ON TOUR again! Tonight at the Ice Box in Glasgow, tomorrow Bannerman’s in Edinburgh, a massive string all over the country in the next three months and plenty more planned after that, including my first gigs in mainland Europe for three years in June.  
 
And, later in the year, I’m proud to have been asked back to our sister paper Unsere Zeit’s Pressefest in Dortmund, a wonderful gathering of like-minded comrades from all over the world. Lovely to be back.
 
But still being careful. It’s logical that Johnson seeks to abandon all Covid restrictions, since he didn't abide by them himself, but the only people I listen to (the medical profession) are saying it is too early. He’s just doing it to try and save his own political skin — as always, thinking only of himself — and it is incredible that he is still in position after flouting his own rules and lying about it, a fact which says a lot about the supine nature of our Tory press.
 
Imagine the apoplexy in the Mail, Sun, Express, Telegraph and Times if a Labour leader had behaved in such a way.
 
I am Iooking forward more than I can say to my forthcoming 40th anniversary tour after two years’ delay. But I shall certainly still be wearing a mask in certain situations, and if I catch Covid I shall be cancelling gigs and isolating, even if physically capable of carrying on. I’m sure you’ll be thinking the same way.
 
My encounter with it a few weeks ago was very mild, and omicron is certainly less virulent, but there is no guarantee that future variants will be the same. My COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) has not gone away, and I shall be vigilant. Johnson is gambling with the health of the nation, testiculating with all his might. May he soon be history.
 
Had my first ever literary dream a week or so ago. I was in a pub, having a raging argument about politics with Hilaire Belloc, while his mate GK Chesterton glowered at us.
We were pissed and shouting at each other:
“HOW CAN YOU WRITE SUCH BRILLIANT POETRY AND PROSE AND BE SUCH A F***ING RACIST?” I was shouting at him. “YOU'RE MY FAVOURITE POET. YOU WRITE AND THINK LIKE ME. YOU’RE THE REASON I STARTED WRITING POETRY. YOU HATE AND SATIRISE THE POLITICAL ESTABLISHMENT JUST LIKE I DO. BUT YOU ARE A F**KING RACIST!”
 
“I’M NOT A RACIST! IT’S THE WAY PEOPLE THOUGHT BACK THEN - YOU STUPID FOOL!” he was shouting back.
 
“THAT’S BOLLOCKS! YOU DIDN'T THINK THE SAME AS EVERYONE ELSE ABOUT POETRY OR THE POLITICAL ESTABLISHMENT, SO WHY ABOUT RACE?
 
“STOP SWEARING AND BE QUIET, YOU STUPID YOUNG MAN!”
 
Belloc is the person from before my time I would most like to have met. His Cautionary Tales was the first poetry I heard — from my Victorian father — and the first poetry I read.

His South Country speaks to my Sussex soul. His Collected Works would come with me to that theoretical desert island. His prose writings on all kinds of topics, from the homogeneous and corrupt nature of Establishment politics to the corporatisation and destruction of our pub culture, have accompanied me all my life.
 
But he was also a racist, reactionary Catholic fundamentalist knobhead. (Although he didn’t actually believe in God, the sacraments, life after death, etc, as his description of death as “consecrated silence” shows: he just liked sounding off about it.)
 
But out of nowhere, having not had a Bellocose thought for ages (I did a Radio Four programme called that once, a eulogy of praise and abuse just like the above) in a brain which had gone to sleep composing my thoughts about the Russia-Ukraine confrontation, I finally had the argument with my grumpy old mentor I had, always, well, dreamed about.

We were both wrong. There is life after death after all.

I was just sad that I woke up before I changed his mind.
’Cos I would have done.
 
Keep safe.

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