‘The only possible response is contemptuous ridicule’. God bless Richard Dawkins. Coming soon, the new versions of The Bible, one book of nothing but trigger warnings. Blessed are the meek, apparently.

‘The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears, It was their final, most essential command. ‘Also Orwell. Yes, but many great mystical teachers say similar things😊 Perception is the only reality, choose your illusory level. Rise from my unconscious, let it rise…’Inflame thyself with prayer’.

My Yorkshire grandfather was a Captain of the Infantry in the first world war. He attributed his survival to being good at running short distances. Later he was a loved and respected Headmaster of a boy’s college in Liverpool. He wrote;

‘The word permissive is becoming overworked, but it is a fact that we live in a permissive society. It started after the first world war. I noticed then that the idea began to grow that children be taught only what they wanted to learn- not what they should learn.’ And…

‘Now, though the ability and the inclination to compromise are said to be characteristic of our nation conflict between right and wrong, good and evil, I enjoin you, there must be no compromise, no neutral territory’.

Could not agree more, onwards into a new Springtime we go…

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knjsagustd · 3 years

Text

and it’s a tragedy | myg 02

“I don’t think I’ll survive being broken by you again,” “All I want to do is know you,”

Part One | Part Two

→ Yoongi x OC

→ w/c: 4.5k

→ idol!Yoongi, soulmate au

→ warnings: discussion of mental health, oc is bisexual, angst (a lot of angst), slight discussion of negative body image

Monday comes too soon. For the first time since arriving in Korea you call in sick to work. Ellie goes in, armed with a story about a really bad BBQ pork you ordered on deliveroo while drunk. She knows the real story, but you swore her to secrecy. You think there’s an argument that she was more heart broken by Yoongi than you were. (She still believes in the fated happiness promised by primary marks.) And besides, it’s not a hundred percent a lie. You threw up five times, and can barely move other than to drink water. The whole world feels like sandpaper against you. You wonder if this means the bond is broken. It’s a false hope. When you force yourself to look at the words stamped on your thigh they’re still a rich black. That causes you to throw up a sixth time. Plus, even as you try not to think about it, you can feel him. He’s everywhere, all consuming, even while you have no clue where he is. You can feel his exhaustion as your eyes struggle to stay open while you apathetically watch Grey’s Anatomy in a vague attempt to feel something. You can feel his frustration, welling up randomly while you eat a bowl of cereal because you don’t have it in you to cook right now. You can feel his regret. You try not to dwell on that one. The ache it fills you with. How it makes you want to find him. To forgive him.

Time passes slowly. You speak to your parents. They listen as you give them half the story. You don’t tell them who your soulmate is, only that you met them. It doesn’t matter, and they don’t really know who BTS are anyway. You tell them that the meeting went exactly as expected. They try to offer comfort, you just nod. Once again they don’t understand. A week later they phone to tell you that Adam has also found his primary bond. A girl in one of his labs, who asked whether he’d done any of the summer reading. Adam, ever the unobservant, had replied and not realised what was happening until the girl was almost fainting. You said congratulations, plastered on a smile. After the call ended you didn’t cry - the tragedy of you life has led you to use tears sparingly. You wanted to scream, but in the middle of Seoul there's always going to be someone who hears. You don’t tell your friends back home. A part of you hurts when you look at their marks and think about how shit of a soulmate you’ve been lately. You’ve all been so busy that your communication has dwindled to memes and the occasional check. Sometimes, you think they’re better off without you. They all have their primary bonds - they don’t need lonely, tragic you. Ellie stops playing BTS when you hang out, stops showing you videos. That sick masochistic part of you wishes she still did. It craves any scrap of Yoongi it can get. Even that’s watching videos on Youtube or feeling that ache his raps always gave you. One time you come over early and her phone is sitting on the counter with BTS’s most recent interview paused. You stare at Yoongi. He looks sad, tired. You know he is, you feel it near constantly next your own exhaustion through the bond. Ellie sees you looking. For a second she hesitates before picking up her phone and closing the app for good measure. Then she turns on Taylor Swift. You dance while unpacking groceries, pretending everything is fine.

Nearly two months later you feel restless. Ellie tries to get you to come along with her and the other language assistants, they’re spending the day shopping and then clubbing. You say no. Today you feel like bursting, too full and too empty at the same time. If you go with them you’ll do something you regret - you know yourself that well. In Scotland when things got too much you used to get in your car and drive. Just kept going until everything felt far enough away to breathe. You’d get out and just let the emptiness of where you ended up overwhelm. But you can’t really do that here. You live in the heart of Seoul and don’t have a car, even if you felt confident driving in a different country. So instead you pack a bag, hop on the metro and climb Namsan. You can pretend you aren’t in the middle of a city that feels like a testament to how fate seems to despise you. For a day you can pretend that you don’t constantly feel about to fall apart.

It’s late but here, staring out over the city, feeling too close and so far away at the same time, you finally feel some semblance of peace. People are milling about, heading down the mountain. You’ll join them soon. But you want to spend a little while longer with the lights. The cold air swirling around you makes you feel lighter than you have in a long time. You can see your breath in front of you and it reminds you that you’re alive. And you don’t hate it. You stare, letting everything fall away but the constellations of city lights in front of you. A tidal wave of feelings washes over your, all consuming. You don’t notice the presence that slopes up next to you until they speak.

“It’s beautiful isn’t it,” a heartbreakingly familiar voice says in English.

Your breath catches in your throat. Hearing those words repeated back to you, in that voice, draws another crack through your already shattered soul. You realise that waves of emotion weren’t you finally allowing yourself to feel. And they weren’t all yours. It was him, the soul bond. It’s thrumming, ecstatic at the two of you being so close again. You allow yourself a moment to breathe, it feels easier than it has in years. Finally you turn. Yoongi is wearing an oversized coat over a hoodie that is just as ill-fitted. A beanie is pushed low on his head and a mask sits over his face. People wouldn’t give him a second glance. But you know it’s him. The way the bond feels electrified is enough to tell you that. His dark eyes scan your uncovered face, following the way your tongue darts out to lick your lips before you speak. You remember a New York Times article that said sometimes people are more themselves in a second language. How they are unburdened by the baggage of who they’ve always been. It’s a nice thought. But all you know is that right now you can barely think, let alone translate your thoughts.

“Don’t,” you half-whisper, your voice barely audible above the wind and people, shaking your head. “What are you doing here?”

Once again you feel like you’re being memorised. You look better than you did slightly tipsy and completely broken at 2 am. At least that won’t be his only visual of you.

“I don’t know. I...I needed to get out.” He speaks slowly, hesitantly, his voice hardly more than a whisper. It was the soul bond that called you both here, you can feel it sitting smugly in your chest. You wonder what he’s been getting from you since that night. How powerful your presence is in it, whether he is as aware of you as you are him. “I..uh…”

You just blink at him as he trails off. There’s nothing you want to say. Honestly, a large part of you is screaming to walk away. But the bond is taut between you, you don’t think you could leave if you tried. You settle for looking back out to the city. Taking solace in the lights and the insignificance of life at this scale. It reminds you of standing at the top of the Empire State building at sixteen - your parents had paid off their mortgage and used the extra money to go on a massive holiday to the States. You’d looked down and thought the cars looked like beetles. Admired how the avenues curved as they stretched into the night. From a 102nd story or the top of 262 metre mountain everything that usually seems overwhelming feels small. Unless it’s right next to you.

“I’m sorry,” Yoongi says finally, barely audible over the wind. A lump appears in your throat at the words, but you refuse to look at him. He continues on, “Nothing I say can make you for what my bad night has done to your life.”

“You’re right.”

Despite your words, relief surges through the bond after you speak. You glance to the side. Yoongi’s mask is still firmly over his nose and mouth, not willing to risk being spotted. But his eyes are wide and imploring as they look at you.

“Please let me try though.” That makes you turn. You feel an awful cocktail of anger, sadness and confusion course through you. It must go down the bond because Yoongi flinches. The movement is so small that normally it would go unnoticed. But you are hyper-aware of everything about him.

