Fifty Not Out

Ladies, Gentlemen, and those of you in the cheap seats,

It seems that a rather significant event occured whilst I prattled on about dead foxes last week. This wretched blog lurched past the fifty posts mark. Extraordinary...I always assumed I had better things to do with my meaningless little life. But it seems not.

Still, my loss is posterity's gain, for these few brief pages will provide a quite fascinating insight into life for an idle, misanthropic middle-aged British Man just before the complete collapse of capitalism and western Civilisation into barbarism.

So one is in a retrospective frame of mind this cold autumn afternoon. I find myself thinking back over the period that I have been blogging, then over recent years, and then surveying a life, rich in incident and adventure, peopled with some of the Great and the Good of the last Century, a life devoted to public service, to the furtherance of God, Queen and Empire, A life given over the British Virtues, to the maintenance of politesse and decency, to the wearing of tweed and the waxing of moustaches.

And a life not without danger. In this time of struggle, when all that we hold dear (Lock's; Lobbs; Bates the Hatters; Crockett and Jones; Harvie and Hudson; Fortnum's and even Paxton and Whitfield) is in peril from an unholy alliance of frenzied Afghan tribesmen and crazed hedge fund managers, I recall that this Great Nation has faced the Void before. I refer of course to the Cold War. Oh yes - I too did my bit for Blighty, standing firm during the 1970s, holding back the red hordes of the Warsaw Pact from a decrepit Nissen Hut, bearing a heavy burden of Command as a Leading Cadet in Her Majesty's Air Training Corps. Duty and Sacrifice came easy to me, even then. I firmly believe that I could have gone on to a successful and rewarding military career, were it not for the moral turpitude that seized society, and led to my being seduced into a Jazz-Age style frenzy of drugs, drink and wild parties by the phenomenon known now as "Punk Rock".

For extraordinary as it now seems, I was once a "punk rocker". Impeccably tailored though my tweeds may now be, immaculate as my waxed moustache undoubtedly is, however mirror-like the polish of my brogues... The grim truth is that I once slouched the streets of London in ragged black drainpipe trousers, studded leather, and fingerless gloves.

My feet were encased not in polished calf but scuffed army boots, my hair resembled nothing so much as a bedraggled toilet brush, my neck was ornamented, not with tie or cravat, but an Imperial German Iron cross and a wealth of chains. However, a shred of decency remained: if one had taken from me my soiled neckerchief and, after careful fumigation, unrolled it, one would have realised it took the form of a white-bordered silk Union Flag. I was a drunk, I was a relentless sybarite, I was a squatter, I was wired off my noggin on amphetamines, I was even (oh, the shame!) in arrears on my library fines. But By GOD, I was British!

In the immortal word of Jim Morrison - what a long,strange trip it's been.