A very Long chapter

Since the autumn of 2018 Virginia had been fighting another devil, too. Her now elderly father lived alone, about ten miles away from where Virginia lived. And he was being burgled, very regularly. The burglar only wanted money, he wasn’t interested in art or antiques but he came for money once a month, sometimes more often than that.

Virginia’s father was getting on, but he tried to live as independently as he could, though he couldn’t drive, due to his glaucoma. Virginia’s mother had died a long time before. He lived alone in an 18th century country house with his various collections. He was losing his sight and had given up working as a result. The house, though modern compared to Kineburn, was rather prone to sash windows rotting in the light and prevailing weather and doors twisting and warping as a result of the shifting earth in this former mining country, where the pumps had ceased to function and nature was taking its course beneath the ground. In other words, he was vulnerable, in a world where a man might love his neighbours as himself but could not necessarily expect all of them to love him back. He could not depend on thick stone walls, built on stony ground, mullioned windows with iron bars between leaded lights, or pegged oak doors which bolted by means of a length of timber the size of a man’s thigh which was pulled out of a deep recess in the wall. His Englishman’s home was not the castle it had been in Virginia’s childhood, it was only his castle as long as it was so in the respectful imaginations of his fellow men.

This particular fellow man, who neither loved Virginia’s father as himself nor imagined her father’s home to be her father’s castle, had started out by rifling through Virginia’s father’s coat pockets, where they hung in the hall. He had helped himself to cash and the card, with the number that Virginia’s father had had for years and for which he remembered. Virginia ‘s father duly ordered another card, believing he had lost his cash and card somewhere due to his failing eyesight. The new card turned up, was duly placed in his coat pocket in the hall along with the new number, written down clearly where he could see it until he had got it into his memory. Of course this card disappeared within a couple of weeks of arriving and at the end of the month when his bank statement arrived, it transpired several hundred pounds had also disappeared from his account.

This went on and on, every month Virginia’s father ordered a new card, every month, unbeknown to Virginia he labelled the envelope with his new card in it, clearly, writing the pin on the back of the envelope and filing it in a pile of other, important post, as part of his dining chair filing system, in which the fifteen or so dining chairs in his dining room and another assortment, in every style from Queen Anne, Chippendale, Hepplewhite, Gillows, Charles Lamb to Art Deco dating from 1700 to 1930, dotted about the entrance hall, the landings of the stairs and so on, the seats of which were made use of, for piling up post. Virginia was too absorbed in politics and too selfish to notice her father wasn’t coping quite as well as he had been before. The bank’s fraud department was too kind, really, refunding every cash withdrawal that was made by the burglar using the correct pin, in the dead of night. The burglar went on cheerily entering Virginia’s father’s house every month and collecting the new card he had ordered and finding the envelope with the new pin written on it.

It was nice work, if you could get it, easy money, exploiting a visually impaired, elderly, vulnerable man, doing what he could to help himself keep track of things, living alone in an old house with warped doors, misaligned locks and bolts, rotten sashes that allowed the easy and quiet removal of thin, single early glass panes. And it was nice work when the police came and took a statement every month and believed the old man was reporting the same crime over and over again, that is, remembering it had happened once and then describing the same event. Even though the fraud department could see the money disappearing from a cash machine in the local town and refunded it and even though the withdrawals showed up on his bank statements, it was easier and less costly for the police to assume senility than to make any effort to patrol a remote spot. It wasn’t until Virginia’s half-brother repaired the locks in April 2019 and the burglar actively started breaking and entering rather than walking in through unlocked, unlockable doors, that the police started to take the matter seriously. Even then they could get nothing from CCTV footage at the supermarket where the burglar took the cash, because the burglar covered his face and knew every trick in the book. The police said even if they got footage of him before the moment of withdrawal of cash and the moment after withdrawal, in the vicinity of the machine with his face uncovered they would not be able to make an arrest, if his face was covered during the moment of theft. It was the same old crap. Our liberty had been removed, in order to prevent crime, only criminals were not prevented from committing crime, they could not be arrested even when they were caught on CCTV red handed if their faces were uncovered, but the state still had its eye on you, going about your lawful business and woe betide you if you said something hateful via social media.

