In the hedgerow, just past the bend where the old paths split but never end, a young fox pauses, nose held high, debating truths the winds deny.
He’s quick of thought, of paw, of glance, already certain of each chance— for why should age alone decide what sharper minds can see inside?
“The wiser learn,” he’s heard it said, “from paths that others’ footsteps tread.” He nods—of course. It seems quite clear. Why stumble when the route is here?
Yet still the brambles catch his fur, the ground gives way, the scents all blur. The map he holds—so neat, so true— forgets the rain that soaks it through.
Above, the older fox looks on, not sighing when the youth is wrong, but faintly smiling at the art of watching wisdom slowly start.
For every gust the young one names is not the wind, but shifting claims— and though he speaks with measured tone, the forest teaches on its own.
So off he goes, with courteous bite, to test each shadow, prove each right, unaware (or half-aware) the answers grow because he’s there.
And should he pause—just once, just when the path feels less like “if” and “then”— he might suspect, though never say, the wind was busy all the way.
I was twenty-four when Egypt first settled into my bones. Not the Egypt of postcards and pyramids, but the Egypt of hot concrete runways shimmering under a white sun, the smell of aviation fuel drifting lazily across the dispersal pans, and voices floating up from the town markets beyond the wire where life continued with a rhythm entirely indifferent to war or empire.
My name is Ronald Walker, Pilot Officer in the Royal Air Force, and in 1954 I was stationed at RAF El Adem, just south of Tobruk. Officially, we were there to maintain stability and British interests across the region. Unofficially, we were young men flying fast aeroplanes, half-believing ourselves immortal.
I flew the de Havilland Mosquito — the “Wooden Wonder,” though by then she was becoming something of an elder stateswoman among aircraft. She lacked the brute modernity of the jets beginning to appear in other squadrons, but she possessed grace, reach, and a peculiar liveliness that made her feel less like a machine and more like a partner that rewarded care and punished arrogance.
I adored her.
Most pilots spoke of aircraft in practical terms: speed, climb rate, armament, handling at altitude. I spoke of her balance in a banking turn, the almost musical note of the engines when the propellers bit cleanly into dense desert air, and the way she seemed to sense hesitation through the controls. She flew best when one flew with conviction.
El Adem itself was a curious posting. The base was British, of course — orderly, precise, regulated by paperwork and tea — but Egypt and Libya seeped through the edges of daily life. Local contractors worked on the ground crews. Traders supplied fruit and coffee that tasted like smoke and earth. Children waved at our vehicles with wide, fearless grins. We were strangers, yet not entirely unwelcome.
I took to it immediately. I enjoyed the people, their patience, their humour, their endless capacity to negotiate everything from carpet prices to philosophical disagreements with equal enthusiasm. I found the country beautiful in a severe way — the desert stretching to horizons that made a man aware of his smallness, while the towns bustled with stubborn human colour.
And I developed a reputation within the squadron for two things: flying well and playing squash even better.
The squash courts sat behind the officers’ mess, constructed from pale stone that trapped the day’s heat and released it slowly through the evening matches. Squash was an obsession for me. I had played at school, dominated the station tournaments, and, being young, I carried my success with an enthusiasm that bordered on performance.
“Walker will be insufferable if he wins again,” one of the ground crew said once within earshot.
I smiled at the time. I took it as confirmation of my superiority rather than warning of my youth.
One afternoon, after dispatching another unfortunate flight lieutenant in straight sets, I was approached by a corporal who worked liaison duties with local staff.
“There’s an Egyptian gentleman who would like a game,” he said.
“Is he service?” I asked, towelling my neck.
“No, sir. Civilian contractor. Maintenance supply, I believe.”
I shrugged. “Bring him along.”
The man who entered the court was slight, silver-haired, and easily past sixty. He wore loose cotton trousers and carried a battered racket that looked older than most of the squadron.
He bowed his head slightly.
“Mr Walker,” he said in careful English, “I am Hassan.”
I offered him a hand and the casual confidence of youth. “Ronald, please. We play best of three?”
He smiled politely. “As you wish.”
I remember the match with uncomfortable clarity. At first, I played as I always did — aggressive, fast, driving the ball deep into corners, forcing my opponent to chase. Hassan moved slowly, almost lazily, returning each shot with gentle placement rather than force.
