Category: Blog

A film script has just crossed my desk, and I do think it has great potential. The financing may be hard to get, and critical support is far from assured, but that’s not taking anything away from the sparkling exuberance of the script as such. But judge for yourself.

OPEN ON ROOM SOMEWHERE IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE. RENT GIRLS AND BOYS ARE SITTING AROUND OVAL TABLE DISCUSSING THEIR STOCK-IN-TRADE. THROUGHOUT SUBSEQUENT EXCHANGES CAMERA PANS ROOM, CUTTING ON CLOSE-UP OF SPEAKER, THEN REVERSING TO TESSA FOR REACTION SHOTS

TESSA: In an ideal world, I’d like a hard one. But I’ll take a soft one if I have to. Better than none.

BORIS: A soft one is like polishing a turd…

TESSA (DISMISSIVELY): Oh shut up, Boris. You’re the only one here who goes in for coprophilia.

MICHAEL: I don’t know how to take this…

TESSA: The way you always do, Michael. Bend over and take it like a man.

PENNY (WAKING UP): I’ll take a hard one any day. A soft one is useless, worse than none.

TESSA (SARCASTICALLY): Oh good morning, Penny. Glad you could join us. We’re talking about leaving the Brussels home and starting our own. You know, the Common European Home, COM for short? What did you think we were talking about?

PENNY (DISAPPOINTED): Oh that. And I thought…

ANDREA: No one here gives a turd what you thought, Penny. Anyway, all you ever think about is flashing your thunder thighs.

BORIS: And speaking of turds…

TESSA: Oh shut up, Boris. No one here is speaking of turds. We’re talking about keeping our johns well happy after we go freelance. Without getting the Brussels cougar daddy really livid.

ANDREA: I’m with you, Tessa. The soft one will do me. And if you wanted a hard one, that would do me too. COM to think of it, the hard one would do me even better. (GUFFAWS)

MICHAEL: I think I’m speaking for all the rent boys and girls here when I say that we’re all unreservedly, unequivocally and uncompromisingly committed to the hard one. But we are all –  just as unreservedly, unequivocally and uncompromisingly – committed to Tessa, who prefers the soft one. Sorted.

PENNY: The hard one worked for me, last time I did my TA training…

DAVID: What’s that, TA, Penny? Tits and…

PENNY: Not funny, Dave. That’s Territorial Army, I’ll have you know. I’m an officer there…

BORIS: When it comes to TA, you’re a bloody general, Penny.

TESSA: Penny, either listen or go parade your TA somewhere else.

PENNY (IRONICALLY): Yessir!

TESSA: Anyway, I did Brussels the other day and I know how we can keep them sweet.

DAVID (SCOWLING): I get it. By poaching their johns.

BORIS: And by polishing a turd.

TESSA (IRATE): Oh, shut your gobs, lads, for crying out loud. They won’t mind it all that much if we poach some of their johns, long as they get their cut. You do us right, we’ll do you right, they told me at the home.

LIAM: Why do we need to leave the home then? If we still kick our hard-earned back their way?

TESSA: So they don’t send the boys in. Get it? Or shall I draw you a picture?

DAVID: I don’t get this. Are we leaving COM or what? I thought we were starting our own home, smaller and leaner.

TESSA: You thought right, Dave. A new home run by the old home’s rules. What’s there not to like?

BORIS:  With you as the bloody madam, no doubt. (STABS FINGER INTO MICHAEL’S CHEST) You said I’d get the madam’s job, you turd.

MICHAEL: I did, unreservedly, unequivocally and uncompromisingly. But seeing that Tessa here is doing such a sterling job…

LIAM: Not a euro one?

BORIS: No one’s laughing, Liam, you turd.

TESSA: Boris, one more ‘turd’ from you, and you’re back to walking Fleet Street. You follow?

BORIS: Yes, madam.

TESSA: So we’re all in agreement then? We’ll hold on to the soft one and wave it at COM? See if they swallow it?

ANDREA: Oh they will. Especially if they can get freebies at our new small home. And come and go as they like.

BORIS (WITH RESIGNATION, OR RATHER WITHOUT IT): Fine, have your soft one, you bloody turd polishers.

DISSOLVE TO OVAL OFFICE AT WHITE HOUSE.

TRUMP: So I hear the Limeys beat off Switzerland.

PENCE: It’s ‘beat’, sir, not ‘beat off’. And it’s Sweden, not Switzerland.

TRUMP:  Sweden, Switzerland, ain’t no goddam difference. Don’t be like Tessa, Mike, always correcting my English.

PENCE: I think she’s going soft on you, sir.

TRUMP: Not me, you asshole. She’s goin’ soft on COM.

(FADE TO DARK SCREEN WITH CREDITS CRAWL COMING ON)

That question was hilariously asked in the Monty Python film The Life of Brian. It was hilarious because it was so incongruous.

Everybody knows we got – inter alia, oodles of alia – our plumbing, roads, aqueducts, public lavatories, alphabet and much of our thought and legality from the Romans. Even the notion that a meal should have three courses came from them.

However, as any wizened old cynic will tell you, every silver lining has a cloud.

In this case, recent research shows that the Romans are directly responsible for almost two million people dying of tuberculosis every year – not to mention all those millions who have died over the centuries from the time soldiers wore shiny breastplates to the time they started sporting Kevlar vests.

TB first appeared in Africa some 5,000 years ago and there it stayed until the Romans got going in earnest. When the Roman republic became the Roman Empire, TB began to spread like bad taste.