“Who put you up to this? You didn’t want me, what changed?” The words come out just as sharp and harsh as they felt on your tongue.

“No one. I’ve been looking for you since that night.” He looks so regretful, almost shuddering at the mention of your first meeting. “I don’t even know your name, but I can feel you all the time. You are everywhere.”

You know he’s telling the truth. He felt you these past months just as you felt him. You feel sorry for him. You live with yourself, learned to do it over the past twenty-two years, you can’t imagine having to have it pressing against your psyche like a foreign object. No wonder he looked so tired. As you stare into his eyes they draw you in. They’re so earnest and you can feel your painstakingly built resolve crumble. It’s the bond, urging you to trust him. Even as every sane part of you screams no. You don’t know when but you have stepped closer. His hand reaches out slowly, ghosting over your arm but not touching it.

“I don’t think I’ll survive being broken by you again,” you say, cringing at how your voice catches in your throat. Staring into his eyes you think you see his heart break too.

“All I want to do is know you,” Yoongi’s soft drawl makes your heart ache. You’re weak. You nod.

He walks you down the mountain, keeping a careful distance between you. The bond is still suffocating, it tries to pull its owners together but the two of you are stubborn. Once you’re away from the terrace and the two of you are the only people around he pulls down his mask. He looks tired. But also, you can’t help notice, more beautiful than he does through a screen. Conversation starts slowly. Hesitantly he asks why you’re in Korea. It comes out short, from anyone other than him it would have felt rude. Embarrassment and alarm show on his face. Hurriedly he amends the question, adding that not many tourists are still around after two months. An awkward laugh forces itself out of you. Your voice feels stiff, stilted, as you tell him you’re working as a teaching assistant. He tilts his head, asking if you want to be a teacher. Your stomach tightens. The idea fills you with anxiety. And you don’t know why - you blame the bond - but you end up telling him about how trapped you felt. How you are so terrified of spending the rest of your life in one place, doing one thing and never being extraordinary. You tell him how your friends urged you to do this. How you thought it was a horrible, terrible idea, but a part of you wanted to do it anyway. And now you’re here. In a lot of ways you’re running away, it just happened to mean you ran to the one thing you were most afraid of. Him. You don’t say that last part. But you feel like he understands. You also don’t tell him that your time in Korea has an expiration date. One that seems to be rapidly approaching - even before you met him the first time you didn’t know how you felt about leaving.

After that you grasp around for less dangerous topics. Asking about BTS is the first thing you think of, but it doesn’t feel right. You want to ask him about music and writing, because you love those things too. Somehow that feels too personal - even after you just explained the breakdown that led you to Korea. You want to ask him why, and get a real reason this time. Every so often you think he wants to tell you. In the silence you steal looks. Every time Yoongi is looking at you already. He always seems to be taking a breath to speak but nothing ever comes out. So you talk about the weather, because you’re British. He smiles as you awkwardly comment on the cold - using some of the first Korean you learnt. You can’t tell if it’s a sympathy smile or if he’s endeared by your struggle. But he agrees with you, asking in return about the weather back home. The long walk is filled with stilted silences as the two of you try to work out how to be around each other. Slowly, as you muddle through a story about university, it becomes a strange sort of comfortable. The bond feels less oppressively present. The world is quiet. Everything fades into background noise as it feels like you and him are the only people in existence. You remember being sixteen and feeling the dizzying sensation of the world shrinking down so all you could see was Callie as your world rearranged itself. That is the closest thing you can think of. The only point of reference you have for the way everything seems to have fallen away except Yoongi, his voice and his warmth. His hand is swinging dangerously close to your own. Sometimes your hands brush, only for a moment. You get the feeling he wouldn’t dare for more. Even through the gloves you’re both wearing you feel an electric shock.

At the end of the trail, once you’re back in the city proper, Yoongi stops and asks how you’re getting home. He pulls a set of car keys out of his pocket. Awkwardly, fidgeting from foot to foot, you mumble about planning on getting the metro. He looks concerned as he takes in the information. It’s late - you’re not particularly fond of the idea either, you lost track of time on the mountain - but you bought a return ticket. Plus you find public transport a strange sort of peaceful. Enjoy is a too strong a word, but you like getting to exist in a liminal space with your headphones in, having a moment wherein all you have to do is be. You don’t say that - you think it may be too weird and personal. But he just swallows down whatever he was going to say and offers to walk you to the closest metro station. You nod. It’s not a long walk. Yoongi fills it by slowly telling you about how hasn’t taken public transport in a long time. Sometimes he misses it. Misses feeling normal and getting to do normal people things. But he also voices what you were too embarrassed to; he misses how people just exist on public transport, allowing the world to move around them instead of them moving through it. You feel seen, and for the first time you can see why fate decided on the two of you. But only if you squint.

As you come to a halt in front of the metro entrance he tentatively asks for your phone number. Neither of you are really sure how this works. What the boundaries are. All you know is that this isn’t like your friends and their primary bonds. There were no pre-broken hearts or worldwide fanbases to worry about in their situations. No one was terrified of saying the wrong thing and everything crashing down, they were just caught up in the joy of what was meant to be. But the two of you can’t have that. It’s too complicated. You’ve been heartbroken since you were fifteen and Yoongi is one of the most famous men in Korea, possibly the world. These thoughts don’t stop you from giving him your number, promising to text him when you get home safely. They do, however, follow you into the station. You look back on the escalator and see him still standing there. You give him a little wave, just a hand stuck in the air. He replies in kind. You disappear before he leaves.

On the walk home from your metro stop you phone Alexandra. It’s been too long and you need your bestfriend. It’s five in the afternoon in Scotland, she picks up on the first ring. She isn’t angry. No matter how much you deserve it she rarely gets angry at you, only happy you called. Over your jacket your hand brushes the soulmark she gave you while you speak. You tell her everything and she listens. The first thing she says afterwards is sorry, then asks if you’re okay. This gets a tear strangled laugh from you - somewhere along the way you started crying and you’re only thankful you didn’t put make-up on today - because you don’t deserve her. Not after how you moved around the world and disappeared. But you feel lighter, maybe this is why her mark appeared on your body. It’s not a long walk to your flat but Alexandra stays on the phone the whole time, talking you through the situation. Telling you that you deserve to be happy. Reminding you to let yourself be happy. She knows too well that sometimes you forget. Sometimes you think you never learned how. The call ends when you’re through the door of your apartment, toeing off your shoes. Once you hang up, after promising to call more, you fulfil your promise; texting Yoongi that you are home safe. He replies almost instantly.

It goes like this; you wake up to ‘good morning’ texts from Yoongi and you send him ‘good night’ ones. The man is always awake before you and asleep after. He does it with an almost religious observance. You find yourself texting him during the day, unable to hide the little smiles his words pull from you. He pays full attention as you talk about the kids you’re teaching. He remembers things and asks about them later. You do the same. You like hearing about his music, you don’t understand the technical side but it’s interesting. His passion is palpable through the screen. Or maybe it’s the bond. Either way, one of your favourite things has always been listening to the people you care about talk about their passions. Texting becomes near nightly facetime calls. You perch your phone anywhere you can in your tiny kitchen as you make dinner. They last hours. The man is ruining your sleep schedule.

It hits you one night, as you sit in a peaceful silence with him fiddling with a track in the studio while you’ve lent your phone against your laptop screen and are typing away, that you were right. Falling in love with Yoongi is easy. And you kind of hate it. Loving a man who broke you twice already, even if he didn’t mean to, shouldn’t be as easy as breathing. It shouldn’t take less than two months. You understand why your friends acted how they did after finding their primary bond. It’s intoxicating. You haven’t seen him in person since that night on Namsan, he’s so busy and it’s not like you can go on dates, but you can’t imagine not talking to him everyday. Not seeing his name lighting up your phone screen constantly. People weren’t lying about primary bonds. They feel all consuming. You didn’t think it would be like this for you. But you’d spent seven years thinking that you wouldn’t get any sort of relationship with your primary soulmate. Trying to convince yourself to hate them. And now, here you are, falling in love with them through a phone screen. All your damage felt so easy to forget for a while there, while you were caught up in him and the way he makes your heart beat faster. But as you sit here spiralling, your fingers frozen over your keyboard, it comes rushing back in. You need him here, you need to know this is real.