After the Easter, Good Friday break in, when the 18th century door had been kicked open, and a huge timber cross beam had had to be fastened over it, things had gone quiet for a bit.

The Devil had been having quite a moment, he was satisfied with his work. The roof of Notre Dame had burnt through, though the whole hadn’t crumbled, Brexit was thoroughly smashed to pieces and not even on life support, most of the ERG had gone limp, while each individual Judas had no intention of doing himself in, out of guilt, but on the contrary was thoroughly enjoying his near victory over Democracy. The state had the little people where it wanted them, they had been given the chance to express their opinion, during the referendum campaign, now the establishment could get back to doing what it wanted to do, unconcerned with the nuisances who expected any kind of service or representation. But the state had equipped itself with all the power to haul the nuisances over the coals if they stepped out of line. Call an anti-democratic, loud mouthed, aggressive harridan MP a Nazi and you could be banned from entering London, your family could have their gun licences removed, the police could turn up at your parents’ house or turn up and arrest you in front of your children. One could not get away with any overt expressions of disgust for the devil as he manifested himself in members of the establishment. Virginia knew she would have to fight him in the darkness, using the old, female wiliness, drawing him out poultice-like from the current flesh he inhabited, persuading him to let it weaken and become impotent, because surely there were so many bigger, more profound kinds of shit to stir, elsewhere.

But had he bigger loads of shit to stir elsewhere? Wasn’t this atomising of society the profoundest kind of shit stirring there was, really? Wars and murder, famine, terror, environmental disaster, these things were dreadful, but in an odd kind of way their after effects could be regarded as positive, like the terrible effects of fires in the bush, in the long term they brought forth the growth of society, they made bonds between people, new shoots of love and generosity. Terrible though it was to sentimentalise and try and look for silver linings and to try and argue that peaceful, wealthy life in the west was blacker at its heart than the aftermath of war, Virginia felt the dark underground, mole like stirring of the idea that it might be.

Christ had given us only two commandments, that God should be our only God and that we should love our neighbours as ourselves. Yet every aspect of modern life had been aimed at getting rid of God altogether, not just separating Him from the state, but making Him irrelevant. We were to serve Mammon, and the Devil, we were to diversify, we were to celebrate our differences, our divisions, not to celebrate that we were all made in His image. It was alright to acknowledge we were all human and at a philosophical level accept as a theory that we had more in common than otherwise, but we were always being told the things that made blacks and Asians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, homosexuals and transgender people different was the most profound thing about them and that Martin Luther King’s naff old Christian vision of a world where a man might be judged by the content of his character was just another kind of racism. A man must be judged according to the colour of his skin and if he were found to be a white man he must abase himself and repent of the colonialist sins of his ancestors, however poor and humble they might have been, however much they might have slaved and toiled for some tyrant themselves, for he and they bore the collective guilt of the white-man.

In small towns and villages where society was still fairly homogenous and working class, there was still something of the looking out for one another there had always been, the establishment had not succeeded in atomising these people, here. Their sort of looking out for their neighbours went hand in hand with twitching the curtains and gossiping about those who took their motorbikes apart in the front garden and didn’t trim the hedge. And yet oddly it was in these towns where the influxes of Eastern European immigrants had been well integrated. You couldn’t come over here with your fancy foreign ways and think you could escape the nosy parker next door.

But in the cities and amongst the worker drones and the middle classes people were becoming incredibly distant from each other.

At some level one did need to love oneself in order to know the kind of thing love was, so that one could love one’s neighbour as one loved oneself. But if a black man were to love himself because he were a black man and considered the quantity of melatonin in his skin his most significant characteristic, one which affected everything he thought and did, how could he love his Chinese or Polish neighbour let alone a little English woman in the flat above who objected to his musical taste? That had not been the kind of love Rochelle and Shaz had felt, Virginia thought, why should their children suddenly be expected to take on this modern American kind of identity obsession? Virginia knew she had fallen into one of those identity politics traps here, the old ‘I have or had black friends so I can’t be a racist’ trap, but she didn’t care, just because the people who were obsessed with appearances said one’s thoughts were racist because one did not acknowledge the supremacy of appearances, did not mean it was true, it just meant that they were both cunning and shallow simultaneously.

