Thanks to those who have commented to the effect that my absence has been noted. I have been on holiday.

Because I have a number of commitments in the immediate future (now including, rather to my surprise, retaining an architect and rebuilding the less satisfactory parts of the Villa Underclass) blogging will be highly intermittent, if not entirely absent, for some months.

I have to say that I don’t really believe that my failure reliably to harrumph at the nefarious machinations of the professional political class will make a lot of difference, to be quite honest.

It would be nice to say that I am taking time off to construct a space vehicle in which to emigrate to a more sensible planet but unfortunately I seem to have mislaid the relevant supplier’s catalogue.

My readers (bless you both) will probably have to content themselves for a while with an occasional rant or two about the construction business.

Speaking of which.

Once upon a time (quite a long time ago) there was a fellow who has having an extension built. It was the school holidays, so his daughter (6) was being kept amused by helping the builders. She would pick up a brick, and put it down on the other pile. Then she would pick up another. Soon the bricks were all somewhere else.

At the end of the week the builders got paid, and the fellow (being her dad) said that since she had helped the builders all week, she too should be paid, and gave her a £5 note.

At which point her mum (being her mum) said that she ought to open a savings account and put the £5 in it.

So (dutifully but not without some regret) she was taken by her mum to the building society, which conveniently provided suitable accounts.

“Five pounds,” said the lady in the building society, helping her to fill in the forms, “That’s quite a lot. And will you be helping the builders again next week?”

“No.”

“Oh. Not at all?”

“No. Well. Not unless them fcuking bricks arrive.”

WordPress is once again very wiggy. In fact I think it is still wiggy from last time. It is now a toss-up between one’s being silenced by one’s own service provider, as seems to be their intention, and one’s being silenced along with everyone else when the government bans it all, like the Germans.

More of this anon. Perhaps.

Well, isn’t that a surprise. First burst of blogging in weeks and WordPress goes into one of its funny little turns.

Heigh ho.

Hamlet: II, 2; 598

A comment from David Davis, at the Libertarian Alliance, suggests that my extended absence without explanation has been noticed. Apologies to all.

The reason for this absence is that I was referred to the hospital with a curious problem which my GP (as evidenced by her behaviour) clearly thought was something serious. However, after a while a bemused consultant told me that though he would happily take a biopsy ‘to put my mind at rest’, he felt able to say that the signs were satisfactorily accounted for by a peculiar and highly developed stress condition, from which I have never suffered before.

A series of experiments revealed that one significant source of the stress is computer operations, which are divided into (a) ordinary computer operations and (b) blogging.

Of these (b) turned out to be the larger factor. My usual process is to switch on the computer, to deal with the accumulated comments, and to sort through the few hundred items found by the RSS thing, skimming the titles of the majority but individually reading those of importance.

Having gone through the news like this I then read the blogs of all the libertarians, in order not to harrumph at something which has already been adequately harrumphed at. In so doing I usually find something else more or less harrumphable.

At the end of all this I have a number of harrumph precursors lined up and what I usually do is to write a post about each one in turn. Hence the ’short, controlled burst’ of posts which usually occurs towards the end of the morning.

Having done all this I then go and do something else.

The problem seems to arise with the scanning of the news. By the time I have finished doing this I am usually angry and depressed. I am also quite uncomfortable because text work on the screen tends to set off another of my weird ailments. Hence the customary tone of the resulting posts.

Unfortunately these posts are not fully cathartic and I tend to spend the rest of the day being angry and depressed. And sometimes dizzy, nauseous and aching.

Now all this might be worthwhile if I thought that the result was effective in changing the minds of people in general about the appalling governments which they appear to insist upon electing.

However, I am not convinced that it is. The blog statistics suggest that the same couple of hundred people read the blog regularly, with another few hundred occasionally reading posts linked to by more famous bloggers.

They do say that nobody reads a newspaper with which they disagree; it appears that this applies equally to electronic as to dead-tree media.

So what I have been doing is spending half of each day winding myself up into a state which baffles doctors in order to convince people who already agree with me to continue to agree with me.

Though this might be a completely acceptable substitute for the high-Victorian practice of dying romantically of consumption at an early age for the sake of one’s art, the one thing it doesn’t seem likely to achieve is regime change.

Accordingly I have decided that I will put up a blog post only when I have something original to say. I don’t suppose this will be very often because it is always very much easier to comment upon an existing story than to contrive a new one.

What I will do the rest of the time is to continue to try to get people actually to think about the relationship of the state to the individual, and, with any luck, actually to do something about it.

My firm and established belief is that the evil from which it is most important that the people be liberated is that of television (not the technology itself, which apart from its well-known hypnotic quality is relatively harmless, but its application by the forces of darkness).

I have become increasingly challenging and confrontational about this. People always agree with me that television is moronic, manipulative and pernicious, but then they say “Ah, but it’s the kids, you see.”

To which I habitually reply “Ah, yes. Were you even to suggest ‘deprivation-of-television abuse’ they’d report you to Esther Rantzen on the spot, wouldn’t they?”

One would expect any decent parent to react quite firmly to this sort of thing, but in fact they usually just shrug their shoulders and say “You’re not wrong there, mate.”

So rather than attempt forcibly to peel the hypnotised masses from their soma-machines, to the ‘entertainment’ provided by which they are addicted, I am doing what I can to wean them off it by providing alternative sources of ‘entertainment’. It is the methadone-versus-heroin thing.