This ought to have given mankind a pause, best used to ponder the downside of globalism and free movement of people.

The upside, otherwise known as the silver lining, is obvious enough and it’s primarily economic. Some will insist it’s cultural as well and England, say, can benefit no end from the resuscitating cultural input of the 100,000 Somalis now resident here.

Without sounding too reactionary for words, let’s just say that the cultural benefits of global human circulation are open to debate. What’s indisputable is that people from exotic countries bring not only couscous and curry, but also viruses and bacteria.

If you look at two other deadly blights that have afflicted Europe, syphilis and Aids, both were spread due to the Europeans’ unquenchable thirst for expansion.

Syphilis, which reduced the number of Schubert lieder and Baudelaire poems (and, on the plus side, shortened Lenin’s life), was by all accounts brought to Europe by a triumphant Columbus expedition.

So it wasn’t just potatoes, chaps: old Christopher’s ships were also laden with some 30 exotic infections, including smallpox, measles, influenza – and of course syphilis.

I’m not suggesting considerations of hygiene should have put a stop to exploration. And, the day after the great US holiday, I won’t dare insinuate that we should have left America undiscovered and let native Americans (previously known as Red Indians) get on with it.

However… well, I won’t develop this qualifier to its logical conclusion. Suffice it to say that, had those 30 diseases stayed where they came from, Europe might have been spared hundreds of millions of deaths.

A curmudgeon like me may be a bit harsh on the Third World, but then so are the statistics. In 2016, the latest year for which such data are available, 10.4 million people contracted TB, and 1.7 million of them died.

More than 95 per cent of all cases occurred in what used to be called underdeveloped countries. (Are they now called ‘differently’ or ‘alternatively’ developed? Hard to keep up with all the progress.)

And Google helpfully informs me that “Sub-Saharan Africa alone accounted for an estimated 69 per cent of all people living with HIV and 70 per cent of all Aids deaths in 2011.”

Such petty concerns shouldn’t be allowed to stop, nor indeed slow down, the march of diversity. But it wouldn’t hurt raising them from time to time, for not raising them may hurt very badly indeed.

Now what was that about ‘the Aids of March’?

Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, Permanent Secretary of the French Academy and a historian of Russia by trade, has written an article in Le Figaro, lamenting that Russia now sees herself as mainly an Asian power.

Her take on history is that Russia has always been like a pendulum swinging between Europe and Asia, and only the West’s bloody-mindedness has kept her from settling at the European end where she belongs.

To drag Russia back into the European fold, Mme Carrère d’Encausse calls for “searching for paths towards real dialogue”, meaning lifting all sanctions against Russia.

The article is so inane and so ignorant on so many levels that it’s tedious trying to comment on them all. Yet the columnist Igor Yakovenko undertakes just that task in one of those on-line journals that are blocked inside Russia because the great leader doesn’t like them.

Writing with his characteristic brilliance and, alas, equally characteristic shallowness (especially when venturing outside Russia), Mr Yakovenko points out that no such thing as a homogeneous Asia exists, although he believes, incorrectly, that a homogeneous Europe does.

“The civilisational barrier between India and China,” he writes, “is no smaller than that between either country and any country in Europe.

“There are different Asias. Towards which does the Figaro writer think Russia gravitates?

“Europe does exist as a whole. In spite of all the differences among European countries, they all rest on the same foundations of values and culture: Christianity, Greco-Roman heritage and the Latin alphabet. Yet no Asia as a whole exists: different religions, cultures and alphabets.”

It pains me to say this about a writer I hold in high regard, but Mr Yakovenko here displays a characteristic Russian reluctance to hold what he writes to rigorous tests of fact and logic.

(Such intellectual standards were firmly established by the most influential Russian thinker ever, Leo Tolstoy. In addition to novels of unmatched genius, he produced 25 volumes of unmitigated rubbish on every conceivable subject: religion, philosophy, morality, politics, agriculture, education, economics, art. I’d refer you to my book on the subject, God and Man According to Tolstoy, but MacMillan published it as an academic volume and charges astronomical amounts for it.)

The unqualified point about the common European alphabet is bizarre, and Mr Yakovenko wouldn’t have made it had he given it a moment’s thought. For many European countries eschew the Latin script either partially (Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia use both Latin and Cyrillic) or wholly (Bulgaria uses Cyrillic; Greece and Cyprus, Greek).

It’s reasonably clear that to Mr Yakovenko the Europe to which Russia belongs is Western Europe, not Bulgaria and Cyprus. Russia to him, and to most of the Russian intelligentsia, is unquestionably Western European culturally, which means unquestionably European tout court. I wish it were as simple as that.

Actually, the question in the title above has been asked for the better part of four centuries, and most persistently since the reign of Peter I (1682-1725). Every theoretically possible answer has been flogged to death: a) Europe, b) Asia, c) both, d) neither.

Yet even most Russians, and Westerners this side of L’Académie française, still struggle with the answer. So perhaps history should offer a clue.

The accounts of Elizabethan travellers to Russia, such as Giles Fletcher, show they didn’t for a second see the Russians as fellow Europeans. In fact, the territory that’s now Russia was identified on the contemporaneous maps as either Muscovy or, more usually, Tartary.

Peter I set out to change that situation in one fell swoop by, as he put it, “chopping a window into Europe”. Chopping is a rapid, violent action, and that’s how it turned out. For example, at least 300,000 died building Peter’s European capital on a Finnish swamp – his window was chopped through human flesh.

