Round of applause on 8 minutes for Gazza

Too ****in right, mate. Also, I really miss the attention and feeling of power and superiority.

 

Doesn't stop me baldy.

**** off, baldy.

 

Nice one, thanks.

First four paragraphs – nothing much to disagree with, unfortunately, although I don’t think I necessarily know off the top of my head who James McClean is or what his story is about, sorry. (I’ll do a Google Highway dot com search after I’ve finished responding here, so you’re excused the task of explaining.)

I liked the (extensive) quote from the Theodore Dalrymple book, leading up to: "Sentimentality then becomes coercive, that is to say manipulative in a threatening way."

Exactly.

The (public) stiff upper lip may be something of a self-bolstering British national myth, true, but this by no means lessens its desirability as an aspiration (according to me).

I’m glad the other book isn’t a self-help book, though – that was the fear (and how I despair of these things and, I suppose, to a lesser extent, the people who buy them) – and that it doesn’t appear to waste time telling people how to be “happy” (whatever that may actually mean).

Good. I (presently) feel something similar on both counts, although this in itself would tend to militate against my buying the book (why read something I know I already agree with, after all?), but it’s certainly a tempter.

We need a war. Also, whilst donning my specifically British hat and at the risk of repeating something I already once said elsewhere on this site: not a piddling and divisive war like the Iraq stramash, either, but a great big “oh good grief, Mummy, the Germans are in the garden” sort of war; something around which we may usefully cohere and remind ourselves of all that it means to be British. Or simply human. Sieg Heil.

Which, I reckon, is simply a long-winded and favourably immoral way of saying that an awful lot of British people appear to worry about the most terrible ****e these days; working themselves towards a self-pitying (and often greed-based) frenzy whilst remaining untroubled by any sense of perspective. It’s lamentable, debasing, humiliating. (And we’re all guilty of it at some point.)

…………………………………………..​

That’s interesting about the Aborigines. I don’t know anything about such things, but the discovery of a genetic predisposition towards alcoholism would hardly surprise me. Going on instinct (and very limited reading) alone, I feel that this seems at least possible.

Anyway, I tend to shy away from viewing alcoholism as solely a moral weakness, as this feels a little too close to the black and white thinking of Scientologists, say, or the irretrievably religious or unforgiving. (Or my mum, come to think of it.)