The idea of self-love was just meant to be a tiny starting point, not the be all and end all. Self-sacrifice was far more important, self-sacrifice and living as an act of forgiveness, sacrificing vengeance in order to allow others to live. This was the basis of citizenship and social membership as Roger Scruton had explained it. Virginia wished she was capable of living up to it. She was sure she would be able to after Brexit and once some other political reforms were also in place. But at the moment she wished vengeance against those members of the establishment who had gone out of their way to engineer the social breakdown in society, the atomising, the encouragement of self-obsession, the worshipping of money and the endless bloody selfishness. She knew at some stage she would be driven to make vengeance hers and she knew she would tell herself she was ignoring that it should by rights have been the Lord’s, by convincing herself that she was working on His behalf.

At Kineburn, by the gate and in the porches both beneath Virginia’s bedroom and in the East Wing, there had been plague stones. By the gate these were grey, lichen covered sandstone pedestals, for want of a more geometrical or architectural sounding description. The top was hollowed out itself, rather than bearing a basin. In the porches they were hollows made in stone benches that ran the length of the side walls. These, it was conjectured, were designed to contain vinegar or some other household ingredient which had been considered something that cured or prevented the disease. Some said these were places in which the workers’ wages were paid.

When you had been brought up so close to the idea of death, in the form of terrible disease, even when it had not been a feature of one’s own existence, one developed a strange relationship with the idea of society. A plague on all one’s houses meant absolute breakdown, contamination, mass death, the idea of plague meant building in precautions, literally, into the fabric of one’s life. When communities were isolated, they could not be devils supping with long spoons and starving for want of feeding one another. On the one hand close proximity brought death and disease. There was a subtlety and complexity to loving one’s neighbour as oneself, a fine line between distance and closeness, feeding with the long spoon would do mostly, as the best way of explaining how it should be done. But you couldn’t do that if the establishment had indoctrinated other members of your physically close community to believe that they’d rather die than eat any of your hideous, English, whitey, heteronormative grub (and how dare you be so culturally insensitive?) So, communities had become online, virtual ones. A community would be one of like-minded people, not those who were geographically close. There might be a community of lefty gays, a community of lefty blacks, a community of ISIS supporters and communities of online trolls, like Virginia railing against the others, and complaining of the lack of free speech which prevented her railing in a more bad mannered way.

Freedom to vituperate was what Virginia would have fought for, not freedom of speech. Speech was a bit of a bland thing really, it made one think of after dinner and prizes for school swats and sitting listening to bores, or politicians and old celebs, charging vast fees for droning on. Of course the way conservative thinkers were treated by the progressive left and shut down was terrible, the way one was not allowed to insult Islamic extremism even in the wake of some terrorist atrocity and the way one was supposed to join with thinking involuntary celibates and those who campaigned against grooming gangs were as dangerous as Jihadis was all shite. And the way the establishment clamped down on decent ordinary people, stopped them monetizing their YouTube accounts or stopped them having any right of reply in the press, while terrorists and mass rapists and all the other sorts of devils were left to do their worst. But Virginia had no interest in merely discussing these things. She wanted her words to be venomous, when directed at those who caused trouble, she wanted to fight the Devil, not merely speak about his existence.

Of course a strong society needed strong individuals like Virginia, who wanted to vituperate, but it didn’t need the wrong kind of vituperation, like the woke lot and the identity politics people, they were somehow vituperative in a way that caused weakness in other people rather than strength. They got power by encouraging other people to believe they were victims, that is how one could tell they were the Devil. Virginia thought she wanted everyone else to feel as strongly as she did, as enthused about ideas, as short tempered with those who took power at the expense of others and required certain people to be victims. But was that true?