Peter’s turn of phrase was unfortunate in other respects as well. For windows are only used by burglars or Peeping Toms. The phrase “opening a door to Europe” would have been nicer, if probably less accurate.

Peter’s idea was that Russia should learn from Europe the better to dominate it – the way he himself had learned from the Swedish generals he later routed at Poltava.

Yet, like most tyrants, he was a man in a hurry. What had taken Europe millennia to accomplish he wanted to compress into his own lifetime.

Hence saplings of the West were imported wholesale and planted in a Russian soil all too ready to reject them. However, in the arts if not much else, the saplings did grow into luxuriant trees. A century after Peter’s death, Russia took her place side by side with other great European cultures, especially literatures.

Yet there’s more to culture, and infinitely more to civilisation, than just the arts. In fact, I’d say that artistic pursuits are perhaps the least important, if most enjoyable. Sweden, for example, is undeniably a European country even though she has made a rather understated contribution to European arts.

Civilisations differ from one another mainly in the way they see God, man and the world the former created and the latter inhabits. This underlying vision, typically based on the founding religion, determines everything else – and certainly the relationship between the state and the people.

Russia got her Christianity not from the West but from Byzantium, and she got it later than Western European countries did. Now the differences between Western and Eastern confessions may seem trivial to a modern observer, but the doctrinal disagreements begat two civilisations going their divergent ways.

One key disagreement, over filioque, seems to be recondite and trivial. In 1054 the West, as represented by Rome, had declared that the Holy Spirit proceeds equally from the Father and the Son. In turn the East, as represented by Constantinople, insisted that the procession was not double but single, from the Father through the Son.

Yet it’s largely (though far from solely) this seemingly inconsequential difference that explains why political liberty found its natural home in the west, and tyranny in the east.

After all, expressed geometrically, double procession would look like an equilateral triangle. The Father and the Son have true equality underpinned by the Holy Spirit. The three hypostases thus possess what today we call equal rights. Translated to a civilisation based on this concept, the triangular Trinity is likely to be reflected in pluralism.

Conversely, single procession from the Father through the Son implies a straight line, an immutable vertical hierarchy, with the Father sitting at the top. The implications of this went beyond theology.

What was at stake was the kind of kingdom Christians wished to build in this world. Hence the schism of 1054 directly led to the violence of 1204.

That clash between Western and Eastern Christians was linked to the disagreement over filioque, although not just to the face value of the matter. The issue of filioque highlighted the growing chasm between the West and the East, even though the two ostensibly shared the same religion.

In any case, Eastern Christianity had always been under a great influence of other Eastern religions, and consequently of the way of life that sprang from Eastern religiosity. For example it was largely for this reason that Eastern Christianity tended to gravitate towards mysticism, a direct sensory link with God that more or less excluded reason.

It’s also largely because of Eastern influences that various deadly heresies were much more prevalent in the East than in the West. Many of those sprang from the Manichean tendency to regard the physical world as evil.

While a Christian has at his fingertips an immediate link between the absolute grandeur of God and the relativity of earthly life, an exponent of an Eastern religion hasn’t. If for a Christian the absolute is unknowable completely, for, say, a Buddhist the absolute is completely unknowable.

Inextricably linked to the Eastern view of the physical world was relative indifference to tyranny – after all, hard as people tried, there was no getting away from evil on earth anyway. Introspection offered the only escape route, and that road could be taken in any social and political environment.

On the other hand, the West, while obviously accepting that Christ’s kingdom was not of this world, still couldn’t be contemptuous about this world. Christianity sought salvation of the world, not from the world.

The notion of a sovereign individual, intrinsically valuable because of his humanity rather than any particular achievement, is uniquely Western, which is to say European. While compromised in Eastern Christianity by both outside influences and Byzantine Caesarism, this notion is alien to all civilisations that actually are Eastern .

In this, regardless of the many significant differences astutely observed by Mr Yakovenko, they are similar, not to say identical.

Eastern mystical, introspective agnosticism, not to mention straightforward Confucian materialism, are as different from Western individualism as the Buddhist transmutation of souls is different from Christian resurrection.

All this determined the core differences in the relationship between man and state. In the West, with minor glitches here and there, that relationship has always been based on inchoate liberties and at least some pluralism.

In the East, tyranny is the congenitally natural form of government. Hence it’s rather facile to cite, as Mr Yakovenko does elsewhere, the example of Japan and the Asian Tigers as paragons of former Eastern tyrannies that saw the light of Western democracy.

Those countries might have borrowed some Western models for purely economic reasons (or else have been forced to do so by a victorious America), but underneath it all their national character survives very nicely. An essential part of it is subjugating the individual to the collective, and the collective to the leader.

Now, just as Russia got her religion from Byzantium, she got her statehood from the Mongols led at the time by Genghis Khan’s grandson. The rule of the Golden Horde continued for centuries, and even Ivan III (d. 1505), nicknamed ‘the gatherer of the Russian lands’ for his attempts to bring all  principalities together under Moscow, continued to pay tributes to the Mongol khan.

If the ideal (alas, no longer the practice) of Western politics is subsidiarity, the devolution of power to the lowest sensible level, Eastern – and therefore Russian – politics is vectored in the opposite direction. Because this is coded into the country’s DNA, Western-style democracy can never succeed there, nor has ever succeeded.

This isn’t to say that Russia can never acquire a veneer of pluralism – Mr Yakovenko is right in saying “If Taiwan and Singapore can do it, why can’t we?” No reason at all, though I for one would be pleasantly surprised if Russia progressed that far.