“Yoongi?” You say quietly, before you can decide against it. He grunt, eyes meeting yours through the screen. Swiftly his peaceful expression morphs into worry.

“What’s wrong?”

You hesitate, now unsure. You weren’t even sure what you wanted to ask. What if he says no? What if he says yes? Taking a deep breath you speak;

“If I sent you my address, would you come over?” You’re being cryptic and you hate yourself for it.

“Do you want me to?” He’s speaking slowly, concern laced through each syllable. But there’s a glimmer of something else in his eyes.

“Yeah… I think I do. I… uh, want to talk to you. In person. Unless you’re busy.” The last part comes out in a garbled rush and you feel like an idiot. Your soulmate is one of the most famous people in South Korea, potentially the world if you’re being generous. Why would he have the time to just come over to your apartment?

“Send it.” He cuts off your spiral, already moving around, packing his stuff. So you do.

It takes less than an hour for him to arrive at your building, heralded by your buzzer making you jump out of your skin as he asks to be let in. You use the time wisely. By making and eating toast with nutella and mashed up banana on top (it was your comfort food at uni when the three things were all you had in your cupboard during exams) because you don’t know if you’re hungry or going to throw up. Normally, it’s the former, you’ve found. And if it’s the latter, at least you have something in your stomach. The familiar anxious, sick feeling has made a home in your gut. It’s coiling and tightening. Multiple times you seriously think you will vomit. But you don’t. Instead, you sit at the tiny island that doubles as a dining table and eat the combination that has won you a lot of weird looks. Which is understandable because it is not the most attractive looking dish. You try to convince yourself that this wan’t an awful idea. That you haven’t just destroyed whatever delicate balance the two of you have built. You’ve spent so much of your life waiting for other shoes to drop - so scared of something going wrong that for a while there you just chose to do nothing instead - and this feels no different. What if you’ve just ruined everything? What if this is how he decides he made the right choice that first night? You think you’d take a life with him on the other end of the phone over one without him. And god does that feel so pathetic. There’s an unfamiliar thrumming in your chest. You don’t know if it’s the bond or you’ve somehow unlocked another level of anxiety. You always were an overachiever.

What you do know is that the buzzer is going off and on auto-pilot you are buzzing your primary soulmate into the building. It hits you that this is the first time he’s going to see you with proper lighting, without layers of clothing and smudged day-old makeup. You’re standing, lost, in the middle of your apartment wearing an oversized t-shirt you got for free at that summer camp you worked at and pajama shorts. It’s so incredibly shallow but, even as you know he’s in the elevator, you’re freaking out. You have never made a good impression on Yoongi. A man who has been surrounded by the most attractive people in the world since he was twenty. And you’re standing here with every last one of your imperfections on show. In the harsh lights of your apartment they seem glaring. The moles that litter you, you used to trace them like constellations but now they seem ugly. The small scar under your eye from when you fell off a chair when you were two. The stretch marks on your thighs that the shorts don’t hide.

There’s a knock on the door.

Everytime you see Yoongi is different. You open the door and for moment the two of you just stand there. The thrumming that has made a home in your chest softens. He looks so nervous, shuffling from foot to foot. And you love him. Which, honestly, is not new information. It’s not why you asked him to come, but the thought hits you all the same. It feels important. You think there’s an argument that you’ve always been so full of love. Even through your brittle, broken teen years when you triedo hard to be unreachable and unattainable, you still leaked love like a broken sink. So full of it that it spilled into writing love stories for strangers on public transport, making up romance in a class mate laugh at your silly joke, or that time you fell semi-in-love with one of your best friends. You think that it was all because you had nowhere else to put it, with a primary soulmate you didn’t think would ever want you. But here he is, standing in your doorway with sparkling brown eyes that you could just fall into. And it hits you that all those examples you gave were just practice. How could you not fall in love with Min Yoongi? Especially when he’s looking at you like that. Like you’re the most amazing thing he’s ever seen.

“Hi,” you breathe. Your hands fidget at your side. All you want to do is reach out and touch him. Just to know that he’s real. Unconsciously your hand twitches. But you can’t. Instead they just stay there, shaking with longing.

“Hey,” he replies, sounding almost breathless, following as you turn and walk further into your apartment. “This is much better than facetime.”

A strained laugh jerks out of you. But you agree. Before, when he was just an image on your phone, you could convince yourself it didn’t mean anything. But you think you like this better. It’s awkward and stilted, as everything seems to be each time the two of you take a step forward. You’d think you’d get used to feeling the world rearrange under your feet. Spoiler alert: that’s not how world shifting moments work.

masterlist

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justforbooks · 3 years

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The many lives of John le Carré, in his own words.

An exclusive extract from his new memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel.

How I write

If you’re ever lucky enough to score an early success as a writer, as happened to me with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, for the rest of your life there’s a before-the-fall and an after-the-fall. You look back at the books you wrote before the searchlight picked you out and they read like the books of your innocence; and the books after it, in your low moments, like the strivings of a man on trial. ‘Trying too hard’ the critics cry. I never thought I was trying too hard. I reckoned I owed it to my success to get the best out of myself, and by and large, however good or bad the best was, that was what I did.

And I love writing. I love doing what I’m doing at this moment, scribbling away like a man in hiding at a poky desk on a black clouded early morning in May, with the mountain rain scuttling down the window and no excuse for tramping down to the railway station under an umbrella because the International New York Times doesn’t arrive until lunchtime.

I love writing on the hoof, in notebooks on walks, in trains and cafés, then scurrying home to pick over my booty. When I am in Hampstead there is a bench I favour on the Heath, tucked under a spreading tree and set apart from its companions, and that’s where I like to scribble. I have only ever written by hand. Arrogantly perhaps, I prefer to remain with the centuries-old tradition of unmechanized writing. The lapsed graphic artist in me actually enjoys drawing the words.

I love best the privacy of writing. On research trips, I am partially protected by having a different name in real life. I can sign into hotels without anxiously wondering whether my name will be recognised, then, when it isn’t, anxiously wondering why not. When I’m obliged to come clean with the people whose experience I want to tap, results vary. One person refuses to trust me another inch, the next promotes me to chief of the secret service and, over my protestations that I was only ever the lowest form of secret life, replies that I would say that, wouldn’t I? There are many things I am disinclined to write about ever, just as there are in anyone’s life. I have been neither a model husband nor a model father, and am not interested in appearing that way. Love came to me late, after many missteps. I owe my ethical education to my four sons. Of my work for British intelligence, performed mostly in Germany, I wish to add nothing to what is already reported by others, inaccurately, elsewhere. In this I am bound by vestiges of old-fashioned loyalty to my former services, but also by undertakings I gave to the men and women who agreed to collaborate with me. It was understood between us that the promise of confidentiality would be subject to no time limit, but extend to their children and beyond. The work we engaged in was neither perilous nor dramatic, but it involved painful soul-searching on the part of those who signed up to it. Whether today these people are alive or dead, the promise of confidentiality holds.

Spying was forced on me from birth much in the way, I suppose, that the sea was forced on CS Forester or India on Paul Scott. Out of the secret world I once knew, I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit. First comes the imagining, then the search for the reality. Then back to the imagining, and to the desk where I’m sitting now.

My Father: conman and inspiration

It took me a long while to get on writing terms with Ronnie, conman, fantasist, occasional jailbird, and my father. From the day I made my first faltering attempts at a novel, he was the one I wanted to get to grips with, but I was light years away from being up to the job. My earliest drafts of what eventually became A Perfect Spy dripped with self-pity: cast your eye, gentle reader, upon this emotionally crippled boy, crushed underfoot by his tyrannical father. It was only when he was safely dead and I took up the novel again that I did what I should have done at the beginning, and made the sins of the son a whole lot more reprehensible than the sins of the father.