Certainly Virginia knew the left had always required victims, in order to justify its ideology. But of course, to start with those victims had really been oppressed minorities, the working classes, women, blacks and gays and so on. But it didn’t seem able to acknowledge the point at which its work was done, so it had started scrabbling around for new people to call the oppressed. That was true, they’d got the trans bug and decided children were all mentally ill and that there was this thing called Islamophobia, which was basically the same as anti-Semitism. But just because Virginia did not, like the left, require any group of people to imagine themselves feeble victims, that did not necessarily mean she wanted any group of people to be ‘empowered’. Being ‘empowered’ was another thing that the left seemed to want, ironically, it was the other side of the coin, a different kind of devilry. They wanted a negative kind of empowerment. This sort meant banging on about how you were a victim of whitey, heterosexual, neurotypical, while at the same time feeling empowered by banging on about your race, transgenderism, mental health problems, sexuality and so on, to the exclusion of almost every other topic of conversation, seeing everything through the dull as 17th century-green-glass lens of identity.

What Virginia really wanted was for other people to shut up, as Tom Lehrer might have put it. And the thought of that introduction from the 1960s to one of Tom Lehrer’s songs was probably a bit of a clue as to what was happening, now. Westerners were having another Freudian moment, as it were, not a moment of self-realisation, just another moment of self-obsession. Only nobody acknowledged Freud anymore. But nevertheless, it was just another version of that long period of psychological navel gazing. But bloody hell, the obsession with Freud had lasted longer than the obsession with Communism. Or at least as long. Surely identity politics couldn’t go on poisoning the well of social interaction for another 90 years? There is a time for self-obsessing and a time to refrain from self-obsessing, as the teacher might have put it. Let us hope the time to refrain would be upon the West soon enough: a bore was one who banged on about his identity, when you wished to yak about abstract ideas and recollect your most profound thoughts in order to win people over to your point of view.

On the third of May Democracy had a little triumph, a kind of hors d'oeuvre, as it were. The Tories lost over a thousand seats in the local elections. This was sad really because most Conservative Councillors would be decent, Brexit type people, doing a low paid job because they believed in service and good value for money for taxpayers. But it was important to send a message to the Tory Party, they were losing support by going along with the Remainer’s wishes. The Lib Dems though gained 750 seats, so of course every Remainer in Parliament, which was most people in Parliament, decided to learn the wrong lesson. They thought it meant Brexit was dead, because like most people they were only capable of drawing the conclusions they wished to draw.

One of the things Virginia had noticed about arrogant people was this kind of self-reflective conclusion drawing. The conclusions of the arrogant were like similitudes, but the arrogant had no idea that their conclusions could be used against them in the same way. And arrogant politicians who depended on democracy for their survival had no idea that the general public were quite capable of setting about the carefully shaped, nasty little wax or clay conclusions with pins and saying ‘take that you bastard.’

So the establishment bastards went on cheerily, announcing that they would deffo go ahead with the European Elections and feeling rather jolly and hopeful that the Lib Dems would win everything and they needn’t even bother pretending they were going to uphold national democracy anymore. Theresa May explained her silly old Withdrawal Agreement to the House a bit more and Jeremy Hunt spouted a load of garbage at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet about how once Brexit was done (LOL) everyone would be richer and safer and less ill, not just in Britain or in Europe but in the whole wide world!

Theresa May though acknowledged she was beaten. On the 16th of May she agreed a date for her departure with the 1922 committee. Virginia could not imagine Rochelle’s grown up daughter going into a place of study or work and announcing “I will never be able to put my little cross for Theresa again!” as her mother had on the day of Maggie’s resignation.

The Government had been having talks with the Labour Party, and these had consisted of the Labour Party spokesman on Brexit, Sir Keir Starmer, telling the civil servants and the Government what the Labour Party wanted and the Government agreeing to it. The next day the civil servants or Government would read back to Sir Keir Starmer what it was he had demanded and they had agreed to, the previous day at which point Sir Keir would say, to all intents and purposes that that was all crap and not good enough by a long chalk. On the 17th of May, therefore the talks were called off.

Despite the talks being called off, though, Theresa May still included a whole load of lefty guff in the new Withdrawal Deal.