But veneer is all that could possibly be on offer. Russia can no more adopt the essence of the West (especially at a time when the West itself is destroying it) than a man can change the colour of his eyes.

So, to answer the question in the title above, Russia is Asian in every sense that should count to Mme Carrère d’Encausse – in ways the country interacts with Europe. Russia’s politics, legality, philosophy, view of life, existential instincts, relationship between the state and the people are all, mutatis mutandis, Asian.

But yes, Mr Yakovenko – Pushkin, Tchaikovsky and Repin are definitely part of European culture. No one can deny that.

When I said the other day that my pieces would be coming thick and fast, I was foolishly overconfident.

It turns out that, contrary to my misconception, regular writing requires a lot of energy, certainly more than I possess at the moment. So I have to take it easy.

Hence my pieces will be coming in a trickle, rather than a steady stream. But one such trickle will appear tomorrow.

Back in 1990 Norman Tebbit, arguably the best modern PM Britain has never had, came up with a useful test to determine the extent to which immigrants are integrated.

Which team do they support when England plays the one from their native land?

Tebbit had specifically cricket fans from the Subcontinent in mind, but the test works just as well with any other sport and any other group.

But immigrants, Lord Tebbit? How very 1990s. What about second-generation natives? Where do their allegiances lie?

Two German football players, Özil and Gündogan, had answered the question exhaustively before the World Cup started. And then Germany crashed out at the first stage of the competition. One detects a causal relationship there.

Both players are second-generation Germans of Turkish descent. In the run-up to the World Cup both posed with Erdogan and gave him a Germany jersey inscribed with ‘to our president’.

Any football federation with any backbone at all would have responded in an unequivocal fashion. If Erdogan is your president, then Germany isn’t your team.

But football these days imitates life (and exceedingly vice versa). Reacting that way would be deemed decidedly anti-multi-culti. Who says new arrivals or even people born in Germany have to integrate in German society? Anyone who says so must be in favour of genocide.

To be fair, there was some brouhaha in the wake. After all, Frau Merkel is teetering on the edge of political extinction, mainly because of her open-door policy that supplemented the three-odd million ethnic Turks resident in the country with over a million other Muslims.

But the noise died down quickly, outshouted by the demiurge of political correctness. That Germany’s team was rent asunder as a result goes without question. But was Germany herself? No more than she already is.

Anyone who, like me, has experienced schadenfreude (an appropriate word or what?) at the sight of Germany exiting the World Cup at group stage ought to ponder the wider implications. And they are indeed wide.

When millions of citizens feel loyalty to a country other than the one that is, or is soon to be, their home, the home is no longer a home.

It’s merely a house, or rather a hotel inhabited by unconnected people from all over the world. And few people treat hotel rooms with the same loving care as they treat their homes.

Nationhood is a relatively new concept in European history. Throughout the Middle Ages, Europe was united for real, not in the ersatz (another appropriate word?) way peddled by the EU. What united it for real was Christianity and the culture it was creating.

For example, what was Thomas Aquinas’s nationality? German, because that’s what he mostly was ethnically? Italian, because he grew up in Aquino? French, because he spent most of his life in Paris and is buried in Toulouse?

Any or all of the above, from the modern standpoint. From the contemporaneous standpoint, it didn’t matter one iota.

And even in the seventeenth century Europe was still held together by dynastic more than national ties. The Great Condé, for example, twice led Spanish troops against his own country, ruled by his cousin Louis XIV.

Now imagine for the sake of argument Montgomery or Patton leading Nazi troops against the Allies – and losing. What would happen to them? The mode of execution is the only thing open to debate.

Yet Condé got away with a mild slap on the wrist. He was guilty only of squabbling with his cousin, not of treason – as we understand the word.

However, Europe is no longer held together by either religious or dynastic ties: modernity is innately divisive. Yet no other basis for unity exists, nor can exist. As the EU is finding out, a desire for six-week holidays and 30-hour work weeks doesn’t quite work as the adhesive.

Hence a strong sense of national identity within separate but friendly countries is the only realistic obstacle in the way of anarchy. I for one regret that this is the case. But it is the case.

The suicidal drive towards multi-culti diversity is a bomb under the foundations of what’s left of our civilisation. And the bomb’s action isn’t even particularly delayed.

What happened to Germany’s football team can be seen as a microcosm of a much larger catastrophe looming over Europe’s mountains and plains. In that, other than just purely geographic, sense Britain is a fully paid-up part of Europe for she is susceptible to all the same trends.

I can see that by the example of England’s Russian community, and I don’t mean the recent immigrants with their yachts, football clubs and the urge to ‘whack’ one another. I’m talking about the English equivalents of Özil and Gündogan, native-born Britons of Russian descent.

In the early 90s I encountered many of them at the 1812 Ball, one of the premier events in the London social calendar. Normally I detest such festivities, but that time curiosity got the better of me: all those Golitsyns, Obelenskys and Tolstoys were walking, talking Russian history.

In addition, I admired, and still do, the book Victims of Yalta by Nikolai Tolstoy, who was the MC of the ball. Either he or his co-MC, can’t remember which, opened the proceedings by announcing that the gathering was honoured by the presence of the Russian ambassador. “Our ambassador, ladies and gentlemen!”

Now Count Tolstoy (in the absence of primogeniture, everyone even remotely related to a count has the same title) is about as English as Lord Tebbit, and his accent even more so. He was born in England and educated at some of the best schools. His Russian, on the other hand, is uncertain, not to say practically non-existent.