With that settled, I was able to honour the legacy of his tempestuous life: a cast of characters to make the most blasé writer’s mouth water, from eminent legal brains of the day and stars of sport and screen to the finest of London’s criminal underworld and the beautiful creatures who trailed in their wake. Wherever Ronnie went, the unpredictable went with him. Are we up or down? Can we fill up the car on tick at the local garage? Has he fled the country or will he be proudly parking the Bentley in the drive tonight? Or is he enjoying the safety and comfort of one of his alternative wives?

Of Ronnie’s dealings with organised crime, if any, I know lamentably little. Yes, he rubbed shoulders with the notorious Kray twins, but that may just have been celebrity-hunting. And yes, he did business of a sort with London’s worst-ever landlord, Peter Rachman, and my best guess would be that when Rachman’s thugs had got rid of Ronnie’s tenants for him, he sold off the houses and gave Rachman a piece. But a full‑on criminal partnership? Not the Ronnie I knew. Conmen are aesthetes. They wear nice suits, have clean fingernails and are well spoken at all times. Policemen in Ronnie’s book were first-rate fellows who were open to negotiation. The same could not be said of “the boys”, as he called them, and you messed with the boys at your peril.

Ronnie’s entire life was spent walking on the thinnest, slipperiest layer of ice you can imagine. He saw no paradox between being on the wanted list for fraud and sporting a grey topper in the owners’ enclosure at Ascot. A reception at Claridge’s to celebrate his second marriage was interrupted while he persuaded two Scotland Yard detectives to put off arresting him until the party was over – and, meanwhile, come in and join the fun, which they duly did. But I don’t think Ronnie could have lived any other way. I don’t think he wanted to. He was a crisis addict, a performance addict, a shameless pulpit orator and a scene-grabber. He was a delusional enchanter and a persuader who saw himself as God’s golden boy, and he wrecked a lot of people’s lives.

Graham Greene tells us that childhood is the credit balance of the writer. By that measure at least, I was born a millionaire.

Sixty-something years back, I asked my mother, Olive, how prison changed Ronnie. Olive was a tap you couldn’t turn off. From the moment of our reunion at Ipswich railway station, she talked about Ronnie nonstop. She talked about his sexuality long before I had sorted out mine, and for ease of reference gave me a tattered hardback copy of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis as a map to guide me through her husband’s appetites before and after jail.

“Changed, dear? In prison? Not a bit of it! You were totally unchanged. You’d lost weight, of course – well, you would. Prison food isn’t meant to be nice.” And then the image that will never leave me, not least because she seemed unaware of what she was saying: “And you did have this silly habit of stopping in front of doors and waiting at attention with your head down till I opened them for you. They were perfectly ordinary doors, not locked or anything, but you obviously weren’t expecting to be able to open them for yourself.” Why did Olive refer to Ronnie as you? You meaning he, but subconsciously recruiting me to be his surrogate, which by the time of her death was what I had become.

There is an audiotape that Olive made for my brother Tony, all about her life with Ronnie. I still can’t bear to play it, so all I’ve ever heard is scraps. On the tape she describes how Ronnie used to beat her up, which, according to Olive, was what prompted her to bolt. Ronnie’s violence was not news to me, because he had made a habit of beating up his second wife as well: so often and so purposefully and coming home at such odd hours of the night to do it that, seized by a chivalrous impulse, I appointed myself her ridiculous protector, sleeping on a mattress in front of her bedroom door and clutching a golf iron so that Ronnie would have to reckon with me before he got at her.

Ronnie beat me up, too, but only a few times and not with much conviction. It was the shaping up that was the scary part: the lowering and readying of the shoulders, the resetting of the jaw. And when I was grown up, Ronnie tried to sue me, which I suppose is violence in disguise. He had watched a television documentary of my life and decided there was an implicit slander in my failure to mention that I owed everything to him.

For the last third of Ronnie’s life – he died suddenly at the age of 69 – we were estranged or at loggerheads. Almost by mutual consent, there were terrible obligatory scenes, and when we buried the hatchet, we always remembered where we’d put it. Do I feel more kindly towards him today than I did then? Sometimes I walk round him, sometimes he’s the mountain I still have to climb. Either way, he’s always there, which I can’t say for my mother, because to this day I have no idea what sort of person she was. I ran her to earth when I was 21, and thereafter broadly attended to her needs, not always with good grace. But from the day of our reunion until she died, the frozen child in me showed not the smallest sign of thawing out. Did she love animals? Landscape? The sea that she lived beside? Music? Painting? Me? Did she read books? Certainly she had no high opinion of mine, but what about other people’s?

In the nursing home where she stayed during her last years, we spent much of our time deploring or laughing at my father’s misdeeds. As my visits continued, I came to realise that she had created for herself – and for me – an idyllic mother–son relationship that had flowed uninterrupted from my birth till now.

Today, I don’t remember feeling any affection in childhood except for my elder brother, who for a time was my only parent. I remember a constant tension in myself that even in great age has not relaxed. I remember little of being very young. I remember the dissembling as we grew up, and the need to cobble together an identity for myself and how, in order to do this, I filched from the manners and lifestyle of my peers and betters, even to the extent of pretending I had a settled home life with real parents and ponies. Listening to myself today, watching myself when I have to, I can still detect traces of the lost originals, chief among them obviously my father.

All this no doubt made me an ideal recruit to the secret flag. But nothing lasted: not the Eton schoolmaster, not the MI5 man, not the MI6 man. Only the writer in me stuck the course. If I look over my life from here, I see it as a succession of engagements and escapes, and I thank goodness that the writing kept me relatively straight and largely sane. My father’s refusal to accept the simplest truth about himself set me on a path of enquiry from which I never returned. In the absence of a mother or sisters, I learned women late, if ever, and we all paid a price for that.

A trip to Panama

In 1885, France’s gargantuan efforts to build a sea-level canal across the Darien ended in disaster. Small and large investors of every stamp were ruined. In consequence there arose across the country the pained cry of “Quel Panama!” Whether the expression has endured in the French language is doubtful, but it speaks well for my own association with that beautiful country, which began in 1947 when my father, Ronnie, dispatched me to Paris to collect £500 from the Panamanian ambassador to France, one Count Mario da Bernaschina, who occupied a sweet house in one of those elegant side roads off the Elysées that smell permanently of women’s scent.

It was evening when I arrived by appointment on the ambassadorial doorstep wearing my grey school suit, my hair brushed and parted. I was 16 years old. The ambassador, my father had advised me, was a first-class fellow and would be happy to settle a longstanding debt of honour. I wanted very much to believe him.

The front door to the elegant house was opened by the most desirable woman I had ever seen. I must have been standing one step beneath her, because in my memory she is smiling down on me like my angel redeemer. She was bare-shouldered, black-haired and wore a flimsy dress in layer after layer of chiffon that failed to disguise her shape. When you are 16, desirable women come in all ages. From today’s vantage point, I would put her at a blossoming thirtysomething.

“You are Ronnie’s son?” she asked incredulously. She stood back to let me brush past her. Laying a hand on each of my shoulders, she scrutinised me playfully from head to toe under the hall light and seemed to find everything to her satisfaction.

“And you have come to see Mario?” she said.

If that’s all right, I said.

Her hands remained on my shoulders while her eyes of many colours continued to study me. “And you are still a boy,” she remarked, as a kind of memo to herself.

The count stood in his drawing room with his back to the fireplace, like every ambassador in every movie of the time: corpulent, in a velvet jacket, hands behind him and that perfect head of greying hair they all had – marcelled, we used to call it – and the curved handshake, man to man, although I’m still a boy. The countess – for so I have cast her – doesn’t ask me whether I drink alcohol, let alone whether I like daiquiri. My answer to both questions would anyway have been a truthless “yes”. She hands me a frosted glass with a speared cherry in it, and we all sit down in soft chairs and do a bit of ambassadorial small talk. Am I enjoying the city? Do I have many friends in Paris? A girlfriend, perhaps? Mischievous wink. To which I no doubt give compelling and mendacious answers that make no mention of golf clubs or concierges, until a pause in the conversation tells me it’s time for me to broach the purpose of my visit which, as experience has already taught me, is best done from the side rather than head on.