1) The Government will seek to conclude Alternative Arrangements to replace the Ireland/Northern Ireland backstop by December 2020, so that it never needs to be used. 2) a commitment that, should the backstop come into force, the Government will ensure that Great Britain will stay aligned with Northern Ireland. 3) the negotiating objectives and final treaties for our future relationship with the EU will have to be approved by MPs. 4) a new Workers’ Rights Bill that guarantees workers’ rights will be no less favourable than in the EU.5) There will be no change in the level of environmental protection when we leave the EU. 6) The UK will seek as close to frictionless trade in goods with the EU as possible while outside the Single Market and ending free movement. 7) we will keep up to date with EU rules for goods and agri-food products that are relevant to checks at the border, protecting thousands of jobs that depend on just-in-time supply chains. 8) The Government will bring forward a customs compromise for MPs to decide on to break the deadlock. 9) There will be a vote for MPs on whether the deal should be subject to a referendum. 10) there will be a legal duty to secure changes to the political declaration to reflect this new deal.

All good lefty, European things come in tens remember! If only Theresa had remembered that good British things come in dozens: eggs, inches, buns, damask dinner napkins, crates of milk waiting outside infant school doors on early sunlit mornings in sad memories of carefree childhood and family size packs of bog paper, she might have ended her career on a high note and have been the leader of a party that had done well in the European elections, on May 23rd. As it was, when the results came in on the 26th, the Brexit Party gained 29 seats out of the 73.

Of course the Remainer establishment tried to draw the conclusions they wished to draw and invented a scheme of thought whereby if you added up all the votes which the anti-Brexit brigade had got then it was perfectly obvious that the British public did not want Brexit. Never mind that in order to draw this conclusion one had to assume that if you voted for the Conservative Party you were voting Remain, despite the Tory’s promise to honour the referendum result. The heads of the establishment were still in the sand, their arses still up in the air, waiting for another kicking. Yet they were as determined as ever that however hard they were kicked it would be a sign that they were doing the right thing, by the demos. May announced that she would resign on the 7th of June and apologised for not being able to deliver Brexit. She would carry on though, in reality, until her successor was chosen.

On the 12fth of June Parliament had a discussion with itself, one of those business motions, about how it could block a ‘No Deal Brexit, which just meant block Brexit. Fortunately, this motion was defeated. Virginia imagined the defeated motion, wrapped in some of the paper, from one of the dozen rolls in the good old British, family sized pack, hurled through the office window of whoever had proposed it.

In July Ursula von der Leyen was confirmed as the person who would take over from the dreadful Jean Claude Juncker, at Halloween. Virginia, sort of warmed to Ursula as she had umpteen children, but of course she was still one of those ‘powerful women’ by Virginia’s definition, that is one who has got where she is by making the most of rafts of measures which had been put in place to allow her to get where she was. No Maggie, but pretty and at least a woman with children who couldn’t really want to destroy the world too much, as a means of leaving a legacy.

Also in July Boris Johnson was elected leader of the Conservative Party and therefore Prime Minister. So, the country was back to where it should have been in July 2016, three years later they had the leader any gorilla or orangutan would have chosen for these difficult times. He was in the process of divorcing the alpha female, a wise and brilliant lawyer, from whom he had gained much strength in the referendum years, and he had taken up with a younger woman, who, frankly, he was a bit soppy about, but who looked a bit like Virginia’s daughter, so she couldn’t bring herself to dislike her. And plainly this must be a new alpha female, because she moved into number ten.

On the day that Bozzer took his rightful place at last Virginia drove over to the Peak District for a day out and to collect a little 18th century oak corner cupboard she had won on eBay for £22. It was pretty and rustic with a single star made of alternate dark and light-coloured inlay on the front, in the centre. The star represented Britain dropping out of the circle of EU 28 stars and going it alone; the cupboard represented Britain at its enlightened and unified best, before the great industrial age swept everything before it.

