Writings

I always thought your comparison of yourself leaving Britain to Morrissey doing the same was slightly offbeam - surely you left *because* of the remnants of the traditional society, while Morrissey left precisely because he felt there weren't enough such remnants and he would rather live in the real California than in a quasi-California off the coast of Europe?

If I travelled more, well, who knows? I can't judge it at this point. I suppose my writing might be less personalised simply because it'd be much harder to simply retreat into myself.

Well, though it might sound like a group grope, I'd say that what makes all three of us -- me, you, and Moz -- interesting is precisely our ambiguity.

Mainly, we privelege the 'elsewhereness' of here. We are both futurists and antiquarians, radicals and conservatives (your own essay made a clean breast of your Telegraph-reading days). People like us would like either a radical transformation of society into something different, progressive, futuristic (in Morrissey's case that would have been the execution of Thatcher and the royals, and seeing the shoplifters and vegetarians of the world taking over). But failing that, we'd like everything to be as it was in, oh, 1600. Or 200. (Insert your own personal Golden Age of your own personal corner of the UK here.) We're all yankees in the court of King Arthur.