Within minutes, I realised I was chasing him.
He placed the ball into spaces that required me to cover the entire court, while he moved with minimal effort. He changed pace unpredictably. He let me tire myself. Each rally became longer. Each return more humiliatingly precise.
I lost the first game badly.
The second was worse.
He never struck the ball harder than necessary. He never appeared hurried. When I attempted to rush him, he simply angled the ball past me. When I attempted power, he absorbed it. When I attempted cunning, he anticipated it.
He defeated me without once raising his voice or breaking into anything resembling exertion.
At the end, he bowed again and placed his racket under his arm.
“You play with great strength,” he said. “Strength is very useful when one also knows patience.”
I laughed — partly from exhaustion, partly from embarrassment.
“Where did you learn?” I asked.
He gestured vaguely toward the town. “I have played since before your father was born, I think.”
He left me with a handshake and a lesson I would carry long after I forgot individual matches. Skill was not merely power or speed. Skill was observation, restraint, timing, and the quiet confidence of experience.
From that day, I trained differently. I watched my opponents more closely. I listened. I learned to wait.
It was a lesson I never expected to require in the air.
Ronald Walker during RAF service in Egypt in the early 1950s, photographed beside a traditional reed fishing or transport vessel in a wetland area. Off-duty travel allowed him to experience local culture and landscapes that shaped his lifelong affection for Egypt.
The political climate deteriorated gradually, then suddenly. Tensions between Britain and Egypt thickened into open hostility. Communications grew formal. Familiar faces at local markets disappeared. Patrol flights increased. Briefings adopted tones that replaced speculation with operational clarity.
War, when it comes, rarely announces itself with drama. It arrives disguised as administrative procedure.
I remember the morning it became real.
The desert air was unusually cool. I had just landed from a routine patrol when I climbed from the Mosquito and removed my helmet. The control tower — squat, glass-lined, permanently dust-coated — stood against the bright horizon like an observation post over an empty sea.
Inside that tower worked Arthur Bellamy, our senior air traffic controller. He was a meticulous man, fond of terrible jokes and immaculate handwriting. Two nights earlier, over whisky, I had asked him to be my best man when I returned home to marry Patricia.
He had accepted with theatrical solemnity.
I was still smiling about it when the siren began.
Not the drill siren. Not the routine alert. The full, continuous wail that stripped humour from the airfield in seconds.
Ground crews sprinted. Vehicles scattered. The tannoy crackled with overlapping instructions. A runner approached, breathless.
“Hostile aircraft inbound from the west. Multiple contacts. Scramble orders issued.”
I did not think of strategy. I thought of the tower.
I ran.
My navigator, Flight Sergeant Peter Langford — calm, methodical, infinitely reliable — was already climbing aboard. He handed me my helmet without speaking. We had flown together long enough to communicate through economy.
Engines fired. The Merlin engines coughed, roared, and settled into that deep, confident thunder that vibrated through the entire airframe. The scent of oil and hot metal filled the cockpit. I taxied with urgency restrained only by procedure drilled into muscle memory.
The radio burst with voices: scrambled instructions, altitude reports, requests for confirmation. Through the canopy, I saw anti-aircraft crews swinging their guns toward the horizon.
“Tower reports fast movers approaching at medium altitude,” Langford said quietly behind me. “Numbers uncertain.”
I acknowledged and opened the throttles.
The Mosquito surged forward, tail lifting, runway racing beneath us until gravity surrendered. We climbed steeply into the bright morning sky, banking toward the approaching threat.
For a moment, there was only blue and sun glare. Then shapes resolved against the haze.
Two aircraft. Single-engine fighters. Sleeker, faster silhouettes than ours.
Langford confirmed what my eyes already suspected. Egyptian Air Force.
I felt no shock. Only a narrowing of focus.
Below us, the airfield spread like a vulnerable map — hangars, fuel depots, the tower where Arthur would be coordinating defence, perhaps watching our climb with his usual unflappable calm.
The fighters descended toward the base with clear intent.
“Ronald,” Langford said, voice measured, “they’re lining for the tower and dispersal.”
I adjusted course, climbing to intercept. The Mosquito was not designed to out-dogfight modern single-engine fighters in sustained turning combat. But she retained advantages — heavy armament, high speed in a dive, and exceptional stability as a gun platform.