Virginia took two of her daughters with her to Derbyshire, and Phoebe, the day was scorching hot and incredibly beautiful. They ate peanut butter and beetroot sandwiches and crisps by the side of a hilly road, while Phoebe gazed longingly at the sheep and they walked a little through the breath-taking scenery. It was better than any of the previous significant days for pathetic fallacy, “it bodes well”, thought Virginia. The girls wanted a little shopping besides scenery and picnic food, so they drove over the hills to Buxton. They strolled through the park and Phoebe drank from the stream. There were many beautifully dressed ladies with coiffured silver hair attending the Opera House as well as many children and parents. After a little while Virginia stopped outside a Greggs where a crowd was gathering. A fight was breaking out between two huge, fat women, in too tight clothes and tattoos, who had several little children in tow, including one or two in pushchairs. One of the women was fucking the other one’s man, apparently and she wasn’t going to have it and she didn’t care about telling the other bitch so, straight out in-front of her kids. There was a bit of fairly vigorous wrestling, but no actual punches were thrown. Though several well dressed and well-spoken schoolboys were egging them on to greater things. It was an immensely ancient and entertaining spectacle, of the sort Alison Carter would have been familiar with and her grandmother, and probably as much fun to watch as whatever the silver haired ladies were seeing at the Opera House.

When it was over Virginia and the girls sat and drank tea at a table outside a little cafe and listened to two very boring women talking about nothing much endlessly, then they strolled back the way they had come, stopping only at the Victorian apothecary shop and for sweets. But at the top of town, still in the street, but nearer the Opera House, a talented young man was playing the Bach E Major Partita and in the heat of the late afternoon sun sounding much more like fiddlers three than Virginia was ever really able to. She gave him a tenner.

On the way home Boris gave his first speech as Prime Minister, which was broadcast on Radio 4 and Virginia reflected that he was trying to say he would do something for all the types of folk Virginia had observed that afternoon, on that rare people watching occasion, which she had enjoyed so much. Virginia certainly hoped this was what Bozzer meant, she found his speech very moving, believing that he did. Boris declared he would stick to the October the thirty first deadline for Brexit, and although he would like to renegotiate May’s deal, he did not rule out leaving the EU without one. But of course, the nasty crowd on Radio 4 had brought in a bunch of sneering gits to rubbish it and make out it was all meaningless.

A week or two later the dam burst at Whaley Bridge. At the time it was too tense to think about as anything other than reality, but the Radio 4 news was updated by Edwina Currie, who had been the EUphile John Major’s mistress, and who lived in the town. And with hindsight it was a perfect metaphor for what was to come, whichever way one arranged it. The old mistress of the old Prime Minister would have to stand aside, there was a new Tory PM, with a new outlook and a new mistress, the old one would either be swept away by the waters of Brexit or Brexit was the dam and Boris would repair it and not allow the waters of the EU to sweep the old English towns and villages away.

In August there was some positive news, the official commencement order to repeal the European Communities Act 1972 was signed. Then Boris asked the Queen to prorogue parliament for 5 weeks, from the 9th of September until the 17th of October. The bastards were very suspicious about this and decided as usual to go lawyering over it.

This decision to go lawyering again occurred at about the time of the Reith Lectures, on Radio 4, given by a Supreme Court judge, who on the surface of things seemed to be all about judges and The Law staying out of politics. A great many of the goodies were taken in by this piece of devilry, including, sadly, Jacob Rees Mogg and Peter Hitchens. Virginia hated to see men she respected being duped. But they were deceived. This particular fellow was one Virginia could never have trusted, because he was elderly but still had all his own hair. Men with a full, thick head of white hair were usually tramps. Decent men were bald in early middle age. This fellow had grown his hair to resemble his woolly wig, so that his woolly wig could not serve its purpose. That was itself an enormous form of arrogance, because it was a way of sticking two fingers up at anonymity and saying, I want everyone to recognise me, in or out of my professional guise; you couldn’t trust a fellow like that, vanity was the Devils work. But to make up for having all his hair, this fellow decided to miss out all the written part of the Constitution from his lectures. Not once did he mention the Declaration of Rights or the Coronation Oath, according to his deeply learned, woolly headed nonsense, all there was parliament and judges. True he couched his arguments in terms of how the law should let parliament get on and make laws and govern and how judges should uphold and discover and interpret the law, and he seemed not to be too hot on the Human Rights law and lawyers interpreting things in such a way as to undermine the democratic will. But not once did he mention that there were certain rights and liberties that the people had, which were held in perpetuity, granted by the Declaration of Rights and which the Monarch as the head of state swore to keep as Her contract of employment. And which could not be undone. Neither did he mention that his own important role had involved swearing an oath to the Monarch and that judgements could only be made in this realm on her behalf. He did not acknowledge the Queen at all.

