Nick in particular deserves my gratitude. Every time I’m stuck for a topic, especially when in a jaundiced mood, all I have to do is Google his name.
That never fails: Nick can be confidently predicted to say something utterly risible every day. This reliance on Nick started more than three years ago, when I began to appear in this space.
Then Nick expressed his pride in being multi-culti not only in his beliefs but also in his person. And he was especially proud of having a Russian ancestor in his ethnic mix.
Being reasonably familiar with Russian history, I wrote that there wasn’t really much to be proud about. For the ancestor in question, Baroness Moura Budberg, was a woman of easy virtue whose speciality was setting ‘honey traps’ for Lenin’s secret police.
This time around Nick has set out to prove every known truism about the morality of socialism, the perverse doctrine Nick embraces as passionately as his ancestor embraced the likes of H.G. Wells, Maxim Gorky and Bruce Lockhart.
The truism of interest to me now applies to the socialists’ belief that every individual misdemeanour is actually collective. It’s all society’s fault, goes the mantra of defence barristers at a myriad criminal trials.
In that spirit Nick has declared that those caught in possession of illegal substances, including such hard drugs as heroin and crack, shouldn’t even be blamed for it, much less prosecuted.
They are all ‘victims’. Of drug barons, street pushers, police – of society at large.
It’s society’s invisible hand that grabs a junkie by the scruff of the neck, hands him a syringe filled with some disgusting stuff and forces him to shoot up.
No personal responsibility is involved: the addict isn’t a free agent. He’s an automaton whose buttons are pushed by external forces, which implicitly all have the conservative establishment at their root.
It never occurs to Nick that this pronouncement is offensive not only to drug users but to man in general. It reduces mankind to the status of the animal world, which is of course the underlying philosophy of every atheist, particularly a socialist one.
Actually Nick has also mentioned that he’s not so sure about his lifelong atheism any longer. “I’m beginning to warm up to God,” he said. On the evidence of his offensive effluvia, I’m not sure God is warming up to Nick.
And speaking of causing offence, this is where Romanian pickpockets come in.
You know how sometimes one hurts other people’s feelings by saying something unthinkingly, just because it sounds good? Well, this occasionally happens to me, if not as often as in my youth.
Last weekend I played tennis with a very nice chap who told me his little son was also named Alex. No, he said in response to my facetious question, he didn’t name the boy after me.
It’s just that his wife is from Romania, and they decided to choose an English name that wouldn’t sound foreign to Romanians.
“Did you consider Pickpocket?” I asked in one of those encephalophonic moments that one always regrets later.
The pained expression on my partner’s face made me curse myself inwardly and apologise profusely, only making things worse (“I don’t mean they are all like that, and I’m sure your wife would never…”)
Mutual embarrassment ensued, and mine lasted for a couple of days. This morning, however, thanks to Romanian pickpockets it has diminished if not disappeared.
For I read in the paper that a Romanian immigrant has just been sent down for stealing 22 mobile phones (those we know about). Apparently he embarked on this career three days after arrival to these shores, and who says it takes immigrants long to learn how to function in their new land?
Far be it from me to suggest that a propensity to dip into other people’s pockets is an indigenous characteristic of any particular group, but Romanians must have a particular knack for it.
Otherwise it would be hard to explain their disproportionate representation in our prison population, which many of them joined specifically because of this offence.
Exactly the same is happening in France, where Romanians based in camps outside Paris are every morning transported to the city by coach to ply their trade during business hours.
I wonder what Nick’s take on this is. He no doubt feels it’s all society’s fault, specifically the fault of the government that doesn’t welcome new arrivals with enough cash to make them desist from crime.
We must fight not the criminals but the causes of crime, he repeats the socialist shibboleth.
For once I agree. Where we diverge is in our understanding of such causes. His is informed by Marx; mine, by Genesis 2:4-3:24.
You know, the verses about Original Sin and the subsequent explanations of how only individual effort will overcome it – assisted by the deity to which Nick is self-admittedly warming up.