The lesson from Hassan surfaced unexpectedly. Do not rush. Observe. Let the opponent reveal his rhythm.
The Egyptian pilots split, one climbing, one diving toward the airfield. A coordinated attack.
I chose the higher aircraft first. The diving fighter would require time to re-climb after its run. The climbing pilot posed the immediate aerial threat.
I banked sharply, pushing the Mosquito into a climbing intercept. The Merlin engines protested slightly but held steady. The Egyptian pilot spotted us quickly and rolled into a tight turn, attempting to force us into overshoot.
He was skilled. His aircraft turned inside ours easily.
I resisted the instinct to follow directly. Instead, I widened the turn, preserving speed. The Mosquito shuddered slightly as we pushed her beyond comfortable limits, but she responded faithfully.
The Egyptian tightened his circle, expecting pursuit. I climbed slightly above his arc, then rolled down across his flight path, using gravity to increase closure speed.
“Guns ready,” Langford said.
The moment aligned — not by force, but by patience. The fighter crossed our sights. I fired.
The Mosquito’s nose-mounted cannons erupted, the recoil vibrating through the controls. Tracer lines stitched across the Egyptian aircraft’s wing root. Smoke burst from the engine cowling.
He attempted to break away, rolling sharply. For a second, our aircraft flew parallel, close enough that I glimpsed the pilot’s helmet turning toward us.
Then flame erupted along his fuselage. The fighter pitched downward, trailing black smoke as it spiralled toward the desert beyond the airfield.
There was no triumph in the moment. Only clarity. The engagement remained incomplete.
I rolled and dived toward the base. The second Egyptian fighter screamed across the runway line, guns firing. Dust and debris erupted near the tower. Anti-aircraft tracers clawed upward around him.
Rage did not guide me. Nor fear. Only a cold determination anchored by a singular thought: Arthur was in that tower.
The fighter pulled up steeply after his firing pass, climbing directly into our path. He saw us late. He attempted a defensive roll combined with a dive, using superior manoeuvrability.
This pilot was bold — perhaps younger, more aggressive. He executed sharp, unpredictable direction changes, attempting to exploit our heavier airframe.
I remembered Hassan again — the patient placement, the refusal to match energy with energy blindly.
Instead of chasing each turn, I anticipated the pattern. The fighter alternated high-G turns with brief straight accelerations to regain speed. I held slightly above his flight path, waiting for the straight segment.
It came after his fourth turn. He levelled momentarily, perhaps to assess our position or prepare another dive.
I dropped behind him and fired a controlled burst.
The rounds struck his tail assembly. The aircraft jolted violently, then entered an uncontrolled spin. He fought the controls desperately, levelling briefly before the aircraft rolled inverted and plunged downward.
I followed his descent only long enough to confirm impact beyond the perimeter. Then I pulled away, scanning for further threats.
The sky cleared. The radio settled into structured reports. Base defence confirmed no additional attackers.
I circled once, breathing slowly, allowing adrenaline to subside. The airfield below remained intact. The tower still stood.
“Tower reports minor damage,” Langford relayed after a pause. “No casualties confirmed.”
I closed my eyes briefly and exhaled.
The landing felt strangely ordinary. Wheels touched concrete. Engines wound down. Ground crew approached cautiously, faces searching for damage, then relief.
Arthur met me at the base of the ladder. His shirt sleeves were rolled, tie missing, hair dusted with debris.
“You’re still expecting me to stand as best man?” he said.
I laughed, though my hands trembled slightly as I removed my helmet.
“More than ever.”
He clasped my shoulder firmly.
The formal debrief occurred later. Reports were written. Engagement details recorded. Aircraft identifications speculated upon. Numbers, bearings, ammunition counts — the bureaucracy of survival.
Yet that night, sitting alone outside the mess, I found my thoughts returning not to victory, but to Hassan.
War had drawn lines across friendships, across markets and courts and conversations. Men who might have shared coffee or sport now flew toward each other with lethal intent. I felt no regret — only a heavy awareness of how swiftly roles change when governments redraw loyalties.
I thought of the Egyptian pilots’ skill. Their discipline. The courage required to fly directly into defended airspace. They had not been faceless enemies. They had been professionals, perhaps fathers, perhaps mentors to younger airmen as Arthur had been to us.