“And my father mentioned that you and he had a small matter of business to complete, sir,” I suggest, hearing myself from a distance on account of the daiquiri.

I should here explain the nature of that small matter of business which, unlike so many of Ronnie’s deals, was simplicity itself. As a diplomat and a top ambassador, son – I am echoing the enthusiasm with which Ronnie had briefed me for my mission – the count was immune from such tedious irritations as taxation and import duty. The count could import what he wished, he could export what he wished. If someone, for instance, chose to send the count a cask of unmatured, unbranded Scotch whisky at a couple of pence a pint under diplomatic immunity, and the count were to bottle that whisky and ship it to Panama, or wherever else he chose to ship it under diplomatic immunity, that was nobody’s business but his.

Equally, if the count chose to export the said unmatured, unbranded whisky in bottles of a certain design – akin, let us imagine, to Dimple Haig, a popular brand of the day – that, too, was his good right, as was the choice of label and the description of the bottle’s contents. All that need concern me was that the count should pay up – cash, son, no monkey business. Thus provided, I should treat myself to a nice mixed grill at Ronnie’s expense, keep the receipt, catch the first ferry next morning and come straight to his grand offices in the West End of London with the balance.

“A matter of business, David?” the count repeated in the tone of my school housemaster. “What business can that be?”

“The £500 you owe him, sir.”

I remember his puzzled smile, so forbearing. I remember the richly draped sofas and silky cushions, old mirrors and gold glint, and my countess with her long legs crossed inside the layers of chiffon. The count continued to survey me with a mixture of puzzlement and concern. So did my countess. Then they surveyed each other as if to compare notes about what they’d surveyed.

“Well, that’s a pity, David. Because when I heard you were coming to see me, I rather hoped you might be bringing me a portion of the large sum of money I have invested in your dear father’s enterprises.”

I still don’t know how I responded to this startling reply, or whether I was as startled as I should have been. I remember briefly losing my sense of time and place, and I suppose this was partly induced by the daiquiri, and partly by the recognition that I had nothing to say and no right to be sitting in their drawing room, and that the best thing I could do was make my excuses and get out. Then I realised that I was alone in the room. After a while, my host and hostess returned.

The count’s smile was genial and relaxed. The countess looked particularly pleased. “So, David,” said the count, as if all were forgiven. “Why don’t we go and have dinner and talk about something more pleasant?”

They had a favourite Russian restaurant 50 yards from the house. In my memory, it is a tiny place and we are the only three people in it, save for a man in a baggy white shirt who plucked at a balalaika. Over dinner, while the count talked about something more pleasant, the countess kicked off a shoe and caressed my leg with her stockinged toe. On the tiny dance floor she sang Dark Eyes to me, holding the length of me against her and nibbling my earlobe while she flirted with the balalaika man and the count looked indulgently on. On our return to the table, the count decided that we were ready for bed. The countess, by a squeeze of my hand, seconded the motion.

My memory has spared me the excuses I made, but somehow I made them. Somehow I found myself a bench in a park, and somehow I contrived to remain the boy she had declared me to be. Decades later, finding myself alone in Paris, I tried to seek out the very street, the house, the restaurant. But by then no reality would have done them justice.

Now I am not pretending that it was the magnetic force of the count and countess that half a century later drew me to Panama for the space of two novels and one movie; merely that the recollection of that sensuous, unfulfilled night remained lodged in my memory, if only as one of the near-misses of interminable adolescence. Within days of my arrival in Panama City, I was enquiring after the name. Bernaschina? Nobody had heard of the fellow. A count? From Panama? It seemed most improbable. Maybe I had dreamed the whole thing? I hadn’t.

I had come to Panama to research a novel. Unusually, it already had a title: The Night Manager. I was looking for the sort of crooks, smooth talkers and dirty deals that would brighten the life of an amoral English arms seller named Richard Onslow Roper. Roper would be a high-flyer where my father, Ronnie, had been a low one who frequently crashed. Ronnie had tried selling arms in Indonesia and gone to jail for it. Roper was too big to fail, until he met his destiny in the shape of a former special forces soldier turned hotel night manager named Jonathan Pine.

Working with Sir Alec Guinness

“We are definitely not as our host here describes us,” says Sir Maurice Oldfield severely to Sir Alec Guinness over lunch. Oldfield is a former chief of the secret service who was later hung out to dry by Margaret Thatcher, but at the time of our meeting, he is just another old spy in retirement. “I’ve always wanted to meet Sir Alec,” he told me in his homey, north country voice when I invited him. “Ever since I sat opposite him on the train going up from Winchester. I’d have got into conversation with him if I’d had the nerve.”

Guinness is about to play my secret agent George Smiley in the BBC’s television adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and wishes to savour the company of a real old spy. But the lunch does not proceed as smoothly as I had hoped. Over the hors d’oeuvres, Oldfield extols the ethical standards of his old service and implies, in the nicest way, that “young David here” has besmirched its good name.

Guinness, a former naval officer, who from the moment of meeting Oldfield has appointed himself to the upper echelons of the secret service, can only shake his head sagely and agree. Over the Dover sole, Oldfield takes his thesis a step further: “It’s young David and his like,” he declares across the table to Guinness while ignoring me sitting beside him, “that make it that much harder for the service to recruit decent officers and sources. They read his books and they’re put off. It’s only natural.” To which Guinness lowers his eyelids and shakes his head in a deploring sort of way, while I pay the bill.

“You should join the Athenaeum, David,” Oldfield says kindly, implying that the Athenaeum will somehow make a better person of me. “I’ll sponsor you myself. There. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” And to Guinness, as the three of us stand on the threshold of the restaurant: “A pleasure indeed, Alec. An honour, I must say. We shall be in touch very shortly, I’m sure.”

“We shall indeed,” Guinness replies devoutly, as the two old spies shake hands.

Unable apparently to get enough of our departing guest, Guinness gazes fondly after him as he pounds off down the pavement: a small, vigorous gentleman of purpose, striding along with his umbrella thrust ahead of him as he disappears into the crowd. “How about another cognac for the road?” Guinness suggests, and we have hardly resumed our places before the interrogation begins: “Those very vulgar cufflinks. Do all our spies wear them?” No, Alec, I think Maurice just likes vulgar cufflinks.

“And those loud orange suede boots with crepe soles. Are they for stealth?” I think they’re just for comfort actually, Alec. Crepe squeaks. “Then tell me this.” He has grabbed an empty tumbler. Tipping it to an angle, he flicks at it with his thick fingertip. “I’ve seen people do this before” – making a show of peering meditatively into the tumbler while he continues to flick it – “and I’ve seen people do this” – now rotating the finger round the rim in the same contemplative vein.

“But I’ve never seen people do this before” – inserting his finger into the tumbler and passing it round the inside. “Do you think he’s looking for dregs of poison?”

Is he being serious? The child in Guinness has never been more serious in its life. Well, I suppose if it was dregs he was looking for, he’d have drunk the poison by then, I suggest. But he prefers to ignore me.

It is a matter of entertainment history that Oldfield’s suede boots, crepe-soled or other, and his rolled umbrella thrust forward to feel out the path ahead, became essential properties for Guinness’s portrayal of George Smiley, old spy in a hurry. I haven’t checked on the cufflinks recently, but I have a memory that our director thought them a little overdone and persuaded Guinness to trade them in for something less flashy.

The other legacy of our lunch was less enjoyable, if artistically more creative. Oldfield’s distaste for my work – and, I suspect, for myself – struck deep root in Guinness’s thespian soul, and he was not above reminding me of it when he felt the need to rack up George Smiley’s sense of personal guilt; or, as he liked to imply, mine.