So far this seems to be working. The next play we* are doing is about how a group of vampires take over a small country, hypnotise everyone, and start sucking their blood. The author’s original references to ‘a new world order’, bowdlerized by his dramatist, we intend to restore, the original novel being deeply allegorical of the power of the enemy class over the victims of their exploitation.

The hall holds 180 people and we usually fill it for four nights. That’s 720 people, maximum, actually paying to be exposed to this sort of thing, most of whom have never read a libertarian blog and many of whom cannot in fact spell the word ‘libertarian’ (“I have seen this. Arne Saknussem.”).

I reckon this is likely to be a more cost-effective use of time and resources than spending the rest of my life plugged into the computer, persuading the same two hundred-odd people that I’m still on their side, and making myself quite ill in the process.

The format and purpose of the blog will be maintained and I promise to renew my LPUK membership just as soon as I can afford to, but I cannot undertake to carry on with the rapid response stuff; someone else will have to do it. A year’s enough for me.

Thanks to everyone who has posted supportive comments; normal service has now been resumed; for a given value of ‘normal’.

Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murder’d,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words
And fall a-cursing like a very drab,
A scullion! Fie upon’t! Foh!
About, my brain! Hum, I have heard
That guilty creatures, sitting at a play,
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaim’d their malefactions…

Hamlet: II, 2; 577

* the whole town believes that I am now, like so many hapless fellows before me, in the toils of an adventuress, viz. Penelope, but Mrs. Underclass, knowing about the theatre, remains rightly confident that my relationship with Penelope is merely that of an addict with his pusher, who deals to support her own habit.

I started off by having a week off to deal with the amateur dramatic society’s latest production, which required quite a lot of technical consulting. Prior to this I ended up in the hospital again, a string of two dentists, two doctors and a consultant having finally decided that what is wrong with me (in this context) is nothing more than a highly developed stress condition.

A number of experiments since have suggested that one source of the stress is not writing this blog, but trawling through something like 500 news items every day, looking for one which is sufficiently harrumphworthy to justify a posting.

I have since been diagnosed with yet another medical condition, which was being masked by the effects of the first, and for which I am currently being treated.

Under these circumstances something has to give and I have therefore decided that on this blog I will post less frequently and confine my attentions primarily to the reporting of goings-on which I feel might be found amusing. Like these.

The statistics suggest that as yet another Libertarian blogger I am read by most of the other libertarian bloggers and that’s about it, whereas as a raconteur of the inner agonies of the provincial amateur stage I seem to be rather more widely noticed.

Obviously I will continue to post stuff about the appalling state of the country and the diabolical nature of its ruling clique (one hesitates to use a term like junta, which suggests a wholly different standard of organisational acumen). But I will not spend so much time looking for provocation, because it is quite clearly more than slightly bad for me and I have been obliged to make a number of undertakings.

More of this anon. I’m not stopping, nor have I changed my mind, but Act II will be in a different style from that of Act I.

Blogging will be light from today until the end of next week. Comments will be answered as soon as possible.

[Alex Harvey: Next]

Many thanks to all those who left supportive remarks in the comments about doctors, hospitals, etc.

I am back now, having been some miles to and from the local (using the term loosely) general hospital, and having demonstrated to the satisfaction of all that I am capable of sustaining for months on end what appears to have been no more than a self-destructive, involuntary and unperceived stress condition, which has caused such collateral damage as to lead my GP to suspect something very much worse (thereby, of course, neatly incrementing the stress).

This is still not one of those damnable medical blogs (I don’t mind the ones by doctors whingeing about grafting their assets off for the NHS and being sworn at by chavs, if nothing worse, for their pains; it’s the please-admire-my-quiet-courage patient ones that are damnable), so, in the immortal words of the Minstry of Defence, ‘there are no further details’.

Perhaps I ought, like Pratchett’s Granny Weatherwax, to carry a card for the benefit of the concerned, which says ‘I aten’t dead.”

There will be a time interval (dT) during which I have to go to the hospital. More, if all goes well, later.

There is someone from Russia in the comments, talking Russian. My knowledge of Russian is what one would expect of a chap like me: risible. What the comment says is:

Я извиняюсь, что немного не в тему, а что такое RSS? и ка на него подписаться?

My guess is that this enquiry is something to do with RSS, but that’s about my lot. Can anyone construe? Alternatively, Cederash, would you mind reposting the comment? You are welcome to try other languages, on the basis of Holmesian elimination.

As may be apparent from the terse and rapid posting I am trying to get the job out the door before another interruption.

This one involves a family funeral, and will result in my absence until later in the week.

I am having a little bet with myself about whether or not, by the time I return, Gordon Brown will have sacrificed Gorbals Mick upon the altar of his own career.

As to Esther Rantzen standing for election, I never thought I’d say it, but, damn it, I think I’d rather vote for the bloody BNP. Rantzen is a founder member of the Righteous (© leg-iron), and largely responsible, thanks to her initial near-monopoly of mawkish sentimentalism on television, for the creation of the modern society in which parents are routinely blackmailed and terrorised by their own children. Those who vote for this sinister celebrity have only themselves to blame for the consequences.

On the positive side, one of the things I have to do is to send off once again to the LPUK for a renewed supply of business cards. The penny appears to be dropping with the public, who seem to find UKIP, a single-issue pressure-group, to be a less than satisfactory electoral option, and who badly want someone to vote for who will sort out this appalling mess and return the country to something resembling civilisation.

Back later.