The desert night wrapped the base in quiet. Somewhere beyond the perimeter lights, life continued in villages and towns untouched by the morning’s violence.
Langford joined me eventually, offering two glasses of whisky without speaking. We drank in companionable silence.
“Good flying today,” he said at last.
“Good patience,” I replied.
Years later, when younger pilots asked me about that engagement, they expected tales of heroism or tactical brilliance. I told them instead about a squash court and an elderly Egyptian who taught me that strength without patience exhausts itself, while patience transforms strength into precision.
Flying, like sport, demanded reading an opponent’s rhythm. War demanded it with consequences no match could ever replicate.
RAF aircraft undergoing servicing at El Adem airfield in North Africa during mid-20th century Royal Air Force operations. The base served as a key staging and operational location for British aircrews stationed in the region. Credit: Public Domain RAF Official Photograph – Crown Copyright expired.
I carried that lesson through every flight afterward. It shaped how I approached conflict, negotiation, and eventually life beyond the cockpit.
Egypt remained dear to me despite everything. The people, the landscapes, the laughter, even the scorching wind across El Adem’s runways — all of it formed part of my youth and my understanding of the world’s complicated loyalties.
I never spoke lightly of that morning again. Not from sorrow, nor from pride, but from respect for the fragile line between friend and foe, and for the strange ways life teaches its most important lessons.
And whenever I stepped onto a squash court for the rest of my life, I looked first for patience before strength, hearing Hassan’s gentle voice reminding me that victory often belongs to those who wait long enough to understand the game.
Author’s Note
Some names have been changed. Ronald Walker (known to many as Johnnie Walker) died in December 2016 at the age of 87. Like many pilots with long careers, he shared countless stories with his family—this one among them. Although I have recreated and embellished elements of the narrative, the two central incidents at RAF El Adem—Ronald being comprehensively beaten at squash by a man nearly three times his age, and his shooting down of two enemy aircraft attacking the ATC—are events he himself described.
I am the Secretary-General. This time the collapse is financial. Not moral — those have been rolling since the flag was stitched.
We are owed money. A record sum. We like records. Most meetings per outcome. Most languages per problem solved. Most observers per massacre.
In 1994 eight hundred thousand people were killed in Rwanda. We were present. Presence is important. We watched carefully. We took notes. Then we left. Leaving is called restraint when you have name badges.
In 1995 we declared Srebrenica safe. The word safe survived. Eight thousand people did not. We reviewed our processes. The processes survived.
Our peacekeepers went to Haiti to help. Ten thousand people died of cholera. From the help. We apologised. Apologies do not require logistics.
We are neutral. That is why the strong and the weak get one vote each. The United States pays a fifth and speaks once. Tuvalu speaks once. Population eleven thousand. Equality is very tidy on paper.
China pays. China votes. China sits on the Human Rights Council. So do Eritrea and Sudan. We put “human rights” in the title to keep them nearby.
We condemn things. Strongly. Sometimes strongly-er. The things continue. But now they are condemned. This is progress you cannot see.
We investigated Oil-for-Food. Found billions missing. Named thousands. Prosecuted none. Published a report long enough to stop a door.
We have rules. The rules say unused money must be returned to states that did not pay. This is sustainability as understood by people who quote Kafka instead of fixing things.
Our peacekeepers have guidelines. The guidelines say do not abuse the people you are meant to protect. The abuse continues. But now it is against the guidelines. This is accountability.
We may run out of cash by July. This will affect operations. Operations such as watching and expressing concern.
Please send money. We promise to give some of it back to those who didn’t send any. That is the system. We designed it.
Changing it would require a resolution. The resolution would be optional. Optional means ignorable.
I am not good at arithmetic. Or prevention. Or stopping things.
I run the United Nations.
Dedicated to Kenule Beeson Saro-Wiwa — Ken — who spoke when silence was safer, who wrote when truth was unwelcome, and who stood for the land, the people, and the dignity of voice against power that mistook brutality for order. May remembrance outlive repression, and may words continue where courage once paid the ultimate price.
He has my pension, sitting somewhere it no longer remembers me.
He has my property, brick and paper converted into silence.