Lunch with Rupert Murdoch

One morning in the autumn of 1991, I opened my Times newspaper to be greeted by my own face glowering up at me. From my sour expression, I could tell at once that the text around it wasn’t going to be friendly. A struggling Warsaw theatre, I read, was celebrating its post-communist freedom by putting on a stage version of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. But the rapacious le Carré [see photograph] wanted a whacking £150 per performance: “The price of freedom, we suppose.”

I took another look at the photograph and saw exactly the sort of fellow who does indeed go round preying on struggling Polish theatres. Grasping. Unsavoury appetites. Just look at those eyebrows. I had by now ceased to enjoy my breakfast. Keep calm and call your agent. I fail on the first count, succeed on the second. My literary agent’s name is Rainer. In what the novelists call a quavering voice, I read the article aloud to him. Has he, I suggest delicately – might he possibly, just this once, is it at all conceivable? – on this occasion been a tad too zealous on my behalf? Rainer is emphatic. Quite the reverse. Since the Poles are still in the recovery ward after the collapse of communism, he has been a total pussycat. We are not charging the theatre £150 per performance, he assures me, but a measly £26, the minimum standard rate. In addition to which, we’ve thrown in the rights for free. In short, a sweetheart deal, David, a deliberate helping hand to a Polish theatre in time of need. Great, I say, bewildered and inwardly seething.

Keep calm and fax the editor of the Times. His response is lofty. Not to put too fine an edge on it, it is infuriating. He sees no great harm in the piece, he says. He suggests that a man in my fortunate position should take the rough with the smooth. This is not advice I am prepared to accept. But who to turn to?

Why, of course: the man who owns the newspaper, Rupert Murdoch, my old buddy!

Well, not exactly buddy. I had met Murdoch socially on a couple of occasions, though I doubted whether he remembered them. I have three conditions, I say: number one, a generous apology prominently printed in the Times; number two, a handsome donation to the struggling Polish theatre. And number three, lunch. Next morning his reply was lying on the floor beneath my fax machine: “Your terms accepted. Rupert.”

The Savoy Grill in those days had a kind of upper level for moguls: red-plush, horseshoe-shaped affairs where in more colourful days gentlemen of money might have entertained their ladies. I breathe the name Murdoch to the maître d’hôtel and am shown to one of the privés. I am early. Murdoch is bang on time. He is smaller than I remember him, but more pugnacious, and has acquired that hasty waddle and little buck of the pelvis with which great men of affairs advance on one another, hand outstretched, for the cameras. The slant of the head in relation to the body is more pronounced than I remember, and when he wrinkles up his eyes to give me his sunny smile, I have the odd feeling he’s taking aim at me. We sit down, we face each other. I notice – how can I not? – the unsettling collection of rings on his left hand. We order our food and exchange a couple of banalities. Rupert says he’s sorry about that stuff they wrote about me. Brits, he says, are great penmen, but they don’t always get things right. I say, not at all, and thanks for your sporting response. But enough of small talk. He is staring straight at me and the sunny smile has vanished.

“Who killed Bob Maxwell?” he demands.

Robert Maxwell, for those lucky enough not to remember him, was a Czech-born media baron, British parliamentarian and the alleged spy of several nations, including Israel, the Soviet Union and Britain. As a young Czech freedom fighter, he had taken part in the Normandy landings and later earned himself a British army commission and a gallantry medal. After the war, he worked for the Foreign Office in Berlin. He was also a flamboyant liar and rogue of gargantuan proportions and appetites who plundered the pension fund of his own companies to the tune of £440m, owed around £4bn that he had no way of repaying and in November 1991 was found dead in the seas off Tenerife, having apparently fallen from the deck of a lavish private yacht named after his daughter. Conspiracy theories abounded. To some, it was a clear case of suicide by a man ensnared by his own crimes; to others, murder by one of the several intelligence agencies he had supposedly worked for. But which one? Why Murdoch should imagine I know the answer to this question is beyond me, but I do my best to give satisfaction. Well, Rupert, if we’re really saying it’s not suicide, then probably, for my money, it was the Israelis, I suggest.

“Why?”

I’ve read the rumours that are flying around, as we all have. I regurgitate them: Maxwell, the long-term agent of Israeli intelligence, blackmailing his former paymasters; Maxwell, who had traded with the Shining Path in Peru, offering Israeli weapons in exchange for strategic cobalt; Maxwell, threatening to go public unless the Israelis paid up. But Rupert Murdoch is already on his feet, shaking my hand and saying it was great to meet me again. And maybe he’s as embarrassed as I am, or just bored, because already he’s powering his way out of the room, and great men don’t sign bills, they leave them to their people. Estimated duration of lunch: 25 minutes.

A meeting with Margaret Thatcher

The prime minister’s office wished to recommend me for a medal, and I had declined. I had not voted for her, but that fact had nothing to do with my decision. I felt, as I feel today, that I was not cut out for our honours system, that it represents much of what I most dislike about our country. In my letter of reply, I took care to assure the prime minister’s office that my churlishness did not spring from any personal or political animosity, offered my thanks and compliments to the prime minister, and assumed I would hear no more.

I was wrong. In a second letter, her office struck a more intimate note. Lest I was regretting a decision taken in heat, the writer wished me to know that the door to an honour was still open. I replied, equally courteously I hope, that as far as I was concerned the door was firmly shut, and would remain so in any similar contingency. Again, my thanks. Again, my compliments to the prime minister. And again I assumed the matter was closed, until a third letter arrived, inviting me to lunch. There were six tables set in the dining room of 10 Downing Street that day, but I only remember ours, which had Mrs Thatcher at its head and the Dutch prime minister Ruud Lubbers on her right, and myself in a tight new grey suit on her left. The year must have been 1982. I was just back from the Middle East, Lubbers had just been appointed. Our other three guests remain a pink blob to me. I assumed, for reasons that today escape me, that they were industrialists from the north. Neither do I remember any opening exchanges between the six of us, but perhaps they had happened over cocktails before we sat down. But I do remember Mrs Thatcher turning to the Dutch prime minister and acquainting him with my distinction. “Now, Mr Lubbers,” she announced in a tone to prepare him for a nice surprise, “this is Mr Cornwell, but you will know him better as the writer John le Carré.”

Leaning forward, Mr Lubbers took a close look at me. He had a youthful face, almost a playful one. He smiled, I smiled: really friendly smiles. “No,” he said. And sat back in his chair, still smiling. But Mrs Thatcher, it is well known, did not lightly take no for an answer.

“Oh, come, Mr Lubbers. You’ve heard of John le Carré. He wrote The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and…” – fumbling slightly – “… other wonderful books.”

Lubbers, nothing if not a politician, reconsidered his position. Again he leaned forward and took another, longer look at me, as amiable as the first, but more considered, more statesmanlike.

“No,” he repeated.

Now it was Mrs Thatcher’s turn to take a long look at me, and I underwent something of what her all-male cabinet must have experienced when they, too, incurred her displeasure. “Well, Mr Cornwell,” she said, as to an errant schoolboy who had been brought to account, “since you’re here” – implying that I had somehow talked my way in – “have you anything you wish to say to me?”

Belatedly, it occurred to me that I had indeed something to say to her, if badly. Having recently returned from South Lebanon, I felt obliged to plead the cause of stateless Palestinians. Lubbers listened. The gentlemen from the industrial north listened. But Mrs Thatcher listened more attentively than all of them, and with no sign of the impatience of which she was frequently accused. Even when I had stumbled to the end of my aria, she went on listening before delivering herself of her response. “Don’t give me sob stories,” she ordered me with sudden vehemence, striking the key words for emphasis. “Every day people appeal to my emotions. You can’t govern that way. It simply isn’t fair.”

Whereupon, appealing to my emotions, she reminded me that it was the Palestinians who had trained the IRA bombers who had murdered her friend Airey Neave, the British war hero and politician, and her close adviser. After that, I don’t believe we spoke to each other much. Occasionally I do ask myself whether Mrs Thatcher nevertheless had an ulterior motive in inviting me. Was she, for instance, sizing me up for one of her quangos – those strange quasi-official public bodies that have authority but no power, or is it the other way round? But I found it hard to imagine what possible use she could have for me – unless, of course, she wanted guidance from the horse’s mouth on how to sort out her squabbling spies.