And then, to make matters more tense, when it had started to seem they might be coming right, with Boris where he ought to be, the burglaries started up again. The bastard got some of his mates round in the dead of night to take Virginia’s father’s ancient, cathedral sized York stone flags, about fifty of them. He crept in and took her father’s cash card and found the envelope with the card number on it, still hanging around on a dining chair from April. A couple of weeks later he smashed the boot room window and climbed in between narrow glazing bars, he was obviously skinny and agile. The bank coughed up, the police took statements, but nobody was found, no investigations properly undertaken. There seemed to be no motivation in the August heat.

Virginia persuaded the bank not to allow her father anymore cards, for the time being which they agreed to. Nick installed CCTV. And one morning in September they caught the Devil, red handed. He had crawled in through another narrow space between glazing bars where he had removed a pane of glass in the floor to ceiling, bow window of the dining room. Virginia and Nick watched the footage, which went directly to the internet. This Devil appeared in the room from behind the old, decaying 1950s linen union curtains, like the real thing, a manifestation of evil, invisible, then visible. He tiptoed about the room, searching through the piles of new mail, looking for the latest cash card and the envelope with the PIN. When he couldn’t find it he searched the coat and jacket pockets and when he still found nothing, he suddenly noticed the CCTV cameras and decided to take those.

Virginia knew that however bad her goings on were with the black magic nonsense and witchcraft, it wasn’t much more than a game. It was a game that happened to result in some of the bad things she hoped for coming true. The chances, she could be persuaded by Nick or the children of middle-aged men succumbing to heart disease were pretty high. The fact they were in the public eye meant they were subject to stress; Virginia’s mumbo jumbo couldn’t change anything. She didn’t like to admit as much in normal circumstances, but when faced with real evil, like the thing at Kineburn, in that cold damp room, or this burglar, one could not wish one’s bad side to be in the same category of evil as those things.

The burglar had covered up one of the security lights with a paper bag. Unfortunately for him this bag had contained his drug taking tackle. And as a result, it was contaminated with his blood and DNA. At last the police had something to go on. The CCTV footage went out on social media and an arrest was made.

The trouble was, as a Christian, one could not just simply think of another human being as a Devil. The Devil drove him, the Devil had honed his skill, the Devil had made him seek endless supplies of cash in quantities of £300 or £500 at a time, but why had he taken up the drugs that the Devil had tempted him with? He turned out to be a man in his thirties, whom Virginia was used to passing as he cycled up and down the quiet lane where her father lived, he often waved cheerily, thanked her for not splashing him and so on. Virginia was in the habit of banging on about the mistreatment of working class girls and women down the ages, but working class boys didn’t fare much better, and this one was a person of colour.

What was his back story, had he been driven by abuse and sexual exploitation, growing up in a children’s home as so many had? Paedophilia seemed to be the national disease and covering up the extent of it something that the state was very keen on. The story of homosexual exploitation of young men had broken with regard to certain groups, like priests and the clergy and organists and choirmasters and public-school masters and so on. But the drive to make sodomy mainstream, the teaching of its joys using demonstrations involving bananas dipped into jars of Nutella, such as the Scottish education system went in for, meant those who wished for the continuation of the sexual exploitation of male children, however much they dressed it up as education and normalising, had a ready cohort of brainwashed young men. Still one could not assume it was abuse that had led this man into crime, one would end up sounding like a wet liberal, if one did not hold people personally responsible for their actions. He may have been exploited and bullied and abused as a child, but now he was exploiting an old man.