He has my investments, years folded neatly into his pocket, creased beyond recognition.
He owes me the remnants of a vast loan— vast when it was mine, residual now it is his.
He owes me four years’ salary, four winters of restraint, four summers of “next quarter”.
He took my business, and with it the simple dignity of earning my own living.
He does not speak to me. Silence has become his chief operating system.
I do not know what he is doing to our business— I still call it ours out of habit, or grief.
He will not reveal the revenue, despite the healthy turnover, despite the noise it makes when mentioned to others.
He will not let me see the books. They are balanced, he says, like a glass placed just out of reach.
He refuses to meet his commitments, but meets his reflections daily without discomfort.
He loses focus each time he draws breath, as if attention itself is an intolerable cost.
He thinks I am scary. He thinks I am angry. His imagination does the heavy lifting now, running ahead of facts, inventing menace where questions live.
He accuses me of disrespect, of lacking faith— faith, he says, without evidence.
But faith is not required when the truth is present. Faith is a substitute, not a virtue.
Respect has room for secrets— for privacy, for timing, for restraint— but it has no shelter for lies.
And somewhere between the numbers I am not allowed to see and the answers I am not allowed to ask, my life waits like an unpaid invoice, long overdue, still polite enough not to shout.
To be sung to the tune of several bottles of rum while drinking the Wellerman Song
There once was a time on a cold grey sea When men went out in boats of three, With oars of ash and a hemp-rope coil And iron heads for blood and oil.
Oh haul away, lads, haul away down, The Wellerman comes when the work is done, When the tongue’n is cut and the flensing’s begun, Oh hold fast, boys, and pray for sun.
They found her rising at break of day, A mountain of breath in a skin of grey, She sounded deep, then rolled once more, And the sea went still where she lay before.
The first iron flew and the second too, And the water bloomed a darker blue, She thrashed and turned in her mortal pain Till the sea was rope and the rope was strain.
Oh haul away, lads, haul away slow, Greed is a wind that a man won’t know, We sing of profit, we sing of gain, But the sea keeps count of every stain.
The boat ran close in the killing press, Too near the flukes, too deep the mess, One blow would have sent them to the deep, To the cold black hold where the drowned men sleep.
But the whale rolled clear though the iron burned, She held her body, she checked her turn, She lifted her tail, then eased it down, So the fragile boat stayed righted and sound.
No hand of hers was raised in hate, No thought of vengeance, no thirst for fate, Though speared and dying, she chose restraint, While men cried out for oil and weight.
Oh haul away, lads, haul away blind, We name it courage, we name it kind, But what is a man when the beast he slays Shows more care in its final days?
They took her tongue when the breath went thin, They stripped the blubber, the bone, the skin, And the Wellerman came with sugar and rum To pay the price when the work was done.
But the sea remembers what men forget, The balance broken, the quiet debt, And somewhere deep in the turning tide Drifts the mercy that the whale supplied.
So sing this song when the night winds moan, Of the care she showed we’ve never shown, That even dying, harpooned and torn, She kept men safe who never learned.
Oh haul away, lads, haul away true, Let one tear fall in the salt-spray too, For the whale that died so men could take, Yet spared their lives for mercy’s sake.
I keep a garden snail not in a box not in a jar but in an agreement.
The agreement is simple. I do not rush. He does not explain.
Each morning I leave a damp leaf as if it were a letter saying I remembered you.
He answers by remaining alive.
The snail requires very little: shade that means it, water that arrives quietly, and a world that does not suddenly decide to be important.
When I forget myself and think speed is truth, he retracts. When I calm down, he resumes the future.
He has no ambition beyond crossing a stone by Tuesday and surviving the birds’ opinions.
And yet if I can keep this creature content— with no plans, no praise, no comprehension of my efforts— then perhaps living is not mastery.
Perhaps it is maintenance.
If I can keep a snail happy, fed, unpanicked, unharmed by my cleverness, then I can live anything.
Even me.
The story behind this story.
Thanks to my very great friend Alicia, my reading and writing life has been enriched with her curiosity and her vast knowledge of the book world. From authors long forgotten to those still weaving every story from mystery to culture to comedy to the most unusual authors I would never have considered without her most welcome interference.