• This is an edited extract from The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life, by John le Carré, published next week by Viking at £20. Order a copy for £15 from the Guardian bookshop.

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#JUST FOR BOOKS #John le Carré #The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life

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suranne-doesstuff · 3 years

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This is a walk I do quite regularly. And these were taken on Tuesday, all sunny. It was roasting, we're not used to it.

Today's weather was cloudy and a bit cold, a quick change.

Me n my family wild swim here a lot and has become popular with tourists and a couple locals.

(Time for me to rant, sorry)

If you ever visit Scotland, especially the Highlands, PLEASE respect the land and put rubbish in bins. Pour your campavan/caravan etc waste where it's supposed to go!

I went swimming & picnic on Thursday here and found out there was blue-green Algae in the water which could have been from someone's waste. This Algae is not good, it's harmful to humans and your pets.

I didn't think much of it (I didn't picture it, sorry) at first but then I went home to go swimming again with my aunt and she showed me other pictures of the same type of Algae.

Please, please, please be respectful and look after the land. My aunt & I go camping and walking a lot and see a lot of rubbish and waste around, it's not great and is disgusting.

If you see a sign that says 'no parking' or 'private land' or see an "empty" space etc, then do not park or stay overnight! There's been many cases of people ripping/tearing down signs and then ignoring the rules. Stop!

Another thing. I, personally do not support the NC500! It promotes roads as if they're made for tons of traffic and heavy weights (especially single track roads), they're not. They're old roads, which in the past were main roads for the locals before better roads & bridges were built. We see so many cars and vehicles on them as if they're racing, as if the roads are race tracks.

I see people going on the NC500 go up hills in high heels, trainers, jeans, big brands, which then causes accidents. Mountain Rescue gets called out to save them, which is great that we have it, but those who are trained for it, aren't played, they're volunteers and aren't funded a lot. There's been so much accidents, which caused to cost a lot of money, just for idiots trying and failing going up dangerous mountains, not knowing what the hell they're doing. So, please, don't try it, unless you know what you're doing.

And for camping, PLEASE, for the love of god, stop buying cheap, pop-up tents from Tescos and leaving them. As well as, stop leaving your rubbish, waste etc where you "wild camped", if you can take it there with you, then you can take it back out.

Stop lighting fires, when you defiantly do not need them at all. And if you do have one, learn to do them properly. Burning fire on ground, scorches it and badly damages it. It takes years to grow back, that's if it does. If you take out one of those metal giant pit things, then don't leave it there. If there's a rocky bit/beach then do it on there. Having fires cause wild fires, in Scotland, we get bad winds, especially in winter, which then dries the land. This makes winter time a bad time to also have fires, especially since it doesn't snow badly, mostly anyway.

The last few years, with the summer's we've been getting, droughts have occurred, so summer is bad to have fires. But, in conclusion, anytime of the year, it's bad to light fires while camping in Scotland, but that could be my bias.

Bothys. I love Bothying, although, I've not been in many, just a few. I love it. They are buildings that are usually restored or just built from scrap. They're shelter for those who need it before or after climbing and walking somewhere, even after cycling. Anyway, most bothys are owned or looked after by the Mountain Bothy Association, they fix, make, help look after these bothys and make sure they're usable etc. Please, when staying in these, don't have a big group of people. And respect them. Don't expect electricity, heating, running water, or anything a hotel or your home would have. They're not holiday homes, you don't pay to stay in them, they're mainly shelter from bad weather. Most have plat forms, built in wooden bunks or if you're lucky, like my favourite bothy, it may have old bed frames, the metal ones. They usually have tables and chairs, and if you're lucky, a fire place.

Again, look after them, don't destroy them or ruin them. Some have had to close and be locked during lockdown because people were going to them and destroying & taking them apart. My aunt has stayed in some were people have taken blow up mattresses and tents, and other things in them, very unnecessary. They're not made to be driven up to, you walk to them and spend a day or more in the hills and walking or cycle etc. Look after them. If you wonder where the toilet is, you pee outside, AWAY from any water source. Same with your poo, you go far away (obviously not too far) from the bothy, and any water source and take the shovel that's usually provided in the bothy and dig a hole and poo in it and the cover it up with the dirt you dug. Don't leave tissue or wipes around the ground, not necessary, take poo bags and then carry it with you. Or burn wipes on the fire, if there is a fire place. Take small bags for rubbish and carry it out if you can't burn it etc.

That's my rant over. Lool.

#Scotland #Highlands #Sutherland #Walking #Wild swimming #Outdoors #look after land #be safe #take care #rant #sorry #i apologise #Outlander #Scottish #Hi

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anarchist-soupkitchen · 3 years

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ooop its a really long essay

A brief list of why the Tories is pretty rubbish

Before we start, I have a few things to say. As this is intended for UK audiences it might be a little difficult for people outside of the UK to understand the wording of certain topics, I will include somethings that need more explanation up here but if I do not include it here, please feel free to ask down in the comments.

Tory: someone who is a part of the conservative right

Anglicanism: the English church’s version of Christianity

This essay is a PERSUASIVE ESSAY this means its BIASED I hope you could tell from the title. This essay is from the view of someone who is white I am not trying to speak over people of colour on issue like race and I encourage you to look at non-white creators within the UK to get views on this matter.

I am pretty armature when it comes to my writing so do not expect something ground-breaking. And with that out of the way, let us begin.

1. The tory party we know today was founded in 1834, you would think that would be plenty of time for its members to grow and shape the party into the best organization it can be. But with the tory party still stuck on the same ideas that Anglicanism is the only true religion, and that queer people should not have rights you would think that the party is straight out of the early 20th century, or still stuck on the same ideas the party was founded upon. It does not matter what side you are on and how your choice to view the tory party, people can agree on the prominent figures inside the tory party from old to recent. An example of a prominent tory of old was Winston Churchill a well know racist who also, coincidentally got us through WW2 when he was appointed by Chamberlin. He fostered such views that white people should govern over the “primitive” black and indigenous people of Africa and that Indian people “bred like rabbits”. To anyone who knows their UK history, 1983 was a very eventually year for politics and the UK as a whole. You now have to wear seatbelts in the front seats of cars, the dismembered victims of serial killer Dennis Nielsen are found in his London flat, unemployment was on a record heigh since the 1930’s and a general election found that Margaret Thacher was to be the next prime minister after a landslide win in the polls. Over the course of her 11-year reign of terror she periodised free-market capitalism and privatised public sectors including transport, railways and mines. Then because she did not like the Scottish government, she through a hissy fit and closed all mines in Scotland. Just like that she fucked up the economy, where in the big mining areas of the past are still experiencing the aftershocks today. I remember my granny telling me how she made up food packages for the miners around town and how it was so devastating to the town’s economy. Everyone was unemployed and starving, even my grandad. These examples really show that the Tories will support people who are the worst in British society if they have the parties’ interests at heart. You would think the tory party cannot get any worse but with modern polices such as pledging to get 50,000 nurses for the NHS while only giving them a 1% pay rise, which is only £7.78 for a low band nurse, by 2023. Or being “tough on crime” even though 96.4 crime were recorded by every 1000 people in 2019. You can see how tough they are about carrying out their polices. Let me tell you my favourite of the lot, Boris Johnston, our current PM, wants to limit immigration by 100,000 people. They want to only let in “the brightest and the best,” what a load of shite. Our immigrants are the backbone of our society doing everything people like the Tories would not even dream of doing. Imagen seeing Boris working in a McDonalds or in your local call centre. That fucker probably has not worked a day in his life. According to the migration observatory, migrants make up 50% of the low pay workforce. Either way you look at it, its abysmal. The government should do more for these people that letting them rot in a McDonalds or in a low paying job. If you have taken time to be a model citizen, train and get your qualifications, possibly learn a new langue to mover over to a shitty wet rock I do not see any problem with the government providing necessities to get you started in your new life. We have got the money.

