are falling off the corpse.
You might have guessed, from my somewhat precipitate departure from public blogging a few months ago, that I had other duties that required my attention. As has been suggested elsewhere, there were communications coming from an undisclosed location, but they were of a private nature.
As of today, I'd like to say thank you to all the people who sent me nice notes, especially about my mother's death and especially those who said Mass, had Masses said and who prayed for the repose of her soul. I'd like to say an especial thank you to those who said nice things about The Devout Life and how they'd miss me an' all.
I would also like to thank the posters of the vitriolic personal insults and attacks; nice to know I'm not wasting my time.
As of today, I am happy to announce my return to public blogging. As you see, there are a few changes. With the publication of The Long-Awaited Document from Over the Mountains, I feel that there is little more that I have to say about
All That.
But the other great change that has happened lately is of a more personal nature. The countdown continues for my departure from the land of my birth, to return to the land of my origins. I shall be touching down on the ancient tarmac soon and by this time next week, will be commencing life as a British political blogger. Or perhaps, just a blogger in and about Britain.
I hope to do justice to the complexities and wonders of that green n' pleasant land, now so beset with terrors.
Why Britain, some have asked.
I've had quite a few notes sent in to point out the many reasons why everything is going very badly over there.
Yes, I know. Yep, know about that too. Yep, mmmm hmmm, covered that one. No, no, haven't missed it. Got it, yep. Uh huh, that too.
Mostly people have asked, "Why?"
As I said in a recent invitation to my Toronto friends to take me out tomorrow night and buy me a last pint:
because my mum died and it's time to end the exile.
because I want to go see the people I'm related to...
because I've wanted to go back since I was a child...
because there's just more interesting stuff to do there...
because Canada has become such a pointless self-parodying Trudeaupian wasteland of idiocy that there just seems no reason whatever to continue living in it and no eartly reason to be bothered trying to save it...
because there's more politics worth fussing over, more newspapers worth reading, more castles worth visiting, more beer worth drinking, more tweed...
and, after ten thousand years of my ancestors living there, building a culture, a history, a way of life, a way of thought, a manner of governance, a philosophy of law...there's just more stuff there than here that's worth fighting to the death for...
All the things that make Canada stupid and pointless are going double over there. But it has been pointed out to me that in the case of Canada, there isn't anything else. It's just a stupid and pointless ideology that happens to have attached itself, like a giant tundra mosquito, to a particular bit of geography. Canada doesn't really exist any more. In the case of Britain, the stupid pointless ideology is there, probably worse than here, but there is also a real country.
Why England is rotting?England leads Europe in illiteracy, obesity, divorce, drug use, crime and STDs. Bloody hellMARTIN NEWLAND | June 11, 2007 |
There used to be a time when taking on the Royal Navy was a bad idea. The force that policed the high seas through two world wars and protected the largest empire ever seen was for years the emblem of British national pride and pugnacity. Which is why it was particularly humiliating for many Britons to witness the spectacle of the navy's finest peddling stories about their capture a couple of months ago by the Iranian Republican Guard to the newspapers. The British had already watched televised "confessions" by servicemen, in which they criticized national foreign policy and admitted to crimes and trespasses they had not committed.
But it was the paid interviews given once safely home that left the nation wondering what has happened to traditional British reserve and the notion of the stiff upper lip. Leading Seaman Faye Turney told the nation of the sheer hell of being reduced to counting carpet tiles in solitary confinement while waiting to learn of her fate (Iranian prisons, one is led to believe, are carpeted). And the diminutive Operator Mechanic Arthur Batchelor complained to the media that the Republican Guard had taken away his iPod and called him Mr. Bean.
It was not long before commentators drew parallels between the behaviour of our fighting personnel and the collapse of traditional British values. The venerable right of centre newsmagazine The Spectator, in its editorial, said the episode "demonstrated just how deeply British society has been corrupted by the twin cults of celebrity and victimhood." These sentiments were echoed by the social commentator Theodore Dalrymple, who said the affair showed Britain "to be a country of very slight account, with a population increasingly unable to distinguish the trivial from the important and the virtual from the real, led by a man of the most frivolous earnestness who for many years has been given to gushes of cheap moral enthusiasm."