Imagine my surprise when she sent me a photo of a snail and said “Meet my new pet”. So out of character, but then my knowledge of Alicia tells me there is something deep and profound in this peculiar statement, I just need to find it.
The result is the above poem which, as you have probably gathered, isn’t really about a snail. The snail is simply a quiet way into something more human.
At its heart, the poem explores what it feels like to care for something that cannot be hurried, impressed, or persuaded. A garden snail doesn’t respond to effort or intention in the way people do. It doesn’t reward anxiety or ambition. It simply reacts to calm, consistency, and gentleness. That makes the relationship oddly honest.
Many of us live with a constant sense of pressure — to do more, be quicker, justify ourselves, explain our choices, and keep up with an ever-moving world. The snail exists outside all of that. It has no interest in explanations or outcomes. When the poem says, “I do not rush. He does not explain,” it captures a rare peace: a space where nothing needs defending or proving.
The small daily acts in the poem — leaving a damp leaf, choosing shade, moving quietly — reflect a form of care that modern life often overlooks. This isn’t dramatic or self-sacrificing love. It’s ordinary attention. And that ordinariness is what makes it powerful. The snail’s only response is that it continues to live. Somehow, that feels like enough.
The poem also gently reverses the usual idea of control. When the person becomes stressed or hurried, the snail retreats. When calm returns, so does the snail. In this way, the animal mirrors something very familiar: how our own inner world tightens under pressure and opens when treated kindly.
The final lines offer the poem’s quiet insight. If we can keep something small, slow, and vulnerable safe and content — without needing recognition or success — then living isn’t about achievement at all. It’s about learning not to harm what is fragile, including ourselves.
I hope people like this poem not because it is clever, but because it feels like permission. Permission to slow down. Permission to care without justification. Permission to believe that gentleness, consistency, and patience are not weaknesses, but ways of staying alive.
In that sense, the snail becomes a reminder: living well doesn’t always mean doing more. Sometimes it simply means being careful enough to let life continue.
Once upon a time—within living memory, though now spoken of as though it were some sepia-toned idyll—the local council was exactly that: local. A modest civic body, often dull, occasionally officious, but recognisably part of the community whose money it spent. One imagines the town clerk of 1958, sleeves rolled, spectacles perched, frowning over the drainage budget with the stoicism of a man who knows he will meet the ratepayers in the butcher’s queue tomorrow morning. He was not a visionary, a strategist, a consultant, or a “stakeholder partner.” He merely fixed the roads, emptied the bins, and ensured the library opened on time. He did so because the town needed these things, and because the town paid for them.
Compare that modest creature with today’s municipal apparatus, a body swollen to the point of deformity, draped in managerial jargon and trembling under a hundred mutually contradictory regulations. Instead of the honest if plodding civil servant, we have entire platoons of officers whose professional identity is built not on service but on compliance. They do not shape the town; they interpret guidance. They do not defend local interests; they “engage” with frameworks. Their task is not to steward a place but to satisfy a central state that increasingly views local government as one more branch office—an outpost of Whitehall’s neurotic empire.
The transfiguration began when successive governments, each convinced of its own modernising brilliance, decided that the real problem with councils was that they were too responsive to their residents. Better, they thought, to strip away those old provincial arrangements and replace them with uniform “administrative units,” reorganised, rationalised and sanitised to within an inch of their lives. The result was the 1970s map: fewer councils, larger councils, and officials less likely to know the names of the streets they regulated. Efficiency, we were told. Progress, we were told. It has been downhill ever since.
A once-civic institution, now hollowed by bureaucracy and central control.
Then came the centralisers. Rate-capping, council tax limits, mandatory duties without matching funds: every lever was pulled to ensure that no local authority could so much as adjust a streetlight without permission from the capital. A Section 114 notice—local government’s version of sticking a “CLOSED FOR LACK OF MONEY” sign in the window—now hangs over dozens of authorities. The modern councillor governs nothing; he monitors a collapse, anxiously hoping that the Treasury might, in its mercy, approve a little more debt to keep the lights on.
And so to the regulations. If the older council was a steward, the modern council is a defendant—permanently awaiting judgement from a tribunal of auditors, inspectors, commissioners, ombudsmen, regulators and activist lawyers. Procurement law alone could cripple a lesser civilisation: tomes of directives dictating the precise choreography by which a council may purchase so much as a mop. The process is so paralysing that only the largest and most expensive corporations can complete it, creating a tidy cartel of outsourcers who speak the language of “KPIs” and “transformation pathways” while delivering services that are, at best, adequate and, at worst, catastrophic.