How was that career KGB ‘diplomat’ Tolstoy’s and his friends’ ambassador? I couldn’t answer that question, so, when the ambassador rose to speak, I demonstratively walked out across the polished floor. He wasn’t my ambassador – even though I lived the first 25 years of my life in Moscow.

I cite this example simply because it’s something I witnessed myself. The Russian community is still small and rather insignificant in Britain. But it’s indicative of the general trend towards particularism and away from national unity.

This is an explosion waiting to happen, and the fallout will be considerably less enjoyable than Germany’s defeat at the World Cup.

First, I’m deeply moved by all the good wishes I’ve received from you. I thank you all collectively, albeit belatedly: the French hospital where I got some on-the-job training in pulmonary embolism had no Internet access.

I’m lucky to be alive, for the time being, said the doctor, to which I replied that some of my readers may not share that assessment. That wasn’t just a weak attempt at a bon mot, but a reflection on experience.

Some seven years ago I wrote something in The Mail that displeased Peter Tatchel, that great champion of homosexuality. He immediately ran my photo, captioned with all the relevant contact details, in his paper PinkNews.

That produced hundreds of abusive e-mails, most describing me metonymically as female genitalia, and some expressing a heartfelt wish that I croak soon, preferably as a result of ingesting faeces (their language was more colloquial). One irate reader, doubtless a diagnostician of no mean attainment, wrote that he’d gladly kill me, but thankfully there was no need. Judging by my photograph, I was going to peg it soon anyway.

He almost got his wish, if seven years too late. I ended up on a different floor in the same hospital I had graced with my presence just a few days earlier.

For once I found myself the youngest member of a group: every other patient there topped me by at least 10 years. Most of them were demented and, with a few exceptions, bed-ridden.

The few exceptions floated around, making tiny steps like Japanese geishas, but not resembling those ladies in any other way. They looked more like characters from a late Fellini film with casting by Goya during his Black period.

Much to my wife’s amazement, one chap mistook her for a nurse and asked for a yoghurt. “You’re lucky he didn’t ask for an enema,” I told her. The same patient, his eyes popping out of their orbits, would occasionally wander into my room and say ‘Bonjour’ in a way that made me fear he’d then introduce himself as ‘the Auxerre slasher’.

Not the best 10 days in my life, all in all. But hey, at least I wasn’t in an NHS hospital with a syringe driver pumping diamorphine (purified heroin) into my vein.

Actually, my vast medical experience (on the receiving end) includes a month spent on just such a driver. But that was at a private hospital, where the medical staff had no murderous designs on my person.

That apparently wasn’t the case at Gosport Hospital, Hampshire, where close to 650 patients were killed by diamorphine overdose during the 90s.

Now, any druggie will tell you that heroin is a dangerous drug. As Dr Shipman could have testified, it kills if administered in overdose. That’s why it’s banned in many countries, such as Australia and New Zealand, and it’s only ever used in Britain as part of palliative care, when the patient is in agonising pain.

Even then care must be exercised not to OD the recipient accidentally, due to a faulty driver, for example, or a wrongly calculated dose. No such care was taken at Gosport.

Moreover, only about 45 per cent of the victims were in any pain at all. Apparently, in many cases the doctors prescribed, and the nursing staff administered, diamorphine to some patients not because they needed it, but because they were ‘difficult’.

The patients got the message: many tried not to make excessive demands for fear that the medics would kill them. They were old people, like those I met at Auxerre, but many of them were lucid and perfectly able to enjoy what was left of their lives.

They certainly hadn’t consented to euthanasia, which in common parlance means killing and, when done the Gosport way, murder. (Actually, I see no valid moral difference between any type of euthanasia and murder, but my state of health is making me more mellow.)

The report on the final solution practised at Gosport didn’t mention any other NHS hospitals, but the residual cynic in me refuses to believe it’s an isolated case – while the realist is certain it isn’t.

Why would it be? State-run Leviathans like the NHS are congenitally incapable of realising that every human life, no matter how miserable and predictably short, has an intrinsic value.

The big, omnipotent state is self-serving and self-perpetuating. Individuals are seen in that light, and they become expendable should they interfere with the innate imperative of the big state.

Such is the underlying impetus, and obviously it’s manifested to various degrees in different types of state. But manifested it invariably is, and the NHS is a prime example.

Any state tries to brainwash its subjects in the noble motives animating its actions. But frankly, this side of the USSR, I’ve never seen this effort succeed as spectacularly as with the NHS.

The British believe in overwhelming numbers that it’s the NHS that puts the Great into Britain. They also believe that other countries are turning green with envy watching the NHS in action.

If so, they manage to contain the urge to follow suit admirably: Britain is the only European country with fully nationalised medical care. All others use some combination of public and private financing, and the results – certainly in France – are much better.

For that’s what the NHS is: a method of financing medical care. That’s all. It doesn’t occupy a high moral plateau, which socialism never does. It’s not a surrogate deity to be worshiped instead of God. And it’s emphatically not free, which is a common misconception.

‘Free’ means something one doesn’t have to pay for. Yet somebody has to pay for all those MRI scans and mastectomies. Such things are expensive; and the more inefficiently provided, the dearer they get.

If patients don’t pay for them directly, the payment comes from the government, which makes most of its money from taxes. ‘Free’ thus means that the transfer of money from patient to hospital is mediated by the state acting as a general contractor with megalomania.

But governments are less efficient than private enterprise. Thus we must assume that, say, mastectomies are more expensive when one pays for them through the government, whether one needs them or not, than they would be if one paid for them direct, and only when one needed them.