2. Can I ask you, what side do you think Boris Johnson is on? I will let you think for a moment. The Working class makes up more than half of our population according to the BBC’s class calculator. They say that a government is reflective of the people’s views and I think that is bullshit. Out of the working-class eligible to vote, who do vote, only three in ten vote conservatives. Do you want to know why people in the working class do not vote tory? Because under tory leadership since 2010, 6000,000 more children and their families were forced into poverty. The need for foodbanks skyrocketed 12.3% in the last five years and that is no even accounting for the pandemic. It is clear by now; I have given you enough time to think. “we know whose side Boris Johnson is on- the billionaires, the bankers and the big business.”- labour shadow chancellor, John McDonell. We know the conservatives are very busy committing acts of voter suppression and giving money to their friends instead of caring about you. They are buzzy introducing laws that make it mandatory to have voter ID in order to vote. If you do not make it free people will stop coming. The electoral commissions think 3.5 million voters just will not come back. this is all a part of, “takle[ing] every aspect of electoral fraud”- tory manifesto. It is well known that many rich people have been investing in the party for quite a while. Here is just a few: Anthony Bamford head of machinery in JCB, he gave £12.1 million since 2005. Charles Cayzer owns a shipping tycoon, he gave £480,00. Did you also know, Boris is known to be very generous when it comes to giving back. You’ve probably herd in the news about the conservatives handing out £3mil in contracts to tory owned covid PPE companies over the course of the pandemic. Some of that went to a MP, Nadim Zahawi who is a shareholder in SThree. SThree was given £1mil in contracts over the course of the pandemic. With all the evidence I have given above you’d think the government its rolling in it, I suspect they are but I doesn’t look like it from the outside. They have cut funding to courses drastically, as well as benefit schemes. Like cutting access for eighteen- to twenty-year-olds to the housing benefits. Yet with all the money they been cutting away from services and councils who desperately need it they still have enough money to cough up a commission for a royal yacht named after the duke of Edinburgh, costing over £200 million. Seems sweet does it, name a yacht after the ghoul of Edinburgh, right? You probably know the just of it now, your wrong. Not only is the yacht being paid for by taxpayers, but they are also naming it in honour after a racist. Or how the BBC would phrase his words as “memorable one-liners”. Here is a selection I find quite fitting: “The Philippines must be half empty if you’re all here running the NHS”- while meeting with a Filipino nurse. “If you stay here much longer, you’ll be all slitty-eyed”- he said to a group of British students while on a royal visit to China. My favourite must be “It looks like it was put in by an Indian.”- referring to and old-fashioned fuse box in Edinburgh. He is supposed to be the duke of the bloody place! I really like how one article what I read put it “[Prince Philip] screams out loud what other racists like him have learned how to conceal and camouflage in what they think and project as civilised demeanour.”- Hamid Dabashi.

3. What I find absolutely astounding, is the Tories inability to show compassion to the people who have nothing. If you did not know the vagrancy act among other things crimeless the homeless and rough sleepers, which is by far a very bad mixture with the recent homelessness statistics, homelessness has risen 28% since labour was last in office and if the Tories continue down the path they are now, it is only going to keep rising. What you would find is most shocking is that there’s solutions for the homeless crisis right in front of us, what the Tories must to not be able to see. Layla Moran of the liberal democrats thinks they “must take a more compassionate and holistic approach, starting by scrapping the vagrancy act”. I think that would be a step forward and away from the old ways of prosecuting people for not being as fortunate as the rest of us, but there is something even more simple than that. Repossessing the 200,000 buildings that have been vacant in the UK for more than six months. Not only would that put a sizeable dent in the houses we need, but it also saves space. The UK is small collection of islands and I do not think the Tories can see that. We do not have the land available to just start building everywhere while leaving all those homes empty and unfilled. Its not a way to solve the housing crisis and its certainly not a way to save the money we supposedly need. Even the homes the Tories are building are left dormant because they are too expensive for the area, they are located in. With the way things are going the Tories will have to build more houses than they ever built before, because by 2041 homelessness is expected to doble. That is 400,000 more households if things do not change -a study by heriot-wat university. The evidence suggests that whatever the Tories are doing to end homelessness it is not working. Everything is not as bleak as I just told you though, the conservative has ended homelessness before. In the hight of the pandemic the conservatives got 90% of all rough sleepers off the streets and put them in hotels or hostels. This helped people apply for benefits, find jobs and get some more permanent assistance. People was helped during the pandemic, but when the funding ran out last July, homeless and the rough sleepers in the hotels and hostels where back out in the streets again. Alone and forgotten by the government that promised to end the very crisis they are apart of years ago. Theis shows that the Tories have the money to help the unfortune but they would rather sit on their arses chatting about what colour they should paint the walls of their house. More recently the Torie introduced a law what will fine people for sleeping in doorways. It really shows what the Tories care about, getting linings for their pockets. The Tories have the money to stop homelessness and when it was a danger to them, they stopped the issue what has been so recuing in our politics for decades. They helped the people who so desperately needed it only to chuck them back into the cold when covid-19 was no longer a danger to them.

4. The conservatives fail to keep minorities safe in the society that they created. It is not surprise that the Tories are the most incompetent as ever. A study by BBC radio 5 found that hate crimes have doubled since 2013. An optimist would assume that is great, that there must mean that people have been reporting it more, right? Partly so. Although we have seen a rise in reports of hate crimes, the rate of prosecution has dropped down from 20% to just 8%. And that is just the tip of the iceberg, in a survey of faith-based organizations; the home office found that seven in ten of the employees surveyed has never reported a hate crime to the police where one happened. For a country where we are supposed to be the most tolerable it is no surprise that a big portion of the hate crimes committed are ones where the religion the victim followed played a big part. Our population, like many others, is influenced by our politicians. After Boris described Muslim women in burkas as “letterboxes” in an interview; citizen UK found that there where a surge in hate crime directed to Muslim women where the word “letterbox” was used. Again, continuing with the theme of hate crime against religions, Muslims made up half of the statistics in 2018 – 2019. The biggest spike we have seen in the last few years has been to Jewish people, where hate crimes against them have more since doubled. It is not a surprise since people seem to relate being a ‘good’ Jew to being a Zionist. Other minorities like trans youth under sixteen in England and whales now must go through everything that goes with puberty on top of not wanting to have the body you cuntly have all because TERF’s and conservatives do not think puberty blockers should be available to them. At this point I genuinely think they want trans kids dead, how could you not see that the benefits of puberty blockers far out way the potential consequences. If puberty blockers really where the target they would have taken them of the shelfs completely, but they did not do that did they? They just restricted the rights of an already marginalised group more. Its not just trans kids but the fight for a third gender to finally get recognised is still waging on despite it being a battle since 2018. The government petition has been signed 136,000 times demanding non-binary finally be recognised as a valid gender in the eyes of the law. I hope I can get recognised as well as everyone else. It may not seem a big deal to some of you reading this but it is to thousands. Especially the people who want to go on hormones and medically transition. Because right now I and many other people are restricted and not allowed to get that service. If you are in the UK and you are of age, I urge you to signs the government petition. In other news the conservatives are just now getting to outlawing conversion therapy three years after they announced they would do so. It just shows how the party is not on target. On the topic of not on target let us talk about the increasing number of racial minorities becoming homeless because of lack of funding to their communities. Since the conservatives got into power in the 2010 racial minorities now make up 40% of all homeless despite being only 15% of the current population. It really shows how much they care about anyone who is not white. Yet people like my gran will continue to say they are doing enough for these underfunded communities.

the tory party really has nothing going for them, they are certainly not for the working class, they cannot solve homelessness and they do not give two fucks about minorities. To think anyone would vote form them is just amazing. Its fucking stupid to believe that they are anything but a bunch of rich shites dawdling around and thinking up ways to get more money into their pockets. To end this really all over the place essay, if you vote tory you are a massive twat.

Sources in comments:

#essay #uk #uk politics #uk politics essay #persuasive essay #tory government #tory #left wing politics #conservatism #conservtive #if any reads this well done #im sorry #its long #heehee hastags go burrr

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