The tragedy is not merely the cost, though the cost is obscene. It is the culture. Preventive services, those quiet institutions that make a town bearable—youth centres, libraries, local works, the unobtrusive odd-jobbing that keeps a place civilised—have been amputated so that councils can funnel their remaining budget into statutory duties that grow more demanding every year. Social care now consumes the lion’s share of municipal budgets, not because councils have suddenly discovered humanitarian zeal, but because the law compels it and the courts enforce it.
Thus we inhabit the paradox of the British state: councils more elaborate than ever, producing worse public spaces than at any time since rationing. Potholes gape like geological features. Parks resemble the aftermath of a sullen strike. Planning departments take years to produce decisions that amount to artful apologies for not producing any decisions at all. What the average citizen sees is decay. What the average council produces is paperwork.
If the England of the post-war decades possessed a municipal ethic, it has been replaced by a municipal mirage: a swollen bureaucracy masquerading as governance, a system designed chiefly to protect itself from blame. It consumes money without delivering value, enforces rules without delivering order, and utters slogans about “communities” while retreating from the very notion of civic duty.
The state tells us this is progress: professionalism, standardisation, compliance, equality. But a town that cannot fix its own pavements is not progressing. A council that answers to Whitehall more readily than to its residents is not local. And a nation in which the simplest act of governance costs three times what it did half a century ago—and delivers a third of the quality—is not declining by accident.
It is declining by design. The design, as usual, belongs to people who do not have to live with the consequences.
When the state expands its procedures faster than its competence, decline arrives not as a crisis but as a schedule—issued quarterly, audited annually, and noticed by the public only when the bins stop being emptied.
The universe, vast and timeless as it turns, One among infinite, where eternity burns. Each atom, each thought, a unique, fleeting spark, In the grand, endless dance of light and of dark.
If time is unending, if space has no edge, Then what of the self, with no memory to pledge? This life is a moment, a breath in the flow, Yet in infinite cycles, we rise and we go.
The universe spins with no purpose or will, Indifferent to wishes, yet wondrously still, In this vast, restless cosmos, might we not return, As the stars keep on burning, as the galaxies churn?
So perhaps we shall live, time and time once more, In a universe infinite, with mysteries galore. What can happen will happen, and thus we may see, In the grand wheel of existence, the return of you and me.
Authors Note
Although the rhythm and subject of this poem differ, those familiar with The City of Dreadful Night by James Thomson will detect an underlying current that owes much to that remarkable work.
This poem was written in 1974, during my time at Belmont School, Holmbury St Mary. It was inspired by a debate organised by our English Literature teacher, Mr Ballantyne. The topic was “Reincarnation is real”. I was on the team tasked with arguing in favour — no small challenge for an 13-year-old who had, at the time, no idea what reincarnation was.
To prepare, I retreated to the school library and began my research (encouraged and assisted by Mr Ballantyne himself). There, in a rather ancient encyclopaedia (I suspect it predated Britannica by several decades), I stumbled upon a passage quoting James Thomson (BV), which conveyed in essence the belief that death is final. Regrettably, I can no longer recall the precise quotation, and indeed The City of Dreadful Night offers so many bleak and masterful reflections that it is difficult to pinpoint which one it was.
Nonetheless, I remember vividly how deeply Thomson’s writing struck me. His sombre vision of life left a lasting impression. Over fifty years later, certain passages still linger in my mind — testimony to the power of his words.
You will find the full text of The City of Dreadful Night on Project Gutenberg. In particular, you may notice how the poem presented here draws upon the mood and tone of the four stanzas that begin as follows:
The world rolls round for ever like a mill; It grinds out death and life and good and ill; It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.
“While air of Space and Time’s full river flow The mill must blindly whirl unresting so: It may be wearing out, but who can know?
“Man might know one thing were his sight less dim; That it whirls not to suit his petty whim, That it is quite indifferent to him.
“Nay, does it treat him harshly as he saith? It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath, Then grinds him back into eternal death.”
Verbal Alchemy 