(In this regard, I wish Europeans spared me their tales about poor Americans dying in the streets because they can’t afford hospitals. If that were the case, life expectancy in the US would be much lower than in Europe – but it isn’t.

I visited enough friends in American municipal hospitals, where poor people are treated, to know that they are infinitely superior to the NHS. The US system isn’t perfect; no human institution is. And it’s being made more and more imperfect by the litigiousness endemic in America. But people don’t die by the roadside because their bank balance is too low.)

Yet when we pay for state medicine we don’t just pay for mastectomies and scans. An ever-growing proportion of our money pays for the ever-growing state bureaucracy required to administer ‘free’ medical care, something for which they would pay less if medical care were not ‘free’.

Moreover, since steady growth of nationalised medicine is tantamount to the state extorting increasingly larger sums from the people, ‘free’ medical care places an ever-growing proportion of the nation’s finances and labour force under state control, thus increasing the power of the state over the individual.

The NHS is already the biggest employer in the world, and its fans seem to hope it’ll eventually become the only one in Britain. They’re prepared to throw more billions down that bottomless pit even if it means neglecting defence of the realm.

In other words, ‘free’, translated from the NHS, means “serving the state, not the citizen, and therefore being more expensive than it otherwise would be, not to mention less efficient”.

I’m not qualified to pass judgement on the desirability of using diamorphine. On my own example, I know it’s used effectively even in the country’s best private hospitals, but that’s only one man’s experience.

Yet any drug can kill if used inappropriately, either by accident or with malice aforethought. If used correctly, aspirin can make your headache go away. If used wrongly, it can make you bleed to death.

And of course diamorphine is a killer in the wrong hands – such as the hands of the NHS.

Alex sends a message to all his readers that he is in hospital for a few days and will resume his blog when he is home again.

“Listen up, class.

“Which four-letter word describes the worst thing that can happen to a woman? Nothing from you, Peter, I know what you’re going to say. I’ll give you a clue: it starts with an R.

“Splendid, it is indeed ‘rape’. Does everybody know how to spell it? Well done, Sharon. R-A-P-E.

“Now I’m going to ask you a tougher question. What’s the second worst thing?

“No, Andrew, it’s not having every bone in her body broken, and I’ll thank you for not indulging your gruesome fantasies. And neither is it being murdered, thank you very much.

“No, Fiona, it’s not losing a husband, a child, an eye or a limb. Anyone else?

“Well, it’s upskirting, and I bet you don’t know what it is. Nothing from you, Peter, I know what you’re going to say.”

Actually, I can well imagine myself being one of the pupils. For until the other day I had never heard of upskirting and hadn’t had the foggiest idea what it meant.

Now I’ve learned. Upskirting describes the crime of chaps photographing the knickers of unaware women in public places.

Sky TV showed some footage of a shop where that crime was caught on camera. A young man carrying a camera furtively approached a woman wearing a short skirt, bent down quickly, aimed the camera under that garment, snapped a shot and ran away.

That’s not how I’d do it. I’d attach a camera to one of those selfie sticks so favoured by Japanese tourists. That would obviate the need for bending, making concealment easier.

And I confess to having done something similar, minus photographic devices. When I was 11 or so, I’d occupy a strategic position under the school staircase to peak under the skirts of girls walking up.

Now a long way from 11, I don’t see the point of either looking or photographing. After all, by the time they reach their late teens, most boys have had a few opportunities to relish the sight of girls’ knickers without having to resort to subterfuge.

And let’s face it, though perhaps not all women accessorise miniskirts with underwear, I’m sure most do. So where’s the fun in taking those snaps? The transgressors won’t see anything they can’t see on a beach, especially if volleyball is being played.

At least exhibitionists derive some sexual satisfaction from flashing, though I don’t immediately see how. Really, life must have passed me by.

Now the question is, what should be done to discourage such acts of petty puerile voyeurism?

A woman would be well-justified to slap the infantile moron in the face. If she’s accompanied by a man, he couldn’t be blamed for punching the idiot.

And if the police get involved, they’ll have any number of charges to bring on the basis of existing laws. One such could be OPD (Outraging Public Decency), although these days public decency must be sufficiently calloused by things like Gay Day parades not to be outraged too easily.

That’s how it would be in a sane world. In our world, an upskirted woman feels “violated, distressed and traumatised for life”. And women can’t be violated, distressed and traumatised for life without creating political pressure groups and launching national campaigns.

Now I don’t see how such a boorish trick can possibly cause life-long trauma. Suppose for the sake of argument that the upskirting picture ends up on the net. Considering that the camera angle doesn’t allow capturing the victim’s knickers and face at the same time, who’s to know that’s her?

Such identification would be impossible unless there’s something extraordinary about the woman’s upper thighs (if, for example, she’s Serena Williams). So, though some harm was done, it wasn’t very much, was it?

I’m being deliberately crass here. I realise that these days a woman is traumatised if she says she is. And if several of them say they are, we need a new law making the act a specific criminal offence.

Such a law was proposed in a private member’s bill the other day, and enthusiastically supported by the government – led by that upskirtable person. Happy snappers would get up to two years in prison and enter the sex offenders’ register for life. I’m amazed the reintroduction of the death penalty wasn’t mooted, just this once.

To everyone’s amazement, the bill didn’t pass: Sir Christopher Chope, the one-eyed man among the blind, shouted “object” and the bill was derailed for the time being, to be reintroduced in a few weeks.