After the summer hols, the bastards in Parliament got back to their tricks, like the nasty schoolboys and girls they were. On the second of September, the details of the Benn Bill were published. The son of the man who had done so much to champion democracy and the nation state from a left-wing perspective had decided to blow the most enormous raspberry at his dead father. The bill set out two deadlines, the first October the nineteenth was the date by which the Prime Minister would either have to get MPs to pass a Withdrawal agreement, get MPs to agree to a no deal Brexit or write to the EU requesting an extension to article 50. The text of the letter that would have to be sent requesting the extension was set out in a schedule to the bill and setting out the new deadline for the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, as January 31st, if the EU agreed to it.

On the third of September a motion was passed allowing opposition MPs to take control of the order paper in order to pass the Benn Bill. 21 Tories voted with the opposition, the Utter Bastards in Chief and their pals. The Government responded by removing the whip from this bunch of shits and the press went wild about WINSTON CHURCHILL’S GRANDSON being persona non grata with these new hard-line Brexiteer Tories. Pass the smelling salts!

Boris announced he would be tabling a motion under the Fixed term Parliaments Act to hold a general election, should the Benn bill be passed. The following day the Bill passed and went to its Committee stages. There was no filibustering, when the bill went to the Lords, it just went through, because as usual the goodies thought they were playing cricket and the baddies had promised them an election. But of course the baddies had no intention of keeping their promise.

In early September the three most senior judges in Britain, the Master of the Rolls, the President of the Queen’s Bench and the Lord Chief Justice, at the High Court of Justice as well as judges at the Outer House of the Court of Session in Scotland ruled that the matter of prorogation was not justiciable as a political matter. But on September the eleventh the Inner House of the Court of Session overturned the judgement of the Outer House. They said that prorogation was justiciable and found it to be unlawful. On the 24th September the cases were appealed to the Supreme Court. Joanna Cherry and Gina Miller, up to no good with the Constitution again. The Blairite Supreme Court in a unanimous decision had decided to overthrow the monarchy. Just as the woolly headed former Supreme Court judge had already overthrown Her in his learned lectures.

The bastards went back to work in the autumn and were so petty as to not allow any adjournment for the Tory Party Conference. Well into October it seemed the Government was preparing to ignore the Benn bill and leave on Halloween. They had a proper state opening of Parliament, or an almost proper one. During the opening of the previous session she had worn a blue and gold outfit with a hat that looked as if it represented the flag of the EU. She did not really appear as the Crown in Parliament at all, but as Liz Windsor, EU subordinate, perhaps it wasn’t surprising the bastards thought they had defeated Brexit and won and that everything that followed was a hopeless sham. The Queen didn't quite appear as the Crown in Parliament as she should have done, on this occasion either, but she wore her official robes and her crown was carried beside Her as it was too heavy for her to wear, she wore a smaller coronet. She looked absolute daggers at the republican Supreme Court Judges who were opposite Her. As well she might have. “Well I’m still here, anyway, Brenda” she might have expressed Her sentiment in words.

On October the nineteenth the PM was forced to write to Donald Tusk in the way prescribed by the Benn bill, the Government went on pretending it would still leave on October the thirty first, as Boris had said he would rather die in a ditch than not let that happen, people believed Dominic Cummings must have a cunning plan. Signs appeared above the motorways telling lorry drivers we might be leaving on WTO terms and to make sure they were prepared, but as the day grew nearer, everyone’s hopes died. The only good thing that happened before Halloween was that a General Election had finally been agreed to, to be held on December 12fth and that Bercow would be stepping down at Halloween itself.

A date had been set for mid-November for the burglar to appear in court. But the time seemed to have come, for Virginia to set aside her misgivings about what her witchcraft, dark arts, or black magic was. Her mother had had plenty of success over the years, Virginia had one or two little successes of her own, though perhaps people had rather more robust health these days. She didn’t really care anymore about whether it was real, transcendental things were never real anyway, if God was real and the Devil was real, if evil was real and good, if men could claim to be women and vice versa, if the Judiciary who had no power without the Monarchy could overthrow the Monarchy, then Virginia could call upon the dark forces in the world at least to bring down damnation on the heads of her enemies, who were jeopardizing democracy and every other good thing that went with it. Sod reason! Sod respecting other people’s points of view, they didn’t respect the view of the majority, they must get their just deserts. And if that required a certain amount of mumbo jumbo and hocus pocus, then what better cause could there be?