It's been an exciting time to be in London. Cartoon villain Hooky is in jail. A cartoon jailbird on parole is dressed to kill and may be bounced straight back to Clink. The Association of Muslim Cartoon Critics convenes outside the Danish embassy. The police look the other way. No arrests made. It's a Cartoon World. But are they funny?
I went to my ‘ethnic minority’ Greek Cypriot barber (who born in the UK, talks like a Cockney and thinks of himself as Greek only when The Sun declares that the Greeks are the best lovers in the world or when the Greek football team wins the European Nations Cup). In the waiting line we all sit in silence reading whatever is at hand (books on the SAS and the ancient world, GQ magazine, The Sun newspaper).
In the chair we are interviewed by the barber. The man in the hot seat is white, middle class, well spoken. The talk is of riots.
So far there have been no riots in London like those that have been reported in the UK media in France and not reported in the UK media in Denmark. I heard callers say on Vanessa Feltz’s phone-in that it couldn’t happen here, that we are ‘too multi-cultural’. Maybe we are too integrated in London (which is what the caller meant to say, perhaps) for one race to turn against another or for one religion to take up arms against the law.
The man in the hot seat thinks it’s inevitable though. He says we are treating the immigrants as second-class citizens although he provided no evidence. The barber says there are too many immigrants here and he says that the problem is not that they are immigrants (his parents were immigrants after all) but that these immigrants (muslim) do not want even to integrate let alone to assimilate. He says there are a million muslims in the UK. ‘A million,’ he said, cranking up the incredulity, ‘A million!’
Then I was in the chair. Andrew told me about Hannibal crossing the Alps because we do history rather than current affairs.
I wasn’t really focussed on the Hannibal story. I was thinking about the man before me. His assumption was that it was inevitable, yet he expressed no indignation at that. He seemed to me to be suggesting that we ‘have it coming’, as the barber might say. And I can’t help thinking that this clearly educated man had accepted this threat, believed it was justified and that what we should be doing is bending over even further forwards to accommodate the threat and not repel it.
I sent a link to two friends I have known for 30 years by way of wishing them a Happy New Year. It was Mark Steyn’s thousand month stare into the future of the West. I got no reply from my friends on the essay and it made me wonder whether I have become serious with age. I thought about all the places I have known and imagined them with new names, Arabic names, alien names grafted onto the mountains and streets where I grew up. I imagined the village empty of people who look like me, who dressed like me and who spoke like me. I thought about the church yard headstones and the inscriptions to the dead in the church and reflected on how this energy, this drama and this history, already forgotten by its own people, will now be erased altogether by another culture. Maybe.
Well, more than some. Nearly 4% of the city is engaged in snorting Charles according to the calculations of scientists who took samples from the river.
Depends how much you allow for each user. Embarrasingly, friends of ours are regular users. They have proper jobs, careers even (one is a partner in a law firm). We declined an invitation recently to a house party where we knew there would be a big quicksniff element. It's just so self-consciously transgressive. I much preferred it when it was the preserve of the rich and the sleazy. Now, it's so suburban.
Cocaine is at the stage of public acceptance that Cannabis was at in about 1983. Before then smoking dope was for students, hippies and Jamaicans. At some point the students got jobs and began their inevitable climb into positions of power. And with that the drug has become accepted. If you are a low user and not a supplier you have more chance of being busted for not buying a TV licence.
And so it will be with cocaine. In twenty years everyone will have taken cocaine. It is an unstoppable force. There have been the usual attempts (education, siezures) to stop it. To no avail. I went to a place in Shoreditch a few years ago where they had a bouncer in the wc. His role in life was to stop people getting a fix in the cubicle. In twenty years that will seem as quaint as a teacher expecting you not to smoke outside the school.
It's now cheaper than it has ever been. Cocaine is everywhere. Drug deals are done at the top of my suburban street. Every toilet cistern in the night-time economy is used as a cocaine table. Almost every banknote in use in London has traces of cocaine on it.
I note with interest that the bankers are developing new products to help the colonists.
The caliphate won't be extended simply with violence but also with the unwitting help of the infidels themselves, devising products to make life easier for the settlers. Lloyds TSB will no doubt derive some financial advantage out of exploiting this niche market which is always a good thing. They will also benefit with some touchy-feely PR about diversity. But there is another side to this development and that is that we are now creating an economy that will be capable or replacing infidel capitalism. Should we need to. Should we have to.
I know it was over some time ago. But it didn't feel like it. But today in London the sun is shining and the air is cold. It's close to zero and the leaves are autumnal. It's time for winter pursuits, including sitting at a computer and making notes from near the Underground. So, where were we?
I would like to say I am amazed or shocked or even surprised. But I am not. Once again the State has subsidised the living costs of people who would destroy it. Maybe, just maybe, if people like this were not paid to sit around on their arses all day then they wouldn't have so much time to build up a festering hatred of the hand that feeds them. State benefits are a problem in the UK and this has to be the most extreme example of just how much of a problem.
The diligent Melanie Phillips picks up on a story that in ordinary times would have been on the front page. The Times' storyof how men plotted to fly planes into British and Australian targets on the 11th September 2001 made page 12.
Melanie is right to highlight that these conspiracies were before Iraq and before Afghanistan. I am sure her enemies will soon point out though that she is hiding from her readers some of the facts: as she well knows, the intended attacks were preceded by the first Gulf War, the creation of the state of Israel and the collapse of the Caliphate.
Mr Bunglawala from the Muslim Council of Great Britain said in the current atmosphere Muslims were very afraid and other people were looking at them in a very suspicious manner. I imagine they are, especially if they are wearing souped-up rucksacks. Where will this end? Not only do we have to make them our special friendsaccording to Trevor Phillips, now we also have to look at them correctly.