There were screams of “shame!” in the Commons and much other vitriol aimed at Sir Christopher, enough to traumatise him as badly as upskirting could ever traumatise a woman.

Mrs May, doubtless holding on to her own skirt tightly, expressed her dismay: “Upskirting is an invasion of privacy which leaves victims feeling degraded and distressed,” she said. “I am disappointed the Bill didn’t make progress in the Commons today, and I want to see these measures pass through Parliament – with Government support – soon.”

I feel secure in the knowledge that things are going so swimmingly in Britain that our government has the time and energy to throw its weight behind this kind of legislation. I must have been reading the wrong newspapers.

At the same time, I’m outraged (without necessarily feeling violated, distressed and traumatised) at this flagrant display of sex discrimination. My thoughts and prayers go (if that’s the right phrase) to all those Scotsmen who wear kilts with nothing underneath.

What if our liberated females began to commit the heinous crime of upkilting? Perhaps that’s why Sir Christopher stopped the bill from passing – it didn’t cover all eventualities, as it were.

The reason upskirting has received so much attention is that it isn’t just a crime against person. It’s a crime against the ruling ethos, replacing millennia-old certitudes with ersatz nonsense whose sole purpose is to perpetuate the power of the ruling spivocracy.

While crimes against person and property routinely go unpunished and indeed uninvestigated, crimes against the ethos are punished quickly and surely.

How long before an admittedly flippant article like this one is criminalised for making light of people’s suffering? Nothing from you, Peter, I know what you’re going to say.

Few countries ever annex the territory of their weaker neighbours and then tell the world to grin and bear it. They always offer some justification, however flimsy.

The most widespread pretext is a territorial claim presented as valid for historical, ethnic, linguistic and philosophical reasons. The aggressor is both the star and the referee in this game: it’s he who establishes the rules by which the weaker country is supposed to play, but blithely refuses to.

However, if the world accepts the new set of rules in theory, they become a model for everyone else to follow in practice.

For example, once it was accepted, on rather shaky grounds, that every Third World country was entitled to independence, they all claimed it – even those like Algeria, which was an equal province of France, rather than her colony.

That’s why we should sit up and listen whenever a world leader formulates a geopolitical philosophy justifying annexation. As often as not, action may follow.

Donald Trump can’t be easily confused with the philosopher king of Plato’s fancy. His intellectual prowess doesn’t quite stretch to the point where philosophy begins and, though his role is modelled on that of a monarch, he isn’t exactly king.

But, to give him his due, he has strong principles and tends to act on them, God and Congress willing. Hence, whenever he proposes embellishments on geopolitical doctrine, his words ought to be heeded.

His recent contribution to geopolitical theory was to tell G7 leaders that Russia was entitled to help herself to the Crimea because everyone in that peninsula speaks Russian.

Never before had annexation been justified by linguistic commonality alone, although the Anschluss came pretty close.

However, Trump tends to act on his ideas. Hence one has to assume that, rather than limiting that startling discovery to Russia, he believes it has a practical significance for the conduct of US foreign policy.

So if I were a Canadian, I’d be worried. Actually, I’m already worried even as a British subject but, if I were a Canadian, I’d worry even more.

For the fact is that everyone in both Canada and Britain speaks English, although those who’ve heard Sir Kenny Dalglish might disagree. And Canada has the added disadvantage of being right on Trump’s doorstep.

Since the US also enjoys an overwhelming military superiority over Canada, and since Trump is known to hold a dim view of Justin Trudeau and his policies, the stage is set.

Before long the US will annex most of Canada, granting an independent status only to the Francophone Quebec. By the same logic, that province must be claimed by France.

And why stop there? After all, many countries of Africa and Asia speak English too. Some of them do so incomprehensibly, but then no one understands Sir Kenny Dalglish either. This linguistic proclivity makes them ripe for American conquest, presumably led by Trump astride a white steed.

Also, to be fair, the same principle should be extended to other languages as well. For example, every South American country except Brazil speaks Spanish.

I say if Russia is entitled to the Crimea, Spain is entitled to Uruguay. And it’s not just the language either. Uruguay used to belong to Spain, just like the Crimea used to belong to Russia. What better reason for annexation can there be? And fine, Portugal is welcome to Brazil.

Mr Trump added a few glints to his shining concept of linguistic expansionism. We might as well forget Putin’s annexation of the Crimea, he offered magnanimously, because it “happened a while ago”. That’s like a football referee playing advantage, allowing the play to continue after a foul.

This simplifies the task facing the US in Canada, Spain in Uruguay and – as the patriot in me insists on adding – Britain in India. Should these countries claim what’s rightfully theirs, they wouldn’t have to fight a permanent war.

They’d only have to hold on to their acquisitions for four years, after which no arguments against the annexations would have any force.

And speaking of Britain and India, have you noticed a direct parallel with Russia and the Crimea? India belonged to Britain from 1757 to 1948, which is almost exactly the period during which the Crimea belonged to Russia (1783-1954).

Call me a British nationalist and report me to Jean-Claude Juncker, but this makes our claim to India unassailable – especially since most Indians speak English, some of them better than most Englishmen and most of them better than Sir Kenny Dalglish.

Nor is it just about language and prior ownership. According to our philosopher king, the Ukraine is entitled neither to our support nor, by inference, to the Crimea because she’s “one of the most corrupt countries in the world.”

That’s true. The Ukraine is indeed one of the world’s most corrupt nations, finding herself at around Number 130 on that score. Yet Russia, at 195 out of 198 countries in the Verisk Maplecroft corruption rating, is even more corrupt, finding herself next to Sudan and Burma.

My head is beginning to spin. For both Sudan and Burma are largely Anglophone and both used to belong to Britain. If we had the ships to transport a sizeable expeditionary force, I’d say let’s sail and claim what’s ours.

And shouldn’t the Ukraine annex parts of the Russian territory on the basis of being less corrupt than Russia? She should, if she could.

Jokes aside, all 14 former Soviet republics were ruled by Russia until 1991. They all speak Russian and they’re all corrupt, both accomplishments being the inheritance of communism added to some indigenous proclivities.

President Trump seems to be issuing his friend Vlad a carte blanche to recreate the Soviet Union, which is exactly what friend Vlad wants. Nor does Trump seem to see Russia’s aggression as a disqualification from re-entering the civilised community or having all sanctions against her repealed.

I’m not going to add my own collusion stone to those being thrown at Trump, but it increasingly seems that his foreign policy isn’t so much America First as Russia First.

The overriding stratagem appears to be punching holes in all Western alliances, both military and economic – which is Putin’s policy too. Trump clearly sees both NATO and G7 in his sights, and he allows Putin to control the temperature and duration of the Syrian war. That pushes oil prices high and keeps the hydrocarbon-centred Russian economy afloat.

I’m not sure an American invasion of Canada is on the cards, but I wouldn’t bet against more Russian aggression against the neighbouring states. If that happens, Vlad should send a letter of thanks to his friend Donald.

The blurb outside the ruins of this Cluny abbey at Donzy, at the edge of Burgundy, gives the dry facts.

Built in 1103. Destroyed by the Protestants in 1569, then during the Revolution in 1793 and again at the end of XIX century.

Similar stories with similar dates are told by other ruins all over France. That is, when ruins survive.

According to the eminent medievalist Régine Pernoud, some 80 per cent of France’s Romanesque and Gothic buildings were demolished either by the Huguenots or the revolutionaries and their heirs.

One can’t begin to imagine the glory of France as she was when 100 per cent of those buildings were still standing – considering that few countries can match even the 20 per cent she has left. I shan’t even try to strain my imagination.

Instead I’d like to offer those ruins as yet another reminder of what happens when mob instincts are no longer restrained by civilisation. For civilisation is the tether that fetters the beast in us, preventing it from leaping out, fangs bared.

That beast has never been defanged, much less put down. It can only be provisionally tamed by civility, which is a cognate of civilisation. But it’s always there in the background, growling and awaiting its opening.

You don’t have to believe in Original Sin to verify this observation. Empirical evidence over history ought to suffice.

Once some group of people, usually small, always driven, find a way of exploiting mob instincts for their own purposes, the beast pounces and devours all before it – not just the original target against which it was let loose.

Both the rationalisation and post-rationalisation are never in short supply. The people were driven to despair, the typical story goes, by legitimate grievances they could no longer tolerate.

They weren’t. They were driven to overt beastliness by some clever rabble-rousers who knew how to suppress civilisational constraints and appeal to the feral part of human nature.

This isn’t to say that the grievances used as the pretext weren’t legitimate. Since all human institutions are operated by people who are fallen and therefore fallible, none can be held up to absolute standards of goodness. It’s always possible to find something wrong, at times very wrong.

In the run-up to the Reformation the Church indeed indulged in some corrupt practices, although not nearly on the scale claimed by the reformers. But some priests, monks and nuns were indeed as venal, lustful and gluttonous as those depicted by Boccaccio and Rabelais.

Nor was the Church hierarchy free of blame, although, when its enemies wish to attack the Church, it’s always the Borgias they talk about, never Augustine, Leo I or Gregory the Great.

By the same token, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette weren’t ideal monarchs, even though the latter never really suggested that infamous dietary change to the starving people. Yet neither were they the sadistic mass murderers that their enemies proved to be.

Whatever problems existed should have been pointed out and, if possible, solved – though not by the mob, but by the same groups that were the sole guardians of civilisation.

But even if left unsolved, those problems would have had no calamitous effects in France to match the wanton destruction that began at the Reformation, continued through that great misnomer of the Enlightenment, culminated in the horrors of the Revolution and Napoleonic wars, and still radiated its tectonic waves throughout the nineteenth century.

The same, mutatis mutandis, can be said about every mass popular uprising, whatever its pretext and however expertly it’s enveloped in noble-sounding demagoguery.

Once the beast slips its chain, walls will tumble and blood will flow. Clipping the chain back on may sometimes be possible, eventually, but it’s never easy. And it always takes a long time.

If you look at the great popular revolts of the last 600 years, the Reformation, the two English Revolutions and those in France, America and Russia, each did more harm than good. And even those that did do some good, didn’t do enough to compensate for the blood spilled, destruction wreaked and social order obliterated.

Looking at l’Abbaye Notre Dame du Pré at Donzy, it’s hard to think of anything that has made up for its demise, and especially for what it signifies. That is, unless you regard as sufficient compensation the wind farms that have replaced the wind mills.

For it’s not just the Abbey that lies in ruins. It’s our Western civilisation, debauched, prostituted and systematically supplanted by a vulgar impostor that has the gall to call itself by the same name.

P.S. I’d like to apologise to the Duchess of Sussex (aka Meghan Markle). When the subject of her erotic photos came up at a dinner party the other day, I inadvertently stated it was nothing compared to the scandal involving her maternal great-great-grandmother who had posed nude for National Geographic. That rumour, which I accidentally spread and indeed originated, has no basis in reality.